A Breath of Rain

I have been wondering if trees and plants suffer. There are now so many trees dropping their leaves and turning brown. I don't know if they will leaf out again next year or not. Following the great freeze earlier this year, I mourned the loss of trees but to my delight, they rallied and sent out another set of leaves. The fruit was gone but they set out even more leaves than they had before. How resilient. Perhaps they are resilient during droughts and high temperatures as well. I hope so but I am trying not to jump to conclusions.

But last night came a little rain. Our first in 6 weeks. I was a sigh a relief in my soul. Was it also a sigh a relief for the plants and trees. Or do they just take it all in stride without comment or feeling?

I know that I relate to trees and plants as if they have feelings when I am directly influencing their lives. If I am pulling weeds or harvesting I apologize and thank them. I chat with the plants I put in. I have been generally commizerating with their thirstty plight. I felt dried out and shriveled up myself. If love could help them feel better, I did my part.

What I could observe with my senses was the grasses were brown when I went to bed and green when I went out this morning. I could see where the rain had been generoous and where it had skipped just by the color. I hope those that did not get last night benefit vicariously from those that did, like through some great underground root-net.

I just know it sounded like my team had won the championship around here when we heard the first drops of rain. A breath of rain... is why I love my life so much.

Don't Lie for One Day

Don't lie for one day was one of the points on George Copsey's (www.selfimprovementsite.com) list of 10 tips for self improvement. He was talking about the little white lies we tell so as not to hurt other's feelings or to avoid being reprimanded ourselves. He has a point there. All too often we pretend we don't have a preference when we do or we try to cover over some little thing.

But when I read his point I thought how about if I didn't lie for 10 minutes. I was thinking about how I lie to myself feeling alone when I am actually connected with everyone and everything. How about acting as if I have no power or as if I am all powerful. Or how I think something doesn't exist because I. can't see it with my physical senses. Or thinking this illusion is real.

I am thinking it would be an awesome experience not to lie to myself about anything for even a moment, let alone a minute. That would probably be a timeless moment of illumination. If only I could.

I am smiling at myself even as I write this. It was only 14 months ago when someone was challenging me on lies I tell to myself and to him. Nothing in particular, just that I do lie to myself and therefore to others. I was SOOOO incensed. After all I consider myself to have great integrity. And in a way I do. In another way, I have finally realized that I lie to myself most all of the time. I am writing this blog to expose my lies to myself and to find something true, something that rings true from the core of my being.

So the irony of this point of self improvement is not lost on me. I look forward to the day or even the moment when I totally get the truth. In the meantime I will peel off the layers of lies like the layers of and onion. What, then, will I know?
Probably the biggest reason ever to love my life so much.

Life Could Be So Easy If....

My client said, "I just don't know why my son won't settle down and what he knows to do. His life would be so much easier". I replied, "I just don't know why you don't do what you know to do". It caught her by surprize. She started to respond two or three times and then was quiet. I felt just a little smug.

Today I heard a little voice in my head say, "I just don't know why you don't settle down and do what you know to do". Touche. Actually, "Ouch". It only took 48 hours for my words to come back and glare at me in vibrant neon color. Just illustrates that knowing better does not mean doing better.

All the drama of the past week had settled down. The new frig is in place. Food is cooked up or tossed out. Our road is now freshly reblacktopped. The runaway puppy had returned injured but was now finally out from under the shed and to the vet getting his tail amputated and the temperature fell from the 100's to the mid ninties. Everything is in resolving motion. So why do I persist is feeling irritable and overwhelmed? Why am I eating in a way that intensifies my irritibility?

I know what to do. Drink more water. Exercise. Drink green drink and lay off the sugars. I know the price of not doing these things. I am more irritible, my feet ache more, the athlete's foot gets worse. I woke up with a good plan. And then proceeded to have ice cream for breakfast and on it went. It was like I put the wrong operating program in my brain. And altough I was aware of what I was doing, I didn't alter my behavior. If anything I was difiant. My roomate did a double take at my breakfast and I said, "Yep, it's ice cream".

Well, now I have told on myself and tomorrow is another day. Besides, the ice cream is now all gone. I will keep an eye on that smugness and rejoice in the movement of life.

Raindrops on Roses

"Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens....these are a few of my favorite things". I am now clinging to the lyrics from the Sound of Music to help me stay focused and balanced.

I am tempted to instead list my peeves of this day starting with the refrigerator going out yesterday. At 1AM I was out buying ice to keep things cool and shortly thereafter I was stuffing newspaper into the freezer to keep things frozen. The Internet is a wealth of ideas. Now I am waiting for a loaner frig to be delivered since there is no repair person available for a few days. Who knew I could get a loaner frig. That would have to go on my list of favorite things.

All of this goes to illustrate a point. Creating my life requires moment to moment choices or I fall back into some soap opera routine of unpleasant drama. I have learned that repeating the Ho'oponopono cleaning phrases of "I love you, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you" don't work so well to balance me if they are said through clenched teeth. I can feel benefit from such a practice when I relax. Just lower my shoulders and take a deep breath.

Actually, there is nothing I can control. The frig will come when it does. The runaway pup will come back or it won't. The temperatures will drop and rain will come when it does. Would any of these things coming to pass make me happier than I can choose to be at this moment already? They could all happen and if I am in a fussing mood, I would miss the pleasure of each one. Look alive and happy, Patricia.

So there! Happiness is an inside job and a choice. If I can't shit my mood by asking why I love my life so much or saying Gamzu then it is time to sit still and do nothing. Maybe I'll stage a little Julie Andrews song and dance around the living room before I begin.

Re-evaluating Assumptions

My early assumption was that the suffering in the world meant something was wrong, be it the result of sin or something else, and I was here to help change it. This set some unfortunate behaviors into motion. If I am to help the world or people then someone has to know what is right or at least better. I'm guessing that I thought that was me. I wanted to alleviate suffering. Now I am wondering how self righteous I came across.

I was not a happy camper and projected that out onto others. I am thinking I wore two masks back then; one of the saintly helper and the other one of blame. I have already shared my journey from blame to responsibility. Now I am looking at my need to fix situations was based on my Catholic guilt and salvation ethic.

An alternative assumption is that everyone is already born perfect. In this case they do not need fixing regardless of their apparent circumstances. There are a couple of different theories about this and I hope my brief summaries do them justice but you can do a search and learn more if they interest you.

Mike Dooley suggests that God is playing hide and seek with himself in this material illusion and is playing so well, God forgot it was a game. So we are all part of God and the drama we see are the roles we are playing. We have to remember who we are as creators.

Abraham Hicks might say is there is no evil but individuals refuse to step into the stream of well being. The vengeful God is created from human despair in a sea of contrast. Our mission is to step into the stream of well being.

Mabel Catz, in The Easiest Way, relates the creation story that says we were created perfect and given free will in the form of thinking, which was necessary for life in paradise but could be chosen. Adam chose to respond to God saying "She made me do it", and from then til now we have suffered under an ever growing illusion that separated us from God. In this scenario, everyone is perfect but we see them through a veil of illusion written by our individual and collective memories. In order to see clearly, we must apologise to the Divine for our error of perception in order to clear the way for Divine Inspiration. Here, the error that I see in others is in me and my job is to clean it away. By clearing it away from me, I also clear it from mass consciousness.

What is at issue here is the basic assumption about whether humans are born in sin or born perfect. Radically different assumptions. I had lived from the perspective of sin with the resultant self deprecation. If I choose to see everyone as fundamentally perfect, including myself, All sorts of inner building blocks have to change. I would have to accept the "God doesn't create no junk". That includes me and everyone else. I can't explain the depth of shift this would require.

I like the Ho'oponopono view in that it accounts for the apparent sufferings through my perception of others through a distorted view of memory. It also gives me a way to shift things in that I can take total responsibility and clean my illusion that I see around me and open to inspiration. My focus of change shifts from fixing those around me (which they never responded the way I hoped) to a shift within myself. Validation comes from within, not without.

Who knew that loving my life so much would begin a healing process like this. This too is for the best. Gamzu.

My winding spiritual journey

I am facing the possibility of making a couple of u-turns in my spiritual/philosophical life assumptions. That I have not made them already is a reflection of my early religious training/indoctrination. I have probably been dancing around these assumptions for some time but am only now being able to articulate them clearly enough to myself to choose anew, or at least review anew.

Actually I am waffling on my u-turns and have stalled out in the writing about this. So here are my mental meanderings.

I am about personal growth and change, taking personal responsibility. I am about doing this from the most encompassing spiritual perspective I can find that resonates with me.

Initially, I was born and raised catholic. You might call a child who went to mass and communion everyday for 4 years, walking more than a mile to do so, pious if not religiously affected. From this period of time I was a "good girl" with a lot of learned guilt who didn't understand sin because I made the best choices I could at the time So I made up my sins when I went to confession. Somehow I emerged with a recognition of suffering in the world and a need to change it. Oh, if only a woman could be pope!

Searching for me began early on. Might have been the nun who told me and another convert to stop asking questions because we were destroying the faith of others in the class. I think we were the two probing our faith and she didn't have answers.
So I read at the Theosophical Society, read "Be Here Now" by Ram Das, the Rampa books, whatever was available in the mid to late 60's. I studied astrology. About then I had my most formative spiritual experience. I was standing near to my little bookshelf and heard a clear voice in my "heart" that said, "Study anything you want but do not seek psychic experiences. Grow you character and all will come in time."
"Growing my character" became my yardstick of choice. If all else was equal, which option would grow my character the most?

I have to say though, that growing my character was balanced by my need to change the world. That meant my trying to rescue the downtrodden and resulted in my being attracted to guys that needed fixing. They were needy, addicted, self absorbed. So I became a Moonie. I could save the world, live in a celibate community, have a matched marriage eventually,(good, since my men choices were pitiful and unchangeable)
and grow my character. Here, God was a suffering God whose tears I sought to ease.

From there I moved into Feminism and Native American teaching which both embraced the indwelling Spirit of God in all life. I did vision quest in the Apache tradition, studied with a Native American orientated shaman who evolved into Buddhism. All the time growing my character. My current studies lean heavily into Jewish mysticism based on the Kabalah.

My questions are always about good and evil, the origin of evil, the true nature of being human and what is life all about, and what God wants from us. I'll muse further on the next blog.

I Used To Ask Why

I have journeyed from feeling like a victim to taking personal responsibility. Victim hood was probably a step up from where I started in that I suffered quietly and alone. When I looked outside myself and compared myself to others, blame came in and with it victim status. Then my question might have been, "Why did this happen to me"?

Along the way I made choices and took responsibility for them and saw projects through to completion. But I still blamed Dad for our poor relationship and Mom for dying when I was a teenager. That perspective took a radical turn when I went to a lecture at a Science of Mind Church that presented the idea that I chose my parents. While that idea did not make me happy, I did see the potential in it. If I did make that choice then there was a reason I knew in some space and time. So I extended my sense of responsibility beyond my conscious choices to include other things that directly impacted me.

My next awareness along the personal responsibility continuum would be illustrated by the question, "Why me, why this, why now"? This reflected that I was drawing people and experiences into my life on some level. Everything was feedback for my spiritual consciousness. The answers reflected some theorizing like, "Did I break my toe because there is something going on I can't stand", or "Is there some way I am not wanting to stand on my own two feet", or even, "Is there someplace I should be standing up for myself more"? I didn't usually know the answers to my questions but I asked them and moved on without feeling the victim of circumstance.

And until recently, I would explain things to myself by saying, "There is no one out there but me". Somehow this meant to me the reaction I was getting back from others and circumstances is somehow a mirror of what I am projecting. So if I didn't understand or agree with what was happening, I would call it "Curious Karma" knowing, or at least believing, somehow it was connected to me. I encouraged others to take responsibility for what was happening in their lives. I helped other people solve their problems. I could be insightful and incisive.

All this leads me to my recent encounter with Ho'oponopono as presented by Joe Vitale and Ihaleakale Hew Len, PhD. in "Zero Limits". I thought I was pretty far out there on the personal responsibility scale, but Joe and Dr Len were much further out than I had ever even entertained. They are saying that I am responsible for creating even the problem situations that everyone are experiencing through erroneous thoughts within myself. This is more radical than "there is no one out there but me" and also a logical extension of that idea.

There is an power to this idea. If I am 100% responsible for actualizing the problem, then I can be 100% responsible for resolving it using love, forgiveness and gratitude. The system is elegant in it's simplicity of using the mantra, "I love, you, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you", to address the Divinity within me to transmute the erroneous thoughts resulting in whatever shows up in my life.

I have been experimenting with this approach whole heartedly now for 3 weeks. The outcome is that I no longer ask why. Not "Why me, why this, why now". I don't expect to know. I am simply cleaning my and my ancestors' erroneous thoughts. The result is a great decrease in stress since I don't need to figure out the solution. I repeat the mantra until I come to a place of peace or get an inspiration of what action to take next. I am not trying to explain Ho'oponopono as you can read the book. I am noting personal movement even further out along the personal responsibility scale.

It is yet another way I love my life so much and definitely falls into the Gamzu department. This too is for the best!