Hidden Prayers II

Almost every time we do anything, we have an underlying intent ~ a dream, a prayer ~ often more than one.  My path involves trying to be conscious of all the prayers I am offering, which is not always easy.

To me, prayers are the most intimate conversations we can ever have with ourselves.  It is through these conversations that we connect with our highest selves, with the god/dess within.  And the ways in which we speak and listen during these conversations as well as the amount and manner of our integrating them into our entire lives is very important.

I recently read a story about two artists who routinely begin their paintings by penciling a prayer on the canvas.  Although their paint strokes eventually cover the written words, the paint cannot delete the underlying prayer. 

. . . the words infuse the work.  Beneath the layers of paint, the prayer persists.  Blessing and invocation, it calls to the viewer, both concealing and revealing its presence.
(Jan L. Richardson, In the Sanctuary of Women:  A Companion for Reflection and Prayer).

 

For years, I have begun each new project ~ whether that is a short piece of writing or a new relationship ~ by saying a prayer.  Each morning, at the close of my yoga practice or during my nature walk or perhaps while I lie lounging in bed, I allow one word or feeling to bubble up from the depths of my being.  That word or feeling is my intent, my prayer for the day.  It then infuses everything I do. 

The ways in which that prayer is answered are sometimes very straightforward; for instance, when my prayer is “love” I may experience deep interactions with my beloveds.  I may be gifted with opportunities to witness breathtaking expressions of love all around me throughout the day.  Or I may just feel love flowing through me throughout the day as I consciously open my “love” channel wider and wider in alignment with that prayer.  Sometimes, though, the answers to prayers are not so neat and tidy.  Perhaps what I am gifted are opportunities when I feel separated from someone I love, so that I am better able to explore love from a new vantage point.  Or maybe my day is filled with places where love just seems to be in total absence.

But what about the many instances when we may have intents that are not compatible with one another, or that are even in contradiction to one another? 

For example, the intent to deepen intimacy with someone will likely not resonate with the intent to teach them about health or to encourage them to change their habits ~ to change in any way. 

To make money and to support people may be intents that can be held simultaneously; surely, many healers, teachers, and spiritual leaders are successful at pulling both financial security and opportunities to serve others into their lives. 

The question for me revolves around how to align those intents, how to have prayers that are in harmony with one another rather than act counter to one another.

The essential first step in this process (and perhaps also the middle and last steps as well!) is to get very clear about my intent ~ to speak it to myself clearly and openly.

And to ask: what is truly my prayer here?  What am I really trying to create?  I usually find the answers in even deeper levels of intent.

For me, if my prayer comes from a place of scarcity, lack, and competition, I work diligently to unweave the beliefs that underlie it ~ the prayers under the prayer.  

Is my intent to help people purely based on a foundational prayer of love?  Or is the underlying appeal somehow related to my need to feel important?

Do I desire to open to financial abundance because I truly believe that the Universe is plentiful with riches for all and that I long to receive that flow?  Or do I hold somewhere a belief that there are limitations to abundance and/or that I do not deserve to receive?

These prayers underneath our prayers are the very foundation upon which our entire lives are built.  Because they resonate throughout each of our thoughts, words, and actions, it benefits us greatly to become very intimate with them ~ and to rewrite them as necessary.

When our prayers involve other people ~ as in the cases of my friends ~ we are wise to remember that everyone is also praying at the same time.  While my prayer may be to offer help to someone else, that someone else may be praying for opportunities to hold their boundaries and not be constantly swayed by the opinions of others.  It is the intersection of these prayers that will manifest in our interactions.

So, before I called my friend to ask about the email she had sent, I tried to become clear on my intent.  Was I approaching this from a place of self-importance?  Was I standing in the position of “knowing what was best for her?”  I said a prayer, “May this conversation create clarity and harmony in me.”  As I hung up, I was feeling great relief to have my perception validated ~ to know that there was confusion there and that I was not creating a story from a place of judgment or fear.  That prayer was answered. 

I also had a larger prayer answered through that conversation.  This particular friend and I have struggled through some challenging times together and are working at creating more depth and trust in our relationship.  This phone call did a bit of that for me, for which I am very grateful.

She later called and thanked me for my words, saying that they helped her clarify her intents with this project.  And in the information I eventually read about her offering I felt much more alignment between the words written and the energy underneath those words. 

I do not know if she had a prayer for our conversation when she answered the phone.  Or perhaps she had asked for clarity or guidance earlier that day?

It isn’t really my business to know about her prayers, only to keep working on praying consciously myself . . .

And to keep opening to something else . . .

You see, all the time that we are spending creating those prayers ~ consciously and unconsciously ~ something else is going on even beneath these foundations.  As we are praying, something greater is also being prayed through us.  Throughout our lives, as we are busily layering paint strokes onto the canvas (paint strokes that include our prayers), underlying these masterpieces of our creation are the words penciled on the canvas.  These are Spirit’s prayers for us, the Divine’s dream that shines throughout all the layers of our lives.  And these prayers persist.

Hidden Prayers I

Be careful what you’re thinking; every thought’s a prayer.

~Mitch Barrett

I awoke one morning to read an email from a friend, excitedly telling me about a new venture in her life.  I felt waves of energy pulsing from my computer ~ waves that had nothing to do with the electronic equipment and everything to do with the adrenaline she had pumped into the message and was perhaps feeding into this new project.  I wondered what her intent was with this new creation, because I was feeling so many distinct, even divergent, points of energy underneath the words she had typed.  The message felt scattered to me, not because the words conveyed that; in fact, the language was very clear.  What I was feeling was the foundation underlying the words, which did not feel clear at all to me.  It was as though I could sense something being communicated to me underneath the emailed words, and that something caused my being to be confused.

So I called her and asked.  She took a deep breath before she answered.  “To be totally honest,” she said, “My main reason for creating this right now is that I need money; I am really worried about money, so I must offer something new to raise funds.”  She paused before quickly adding, “And I also think it will be a wonderful offering!”

As soon as I heard this, my body relaxed; I now understood that the confusion I was feeling was the result of her confusion.  Although her written words were filled with excitement and promise, she was not feeling only excitement and promise as she wrote them.  She was experiencing lack and scarcity, and that was communicated even through words that conveyed exactly the opposite.  Her intent was to get out of financial crisis by selling something.  So, although the email described a beautiful offering, it may as well have also said, “Act fast!  Going out of business!”  Or even, “Please help save our company!”

The subtext was perhaps even more important than the text here, because it formed the foundation upon which everything else was built.

Will anything bad come from my friend creating something from the place of financial need?  Absolutely not!  And it is possible that that message sent out ~ one of need ~ will inform who she pulls toward her with this creation as well as the result of this creation.  Perhaps others seeking financial security will be drawn to her?  Maybe she will find that this offering is the answer to one prayer and not the other.   Maybe then she will receive the money she needs but the offering will not be wonderful; or perhaps it will be wonderful but not raise the desired amount of income.

We each have the capacity to perceive the intents of others, sometimes subtly and sometimes strongly.  Often, I get the feeling that someone wants something from me, even though their words in no way communicate that to me.  Rather, it is the underlying current beneath their words that I am feeling.

It is the prayer.

In these days when we’re told we can create our own reality and that we can manifest whatever we want, simply through the power of thought alone, the responsibility seems almost overwhelming.  I have no idea how all of that works.

I do believe that the Universe is infinitely more vast and creative than we are and that we are simultaneously incredibly powerful beings and mere specks of stardust.  So, no ~ me having a single thought is not going to instantaneously call something into manifestation.  My thoughts do, however, create my experience of whatever is manifesting through and around me.

And they are waves of energy that I send out all the time and that then interact with all the other waves of energy around me.  So it benefits me to become aware of them as often as I can, particularly when those thoughts involve other people.

Recently, a query posted to one of my Facebook groups got me thinking about desires and prayers and how we are constantly communicating them with the people in our lives, whether we mean to or not.  The question was essentially, “When I would like someone to be conscious about something, how can I help them with that process?”

My invitation to the person posting was one I routinely offer to myself:  to be very mindful.  When we “want” the people in our lives to change, what part of us is doing that wanting?  And why? Is it because we think we know what is best for them? There are lots of ego traps here; any time I believe that I have any idea what someone else’s path should be like I am placing myself in a position for which I am not qualified ~ a position for which I can never be qualified.  And it just may be that I am focusing on someone else’s path in order to avoid consciously walking my own.

Sometimes we want others to change in order to make our lives more comfortable.  If that is the case, it is our responsibility to create the comfort we want ~ not anyone else’s.  Perhaps we want to interact with these people in new ways.  If so, that, too, is our concern and not anyone else’s.  Our desires are always beautiful teachers; they let us know what it is we would like to create in our lives.  So, if I want more of a certain kind of interaction with people in my life, I can go out and create that.  Maybe those interactions are possible with the people already in my life, and maybe they are not.  If they are not, rather than trying to get someone to change (or sitting around wishing that they would change), I can go out and find the people who want to play with me in the way I want to play.

Perhaps when we want those closest to us to become aware of something, it signifies that we desire to share all the gifts we have received with others. That's beautiful.  Instead of forcing our gifts on our beloved friends and family members who may not be receptive to them, we can find those who are desiring those gifts ~ they are out there!  There is never a need to try to convert anyone.

Almost every time we do anything, we have an underlying intent ~ a dream, a prayer ~ often more than one.  We send them out, and they are received.

What are your prayers today?

To be continued . . .

Being Presence

I felt my heart expanding and my muscles relaxing as I gazed out over the breathtaking scenery before me.  My family and I were diving along Highway 1 from Monterey to Big Sur, one of my favorite stretches of land.  A friend had come to our home to heal after the end of a challenging relationship, and we were taking this drive in hopes that she would experience the medicine of rocky cliffs, crashing waves, and immense trees.  The background music to our drive sounded like this:

“Oh, I hope we get this house!”

“Daddy, will we get this house?”

“I know which room is going to be my bedroom.”

“I’ll put my bed right here.”

My two children, heads bent over a computer-printed house plan, were busy creating plans for our next home.  My husband stopped the car so that our houseguest could take pictures from a scenic point.  After a moment or two gazing at the waves crashing on the rocky shore below us, marveling at the majesty of the views around us, and chatting with me about the playful seals, she began to cry.   I was present with her as she discussed the end of her relationship and her fears about the future.

And then a thought popped into my head, just one single sentence:  “Her mind isn’t here at all.”  My frustration level rose as I kept wishing that she would just be here with me now.  This kind of wishing went on for some time before another type of thought encroached:  “Amy, you really should be supporting your friend with an open heart; you really should be more compassionate.”

And then I suddenly realized that it was me who was not being present.  My friend was actually exactly where she was; she may have not been present with her surroundings in the way I would have liked her to be, and she certainly was not present with or in her body to some degree.  However, she was present with what was arising for her.  I was the one wishing for something to change and thus going outside of myself and the present moment to create a fantasy time when things were different.  But the truth is, nothing needed to change in that exact moment.  My friend and I were each doing exactly what we needed to do.  And then, my mind would blip into the future on a moment’s notice ~ even a future just moments away ~ a time when my friend would turn and realize where she was, when she would become present.

And truthfully I was the one who needed to turn and realize were she was, I was the one who needed to become present.  I was experiencing discomfort and then wishing I were not, rather than opening to accept what was true for me in the moment ~ that I was frustrated.

So I did what I often do when I find myself in such a situation; I prayed to one of my guides.  The White Buddha Dakini brings with her “spacious accommodating presence,” as she gracefully floats to us in her orb and gently pours the liquid of acceptance from her white vase into the top of our heads and down into our hearts for healing.  I call on her when I teach, when I support my coaching clients, and when I comfort friends.  And at this point, my prayer to her was that I find a sense of presence large enough to support my eager-for-the future children, my grieving friend, and my frustrated self.

And what she showed me was that that moment in time was a beautiful snapshot for me ~ a little window through which I could look at the quality of my presence at this time in my life.  I saw, too, that my children and friend were perfect mirrors for me.  They helped me hone my awareness and realize that the amount of their presence (or, rather, what I perceived as the lack thereof) that annoyed me actually existed within me.

At one point on that day in Big Sur, my friend did suddenly look up, in the midst of crying, to see the seagulls who seemed to be performing an intricately choreographed airshow just for us.  She gasped and said, “And I don’t want to be feeling this way!  I want to focus on all the beauty and majesty of this place.”  She had an intense desire to transition from despair to joy; and she just was not able to do that in that moment.

For as long as I can remember, I have had an ability to shift my attitude quite easily, even in some very challenging situations.  Shifting my state (with music, with gratitude, through connecting with nature or with other things of beauty) happens when I refocus my thoughts and my awareness.

However, I have come to realize recently that if I am not first fully present and entirely accepting of everything that is here, it is like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound without first cleaning it.  I may be able to pretend that annoyances or other emotions or physical pain are not here if I am not focusing on them ~ if I cannot “see” them.  But it is my experience that if I do not expose them to the air of the present moment, they can never be healed.  My practice lately has been to refrain from flipping my attitude switch to the “happy” position as often as I used to, but rather to open to what is.

Of the four immeasurable qualities, equanimity has always been the one with which I have struggled.  Love, compassion, and joy each seem to come so easily to me and to feel so vibrant and bright.  But somehow equanimity has always felt rather flat, very unexciting.  So over the past decade I have sometimes almost forced myself to try to cultivate it, supposing all the while that it would feel bland.  But recently I have found that there is nothing bland or flat about equanimity.  I used to conceptualize equanimity as though a kind of pause button had been pushed; it was a calm space between the highs and lows, between joy and despair, between excitement and fear.  I tried to avoid that pause as often as possible, shifting my attitude into some other place that felt more alive.  What I have begun to realize, though, is that equanimity is not the pause between states.  Rather, it is the presence that accompanies all states, and my practice is to rest into that presence.

My friend and I scooped some purple sand from one of the beaches into a small plastic bag.  She became so excited to share this unusual specimen with someone close to her who she knew would appreciate it.  But when we looked at the bag later, the sand appeared to be entirely gray, no sparkly purple grains could be seen.  Surely, there is some physical reason for this change in appearance; perhaps we would need to dry the sand in the sun in order for the purple grains to reappear.  Yet, for me, the change was more of a teaching about present moment awareness than it was a geology lesson.  The sand was purple for us in the moment when we saw it.  But trying to recreate that moment for someone who was not there ~ or even to capture its essence so that we could draw upon it later in our own memories ~ took us out of the present moment.  And perhaps this is true of any plans we make for the future.

In general, I have always been very hopeful about the future.  I have come to know that my thoughts can drastically alter my experience of something.  If I think something will be disastrous, it may not actually be disastrous.  However, it is quite likely that I will experience it as disastrous.

As I am working to become more present, though, I find that I have fewer and fewer thoughts about the future ~ hopeful or otherwise.  After my time spent on the internet, fantasizing about my future move, I have consistently brought my mind back to the present moment.  Yes, I am incredibly hopeful about my future life in Colorado; and I am currently in California.  I am very excited about the economic, political, and environmental changes to come in our planet; and I am here right now, accepting the chaos and lack of balance that seem to permeate the times in which we live.

What I discovered as I began to track my presence that day is I am often very present and aware of that presence.  And sometimes I am not.  And when I make presence into a goal ~ as I did that day in Big Sur ~ I am not present at all.  Rather than being fully here in this very real moment, I am existing in some fantasy land where the moment will be different.  But presence has no need for anything to be different.

When I am present ~ or when I am presence ~ my experience is large enough to encompass everything:  the frustration with my friend, my children and myself; the being in my body and not being in my body; acceptance of what is and resistance of what is.  Presence is not a goal toward which I am striving; rather, it is the container that includes beautiful scenery, grief, and excitement about the future ~ even the striving for some goal of being present.

And so my prayer to the White Buddha Dakini has shifted from, “May I find spacious accommodating presence” to “May I be spacious accommodating presence.”

Facebook Fantasies and "Real" Relationships

There I sat, staring at my computer screen, with my finger poised above the keys, ready to change everything with one mere “click”. Or would this strike of the “enter” key change anything at all? Would it relieve me of any of the suffering I had been experiencing?

For the past several months, each time I logged onto Facebook and noticed that one particular member of my group of friends had added a new post or status update, my stomach lurched a bit. As I was becoming more intimate with this person, I was beginning to notice some things that concerned me; and once I began to notice these things, I found it very difficult to not notice them. Because this pattern was interfering with my ability to stay open and present while reading about her on Facebook, I thought it would be best to ensure that I just never saw what she was doing. “If I make her posts invisible, she can still think we are friends, but I will not have to read anything about her,” I reasoned.

This friend’s posts often contain what I experience as partial truths. In the midst of some challenging personal relationships, she appears to write about the relationships she wants to be in, rather than the ones she privately discusses with me. Sometimes she actually lies, saying that she is in a location where she happens to not be. More often, though, what she does is create the prettiest possible picture of her life and promote that through her Facebook page. Her posts are sometimes mere constructions of fantasy and identity, and I frequently wonder: are these constructions for the rest of us ~ or for her? If we all believe the fairytales she presents, does that make them somehow more real? And if we buy into her fantasies, will she be able to eventually convince herself that they are true?

This friend, like so many of us, has things about her life that she does not want to be known. She lives two very different lives ~ a public life and a private life. I truly understand and accept that. So maybe it is just Facebook that is the problem here; because it is so seemingly public, perhaps we are likely to use it more as a means of self-promotion than as a way to interact with one another from a deeper place. Are we less authentic in our Facebook relationships than we are in our other relationships?

“I found you on Facebook.”

“I just asked you to be my friend on Facebook; will you confirm or reject me?”

“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe he just un-friended me!”

It took me a long time to join the other hundreds of millions of people on Facebook (currently 800 million active users). At the time when everyone I knew seemed to be connecting over the Internet, I had decided to commit myself to more personal, interactive connections. I had some concerns about cyber-relationships and their effect on our, what appeared to me to be, culture’s movement away from intimacy and toward ever more surface oriented forms of interaction amongst people.

What I surmised was happening on Facebook was a whole lot of constructions of identity ~ people presenting themselves in ways they wanted to be seen rather than presenting themselves as they really are.

And I did find exactly that . . . but, truthfully, I do not find it true in any greater degree than I do anywhere else.

Maybe every venue through which we meet people gives us the opportunity to present our “best” selves rather than who we authentically are. Just because I can “meet” more people through Facebook than I can through the church choir or at the corner bar or in a University class, it does not necessarily follow that I am any more likely to hide behind constructions of reality there than I am elsewhere.

Facebook is not any different from any other meeting space in this regard ~ my challenges in any Facebook relationship are my challenges. Facebook does not cause them. They all belong to me. And if those challenges involve constructing alternate realities or engaging in fantasies or outright lying, they will appear everywhere ~ not just in cyberspace.

When we were in high school, my brother told me this story one evening over dinner:

So, when I was on the bus home from football practice tonight, I sat next to this guy I know from the British School. He started telling me all about his new girl friend ~ how gorgeous she was, how great she was, all about their relationship. And then he said, “Do you want to see her picture?” I said, “Sure,” and he pulled out a wallet-sized photo of a green-eyed blonde girl. I told him, “That’s not your girlfriend.” He said, “Yes, it is,” and I again said, “No, it isn’t.” He said, “It is my girlfriend, man; why do you think it isn’t?” And my brother said, “Because that’s my sister, dude!”

The photographer who had come to take our school photos had asked me if he could use the pictures he had taken of me in his promotional material, and I had agreed. Apparently, he handed out wallet-sized photos of me to the students at many of Athens’ other high schools; and the only indication that these images were promotional was the stamp on the back of each photo. So my picture eventually made it into the wallets of more than just this one boy. And it seems a few of them turned those pictures into relationships.

I was shocked that someone would create an entire relationship based on a photograph of someone he had never met. I felt somehow invaded or used, as though this young boy had actually done something to me.

But decades later, I see his choices differently.

When that high school boy created his ideal girlfriend and associated her with a picture of me, it actually had nothing to do with me. He took an image on a piece of paper and added to it a whole conglomeration of thoughts he had been carrying with him ~ thoughts about some girlfriend whom he had not yet met.

My adolescent children are beginning to feel some degree of pressure to have “boyfriends and girlfriends”. My son sometimes says to me, “Mama, I want to like someone!” And I ask, “But do you like someone? Is there anyone in particular to whom you are attracted right now?” And he says, “No, but that doesn’t matter! I want to have a girlfriend, like everyone else.” I remember feeling like that sometimes too ~ like I wanted to be seen as being in a relationship, regardless of that relationship.

And isn’t that also what my Facebook friend is desiring too ~ to be seen by others as being in relationships that are not the ones she is actually in?

And, if so, how can I have so much compassion for how my children are feeling in this regard and so little for my friend?

One of my favorite movies about relationships is Lars and the Real Girl, which depicts a young eccentric and reclusive man who turns a mail-order blow-up doll (a Real Girl) into his girlfriend, Bianca. He crafts Bianca’s entire story, and he takes her all around town, introducing her to everyone. The amazing thing is that the townspeople begin to interact with this doll. They initially do so, I believe, out of their deep caring for Lars; however, over time we see that some of them seem to actually fall into relationship with Bianca themselves. They relate to the Bianca that they have constructed out of desires and stories and personal needs and preferences.

This is a lot like what my friend is doing when she shares her hopes for relationships as though they were realities.

And it is a lot like what I am doing with her as well.

Here’s what Lars taught me: almost all of us do the same thing as those townspeople at least part of the time, and some of us do it all of the time. No, most of us do not have “Real Dolls” that we carry around and interact with; instead, we take the physical forms of real people in our lives and graft on them our desires and stories and personal needs and preferences.

I sometimes wonder if we are not always in relationship with the “Real Girl” and the “Real Boy,” with these dolls of our own construction.

I am beginning to accept that my Facebook friend isn’t a doll onto which I can graft my own fantasies. She gets to create her life however she wants to create it. And that may include lying.

So am I frustrated with her for lying? Or am I more frustrated with her for not playing the part of “friend” I had created for her to play, that role where this person does not lie or create fantasies about herself and share them as though they were real?

You see . . . it isn’t just that she hides the truth and sometimes even lies. What I am really upset about is that she has also asked me to hide the truth and to even occasionally lie ~ about some things that are very important to me. She is asking me to also be part of her constructions and her fantasies and to promote them to others in our lives.

And her doing that just does not align with the “Real Girl” friend that I had created! And that means that I am basically doing the same thing she is ~ creating a fantasy relationship rather than merely engaging in the reality of my very real relationship with this very real person.

It would be most healing for me to begin to release the beliefs I have that my relationship with my Facebook friend is different from what it is, that she needs to be impeccable, that she cannot lie and construct realities, and that she has no right to ask me to lie. All of these beliefs are places where I am attached to an ideal. These are places where the real girl does not align with my idea of the “Real Girl” with whom I want to be in relationship.

What’s even more difficult for me to admit to myself is that maybe I have created not only “Real Girls” and “Real Boys” to be in relationship with, but maybe I am one of those “Real Girls” of my own construction.

This is the nagging concern that lies underneath my frustration with my Facebook friend. You see the “Real Amy,” the Amy in the fantasies of my creation, is someone who may not be involved with people who lie and is certainly not someone who would consider hiding the truth simply in order to maintain a friendship. And, even more significantly, that “Real Amy” is someone who would not judge someone else for lying; she would always have compassion and an open heart.

But that “Real Amy” is no more real than Lars’ blow-up girlfriend. She is also a construction based on desires and stories and personal needs and preferences.

And maybe that’s okay.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to be in a relationship with another person ~ or even with ourselves ~ that is entirely without any of these constructions. I do know it isn’t easy. It requires being entirely in the moment with that individual (or with ourselves) every single time we are with them. It means that we are interacting in this moment with whoever shows up in this moment.

When we do this, we may find that we never have another relationship with a “Real Girl” or “Real Boy” of our own creation. But what we might create instead are some real relationships.

Walking the Path of Forgiveness with the Angel of Death

During the early stages of my illness, I received some very angry correspondence from a member of my extended family. She had recently married into the family and was furious with several of us for events that had little to do with her; she let us know exactly what we had done to “wrong everyone” in the family.

I was really hurt when I read her email. This woman did not know me at all, yet she was quick to judge me and to judge what she perceived as my motivations in situations where she had not even been involved. And I carried that hurt inside me for weeks. I wanted to forgive her, but I found it so challenging. Each time I touched on the wound in order to try to heal it, I found myself cycling the same old stories.

. . . until one day when I just no longer felt the urge to go into any story around the incident. Somehow, the process of continually trying to forgive her, of touching upon the tender place that resulted from her correspondence, resulted in me actually forgiving her.

Forgiveness is perhaps the most important task that we can perform in working with our emotional bodies to prepare for our eventual death. Each of us carries with us places where we are still unable to forgive a person or a situation (or oftentimes ourselves), and those places act like clutter in our closets, clutter that may seem deceptively small but which takes up vast amounts of space in our lives.

There is a reason we refer to the lack of forgiveness as “holding a grudge;” because when we are not able to forgive we are actually grasping something. And – just like physically grasping something takes energy – this holding onto something does as well. We carry the places where we still need to forgive around with us like treasured belongings, and these treasures may show up in our physical bodies, in our energetic bodies, or in our spiritual bodies.

I view the places where I have not yet forgiven someone or something as huge holes in my energetic field. I consistently lose energy through these holes; so even though I may continue to raise all the energy I can, if I have areas that are still unclean through lack of forgiveness, some of that new energy will just seep out of me.

Some of us may carry bits of clutter in our emotional bodies. If so, we will often continue to cycle stories around specific events and people, and this cycling makes us unable to release the emotions that need to flow forth. The result is that we are continually adding to our deep reservoirs of repressed emotions.

When our lack of forgiveness is stored in our physical bodies, it can manifest in any number of ailments, as we hoard this clutter in our cells, our tissue, our muscles, and our organs. Recent studies have found clear evidence that a patient’s practice of forgiveness can greatly reduce the effects of some specific physical diseases, including high blood pressure, muscular tension, and chronic back pain.

Okay, so forgiveness can lead to more energy, greater emotional flow, and a healthier physical body. Let’s play a little game to see if we can experience a bit of what that might be like:

Close your eyes. Bring to mind someone or something that you have not yet forgiven. Hold it in front of you and really, really focus on it. Now notice what your body has done: where are you holding this in your body, and how much energy is directed at that location?

Come back to a neutral state and take some deep breaths.

Now consciously bring that person or situation back into your awareness. But this time visualize them as though you have already forgiven them (this may mean recalling the feeling state of forgiving someone or something else and grafting it onto the person or situation in question). Now notice what your body has done.

What is the difference?

Which way do you want to feel?

We all want more of that feeling, so we open up to the concept of forgiveness.

Now what? Sure, to “forgive and forget” seems sweet and simple and may be possible for others to do easily and continually; but what about the rest of us – how do we get there?

For me, learning to forgive has been a path – a spiritual path – that looked nothing like I would have expected. It took me years to actually begin to open to the possibility of forgiveness. And once I did open to the possibility, I still was not ready to forgive, because I was confused about what forgiveness actually was.

For years, I confused forgiveness with reconciliation. I thought that forgiving someone meant that I then needed to be in relationship with that person. That is not at all the case! Forgiveness and reconciliation are not same. And although forgiveness may be a prerequisite for reconciliation, the opposite is not true – reconciliation is not necessary for forgiveness.

That is because forgiveness really has nothing to do with the person we are forgiving at all. They need not apologize; they need not feel sorry; they need not even know that we are forgiving them.

Forgiveness is about cleaning our own lives. We are vessels for the divine to shine through, and we clean our beings so that we may shine brightly. When we release those grudges we have been holding, we create more space in our lives – space for divine flow and inspiration and magic. Why wouldn’t we choose to work toward that?

Another point of confusion for me was that I was trying to forgive or “get over it” from a place of attachment. By forgiving, I had to actually accept fully that something had happened – and that was very hard. When we choose to withhold forgiveness, we often do so because we are very attached to our concept of how things “should have been”. When we choose to live without such judgments and attachments, forgiveness becomes more accessible to us.

I used to feel that if I forgave someone, I was somehow weak and that I was very tough and strong when I held firm in my lack of forgiveness. I think that I had the belief that if I forgave someone for something, I was opening myself up to having a similar thing happen again. If I forgive this person or this situation, I am somehow saying that what happened was okay, right? No, I am simply saying that what happened happened.

When we hold that belief that we are keeping ourselves safe by not forgiving, we are setting ourselves up in a ping-pong game of Judge and Victim, where we get to star in both leading roles. When I do not forgive, I can stand in judgment of the person or the situation that “wronged” me and I can get a tremendous amount of juice out of feeling sorry for myself for the ways in which this wronging was executed.

In the Judge-Victim matrix, blame rules everything, and blame seems to me to be self-indulgent (as does guilt, which is where we live when we cannot forgive ourselves for something). When I am in blame or in guilt, I am not actually able to take any action. When I am in blame, there is no space for forgiveness, for learning, for growth. Blame is all that can exist in that space, and it grows exponentially as I feed it attention. Self-blame that masquerades as awareness functions in this same way. As I notice some way in which I have been wronged by another or in which I have done something wrong, blame gets me stuck in a cycle so that I do not have to take any action, do not have to change things. It keeps the energy on the drama level, the story level, and out of the level of real movement, of real intent.

The models of forgiveness we are often given seem to me to be akin to a benevolent ruler bestowing forgiveness on someone, just as though she had waved a magic wand. So, is that how we forgive someone – we just wave some magic wand?

Believe me I tried that, but it never worked! I kept waving that wand and repeating the mantra, “I forgive; all is forgiven,” and waiting and waiting to feel something. But forgiveness is not a feeling! We may get to a feeling at some point – or perhaps the lack of a feeling – but forgiveness is an action, a practice. And for me, it was like my other spiritual practices. It took time and devotion and sometimes looked pretty darn messy. And, just like with those practices, I found one day that I could do it! And then I might pop out, just like I do in meditation or a yoga posture. So, I get back to the practice.

For me, that practice involves several steps, each of which can be related to different parts of my being:

1. Emotional release: I allow my emotions surrounding the event or person to flow freely, without attaching any stories to them.
2. Mental clarity without judgment: I work to fully accept that the situation has happened. If I find I have attachments to how things “should have” been or how someone “should have” behaved, I have to unravel those to find their underlying assumptions and beliefs.
3. Physical cleansing: I try to locate any places in my body where I might be holding this grudge, and I continually visualize those places being purified by the flow of love from my heart chakra.
4. Energetic reclamation: I work to reclaim the energy I have lost through the situation or event and my holding onto it, by imagining holes in my energy being filled in and my entire field shining the pure bright light of love that I am.

Sometimes, the spiritual practice of forgiveness comes quite easily. At other times, there have been situations and people it has taken me great amounts of time, focus, and energy to forgive and release. We just have a firmer grasp on some of these “treasures” we are carrying than others, and our fingers may take a bit of prying to enable us to finally put down these loads. And that can be difficult.

The results, however, keep me motivated to continue the practice. More forgiveness results in more space in my being and in my life to be filled with divine light and love and magic.

During the early stages of my illness, I found that I had somehow been gifted with a new capacity for forgiveness. I forgave my family member for her judgment of me, I forgave so many people in my life ~ both past and present. I even found that I could forgive myself, which was something that had eluded me throughout my entire life.

Perhaps I was particularly motivated to work on forgiveness those days when I was dying? But the truth is: we are all dying; we just may not be aware of it.

When the Angel of Death tells me that it is time for me to return to her all that I have borrowed, I hope to be as spacious as possible; and for me, that requires that I continually make forgiveness work a significant part of my spiritual practice.

How about you?

Contents Under Pressure: Preparing Emotionally to Meet the Angel of Death

“Are you okay?” my friend asked me after I slammed the car door loudly. I was as surprised as she was to find myself so full of emotion. I had just gotten into my first argument in months, and I was angry. I was also confused by the anger; “Where did this come from?” I wondered. Piled on top of all that was guilt, the feeling that I should not be angry ~ ever again. How could I be angry when I was alive? I had been actively dying just weeks before; surely my gratitude to have received a miraculous life-prolonging surgery should have divested me of the need to ever again be angry about anything or (heaven forbid!) at anyone.

Except that I was. I was feeling anger and confusion and guilt.

During the months when I was most acutely ill, my body was not strong enough to express emotions. Early on, I had several experiences of beginning to feel very emotional and having the expression of that emotion physically hurt me and put me in bed for the rest of the day. I quickly learned that I did not have the physical capacity to have huge emotional surges in those days. In fact, laughing hurt me so much that I began to ask people not to be funny around me. My brother, who can make me laugh with a mere glance, had to work very hard to rein in his humor in an attempt to keep me comfortable.

So here I was, several months later, able to fully express my emotions and finding myself very surprised to feel them ~ and to feel them so strongly. Had my emotions disappeared simply because I was not able to express them?

Not entirely.

It is very true that some things no longer affected me in the ways they used to. I did develop a new perspective in so many areas of my life that created in me a great spaciousness around any emotions I might be feeling. But that did not mean that the emotions had disappeared.

And when my body was again able to handle the energetic outpouring of emotional expression, I found that I did, indeed, have emotions. In fact, I had many emotions that I had stored away from very early in my childhood.

And I knew that I wanted to release those emotions before I became too ill to do so again.

Years later, another slam of another car door reminded me of this lesson of repressed emotions. My young daughter was expressing a huge amount of anxiety on our way out the door by obsessing about the way her shoes felt on her feet and complaining that her brother was talking too much and yelling that I was not giving her the answer she wanted to whatever question she had raised. I felt an enormous amount of anger building inside of me, and – rather than express it verbally – I slammed my car door in rage. This slamming unhinged something in the door mechanism (and in me!), causing the car then to not open from the inside. I could not get out of the car through the driver’s door; I had literally imprisoned myself by my own repressed anger!

It took me a few moments to realize the hilarity of the situation; once I did, I began to laugh hysterically at my predicament, as I wondered just how many times through the years (hundreds? thousands?) that my repressed emotions had held me captive.

And maybe you’ve done something similar. Maybe, like me, you are a shining example of what I call a “good baby”. If so, you are quite skilled at not expressing your emotions, at carting them around in a “contents under pressure” tank and thinking you are keeping the world a safer place by doing so.

Have you ever heard a baby who rarely cries called a “good baby”? This kind of comment consistently amazes me, because it indicates that from birth we are labeled as “good” based on our lack of emotional expression. And those of us who are quick learners soon realize this association between our lack of emotion and our perceived value as human beings.

There are cultural variations in this model, of course. We deem certain emotions suitable for expression by girls (grief, for instance), while others we consider more appropriate for boys to convey (such as anger). And natives of some regions seem to be more comfortable expressing their emotions than are people in other areas.

However, those of us currently living in the western world have certainly experienced the repression of emotions – if not our own, then those of others. You may have received a cutting remark from a store clerk and thought, “Wow, he is angry at something, but it surely isn’t me!” Or maybe you’ve been around someone who cries buckets of tears over something that seems to you to be not exactly the full source of the person’s grief.

Perhaps, like me, you learned a very powerful lesson at a young age: Only poorly behaved people or insane people express their emotions, the rest of us rise above them and would never consider taking up any space with our own emotional responses to anything. I got very good at hiding my emotions – so good that at some point during my teenage years, I could no longer even identify my emotions; I just knew that they were bad and needed to be pushed aside.

But we all know that it is impossible to push emotions aside forever; they will someday surface, often in very harmful ways. These emotional outbursts all happen because most of us are like little time bombs, filled to overflowing with emotions we have refused to express and have instead locked away. We have clamped down on our anger, our grief, even our joy, because we are trying to be just like the “good” little babies who do not upset anyone around them with their emotions. The only problem with what we have done is that there is no “away”. Just like trash hauled to a landfill, our emotions do indeed go somewhere when we do not express them.

Where they go is inside our very beings (where they can infest the cells of our physical bodies, the beliefs of our mental bodies, and the spiritual stores of our energetic bodies). These are the large tanks I see us each hauling around whose contents should be marked “under pressure”. When someone or something happens to bump into our tank, we can release a huge amount of this dangerous substance that has been building and building over the years. It is dangerous not in its original source – which is just pure emotion; rather, it is dangerous, because it has been stored under pressure for so long.

When we do not release our emotions as we experience them, we add them to the ever-growing reservoirs already stored in us; and we become like walking, talking volcanoes, ready to explode our toxic waste all over the place.

And when we reach the end of our lives, many of us may find that we have those storehouses of unexpressed emotions right there with us on our deathbeds. And still others may be unaware that those treasure-boxes of emotions are with us, as we continue to be “good babies” and behave as though we are somehow above “being emotional.”

It was only through giving birth to and raising two babies of my own that I began to realize how natural it is to express emotions ~ and how it serves no one to repress our emotions. When they were small, my children did exactly what all small children do when they felt sad or angry or joyful – they expressed that! It was beautiful to watch, and it all seemed so simple: feel sad, express sadness, move on; feel angry, express anger, move on.

Even though I could appreciate the fluidity with which they expressed their emotions, I still was not able to emulate them quite yet. And they quickly learned this. When the kids were old enough to articulate their experiences, they began to ask questions like, “Are you mad at me?” or “Why is Daddy so sad?” I was so confused when I pondered these questions, because I couldn’t find any words we’d spoken or actions we had taken that would lead them to feel this way. Yet I still had the strong feeling that they were stating their truth; there was absolutely no manipulation or confusion on their part. It finally struck me that the children were more in touch with our emotions than we were. My husband and I had both become so accustomed to clenching our jaws and saying, “No, I’m not angry,” or putting on a happy face and saying some sweet phrase in the midst of feeling really sad that we had no idea we were suppressing our emotions. Indeed, we often did not even realize we were feeling anything at all.

WOW! A brand new world opened up to me at that point! I realized that I hadn’t been fooling anyone but myself with all this hiding of my emotions. And, in fact, I had not even really fooled myself, because the hidden emotions always have a way of surfacing, if not in our emotional bodies then certainly in our physical or mental realms of our being.

Ironically, we often think we are keeping our loved ones and ourselves safe when we store our emotions rather than express them. The truth is, I feel about emotions the same way the lovable ogre Shrek feels about belches, “Better out than in, I always say!”

The element of Water is associated with our Emotional bodies, and its fluidity can be our guide as we work toward our emotional healing. Water can be as small as a tiny teardrop or as vast as the ocean, as slowly moving as a lazy river or as swift as a powerful waterfall. No matter what form it takes, though, water flows and moves; and our emotions flow and move the same way. They arise and they fall away.

But, just like water, emotions can be dammed up; and those dams we create throughout the years invariably break in messy, often painful ways. I picture repressed emotions going into a huge pot that sits quietly on a stove somewhere, simmering away. We keep adding to that pot and slowly turning the heat up under it, until the lid blows off in a burst of steam. We have taken our emotions, which are as pure and clean as fresh rainwater, and by ignoring them and stuffing them and adding stories to them, we have turned them into hot vapor that has the potential to burn all of those around us.

During my time of preparing for death, I needed to release a lot of emotions. But at some point, I found that it was too late; my body was no longer strong enough to allow me to do that.

So, once I recovered from that acute stage of illness, I began to tap into those vats of emotions I had been carrying around with me.

How about you ~ do you have any “contents under pressure”? What emotions would you like to release now, while you still have the ability to do so?