Just for Today

Just for today, can you see you're already perfect? Even with your doubts and regrets?

Just for today, can you see all your love, all your strength, all your inspiration?

Just for today, can you see how far you've come? And embrace the journey that never ends?

Jeff

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The F Word and the S Word

I've been writing a lot about the F word lately.

Fear.

Fear play such a huge role in our lives. Whether we see it as an obstacle or a road map, we spend a lot of time in fear, working with fear, trying to get past fear or through fear. Working with fear seems to be a significant part of being human.

But I'd like to talk about another word today. Just as important, maybe more so. And it's another of those words that sometimes makes us uncomfortable.

Spirit.

Sure, spirit is related to spiritual, which can be related to religious, which can bring up all kinds of issues and baggage depending on your upbringing and your current view of the world. Some people dismiss spiritual as new-agey, some people dismiss religious as fundamentalist.

But I'm talking about spirit as that mysterious essence, whatever your belief, that animates us. Spirit as the root of the word "inspiration."

When we're inspired, we work through our fear with ease. When we are inspired, we know we have a mission in life. We know why we're here, and it's easy to talk about that and share that with others.

Not everyone feels inspired, and those who do certainly don't feel it all the time. But inspiration can be like a wave that carries us to do more than we thought possible. Inspiration is personal, precious, and sometimes fragile. What inspires you is yours alone. No one can make you do or be anything  inconsistent with your inspiration unless you let them.

The end of the week is a great time to stop, take a breath (another meaning of the word "spirit"), and think about what inspires us. And if you're inspired to write about it in a comment, please do.

Have a great weekend!

Jeff

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New in Each Moment

Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg likes to talk about the opportunity we have to begin again.

She talks about it in the context of a meditation practice. We might sit and get distracted, or frustrated, or we might just space out. But each time that we catch ourselves, each time we bring ourselves back to following our breath, we can begin again. With no worries of what happened before. Each moment is a new opportunity.

Of course, this isn't true just for meditation. This is true for the rest of our lives, too.

To begin again is always available to us. It's the simplest thing in the world, if we let it be.

Sure, we can (and do) spend a lot of time and energy thinking about how things should have been different. We can be very judgmental of ourselves, thinking we should have been less harsh or more clever or that we should have worked harder or chosen differently.

But none of those thoughts will affect what already happened, or what happens next.

Instead, no matter what has happened before, we can take this moment and begin again.

Have you had any fresh starts that made a big impact on your life? How were you able to let go of the past? I look forward to hearing anything you have to share.

Jeff

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The Next Step

I want to make a confession. When I first shared this blog on Facebook, even though I had already been writing it for a year, I was scared to death. I remember my heart pounding as I made that first post three weeks ago. I had no idea if my writing would resonate with other people, if people would find it helpful, if it would even make sense. What if people didn't like it? What if they said so publicly?

Since then, two wonderful things have happened. First, a small but very supportive community of readers has developed. Some of them surprised me. I heard from people I've not talked to in 25 years.

Second, the people who don't read it, who don't find value in it, have simply gone elsewhere. And that, too, seems to be exactly as it should be. In some ways, what this blog proposes is the easy way--that we can be happy now, regardless of whether we have everything on our lists. But at its core, that happiness requires an honesty with ourselves that can be a bit daunting. It requires us to challenge our own thinking, sometimes assumptions that we've been making for our entire lives.

I wrote a blog entry a week or so back called "Follow Your Fear." And I've been trying to live that in my own life. Right now, this is what life seems to present to me. There are some things that simply scare me to death, but I feel compelled to do them anyway.

I think that might be true for a lot of us. We have ideas of ways we can contribute in the world but we are deathly afraid to do anything about them. We delay, we make excuses, we avoid stepping into the light. But at some point, if we're lucky, our inspiration overwhelms our fear. And usually, we find that the thing we thought so scary turned out not to be so bad. It often turns out to be exactly what we needed.

Today I want to hear from you. What are the things that have scared you? When is a time that your fear led you to the next step? How did it turn out?

Thanks for sharing--both the time you spend reading these thoughts, and the comments and support you provide to me and to this community.

Jeff

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No Escape

Years ago, I worked with a man who had come to the spiritual path as a way of escaping his sins.

What those sins were, he would not say. But it was clear to me that his situation was serious, that he had deep regrets, and that he felt his life would be completely changed if he came clean. I don't know if that meant that relationships would be damaged, that money would change hands, that there would be prison time, or all three. Whatever it was, it was clear that no one knew, even his wife, and that, to him, what he had done was so terrible he didn't think he could tell anyone without it having irreparable consequences.

We were attending the same program and over the course of a year got to know each other pretty well. He kept asking me theoretical questions that gave me a pretty good idea of what he was dealing with, but he never told me the full story. What became clear over a period of several months is that he had felt that Jesus could save him, but that Christianity had not eased his pain. Now he had determined that if he could become enlightened, he could somehow escape having to deal with this big issue in his life.

I've lost track of him; I don't know if he was ever able to come clean. But the point is that this path, this way of looking at and working with the world, is not an escape route. It's not a way around our issues. Instead, it requires the courage to fully confess, at least to ourselves, the demons that burden us, to see our flaws in full relief.

This isn't easy, and it isn't fun. I don't know many people who have been able to be completely honest with themselves about their stuff. I know I haven't. There are still things that I try to avoid, stories that I'm just not ready to hear.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. As we do, we find that life begins to open up to us. We find that our suffering lessens. We find that as we discover and disclose our flaws, it becomes easier to connect with other people. We find that no matter how grave we may think our sins to be, we can almost always find at least one person who is dealing with the same thing.

And our lives begin to fill with joy, as we realize the gifts our difficulties bring.

Jeff

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Our Deepest Wounds

We all have wounds, from our childhood or our most significant relationships, and we'll do almost anything to protect them.

Sometimes, someone looks at me in a particular way or uses a particular tone and I get very angry, very suddenly. I don't understand what's happening, but I feel my anger, even rage.

This is a classic trigger, and it happens when you're trying to protect yourself. You've been wounded before, and you want like anything to avoid experiencing that pain again.

These wounds can be buried deep. We may not even know what they are, much less acknowledge them. But we can see our triggers as clues. We can notice what kinds of things cause us to react. Sometimes, working with a therapist or a teacher is called for.

As we get less reactive, we can begin to explore the causes. What is it that we're afraid of? What is it that we're trying to avoid? When we begin to see our wounds in the full light of our own compassion, we can begin to let them go. To see that they're just thoughts, and that in all likelihood the circumstances that produced these patterns are long gone.

It may take many reactions, and many sincere explorations, before we get to this point. Even then, we might still get triggered from time to time. In fact, we most certainly will. But what's changed is that we now see what is happening. We see the pattern as something that occasionally happens to us, like a bad mood or a cold, instead of something that defines us.

Jeff

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Sleep as a Spiritual Practice

Here's a fun project for the weekend. Try to get some extra sleep.

Getting enough sleep is a critical part of our well being. And the sad truth is that most of us don't get enough.

Too little sleep has been linked to problems with the immune system, with mood, with learning and memory.

I know when I'm tired, I'm just not a very nice person. I'm cranky and defensive. I'm worried so much about getting through the day that connecting, being present, simply being here seems to drop to the bottom of the list. I get so focused on the body, I forget all about the spirit.

When I don't sleep enough it starts a destructive cycle. I turn to to caffeine and sugar to pick me up, and then alcohol later to come down. Then I sleep badly the next night, too, and the cycle repeats.

I and those around me suffer because of it.

I've begun to prioritize sleep over lots of other things that used to grab my attention in the evening, like TV and the Internet. Those "downtime" activities really just keep our brains buzzing later in the evening than they should. I'm getting better at saying "no," and would like to make even more progress.

I'm beginning to feel more like the present, alive person that I aspire to be. I hope you will, too.

Jeff

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