My new favorite line ever... EVER!

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you."- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now if I could only figure out how to find out if its true...

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 64


An answer perhaps to the eternal question of the need for human pain and suffering can be found, I think in the word ‘experience’. It is only in the experience of pain and suffering that we as human beings can know empathy. This is the only way in which two people can truly connect at a real and intimate level. This is the only way that one can truly know what the other knows. It is only in feeling the pain, in knowing of that experience that we truly and honestly share with another. This is where we come to that meeting place of true spiritual connection that enables us to know what is in the heart of the other. The defenses are gone and the truth of the other is known.

I have to admit

That sometimes this whole God thing seems like utter bullshit to me. I mean mystery is cool and all, and it offers hope and it offers intrigue and all of those other really cool things. But sometimes I think to myself “what a load of crap”. What is the point? We struggle through life, we deal with the good, the bad and the ugly. We have times in our lives when things are not going well, one thing after the next and we try to keep it all at bay, try to get up and go to work each day, try to put it out of our minds and for what?

For a load of guesswork that’s what. Because in the end, despite the positive thinking, despite the ‘Just Do It’ slogans, despite all the cheap talk of God’s love, in the end when life is hitting us from every angle the bottom line is that we feel like we’re struggling through this on our own. And that’s the truth.

When I hear some guy talk about how he walked away from a car wreck because of his personal blessing of God’s protection while at the same time 500 people are killed in an earthquake it all suddenly becomes crystal clear to me that it’s all mostly just a bunch of guesswork. And perseverance and intestinal fortitude and a little bit of vodka or valium, which is a bit of a joke but it's really not all that funny. Sometimes I think it would be great to be able to just walk away.

This could be a good example of this thing that I referred to as doubt a few posts back.

Just Do It

I used to take guitar lessons. One day a bunch of years ago I saw a guy playing the violin at a wedding and I decided right then and there that I simply had to learn how to do that before I died. So a couple of months later I took my bad self down to the local music store and told the dude that I was going to start violin lessons. And you know what I did then? I let that s.o.b talk me out of it. Yes I did and I have been flogging myself ever since. He told me that it takes years to learn to play the violin well and clearly (I guess by looking at me he could tell) I didn’t have that many good years left, there simply wasn’t enough time. So he pointed me in the direction of the guitar and I said what the hell. Classical guitar is lovely and I would be thrilled to be able to play classical guitar.

Yeah, well about eight years later I’m still struggling with this freaking classical guitar and sometimes I just want to throw the damn thing through the window. There is something amazingly soothing to me about the sound of shattering glass… especially when I’m the one that shattered it.

Anyway… so here I am eight years later, still learning to play the classical guitar and I am here to tell you and I don’t care what ANYONE says, there is NO WAY ON THIS EARTH that learning to play the violin could be any harder than learning to play classical guitar. And all you violinists out there my hat’s off to you and you have my undying respect, as do all of the classical guitarists out there as well as any other player of a musical instrument. You do not know the meaning of the word ‘perseverance’ until you have taken up the task of learning a musical instrument. The good news is that the payoff is so high and that makes it all worth the effort (at least I keep telling myself this).
That a person could learn to play the classical guitar, or violin or any other stringed instrument is proof positive to me that we are capable of things we never dreamed possible if we are only willing to slog through the difficulties of life.

So here’s my point. I took lessons for something like five years and I made progress but I never could get over the feeling of being judged. I never could get over my obsession with playing each scale perfectly, with sounding each note perfectly, with not making any mistakes. In short I never could allow myself to play like the beginner I was instead I expected that I should, right out of the box be able to play this instrument like Segovia.

Ridiculous I know and I did know it in my head… but my heart was something else. I could not let go of this. I read books about how to practice. I read books about the learning process. I read books about how to freaking LET yourself make mistakes for god’s sake! (that is so pathetic). And still….

My guitar teacher used to tell me all the time how I just needed to ‘let it fly’. Just let it go and PLAY. And I couldn’t and I used to beat myself over and about the head trying to find that ‘thing’, that elusive gene, that mysterious whatchamacallit that would magically enable me to let go of the need to play it ‘right’ and instead just play it. What was wrong with me that I could not Just Do It?

And so to Nike and your ‘Just Do It’ slogan might I just say… Well I would be breaking my own little rule of no naughty words on my blog. But you all know what I’m thinking.

Is It Possible

To possess both self-confidence and humility that is rooted in the knowledge of God’s love and acceptance?

To accept the possibility of failure in our lives and on our part without being paralyzed by the fear of it?

To permit ourselves to be satisfied and pleased with our accomplishments and successes, safe in the knowledge that they are gifts from God and testaments to the talents and abilities inherent to our personal being, placed there by Him and designed to be used by us?

To live our lives in a desire for discovery of the richness that life has to offer, to live in anticipation of the mystery and challenges, understanding that those mysteries and challenges might involve pain and difficulty and yet having the courage to step out into it anyway?

Therapy Forever

Is it wrong? I have pondered this question recently. I have done a lot of reading on the whole therapy thing in the past year and from therapist to therapist you get different opinions. There are those that take the approach that certain problems ‘should’ only take two (or one or five, etc.) years to resolve and if the problem isn’t resolved in that time well then something is wrong. I read a book recently where the author had endured years of sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriends and her therapist indicated to her that it should only take two years to resolve (or whatever word is appropriate here). Two years of therapy for ten years of sexual abuse that resulted in (among other things) dissociative identity disorder? Damn, that’s some good therapy. What if she wanted to get into other things also? What is this, we’re here to fix the DID and move on? Here’s your new toothbrush and dental floss kit, out you go now dearie.

I have to say – if I had walked into my therapist’s office, related what I thought to be my reasons for being there and she told me that it should all be resolved in two years (or one or five, etc.) then I’d feel a hell of a lot of pressure to make sure that my ‘issues’ were ‘resolved’ to somebody’s satisfaction in those two years and if they weren’t well them somebody must surely be a complete failure. I wonder who that somebody might be.

In addition none of this takes into account how open the client is willing to be among other things. Being one of those clients that is disinclined to blurt it all out in a hail of gunfire I simply don’t get this idea of time limits.
Now let me just state that I understand that there very well might be appropriate endings, time to move on, with or without a therapist but I have to say these time limits really make me uncomfortable.

I am not in love with my therapist although I am certainly quite fond of her. I don’t feel any kind of excessive dependency on her, in fact I try like hell not to be dependent on her at all which may be some therapists idea of a problem but I’m good with what we’re doing. And who knows, maybe that will change someday but right now I think she’s a good fit for me and I kind of like what we’re building here. I suspect she finds me a bit of a challenge - I cannot help that but she places absolutely no pressure on me whatsoever and it simply has to be that way for me. And it’s going to take as long as it takes and I’m ok with that. And she is too.
Given the confrontational, oftentimes harsh family environment I come from - if you had a problem boy you'd better say in fifty words or less and you'd better get over it in twenty-four hours or less because didn't nobody have time for your problems - I really like having a place to go where I can get rational, thoughtful, patient, kind and accepting responses to the things I want to discuss. And I get to be confident that I will be challenged in her gentle way when the need arises and how often do we get this in life? Rational, thoughtful, patient, kind, accepting confrontation. And no time limits! I never knew it could be this way.

And if I want it to be this way for a good, long time is there something wrong with that?

Natural vs. Supernatural

From Thomas Merton’s “The Inner Experience”:

“Our awareness of our inner self can at least theoretically be the fruit of natural and psychological purification. Our awareness of God is a super-natural participation in the light by which he reveals himself interiorly as dwelling in our inmost self.”

This thought is interesting and perplexing to me in the way that he seems to differentiate between the ‘natural’ or (it seems to me) ‘not God’, and the ‘super-natural’ or (it seems to me) God. In other words as if the ‘natural’ things have nothing to do with God’s involvement.

And he continues with:

“Hence the Christian mystical experience is not only an awareness of the inner self, but also, by a super-natural intensification of faith, it is an experiential grasp of God as present within our inner self.”

I have a personal, intuitive understanding of this second part. God is here, I cannot necessarily explain the experience but I know it and the knowing is not with my head, or rather I should say not just with my head.

Here’s the thing. This awareness, this knowing, this experience can come, and I might even venture to say usually comes in ways that we define as completely natural. The catalyst for awareness arrives in the form of natural occurrences that we often overlook, mostly because we are conditioned by this life to overlook them as pertinent to our spiritual development.

Take for example a period of depression, or a psychotic episode, a serious physical illness, a life-threatening accident, you pick it. All what we would consider perfectly natural occurrences. Let us look at depression. That a clinical diagnosis can be made is both perfectly understandable and acceptable and completely irrelevant at the same time. The clinical diagnosis – the ‘natural’ explanation, does not cancel out the spiritual significance of the event. I read something recently about a woman who experienced, for the first time ever in her life a severe psychotic episode. She understood it as a catalyst for spiritual awareness. The doctors and psychiatric people who were treating her, as well as the author of the article seemed to scoff at that idea, treating it as nothing more than a ‘natural’, perfectly scientific, perfectly organic case of psychosis. One can only assume that they believe that God has nothing to do with psychosis, or depression or any other human condition that can be diagnosed clinically. But you see she has a completely different perspective than they do because she knows the person she is after in comparison to the person she was before. She knows what she knows now as opposed to what she didn’t know before. She is aware of the differences in her thought patterns after as being vastly different from her thought patterns before.

We have fallen into this misguided belief that if it comes from God that it must be in terms of our definition of supernatural. That it must come in the form of the parting of the Red Sea or of some crazy vision of heaven and hell or angels or a sudden flash of thunder and lightning followed by an audible voice from the heavens. In other words it must come in the form of something that we cannot explain in our known, scientific terms.

We do not understand that mostly God works within the laws of the universe. We do not understand that he mostly works within the guidelines set forth by him and that he works quietly and slowly, behind the scenes and below the surface.