Your Story's Value - Janet Conner

There are many spiritual traditions which teach that you must
dissolve your personal story; drop the story, in order to attain
"enlightenment", "awakening."  While I understand the need
not to become entangled in the content of our personal stories,
as I have done several times over the past couple of years, :)
there is still value in our stories...

MM

~

Your story is you healer.  In every story is conflict,
and within the conflict is the chance for change.  The story
is what happened; it is what is.  The value is in what the story
is telling you.  It's your guidance from Spirit, who wants to
bring you to a new place.....  Listen beyond the details of the
story you are telling yourself, for the core identity, and deeper
needs.  You can even ask:  What is the deeper need here?  If
you journal you can write your story in all its fullness and as
you do, begin to listen to hear yourself.  And as you hear yourself,
you begin to discern the needs hidden behind the details of your
story.  And behind those needs, you begin to hear the sound of
your Essence, your Core, your Soul.  This kind of listening
reaches far beyond the physical act of hearing to a spiritual act of
perceiving the essence within the words.

Gene Knudsen Hoffman says:  I am not talking about listening
with the human ear.  I am talking about perceiving what's hidden
and obscure.  We must listen with our spiritual ear, the one inside....
We must literally suspend our beliefs and listen to learn whether
what we hear expands or diminishes our sense of Truth.

Brian and Lisa Burman say: The challenge is when people are
so embedded in the character in the story [and the content of
the story] that they don't connect that they are the container for the
whole thing.  Within you is everything.  Your job is to connect with
that innate wisdom so you can have a deep connection with the
heart of what really happened, and move on.

Listen to your sorrows, joys, fears, frustrations....
To listen deeply you must open your innermost spiritual ear.
Listen beyond the story to the story behind the story...

Listen for what motivates you, what inspires you, what
frightens you, what stops you in your tracks.  Listen for what
keeps happening over and over again - the patterns...

You will learn much about yourself...

Janet Conner
Brian and Lisa Burman
Gene Knudsen Hoffman

excerpts from the book: Writing Down Your Soul
by Janet Conner

~

Your story has value.
it can reflect back to you something you need to see,
or know about a situation, or yourself, if you listen,
observe, and find what's beneath the story you
keep telling yourself...

MM

~

Photo - taken by my brother at Plum Island, MA

 

Ending Suffering - Joan Tollifson

If we truly want to end suffering, we must move from our self-centered drama and story line, to the open surrender of "Thy will be done."  It involves a shift in attention - a shift out of the entanglement in and identification with the thought-stream - and open into awareness of Presence - a shift from thinking to sensing and awaring.  It involves a surrender, or opening, into the whole body-mind, a dissolving of the felt sense of separation, and duality, a melting into the spacious undivided, luminous and inseparable; noticing what is ever-present regardless of the experience that is arising.  

Surrendering is an opening of the whole body-mind, a dissolving of the solidity of the body-mind, a letting go into boundlessness, [realizing] that it is all appearing in a larger context - the open space of awareness.  The true "I" to which we all refer is ultimately this unbound awareness that is being and beholding everything.  We are not limited to the body-mind, and the body-mind is not really a separate, solid, autonomous "thing."  In fact there is no real boundary between "awareness" and "the body."  The words seem to divide what is actually seamless and whole.  So we don't need to deny the body or the person or relative reality, because all of that is appearing in a much larger context, and all of that is really very ephemeral and fluid and ungraspable...

There are many words for surrender: dissolving, opening, relaxing, softening, melting, letting go, resting, allowing, welcoming.  What matters is not the word or some idea of this, but discovering this for oneself experientially.  Surrender is a discovery that we each have to make for ourself.

In surrendering there is a letting go, an opening - allowing everything to be as it is, not resisting anything, and not trying to get anything.  Simply stay with the living reality itself, just as it is.  Awareness always allows everything to be as it is.  It never rejects or hates anything.  It is never really harmed or destroyed by anything that appears to happen in waking life.  All the apparent darkness and getting lost is always happening in this bigger, vaster context.  To realize this is to be free from suffering...

Joan Tollifson

Tree Saga...

This week I am grieving the felling of an old Cottonwood tree, amongst other things. Let’s say, the felling of the tree allowed the grief that was already in my heart to spill out. Interesting how that happens. One thing, not related to other things, even though it’s all interconnected, can open the flood gates that have been in place for a long time.


I awoke Monday morning to the sound of chain saws buzzing. Upon arising and investigating it turned out that the tree men had come to cut down the neighbor’s huge, probably 80 foot high or more, Cottonwood tree some of whose branches overhung the corner of our property… The neighbor had mentioned cutting it down last year, but evidently it got a reprieve until now. I understand why he did it. Trees have an arc life, just like everything else. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end – just like humans, as well as moods and thoughts and the stories that we live by. But they also have a liability – trees and stories. :) And that’s what did this tree in; not because it was too old, or diseased, but because it had gotten so big in the corner of the property, that it was now a liability. Cottonwoods are known to prune themselves, with large, heavy branches falling off – killing whoever they fall on.

As one man climbed the tree and started cutting off the limbs, another man took turns standing on the top of our shed, crossing back and forth over the top of our 6 foot fence, and standing on the neighbor’s shed, to help in the process - some of the branches ending up in our yard; and a third man on the ground in the neighbor’s yard held the ropes to guide the large limbs down to the ground – as they swung like large pendulums. It was a dangerous endeavor, killing the tree. They had to call in the boss. Once the tree man was done dismantling as many limbs as he could, he cut the top 30 - 40 foot section off, like a mast off a ship, which when it landed, took up at least ½ of the neighbor’s backyard with its splayed branches. I could see everyone give a sigh of relief after it landed, whoosh, thud. It took up more space than they had anticipated – you could tell by the surprised look on their faces and the relief as they realized they had “lucked out” - not hitting anything or anyone on the way down.

Top of tree falling over...

I watched and took pictures from a second story window, from behind the shear curtains, trying not to be too obvious. Sleuth journalist that I am. My husband’s new name for me is snoop dog. :) I don’t miss a thing – well almost nothing. I missed the pictures at the beginning of the process because I was so worried about what might happen that I just stood in the kitchen window and watched for about an hour or so as limbs came down. The whole process made me nervous. And I didn’t like the fact that we had not been told by our neighbor that this would be taking place; that little tree fellers would be climbing over the fence, and onto our shed, and tree limbs falling down. Oh my… Run chicken little, run! My world was being invaded – or so the story went on Monday. They were just doing their job, I know – the tree men. But I like to know what to expect. As usual, life doesn’t work that way. :) Life isn’t given out in neatly wrapped packages with directions that say open this way and this will happen… There’s always something unexpected happening – But I’m not like Simba in the Lion King. I do not “laugh in the face of danger. Ha-Ha-Haaa….”

Once they got to where it was just the remaining trunk – about 30-40 feet high – which would have made a nice carved totem pole actually, they started cutting around the bottom of the tree, then cut a notch out of the base. I had stepped away from the window so I missed its actual fall, but when it hit there was a horrendous thud and the house and windows shook. It even left a big hole in the ground where one of the limb stumps must have hit. I went to the window and saw this:

And then they proceeded to cut the trunk up into circular pieces like this:

It was a 12 hour process… Needless to say I didn’t get a lot else done, being so preoccupied with what was going on next door. I am sad for the tree of course. It had no idea what was coming, or what hit it. Here and gone in less than 12 hours. And maybe it really didn’t matter to the tree. It was another form of living Consciousness, a collection of wave forms - being a tree. The form has been removed, but the Consciousness that inhabited that form lives on - endlessly. Maybe it’s only human beings with minds and feelings that create stories around these things, about whether a tree feels – I don’t know. That’s beyond my scope. But still I grieve. Now there’s just empty spaciousness where the tree and its branches used to be, as if there had never been anything there at all. I just happened to take a few pictures up through those branches on one of my twilight walks this winter. She’s the grey-brown one in the back.

Why it triggered a deluge of grief I don’t know. But it opened up a big hole in my heart that has been emptying out ever since. It seems it’s the “little things” that do that, that open us unexpectedly and allow us to feel our accumulated pain and the pain of other beings more acutely. Life is like that. We just never know when it’s going to hit… But feelings have an arc too – they wane and end, given enough time.

Good-bye Big Tree ~ ~ ~ ~ Thank you for your shade, and the leaves, that I no longer will have to rake up in the Fall. And thank you for being a perch to owls and birds; and a natural "jungle-gym" for squirrels; and the sound of the whispering wind through your leaves, making you talk. And thank you just for being here…

Accepting the Storyline

This past week, being with my mother as she recovers from her eye surgery at home, has been an interesting experience in “no resistance”, being in the present moment, and acceptance. The outcome of her surgery did not go as she expected, as she can’t see well out of that eye. However, it’s evidently not that unusual in diabetics. She is required to have eye drops every two hours, but she is unable to give them to herself, as she can’t see the bottle and how close it is to her eye. This requires my presence 12+ hours a day to give eye drops. This is also an unexpected outcome for me.

Being present here, in this experience, I have seen more cooking shows than I ever realized existed! There is no opportunity here to slip off by myself. It’s a total emersion in a foreign land, where there is constant TV and talking, talking, talking about TV, and listening to criticism of the people on TV, and tales of my father’s old war stories. I am not used to so much stimulation 12+ hours a day. I do not stay overnight as she doesn’t require eye drops during the night. Thankfully.

I am in dire need of quiet, silence and space!

Even as I sat trying to handwrite this blog post a couple of days ag0 - in the living room, with TV on - my mother was trying to hold a conversation with me! Until the phone rang, after which she resumed talking to me…

It took me 3 days for the internal resistance to this particular present life experience to subside. I am present, but there has been internal resistance to what is being asked of me, of where life is going at the moment – this particular storyline in the fabric of Reality. And surrender is not necessarily volitional, I discovered. It just happens out of necessity – when it is realized that there is no other way.

In one brief moment on one of the programs on TV I saw Pema Chodron being interviewed on a local news station. I perked up. At just that moment the phone rang and most of what Pema was saying was drowned out by my mother’s – talking. Timing… But from what I gathered Pema was saying something about not creating stories about what was happening in our life. And the interviewer commented: Even if the storyline is true, because sometimes the storyline is true. Pema agreed. Sometimes the storyline *is* true… When I heard that, some of my resistance around this situation relaxed. I think on this path we get so concerned about whether we’re creating “stories” that we often can’t accept that sometimes the storyline is true! What is happening is happening. It is life being lived. So I’m trying not to create “story” by resisting the storyline that is happening here. And I have found that the “storyline” is often the vehicle for awareness to emerge – if we are aware and open to it.

And what has emerged in this present storyline, is that I feel very little sense of the presence of Awareness! You know – the Stillness of Awareness that just is. Oh I know it’s always there under all this – like the back-light behind the silhouetted clouds at twilight - but I can’t *feel* it, and I miss the *connection* - the felt sense of Presence in this particular situation. I miss having time to be quiet during the day and just resting in the place of Stillness, where I *feel* the connection. I am so over-stimulated during the day, and physically drained from little sleep, that even in the silent 25 minute ride home, I still can’t *feel* this larger sense of Presence… The world has gone numb…

And an awareness has emerged that there seems to be a difference between being in the present moment, and being present to the moment from Presence, or Awareness. I feel the difference. “I” can be present *to* the present moment, participating, engaging – at the surface of life – living life as it is. But the deeper sense of *relating* from Presence is missing.

I miss this sense of personal intimacy with this felt Presence. Just like any other relationship that you cultivate, it seems this primary relationship with Presence needs just as much attention as anything else. What we put our attention on flourishes. That’s why I meditate. That’s why I enjoy the space of Silence – to just listen. And for some reason this week I am being asked to completely surrender this to life as it is… The white flag of surrender has not been raised. However, there is a growing sense of acceptance to the way things are at the moment – acceptance of the storyline that is playing itself out here – without creating “story” through resistance – holding myself open to this particular weave of the storyline.

~*~