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Aliveness
Aliveness is my word for this year, and like every word that has chosen me year after year, it’s taught me so much. I’ve had a multitude of lessons this year that point back to aliveness, the gift of it, the way we should be grateful for it, how the lack of aliveness changes everything. (I speak from experience on this point: my eight week illness was indeed life-changing.) For the last several years, I’ve not taken aliveness for granted — worse. I’ve diminished the preciousness of it. While I don’t wish to die, I have thought a lot over the last few years about how I’d rather be in the next life (whatever that consists of), than in this one. Is it the product of anxiety, depression, the energetics of this world that are sometimes hard to bear, or something else? I’m not…
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Come Together
“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the ‘normal people’ as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like ‘have a nice day’ and ‘weather’s awful today, eh?’, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like ‘tell me something that makes you cry’ or ‘what do you think deja vu is for?’ Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing?…
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Everyday Sacred
During the final phase of my illness, I embarked on a 30-day spiritual journey called ‘My Deepest Me.’ It was an assignment through SGTI, my spiritual direction training. Essentially, it was a journaling journey with a reading and a few prompts to answer each day via a book by the same name, written by one of my beloved teachers, Jan Lundy. It kicked off in me what she calls the ‘everyday sacred.’ The everyday sacred is a way of viewing life that honors and respects the fact that God is in everything. Our brains tend to want to separate and categorize, but ultimate reality cannot be either of those. All is one. God is in the sacred and the profane. God is in everything and everyone. God is in every interaction we have. The struggle is that our egos and the ways our brains…
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A Lesson from Anger
Many things have revealed themselves since my illness/spiritual crisis. Big things. Small things. Things that I need to do more of. Things I need to stop doing. Even ways I was fooling myself. It’s been amazing to have so many divine downloads. In the midst of my illness, especially after I determined it was spiritual, energetic and emotional in nature at its core, I kept wondering, ‘where are the lessons?’ None came when I was really sick. No, I think I needed to be taken down very low for a long period of time for me to really feel it, to know that it was real, and to remember that it was a place I never wish to return. But as I’ve been recovering, so much has changed. “I don’t know who I am anymore” is a phrase I use often, but it’s not…
