We have finally reached the last three letters of the alphabet, X, Y, and Z. there are probably less words beginning with the letter X then any other letter in the alphabet. However, the word, which seemed to grasp my attention this week, was xenophobia: According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, xenophobia is “the fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.”
Read moreW is for Warrior
If V is for Victim, then W is for Warrior and warriors are not victims. When I first heard the word warrior I had this image of somebody doing battle, at war against an enemy and it was not an image I wanted to embrace. Warrior, as defined by Toltec Wisdom, is a Toltec who is “fighting for freedom from her own domestication and social conditioning. She is free from needing to link her self-worth to the beliefs, thoughts, and wishes of her fellow human, free to be happy no matter what happens in life.”[1] Being a warrior, from this perspective is about embodying the five agreements, detaching from those things, ideas, beliefs, and people who constrain our happiness, obscure our clarity, and live as parasites in our mind, body, and soul.
Read moreV is for Victim
Anybody who knows me knows I hate playing the victim, but I cannot talk about my W word for next week, Warrior, without talking about the V word for this week, Victim. In case, you were wondering, no I am not going to tell you what X, Y, or Z are going to be. You will have to wait for those weeks to come.
It is easy for most people to think about a situation or experience where they wanted to blame someone for what happened to them or the abuse they experienced. What we feel regarding those situations and experiences is real. However, at the same time, choosing to stay in that space of reliving the situation or experience can be self-abusive.
Read moreU is for Uncomfortable
Merriam and Webster’s dictionary defines uncomfortable as “causing or feeling slight pain or physical discomfort.” Some people when thinking about what makes them uncomfortable think about things they wear. Things such as shoes may start feeling comfortable when first put on, however by the end of the day, you can be so ready to slide your feet out of them and slip into something far more comfortable. Sometimes after eating a filling meal, the waistband on our clothes can make you wish you were wearing something stretchable because it is beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. My female friends will tell you that one of the most uncomfortable things they wear is a bra and many cannot wait to get home and take that off as soon as possible.
Read moreT is for Toxins
There are two sources of spiritual toxins in our lives: internal and external. It is easy to understand how internal toxic cleanup is a process. We can understand that stalking, as I wrote about last week, is a process whereby our inner jaguar preys out the internal toxins, or parasites as don Miguel Ruiz would refer to them, and ruthlessly remove them. We then go back and seek to understand the roots of how that toxin came in and remove our attachment to it.
Read moreS is for Stalking
Most of us when we hear the word, stalking think of someone who is constantly watching us, following or harassing us, making us feel afraid or unsafe. Those of you who know me well enough, know this is not the type of thing I generally blog about and you would be right. You also probably know that I tend to take words that have “negative” connotations to them and looking at them from a completely different perspective. So today, I want to talk about stalking as a healthy and transformative thing we can do for and to ourselves and not others.
Read moreR is for Rebuilding
This morning, I received an email from a long time friend who I have not spoken to for a long time. After looking briefly at our April newsletter said, “You have really evolved and come into your own. I am very proud of you. You have taken all the broken pieces in your life and have allowed the spirit of healing and love to make something unique and wonderful out of it.” I know that what she wrote came from a space of love. However, as I thought about it, I realized I had not made something beautiful out of the broken pieces. I had left that which was broken behind and begun to build a life for myself that was built on qualities that are life giving and left behind all that which I had allowed to become broken and the beliefs which contributed to that process got left behind.
Read moreQ is for Quiet
When I first began to think about the word Q very few things came to my mind. However, one of my readers suggested quiet. Ironically, I am sitting here unable to speak as my wife and I are both healing our way through viral laryngitis, which can take 1-3 weeks to run its course. The second thought that crossed my mind was a line from a poem I recently was blessed to hear. In this poem, she wrote about the “symphony of silence” which she heard while sitting in the garden. This made such perfect sense to me as so often some of my most powerful moments of enlightenment have come during those moments of silence, those quiet times where I am so in tune with the Spirit. In the midst of the quiet, we can hear the symphonic wisdom of our Spirit guides, the Infinite, and the cloud of witnesses surrounding us.
Read moreP is for Practice
This week, there were three amazing concepts offered as inspiration for my blog: patience, persistence, and purpose. As I had already blogged about patience a few months ago, I knew that would not be the one. However, as I began to think about the three words I came to realize that in their own way they were all related to practice. Practice requires us to be patient with ourselves. Practice requires us to be persistent as we strive to achieve our goal or change a behavior. Practice requires us to stay focused on the purpose we are trying to achieve.
Read moreO is for Opinion
I am always grateful to my readers who offer me inspiration as I work my way through this A to Z blogging challenge. My friend Jerry suggested I blog about opinions because everyone has one. His reason reminded me of what my wife Zoe says about opinions, which is actually a line from the 1988 movie The Dead Pool. “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one and everyone thinks everyone else’s stinks.”
The dictionary defines opinion as “a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty” and “a personal view, attitude, or appraisal." [1] Opinions are not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. They are simply what one personally believes. Some people change their opinion on something over time. However, sometimes opinions become so ingrained in our psyche that they are no longer an opinion, but a belief. If enough people hold the same opinion, it can evolve into a belief system.
Read moreN is for Negativity
The aspects of one’s spiritual life my readers suggest I blog on always intrigue me. The N words suggested for this week’s blog included negligence, negativity, naïve, and nonjudgmental. I was very tempted to write about being nonjudgmental as it is something I have been working on in my own life. It has assisted me with being impeccable with my thoughts and words. However, negativity seemed to beg me to look at it, especially as I strive to be intentional about being positive at all times and in all situations. The reality, however, is that there are memories from my past which do not always elicit the most positive of reactions. Perhaps it also intrigued me because we tend to, in this culture, think about negativity, or negative energy, as the polar opposite to positive attitude or energy. However, they are both parts of our lives and are interrelated and connected.
Read moreM is for Mal-intent
http://funologist.org/2010/12/03/new-words-mislike/
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog called I is for Impeccabilis. It was all about being impeccable with one’s words, thought, actions, and energy. The more we become impeccable in our lives, the less likely we are to practice mal-intent. Mal-intent is when we are not impeccable with our words. It is when we say or do something with the purpose of harming or hurting one’s self or others. Talking about mal-intent is not quite the same as talking about being impeccable.
Read moreL is for Ladders and Lent
A few weeks ago, a colleague posted the above picture on Facebook. It generated a thoughtful and insightful discussion of ladders. We talked about how the ladder is not just a place on which we ascend, but also a place on which sometimes we must descend. We each climb our spiritual ladder at our own pace. Rabbi Elimelech, a Hasidic mystic, taught that if a person wishes to rise higher in their spiritual journey, they must have mastered the character traits of their lower level. He taught that a wise person would first test the safety of the rungs of the ladder to ensure they are whole and intact, so that you could return to them at any point if need be. All too often, we focus on the ascension as positive and think of descending as negative. However, there are some very healthy reasons for returning to a lower rung on the ladder. For example, sometimes we just were not ready for the next rung. Sometimes we have something we need to let go of before we can move forward.
Read moreK is for Kindness
Some words are easier to use than explain. Kindness is one of them. I recognize an act of kindness when I am the recipient of one, but trying to explain it has been difficult. It is not so much what someone has done that makes it feel like kindness, but the context in which it happens. For example, when I was still able to drive and had my own car, friends would swing by and pick me up so we could go do something together, I never thought twice about them doing that. It was just something we did for each other. Now that I can no longer drive and I have lost my paratransit services, when my friends offer to come take me and my manual wheelchair so I can go somewhere with them, I experience the effects of their act of kindness. In a poem called Kindness by Naomi Shihah Nye,[1] she explains that kindness is an inherent part of who we are. We become kind and gain an understanding of kindness when we understand what it is to have been in that space of deep sorrow and loss.
[1] Nye, Naomi Shihah (1995). Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Portland, OR: Far Corner Books.
Read moreJ is for Jealousy
When I was in seminary, Dr. Gail Ricciuti, my homiletics professor, told me about a book by J Ruth Gendler called The Book of Qualities. It has since become one of my favorite books, in part because she has helped me to understand human qualities, such as jealousy, in new ways and enabled me to put a very different human face on them. She wrote this about jealousy,
Jealousy stands by the blue flame of the gas stove stirring obsession stew. In his mind he is tearing people limb from limb. He wears a shirt that is almost in style with it odd angular shapes and bright edges. He can be quite charming when he wants to be. He certainly has a flair for drama. After a while though, the roles jealousy takes begin to seem shallow, dishonest, repetitive. The more upset he feels, the more loudly he denies it. For a time I stopped giving parties because he wouldn’t come if I invited certain people. At that point, I couldn’t give a party without inviting him, and I was unwilling to censor my guest list for his sake. He is quite capable of showing up anywhere unexpected, uninvited, unwelcome.Read more
I is for Impeccabilis
Impeccabilis is Latin for impeccable which means not to sin. The first agreement in Toltec Wisdom is to “be impeccable with your word.” So what exactly does that mean? To be impeccable with one’s word is not just the verbal or spoken word, but also those that float through your mind. It means we are mindful of what we think about others, the universe, and ourselves.
Being impeccable with one’s word is not easy. Read moreH is for Heart
Most of us know that the heart is the organ, which pumps blood through the circulatory system. They are also a symbol of love, which you often find on Valentine’s Day cards and are the shape of candies that people give each other on that day, at least in the United States. However, the heart I have been thinking about today is not a physical heart or a material heart, but the spiritual state of being which enables love to flow through our mind, body, and soul. It is that state of being which enables love to flow in us and through our interactions with others.
Several years ago, a dear friend underwent open-heart surgery. She needed it to fix the disease, which had physically damaged her heart. Recently, I had a conversation with an acquaintance who suggested she needed open heart surgery because she had experienced so much wounding and hurt that she no longer trusted herself or others.
Read moreG is for Gratitude
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-archer/gifts-the-gratitude-exper_b_582207.html
“If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” – Meister Eckhart
Gratitude is more then an attitude, it is a way of being. It is a spiritual practice, which has been shown to have significant impacts on the quality of one’s life. Two psychologists, Michael McCollough of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, wrote an article about an experiment they conducted on gratitude and its impact on well-being. The study split several hundred people into three different groups and all of the participants were asked to keep daily diaries. The first group kept a diary of the events that occurred during the day without being told specifically to write about either good or bad things; the second group was told to record their unpleasant experiences; and the last group was instructed to make a daily list of things for which they were grateful. The results of the study indicated that daily gratitude exercises resulted in higher reported levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism, and energy. In addition, those in the gratitude group experienced less depression and stress, were more likely to help others, exercised more regularly, and made greater progress toward achieving personal goals.
Read moreF is for Fog
I was looking at the image on our website's homepage and the fog, which hovered over the water and the mountains, caught my attention. The fog seemed heavier in some spots then others. As a result, I could see the details in some areas more then others. It reminded me of when I was driving through fog and I could barely see what was ahead of me. However, as I moved through the fog in faith, a few feet at a time, I always reached my destination. Sometimes I had to slow down and focus on being mindful of where I was and what I could see, but I made it through.
Read moreE is for Empty
This might seem like a strange way to begin my first blog for this New Year, but empty for me is an awesome space to be at in my life. I am not talking about the stressful kind of empty like when you run out of gas on the highway because you did not realize your gas tank was empty. Nor am I talking about that space when you may feel like you are running on empty because you have no energy left in your life. Nor am I talking about how you feel like your life is empty of love, life, and meaning, although that too would be a great focus for a reflection. Rather, I am talking about this state of happiness and bliss, which comes when one is empty, and in need of nothing.
Read more