Connecting Point

This is a letter I wrote to a friend after a recent discussion we had.

  I keep asking for help in writing something that will be useful for you around the thought that this little life is not so important in the scope of the vast and infinite spirit. I’ve written a bunch of things, none of which seemed just right. I did write a new post on my blog that might be helpful in some ways, though not exactly on point to this subject. So then I decided that maybe I just need to write what it is for me and not think about what you need to hear, because I don’t really know that, I’m not in your body walking through your experience.

  There have been times when I definitely wanted to check out of this body throughout my life, so I understand the impulse. Sometimes it all just seems to hard or to impossible to get through. I understand the not wanting to get through it, to not go beyond what you want that isn’t happening. I guess I’d have to say that I’ve been through a few ‘dark night of the soul’ experiences, the one after my mother died being the longest. What I can say now, being where I am, is that I’m very grateful to be on this side of those experiences and to have survived them. I also think those experiences help me in profound ways. One is that having been in the depths of despair, I am able at times to rise to bliss, but most often a be very nice place of peace within and a sense of well-being that I never felt before. The other thing is that I can recognize my past experiences as being helpful toward feeling compassion and kindness toward others.

  What I think about the importance about this lifetime, for myself I just want to evolve to the best place I can possibly be before I leave this physical experience. It is my thinking that we have a series of lives to live on this planet, which may go on infinitely or that one may chose at some point in their soul level to stay in spirit. From the many things I have read and what feels true to me, is that it’s a progression or continuum as you go through the lives, each one building in knowledge and development on the other. I feel like I came into this life in a very blessed level of consciousness, in that I was always able to recognize when someone else’s reality (parents, friends, lovers) was not my own. Even still I succumbed to the pressures of fitting in and accepted those realities, and to the hardships I lived though, believing I was less than who I thought I might be. I finally now am coming back to accepting my true self and recognizing all the things I have to be truly grateful for.

  From this place of having survived and even evolved somewhat, it is my deepest desire to evolve and awaken to my true self – my spirit self as much as possible in this physical lifetime, so that I don’t have to come back and re-experience or re-live some of those very painful things I did in this life. I do think that if you don’t learn the lesson and accept the experience for the good and learning that can come from it, you have to do it again and again until you do get it. So that checking out of this life is just a postponement of what you still need to learn.

  Also, I want to be the best I can be to be the most helpful I can in this life to bringing in love and well-being to the planet, because I’m not just trying to leave a better place for the next generation, I might very well be in that next generation or the many generations to come. If I am, I want to come here in a good state of being, to a planet that is in a good state of being.

  On a moment-to-moment level, we are all energy and we are all connected because we are of the same energy base (there is actual quantum physics science backing this up now). Because we are all of the same energy and connected, everything we do, think, (because thoughts are energy as much as action and substance), and feel affects the energy, feelings being stronger in effect that thought. It is my desire on this level that the energy I contribute is of a good, positive nature as much as possible. It’s a learning process and I’m totally not saying that I am always positive. I’m just saying I’m learning how to recognize when I am not, learning how to know why I am not and learning how to change my thoughts and feelings. Mostly, I just don’t really like feeling bad, and I am very grateful to be learning how to feel good more and more.

The first thing I want to say about our trip to Europe is that it is an example of the Law of Attraction totally working. Within a year of my writing down that I wanted to go on a guided trip to Europe, and stay in wonderful hotels, we were there doing just that. I didn’t know how or where the money would come from, but I wrote it down and put it in my ‘magic creation box’. It is something that I wanted to do all my adult life, but could never quite get it together. There have been many other things that I wrote and put in that box that have also come forth, for which I am so very grateful, not the least of which is much more happiness in my experience of this life. That being said, in retrospect, I might also have asked for patience and openess to the new experiences of European travel, as I found myself being frustrated a number of times with things not being what I was used to or what I expected. I also might have kept my ‘complaint free world’ bracelet on, which would have saved Barrie from having to listen to my frustrations. I am learning much in this life and I apreciate each step forward in recognizing the lessons for the good they bring.

I have been meaning to sit down and write all about our trip to Europe ever since we got back about a month and a half ago. I was a little cranky about parts of the trip during it and after we got back, though Barrie said I hid my complaints well while we were there. Come to find out, I, in my menopausal state, was having some hormonal fluxuations, which are not at all regular these days, coming around at surprising times. This gives me at least a little excuse beyond my American snobbery, of which I had not been previously aware. I have had time now to look back to all that we did and the people we met, and I have to say that all in all, we had a great time and I highly recommend traveling in a tour to first time novice travelers. We chose Adventures By Disney, and they took very good care of us. After doing some tour research and closely comparing a number of packages, we found that their tours were a good value. After having been on the tours, I’d have to say that the value was excellent, which I will explain in the next blog.

We actually went on two tours, which i don’t recommend doing back to back as we did. It was too exhausting. I do recommend taking a tour, if you have reservations about traveling to places you have never been outside of your own country. I also recommend adding days on at either end of a tour. A day or so at the front gives you time to get use to your surroundings. Adding a few days at the end allows you the time to go see and do the things you didn’t have time for on your tour.

This is just my introduction the the European Dream Sequence, as it is late and my partner says I should not prattle on over long as I have in the other blog entries. Next I will go into detail about where we went and what we saw as we traveled about through Italy and France. Until then, Ciao!

I know I just started this blog, but now I am going off to Europe for the first time in my life, and I will be gone for three weeks. I said in another post that I have no idea where I’m going with this blog and it’s very likely that my next posts will be about traveling. I know you are waiting with baited breath.

My little brother woke me up at 4am Sunday morning, calling because it was Mother’s Day, and I’m the closest thing he has to a mother now. He was calling from Georgia and had forgotten that my time was three hours earlier. He was crying. He’s been going through a lot lately and our mother died of colon cancer just a little before Mother’s Day ten years ago. We lost our father when he was three and I was seventeen. I lost one of my best friends then and my little brother never even got to know him. He grew up with a different father. I’m in my 50’s now and he has a family of his own. I don’t know where I’m going with this blog, but I feel compelled to write. Like many, our family has been through a lot over the years, with a lot of painful experiences. He asked me what our father was like and all I could tell him was that he was a good, kind and generous man with a few flaws. I’ll have to work on that and give him a better description later.

I have been angry at God a lot over the years, and if not angry, really not understanding how someone so all powerful could let such things happen to me and to the ones I love. I have learned a lot in the last couple of years and the most helpful to me and this particular life I’m living is forgiveness. My mother use to talk to me about my need to forgive and I so didn’t get it at the time. I couldn’t even imagine how one did forgiveness and I couldn’t imagine how she had so much faith given all we’d been through. It did in fact take me many years and many more painful experiences, not the least of which was her death and the aftermath, to gain understanding. I was pretty deeply depressed for three years or more and I so didn’t get what kind of God would have made her suffer that way. I was still at that time holding the image of God that I was taught by her and the churches she took us to. The man, omniscient maybe, but a man made in our image, none the less.

Having realized I was a lesbian along the way and coming up in the 70’s, embracing feminism as I did, I didn’t embrace a man, who wouldn’t really fix things as far as I could see, as being my guiding force. I had no faith or trust in this person we couldn’t see or hear, who was described to me in the bible. I pretty much rejected the whole christian ideal as it was shown to me in my early years. I did however glide down a seeking path over the years, for something greater than myself to explain our world and my experience in it. I just couldn’t seem to find that philosophy or ideal that really held answers that made sense to me. Forgivenss was still a very long ways away. Until recently.

I have a new understanding of our creator.  I’ve discovered a concept of our creator that makes sense to me. Not that I can explain or understand why we in our family or anyone is this world has to experience so many painful things, but my new understanding says our creator doesn’t take credit for everything that happens. My new understanding is that we infact create much of our experience ourselves and we definately create how we feel about what we experience. I know there has always been free will and all that, but somehow I got the impression through my early church experience, and within a working class environment, that we did not have much power to affect the course of our lives. We had to take the life that was handed us by God and make the best of it, being thankful  for what little pleasures we got. It was a bleek outlook for my young starving consciousness, looking ahead an seeing a lifetime of nothing I wanted.

The literature and information coming out these days (which is has always been available),  paints an entirely different picture. I have links to some different writers and websites on my website that I have really liked. The books and podcasts of these teachers have been very helpful in my learning to think differently about our creator and to finding my way out of the anger, resentment and guilt, by way of understanding and working with forgiveness. It’s been a long haul for me to get here, but I do finally get it. I won’t repeat everything I’ve written on my website about forgiveness, but it has been a miracle in my life. I have systematically gone back through all my experiences that seemed unforgivable, or even just kind fo bad, but which I clung to as the reason for all my pain and anger, and I have forgiven everything. this education has taught me that I don’t have to live in fear, that I don’t have to feel guilt for every mistake I made, and that I don’t have to defend my anger and resentment as righteous and inevitable given my experiences.

Now I love God, who i consider to be love, the creative energy of all that is.  I’m not saying that going through and releasing myself from all that unforgiveness was easy, or that it happened over night. It has been totally worth it though. I feel so much more at peace than I ever thought possible.  I feel so much more hope for our future than I ever thought I would, given the state of our world these days. I no longer feel impotent to achieve what I want or to have a positive affect on our future. I could go on with nice little affirmations about forgivness and it’s miraculous affect on me, but now I want to bring this post back to my little brother and his phone call.

My little brother’s call gives me another opportunity to practice forgiveness, and I do find that opportunities appear all the time. He is a full time employee of the National Guard and he talked to me about his upcoming deployment to Iraq. I could find a lot of things to not forgive about this.  I do not support violence in any circumstance and my brother being in the service has been challenging. I have made an effort to be supportive to him and his choices. Before my recent spiritual education I would have met the news of him going to war with huge inner resistance, then anger at our government for making such a thing possible. I would have thought of all the terrible possibilities and worried myself sick over his safety.

With the gift of my new understanding and ability to bring forgivenss to this situation, I can stop all that and give him what he truly needs, which is my love and my support. Before I might have tried to talk him out of it, and I did for a brief moment in our conversation, blurting out, “Don’t Go!”. But then I backed off. I realized arguing with him will only create mistrust and division and possibly hurt feelings all around. Do I want that between us as he goes off to war? No.

So I have discovered that though forgiveness is not always easy, for me it has become the best tool I can use in any situation. Once I bring forgiveness, which is also to bring love into a situation, I can let go of my fear and frustration and truly give the best that I have. I can bring loving kindness, compassionion and my attention to the moment.  So my brother, I love you deeply and though I might even cry about this occasionally, I know now that I can always forgive what causes fear in me. I know we will always be connected by the love that created us.