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This advice has gotten much more refined as I’ve played with it over time.
The controlling neurotic perfectionists will likely be able to relate the most to what treacherous bridges must be crossed to begin Saying Yes.
It can be all-out war inside.
I’ve enjoyed many delicious examples of Yes today. That I’m here at all is big fat Yes.
Where am I? Gesalen, FriendHusband’s woodland retreat. I got out of bed just minutes ago, and it is 2:30pm. (Okay, I peed and ate breakfast, but still.)
Why am I here? This afternoon I begin a 4-day silent retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA. Gesalen is just up the road.
What did it take for me to get here?
*willingness to spend the money (but I’ve already done retreats, why do I need to do another one/ I’ll never save up enough for a house down payment if I keep this up/ but can’t I just meditate for free at home and at the Integral Center?)
*willingness to take a few days off from my business (HARD – what if clients forget me/what if clients choose someone else because I’m not around/I don’t work all THAT hard so why the heck am I taking a break from it, etc.)
*willingness to be friends with FriendHusband at all (but he’s much older than I am/but he…lots of his business I won’t dish)
*willingness to not travel East over the holiday (but family really only gets together once a year/but they’d do all the work and why am I so selfish that I keep myself away from them at a special time/you never know how much longer any of us have on Earth)
*willingness to let go my rigid control around my food choices (but what if I gain weight and then really nobody wants to make out with me/but what if I can’t “control” myself/shouldn’t I “behave” since I’m just emerging from a hard time?)
And on and on.
And you know what, I stared at the trees and the rain and listened to my second favorite sound in the world for hours today. I wouldn’t trade anything for it. FriendHusband offered to go to the store while I laid in bed for my breakfast and lunch, so there went that worry without my having to do anything but tell him what I wanted. I asked him to play with my hair which I love love love, and he did and it felt wonderful. I usually tease him about his astrological study, but I was in a good space to hear it (yeses beget yeses) and it was actually fascinating how he explained it. (My chart says I’m mainly about sex and death and uncovering the unseen things in life. AND I’ll have tender feelings about the whole thing. Woah! That works!)
I said Yes yesterday when FriendHusband and Yam encouraged me to do the whole 9 yards of the retreat, which means 5am-10pm each day. I have this thing that I only want to say Yes when I can 100% guarantee I will do it. But that’s not really a dynamic approach. I meant it then. And then when I thought it through today, I realized my motivations for doing the retreat that way would be in pleasing and proving. Been there, done that, got the suffering T-shirt. So today I’m a Yes to NOT doing it from 5am-10pm each day, because I’ve learned about myself and my constitution that it wouldn’t work well for my health, really in any way. Could I force myself? I think so. Do I want to? Kind of, because I don’t want to get teased. Am I going to? No I’m not. There is a broader picture to consider, and I pray for guidance in continuing to consider it every day.
So I’m curious today, to what have you said Yes to? To what would you like to say Yes to, and what might be in the way? What’s the “long tail” as they say for what your specific yeses may lead to?
Happy Yes’ing
My former teacher used to tell the story of her Bike Ride of Faith.
I just had my Compost Bin Roll of Faith.
I worked in Concord this afternoon. (Bookkeeping for E’s Dad! And I got to meet his Grandpa! It was awesome, lots of fun.) However, BART had a mechanical problem and it took me nearly 2 hours to get home. During that time I wrote off my little head of steam. I continued to look at the bargains I had made with God….IF The Man had worked out, oh I would have been so willing to be GOOD. And The Man has not ever worked out (according to my plan) and there’s still program to work, bills to pay, health to take care of, and it’s my week to take out the compost bin. Thanks, Jerky God, for sending me that kick to the ovaries and leaving the responsibilities piled high as if my heart were intact and fully functional. Heinous. Poor moi.
So once I got home I talked to my roommate a little bit about how my unwillingness was there, but I’d pretend like it wasn’t and I’d just roll the dang thing out. Even though life is not at all going according to my plan and I really don’t feel like following the good script. Pout pout pout.
So I’m rolling this heavy thing, taller than waist-high, through our dark basement. I’m lugging it and praying at the same time. I put my arm out in case there were spider webs and bent and softened my knees in case there were holes in the old floor boards. I get it while I’m there in the dark that it’s significant that I’m rolling this heavy thing blindly and trusting something to get it through and out to the street.
And I also get it just then how I judge God as a coward for not showing up in skin right in front of me so we can talk person to person. That seems so chicken to be all invisible and ubiquitous and anywhere and everywhere at the same time, while we’re here rotting away in bodies and not understanding jackdoodle. How on earth could man have been created in God’s image if we can’t see or touch God? This theory is just not holding up under examination for me. And I’m trying to think of a comparable scenario in which I’m God. I know I’m going to live forever and I “know” everything. I think I’ll create a big ol’ hive of little things that will die in a short amount of time and understand hardly anything at all, but think they have it practically all figured out!
A few things helped me realize that Kind Of Very Big Deal thing. (Oh, it’s just that I’ve been totally mad at The Way Things Are and I keep blaming other people, even though they’re just in their own confused rotting bodies just like I am. There’s just not any way at the ultimate level that any human beings are not playing for the same big team. Opted in upon birth, like it or not.)
Reading B’i's-recommended book (We by Robert Johnson; also got through lots of it on the epic journey home tonight), I was enraptured by passages like this.
p 61 ” We have taken the God-image out of the temple, out of heaven, and suddenly relocated it here in our midst, contained in the relationship between two human beings….In the feeling of being possessed by our loves, of being caught up in some power that completely overwhelms us, we rediscover our religious life.”
Oh! How unfair! I’ve been doing that all along, then feeling so disappointed in the Not-God human that I had such high hopes for!
p 71 “It still hasn’t occurred to Western man to stop looking on woman as the symbol of something and to begin seeing her simply as a woman-as a human being. He is caught in the ambivalence he feels toward his own inner feminine, sometimes rushing toward it in search of his lost soul, sometimes disdaining it as a needless complication in his life, a “‘wrench in the gears’ of his patriarchal machinery. This is the unhealed split within man that he projects onto outer woman, the war he fights at her expense.”
Thank you so much. I got solace from that. If I die of heart ache, put that on my tomb. (And end it with, “She tried real hard to be a good martyr, but her personality just got in the way.”)
p 78 “If a woman is ignored or hurt by a man, she will often find a way to turn his sword against him, to wound him through his own power drive. But in the instant that a man wakes up to his own need, offers his love, and affirmatively relates to her, woman has an almost magical power to forgive…..The feminine, whether in a woman or a man, will usually drop her grudges, and forget the wounds of the past if she is offered genuine relatedness and affection in the present. This is one of the most noble and beautiful instincts in woman, one of the ways that she serves and transforms life. Relatedness is her first principle, the dominant theme of nature, that for which, more than all else, she lives.”
YES YES YES
Ha! now that I’ve been granted the grace to “get” these things, now let’s look at actual behavior.
What do I do when someone turns around and actually DOES want to play with me, all of me, as I am? How often do I run or block or deflect or excuse myself for lame reasons?
What do I do when I feel genuine connection with Spirit? How often do I speed up my life to try and escape the high-octane purity of that radiance?
How have I handled my own awakening experiences, during and after which I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that all is as it should be, and I am never alone, not one of us is ever alone? Did I go back to my addictions? Did I find new ones? Did I repeat unskillful habits? Tres oui.
Okay, at this point those of you who are “nice” are saying, woah, B, go easy, you’re just human. I know. AND it’s true! If I’m going to be all scrappy-girl-in-the-boxing-ring, I’d better be ready to fully participate in the fight!
Oh, something else I got today is forgiveness of myself for the times I’ve “broken hearts”. I saw they were just going for their own deeply religious experience by feeling that much and pursuing so strongly.
So where does that leave me on this fine mid-December day?
I can’t make anyone else open up. I can’t make anyone else play. I can’t change anyone else’s feelings.
I can love myself. I can love other people whether they are around or not. I can practice metta meditation. I can share with you the format I’ve been given for metta (“lovingkindness”) meditation.
This is not the complete instruction. (Oh! How helpful! I just learned something new from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett%C4%81)
But the basic format (and see further instruction for which names to choose)
May (person) be free from suffering
May (person) be healthy and at ease
May (person) be clear of mind
May (person) feel held and warm and seen
May (person) feel joyful and satisfied
May you be all those things and more.
With love to all~
I listened to the SF Zen Center’s podcast “The Zen of Going to the Bathroom”. It is simply brilliant.
When someone asked Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the Zen Center, “what is Buddha?”, he answered (the English equivalent of) “toilet paper”.
I felt a little scandalized when I heard that. How disrespectful! How gross! Was Roshi just being callous?
But the explanation is beautiful. We take in take in take in all the time. All the senses, taking in.
At some point, stuff needs to go out.
Buddha is what helps wipe away what we are done with, what’s no longer needed. Like toilet paper.
And now I have a whole new appreciation for toilet paper! Such luxury.
Check out #40 from this list if you want to listen to more of this dharma talk:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/san-francisco-zen-center-dharma/id254113729
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I had compartmentalized plans yesterday. Afternoon….see friend who is moving to Israel next week. Night…dinner with friends visiting from South Carolina.
At some point in the day, the inspiration hit, OH! I could actually combine them!
I recall as a little kid not wanting any of the different foods on my plate to touch each other. (You might be a control freak if….)
I’m so glad I reached beyond that. All 4 of us had an awesome dinner in the ‘hood last night.
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A theme I’ve been working with now that there’s no specific Man between me and God, is that I’ve been holding a grudge against God for years now that it doesn’t work my way.
I mean 2 things by ‘working my way’.
1) I had the image the other night as I was drifting off to sleep that the way I used to do romantic relationships was like this.
I’m fishing in the ocean from a pier. It’s me sitting alone looking above the swimmers in the ocean.
Once I see one of those swimmers I want, I throw out the line and make the bait as attractive as possible.
If they bite, I pull them out of the water to sit next to me on the pier.
Well that’s kind of sad for us both. How lonely. How dry.
So then I imagined, well, what if I was swimming along with everyone else, and wasn’t trying to hook any 1 of them. Sometimes I’d swim with others, sometimes not.
And that image makes me want to cry with hopelessness. Just floating on the ocean all the time? Where’s the solidity? Where are the dry times?
So then I imagined (oh jeez, I’ve probably totally lost the readers who don’t think in metaphor. Alas.), okay, I can wash up on shore on occasion and lie still and dry out.
That also seemed lonely and already when I was on the shore I was worrying about having to adjust to the cold temperature of the water again.
I do not know the answer to this one.
2) I’ve been holding another grudge against God that it is so clearly not my path to hold on to just 1 “partner”. I’ve been wanting God to show it/him/her/itself in the version of an attractive person who I admire and can hold on to for dear life. (A person would be the equivalent to the solidity in the ocean, I suppose.) And it doesn’t seem to freakin’ work that way! When I want to connect with God, where’s the body? What can I touch and hold onto that feels real? No, it’s not the same when it’s just me. Me is a wonderful person and it’s also not the God connection I sense is possible. Is this just immaturity on my part? Has the rest of the world figured this one out? I don’t know what it feels like to NOT want God to manifest in the form of 1 partner who I can do growing work with. People say so often, “it happened for me when I stopped wanting it.” Flip that shite, I really want it! Does that mean I will never have it??
Oy.
Top Ten Happiness Provokers in Beth Today
1) I got a Carmen song stuck in my mind and went I went to listen it out, I found this adorable classic.
2) Could feel a roommate’s anger. Asked her about it, stayed open, had a great sweet conversation. In the midst of a work deadline, communicating with a worker about the tub being full of dirt (they fixed it), as well as heading to a lunch meeting.
3) Thoroughly enjoyed said lunch with new neighborhood friend. She helps men “get the girl”, so I think I may have a possible solution to transitioning away from the dating client that’s not the best match for what I’m offering anymore. And she moved here from Texas and is really into spiritual things as well as entrepreneurship. Aye carumba!
4) Breathing in the sunshine after a fresh rain had passed by. Enjoyed a simple present walk.
5) Moving forward with the project to market the children’s book illustrator. Him sharing how I inspired him. Yay.
6) Another roommate, the master tenant, shared with me over breakfast that she may want to move out. I did not freak out (although I did selfishly think, “but I just bought a bed!!”). I will cross that bridge when I come to it. People say stuff all the time. It’s the action decisions that I need to take actions on. I absolutely do not need to knock myself out trying to find a place on CL just yet.
7) Yesterday I ran in to a friend on the bus, and we’ve been trying to work out a schedule for massage trades for ages. I called him with a time I could give him a massage today and he didn’t call me back. A friend and client texted me last minute to see if I would give him a massage today. I am totally in the mood for it, it will balance out the computer work I’ve been doing and smooth out my energy. Thank you thank you! Sometimes the blank of the desire gets filled in unexpected ways if I allow it to.
8) At a time this morning when I normally would have emotionally tanked when perceiving Cadillac didn’t like something, not only did my ship not sink, I stayed floating on the waves inside of me. Okay, so I caught a little bit of air on a couple of them, but no capsizing is definite progress.
9) I had a FANTASTIC conversation with a good friend today about a wild monk and the etiquette of conscious 3somes. Fascinating!
10) Still glowing from discovering that the 2 pastors for whom I’m babysitting on a regular basis are in a Presbyterian group of churches who are moving forward with ordaining gay and lesbian pastors. YAY!
Craig’s List personals are fascinating!
Under Women Seeking Men:
MORE CUSHION FOR THE PUSHIN’! – 19 – (san jose east)
Come have me on your night off – 24 – (willow glen / cambrian)
Are you the one for tonite at least? – 24 – (watsonville)
I’m quirky, a little aloof at times but totally devoted to my one – 37 – (mission district)
My heart is kind of breaking at this point reading these. : ( There is someone for everyone, I do believe that.
I posted a research ad under Craig’s List Activity Partners to see who I hear from about how folks in their 40′s and 50′s meet. Connected seeking folks, who want good quality relationships.
Would love to hear your ideas and longings if you’d care to share.
I’m reading the delightful book If The Buddha Dated.
From the intro, p 4-5:
“What would it mean to bring Buddha consciousness to dating?
Instead of feeling a sense of urgency, we would be fascinated by the process of meeting and getting to know new people. Compassion, care, and kindness for others would supersede “getting someone to be with us.” And we would never try to control another person. We wouldn’t put others on a pedestal, nor would we set them below us. We’d remember that on the spiritual path, the purpose of any relationship is to wake up and get to know ourselves and our lover, thoroughly, without judgment or pride. On the spiritual path, we enter into a shared union where we cherish and give to each other, expanding our ability to love unconditionally. We would also accept that the process can be awkward, unpredictable, challenging, and surprising.”
(If I am personally able to do any ONE of these things in the next decade……..! Cadillac is probably ROTFL.)
