Life

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Low Strings

I learned to drum in Ubaka Hill’s DrumSong Orchestra at MichFest. I’m sure she wouldn’t even recognize me as a two-time participant (that’s peanuts — although I did have the honor once of doing vocal improv on stage with her and several other women at a concert she did at a church in St. Paul), but from her I learned how to play some basic, passable, serviceable rhythms on the djembe, rhythms which have given me much joy and have helped me to express many songs and chants. It was in those sessions in the tent on those hot August days that I began to understand myself as a drummer, and eventually to claim and own that part of myself.

I also enjoyed Ubaka’s talks on social issues and philosophies of music and sound and drumming. In one of these, she discussed the tendencies of men and women to choose higher or lower drums. Women, she proposed, often liked to play big, low-toned drums to compensate for, or balance out, a high vocal range. Through the drums they could express those parts of themselves that vibrated with deep notes, and men often sought the same balancing with smaller, higher-pitched drums. She drew the connection between the tones of the drums and the chakras, and suggested that women would benefit from playing the smaller drums too, because their sounds resonated more with the higher chakras. … A theory, and reasonable enough, in my opinion.

At the time, though, I remember thinking that I was more drawn (or at least equally so) to the higher-pitched drums and other instruments. I hypothesized that I feel the urge to fill in the high notes because of my low alto singing voice. I’ve always felt self conscious about my upper cut-off, and sometimes, while singing along with a fearless soprano, I feel a blankness where no sound comes out, and wish that I had some way to externalize that feeling, to express it in a vibration that can be heard. When I play high notes on my guitar, or uke, or on a sharp, tight doumbek (which I only wish I could play), it gives me such a feeling of satisfaction, like that pent up sound is finally being let out. The feeling in my chest is as the excess air hissing out of an overinflated tire.

The other night after I was playing the guitar for a while and leading a dance, someone who’s a good guitar player told me she noticed I play only my high strings, never the low ones. I told her my theory about the high notes and the low voice. She didn’t dismiss it, but said that in her opinion, the way I was playing did not make me sound commanding. I said I didn’t want to sound wishy-washy … ! She said it wasn’t that exactly, but she noticed the absence of low notes when I was playing.

I’m a guitar student without a teacher who takes advice and feedback and instruction wherever she can get it. I take it to heart and try to use it to improve myself and my playing as much as I am able. I consider this information. To me it feels like maybe a lack of foundation in my playing, maybe the instability of my fundamental insecurity about whether I will be allowed to play at all, and if I am, whether I will just embarrass myself. Maybe I need to just get over it.

I want to be able to play all the notes. I want to embrace and love every part of myself. I want to shake off that dang insecurity that keeps me down as a musician! So I’ll keep working on it — get knocked down and get up again (in the words of Chumbawamba — I really love that song, not even kidding). My ego gets some message that it interprets as a need for shame. I lose confidence in myself, I think I’m a total loser idiot, I sulk … and eventually I just put it out of my mind, lalalalalalala, and go back to doing the thing I love doing and being goofily grateful that people let me do it. Hm, yeah, I think a little more confidence would soften up that cycle a lot.

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Humility

I had just finished the hands-on portion of an interview to do fill-in work as a massage therapist at a local spa. The manager was telling me …

“You have very good techniques and you obviously know where the muscles and attachments are. But I can’t hire you, because there’s something crucial missing — the intuition about how a massage should flow, when you can touch a body and instantly know what it needs. I suggest you set up a table in a coffee shop and work on as many bodies as you can, and it will come. It has to come from deep in your heart.”

I was shocked at first to hear her say this. I’m not inexperienced; I’ve done massage in a city clinic and a super swanky resort spa and various places in between. I’ve often been complimented on how I can touch a body and know exactly what it needs. How was this woman not picking up on that??? But by the time she came to that last bit, about it coming from deep in the heart — I was actually smiling. Because I knew what she was talking about. Although she didn’t quite get the reason, she did sense the truth: it wasn’t coming from deep in my heart, and if I was honest, I already knew that.

Of course, it was still a blow to my ego. Part of me just wanted to give her the finger. And then go home and cry. That same part wanted to say (maybe in a follow up email), “Look, lady, you’re on crack. I’ve worked at way fancier, way more reputable spas than this old joint, and everyone loved my massages and loved ME. And PS, your advertising is racist. If you didn’t feel my heart, it’s because I don’t want to work here anyway!” Etc.

But that wouldn’t be true — at least not the part about how I’m awesome and she was just too much on crack to realize it. She was totally right that I was, on some level, checked out, and it wasn’t just because of my ambivalence about this spa. I wanted the job for various reasons, mainly that it was close to my home and I need the money. But in my heart, I don’t really want to do massage as a job anymore. For a few people whom I care about, yes, but I think I am done pursuing it actively, at least at this time. Writing it publicly like this makes me go “eek!” inside, and brings up a ton of fear and shame and self doubt. But as I shared in Sam’s Phoenix Rising group in December, my heart and soul are yearning for consolidation. I don’t want to split my attention between two totally separate careers anymore. I want to teach full time. I want it with a passion.

The funny thing was that right before I walked out the door for the interview, I drew a card from the angel box and the card I got was the Angel of Miracles. I certainly had an idea about what that meant when I left the house — and a very different idea when I got back. I thought, maybe the miracle is that my soul truth made itself known in a way that saved me from a job that would have drained my energy away from following my true dream. Or maybe the miracle is that I saw it that way.

I am humbled but grateful.

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Christmas Break

It’s the night before New Year’s Eve. I’ve just spent the last hour and a half (okay two hours–I’m slow) making General Tso’s Tofu. (Yum!) Sam and I are having a tv-watching marathon with whatever series DVDs we could find at the library. We just finished the first two seasons of Drop Dead Diva, randomly enough. I’m pretty charmed by it, actually. You go, Jane!

I am taking a mental vacation. I am so happy to be a teacher right now, because I really need this break. I can’t really believe it’s still December, because I was triple-timing it at the beginning of the month, training for and starting a new job while getting through finals at the community college where I teach. I pushed myself with all I had, and was not NOT enjoying myself despite going crazy, until I got sick with some throat and chest thing that actually forced me to cancel everything I had on my calendar and stay in bed for three days. Then I got better enough to go Christmas shopping really fast and then fly to California for the actual holiday with his side of the family. It was a very fun trip. But it was not relaxing.

Incidentally, I may have written last year about my idea that Christmas, if it’s going to be focused on for three to four months, should really only occur every, say, three years. It’s kind of like a presidential election, or like the Olympics, when you think about it, in terms of prep time and attention demanded. Though I don’t think people could hold out for FOUR years between Christmases; or maybe three just feels like the right amount of recovery time. Well, this year I have amended that plan to allow for one long Christmas season followed by two short ones, when we only focus on the holiday for a couple of weeks. Since last year was a LONG Christmas, in my mind I declared this year a SHORT one and tried to disengage from feelings of obligation or external pressure to maintain holiday spirit for multiple months. I don’t know if anyone else is buying this plan, though …

But anyway, that was a tangent. And even with my long-short-short plan, I do still agree with my friend Amy’s recent Facebook post reminding us that according to the Catholic Church, which pretty much started Christmas, officially ends the Christmas season on January 13, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Which is longer than most people think. It’s really the PRE Christmas excess that needs to be curtailed in my opinion — the pre-Advent part that’s all about guilt and purchases. The POST Christmas season can go on for even longer as far as I’m concerned. This is the time when we can enjoy the beauty of, say, the lights we put up without thinking about how behind we are, or what we still need to buy. We can take it a little easier, rest and breathe and integrate and receive all the loving energy we generated with our Holiday Hoopla (as some lovely Denver gals call the festivities they hostess).

So, now I am taking a time out before jumping back in to syllabus writing and event planning (both things I do enjoy!) and job training and studying math so I can get a good enough score on the ACT (I have to retake this for the new job, which involves test prep tutoring, even though I have, yes, both gotten into and completed college a long time ago–although without much math, damn!) with hopefully some time in there for guitar practice. I know when my body is intervening to tell me I’m doing too much and I need to slow down. I don’t want the only time I rest to be when I’m sick. I’m lucky to have the space to be able to make that choice right now, and it will have to tide me over through a lot of upcoming insanity!

And when I take a mental vacation I notice certain nice things like … my creativity coming back. And I start getting ideas for things I would like to write, or organize, or learn … And I feel a little bit of resignation, knowing I’m very soon to go back to ultra busy life and that most of these ideas will never be followed up on. But a few of them will. And again I’ll resolve to keep some time for myself, to rest and integrate and work on projects … and I will probably do a bad job of it … but maybe I will get a little better every time until I stop needing to get sick or wreck my car (twice) or have some other crisis in order to give myself permission to take a break. Well, maybe someone will call me on that.

So, ta ta for now. It’s back to relaxing. Which leads to blog posting! Coincidence?

I think not. 🙂

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Pink Aura

Yesterday I went to a day spa to use the gift certificate I got for my birthday from my partner’s wonderful sister (I guess I can’t say sister-in-law, even though that’s how I think of her, because “in-law” is exactly the one way we AREN’T related!) two months ago.  And man was I ready for it — I work in a spa so I see the fancy ladies come in for their multiple services and float out the door five hours later looking absolutely blissed out.  A month into the semester I was ready to be blissed out too.

But sometimes when I do things like that, i.e., go to the spa by myself, I DON’T leave floating on a cloud; instead I feel like the cloud is inside my head.  And it is: my negative thoughts, my undeserving thoughts, my recurrent thought that I am doing everything (even relaxing) all wrong.  I had really been looking forward to this day and I really didn’t want to sink myself with self-criticism.  So while I sat in the waiting room I tried to think of a mantra for the day — something I could direct my mind to whenever it started to go off on an unhelpful track; something my brain could hold onto like the hand can hold a pebble, to ground it when it starts to worry.   The mantra I chose was simply “I love you,” repeated on the in breath and the out breath both.  Later, when I was, indeed, so relaxed that my posture resembled that of a cooked noodle, this writing came out:

I love you I love you I love you I say — to myself, I love you as I breathe in, drawing this truth up from the ground beneath the floor beneath my slippers beneath my feet — finding the love in the energy that radiates from the earth — the Earth is the “I,” the mother Gaia.  I love you I breathe out, filling the bubble of my aura with this phrase — now I am the “I” and the “you” is me too.  I just want to fill my own field with the pink glow of loving but I know that as it fills with light it will shine those waves out and have an influence on the air, the crowd, the trees, and the earth all around me — so really I am breathing out “I love you” to the whole world.

Love!

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Mich Fest Vision Quest

One of the trips I took this summer with my partner was up to Hart, Michigan for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

MichFest has always been my partner’s thing, from long before we got together.  He liked to go every year, and so I’ve gone with him every year since I’ve been with him.  (He? Isn’t that festival notoriously womyn-only? You may remember my partner’s a female-to-male transsexual, and he started going to this fest back in his angry lesbian days.  Hey, we’ve all had them, right?  Anyway, you may also know this fest has an official ANTI TRANS policy, so you can imagine what a can of worms it is for him/us to be there.  He’s been productively processing that, with amazing wisdom and beauty, in his writing since we’ve been back.  It’s been cool to see.)

Well, because I am working two part time gigs, neither extremely well paying, and I was making less as a part-time community college teacher in the summer, I was unsure about laying out this big chunk of dough to go to something I knew from experience would be simultaneously both a good time and major drag.  Last time we went, right after his firing from Women’s Studies, between the trans hate, our own issues and the thunderstorms, we un-pitched our tent a night early and departed, growling that we would not be back for a long time, if at all.  Two years later …

I know I tell way too much of the story and take too long getting to the point.  Okay, since I was committed to going but feeling ambivalent, I decided I was going to make the whole journey (we were planning to travel around for another week afterwards visiting friends, culminating (for me anyway) with seeing my Sufi friends and teacher in MO) a sort of vision quest, less in the Native American sense than like Parsifal and the knightly quests of the Grail days.  Since I was going into a big festival of music, getting the opportunity to see a lot of shows, hear a lot of musicians and artists talk about their process, go to workshops like the intensive drumming class I took, and basically be surrounded by creativity in action, I wanted to open myself to greater knowledge and clarity of my creative vision.  I have known I have been pursuing something, but it has been more of an unnamed feeling than even a thought.  I’ve been after something, trying to develop something in me, it has to do with playing and writing music, and maybe other writing too, and teaching (and doing) chant … but it was starting to get a little crazy-making so I decided to make the whole trip a spiritual quest and to seek in all things, from acoustic stage folk music concert to Twilight Zone panty party, whatever information or insight might be there to be found for me.  I tell you, it made things very interesting for me.  It really made me pay attention – I had my antennae up all the time.  I found myself savoring the times I walked alone on the paths – in the company of truly magical trees, mulling over the bits and pieces that came to me.  Though there was definitely upset going on around me, I was having a very close, intimate and sweet time with myself.

I am sure I will refer to more stuff from this time, because it brought a lot that I am still working with (yay! that was what I was hoping for after all), but I wanted to share one of the things that seemed both the most “duh” and also perhaps on some level the most important: and when this came to me I was, in fact, sitting on the grass at a concert at the acoustic stage.  I don’t remember who was playing or what prompted this thought, just that it suddenly occurred to me, It seems I have a lot of anger in my life, and one of the main things that anger attaches itself to is this idea that I don’t have time to play music or write or learn how to play the guitar better, etc. etc.  I would like to reduce the anger in my life because I don’t enjoy being in fights, either with myself or with others.  So – maybe if I devote more time to music and writing, I will actually have less anger in my life.  OMG!  This was like a lightning bolt to me (and incidentally, lightning did actually strike a tree the second night we were on the land.  I brought a piece of it home with me “for use in magic” as they said).  It seems very simple, almost stupidly so – like, why does this seem so profound to me? 

I guess it seems profound, even if obvious, because its implementation makes such a huge difference.  I really did/do have a ton of anger – which is frustration at not following what my heart is pushing me to do, aka my inner guidance, which is strongly suggesting I work on developing my music and writing, counterproductively turned against my own self (if I am self-hating) or my external circumstances (if I am blaming).  It is the blocked energy that has been wanting to go toward these things, becoming something else.   Because I have not been able to honestly acknowledge the importance of those things to me, and the role I really want them to take in my life – as a big part of what I am doing on this planet.  Putting myself out there and committing publicly to the fact that I am pursuing a creative dream of some kind – well of course it raises all sorts of terrifying anxieties of the “who do you think you are, lame-o?” variety.  But when it came down to a choice between actual greater peace of mind and continuing to thwart my own energies, well, one just sounded a lot more enjoyable so there became no excuse not to go for it.

So hence the guitar class that I enrolled in immediately after I got back from this journey.  Hence new commitments about writing, and a lot more experimentation, and, of course, the revival of this blog.  Truthfully the main reason I didn’t want to give it up even though I haven’t written all this time is because I like the name.  Hey, whatever works. 

That’s all for today.  Peace be with you!

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Balance: Life and Art

What a year it’s been.  Moving to Colorado, many ups & downs (and not just my commute over the mountains ha ha ha) … a lot of fodder for thought packed into a relatively short amount of time.  You could say the stimuli have been highly concentrated for the past while.

Lately I’ve felt my pendulum swinging from a strong drive to go out and meet people, join groups, visit family and friends all over the country and interact constantly with others, to a definite and un-ignorable desire to go inward.   I have really felt most like getting down on my hands and knees and digging around in the muddy earth that is my brain.  Since May (spring Sufi camp, actually) my main desires have been to pray; to chant; to push deeper into understanding, even just a tiny bit more; and to create and create and create!  The feeling of fertility in the inner landscape has lasted a long enough time to surprise me.  Though I hold the awareness that it IS a cycle, and it WILL end, and swing in perhaps a third, as yet unknown direction — I still fear its end because I don’t have faith in myself to make the most of it.

Instead of just sitting down and making stuff, which is what I want to do, instead I sit down and ponder how best to divide up my time, and then I have a discussion about it, and then I dust my furniture, and then I remember something I need to do for work, and THEN I might squeeze in half an hour of letting neat things flow from my hands.  But really, even those half hours, even those fifteen minutes sometimes, they come around more often than is normal for me and so *I* feel like it is a rather lavish abundance.  So, that’s a good thing!

The more I decide to let myself be absorbed in what I really want to do, the less fear will have room to rise up and distract me.  So, that’s what I’m working on right now.

 

 

 

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Teachers and Teaching

I have been thinking about the director of my massage school, Tom, because I just learned that he and his wife had a baby.  That might have been what put me in the frame of mind to give my chakras a good cleaning, using the Pranic Healing techniques I learned from him.  Ah, that felt great – like a spa treatment for my energy system! It perked me right up.

That got me feeling gratitude toward Tom for his teaching, and for the practices he passed on to me, along with hundreds of other Healing Arts Center students.  Now he is someone who has a big impact – and a great prosperity role model, too, come to think of it.  Then I thought about how I had responded to him on occasion – reactive and defensive when I thought he was oversimplifying a complex issue.  When I had him for a teacher, his method definitely rubbed me the wrong way sometimes.  I thought it was “masculinist,” as opposed to feminist, and the philosophy he espoused – about students becoming empty vessels so that the teacher could pour into them the water of knowledge – was, I thought, exactly what progressive pedagogy had criticized decades before.  To borrow an expression, it really ground my gears. 

In retrospect, I question these responses of mine – especially as I explore my relationship to teachers and teaching, and the meanings of my tendency toward defensiveness in general.  I begin to suspect (uncomfortably) that the “problem” has more to do with my emotional investment in believing I am “right” about certain things, and consequent identity attachment to external objects, which are by their nature insecure and unstable, than with any particular teacher’s method of teaching.  Oops.  Well, as I become aware of these stuck places in myself, these places where my attachments keep me from seeing a bigger truth, I am hopefully able to let them go, one by one.

I finally came to question even my long-held belief that the “pouring water into vessels” approach was an oppressive one.  It is usually associated, in my mind, with the use of institutions by the state to transmit the ideology of the state to all citizens, specifically through the educational system.  And while I still believe this to be a common (mal)practice, from an academic and political point of view, I have also arrived at a new location in my spiritual journey, one at which I find it possible that there might be something I want to learn about so badly that I want it to fill me, indeed, that I want to empty myself so that it can fill me more completely; and I know that it is my pre-existing beliefs that prevent me from grasping and fully understanding a Truth that is much higher and deeper than the current spectrum of my thought.

Well, may we all live and learn!

Peace to everyone,

heartland soul

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Things I’ve Prayed For Lately

A moment of grace happened tonight, that I thought I’d share:

My partner Hawk and I are planning a church service together.  We’re co-leading the service at his aunt’s Unitarian Universalist church.  I think it has come as a surprise to both of us that the planning process has been fairly contentious.  I.e., on most things we are not tending to see eye to eye.  From how we were going to actually compose the sermon to which affirmation to use for the benediction, we’ve been disagreeing on everything.

Things had gotten out of hand, to the point where it seemed like every time we sat down to actually plan the thing, we ended up having a big fight!  I kept thinking, For crying out loud, this is supposed to be a sacred occasion and an opportunity to be of service (to the Great Love, no less) and here we are fighting!  What is going on?  But I also knew that I was as responsible as anyone for the condition our process was in.  And, truthfully, I didn’t really have any faith in my ability to not start or engage in arguments with Hawk over bits and pieces of the service.  I could see that something was pushing my button for “feeling threatened and powerless” — I didn’t know why it had come up, but  I was stuck in a pattern of feeling like all my opinions were being steamrollered, if that is the right word — feeling like I didn’t have any say and my creative contribution ws going to be lost.  This is something from my childhood.  I don’t really know why it’s been coming up at this particular moment or what triggered it in the first place, but I was definitely feeling stuck, and I was really suffering because of it.

I have, however, been praying for grace — this was both strongly encouraged by Hawk and inspired by the Caroline Myss book I mentioned in the previous post (in response, in fact, to just such fears as as I described).  Once I humbled myself enough to be willing to let go of the pain (and to try something Hawk suggested) I prayed for my heart to be strengthened enough that I would be able to choose things that were harder but right.  And I prayed that my actions could be aligned with God’s will.  (This phrase, for me, expresses my knowing that I am out of alignment and also not honestly knowing how I will — or can — bring myself into re-alignment; I guess it is an expression of trust in grace, that somehow even if I don’t actually think I have the strength of will to always do what is of the highest good, it can — somehow — end up being done through me.)

And also I took a page from the AA book — one I never really got into while I was going to AA, but which felt appropriate now — and prayed that God would take away my character flaws.  Jealousy, for one, and the fear of being overshadowed (itself actually an expression of choosing the ego over the higher self).  I did not groove on the language of “character flaws” in my AA days, let me tell you.  But I’m at a place now where I see the value that concept can have … I can see how such a prayer could really be the gateway to having a big step up.  (I think the twelve step program is actually a wonderful path of prayer, self-knowledge, knowledge of God, and service — not unlike the path of mysticism that I was talking about before.  Note how I never got a sponsor or did the twelve steps, either.  🙂  )

Anyway, when I wasn’t actively engaged in prayer, I wasn’t really thinking about these things as I went about my day, but I gradually realized that a shift was happening in the way Hawk and I were working on the service — or rather, in the way I perceived the process.  I actually started being able, when I noticed a potential conflict coming up, to not start a fight!  Sometimes this meant just letting something pass by without question or comment, and sometimes it meant telling Hawk that I wasn’t thrilled with some element he was proposing, but I was willing to go along with it if he was excited about it.  I felt glad that we seemed to have achieved some degree of peace, though it felt precarious to me.

then we got to the subject of the affirmation to use in the benediction.  Hawk had proposed something; I had objected on the grounds that it wasn’t specific enough to our topic; yadda yadda yadda; I had made a whole fuss about it the last time we tried to have a planning session.  This time, I said to myself, I will go with the strategy that seems to have been sorking so well — just go along with whatever he proposes for the sections he’s in charge of.  So when he brought it up, I just said, Ok, sure, that’s fine. 

But even though I said it was fine, he went on to explain why he liked it, why he felt like it was a good finish to the service, and how he thought it related to our sermon.  At first, I started to get a little defensive — I could feel some resistance coming up.  Then the thought occurred to me — and this, I think, was the moment of grace — like a little voice in my head: “Wow, ok, he’s trying to share with me why he thinks this would be a good fit, and I’m just dismissing it because I still want to hold onto my feeling of being right, regardless of whether we use it or not.  What if I just — allowed myself to listen to his reasoning?  What if I opened just that much?”  And … as a matter of fact … I did start really listening to what he was saying.  And I did feel my heart opening — and I did get where he was coming from.  Really. 

So I was able to say, Yes, let’s go with that, and actually mean it.  And some peace was sustained.  But really the true moment of grace was in the sudden flash of light with which I saw that I was really attached to the feeling of being right — that up to this point I’d been choosing that over my love for my partner.  And once I am able to see that that’s the choice I’m making with my actions (in this case, my words as actions) — I definitely do not want to stay there!  But I might still not have the moral courage to change my direction — in essence, admit that I was wrong, and change my actions and words accordingly — were it not for God’s grace and the strengthening of my heart that I prayed for.  In fact, it may be that every time I admit to being wrong, and that someone else was right (or even just that they have a good point!), that is happening because of an intervention of grace.  Because the habit of clinging to the sense of rightness is very strong in me.  And I think that much of the time I don’t even realize I’m doing it — let alone realize what choices I’m making from that place, and what those choices say about my priorities!  I’m saddened every time it strikes me how far away I am from the ideal … but I do have faith that I can get better, step by step.  And moments of revelation like this one tonight, where I realize how much I am reliant on grace for any change I make for the better in my self … are really pretty mind-blowing to me, pretty heart-filling.  And I just have to say I’m grateful for being shown a glimpse of what I was actually doing, difficult though it may be for me to witness, and I’m grateful that although I didn’t know if I would be able to do it, the right thing happened through me. 

Good night and love,

H.S.

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Don’t Worry!

I just drew this angel card:

BLESSING IN DISGUISE

“What appears to be a problem is actually part of your answered prayer.  You’ll understand the reasons behind your present situation as everything resolves.  Trust in heaven’s protection and infinite wisdom to answer your prayer in the best way.”

This was in response to a request for information about the overall lesson I’m supposed to be working on through all of this upheaval, the bigger picture.  Oh, those angels.

I must believe this on some level, because I say it all the time, and it comes out easily, like something I believe.  I especially say it in regard to my spouse’s future.  I know it will come out all right — I know his star is headed up — that he’s moving on to something that’s a better match for him (though I don’t know what that may be).  I noticed I don’t say it as much in reference to myself, my own future.  A major era is coming to an end for me in ways that are totally unrelated to Hawk’s job.  It’s time for me to be moving from “student” to “professional” as I finish grad school and massage school within the next month.  I’ve been freaking out for the last couple of days about all the change … worrying. 

I think some of what I’m experiencing is just natural grief as some important things pass out of my life — a part of life’s cycles, the dying of each moment into the next.  And another big part of what’s been getting me down is worry, the irritation and distress at not knowing what’s coming next, not being able to control or predict it, not knowing what to do in the meantime to ensure a positive outcome.  Being afraid that whatever happens it’s going to be painful for me and there’s not going to be much reward at the end of it.  I.e., experiencing (unnecessarily) the imagined painfulness before it happens — if it’s even destined to happen at all.

Friday I had a whole mini-lesson on this very topic.  I say “mini” because it was only one day compared to the months-long transitional period we’re in, but it made a dramatic impression on me (and it did seem to go on for the entire day, repeating the theme across multiple contexts).  This was a day I’d been planning for the past week — a “fun day” in St. Louis.  Hawk was going to drive out to meet me in the middle of a weekend I’d be spending there for school; we’d use some free movie tickets I’d acquired to go see the new Star Trek movie, spend the night at my friend’s and generally make a day of it.  A city date.  And, I thought, we really MUST go to the Botanical Gardens in St. Louis — we definitely had to before leaving the state, and this would be one of the best times of year to see it, early May.  So I planned this whole day around us going to the gardens, searching online for places to eat, routes to different movie theaters, gay places in the same area to go dancing after the movie.  It was an elaborate itinerary and it kicked off with the Gardens and so damn it, we must have a good start!  Everything must go well!  With all the stress we’d been under (individually and as a couple), I thought, we really needed  this day of fun.

(I hope that from my exclamation points, capitals, and italics you can gather a sense of the pressure I put on myself about this day.)

Hawk was supposed to meet me at one, after my anatomy class let out.  This class begins at 9 a.m.  For at least five hours straight, I kid you not, from the time I woke up in the morning until fifteen minutes after one p.m. it poured down rain in a five-hour thunderstorm.  It thundered and lightninged the whole time.  The sky was dark gray and the rain was pounding on the patio roof.  I was sitting there for the entire class thinking, F, f, f!  How can we possibly go to the Botanical Gardens in this?  The whole day is going to be RUINED!!!

Well, I reluctantly patched together some backup plans.  Someone told me we could still go to the Climatron (I was bemoaning this situation to several of my classmates who knew the city better).  I was like, Yeah, okay, sure.  We’ll do that and it will be okay.  It’s sure not May flowers, though.

Well, at 1:10 I was waiting for Hawk to show up.  (It’s a two-hour drive from Columbia and he’d gotten a late start.)  I had to stand behind the door of my school and look out because the rain was blowing so hard horizontally into the porch. 

At 1:13 it seemed like the rain might be letting up enough to actually go out to my truck without getting totally soaked.

At 1:15 the rain stopped entirely.

By about 1:30 it was completely sunny with a few fluffy white clouds, seventy degrees, with a cool, gentle post-shower breeze.

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We had a fantastic time at the Botanical Gardens.  It really was awesome — with all kinds of spring flowers in bloom.  And we had a very fun time together.  And it wasn’t hard for me to get the point of this story (you might say it was like a blinding ray of light):  When you (I said to myself) are sitting there wrinnging your hands and saying Oh no, oh no, this is going to be bad, stop worrying!  The very outcome you have been hoping for might be just about to explode into being — even when NO signs suggest it could even be possible.  That’s the way Spirit works, that’s the way miracles work.

And I don’t want to take away the message that I am always going to get exactly what I want, that things will always turn out exactly like I plan them, regardless of the weather at any given moment.  It’s more that — I’m to be reassured that things will be all right.  That something even better than I can imagine is coming.  And that worrying about what the future’s going to bring in the way of badness is not only unhelpful — it’s frequently irrelevant. 

So — yeah.  You can call me on this.  Cause I don’t have it down yet.

Peace to all,

H.S.

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by

Shiva

Last weekend, my kirtan-leading friend invited me out to her place to join her for a fire ceremony on the morning after the New Moon — a time, traditionally, favorable to new beginnings.  It was cool.  This time she gave me a booklet so I could chant along with her toward the end.  That’s my favorite part, of course. 

Around the middle of the ceremony we were singing “Om Namah Shivaya,” and she casually mentioned that chanting Om Namah Shivaya would be a good practice for me this month.  I was like, Hm.  Interesting.  She knew a tiny bit about my partner’s job, just that something stressful was going on.  I was certainly thinking about it that morning, and really looking for signs, guidance about what to do, how to be, when I was feeling like I was about to fall apart.  So I took the suggestion to heart.

She also said something about her practice of doing the  fire ceremony on the full moon — that it didn’t matter what the practice was, it was just making the commitment to do something with a certain specific regularity.  So since then, I have been thinking about committing to chant Om Namah Shivaya a certain number of times every day for a month.  (Apparently the standard number of times is 108; I just looked it up.)  So, no more half-assing.  I hereby commit to chanting Om Namah Shivaya 108 times each day for the next 31 days.  Anyway, I have been doing it a little each day, when I thought about it; and so I was also wondering as I did it, Why this?  My friend quoted Babaji as saying that the power of Om Namah Shivaya could stop an atomic bomb.  But I thought there must be some reason why this suggestion had come to me, something about Shiva that I needed to learn.

Well, tonight Hawk went to bed before me so on a whim I got out a copy of Toward the One (a Sufi journal) that I’ve been working on reading since last October.  I opened it up to a random page, and what did I find?  That’s right, a whole 17-page article about the various aspects and qualities of Shiva!  Aw yeah!  Okay, I get excited about synchronicity.

Then, of course, the first quote at the top of the first page explained a great deal.  I’d had the vague idea that Shiva was some sort of god of destruction (my impression was, the breaking down of the old and dead to make space for the new and lively).  This quote said, “All pain is significant of change; all that changes for better or worse must cause a certain amount of pain, for change is at once birth and death.”  Wow, man, that knocked my socks off.

The pain of change is exactly what’s been getting me down, on all sorts of levels at once, conscious and unconscious, big and small.  Hawk’s firing and the uncertainty it throws us into about where and how we’re going to live after this summer has definitely been rattling my sense of security, my general orientation in the world.  It’s made me feel very powerless, out of control (in good ways, I guess, for my personal growth, but it has NOT been fun); like I’m waiting to find out what aspects of my life I’m going to lose, what I’m going to have to replace.  I’ve been on the pessimistic side a bit.  I have not been graceful about surrendering control (or the illusion of control that I cling to foolishly).  I haven’t been open to the cycle of change/pain/birth/death, the endless destruction and regeneration of life. 

But it’s not just that situation; I think there’s also an element of this panic of change hanging around my thoughts of finishing massage school at the end of May, and defending my dissertation (if all goes well) in June.  I’m a little freaked about what I’m going to do when those two events are over.  It’s pretty much a blank after that. 

I guess part of the message is that I can’t let myself get psyched out by this stuff.  According to the article I’m reading, Shiva’s devotees have the practice of “acting contrary to their nature for the purpose of acquiring mastery over themselves,” and thus experiencing the liberation of their souls.  Acting contrary to my nature, in this case, would be gracefully surrendering to the flow of life, not resisting, and thus not causing myself needless pain.  “Shiva the liberator,” the author continues, “is often represented as an archer” whose arrows frighten awake “those who feel comfortable in their peaceful and superficially virtuous life” (Nirtan Ekaterina Pasnak 53-54).  But Shiva is also described as extremely compassionate, repeatedly taking on harm or pain to himself to spare humans or gods from suffering (55). 

Compassion in gods of destruction is comforting to me.  It reassures me that whatever the outcome, there’s really no way for me to do it “wrong.”  Having the intention to let my higher self take the reins as much as possible in my life right now couldn’t hurt.  But when I am feeling like a big screw-up, it’s nice to know a god is not there to judge me or rate me, but merely to assist me.  And then I do feel supported and guided.  I start acting a little nicer to myself.  I repeat to myself, I surrender.  I tell myself slogans — Let Go and Let God.  And maybe, a little bit, I start to really release and relax, to ease up on the death grip I try to put on life.  Then, a little bit at a time, spaces open up where miracles can enter in.

Peace and love to all,

H.S.