Over And Over

 Why do we have to continue to examine on conscience on a daily basis?  It is because our shortcomings, bad habits, are like weeds.  If we do not attend to the garden of our heart, stuff will come up to choke us off from being our better self.  In recovery this would be as step 6 and 7.  Since we cannot eradicate our faults all by our own will-power, prayer comes into play.  We need a higher power than our own will-power.  Humility helps here of course.  

Te Recovering Farmer

 Agriculture, like Recovery, is essential for life.  The persons involved have some things in common.  They must both have patience.  They ultimately rely on a power higher than themselves.  Alone, they are subject to a lot of things they do not control.  So they have to trust that their work, on a daily basis, will pay off.  No days off.  They must be humble enough to know they need outside help.  They will need trust, and of course hard work.  But all this is worth it, or so I believe, and I am not a farmer.  

Moving On

 Many people wait until I am about to move on from where I live, and minister, to tell me nice things about myself, my importance in their life, how helpful I have been.  Why they wait I do not know.  The Monastery in the Snowmass Mountains will not be my home, but rather a place I will come to visit from time to time, while it is still here as a monastery.  It has not been sold as of now.  In moving  I have been downsizing my “stuff” and things in my life that are so convenient but weigh me down.  I gave away a lot of things to the local people.  When I get to Boulder I am going to do a lot of downsizing there too.  No one ever said they liked me or what I did for them because of all my stuff.  So I want to live more simply.  As I age, I need less.  I probably needed less before I aged, but that is another story.  I will take all the complements with me.  They fill up my heart better than my shopped stuff.  

Yesterday

 Don’t try to capture yesterday.  You had a good meditation yesterday?  Or just a good day?  It is past.  Whatever the reason for a good yesterday, it does not guarantee today.  So I try to think of myself as a newcomer, and indeed this is my first time in today.  A newcomer is open to new things.  A newcomer does not try to keep living their past.  A newcomer may have goals but is open to what others have to say, their experience.  So a newcomer is a listener, not judgmental.  Be open to surprise and to new information, especially if it does not fit what you have known in your past.  Instead as judging people, I try to find out why they said, do or think something of which I have no knowledge or a different experience.  People tend to open up if they think I am listening and care.  Be a newcomer every day.  

Expiration Date

 We all have an expiration date, so why use today to be purposefully miserable?  Sometimes we simply need an attitude adjustment to make for a better day in life’s uncontrollable circumstances.  Sometimes it is simply to do something that fills the heart.  There is sadness when someone we love experiences their expiration date.  We miss them for sure, but then we can recall why we miss them.  Maybe the joy they brought us, or maybe the sadness that they never did find life fulfillment.  But even in this sadness we can find solace and relief that we did not go down that same path, that we did find a life worth living. Joy is contagious.   

Self-Pity

 Self-pity is not a good tool to have in our tool box of responses to whatever comes up in our day.  The spiritual path, the recovery path, the growth in human potential path puts self-pity into the memory box.  Sanity does not forget the past.  The past mess can be useful in reminding us of how we have grown, and in being able to relate to others in their still-wallowing self-pity.  Our story becomes one that helps others relate to us and listen because they come to realize we were once just like they are now, an incomprehensible stage of life.  

Emptiness

Contemplation has the experience of emptiness, which is why many people avoid it on any continuing practice.  Yet it is not emptiness, but is an experience beyond anything we can define, and beyond limits.  Contemplation has no outer edges that define its space.  Contemplation brings us into the limitless.  The mind cannot handle this but the heart sees and is fed by this prayer.  This emptiness in prayer is not passive as in inert.  It is full of energy, Power, and  freedom so we can act in a more selfless and loving way towards other people and situations.  We no longer use the go to response of resentment and judgment, but rather acceptance, compassion, service and love.  Contemplation is the stepping aside practice so that we can step back in on the right foot.  

Oh So Dry!

 Some people can stay dry, away from the booze, or some other addictive substance on ego…for a while.  There is no real spiritual growth yet, and little selfless service for others.  In addition, resentments build up and the attitude one has is rather negative.  As one person said, prayer, if any, is lip-service.  Life is not much fun, though you might still have a job and family and car and house.  Eventually, it all falls apart.  For the more normal people, a lack of a spiritual life beyond lip-service, will result in the same resentment mountain and bad attitude.  I would suggest sobriety, that is, surrender, have a daily prayer practice that is not all about your ego, accept that life around you which you cannot change.  Work on yourself and the attitude will change and the resentment list will diminish.  Ego is short-term, and then comes the cliff.  

Ignore The Message

 Many a Christian tends to focus on Jesus as divine, but seem to ignore what he said.  He never really focused on a belief in his divinity.  Rather he gave the sermon on the mount and said, “Follow me.”  Rather convenient if you don’t much care to follow Jesus, being he talked about being the servant of all, the first shall be last, forgive all the time, sell all you have and so forth.  Even my Church had a time when it was a mortal sin to skip mass on Sunday, but never a mortal sin to skip following Jesus as in the Sermon on the Mount.  This made the pursuit of power and riches, as in kings and queens, emperors all that more convenient.  So I tend to recommend spiritual programs that emphasize service, selflessness, surrender to the power and trying to do what Jesus said.  “Come and follow me.”  

In The Way

 Meditation is not so much about what you believe as it is about getting out of your own way.  Get beyond or beneath your busy brain.  If you get out of your own way, your own thoughts and opinions, then what do you rely on?  A Power greater than your thinking for starters.  If you stop relying on you in your meditation, then perhaps you will begin to rely on something other than yourself.  Once you stop running your own prayer show, you allow some other power to get involved.  And you just might become your better self.  This process might sound like “going out on a limb.”  Well, where is the fruit?  

A Small God

 Some of us who are skeptical about God’s existence tend to make their  God too small.  That is, they make it small enough to comprehend or deny.  I don’t think a small god can do anyone any good.  You have to get beyond what you believe or deny.  That god is all in your head.  God is much bigger than anyone can comprehend.  God is energy and is revealed through the heart not the head or imagination.  Meditation is the path to the heart.  It is why Step 11 in the AA Recovery program tells the initiate to meditate.  Belief is optional.  Learn to meditate and things will go much better in life and recovery.  Small gods are for the more self-centered, less helpful oriented people.  Small gods can pave the way to make oneself the center of our world.  My God is beyond what I can think up or imagine.  So I don’t so much try to think God as to experience the Power.  

Fallen Condition

What is our “fallen” condition as said in the Bible?  It is the loss of freedom to be our truest self.  What prevents a fallen person from being their truest self?  Greed, fear, ongoing resentments, an angry ego, desire for more things than are needed, including knowledge which sometimes avails us nothing.  There are many educated and prosperous people who are enslaved by ego, who try to find happiness in all they know or own.   People can tend to focus on internet for more knowledge of useless information, or shop till they drop, or buy and build.  None of these have proven to be steps to interior freedom.  Democracy can try to make us free, but with no spiritual path, freedom is elusive.  

Soul

 The “soul” is our truest and most personal identity.  But to get to it, we must go through a process or journey of discarding the clothing of other identities because they do not manifest our authentic self.  They are discovered as a bad fit.  Growing up we tend to put on masks, things exterior to our deepest self, things that are at best only partial of who we are.  The spiritual journey then requires courage and discipline.  Courage, because we do not live up to what others might require us to be for their own false sense of self.  To become an insider to our truest self, we may be required to leave others groups that support a false, partial self.  Alcoholics would call them “drinking buddies!”  Discipline, because it becomes an everyday practice of spiritual formation.  We never really graduate, or rest on our laurels.  

Default Position

 My default position used to be “self-centeredness.”  What is in it for me?  How will this affect me?  Me and more me.  It works if I want isolation, loneliness and unhappiness.  I would rather not have much of those things if self-imposed.  So what is my new default position?  Honesty.  Be honest with myself.  Know and admit when I am doing things only to please me at the expense of others.  This admittance opens me to some space for a change in attitude, from all about me, to being about others, as in “we are all one.”  Am I being helpful or hurtful?  My meditation and spiritual reading does focus on me, but this is so that I can go forth being of service to others.  I have found a more fulfilling way of feeling good about me.  It is not always easy.  Attitude helps to ease the way.  

The Desert

 The call into the desert in meditation is not about separating from the world as if the world is bad.  We are all part of the world, nature, creation.  The desert is not running away.  It is about distractions.  The desert is about being called away from distractions, so that we can wake up to what are distractions as opposed to what is important.  Distractions fill up our life when we are anxious, fearful, selfish, resentful, and bored, to name a few causes of what multiplies distractions in our life.  Meditation quiets us down and separates us from these distractions just enough to see them for what they are: unnecessary impediments to being our best self which will include service to others in need.  I try to go into the desert a couple of times a day.  It gives me a good balance.  

The One Lost

There is a story in the New Testament of the Bible told by Jesus, about the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep and goes after the one that is lost.  On the surface it looks like bad economics.  Cut your losses.  Don’t chase after them.  You only lost one percent, not so bad.  But the story is more about Nirvana, Oneness, than about economics.  If you can see and feel from the heart, as does the shepherd, you know that the lost sheep separates the whole, which is 100 sheep.  They are all equal and thus One.  To be lost is to be separated from the whole.  The herd is incomplete.  So the shepherd trusts in the 99 and goes to seek that which will restore wholeness, oneness.  There is not a sliding scale of value, no rating as better than, and certainly no punishment for being lost, drifting off.  We are all called on the spiritual journey to restore the reality of Oneness.  We all participate in it, if we have to eyes to see.  

Pray First

 Why is it important to pray first in the morning before all your laundry list of work and tasks?  Early morning prayer is an act of trust and humility.  The trust is that your God Power is at work on your behalf, and the humility is that you need this Power to stay sane and be your true self through the day.  The best of what you will do that day in your list, will be through your contact with this Power within you.  Prayer time actually frees you up to do what needs to be done because you are not so anxious or fearful as to try to do too much.  Prayer takes time.  But so does insanity.  

Popularity

It is better to be disliked or rejected for who you really are, then to be liked for who you are not, so someone found out.  It takes a lot of work to keep up the facade of someone you are not, just so you will be accepted by whoever or whatever.  The stress of a job interview or college entrance interview or process of applying for so many things.  What do they want?  You ask yourself and it is so stressful, and false to try to “get in” then to be rejected for not being what they want.  There is a place for you, but you don’t find the place until you find you.  I keep working on that even to this day.   

Sex Too Soon

 Sex too soon in a new relationship is problematic.  It can keep you in a relationship when it is pretty obvious that you need to get out, it is over.  Sex can give you the sense that you have made some commitment that in fact you have not really been able to make.  Sex can become an “implied” commitment.  And the other person may be a wonderful person, a great person, but just not someone great for you.  So it is important to know who you are and sex won’t do that.  Sex can also be as escape from super lonely.  But most often, “too soon” sex makes you feel lonelier.  And you still don’t know the other person.  That takes time.  And skill.  

The Basements

 I admire churches, not so much for what goes on upstairs, but for what goes on downstairs, in the basement rooms.  Addiction recovery meetings of one sort or another go on there, mostly alcohol addiction.  The church is told that these people will never be cured, but they can go into remission if they do certain things including the meetings.  So the church gives one of the members a key to open up, set up, clean up, and close up.  There is no other church guard or front desk person around.  The church has entrusted their physical property to crazy people, insane people, spiritual toddlers, to the use of church stuff.  And it works.  Some of these addicts may eventually go upstairs, but the meetings are not convert work of the church upstairs.  It is once desperate, lonely, selfish, bizarre behavior people, now recovering by helping  the newly desperate one.  It works if you work it.  

The Bar

 People don’t go to bars to drink.  They can do that at home.  They go to bars to meet friends, or out of loneliness.  Sometimes the meeting of friends is filled with an empty sense within us.  You need not go to a bar to meet friends.  You could meet a lot of other places and enjoy one another.  If I am with friends I don’t need a drink to loosen me up or relax me.  If I am all stressed from work, the drink will only be a temporary fix.  The work will still be there all stress-filled the next time I go to it.  Bars can be quite noisy, the most popular meeting bars, so you have to shout to be heard.  This is fun?  I would be a rich man had I learned this in college.  And applied it.  

New Things

 We can become scared of trying new things, which can be old things that we let go of long ago.  For instance, we start out being whoever we really are.  But then social pressure from wherever comes into play and we then try for approval, acceptance, the spotlight, all which requires us to try and become someone else, someone we are not.  Eventually, exhausted and unfulfilled, if not at the jumping off point, we decide, with help, to try and become who we really are, the person we started out to develop as a child.  If we are not desperate enough, at the jumping off point sometimes, we will be too scared to try and become our truer self.  The interior journey, help from others who really care about us, and the effort it takes, requires us to let go of the false self we have tried to become.  Fear paralyses us.  Meditation can give us sufficient peace to trust we are on the right path, finally.  

The Me Work

Some say that the hardest relationship to work on is oneself.  What is so hard about working on me?  Put the brakes on who you are trying to be, that is not you, and just be yourself.  Not easy.  Culture, society, media and groups with who we associate, can have a big influence on us.  We can end up trying to be someone who is not our real self.  And while working on this “character” we spend no time on finding out who we are.   I think that to find out who I truly am, I need some spiritual reading from people who have figured out how to do this.  Then I need some meditation to bring me to this truer inner self.  But it is worth the work and often a lot less expensive than trying to be someone I am not.

Trust Your Wings

 Some people say to me that they do not see or feel a god or higher power in their life.  They have a spiritual practice, are helpful to others, read spiritual writings, but don’t “feel” a god.  Well, maybe it is not always about feeling.  Does a bird see the air?  Does the bird always feel the air?  But at some point, the bird spreads its wings, begins to flap and flies.  Lots of trust here.  It has a bird-brain.  Trust and act.  To feel and see, is not so important.  Don’t try to think yourself to a spiritual life.  

Wounded

 Some people treat recovery from bad behavior like someone who has recovered from a gunshot wound.  They then think they are bulletproof.  I have seen so many people who join some religion, spiritual practice, or recovery program.  They get some healing.  They feel well.  Then they stop doing what made them well.  Spiritual practice is like a medicine that you cannot stop taking and expect to remain healthy.  Whenever I get away from what has made me sane and spiritually healthy and whole, I begin to fall apart.  It is a daily practice.  Yesterday’s efforts were good for yesterday.  Today is a new day for gratitude for yesterday and the chance to be in good shape today.  

Opposites

 The opposite of the spiritual life is the self-centered life.  How do we get out of the self and into the spiritual?  First, identify the problem.  You do something that feeds self-centeredness, thinking it will make you happy.  Drinking too much as a solution to happiness, is insanity.  You identify the problem and the behavior.  If you are addicted, sanity is not natural to you.  So you do what you need to do to maintain sanity.  Lots of steps here.  But once you reach a spiritual practice on a daily basis, like meditation/spiritual reading, you then begin to live out the spiritual life.  For the addict this would be their step twelve.  For all of us it would include self-less action for the benefit of others, especially persons who were where you once were.  

Sanity Timing

 How do you know your level of emotional sobriety?  A measure of emotional sobriety is when you first think something bad happened.  Then how long until you realize that nothing bad had really happened.  Our measure of happy, joyous and free can be measured by how small the gap is between something bad happened, to nothing really bad had happened.  We will always have a gap because the spiritual life is about progress, not perfection.  So it is a good idea to do an examination of conscience during the day if not at least at the end of the day.  

Assumption

 For Catholics, August is the month when they celebrate the Feast of the Assumption.  It is August 15, when many Catholics are on holiday or getting ready for school for their children, so mass attendance is not all that great.  But the event of the Assumption has a deep meaning for us all.  In the Creation story God made Eve so that she would live in Paradise Garden without death.  Also, she would not suffer from giving childbirth.  But that did not work out.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, is supposed to be the “New Eve.”  To do this she has to follow God’s plan and not succumb to tricky, insidious evil.  She did this in part by not holding onto her plans.  She surrendered, which is key to transformation.  She was humble.  Now, recovering people can tune into all this.  So, when Mary dies, she does not corrupt.  She goes to God intact, God’s original plan for us all.  So why not us too?  Well, instead of whining about why we have to die and get buried and corrupt or burn into asses as in cremation, maybe we should accept that she is one of a kind, but a kind that points the way.  So I work on surrender and humility and letting go of my plans.  

Passenger Seat

 Meditation is a bit like sitting in the passenger seat while someone else drives.  The more you trust, the better the ride will be for you.  God is the driver and knows where to go.  You don’t know where to go nor how to get where God wants you to go.  What happens when you try to take over?  Self-will runs riot.  Acceptance is that you cannot drive from the passenger seat.  Let go and let God do the driving in your meditation.  If you think there is a barrier up ahead don’t worry.  God has it figured out.  Trust.  Not easy for many of us.  Sometimes meditation can feel “bumpy.”  So what.  Just stay with it in your passenger seat.  Don’t complain that things are not as smooth as you would like.  Life is not smooth.  Addicts try to make rough patches smooth but simply end up crashing.  Just meditate each day.  God is taking you where you are meant to go.  

Whose Will?

 Many of the times that I pray for God’s will, I really want God to give me my will.  I want what I want.  I want Union, but union of God’s will and mine.  I want surrender, but God to surrender to my will.  I pray for my Giants to win the World Series.  Well, that ain’t going to happen.  Even that is beyond God.  When I get into this fix, I then try to begin my prayer with, “What is it I want?”  Name it.  Then turn it over to God and don’t pay my agenda much attention.  My meditation methods are to ignore myself.  My mess is that I think I am being still, while in fact, I am getting in the way of God.  Not God’s way, but just in the way.  I am my own stumbling block.