Spirituality and the Inner Self

I believe that each person's spiritual life is his or her own business, and that we each need to develop a connection with the world around us in whatever way works best for us. Here are some musings on the spiritual life to consider.

Blog Posts:
This is the Year for Me
Clearing the Old Clutter
The Blender Effect
Whose Worldview Have You Got?
Nature's Music
Living in Layers
Universe on the Wall

This is the Year for Me
In 2012, I resolve to start taking care of myself. Really taking care of myself.

I’ve tried the new diets; I’ve sweated through the “no pain, no gain” exercise programs. I’ve even exorcised my clutter. But this year, I resolve to take care of myself the way I want to be taken care of. I resolve to nurture myself emotionally.

I solemnly pledge that I will not let anyone put me down or walk all over me, and I vow to put my own needs first, at least some of the time. I want to let go of feeding other people’s expectations, so I can finally learn how to nourish myself and enjoy my life.

This kind of thinking always makes my guilt monster growl. When I hear that snarl in my mind, I start doubting myself, and fretfully fall back into the old, familiar rut of pushing my own needs aside and trying to please everyone else. But this time, I’m determined to get around the guilt monster and change my ways.

I’ve noticed that I usually feel less guilty about something if I can manage to find out that other people do the same thing. So I did a little research on the web: What kinds of resolutions have other people made?

Here’s one: “Part of my New Year’s resolution is to become a superhuman, achieving perfection in both mind and body.” Wow! And that was only part of the resolution! I’m sure that by January 2nd, I’d be wallowing in a stupor of shame and mediocrity, unable to even figure out how to start.

Here’s another possibility: The Babylonians, who lived around 2000 BC, had as their most popular resolution a promise to return borrowed farm equipment – now that’s more my style. I can do that! I haven’t borrowed any farm equipment!

I’ve come to the conclusion after years of experience that if I’m going to stick to a resolution, it has to be something simple, something I can commit to with every fiber of my being. I’ve been pushing myself to do things I don’t want to do for so many decades now – and it has never worked! – that the only option left is to try something kinder, gentler, easier. That’s the only way I’ll be able to start building a history of success. And what’s easier than being myself?

So this is the year I resolve to take back my life from the Good-Little-Girl persona that I was trained to hide my real self behind. I don’t want to conform any longer. I don’t want People magazine to tell me who I should emulate. I don’t want to listen to the media tell me how I should eat, how much I should weigh, how I should dress, or what I need to change about myself to become a state-of-the-art human being. I don’t like cell phones; I don’t know how to work an iPod, and I don’t want Cosmo to advise me on how to be sexier. I want to live life my way!

I know that the Good-Little-Girl inside of me is very strong. She’s been ruling my life for fifty years, in spite of my occasional escapades into authenticity. She drags me into doing things I don’t want to do; she makes me clean when I’d rather be playing. She sets the alarm I have to wake up to. She nags me about keeping up appearances. She makes me smile and nod when I want to get angry or walk away. She spoils my fun by constantly reminding me of the 1,347 things I should be doing instead of enjoying myself, and she doesn’t let me have potato chips.

In 2012, I will have potato chips! I will talk back to the Good-Little-Girl, and tell her that she can go…do the cleaning herself, because I am going out! I will yell at her if necessary, and tell her in no uncertain terms that I am in charge now. I will ignore the 1,347 things I should be doing while I explore who I really am. I will stop worrying about what other people think. I resolve to do things my way, and I will not let the Good-Little-Girl stand in my way, make me talk with people I don’t like, eat food I don’t want, or buy things that everybody has but that I have no real use for. I’m taking my life back, and she can just go away.

I read somewhere once that we can only give truly from the heart when we’ve given to ourselves first. That’s a theory I’d like to put to the test, though I have to shush the inner voice that says women should always give to others first and patiently wait their turn. In 2012, I’m taking my turn, and trusting that when my own heart is full, it will overflow and spill its gifts to the rest of the world.

Clearing the Old Clutter
I’ve been fighting that old demon, clutter.

Somehow, the mail has piled up until it’s grown to the size of a small mountain. My pile of paperwork-to-do is demanding that I pay attention to it. I try to shut their voices out by playing a computer game or going for a walk, but the echoes of their insistence follow me everywhere. I feel completely overwhelmed by my clutter.

And then it hit me: that’s exactly the feeling I had when I was growing up! My family of origin was defined by a very chaotic energy, and every time I felt like I had finally figured things out, everything changed, and whatever I had organized in my head got blown away.

I always thought life was supposed to be clear and organized, planned and ordered. But it doesn’t always happen that way.

Where I got lost in my current struggle with clutter was in being reminded of the chaos in childhood, when I was helpless to do anything about it. Nothing I did made any difference. I tried for years to make sense of it, and finally I gave up. And I carried that old belief into adulthood.

But as an adult, I do have the power to make changes in my life, to clear the old clutter. Once I realized that I was responding to the piles and their demanding voices the same way I responded to my mother when things got chaotic so many years ago, I could remind myself that now is now – it is not then – and now I have the power to clear the clutter.

Once I let go of the old way of being, I felt a burst of energy, and dug into the piles. Though it’s taken a few hours, spread over the course of several days, I’ve reduced the pile to a very manageable size. It feels good to overcome the chaos. It feels even better to understand that the problem was caused by my responding to my current situation in an old way.

Sometimes it helps to look backward to see whether something from the past is clouding your vision in the present. I don’t even hear my piles now, and the silence is blessed.

The Blender Effect
This week, I feel like I’m living in a blender. Everything is whirling and twirling in a messy goo of missed appointments, half-baked emotions, unexpressed desires, and fretful annoyances. I bend uneasily under the heavy weight of my calendar, stumbling only half-effectively from one task to the next, while the clock continues tsk-ing out its count of the seconds I no longer have available to get too many things done.

The creatures on my to-do list are whining with dismay at having been left alone too long, each one moaning louder in my mind when I attend to another, in the hopes that it will become the next accomplishment.

And the accomplishments slide under my feet like a muddy, uneven treadmill, sometimes so fast that I don’t even notice; and while the accomplishment treadmill chugs tiredly onward beneath my feet, the guilt-for-not-getting-enough-done movie plays over and over in my head, following the endless dog-eared loop that circles around the head of nearly every average American citizen.

The world is tilting, and I feel as if everything is about to slide off – all that I think I know about myself and life is sliding sideways into a huge confusing jumble of mistakes and missteps and misunderstandings, pushed over the edge by the scorekeeping judge of my general ability to cope with life who lives in my head and always knows where my most tender vulnerabilities lie. I look at the smoldering, sodden heap of what I thought I knew, and the sigh that starts in my brain glides slowly and steadily all the way down to my toes.

Perhaps spirituality is not always about reaching for the clouds or finding inner peace. Sometimes it’s about scrabbling down into the dark earth of life, coping with the Blender Effect without resistance, and knowing that everything will still turn out okay in the end.

Whose Worldview Have You Got?
Is the way you see the world the way it really is?

As we grow up, we buy into the collective reality because we don’t know that things can be any other way. We base our view of the world on what our parents and others around us teach us to believe. But that view can only control our reality until we work on changing our perspective.

Imagine how two people with different worldviews would experience an unexpected gift coming into their lives. If one of them is used to unexpected gifts being wonderful things, that person will take it in stride, and enjoy and appreciate it. But perhaps the other person grew up with a worldview where gifts only come with strings attached or some kind of “payment” later on. For that person, the gift will create anxiety and the fear of being subject to another’s agenda or of being expected to repay the gift somehow.

The reason most of us have difficulty manifesting the reality we choose is not that we’re not good at it. The problem is that we haven’t cleared away the old beliefs we were taught. We operate under our parents’ worldview as adults, constantly recreating the old reality on a subconscious level, even if we don’t like it. And if we grew up in a dysfunctional family, our views of reality can be really skewed.

Until we consciously change our perspective by digging into the beliefs that we were taught and discarding those that don’t align with our current value system, life won’t change much. We may work and work in an attempt to create a different reality, but we can’t create something new when all the old roadblocks are still standing in the way.

If you’re not happy with your life, and want to work on changing your perspective, Alice Miller’s book For Your Own Good is a good place to start.

Nature's Music
I think that crickets created jazz. One night in late summer a few years ago, I was sitting on the back porch enjoying the sunset, and I started listening to the rhythm of the crickets. Two of them were talking back and forth across the street, “ZZZ zzz zzz.” Pause. “zzz ZZZ zzz.” Pause. As I listened, I noticed that they would continue in a certain rhythm of threes or fours for awhile, but then one would skip a beat, and the other would immediately moderate his or her rhythm. Once in awhile, everything would get off track and they’d be zzz-zing at the same time, or one would shut up to let the other initiate a new rhythm. (As an amateur musician, I notice these things).

I imagine some mild-mannered old musician down in New Orleans a hundred years ago, sitting and listening to the rhythm of the crickets, and using it as a beat for his new song. They really have a sense of rhythm! And when one drops out altogether, whether to feed or mate or just rest for awhile (or whatever else crickets do), the other keeps the beat going just in case the first wants to jam some more.

What’s really amazing is when three or more of them get going at once – the options for rhythm and beat counterpoint are much more open, and when one puts a little extra beat into the mix, the other two each come up with their own new response, and they’re off on a completely different riff.

Which brings me to the subject of ears: did you know that crickets have ears on their legs? I suppose that means that their response time between hearing another cricket and making their own sound is pretty fast. And I always want to know the purpose of things. Why were crickets created? Sure, they eat bugs, but maybe their intended purpose was to create jazz so that humans could copy and build on it, and sit in lounges with a glass of wine, enjoying the gift of the crickets.

Nature is truly amazing. I hope you get a chance to listen to the cricket jazz this summer.

Living in Layers
This morning, I woke early at the insistence of my cat, and lay in bed listening to the pulse of the rain coming lighter, then heavier, as the birds who were waking with the sun provided a background of sweet harmony.

I was struck by the fact that as a child I learned to focus on the world in a very linear fashion: looking at and thinking about one thing at a time, going in a single direction, accomplishing one task before I started another. This early morning experience was quite different. I was experiencing layers of life rather than a single line of it – the rain and the birds and the breeze coming in the window and the experience of my skin against the soft sheets were all interwoven with the environment I live in, my thoughts and hopes and dreams and sensations of possibility, all shifting and moving and weaving in a tremendous expression of life force energy. The trees were moving outside the window, the flowers in the garden reaching for the light and soaking in the water to nourish themselves, the breeze taking branches in one direction, then another, while somewhere in the community other people were waking up or walking dogs, and other places across the country the skies were clear. And the experience of who I am and who I have been and who I hope to be threads through it all...

Life is such a different experience when we open up to the layers of what's happening around us. I think this must be how animals experience life – the smells intermingled with what they sense all around them in every direction, with a constant check of wind and weather and possible predators or prey. The bonus for living in layers is that it leaves much less room for monkey mind, for our focus to get caught on a single thought that won't leave us alone or batter us about the laundry list of things yet to be done. Living in layers allows a more organic experience of body-mind-spirit without the domination of the mind pushing us to go in particular directions. It's a nice rest for the soul.

Universe on the Wall
One of my favorite things to do when I need to relax and connect with All That Is is to watch the patterns that the sun shining through leaves makes on the wall. The branches outside the window dance if there’s a slight breeze, and on the wall, the leaves turn into a three-dimensional kaleidoscope of fluttering shadows, prompting a feeling of endless time and space, infinity right there on the wall. Some of the branches are still, and some are wafting in the breeze; some are clearly outlined, and some are fuzzy, depending on their placement; and all of them together create a flowing painting full of the wonder of nature’s design. It's like watching a fire in the fireplace. If I focus on the show for awhile, I begin to feel as if I’m right there with Cosmic Intelligence, as if it’s showing me its inner workings as it grows the trees and feeds the leaves, moving and shifting and changing and recreating the world around its center.

After years of watching this natural display, it only takes a few minutes now for me to shift into a very meditative state. My body knows that it’s time to slow down and unite with the very fabric of life, and my mind quickly empties of daily concerns and worries. I often use this time to work on manifesting what I want in my life. It’s as if by spiraling into the shadows, witnessing the energy behind the energy that creates the Universe, I can more easily send my own energy into fulfilling my desires, whether for myself or for the good of all. The Universe on the Wall always puts me into a good space, and the rest of the day goes well.

Finding your own way to connect with Source is an important part of living a comfortable and peaceful life. You might want to check out the Universe on the Wall when you get a chance.