Opening a Heart

Here is part one of my new book:

 

“Good Lord, It’s 4 AM”, I moaned.  “Whaaaaaa?!”

But the Jack just smiled and thumped his big tail and pushed his cold nose into my face again.  I knew this meant that he needed to go outside and pee.  As he had only been house trained for a month or so, and he was a big dog, I trusted that he was telling the truth and needed to go outside. 

“Well, this is a win I guess, better than the consequences.” I mumbled to no one in particular. 

I pulled myself up and shoved my arms into my too big terrycloth robe and shuffled through the kitchen to the back door, opened it, and let Jack out. 

“I would never do this for anyone else” I said loudly to Jack as he trotted out the door.  Then a bright flash of realization blazed across my mind.  There was no one that I was willing to get out of my warm bed to help do anything, let alone a bodily function. 

I watched Jack run out to his favorite Norwegian pine and do his business, run back with his big smile, looking very proud of his accomplishment.  As I shuffled my way back to my bedroom thoughts kept racing through my head.  I was awake now, no hope of returning to sleep.  I sat up in bed and pondered. What is going on with me?  What has really happened to me in these past 3 months?

This is about how a normal life can be transformed by awakening one’s heart.  It’s about how a normal person that has normal challenges, normal heartbreaks, disappointments, successes and failures and thinks life is ‘fine’.  But as the years pass, one doesn’t recognize that in this normal life one shuts down subtly, covertly and silently.  In the process of life itself our most treasured core of whom and what we are gets closed off:  our heart.  It takes someone or something to open ones heart again. My 'opener' was a 100 lb German Sheppard that was willing to come home with me.

Meditation With Dogs pt3

Ah, yes.  This mornings meditation with the dogs was slightly more challenging today.  I got myself in my spot to meditate, Rook, my white boxer, snuggled up to me using her somersault method.

 In this method, she turns a somersault using my body as her guide and slides her head down my side and under to roll  and flip so her legs are now by my side and her head is further away.

When she does this the little one, Sprocket,  sees it as a perfect opportunity for play,   She  runs, from where ever she is,  and pounces on top of Rook,  and, as we say, "Oh, it's on now!".

So much for a quite meditation. 

I remembered what one of my mentors told me.  Whatever is in your space, IS your meditation.  The more you resist what comes to you the slower your development in awareness.  Awareness is why you meditate in the first place.

So, I surrendered that my dogs were going to take this opportunity to play and wrestle with each other, and I maintained my meditation.  I didn't do the full 30 minutes, but I did get in 20 minutes.

Ah, thank goodness I get another chance to meditate this afternoon. 

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.