More Words to Express the Many Faces of Love

I think we need several new words to express love.  Much like a specific tribe in Polynesia that has 25 words for 'blue sea' or a tribe of Eskimo tribe that has 14 words for 'snow and ice'.  They have distinctions in the environment around them.

The Polynesia tribe has a different word for the blue sea when they know it will rain, or when a hot spell is coming, or fog.  The Eskimo tribe  has a different  word for snow that tell them if the snow is large wet flakes that rest on your eyelashes, or the small dry flakes that sting and hurt your skin when they hit you.

 People make new words when they have an interest in describing and understanding the environment around them.  English is a vibrant and living language with new words added to the dictionary every year.  However, most of these words are scientific in nature.  That is where our interest is at this time.  Keeping up with the developments in science, diseases, math, and computers.  We are discovering new diseases each year. And we name them. 

Maybe we only have one word for love as we haven't needed to understand the human hearts capacity and subtlety for relationships.  Maybe it's time to invest defining the wild and crazy emotions we fear. 

There is the love inside of friendship, partners, pets, nature, admiration, pleasure.  But these things are not just love, there is a separate quality to each of these emotions.  Why not distinguish them?  Like the Eskimo tribe and Polynesian tribe in distinguishing their environment of snow and the ocean. 

Sometimes It Just Hurts

There is a song from the 60's by Gene Pitney, "It Hurts to be in Love".  It's a song about unrequited love, or loving someone who only thinks of you as a friend.   It goes like this:

"It hurts to be in love when the only one you love turns out to be someone who's not in love with you. It hurts to love her so when deep down inside you know she will never want you, no matter what you do.
And so you cry a little bit (Hurts to be in love) Oh, you die a little bit (Hurts to be in love) Day and night, night and day It hurts to be in love this way"   Here is Youtube video to listen

I think there is a deeper level of truth in that song.  It hurts to love the world, to love people, both specific and general.  We can do such damage to one another, we say and do hurtful and harmful  things, we get positional about others behaviors, we get up in arms that someone has a differing opinion or belief of God than ours.   We create more drama than any soap opera could possibly convey. 

Yes, it hurts to be in love specifically with anyone, a spouse, a family member, a friend.  But it also hurts to love a job, a home or possession like our grandmothers ring, or grandfathers WWII footlocker.  Once we love fully, what is looming right next to us is the presence of the natural impermanence of life itself.  The fleeting transitory quality of the passing of time.

To be a real master of oneself is to embrace both the pain and joy of love and loving.  It feels like you are on the verge of laughter and tears at any moment.  At least that's what it feels like to me.  It almost feels uncontrollable.  In these moments of a kind of edgy almost irritation, I breathe.  I surrender to the feelings and imagine that many of our profits and masters have traveled here before.  It is the path less traveled.  

Meditation with the Dogs pt2

As I have mentioned in previous blogs, I meditate each morning with my dogs.  I have three boxers from ages 1-6.  The one year old is very peppy to say the least,  to get her to sit down in the morning has been slightly challenging in the beginning.

However, each morning I take my seat and we all settle down to meditate.  Surprising things have been happening.

The first thing is how attentive the dogs have been towards me.  But more importantly, they are fast to respond to any command I give them, such as sit, wait, stop, lie down.  They have always been obedient, as we spent lots of time in obedience classes.  But this is something different.  This feels as if they know the command before I speak it and are sitting as I speak the words.  At first I thought it was curious.

Then I was at the dog park with the little one the other day.  There was one dog that was giving her a hard time, chasing her and nipping at her heels, like she was trying to herd mine.  One large German Sheppard saw this happening and kept cutting in-between to separate the chasing dog from my dog.  This happened several times, and  the German Sheppard got himself in position to block the other dog away from mine.   He got into a protective position next to me, my dog and the herding dogs.  The other dog got the message and sauntered off.  I looked down at the German Sheppard and said "Thank You".  The German Sheppard looked at me right in the eyes and nodded his head.

He knew I was speaking to him, he knew I was acknowledging him.  The connection was clear.  I was startled. As in all moments, things happen and you move on to the next task and don't think about it until later. 

 Later than night I was thinking of the connection with the German Sheppard and was reminded of The Bodhisattva Vow: Beings are numberless; I vow to awaken with them. 

Who knew it could look like that?

The Game of Thrones and Humanity

Doesn't that sound like an ominous statement? 

Let me fill in some blanks.  

I completed all 5 of the current volumes of The Song Fire and Ice series by George RR Martin.  It is quite a long and engrossing read.  I found it perfect for my current underemployment state.  :)  I had the time and mental prowess to tackle such a massive series.  I was determined to get through it, so I read each 700+ page volume within weeks of each other.  (Something I don't recommend.  I recommend you take your time, savor the culture, the life these people live and the world Mr. Martin is creating. 

Each book is an epic journey and as I got to the middle of the 5th book I realized that there had to be more coming, this was not tying anything of the separate stories together, there were all sorts of dangling journeys scattered about, it left more characters 'out on a limb' so to speak, or 'just having been beaten, stabbed, hit on the head with an axe, trampled on by wild boars, or all sorts of dangerous accidents.  Was I to assume they were dead?  My favorite characters voices were silent and some of the least favorite were still in power, still causing damage, still up to no good.  (Kinda just like life, huh?)

I had been telling my husband that this book is about the land, that it's not about the characters. 
So many of them get beheaded, thrown of cliffs, tortured, murdered, poisoned, shipped off to unknown lands, raped, or just plane old die, you need to let go of your favorite people to see a bigger picture.  Maybe that picture is about the land itself, not the individual people that live, breathe and die in it, but what it takes to bring stability to a country or region. 

When you look at the taming of a land,  or to 'civilize' an area, a different perspective comes across.  When I began to look at the book from that point of view, I saw that we really haven't progressed on the inside in 1000 years.  And, if I want to see how we behaved as humans I could just go into a 'third world country' and see the behavior of people there to understand that the hold we have on this world is tenuous at best.  That anything that rocks the boat too hard, such as an economic collapse, which isn't too far off the reality scale, and we are back to behaving as the characters in this book.  We don't have the luxury of magic, dragons and spells.  We do have spies, cunning, subterfuge, back stabbing, gossipy, murderous behavior at our fingertips.  That's what I saw in the middle of the book. 

We pretend to be civilized, but it's a thin and fine line.  Peter Drucker has said, "When you squeeze oranges you get orange juice, when you squeeze lemons you get lemon juice,  when you squeeze human beings you get what is inside, the good and the bad".

This book was a great eye opener in raising my awareness for humanity, for being honest about the design of life and my piece within it.

A Conversation Worth Having

Through most of my teenage and young adult years I loved talking with friends through the night about God, eternity, traveling in space like Star Trek, true love, and many more topics I'm sure I have forgotten even though they were very important at the time.

Recently, a trainer of mine asked me "Was this a conversation worth having?", in reference to our conversation.  I had never been asked that question before, and I noticed all the emotions that come up within the question.  I wanted to make her feel valued and say yes, I felt pressured to say yes because that was the 'nice' thing to do, I also saw where the conversation was not worth having because I didn't talk enough, and all sorts of other judgements came flying into my mind. 

I actually told her I couldn't answer her authentically yet as I was so busy judging and evaluating from a negative position that anything I would say would be a fabrication. 

I thought of the fox and the grapes, a story from Aesop's Fables.  the fox viewing lovely grapes gives up as he can't reach them, and justifies them by saying "they were probably sour anyway."

Often I give up and don't allow myself to struggle through the uncertainty of real thinking, the challenges of our times, and the self imposed pressures to be a 'good person'.  Living authentically is a conversation worth having, it presses and pull and stretches, and it is worth the never ending discipline to develop.

Moods Come and Then They Go

I woke up into a bad mood this morning.  I have no excuse, nothing happened differently this morning apart from any other morning.  Alarm at 5:51 AM, coaching call at 6 AM. The dogs first walk of the day, feed and water them, get coffee and meditate.  "The usual", as my husband might say.  But here I was, in my sitting meditation squirming.

I found myself upset about things that happened months and years ago.  Unable to focus and be present to the moment. I went about the morning with the things we all do, check email, read news, look at job postings and take the dogs to the park and stop off at the grocery store to pick up a few things.

 My mood came to a head in the grocery store.

Here I am, minding my own business.  I am checking out the fresh fruit, getting the proper cheese to make smooth and creamy mac and cheese for dinner tonight with friends, plus a few more odds and ends.   I take my booty to the self-check register and 'pow'.  The register won't accept one of my items and tells me I need to wait for assistance.  "WAIT?!  Are you kidding", my bad mood screamed in my head. 

At 8:30 AM, the number of people working at the grocery store is few and less.  Understandable, as they need to staff the store during their busy hours.  But given the mood I was in, I had little patience to wait for assistance. 

That is when I remembered a teacher of mine who gave a talk about the medieval wheel of fortune.  That fortune goes up and goes down, the real power is to be unaffected by the circumstances, to be in the center of the wheel.  When I first heard that lecture, all I could think about was my lousy love life and that I couldn't pay someone enough to date me.  I was bemoaning my fate.  The next time I remembered that lecture I was in a financial downturn, and I for the first time I thought; "This too shall pass."

Currently, I am experiencing a new level of, well for lack of a better word, disappointments. Once again, I am reminded that this too shall pass.  The point is not to get stuck in negative thinking, or caught in the trap of worry, fear, suffering and sadness. 

Moods come and they go.  To think I can stop a mood, either good or bad, is childish.  To allow myself and others to move through their moods is where real freedom and power lives. 

Aging Gracefully Comes From Patience

My mother-in-law fractured her pelvis and was in the hospital and transitional care unit for 2 months.  It has been a depessing time for her as the pain is unbearable.  The path to recovery is a lot of sitting and walking when all one wants to do is to lay down and not get up.  The bones need compression to heal, so to sit and walk is the best way to repair the fracture.  That has been the last thing she wants to do.

Her depression has been magnified as she is a very active woman, with a walking club, activities with her book club and church.  One can imagine a shy but very social lady stuck in bed with no desire to sit or walk due to the pain. 

Her behavior during this time has been challenging at best for me.  She was rude to the nurses, telling two nurses she dismissed from her case.  (Can you imagine?)  To say she was rude to me is putting it mildly.  My husband and I visited her every day for the entire time she was in the hospital and the transitional care unit.  We brought her things to make her stay at the hospital more comfortable.  Little things like a box of soft tissues, hand sanitizer, wet naps, toothbrush, toothpaste, soft toilet paper, lip balm, dental floss, soft soap.  Nothing big or expensive,  just simple things to show we care and want to ease her stay.

Not one word of thank you, or kindness was expressed towards us.  Not one. 

To say I was upset about that is putting it mildly.  (lol)  At one time I told my husband 'I am done with her!'.  Yes, I was angry, vengeful, and visiting very dark emotions.  (To say the least)

Then I thought about her and realized at one time she was a young woman, with hopes and dreams, love and expectation.  She is now in more pain than she has ever experienced through either the birth of her two children, breast cancer, and hysterectomy, I  began to wonder how I would act, react and feel in the same situation.

That was a wake up call for me.  I started to really ask, "How do I want to age?  How do I want to live in my aging?  What can I do on a daily basis to support my ability to remain open, aware and develop my consciousness while I age?

 I saw that what I do today greatly impacts my future, and I asked myself what is the future I am moving towards? 

I began to practice meditation and yoga daily. I changed my eating habits, began to develop more humor and laugh more.  I got curious to my inherited behaviors, the things I learned from my family and they learned from their family and back and back and back.  What could I do to unravel that never ending spiral of ego, pain, suffering and sadness.

I see that the daily practice of patience and compassion towards my mother-in-law and ultimately all beings that get under my skin,  can help me develop compassion towards my life.  To age gracefully and with elegance, compassion and kindness towards others is key. I can feel connected to all, understanding the fear and concerns that are ever present although never spoken.  These fears and dissatisfaction can be dissipated in each breath we take.  Breathing in the richness of this moment, the colors, textures, and grace.  No matter the circumstance, I can feel the exquisiteness of the emotion in now.

Compassion On a Daily Basis

I am dealing with ill and aging parents.  Not mine, mine passed away many years ago.  But most of my friends and my husband are witnessing their parents age; some not so gracefully.  And issues arise, like the sun each morning, issues long thought handled, healed and transformed arise.  Those smelly, stinky, uncomfortable, hurtful issues. 

One of my friends has an in-law living with them, in his experience, he feels like he is constantly being lied to.  Whether it is about how the parent feels, what happened, where they were, anything feels like the truth is not told, but a made up lie is being told.   In my experience, I feel that what I do is unrecognized and unappreciated.  Both of us realize these are old issues or triggers from our pasts.  Now we get to deal with them on a new and deeper level.  "Oh, yippe" we seemed to say.  Might as well take on climbing Mount Everest, that would be easier!  (Maybe that's why some do.)

It occurs to me that life is just that.  One gets issues, and they stay with us from birth to the grave.  On possibility' is to embrace them, have a sense of humor about them,  keep them from running the show and transform them not only for our benefit, but for the benefit of others.  By expressing compassion through feeling our way while triggered, feeling the sadness and pain, just being with the trigger and breathing, we gain the power to diminish the grip and control they have over us.  Eventually they sit on the sidelines, there but impotent to affect us.


Every time I embrace one of the things that 'others do to me' or 'against me' and allow myself to feel the pain that resides, I free not only myself from the repetitive nature of our complaints, but it creates an opening for others to express their pain and suffering.  That is the basis of Al Anon, granting a place where it was safe to express the demons inside with no agenda.

Practcing Patience at Disneyland

Jeff and I have annual passes to Disneyland.  It's a gift we give ourselves, as we have discovered that a small trip to Disneyland, even if it's only for a small dinner and one ride on the Tower of Terror renews, refreshed and revitalizes.  It's a mini vacation.

We went to D-land last night for dinner with a friend and to see if we could get on the new Cars Land ride Radiator Springs Racers.  Disneyland is notorious for long lines at rides, but tonight it would be a 2 hour wait.  We decided to suck it up and got in line.

One hour and a half into our wait the ride broke down.  We were told it would be another hour wait as they fixed the electrical breakdown.  As we were in line and had waited so long, we decided to wait it out.  Several people ahead of us bailed, and our position improved.

As we were waiting, I did some meditative breathing.  Keeping my mind clear, and present to the beauty around us.  48 minutes later, the ride was fixed and we were moving along nicely.  We did get on the ride in under 20 minutes after that.  It was a nice experience.  Riding through the 'painted dessert canyons in night time with the beautiful lighting made it worthwhile.

What was amazing was my husband saying he didn't feel the pressure of time waiting in line.  He said it didn't feel like we had been waiting 3 hours.  Wow!

I think I will take that one as evidence of my doing meditation breathing to keep the edginess of impatience building within me.

Meditation With My Dogs

Three dogs own me.  I don't 'own them'.  They have adopted me, taken me into their lives, hearts, and ultimately have trained me.  There are so many lessons I have learned from my dogs.  For example, always be happy to meet someone, a tail wagging body is a happy body, a nap in the afternoon is a good thing, and it's okay to growl once in a while to keep peace.  I will write more on that at another time.

I did want to express the joys I have discovered in meditating with my dogs each morning.  It's a practice I've developed in the past year.  After our morning walk, and feeding, and after my 7:00 AM coaching call I settle in to meditate.  To my delight the dogs have observed my behavior and found that they too want to settle in for 30 minutes of sitting quietly and being.  Each dogs goes to their spot on the couch or floor.  This is after the coveted spot next to me has been taken by one of them.  We all calm our breathing and sit.

Its wonderful, my dogs are my meditation buddies!  I would love to tell you that all sorts of beautiful things happen, but mostly its  30 minutes of the day that I get to check in watch my mind tumble and machinate over images and arguments from ages past.  And sometimes I see the humor of it all.  The dogs keep me anchored in the present moment, of seeing the beautiful colors of the day, hearing the birds and neighborhood awaken and greet the day. 

There are times I imagine that my big dog, Mace, has wisdom beyond his appearance.  My middle girl, Rook, is the love dog, she glows with deep love for her pack.  The new pup, Sprocket, is just energy now, but I see a spirited adventurer emerging..

Each of them teach me about being aware, being love, and savoring each moment of life.

Why I Meditate

I have been taught many different types of meditation.  In the beginning of my practice, I used guided meditation and found it very helpful to keep me on the path.  It produced good results over time.

I was able to change behaviors that I struggled with for years, things like eating fatty and sugary foods when nervous.  In my practice, I could feel the difference in my moods and physical stamina when I engaged in that behavior.  I've known this for years but in the heat of the moment I've never been able to stop from eating sugary and fatty foods.  After consistent practice the carvings disappeared.  Score!

Lately, I've been practicing a simpler form of meditation.  Simpler in that I just sit and breathe, yet harder as there are no distractions like a soft reassuring voice or lovely music to bring me back to meditation.  It was pointed out to me you can meditate to 'transcend' the moment and leave the chaos of living, or you can meditate to bring you into the moment, to gain power in living life as it is.

I could see that what I was looking for was a way to bring power to each moment of my life, the ones that stop me, the ones that upset me, the ones that repel me.  I wanted to gain power and bring myself fully to life, not shy away from the difficulties that life presents each day.

This isn't an instant cure, it is a step by step process to give me freedom and compassion for our human condition.  That is why I meditate, each day.