Category Archives: Spiritual journey

Judgment day

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When I was in the fourth grade, my younger brother, sister, and I responded to an altar call at the Bible Baptist church in Rantoul, Illinois.

Now, it wasn’t like we weren’t Christians before. Mom had been raised a Methodist in Germany, and opting out of the state church to join a different one meant something. It meant you were conscious about your faith. Mom’s ancestors were Huguenots, who were driven out of France for being protestant, so consciousness around faith went back for generations.

cross in handWhy wasn’t that good enough? Because the salvation part was missing. So Mom took it up a notch, accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, and encouraged us to do the same. Dad politely declined. (Actually, he threatened to start smoking again if Mom was baptized, but she did it anyway, and he never followed through on his threat.)

Salvation brought division into our family. The pressure on Dad to convert was unrelenting. We were right, he was wrong. We were saved, he was a sinner. Everything was black and white.

Eventually, I became a Sunday school teacher, youth group leader, Christian camp counselor, and a resident advisor in a dorm at a Christian college. The black-and-whiteness of my world made me feel safe, and Christianity brought order to my universe. But one day, I said to myself, “This is too easy. I can fit the God I believe in into a shoebox.”

I went out to my Grandpa’s pasture and prayed, “God, show me how big you are.” And then all hell broke loose. Mike and Jill, two of my youth group kids, died in the same car accident, and my faith shattered.

I continued to live by Christian principles, not knowing anything else, but eventually, after spending a year in Germany, I fell in love with a German man and we decided to move in together. Now, in Germany, this was no big deal—not even for Mom’s brother, a Methodist minister. But we decided to set up housekeeping in the U.S., and it definitely was a Big Deal for my family. For the first time, I felt the sting of Christian judgment.

Any kind of fundamentalism is based on a we’re-right-they’re-wrong sort of belief system, and judgment is its lifeblood. In the religious tradition in which I was raised, swearing was wrong. Consuming alcohol was wrong. Smoking was wrong. Secular music was wrong. Premarital sex was wrong (but so was masturbation). At the Christian college I went to, even dancing was wrong because it was a “vertical expression of a horizontal idea.” Thinking outside the fundamentalistic box was wrong. I could go on and on.

When it came time for Reiner and me to move to our new place, no one in my family helped—as they’d always done when I moved before—because helping would imply support for our decision to live in sin. Perhaps, by shunning me, my family hoped to encourage me to return to the fold, but it had the opposite effect. My family’s judgment hurt so deeply that I could no longer bring myself to judge others, and my Christian faith came to an official end.

Walt Whitman said, “Be curious, not judgmental,” and I’ve tried to live by that since. I fail daily. But I often succeed, and my world is much richer now that I love people who are different from me. Now that I respect and defend their right to be different. Now that I’ve given up any attempt to evangelize them into my way of thinking.

I would love it if my mother respected my beliefs. The little girl in me yearns to be loved for who I am, not condemned for who I am not. But, I’m not going to spend a single second judging or trying to unravel her belief system in an attempt to make her love me as I long to be loved. Her faith nourishes and sustains her, helps her make sense of the world around her, and gives her a group of like-minded people to belong to. It makes her happy.

In the end, I respect the differences in others because it makes me happy. I like who I am when I’m not judging others. Love just feels better.

The fortress

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The day I walked through the doors of Gifford Grade School at the beginning of third grade, I entered my sixth school. By then, my father’s career in the military had taken my family from:

Gifford was a Lake Wobegon sort of town. It had around 600 inhabitants, and we lived there for three years—long enough to put down roots. We caught fireflies, got lost in  endless fields of popcorn, and actually knew people where we trick-or-treated. We skied down snow drifts, became Cub Scouts and Brownies, and sang for the residents of the local nursing home.

Then, Dad retired from the military, and we headed west in the station wagon, towing a travel trailer behind us. I loathed the forever place to which my parents retired and missed Gifford terribly.

At 11, I was on my way to my seventh school, and something snapped inside me. I had said so many goodbyes over the years that I couldn’t bear the thought of saying any more. So I addressed the problem by building a fortress that surrounded and protected me. By preventing hellos, it would prevent goodbyes.

It worked. It kept me safe—and very lonely—into adulthood, and despite my best efforts, still exists today. Occasionally, someone breaches the wall, but it’s relatively rare, and I wonder sometimes what makes it so effective, especially now that I no longer want it to be.

Recently, however, I was minding my own business at a coffee shop, when I turned to find a stranger inside my battlements, fiddling with a cream pitcher. I had no idea who he was, or how he got there. We exchanged a few sentences over the course of the evening, and went our separate ways. I was shaken.

The stranger appeared inside the battlements several times after that, and each time I felt a sense of joyful recognition that was completely inconsistent with how well I knew him. Then, one day, he skittered under the portcullis just before it closed and declared his love for me from the other side.

What am I supposed to do with that? Leave? The fortress?

I am intensely and inexplicably drawn to the stranger. Can I work up the courage to leave these walls I’ve come to know so well?

And will he be there if I do?

Destiny, boys, and men

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How I failed to meet my Destiny

As I was washing dishes in my teens one day, I looked out the window and “saw” a joyful little girl on a swing, her pigtails flying behind her. Perhaps, I thought, this was a visitation from a child I will have someday. I named her Destiny and thought of her often through the years.

I always wanted children, but married a man who didn’t, and it took us years to come to a compromise. He finally agreed that we could have one (and only one) child if I could conceive it without the aid of fertility drugs or in-vitro fertilization. In spite of the fact that I was in my late 30s, I conceived easily. But I knew in that intuitive way mothers often do that this baby was a boy. Since I had only one chance at motherhood, that meant I would never meet my Destiny.

Over time, however, the baby I carried managed to communicate with me in various ways, and I warmed to him. In fact, by the time I miscarried two-and-a-half months later, I would have been disappointed if he had been a girl. His purpose was clear. Like John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus, the first baby I carried prepared the way for the son I bore about a year later.

How having a son turned out to for the best

The fact that my child was male turned out to be a brilliant cosmic move that ensured that my family history didn’t repeat itself. My mother and I were completely enmeshed. I didn’t know where she ended and I began, I just knew that my purpose in life was to meet her expectations. I worked constantly to stay within the target area of her love—because falling outside it was life-threatening. Would she care for me if she didn’t love me?

My son and I will never become enmeshed because we are so different from each other—that Y chromosome is our continental divide. In this otherness, my boy has given me a new understanding of and respect for men. He has unwittingly taught me this:

Girls are born women. They begin nurturing soon after they can walk, and there is nothing remarkable about the fact that they eventually become mothers. Boys, on the other hand, are born boys, and thanks to my son, I know what an enormous metamorphosis it takes to turn armpit-farting, BB-gun toting megaburpers into daddies.

Today, witnessing daddies who deeply, compassionately, and meaningfully engage with their children sometimes moves me to tears. These men bear a message from the future that helps put my troubled mama-mind at ease.

“Don’t worry,” they seem to say while wiping their child’s nose with their shirttail. “Your son’s going to turn out just fine.”

Life, and how we move through it

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As I walked through the forest on my son’s birthday yesterday, I reflected on how challenging life has been since the moment, 12 years ago, when he was born. At the same time, I’ve grown weary of thinking about how hard it’s been. Weary of feeling sorry for myself. Weary of My Story.

I realized that the past twelve years have felt like walking through chest-high water, which is something I used to do on purpose for exercise. There’s a much more efficient way to get through water. It’s called swimming.

Walking through the water of my life hasn’t exactly been a conscious choice. I do it because it’s all I’ve ever known. But I’m ready to find a more efficient and joyful way to move through life.

I’m going to sign up for swimming lessons.

Truth, and where to find it

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I was raised a fundamentalist Christian, and the Bible was our sole source of truth. It was considered inerrant, which means, in essence, that God dictated every word of it, and that it was perfect in every way.

It doesn’t take much scrutiny to discover contradictions and ethical quandaries in the Bible, and that’s not a problem if you consider it a book that was written over a period of hundreds of years by countless authors. But if you believe that the Bible is literally the word of God, these contradictions are a big problem that leads pastors everywhere to cherry-pick the bits that serve them and sweep the rest under the carpet.

Of course, as a Sunday school teacher, youth group leader, Christian camp counselor, and resident assistant in a dorm at a Christian university, I cherry-picked, too. Only I swept much bigger things under the carpet—things I never understood. Like why Jesus had to die for my sins (the core tenet of fundamentalist Christianity) and communion (the idea of symbolically eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood grossed me out). Large cracks began to form in my faith, but on the whole, it still held together.

Then two of my former youth group kids died at the age of 17 and 18 in the same car accident and my faith crumbled. It took two decades to rebuild my cosmology, and I slowly found new sources of Truth. I no longer wanted to BELIEVE something was true. I wanted to KNOW it was true.

When I believe something, it calls on me to have faith. Like, say, that the Bible is literally the word of God. When I know something, every pore in my body opens to receive it and incorporate it into my being. Believing is an intellectual experience. Knowing is a physical one.

Long after Mike and Jill died, a woman in her seventies handed me a cassette tape and suggested that I listen to it. I did and knew there was Truth on that tape. Then I learned that the Truth was channeled. This posed a problem. If I accepted this new source of Truth, I would have to keep it secret. My fundamentalist loved ones would consider it satanic and fear for my mortal soul.

In the end, I decided to accept this new source of Truth and concluded that:

Truth is Truth, no matter where you find it.

This mindset has made it possible for me to find Truth in unexpected places. Like a quote by musician Marilyn Manson in the movie Bowling for Columbine, while dreaming, and while packing for a move.

Recently, I discovered my most cherished source of Truth yet: Shamanic journeying. Journeying provides a means of obtaining direct revelation, which is something I’ve yearned for all my life. Until now, the quality of my connection with the Universe was about as good as you can achieve with two soup cans and a string. I always longed for a hard-wired, broadband connection that provides me with a sense of direction and spiritual companionship. Journeying is it.

Again, I have found a source of Truth that I have to hide from people who love me. But Truth is Truth, no matter where you find it. And I couldn’t be more grateful for this one.

Oh, hell

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My 80-year-old mother and I got in a big argument about hell on Sunday. She’s absolutely certain that I’m going there, and I’m just as certain that I’m not.

Here’s my reasoning:

  1. One of the most important laws of physics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.
  2. I believe that our essential selves–the core of who we are–are made up of energy.
  3. This was made clear to me at the funeral of my friend Jill, who died in a car accident at the age of 16. Seeing her body at the funeral was a shock. Though it looked like Jill, her essential “Jillness” was gone, and all that was left was a shell.
  4. Jill’s death caused my then-fundamentalist Christian faith to crumble. It took me 20 years to rebuild a belief system that made sense to me. But I never stopped believing that Jill’s consciousness had survived the accident.
  5. I concluded that, because a disembodied consciousness (or “soul”) does not have physical senses, you can’t hurt it by hitting, stabbing, or burning it.
  6. So, even if a physical hell did exist, how could it hurt something that is pure consciousness?

There are many other reasons why I don’t believe there’s a hell (more of my journey away from fundamentalist Christianity is described here). But as I said, Mom is just as sure that there is a hell, and that it’s my destiny. There’s a little girl inside me who has always yearned for my mother’s approval, and it hurts to know that the only way I will ever receive it is become what I am not. I find it difficult to reconcile Mom’s professions of love for me on the one hand with her insistence that I am going to hell on the other.

A few years ago, Mom got not one, but two ulcers. She attributed them to my sister’s and my refusal to accept Jesus as our lord and savior. She was hospitalized, so I called the hospital’s gift shop and asked them to fill up two helium balloons, then write my name on one of them with a permanent marker, and my sister’s name on the other. I asked them to take the balloons up to Mom’s room, then called Mom and instructed her to go outside and let the balloons go. I wanted her to experience the release of that, but she didn’t do it. She asked my brother to go outside and do it for her, saying she’d watch from the window. I don’t know if he ever did. The whole meaning of the ritual was lost.

So here’s take two: A declaration of emancipation.

I don’t know if it’ll help Mom, but it helped me. When my son and I want to let things go, we find big rocks, write what we want to release on them in permanent marker, and then drive up to Deception Pass. There’s a bridge there whose deck is about 180 feet above the water, and when we drop our rocks over the railing, it takes a loooong time for the them to hit the water. It gives us a satisfying feeling of release.

Our New Year’s Eve tradition (in fact, we just did it today), is to conduct a burning bowl ceremony. We write on slips of tissue paper all the things that we want to release, take turns sharing them with each other, touch the paper to the flame of a candle, and then drop the burning paper into a metal bowl. One of the things I burned up today was “My mother’s expectations.”

Can a recession teach us anything about happiness?

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Like many of us, I’ve been affected by the economy. Sometimes, when projecting my life out into the future, I have become deer-in-the-headlights scared, which has caused me to turn to the past and berate myself for choices that got me to where I am. No matter which direction I turned—forward or back—I felt awful. Eventually, I realized that I felt most comfortable in the present moment.

I realized that I would create the very future that I feared if I didn’t bring my thoughts home to the present. I also realized that no amount of second guessing could change the past, and pulled those thoughts into the present as well. (This is not something that stays done, by the way. It takes constant vigilance.)

For some reason, I believed that the circumstances I found myself in amounted to failure, and I feared that others would judge me as harshly as I judged myself. They didn’t. In fact, I received the most love and support from the people I least expected to receive it from.

Letting go of the past and the future and feeling the support of loved ones enabled me to relax into the moment and discover that I have absolutely everything I need—right now.

I achieved a somewhat fragile sense of inner peace when I heard a recorded interview with Marci Shimoff, author of Happy for No Reason, and checked her book out of the library. Since then, I’ve learned more about the field of Positive Psychology, and have a queue of books to read, including two by Positive Psychology founder Martin Seligman (Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimism) and one by scholar Sonja Lyubomirsky, who wrote The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want.

In the Upanishads, it says, “Happiness for any reason is just another form of misery.” The idea that I could be happy for no reason was a new one for me.

Like most of us, I thought my circumstances determined my happiness. We think we’ll be happy when we get a better job, find our soul mate, earn a certain amount of money, acquire a desired object, lose weight, achieve better health, and so on. But when we realize those goals, we often find that they don’t make us happy after all–or do for only a while. So we set our sights on a new goal, get back on the hamster wheel, and try again. It’s a game that can’t be won.

Not so with happiness that we find within. Because unconditional happiness isn’t linked to what we have, what we do, or who we’re with, we can never lose it. The spiritual masters we revere most achieved this state. They had nothing in the way of possessions, yet radiated a sense of unshakable peace and happiness that draws us to them.

For years, I’ve claimed the saying, “My greatest gift to others is my own happiness.” I even had it printed on my checks. But I never really got it until the recession forced me to realize that happiness doesn’t come from anything outside me. It comes from within and to achieve it, that’s where my focus needs to be.

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life,
the whole aim and end of human existence.” Aristotle

The illustration, by Kris Wiltse, is from the “Happy” card, which is part of the Mixed Emotions card deck.

A major spiritual shift

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I was speaking, in passing, with a friend, when someone who overheard our conversation stopped, waited for it to end, and then mentioned something she’d just learned about that might help me. Challenging to pronounce, and even more difficult to spell, I had trouble finding more information about it on the Internet, but ultimately succeeded. It’s called ho’oponopono, and as you may guess from its spelling, is Hawaiian in origin.

What is it? It is an ancient practice of reconciliation and forgiveness. “Ho’oponopono” basically means to set things right. It entails taking 100 percent responsibility for everything that enters your awareness, because there is no “out there.” Everything you perceive is interpreted within the confines of your physical body, where all kinds of filters and influences come into play—especially in the form of memories.

We are all One, and in ho’oponopono, we take responsibility for the situations in which we find ourselves, whether we “caused” them or not. Long before I knew about ho’oponopono, I forced myself to go to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. I did not play a role in the Holocaust. I was not responsible for it. But I knew that if humans could do that to each other, somewhere deep inside me, I must hold the potential to do it too. I had to face and confront that.

If I had known ho’oponopono then, my experience would have been different. Ho’oponopono is a simple four-step process that entails taking responsibility, apologizing, and asking for forgiveness. In Dachau, I might have said something like this:

  1. I am sorry for the suffering that people experienced here. I am sorry for the unspeakable cruelty that prisoners endured. But I am also sorry that Nazi soldiers were ordered to be cruel by their superiors.
  2. Please forgive me for the potential that lies within me to be so judgmental of and so cruel to my fellow human beings.
  3. Thank you for this opportunity to make amends.
  4. I love you.

This process is called “cleaning.”

Ho’oponopono in everyday life

Yesterday, a friend told me about a situation that has been incredibly challenging, in a twisted, convoluted, messed up sort of way. It was her experience, but once she told me about it, it became part of my experience, and something I needed to clean. You clean everything that comes into your experience that does not feel right or harmonious—which means you could be cleaning continuously. And when you are not cleaning, you can cut to the last step and say, “I love you” to things you’ve been taking for granted. Today, for example, I loved the trees in their autumn splendor and the road that brought me home.

Another example of using ho’oponopono is food, which I’ve thought a lot about. Are certain kinds of foods bad for us in and of themselves, or are they bad for us because we think they’re bad? A friend recently told the story of her Grandpa Norm, who had his own stick of butter at mealtimes (everyone else at the table had to share a second stick). He put butter on everything—including donuts—and lived to the age of 92. Clearly, grandpa was saying “I love you” to his butter. He welcomed it into his body and his body received it in harmony.

Although I’m committed to eating in a healthy way, I hate thinking of supermarkets or restaurants as mine fields, where danger lurks in the artificial sweeteners, trans fats, and genetically modified organisms that are hiding everywhere. So today, I tried ho’oponopono on the can of non-organic soup I had for lunch. I said, “I am sorry for the way I have judged you. Please forgive me for thinking that any part of you might be bad for my health. Thank you for nourishing me. I love you.” This will be our new way of saying grace.

The advantages of ho’oponopono

For me, the advantages of ho’oponopono are:

  1. It prevents me from judging. When I take responsibility for the circumstances I’m in, say I’m sorry, ask for forgiveness, and express gratitude and love, it becomes impossible to judge.
  2. It makes me feel peaceful.
  3. It makes me feel empowered, because acknowledging the role I play in everything means I can’t possibly be a victim.
  4. It addresses issues I’ve had with the law of attraction for a long time. The law of attraction is about intention (tell the Universe exactly what you want and you will get it). Ho’oponopono is about inspiration (clean up your mess and clear the way, so you can receive inspiration from the Divine). The law of attraction entails constant effort via affirmations, visioning, scripting, etc. Ho’oponopono entails clearing the channels between ourselves and the Divine, so we can receive (and act on) its inspiration and guidance. And that feels right to me.

I’ve fallen, and it takes a village to get me up

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While Adrian and I were at an orchard party yesterday, I missed a step and took a header onto concrete. I lay there taking inventory, trying to figure out what body part hurt worst, and people rushed to my aid. I sat up and determined that my right foot had suffered the worst damage. A reflexologist immediately grabbed my ears and applied pressure in spots that help with pain. An emergency physician checked out my ankle, assured me that it wasn’t broken, and prevented a trip to the hospital. The host of the party brought an ace bandage and the physician’s wife, an emergency nurse, wrapped my foot in it. A neighbor brought arnica ointment and tablets, and I’m not exactly sure where the ibuprofen and a Ziploc bag full of ice came from. People helped me walk to a lawn-type recliner that they had placed in the sun for me (I was in shock and shaking), and they made me elevate my ankle and put ice on it.

As I lay on the recliner, I thought about the fact that we were completely out of hay, our goats had nothing to eat, and that I would be unable to go to the feed store after the party to get a couple bales of hay as I had planned. When I mentioned this, a woman I’d never met said that she needed to get a couple bales of hay for her goats, too, and offered to pick some up for me and bring them to our house. (Even here on rural Whidbey Island, it’s rare to be at a party with someone who also has goats, much less someone who has also run out of hay and was also headed to the feed store to get exactly the same thing you were planning to get after the party.)

My fall could’ve been an accident, carelessness, or dumb luck, but if this experience had a message in it, I wanted to hear it. I had literally missed a step. Might that be a metaphor for missing a step in real life? Had I overlooked something? Or maybe I just need to slow down.

Today, I thought of the friends, acquaintances, and strangers who had cared for me and how completely and instantaneously supported I felt. Tears came to my eyes, and I realized that that was the message: shit will happen, but you will get through it with the help of your community.

My foot hurts, but I can walk, and I have learned that I don’t always have to walk alone.