Spiritual Beings Having a Physical Experience

I just facilitated a four day men’s spiritual retreat in Mexico, near Rocky Point on the shore of the Sea of Cortez.  We got back late on Sunday and I have been sick and mostly in bed with cramps and diarrhea since then.  It is now Tuesday evening and I am happy to say that I feel better.  I don’t like being sick, but know it will pass, as things do.
The retreat was a wonderful experience for all ten of us.  Lots of love, connection and emotional vulnerability.  Early in the retreat we spread the ashes of a friend in the Sea.  We then talked about grief, change, who and what we really are.  I put the stress on each of us being spiritual beings having a physical experience.  As usual, I attempted to facilitate the movement of each individual a step or two further along their spiritual path, by providing the emotional and spiritual space they need.  It is important, for me, that I keep things general and have respect for individual differences.  I truly feel a lot of love for these guys and want the best for them.

Holding Hands With Personal Demons

As I said in the meeting tonight, “I believe that life is perfect right now, and there is a pretty good chance that will be true tomorrow!”  Perfection , for me, does not mean there is no room for growth and change, it just means that things are just fine the way they are and that I very much enjoy the human experience.  That attitude is quite remarkable since I have spent most of my life living with guilt, shame, low self worth, rules of conduct and a lot of fear.  It took being near death a few times for me to realize the truth of what I heard years ago, that “nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all”.  With that in mind, the emotions that were troubling me, my personal demons, fell away, with effort.
As I said in the previous paragraph, I had a lot of personal demons.  The way I have gotten (mostly!) past them is to “hold hands” with them, confront them and work through them, one at a time.  When I say hold hands with them, I mean accept and embrace them as part of me, I can then do the work of confronting and working past them.  During the process, my central focus was my spiritual condition.  I could only do the work from within love.  The process was neither pretty nor fun.

Complete Understanding

During my experiences today, both with clients and at my recovery meeting, it, once again, became quite clear that it is not possible for most people to completely understand the experiences of another.  What I call “deep listening” makes it possible to come a great deal closer to a complete understanding, but it is still like being outside of the experience looking in, rather than having had the experience.  Deep listening certainly allows for greater understanding and genuine empathy, but it is not the same as going through the experience.  This realization came about through discussions about what it meant to be addicted, dependent on and obsessed by some sort of chemical, what I typically describe as ‘being owned” by the chemical.  It is not possible for a non-addict to completely understand what it is like to be addicted.  However, even without a given experience, it is possible to truly listen and come to a valid understanding, rather than simply projecting beliefs, it just requires more effort.

A Divine Meeting

Today, while working with a family, I was reminded of a comment made by deCastillejo in her book Knowing Woman, "For there to be a meeting, it seems as though a third, a something else, is always present.  You may call it Love, or the Holy Spirit.  Jungians would say that it is the presence of the Self.  If this 'Other' is present, there cannot have failed to be a meeting." In this case, there was a very strong feeling of a presence and I felt very much like a divine conduit along with my typical indications of sweating, runny nose and speech improvement.  Also, each of the family members were being authentic and completely present.  It was an important, loving, magical, and totally exhausting, couple of hours.  It feels amazing for me to be present for such a life changing moment.

Achieving Peace and Serenity

I was reminded today that my experience is that it is not possible to skip over the unpleasant emotions like shame, guilt or hurt, often associated with past events, and move straight to peace and serenity.  It is clear to me that in order to achieve higher levels of communion and deeper levels of peace, it is necessary to completely resolve and integrate those feelings first.  For me, the first step in the process of resolving my past issues was breaking down my denial and becoming aware that I was carrying around feelings of hurt, guilt and shame, an unpleasant realization.  The next step(s) involved several years of shedding light on those feelings, understanding where they came from and recognizing the truth about them, that they were lies or misunderstandings.  The final result has been a sense of freedom I did not know was possible and a deeper love for myself and others.

Joy in Simple Things

One of my friends has a “special needs child”.  She is profoundly disabled and has a lot of pain.  She also finds great joy in the simple things in life, as do I.  Pain and disability has a way of stripping away a commonly held grasping toward the unimportant things in life, transient things like material possessions, money, power and prestige.  It then becomes more possible to see and feel joy in simple, basic things, like feeling a breeze, being with family or a hug.  In general, children have not yet gotten lost in the meaningless aspects of our culture.  They can teach us much, if we adults can listen.

Looking for Love

During the recovery meeting tonight the speaker mentioned what he described as a very strong and indefinable and powerful feeling in his home group that he found very comforting and supportive.  The others, including me, in the meeting believed what he was describing to be love and connectedness.  There was a general acceptance of its importance in recovery, a recognition that we are all seeking that feeling.

Love and Faith

A day of rest.  I did my exercises, paid some bills, went to a movie and relaxed.  The movie, “The Croods”, was all about the consequences of a life based on fear versus a life based on love and faith, very touching.  I cried several times due to the truth expressed in the movie about the confining nature of a fear based life versus the freedom and power of a love and faith based life.
Two things that I practice on a daily basis are gratitude for my life and staying within my physical limits.  The fact is that because of my age and disability, I have relatively little endurance.  I try, successfully, to be grateful and not do very much and, as a result, I end up tired, but not exhausted, at the end of each day.  Recently, I also became aware that any resistance I had to experiencing the events of my life also made me tired, any resistance to “what is”.

Pure Love

As far as I can tell, there is only one kind of love, a strong feeling of an intense willingness and desire to exert oneself for someone else’s spiritual and emotional growth or welfare.  That love comes from the force/power known as God.  In its pure form love is totally selfless and totally directed at the growth and welfare of the other entity.  I feel it all the time for everything and everyone else and I also feel it directed at me, most powerfully from God but also from everything and everyone, since we are all connected and all of us have a portion of that power/force within us.  I find it to be quite amazing to live my life so immersed and surrounded by love.
In my past, love was mixed up with fear and co-dependency, not totally selfless and experienced as feelings of infatuation, being “in love” and lust.  There is nothing at all wrong with those feelings, they are fun and intense to experience, they are simply not purely love.  For example, when my wife and I met, thirty-two years ago, there were strong feelings of being in love and the lust that, in my case, comes with a touch of fear mixed with love.  It was very human and wonderful to experience those feelings.  We have now been married for thirty one years and we feel an enduring love for each other, also wonderful to experience.

A Day of Connection and Love

A day of connection and love.  I worked with several individual clients and one family today, using the guidance I received plus my own intuition.  I felt very much like a simple conduit, a tool responding to outside forces.  My job was to remain neutral, love the people I was working with at that moment, listen and take action according to input from the people at one end and God at the other.  I was in the middle, responding to both sides.  As long as I stay neutral and keep my own ego out of it, the results are quite magical and totally enjoyable, for everyone.
The people and family I worked with are all at different stages of their own growth.  One of the clients and his family are preparing to move on to the next stage of recovery, so I have to keep in mind that my job is to make myself obsolete.  One of the others is at the beginning of his journey with me and with him I need to keep in mind that I am just a part of that journey.  The others are in between.  All in all, a very fulfilling mixture!