HOW TO STAND IN YOUR POSSIBILITY

It was the first day of our training program and we were all waiting for the coach to arrive and start teaching. The participants were professionals from all walks of life and it was the peak of popularity of Ontological Design and Experiential Learning workshops which created awareness about new ways of being and showing up in life.

I never forget that day because when the coach arrived he went directly to the white board and wrote: WHY ARE YOU HERE?! The whole class was staring at him and we were all speechless as if we needed more explanation. After a few minutes of silence he asked the class to stand up one by one and to respond to his question starting with the front row. We were about twenty or twenty five participants and our answers to his question were more or less the same thing, ranging from wanting to improve our life, to perform better, to succeed, etc. When we each delivered our response he would ask us to sit down and he would continue with the next person. At the end of this exercise we realized that he has not been happy with any of our answers.

While we were trying to cope with our anxiety and disappointment in ourselves he came a bit closer to us and said: THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IS VERY SIMPLE. YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE YOU WANT TO BE HERE. IT IS YOUR CHOICE TO BE HERE. AS SIMPLE AS THAT!

I was in awe because nobody had thought about that. It was about the importance of the choices we make and the stand that we take with our words. He then wrote on the white board: MY LIFE IS MY CHOICE BECAUSE, I AM THAT EVERYTHING ELSE IS!

That was the start of an exciting and dynamic training program about standing in our possibility vs. clinging to our stories and fears.

Here is the essence of the lessons learned:

1. We usually think of possibility as options but it also means a state of being, a context for something to be created and a domain in which new options become possible. I can be a story about my fears and doubts or be a possibility that I stand for. Living out of possibility gives me access to the extraordinary.

2. What I see as possible or as achievable determine how I think, manage, talk and act. I should be able to distinguish Being from the action of thinking. This is the distinction between what I think and who I am. That is when the Being takes over.

3. Possibility is a declaration and my words create reality when I speak it. The confidence comes from what I am standing for, which is making a difference in other people’s life. My declaration and words can also free the best in others.

4. If I have fear it is because I am thinking about a story, something that happened in the past. If I keep saying that “this will not work out” then I bring it to myself and I let my future be determined by my past. I should give up the fear in order to be my possibility. I should constantly ask myself - what do I stand for.

5. Possibility involves others, it is not personal and it includes everyone else. The question is who I have been being in my community. Have I been resigned or in action. I should confront my cynicism and resignation and give those up to become enrolling. I should be able to find out how I have been stopping myself and how I can teach myself to fly. I should invent other possible ways to be.

6. When I am enrolled in my possibility there is compassion for self and others, there is effective listening and hearing the concerns of the members of the community. I cultivate authenticity and openness and people feel that they are being taken care of; otherwise, there will be boredom and nervousness which will stop my self-expression and my meaningful efforts.

I would like to briefly add here that I personally chose to stand in the possibility of Vitality and Self-Expression which was the challenge I needed in order to get out of my comfort zone. Given the socio-cultural background where I came from, this was not an easy task to do but my stand and my declaration enabled me to stop shying away from people, to live my life fully, and to impact other people’s life in a big way. In other words, I learned to fully and authentically express myself in a way that forwarded the freedom and self-expression of others.

To be continued.....

IN SEARCH OF REALITY

I have always been curious about the realities of life and existence. I used to read and document the views and comments of my favorite writers on specific concepts or topics and then delve into what they had said for hours, even days.

The philosophical definition of “reality” is “something that exists independently of ideas concerning it.” Considering this definition one could assume that the sunset is the “reality” and a painting of it is what we make of it.

Here are my notes of what some writers have painted of “reality”.

David Spangler - The universe is ultimately the manifestation of non-physical, non-material possibilities, and the dominant view of science now is how much we don’t really know about the nature of reality. On atomic and sub-atomic or quantum level, reality is a joint creation or product of the participation of observer and observed. Reality is continually co-created. We perceive only what we think or believe we can perceive. The world is as hard as we wish it to be, or as open, fluid and expanding as we can embody.

Chogyan Trungpa - The human potential for intelligence and dignity is attuned to experiencing the brilliance of the bright blue sky, the freshness of the green fields, and the beauty of the trees and mountains. We have an actual connection with reality that can wake us up and make us feel basically, fundamentally good. The problem is that when we begin to realize that potential goodness in ourselves we often take our discovery much too seriously. We might kill for goodness or die for goodness, we want it so badly. A genuine sense of humor is having a light touch, not beating the reality into the ground but appreciating reality with a light touch. The discovery of basic goodness is the realization that we can directly experience and work with reality, the real world that we are in.

Susan Howatch – We live in the world of movement, of change, which is reflected in the words “past”, “present”, and “future”, but beyond this world is another world to which we are inextricably linked but which we can only dimly perceive. This world is kingdom of values, the absolute values of goodness, truth and beauty, and it is these unchanging values present in our changing world of time and space, which reflect the other world, ultimate reality, which is beyond space and time.

Rick Fields - For the ordinary man whose mind is checkerboard of crisscrossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible, his life is thus centered not on reality itself but on his ideas about it.

Hugh Prather – What an obsured amount of energy I have been wasting all my life trying to figure out how things “really are” when all the time they weren’t. There are no absolute for something so relative as human life. The measure of communication is trust. Insofar as I hide any feeling or experience, I separate myself from knowledge of reality and the love of others.

Gary Zukav - Quantum physics was born of an intense and cumulative effort to understand the nature of physical light. It is possible to build a device that reveals wave-like nature of light that causes light to produce phenomena that can only be produced by wave. It is also possible to make a device that detects particles of light, as though they were tiny pellets, and to measure the force of the impact of each particle. Yet it is not possible for light to be described as a wave phenomenon at the same time. In other words, it is not possible to describe the nature of light – literally, the shape of physical apart from the experimental apparatus that is used to determine it, and this depends upon the intention of the experimenter.

The dependency of the form of physical light upon the intention of the experimenter reflects in a limited but accurate manner the dependency of the form of non-physical light upon the intentions of the soul that shapes it, just as the nature of physical light itself reflects in a limited but essentially accurate way the nature of the light of the universe. The true human condition in its most perfect form has no secrets. It does not hide, but exists in clear love.

Allan Watts -  Intelligence is not a separate, ordering faculty of the mind, but a characteristic of the whole organism-environment relationship, the field of forces where in lies the reality of a human being. Nature is a field of relationships rather than a collection of things. If the fundamental energy and impulse of the universe were not blissful, the whole system would have ceased long ego.

Elizabeth Heich - We are able to shift our consciousness into the past or into the future at will. In other words, we are able to experience the past and the future as present. And with the same case we can free ourselves from the hindrance of space and move our consciousness to any place we wish. In this condition there is no “here” and no “there” but only omnipresence. For past and future – here and there – are only different aspects, different projections of the one and only reality, the eternal omnipresent.

Buddhism - Considers “I” an idea of incorrect perception of reality. The teachings deal with truths which go entirely beyond the merely rational, unfolding a transcendental vision of reality which altogether surpasses all our usual categories of thought. There is a belief that we have the capacity to penetrate directly to the heart of reality.

Ray Grigg - There is mystery because there is not-knowing

                     Yet beneath each knowing is the next not-knowing

                     So each knowing deepens the mystery

                     Yet even in knowing there is the mystery of knowing

Well said as a conclusion!

To be continued….

THROUGH THE MIRRORING EYES....

My continued focus on self-awareness has empowered me to constantly look back at the events of my life and to gradually stop defining myself through the mirroring eyes of others. Here is a brief account of my journey in the past six months.

To begin with I learned to detach my self-worth from the opinion and approval of others and I stopped looking for their hard to get attention or love. This was a huge realization for me because as a child and while growing up, I had learned to do the opposite.

I learned to protect my boundaries by having my own standards and by letting go of any type of blame. This helped me get rid of my defensive attitude, which was ready to pop up, every single time I was criticized.

I learned to deal with my fear of disapproval, and I opened the channels for my authentic self-expression. As a result, I stopped alienating myself and I started to connect with others around me and feel the impact of belonging.

I learned to let go of perfectionism in me and to start loving myself as the imperfect person that I was. How could I love other people if I did not have self-love and self-compassion as pre-requisites? My joy from this realization is immeasurable.

I gained the courage to face and to own my vulnerabilities and to talk about it with my loved ones and others. This deepened my sense of clarity about who I am and what I need to do in order to gain resilience. I come from a culture that people rarely share or talk about themselves, their fear being that they will be wrongly judged. 

Here I am now, getting grounded in an inner life that is growing in richness and in providing the freedom of mind that I need. I owe everything to my teachers, present and past, and from whom I learned either in person or by reading their writings.

The year 2013 is coming to an end but my journey on this path is only beginning. I have gratitude for life and for being able to see myself and others only through the mirroring eyes of love and compassion.

To be continued….

LIFE IS ARITHMETIC!

LIGHT OF TRUTH

Self-worth is simply a declaration and does not have any pre-requisites. Anyone can declare their self-worth by saying that – I have a place in this world, I am uniquely me, and I have something to offer.

Self-esteem, on the other hand, happens in the listening of others and it is an admiration for what we bring (self) to what we do. It has to do with our actions and whether or not they produce value in the lives of others. It is the contribution that we are, and whether we meet or exceed our own standards. Confidence comes from what we are standing for.

According to psychologists childhood experiences of shame can change who we are and how we think about ourselves and our sense of self-worth. A child who is constantly blamed and shamed for different reasons will ultimately believe that he/she is not good enough and is unworthy of attention and affection. Destruction of self-worth leads to lack of self-love which in turn is a pre-requisite to loving others. In time, the individual becomes isolated and disengaged from society and can not be creative or contribute to the lives of other people.

Brené Brown defines shame as” the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore, unworthy of love and belonging.” For that reason shaming should never be used as a parenting tool because it destroys self-worth and prevents us from engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. However, we should not keep blaming or shaming our parents for having done that because as Louise Hay has said: “We are all victims of victims, and they could not possibly have taught us or done anything they did not know. We need to choose to release the past and forgive everyone, ourselves included.”

Reading about worthiness and shame triggered me to look at my own experiences through childhood and adult life and find out if I can identify with any of the standard categories of shame. To my surprise, I could easily identify a few categories such as my traumatic childhood, my survival traumas during the revolution in Iran, my divorce and my imperfection around parenting and motherhood having to play the role of both mother and father, my altered body image as a result of breast cancer, bankruptcy and not being able to pay my debts, having an accent and being considered a foreigner, getting old and not finding a job and having to rely on my children, and the list goes on and on.

I then tried to introspect and see if I, as a mother, have ever used shame as a parenting tool. My daughter told me that I have compared her with a friend of hers in high school and have asked her why she is not in the honor list of her school as frequently as her friend is. She hated to be compared with someone else and still remembers the experience of not being good enough. I also remembered that when my son graduated and was settling down in his first apartment, I visited him a few times and I made comments about the size of his apartment, the dishes he used, and similar remarks which upset him and he said he remembers other things too. While my intention was good, my words had registered with both of them as shame.

For the first time I shared my findings about myself with my children and a few of my friends, and now with my readers. My courage to do that and to be vulnerable was extremely helpful to me in terms of getting rid of the heavy burden of shame and gaining more clarity in the light of truth.

Now I actually believe that no matter who we are and at what age, we should identify and recognize the areas of shame we have suffered in our childhood or in our lives as adults, and have the courage to own, to share, and to engage with our own vulnerabilities. We may get emotional in the process but we need to show the depth of our courage as our value which will lead us to a renewed sense of ourselves. As stated by David Richo:

“Mental health is not about what happened but how we manage what happened.”

Being vulnerable is also one of the important criteria in self-expression especially when we are sharing our stories with others. We should be authentic, able to show our emotions, able to reach out and able to not show concern about other people’s judgments. This is practicing awareness and courage, owning the stories, and developing resilience. We should remind ourselves that we each are part of the grand design of life and our willingness to go forward in spite of our vulnerabilities will enable us to access the courage that we need because as PEMA CHÖDRÖN says:

“Deep down in the human spirit there is a reservoir of courage. It is always available, always waiting to be discovered.”

To be continued….                                                                             

THEY SPOKE TO ME....

This

Sky

Where we live

Is no place to lose your wings

So love, love,

Love.

How

Did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give to this world

All its

Beauty

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its

Being

Otherwise,

We all remain

Too

Frightened

Even

After

All this time

The sun never says to the earth

“You owe

  Me.”

Look

What happens

With a love like that,

It lights the Whole

Sky

If God

Invited you to a party

And said,

“Everyone

In the ballroom tonight

Will be my special

Guest,”

How would you then treat them

When you

Arrived?

Indeed, indeed!

And Hafiz knows

There is no one in this world

Who

Is not upon

His Jeweled Dance

Floor.

Blame

Keeps the sad game going,

It keeps stealing all your wealth

Giving to an imbecile with

No financial skills,

Dear one,

Wise

Up.

I

Will need

Someone to feed my cat

When I leave this world,

Though my cat is not ordinary.

She only has three paws:

Fire, air,

Water.

The

Heart is right to cry

Even when the smallest drop of light,

Of love,

Is taken away.

Perhaps you may kick, moan, scream

In a dignified

Silence,

But you are so right

To do so in any fashion

Until God returns

To

You.

  

We all

Sit in His orchestra,

Some play their

Fiddles,

Some wield their

Clubs.

Tonight is worthy of music.

Let’s get loose

With

Compassion,

Let’s down in the delicious

Ambience of

Love.

What

We speak

Becomes the house we live in.

Who will want to sleep in your bed

If the roof leaks

Right above

It?

Look what happens when the tongue

Cannot say to kindness,

“I will be your slave.”

The moon

Covers her face with both hands

And can’t bear

To look

Why

Are there

So few in the court

Of a perfect

Saint?

Because

Every time you are near Him

You have to leave pieces

Of your

Ego

With

The hatcheck

Girl

Who won’t give them

Back….

Passing, passing

The blossom gives way to the fruit;

Both are necessary,

One passes into another.

Bread exists to be broken

To sustain its purpose,

The grape on the vine

Is wine in the making,

Crush it and it comes alive.

When for an infinite second

You leap like antelope

Out of time’s snaking passage

You leave attachment behind,

It fades into the distance.

Timeless, without expectation

You’re born into non-attachment.

Don’t flounder in preambles of the past

Wounded with regrets; don’t let autumnal

Nostalgia blind you to the sounds and scents

Of the present’s Spring; you’re a native of

The pellucid moment, make it infinite beyond

The curving snake of passing time and space,

Learn to die in the infinitely elusive moment.

  

I was a speck of dust measured in molecules

Now I am a rising mountain peak, snow-capped;

I was forgotten like coffee grains in an empty pot

Now I am surging light leading a multitude.

You erased my famine, unpicked my anger

Your energy charges my voice, it radiates my heart;

Now I am alive with the ore of words pouring

From my lips like molten lava glittering with joy

__________________________

Selection of short poems of beloved Persian poets namely Hafiz and Rumi translated by Daniel Ladinsky, and Raficq Abdulla

PONDER ON THESE - III

If you are doing something to avoid pain, the pain is running your life. Your effort to avoid pain has created layer upon layer of sensitivities that are linked to the hidden pain. The other choice is to stop avoiding pain and to face it through inner work. There is tremendous joy within you on the other side of pain.

The personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not OK with life and needs protection. To obtain inner freedom you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them. You have to be willing to just watch the fear without protecting yourself from it.

You can actually feel the fears and insecurity of a five-year old when you are sixty because that unfinished mental and emotional energy patterns are getting stored and reactivated.

Pushing away and/or clinging to your life experiences create energy blockages which are the cause of all your fears. The alternative is to enjoy life instead of pushing away or clinging to anything.

Real spiritual growth happens when all parts of you are unified. There is not a part that is scared and another part that is protecting the part that is scared. There is simply you (the consciousness) watching the dance of the psyche.

Decide that you don’t want the weakest part of you running your life. You want to talk to people because they are interesting not because you are lonely. All you need to do is to watch who is feeling lonely. The one that notices is already free.

Your mind is always telling you what to change outside in order to solve your inner problem. If you are wise you don’t play this game.

If you are not in touch with your emotions you will start acting out. That means you will do something but you won’t know why you are doing it. Examples are eating compulsively, yelling at a child when you had a bad day, getting drunk, etc. If you experience your emotions you will have less destructive behavior.

When you feel weak remind yourself that you are spirits who have taken on the physical experience and have far greater power than you are showing in the moment of weakness.

Try to create authentic power by transcending fear and choosing love in every moment of your life. Expand the loving part of your personality.

If you feel that you are giving all the time and are not receiving, your love is filled with sorrow for yourself. To others the love feels thick with need.

Power is energy that is formed by the intentions of the soul and love is the energy of the soul. When you hold someone responsible for what you experience you lose power. Accept responsibility for your choices and choose intention of love instead of fear.

The parents are the souls to whom you are closest in your life time, and whose influence upon you is the greatest. This is so even if it does not appear that way, even if, for example, you were separated from your parents, or a parent, at birth. Your soul and the souls of your parents agreed to your relationship in order to balance the energy that each needed to balance, or activate dynamics within each other that are essential to lessons that each must learn.

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes and I am left the same as I began.

We are not troubled by things but by the opinions which we have of things. Let me see this exactly as it is, let me not distort it by judging it.

The way for gauging one’s spiritual strength is to find out how often you become disturbed in the course of a single day.

Don’t limit your child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

A newly married couple said, “What shall we do to make our love endure?”

Said the Master, “Love other things together."

But I am where man chooses to look and see me. Even if he chooses to look within himself, there I am.

Each time you cling to something to stop yourself from falling, understand that it is falling too.

_____________

*Quotations from the books I have read and documented.

To be continued……..