Living on the Other Side

Many of us have been on a spiritual path since before we can remember.  Born into a Roman Catholic family, I was baptized and began my early spiritual training before I could talk or walk.  At the age of 14 I had completed 8 years of Catholic school and attended Mass six days a week for that entire time.  Hmmm....that equates to something like 1,928 days of church.

Somewhere during the middle school years I began questioning..first it was some of the doctrine.  Then, it was why we couldn't experience God outside of church.  You know, why did we have to go to church?  If God was everywhere, wouldn't he know if we spent an hour with him...say, from bed?

Those of you familiar with Vatican II, which ran from 1962 to 1965, may remember those days when many church rules were changed or completely eliminated.  The celebrant turned to face the people, meat was no longer forbidden on Fridays, and we were, startlingly allowed to actually touch the host during the sacrament of Communion.

These changes brought other things to the surface that I had been taught over the years.  Like, why would babies be born in countries where they could not be introduced to God and baptized into the Church so they could go to heaven?

Several years ago, my friend Roberta reminded me how we had raised the ire of our local pastor one day when we decided to knock on his door and ask him?  As she recalls it, he became red-faced and could barely keep spittle from flying out of his mouth as he raised his voice and, essentially, ran us out of his house.  I don't actually remember this but I'm sure it was something we would have done.

After moving out of my parents' home in the mid-70's I found myself on another path exploring Eastern religions, yoga and meditation.  I studied runes and the Tao.  I attended programs with Tibetan monks who chanted and read philosophy.  As I approached my 21st birthday I remember experiences that opened me up to learning about chakras and my own intuitive nature.

In the late 80's I volunteered at the Houston Center for Attitudinal Healing and taught workshops on perception, emotions, and finding meaning and purpose in life.  I attended a 10-day

Vipassana meditation in western Massachusetts where we took a vow of silence for the duration.  In 1989 I had a spiritual  death and re-birth experience from which I emerged a different person.

During the 90's I began training as a holistic nurse and became certified in 2000 just as my marriage was ending.  I taught workshops on holistic nursing and began coaching others who found themselves navigating transitions in life and dealing with spiritual awakening.  I continued to work in the hospital part time and began to see health challenges as episodes of emerging consciousness.

As the years progressed I began to wonder why there was so little information available on living life beyond the point of first awakening.  Most of the literature, even today, seems to be about getting people to begin to reflect and search for meaning in life and getting past the struggle of unconscious living.  Very little seems to speak to life on the other side of awakening.

Somewhere in the past ten years, I grew weary of the external voices of authority that dictate things I already practice.  What of a life that is sourced from a deep sense of connectedness to all things?  Is it too 'crazy' to write from the center of our soul?  To share with others our experiences of a life by Design?

What would happen if we all lived from our truest self.  If we shared that self with one another?  Would we find our tribe?  Our soul mates?  Our community?

Could we unify our focus and shift our energy to a higher state of being?

Could we allow life to create by Design?

I wonder...

Our Zone of Genius

What do we do when we find ourselves perched on the plateau? So much of our lives are lived in the highs and lows of emotion...

...We're satisfied with this, not satisfied with that.

But, what of the neutral zone? That place where life stalls and we find ourselves leveling out...motivation falls away...no urgency to 'do' anything...nothing pulling at us.  We're not exactly content but then we're not disappointed either.

If we are lucky enough to find this spot it may feel a bit uncomfortable at first.  We're so used to having too much on our plates.  The Christmas break afforded me some wonderful, unstructured time.  It was time spent doing what I wanted.  Relaxing.  Enjoying the Christmas holiday.  Preparing meals and treats with my partner, Richard.

When I returned to work this past Tuesday I was surprisingly sensitive to the aggressive energy I felt as I merged onto the freeway.  I knew this energy was no different than before the break but somehow my own skin had thinned and it buffeted me around a bit.

December had been a challenging month with my Dad's stroke and my cat losing weight.  My emotions were a lot closer to the surface and I felt raw.  However, merging onto the freeway, I was not so sure I was ready to put up the hard defenses that I had carried around the past year.  What if I just softened my shell a bit and eased into the world from a new perspective?

Everyone needs a certain level of activity in their lives.  But there is a distinction between activity and frenzy and aggression.  Most of us never find that place where peacefulness settles in.  And if we do it seems to create a certain anxiety. 

Navigating to a place where peacefulness exists seems to somehow take away the need and desire for action.  If we can get to that place we often label it as boredom.  But what if we realized that place as the space of pure potential.  A space where our energy could be directed or channeled into a creative direction of our own.

The challenge of being in this space is that we don't usually feel like being creative.  At least not for a while.  We so rarely arrive here that it is as if our body, mind and spirit long for a regenerative rest.  In this place we seem to just observe where we are and what we are doing.  Our energy lulls and seems to simple sit quietly in a pool of self contemplation.

Last Monday I had the opportunity of spending the better part of the day alone.  My guests were gone and my son wouldn't return until evening.  I had the wonderful awareness that 2010 might be more enjoyable if I could learn to be more conscious of how I managed my energy.

So, for the remainder of the day I simply observed how my energy felt.  When I was tired, I slept.  When I was hungry, I ate.  When I remembered something I needed to do, I did it.  No plans.  No urgency.  No worry.

As the week wore on, I had more opportunities to observe how I managed my energy.  This weekend I found myself sitting on the plateau.  No urgency to do anything.  I knew there were things I "should" do but I just didn't feel like doing them.  I began to notice my energy no longer moved out in front of me.  In fact, it seemed as if it were collapsing inward.  I noticed how it actually felt better if I moved my energy out into simple activities without any attachment to outcome or achievement.  I began to wonder if health was the positive movement of energy that sources from within outward into our immediate surroundings.

Richard had recently expressed the valence of our two energies coming together in the context of a Venn diagram.  Where our individual energies overlapped there were at times harmony and at other times discord.  If we think of ourselves as energy beings and how we run our energy we might be able to gain more objective insight into our lives.

In that place where we rest on the plateau and the energy seems neutral, we might just find our zone of genius.