Saturday, January 27, 2007

It's All Your Fault!

By Namaste Publishing Staff

Perhaps you have heard about the factory worker who was called on the carpet by the manager for talking back to his foreman.

“Is it true that you called him a liar?” asked the manager.

“Yes,” said the worker, staring down at the floor.

“Did you call him stupid?”

“Yes.”

“Slave driver?”

“Yes.”

“And did you call him an opinionated, bull-headed egomaniac?”

“No,” said the factory worker.

After a moment’s pause he looked up questioningly. “Should I have?”

Author Michael Brown says in his book The Presence Process, “Whenever anything happens that upsets us emotionally, whether it appears to us as an event or as another person’s behavior, we are seeing a reflection of our past.”

Think back to the last time you were really irritated with someone, as the factory worker was in the story. Maybe you even used some of the factory worker’s words. Or perhaps you were simply upset and, instead of expressing your anger, withdrew into an icy silence. What is it that causes us to react so strongly, instead of simply responding to a difficult situation in a constructive and helpful manner . . . without irritation, anger, or distancing—all of which serve only to compound the damage?

We don’t cause other people’s behaviors, and other people don’t cause our behaviors. Each of us is responsible for our own behavior. This includes taking responsibility for our reactions to someone’s behavior.

Sometimes people are downright inappropriate in what they say or do. The person’s actions may not be a reflection of you or me at all. They may be a form of behavior that’s most unwelcome. We didn’t cause this behavior.

They said what was said, did what was done.

But—we are responsible for our words and actions from this point on.

You see, Michael also shows us that every situation in our lives is a setup, intended to help us move into a state of loving Presence. So while we didn’t cause the original upset, it’s also being played out in our lives for our benefit, if we but have the eyes to recognize this.

Upsets are always setups.

We don’t like to take responsibility for our response to situations that happen. The story of the factory worker shows how we tend to shift responsibility entirely to the other—responsibility not just for his or her behavior, but for our reaction to such behavior. He or she made us angry, we tell ourselves.

Observes Michael Brown, “Whenever we react physically, mentally, or emotionally to such a circumstance, we are projecting.” What this means is that the other person never causes or reaction, but we like to imagine they do! We like to think it’s all their fault—including the fact that we are now upset on top of the original offence.

Owning our reflections and projections means facing up to the fact that we alone are responsible for our behavior. No one makes us angry, sad, irritated, frustrated, impatient, jealous, or any of a host of other emotions. The other person only triggers what’s already in us. And this we intended, so that we might discover that we don’t have to be triggered any longer!

Our reactions are something we have carried with us throughout life, ever since we learned in early childhood that this is how you behave in certain situations. They are a pattern laid down in our home of origin and reinforced over many years.

The Presence Process asks us to become conscious of how we are either reacting or responding to life’s situations. It asks us to examine the patterns in how we react, bring them to full awareness, and then allow them to dissolve in a growing sense of Presence.

Presence is about the present, not the past. Rehashing the past achieves nothing. But when patterns of behavior appear in the present and are brought to consciousness, they can then be dissolved. Without a lot of digging, probing, rehashing—without endless therapy—Presence allows us to become free of patterns from childhood.

To live fully in each moment, each situation, is to no longer be driven by the past. When we are free in this way, then we choose, responsibly, how we will respond in an appropriate manner to whatever happens to us, instead of reacting destructively.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

A Personal Connection

I’m in the hair salon and a little guy, maybe three, is with his mother and grandmother waiting for his haircut.

Through the glass window, he sees a car pull up at the curb. “Who that car belong to?”

His mom says she doesn’t know.

A big smile is on his face as he whirls around and points at another car: “That momma’s car!”

A few moments later, he picks something up in the salon and plays with it. Then he looks at me sitting across the room and grins a big grin.

I am struck by this little boy’s complete freedom to interact with everyone and everything in his environment. He feels like he belongs, and he isn’t afraid to make contact.

This little boy’s spontaneity flows out of a deep sense of connection to his world. There are moments, situations, when he may draw back a bit, perhaps act shyly. But his fundamental state of being is one of belonging, feeling at home.

Our society has been dubbed a high-tech, low-touch world. We grow up to feel increasingly separate from, even alienated from, the world around us. We go about our lives with a high degree of isolation, even when we are in close proximity to others. Connection isn’t one of the strengths of modern western culture.

When our sense of connection has been ripped apart––in divorce, loss of a loved one, loss of a job––or when we feel alienated, all alone—we long to connect. Being an individual is important to us, but we don’t want to be isolated.

I have been on an individual journey recently. It’s called The Presence Process. Devised by Michael Brown, it doesn’t lend itself to group work. It’s very much a personal process. It’s not something you talk about a lot with others. You do it alone in your room at home.

Although The Presence Process is a journey that can only be taken by each of us as individuals, as I take this journey I find myself able to connect in a deeper way than ever before. As I come in touch with the divine Presence that is the source of all life, I experience a profound underlying oneness to our existence. The Presence I experience at my own center is the same Presence that forms the core of everyone else.

Becoming aware of divine Presence in life creates community. For we realize that, beneath our apparent isolation, we are all part of a universal life. The more deeply this realization dawns on us, the more we desire to connect. The more we plunge into the depths of this Presence, the more capable are we of touching each other’s hearts.

A woman was telling me of how her ability to connect is developing—of how even the people in her life are different people these days. She just doesn’t care to spend her time among people with whom she can’t connect.

She shared that in her fifty years of marriage, not once did she have a conversation with her husband in which she experienced the depth of connection that is so essential to her today in her relationships.

“Fifty wasted years,” she said.

And then she corrected herself. “No, not wasted––they are what got me where I am today.” Today, she can connect soul to soul.

Everything that happens in our lives is part of a drama that is being played out to bring us in touch with Presence. The external world of each of our lives is meant to drive us to find the internal, where Presence resides.

And, paradoxically, as we connect with Presence, we desire to—and find we are able to—connect with each other. But until we take the personal journey of connecting with Presence within our own being, we will never truly connect with another.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

It’s All Good


By Namaste Publishing Staff

A purser, a friend of mine, was standing at the door greeting people aboard the plane, when a man approached, anger oozing from his pores.

Walking so briskly that he bumped into the purser, just about knocking her down in the jetway, he exclaimed, "I'm never flying this airline again!"

"That's too bad," the purser said, maintaining her composure. Ignoring her, the man headed to his seat.

The first couple of hours of the flight, he had his arms tightly crossed on his chest, a menacing grimace on his face. You know the look: "I'm mad, don't talk to me!"

By the third hour into the flight, he was looking tired and his arms were clasped more loosely. The purser knelt beside him. "Are you the passenger who had a rough day today?"

"Yes, and I'm never flying this airline again."

"Can you tell me what happened?"

He had started his journey in Frankfurt, where he surrendered 30,000 frequent flyer points to be upgrade from coach to business. But when he got to Chicago, business class on the flight to San Francisco was full and the airline didn't credit him the points for this leg of his journey.

How many of us become upset when things don’t go just the way we’d like them to?

Trying to make everything “perfect” is a tense state. Instead of being perfectly okay with the fact life is a kaleidoscope of experiences, you are constantly bucking much of what happens.

With this frame of mind, you can never really relax and just be. Even when you park your carcass in front of the television with pretzels and a beverage, you're not relaxed. Immobile, but not relaxed.

When you want life to be perfect, you go through your day expecting things to be exactly the way you wish them to. When they're not, you’re miserable.

The airline passenger has allowed a concept of what ought to be intrude upon what is. Because things aren't perfect, to his thinking everything is ruined—and he's determined to make everyone else feel miserable too!

The purser was understanding. "You should at least get your points back."

By now the man was feeling bad for behaving so badly, and he felt a need to offer an explanation. "I don't do this for the food. I do it because I have a medical condition."

"What's the matter?" asked the purser.

"Arthritis. My back's going to be killing me for the next several days."

"That's terrible," said the purser. "My grandma had arthritis, and my mother had arthritis."

Beginning to open up, the passenger asked, "What kind?"

"Osteoarthritis."

As he visibly relaxed, they talked about the different kinds of arthritis and he told the purser about the rare type with which he was afflicted.

It was becoming obvious there was a really nice man beneath that angry front. But his belief that things had to go a certain way, or everything was wrong, had got in the way of being the person he really was.

Warming to him, the purser said, "I have a business class seat, but the reading light doesn't work. I had to move the passenger to first because he had a lot of work to do. If you'd like that seat, it'll be just between you and me."

"Why are you doing this for me?" the man asked. Then, feeling embarrassed about how he had behaved, he added, "I'm just a grumpy old man."

Expecting perfection—of situations and of ourselves—is a recipe for misery. We block all enjoyment of the moment because we have a concept of how things ought to be. And when they aren't well, we’re fit to be tied.

You could argue that the man had a right to be mad. After all, he did lose his points. Yet it was from precisely this feeling of being “right” that his tension arose. Feeling justified in his cause—telling himself how wrong the airline was—spoiled his whole day.

You know when you go into a building and those security cameras are always moving, blinking, picking up any kind of threat. That's what it's like for many of us all the time. Our security system is never down. We're always monitoring to see whether things are perfect enough, whether we're measuring up, whether others are pulling their weight.

There’s a much better way to live, one that doesn’t compound difficulties with emotional reactivity when things don’t go according to our preferences. Michael Brown introduces us to it in his books and CDs about The Presence Process. It’s to live from a state of Presence.

When you live from Presence, instead of with expectations of how things should be, you increasingly come to feel, as Michael puts it, that “it’s all good!”

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Faith

“The money’s great, by far the best of the three offers. Everyone things I should take it.” Sarah was focused on the tea bag she was dunking in the cup of steaming hot water on the table in front of her.

“But?” said her closest friend, Abigail, who could always read Sarah’s mind.

“I just don’t know if it’s the right job for me.” Sarah set the tea bag on a napkin and looked at her friend. “Which do you think I should take?”

Abigail sighed. She had been down this road so many times before with her friend. Would Sarah never learn to stand on her own two feet?

“What does it matter what I think?” Abigail said.

“I value your opinion.”

“Ah, I know what that means. It means you want me to tell you to take this job so you don’t have to make a decision that’s contrary to what your mom and dad, your brother, and everybody else with an opinion thinks you should do. All the years I’ve known you, you’ve wanted other people to decide for you.”

Sarah responded, “Well, I’ve no idea which job I should take.”

For years Abigail had listened to Sarah go back and forth on every decision she had to make. Sarah always ended up doing what the majority thought she should do, without ever discovering what she really wanted.

Abigail hated to see her friend relying so much on other people’s opinions. This time she wasn’t going to give hers. “Do you want to sit here and listen to me pontificate like a Mother Superior?” she asked. “Or would you rather get to the place where you don’t need other people’s approval and figure out what you want to do? For once, trust your own feelings and perceptions, regardless of whether anybody else thinks they’re accurate.”

Sarah imagines there’s safety in numbers. If enough people approve of her decisions, she must be on the right track. Once again, because her parents and several close friends stressed the importance of security, she took the job that paid the most money.

When she ended up hating her work, the truth of Abigail’s words dawned on Sarah. She realized that, had she listened to her heart instead of the opinions of everyone else, she could have known that the job that paid less money was the one she should have taken. It was the kind of work she liked.

Faith involves learning to stand on our own two feet, trusting ourselves, and needing validation from no one.

It’s one thing to gather information, or even to talk something over with a close friend to see if there are aspects of an issue that we’ve missed. But it’s something altogether different to look to others for what we should do.

We want someone to tell us the safe course of action. We go over the same ground again and again with family, friends and coworkers, instead of going within ourselves for the answers.

Direction doesn’t come simply from thinking something through, talking to others, and then making a calculated choice. It comes intuitively, without thought, spontaneously. It’s a silent knowing.

Faith is learning to trust our deepest being, regardless of what others think. It’s feeling the right choice—not at the level of emotional reactions, but deeper than this. It’s being in tune with the infinite Presence at our core.

After all, how can someone else possibly know whether we should marry a certain person, take a particular job, have a child, or undergo chemotherapy?

Equally, how can we know what someone else should do? It’s arrogant to think we know what’s best for another.

Faith means to let go of our dependence on external authority and find our authority within, in the sacred Presence at our center.

After years of looking to other people for validation, it isn’t easy to become a self-directed person. Messages from our true self dart into our consciousness but we dismiss them in favor of the opinions of others.

After all, how could someone as ordinary as us have a thought that’s truly significant?

When we don’t believe in ourselves, instead of becoming poetry, our lives are lived at the level of prose.

But if we once allow ourselves to feel our spiritual center beckoning us through our desires and intuition, our deepest yearnings and hunches will be illumined with a halo of significance.

By tuning into our creative center, we’ll shrug our shoulders at the mediocrity that has beleaguered us. Following the cues of our deepest self, we’ll stand on our own two feet and find the fulfillment that comes only when we have such faith. In the words of Michael Brown, author of The Presence Process, we’ll “show up.”

There’s just one person to trust in life when it comes to making decisions, and that’s yourself. But this trust isn’t in your ego, and it isn’t in a track record of past experiences. It’s a trust that’s based on an inner “knowing.”

No parent, spouse, therapist or minister experiences what it is to be you, which is why you alone are qualified to decide your course in life.

For at the end of the day, you are the one who has to live with the consequences of your choices.

May we each stand on our own two feet, charting our own lives—not individualistically, but grounded in the infinite oneness of divine Presence.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

What Do We Mean . . . “Spirituality?”

The term “spirituality” is much in vogue today. Probably few words carry a broader range of meanings.

From New Age fascination with astrology to humanism’s concern for ecology, the broadest cross section of folk in perhaps any era in history are talking about spirituality.

In a very real sense all this talk of spirituality is a return to roots. Spirituality originally was a holistic term. It implied that the whole of reality is connected.

The individual, the community, the very universe itself were understood to be permeated by a transcendent reality. Spirit referred to the mysterious Presence that underlies and unites everything.

The era of Christendom changed this. There was a constricting of people’s understanding of spirituality. It came to mean not that which joins everything into a seamless whole, but a separate and otherworldly reality.

The pseudo spirituality of the Dark and Middle Ages attempted to escape any deep contact with the material world. Spirituality became detached from the world of everyday life. Consequently it furnished us with no real vision for life beyond the thought of escaping it.

Indeed, to be spiritual meant you viewed the material world as inferior to a “heavenly” realm. That spirit was opposed to matter was the predominant worldview through fourteen centuries.

Ever since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution some four centuries ago, we have been suspended between two polarities—a “sky pilot” mentality on the one hand, and a purely physical scientific mentality that sees the universe in mechanistic terms on the other.

But in our time, once again the term spirituality is regaining its holistic flavor. To hear both atheists and people of faith speak of spirituality is to sense a coming together of polarities, and to experience a renewal of the spirit.

Spirituality is about being deeply enough in touch with our experience of life to truly love it. Such a love of life is what grounds and shapes an authentic spiritual vision. For when we love things, we don’t abuse them, we use them well.

We can learn more about the transcendent by plumbing the depths of our everyday experience than we can ever discover by spinning webs of speculation about the hereafter or other dimensions of existence.

Spirit manifests itself not in airy fairy imaginings but in the particular of our everyday lives. It is in the concrete, not the abstract, that spirit reveals itself in us.

Because the transcendent is transmitted in the real and the down-to-earth, only when we ground ourselves in our actual experiences, not in speculation, do we find a sustaining meaning for our lives. As the fourteenth-century English mystic Julian of Norwich understood, the humble hazelnut holds within it the mystery of the entire universe if we have eyes to see it!

To be grounded in our experiences, we must plumb their depths. Skirting across the surface of life in a helter-skelter existence is not only stressful, it robs us of both meaning and fulfillment. Only allowing ourselves to experience the depth dimension of our daily experiences can fulfill us.

When we embrace the depth dimension of our experiences, we come to view life as sacred. Rather than being a scattered series of random events, our lives become an unfolding of divine Presence, in which we find meaning and contentment.

Montana writer William Kittredge says in his memoir, Hole in the Sky, “If we want to be happy at all, we have to acknowledge that the circumstances which encourage us in our love of this existence are essential. We are part of what is sacred. That is our main defense against craziness, our solace, the source of our best politics, and our only chance at paradise.”

What do we mean by the depth dimension of our lives? Kittredge puts it nicely: “I want to think that all creatures, even us, are in love with the makeup of their actualities like bats at the throat of some desert flower while no one is watching, spreading pollen in ways the flower would love if flowers did such things. And maybe they do.”

Two great spiritual teachers of our time not only echo Kittredge’s insight, they show us how to experience it in practical terms. Michael Brown and Eckhart Tolle ask us to embrace the whole of life as a seamless expression of divine Presence.

To be spiritual is to allow the deepest currents of our being to rise to the surface and animate our lives. The goal of spirituality is not to leave life, but to learn how to be fully present in it.

Spirit is that which pulses within and unifies all being. To be spiritual is to recognize ourselves as cells of one universal organism. As our individual experiences become grounded in the spiritual dimension of life, we find our concern for depth in our own lives washing over into a concern for depth in the way we treat the world around us.

Three books available on this website, coupled with CDs by the same authors, have helped me deepen my awareness of the divine Presence in every dimension of my life. They have helped me find wholeness in the life I lead every day.

The Presence Process, by Michael Brown, and A New Earth and The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, are unsurpassed for their ability to bring one in touch with spirit in each and every facet of life. They may be the best investment you ever make. They certainly have been for me.

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Being Yourself in Relationships

“I’m at my wits’ end,” said a woman who called me two evenings ago. “Every time I try to be who I really am, my spouse gets so angry that I end up backing down. I just don’t know how to really be myself in this relationship. I feel like I’m losing myself completely.”

The following evening, a post appeared on a website in which the writer said that his or her spouse can’t tolerate a contrary opinion or course of action. For this person to be authentic provokes anger in the spouse. The person asked, “Does my response always have to be acquiescence?”

I seem to be constantly running into people who feel this way. If it isn’t about their partner, it’s a parent or someone at work, church, or a social organization.

Wouldn’t life be nice if such people weren’t so difficult?

Well . . . no. On the contrary, this person who tries to bully us is actually a Godsend. Life becomes quite wonderful only when we get the message God is sending!

Gail Godwin’s novel Evensong revolves around an Episcopal priest, Margaret, and a man who is a chaplain. The two of them are contemplating spending their lives together.

Margaret's oldest friend Harriet says to her, "Remember that nasty old witch you told me about? The one you were scared would drag you off into the closet and make you live with her when you were little? So what's the first thing you do when you grow up and get free of the closet? You look up the witch, you call her up on the telephone, and go and live with her."

That's a pretty good description of relationships, especially romantic ones. You look up the witch and go live with her—in the form of a husband, a wife, a partner. (An equivalent might be going home to your parents for the holidays!)

Of course, when you first fall in love with him, this man or woman you think you can't live without doesn't look anything like the witch from your childhood.

But Prince and Princess Charming have a way of losing their charm. Pretty soon you see the witch. "My God," you tell yourself, "did I pick the wrong person? Have I made one awful mistake?"

In The Presence Process, which is among the most helpful books I have ever read, Michael Brown asks us to see in the person who seems to be making our lives miserable a reflection of what we don’t want to face up to in ourselves.

Early in Evensong, there’s a description of a character called Madelyn, of whom it is said that she "could see around to the backsides of the stage sets people presented as their lives."

In The Presence Process, Michael Brown suggests that this is precisely what relationships are meant to do. They enable us to see around to the backsides of the stage sets we present as our lives.

In other words, the person who phoned me the other evening invited this particular man into her life as her partner because he is what she needs if she is ever to really be herself. His reactions to her attempts to define herself are necessary if she is ever to evolve into her fullest self.

How else are we going to see around to the backsides of our lives—to the things we don’t want to face up to in ourselves—unless someone mirrors these for us?

Adrian, the chaplain, tells Margaret that the ideal career is “a job that would keep making more of you.” This is also what our relationships are meant to do. They do it by reflecting back to us where we are not being true to ourselves—where we coddle our weaknesses, and where we fail to develop our strengths.

When someone resists our attempts to be who we are, tension arises. In response, we become anxious—and perhaps angry. What The Presence Process asks us to do is to become centered.

In our center, no matter how stormy life has become, there is a deep calm. It is always calm at the center, though a lot of the time we can’t feel it because we are so caught up in our emotional reactivity and anxious thoughts.

By not reacting in reptilian fashion when someone opposes us, and instead allowing ourselves to identify with the peace within, we can use our head instead of losing it. We respond in a manner that’s true to ourselves and yet invites connection with the other.

Acquiescence isn’t helpful because who we really are doesn’t “show up” when we cave in. And the point of The Presence Process is to enable us to show up in our lives!

Stilling our fears, while continuing to be true to ourselves in a calm and steady manner, allows our essence to flourish. We learn not to be intimidated.

When our partner, parent, or someone in some other part of our life goes ballistic, the trick is to respond from Presence and not get sucked into reacting. If we can stay calm, and stay true to ourselves, more of who we really are will emerge.

At first it’s not easy to do. For a start, our feelings get hurt. But we can counter this by recognizing, as The Presence Process points out, that the other is doing the best she or he can at this moment. His or her reaction isn’t about us, it’s coming from childhood.

How do you get over your fear of showing up in your life? You have to weather the storm. The storm is there precisely to give you practice in this. (See the helpful book Passionate Marriage by Dr David Schnarch, which goes into detail about how to do this.)

When the storm is raging, you may find it helpful to use connected breathing, in the manner The Presence Process describes. It centers you. Then your anxiety doesn’t take over. You can stay calm and respond nicely to the other person.

It’s absolutely crucial to go against our fears, which cause us to pull away, and instead allow ourselves to feel the love at our center and stay connected. We need to reach out at the very moment we are most tempted to withdraw. We can do this. As Michael Brown likes to say, “Presence knows no order of difficulty.”

Amazingly, when we calmly define ourselves without reacting to a partner’s reaction, the partner also begins to calm down in a lot of cases. Not the first time, nor the second or third, but after we’ve shown our metal enough times that the person knows we can’t be cowed any longer—and sees that neither are we going to lash out, sulk, or distance ourselves.

If this doesn’t happen, then there might come a day when our calm center takes us in a new direction. But only after the witch has done his or her job! (For some of us, where there is physical danger, the witch might be asking us to “show up” more quickly by removing ourselves from the danger we are in.)

How to utilize Presence to enrich a relationship is covered in a truly insightful book, The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. It can be found on this website.

Also, when your partner lashes out at you and your feelings get hurt, you’ll find much help in dealing with those feelings in Eckhart’s book A New Earth. It too can be found on this website.

Friday, January 5, 2007

A Lesson in Presence from Apocalypto


Set in Central America just before the Spanish conquest 500 years ago, the film Apocalypto features a young hunter whose village life in the rain forest is suddenly extinguished by raiders who seek individuals for sacrifice at their great pyramids.

One of the captors of the young hunter names him “Almost.”

The raider has homed in on this hunter’s mental and emotional state. There’s a part of him that just hasn’t quite come to the fore yet.

As this new year gets solidly underway, many of us, reviewing the past twelve months, and perhaps our lives up until 2007, undoubtedly resonate with the idea that we are an “Almost.” There’s something in us that longs to burst forth into fullness of expression, but that we sense we hold back.

When I speak of a “fullness” that seeks to emerge, I’m not referring to what the world usually thinks of as success. For instance, a star, superhero, or tycoon in our culture is looked upon as successful. Yet most such individuals are in fact “Almosts,” just like humans in general. Inside, they really don’t know and believe in themselves any more than the rest of us.

In his book The Presence Process, Michael Brown says that divine Presence knows “no order of difficulty.” In Apocalypto, the captured hunter is being propelled by an intention that he has set, which will conquer every difficulty. Because of this, he doesn’t accede to the gory fate that awaits him.

The hunter has a wife, a child, and a baby about to be born, who are trapped in a hideout in his village. Instead of succumbing to the raging fear that threatens to engulf him, he focuses his intent.

There is nothing “Almost” about him now. This is his beloved wife and children who are at stake!

As a result of his clear intent, the hunter experiences a remarkable rescue in the form of an eclipse that tells his captors the gods have been appeased and no more sacrifices are needed. As The Presence Process teaches us, the universe has an amazing way of working with us when we set our intention in line with the divine Presence at our center.

Although the hunter is spared from being sacrificed, he’s still slated to be destroyed. This will take the form of brutal “sport,” as he’s set free and then chased and attacked. But with powerful intent, he conquers his fear, outstrips his limitations, and lives to save his family.

The young hunter is no longer an “Almost.”

The Presence Process invites us to “show up” in our lives—to become more than an “Almost.”

In each of us, showing up will take a different form. It may include what the world calls success, and it may not. One thing is certain, it will be in the form of something that allows us to love people by bringing our giftedness to them. We will be a blessing in their lives.

To show up, we have to allow our fears to evaporate. The reticence, the self-doubt, and the putting ourselves down that we so readily engage in have to go. For as a wise person wrote long ago, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment” (I Jn. 4:18, NKJV).

As with the young hunter, it’s often a crisis that precipitates in us an awareness of the infinite Presence at our center. We are forced to face our fear, because there is no other way forward. We finally wake up to the immense love that is our birthright.

But it doesn’t have to come to this. If we pay attention to the gentle nudging of our deepest self, we can awaken to our fullness without having to be pushed to our breaking point. This is what Michael’s book invites us to do.

None of us has to be an “Almost”—and the world is waiting for us to gain a new sense of ourselves, that we might bless it with our Presence.

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Honey From A Corpse

In Jewish sacred writings, a group of men were given a riddle by a warrior: “Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet.”

The men couldn’t figure it out.

Finally, the warrior who posed the riddle gave them a clue: “What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?”

The warrior had been on a journey when a young lion roared after him. Being agile, the warrior grabbed it with his bare hands and tore it apart. Some time later, journeying back the same route, he stopped to see the lion’s carcass. In its rib cage was a swarm of bees, and he was able to scrape out honey to sustain himself on the journey.

In my life some of the worst things that have happened, which seemed like they were tearing me apart, have ended up as honey. They changed me. I’m not talking about making a few adjustments. I’m talking about coming to understand my entire being differently.

There come into our lives times when we feel as if we are imploding. It’s as though our sense of identity is collapsing. For some of us the year 2006 was such a moment.

This experience of imploding is described by a father, who worked as an executioner, in the movie Monster’s Ball. “I got to a place where I just couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t escape myself,” he said.

Do you know that place where you just can’t breathe? That place where you want to escape yourself but you can’t?

T. S. Eliot knew about this collapse of identity. “In order to possess what you do not possess,” he wrote, “you must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.”

“The way in which you are not.” This isn’t altering a few things in our lives—it isn’t merely tinkering with aspects of who we are. This is change beyond all attempts to reform, reprogram, revise, restructure, or revamp our lives. It’s dissolution—coming to the end of everything we’ve imagined ourselves to be, the end of everything we’ve considered important to our identity.

At such times, life exposes us to the possibility of a different identity, a different purpose, different goals, a different reason for getting up each morning. Jesus called it “losing yourself to find yourself.”

We are introduced to a “self” we’ve always been but haven’t been aware of. This self is grounded in an infinite Presence at our center.

D. H. Lawrence asks in Phoenix, “Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing, dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.”

In Monsters’ Ball, when the executioner’s son turns a gun on himself, the father’s sense of himself goes into a tailspin. Everything he has believed about being a disciplinarian, having his son walk in his shoes, being tough, setting high standards—

everything he has ever stood for—is shattered. He quits his job, quits his whole lifestyle. He is the lion torn apart.

Deprived of his son, this father finally faces up to the reality that he’s been a mere ghost of a person all his life. He realizes that just as he bullied his son, he too was bullied by his own father. Each of them passed on to the other patterns of behavior that denied them an experience of their real selves—the self of divine Presence.

T. S. Eliot captures what’s going on at such a time. “Into another intensity,” he writes, “for a further union, a deeper communion, through the dark cold and the empty desolation, the wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”

For many of us, 2007 will be a year of endings that can birth new beginnings. We’ll face situations that appear to tear us apart. But by embracing such times, we allow them to do their transforming work, ridding us of an identity that simply isn’t who we really are. Then, the sweetness can come forth in our lives.

How do you actually embrace such times? A simple process developed by Michael Brown leads us step-by-step to a full embracing of the whole of our experience. The Process shows us how the thing that terrifies us because it feels like it’s tearing us apart can become a source of sweetness in our lives.

“Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet.” When a situation takes your breath away, when it wears your soul thin, when you feel yourself imploding and there’s no way to escape yourself, your dissolution can become the means of your remaking. The carcass can become a source of honey.