Love Seed

When we witness videos of loving acts on TV or internet, it touches that God or love seed in each of us.  There is a strong feeling of connection and “rightness” about it, a feeling that can be very intense or even overwhelming at times.  Without us having that seed, witnessing such acts would not have that impact.  Personally, I consider it vital to nurture that seed and to carry it with me, in my awareness, throughout the day, a procedure that changes my perceptions and interactions all during the day.  I love my life!

God Or Love Seed

I now know that each of us has that God or love seed inside of us, and so I’m aware of how much potential is inside each of us.  It is both worrisome and wonderful to know it’s there while watching as many humans make negative choices which harm each other or the earth that supports us.  As with me, my clients and others I contact, it is truly wonderful that each of us sense what the loving choice is, the choice that generally feels “right” and will increase the integrity of the universe.  As far as I can tell, I always make that choice.  As I said, it is also worrisome since on so many occasions people choose the more negative option which seems to require less discipline and appears to be easiest.  Making the loving choice is something we are growing towards.

Being Of Service

At the present time, I spend the majority of my life being of service with no thought of a return.  This feels vital to me.  Being partially retired, I have the time and resources that permit this sort of life.  Sometimes I get some sort of compensation and often not, which seems to make no difference.  I used to feel that I needed to guard against people taking advantage of me, a feeling that dropped away as I felt more secure with a loving approach to life and got better at self-care and boundaries.  I now ask myself frequently “is this a gift freely given?”, if the answer is yes, I go ahead.

Achieving Freedom

June 22, 2014
During most of my life I wondered “what I would do when I grew up”, meaning that there was always something missing from being me, I did not feel complete.  Within the last decade, though I am clearly not done, I have achieved the feeling of being complete.  The completion process has been a complex one and is outlined within my website.  The process is summarized nicely by the comment of Dubay: “The unending yearnings of the human spirit are satisfied by nothing that can be measured, seen, heard or touched. To focus selfishly on anything in the created order is to be restricted and thus to fall that far short of full freedom.”  The process has been a lot of work and involved a lot of prayer and meditation.

Being Grateful

As M. Nepo points out, particularly with Polynesians, indigenous people frequently sense the life force and our connection with all things.  As he points out, a person has to slow down, release their various distractions and listen in order to sense it.  At one point about a year ago, I was sitting quietly while communicating with a tree and lamenting its hard life and difficult location.  The sense or message I got back from the tree was “it is what it is”, a valuable take away message.  The tree was accepting what life had to offer.  Like that tree, during my life, I have been given many gifts and I also have many challenges (gifts in disguise!).  I find that it works best to just be accepting and grateful.

Trusting The Process

I am not in charge of outcomes, only the actions that I perform.  There is a loving force or power, which I call God, in the universe that takes care of outcomes, they are beyond me.  In the event that I act lovingly, which is my choice and responsibility, things work out smoothly and harmoniously, increasing the integrity of the Universe.  If I choose otherwise there is generally a feeling of tension and often negative consequences.  I was actually aggravated when I realized how much time and energy I had wasted by trying to force outcomes.  After all, I certainly knew what the best outcomes were!

What Matters

One of the phrases that I learned early in my recovery work was “nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all", meaning that the vast majority of the things that I worried about meant nothing.  At that point in my life, I was thirty seven, had an ulcer, had high blood pressure, did not sleep well and I was having other anxiety problems.  Gradually, using a lot of meditation I finally fully realized that the vast majority of things I worried about meant nothing and that I was definitely not in charge of outcomes, both very freeing.  I am now sixty five, have no signs of anxiety, have low blood pressure and sleep very well, most nights.  I now place my emphasis on relationships and love, knowing that they matter.  I think that little phrase was important!

Spiritual Development

I work as a mental health therapist with many addicts and alcoholics.  Part of what I find when working with them is that their spiritual and emotional sides have not been attended to and are not developed.  Personally, that was true with me as well until I got into recovery and realized that was part of my problem.  The lack of emotional and spiritual development is one of the common clinical and sociological results of addiction but it is also one part of its cause.  There is and emotional and spiritual hole or lack which is filled, at least initially, by the chemical of addiction.  In my work with addicts, I first locate their God or love part and then, using that part, begin to develop their spiritual sides.

Spiritual Bankruptcy

During a recovery meeting recently someone commented something to the effect that we humans spend a great deal of time in an effort to prove that we are “smarter than prairie dogs”. While this was an exaggeration and meant to get a laugh, which it did, as a species, we do emphasize the power of our intellects, sometimes at the expense of our spiritual and emotional development.  In my case, after being a rebellious teen, I turned my attention to my intellectual achievements.  At the end of that process and after several years I received a Ph.D., had some notoriety in academic circles and had become an assistant professor.  I was also miserable, emotionally and spiritually bankrupt.  I then set about developing my emotional and spiritual sides.  I have since realized that my intellect, while a wonderful and vital part of my being, is limited.  In addition, I now recognize the importance of love, compassion, forgiveness and connectedness in my life.

Expectations

I live in a world where many people at all socioeconomic levels and in all positions lie and deceive, while I do not.  I spend a great deal of time, daily, in order to insure that I lead a life that increases the integrity of the universe, which does not include lying or deceiving.  A large part of me expects other people to recognize that I am open and honest, and then I also get offended when they do not realize that I am different.  I realize that I am being pretty silly and certainly unrealistic.  As I have learned through my recovery programs, “an expectation is a premeditated resentment”.