just be it Just Be It is a practice of presence that recognizes the limits of language. When aware of silence there is a state of inner still alertness. You are wholeheartedly present.

R.D. Laing has extensively written about the uniqueness of our experiences and the truth that we’ll never have another’s exact experience.  He writes:

“I see you, and you see me.  I experience you, and you experience me.  I see your behavior.  You see my behavior.  But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me.  Just as you cannot “see” my experience of you.  My experience of you is not “inside” me.  It is simply you, as I experience you.  And I do not experience you as inside me.  Similarly, I take it that you do not experience me inside you.” (from The Politics of Experience).

This doesn’t mean that we can’t try to understand others.  Yet, it humbles us to mistakes made when we try to take our unique experiences and draw certain ‘truths’ which we think can be imposed on others.   The series Fargo beautifully captures this in the video below.  Here, a brother is confessing to accidentally killing his brother.  He’s asking for validation from the sheriff to his story, sincerely questioning whether or not something is ‘true’ because we believe it.  The sheriff calls it out and says, “It’s not my story”.  This clearly illustrates the nature of Laing’s commentary.  Meaning is in the person!

The real work to happiness lies in our capacity to still the mind of disatisfaction.  We’re continually drawn from here to wishing we were back their, dreaming of the future or fearing the future.  This is a meditation commentary a few years back on the practice of, “I’m here.  I just want to be here, in this moment.  No complaint, no complaint.”

The small mind is drawn into believing ‘it knows’.  The big mind accepts the vast mystery and is always curious and is respectful of the wisdom, “New shit comes to light” (The Big Lebowski):

“When you do judo, you’re working with the energy of the person.  If you want to go in a certain direction, you wait until the energy of the other person goes that way, too.  If it doesn’t, you wait awhile, knowing that change happens.  As the Dude says, ‘New shit comes to light’, and when it does, you’ll pick it up again.  We wait for the grain to go in the direction we want to go, and then we move with it.  But new shit keeps coming to light, things keep on changing, and we run into another knot in the wood.  So we wait again.  We have a little patience.”  (from The Dude and the Zen Master, p. 99)

The small mind is drawn into action without the patience to get more information and without the humility to know it doesn’t know.  When we draw conclusions from our reactive ego minds we dramatically run the risk for causing harm.  The small mind holds the thought (belief) that we are separate from the vast interconnection of the universe.  It’s insensitive to the damage caused from the wake of our thoughts and actions.  Locking into fixed beliefs, approaching things from our ‘knowing mind’, we engage in our attempts to change things long before the ‘grain’ is going in the direction we want to go.  The magnanimous mind comes from a spiritual guiding light that’s deep within all of us.  Our spiritual teachers have all directed us to ‘wake up’ to this.  The delusion that we’re separate drives our violence.  Our belief that we ‘know’ feeds our pride.  Our lack of patience feeds our wars.

Small minds are susceptible to other small minds who preach fear and greed.  Fear and greed lead us to actions causing harm.  When we ‘think’ we know we’re no longer open to honest, collaborative communication.  We place demands on our enemies before we’ve come to the place of open, active listening for understanding.  Frozen in our thoughts of ‘rightness’, we’re doomed to failure.  Real communication, dialogue, commands that all parties temporarily suspend their beliefs of ‘rightness’, of knowing.  We can only see how the grain goes in the direction we want to go when we move to the bigger, magnanimous mind that recognizes how everything affects everything and nothing disappears.

Today, the small mind seems to be gaining strength.  We don’t seem to learn from the tragic mistakes made from the impatient minds who’ve led us to such destructive behavior.  We went to Vietnam, lost close to 60,000 Americans alone, let alone all the destruction and loss of life to the Vietnamese people.  At over 80, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, came to see how the entire premise for the war was a mistake.  A more patient big mind would have come to see that the war was not about democracy vs. communism; it was a civil war.  ( from the movie The Fog of War).  We repeat this with our military conflict in the Middle East.  Almost every authority on the region advised against it,  loudly proclaiming that once we go in we’ll never get out.  Yet, our small minds lacked patience to get accurate information and we engaged in war before letting ‘new shit come to light’.  The American populace was sold on the slogan, “Liberate Iraq”.  Today, we have a strong contingency of government leaders who believe the US is responsible for the world.  They’ve locked into their notions of ‘rightness’ and seem to have little regard for the harm caused from this fixed belief.  The magnanimous mind would recognize the tremendous value of the rest of the world’s population before making unilateral decisions.

Today we stand on the brink of another potentially disastrous military action without having all the information and without imploring a conversation with the rest of the planet’s leaders.  Our sense of justice and ‘rightness’ has many asking for military action against the Assad regime for use of chemical warfare.  Assumptions are made that it was Assad, yet many other world leaders have motive to get Russia and the US into a continued, economically draining military conflict.  The small mind is drawn into the illusion that there will be a winner.  The magnanimous mind waits, allows the grain to go in the spiritually driven direction, and the illusion of our separateness diminishes.  The foolishness of greed and fear is the new shit that comes up.  The Law of the Universe that speaks to our interconnection is presented and we clearly see how when we hurt another we hurt ourselves.  This only comes to light when we use ‘common sense’ to waking up to a bigger, magnanimous mind.

This ‘waking up’ comes through a variety of experiences, whether spiritual practice or the fully surrendered experience in music, sport, etc.  Many of our astronauts have had this experience and a new National Geographic program has captured their ‘big mind’ realizations as they experience the fragility and oneness of the planet.  In a day where the vast majority of TV programming speaks to opinion and division, this show implores us to be more careful in our actions, to see how what we ‘thought’ was true is not, and to carry a deeper sense of stewardship toward one another, toward this amazing experience on earth we’ve been given.  For sure, our small mind will never settle down.  It’s always wanting a fixed answer.  Certainly, religions and political parties feed on this.  Corporations do their part to ‘sell’ their knowing.  

This isn’t a plea for the empty, ignorant mind.  A bigger mind is always looking to what we know for now, making decisions guided from the premise of ‘not causing harm’.  Yet, it never loses it’s curiosity.  The small mind is closed.  The big mind is open.  Perhaps that would be a better way to label our political and/or religious affiliation.  The current polarization from limited language and labels is broken, frozen in action to the rapidly changing planet.  When we recognize we are each other, we all breath the same air, all want our children to grow up in safety and stewardship to one another and the planet, the folly of trying to change one another to our small minds dissipates.  And then real collaboration and communication can grow.

Here’s an interview with Robby Naish speaking to the body/mind/spirit aspects of riding.  Engaging in play is what keeps us vital, alive.  Check it out.

Robby Naish Interview

Whether we voted for Hillary, Donald, a third party candidate, or were part of the 50% who didn’t even vote, the vast majority of voters were protesting a broken, dysfunctional system in dire need of an upgrade. Change is accelerating at an amazing speed and we simply don’t have time to stagnate in our capacity to adapt to it. Our small brains struggle with trying to make sense of complexities that are far beyond our egos solutions. We ‘think’ we can be on the winning side, when if fact, we all know the circle has no sides. The mystery is simply too big for us to ever think we have all the information. Some have said that our informational society doubles in what it knows each day. That means, what we’ve learned in history up to this moment is doubled due to the tremendous capacities of technological development. Yet, our juvenile minds seems to want to work from ‘knowing’ what’s right and what’s wrong. These small minds want to lock into fixed solutions for issues that are far beyond our thought. We end up pushing antiquated political agendas at our peril. We refuse to open to solutions that are bigger than us. We push science to validate our limited thinking rather than to discover new territory. We’re no longer the pilgrims we once were. We’re a society filled with fear and complaint and our country simply doesn’t function when that’s the driving force. So what can we do? My suggestion is to humbly acknowledge that we don’t know everything.

The famous Sufi mystic, Rumi, once wrote, “Out there, is a field. It’s a field beyond notions of right knowing and wrong knowing. Let’s meet there.” Our Declaration of Independence says that our true freedom relies upon the protection of divine Providence. There’s a deeper faith that’s far beyond our temptation to put complete trust in any political leader, party or branch of government. It begs us to come together, in humility and dedicated service, to “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”. There’s a sense of stewardship from knowing ‘we don’t know’ and the quality of our living is dependent upon this pledge to our interdependence. When we sit silently in the field of uncertainty we find our real grounding. It’s not in some political platform designed from special interest lobbyists. There’s little centering found in media that feeds on conflict. We can take religious beliefs from controlling our laws, but it’s an ugly picture when we take spirituality and the sacred out of politics. We must all come to ground and admit ‘we don’t know everything’. If we truly get the divine, we accept that we’re just beginning to touch the tip of the iceberg. When we do this we open to bigger solutions. We appreciate the failures of our past efforts to push our sense of rightness.

We’re all going through our spiritual journeys. We can read all of our spiritual texts advising a life of moderation. We all know we’re to love one another, even our perceived enemies. We’re all perplexed by the tremendous harm that’s come from the hoarding of wealth as we witness millions of children suffering from lack of food and shelter. We’re somehow caught in the illusion that we’re separate from one another. Yet, deep within us, we all know that when another dies from our recklessness, fear and greed, we also experience loss. So what can we do? I can’t change you. And my happiness is not dependent up on you. I can touch true freedom when I can let go my notions of blame, complaint and entitlement. The center and calm I create within my own mind calms and centers the world. So next time we meet, can we ask Rumi’s question? Can we spend our opening time by just admitting, “We don’t know everything”? Can we pay attention to one another, accept one another’s honor to ‘just be’, allowing one another to be carried by the thoughts we’ve been exposed to through our journey, appreciating our vast diversity, and ultimately, touching one another’s heart in stillness.

I guarantee that our world would progress more positively if our branches of congress could open all meetings with, “I admit that I don’t know everything. I honor your journey. I commit my life, fortunes and sacred honor to this endeavor. And acknowledging the mystery of divine Providence, I sit with stilled mind and speech, aiming to not cause harm in search of a bigger solution.”

As Donald would say, “Today’s problems are huge”. And when the problems are big, we have to get bigger than the problem and work from a higher vibration lest we be carried in ignorance to the promises of a narcissistic paternal leader who thinks he/she is God.

There’s something magical about the first light of the day. There’s a ‘waking up’ to the conscious state after being asleep. As we celebrate the coming of light we’re each destined to express the divine mystery in our own unique way. I’ve always loved the breaking of silence that comes long before the sun’s rise, the first bird to sing. As a youngster I was taken with curiosity and enthusiasm for the day, raised on a farm filled with the mystery of life. Now in my latter half of time in this body, entropy has made this task more challenging given the typical aches in the body. Yet, there’s tremendous gift to be recognized, honoring this special gift of the next breath. Brother David Steindl-Rast has written:

If we were to learn to avail ourselves of those countless opportunities to enjoy, to dwell in the gift of being alive, then, when the moment comes to do something difficult, we could see that, too, as an opportunity and gratefully take advantage of it. p. 31 “The Music of Silence”

He calls this celebration of the gift ‘joy’. It’s the kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on our expectations. He calls it our ‘wholehearted response to whatever opportunity is given to us in any moment’. Then we can be happy no matter what. He points out the mistake to think we’re grateful because we’re happy. Better to realize that happy is a necessary consequence of gratitude. Lauds is a perfect time of the day to fill with thanks for grace given in our rising, meeting life’s next breath.

There’s a guided meditation that’s nothing but breathing in “yes” and breathing out “thank you”. During this lighting of the day, it’s a beautiful way to fill with mana for finding strength in meeting whatever comes up. It’s fuel for holding positive energy and for dismissing negative, complaining thoughts. This is a wonderful time to re-affirm our vows to not cause harm, to foster harmony, to not take what hasn’t been offered, to be careful in our speech and relationships to others, and to commit to further awakening rather than numbing ourselves to sleep with intoxicants.

As a youngster, I held more concrete beliefs about the divine mystery. My ancestral religion, Lutheran, asked me to profess my belief in certain thoughts. Yet, my deeper relationship to the divine came in these early morning hours. This is where spirituality was found:

“Spirituality is not religion. It is a path for us to generate happiness, understanding, and love, so we can live deeply each moment of our life.” ‘The Art of Living” by Thich Nhat Hanh

I’ve heard that successful aging is practicing this ability to ‘live deeply each moment of our life’, to meet each moment new. Our joy is robbed when we lament the loss of what we could do in our youth or grow fear about our imminent entropy and surrender of the body. Today, I meet the lighting of the day in a different way, seeing it more as a lighting of the spirit. In youth I seemed to put more attention to waking the body and mind. Today, it’s more about finding balance and stability in the body/mind as the work/discipline is undertaken to waken spirit in readiness to the vast divine mystery. I see, hear, smell, taste and touch things more deeply. More work is put to ‘not taking things for granted’. We can deny impermanence, attaching to our achievements, material accumulations and any other number of identifications, or we can embrace the surprise of what comes up in pure wonder. Einstein said we can see nothing as a miracle or everything as a miracle. Lauds is the easiest time of the day for me to fill with awe for the miracle. It’s the time to humble ourselves in that which is so much bigger than our concept of who we are, a time for the ‘self to settle into the Self’, it’s a time to ‘be still and know God’.

Good morning sunshine… you light my spirit and fill me with strength to find the gift in the given.

Vision Poster

Complete balance is found when we’re in complete presence. Full awareness to the unfolding present moment comes in that space between thoughts. Thoughts are verbal and by nature, dichotomous. There’s a subject/object division that’s working. The felt experience of complete balance comes when we’re free from the thinking mind, free from judgments, totally engaged in just being here and now. However, it’s of our nature to continuously move in and out of this experience of presence. It’s why a dedicated practice is so important. The more we work with opening this nonverbal space, the more we can extend it, the more solid our life experience is. While the stress in our life is the space between where we are and where our dissatisfied mind wants to be, the peace in our life is found in the gap between thought. While our thinking mind is forever busy chattering away, the stilled mind is solid, fresh and spaciously settling into something much bigger than our typical small identifications, the ones which have led to the illusion of our separateness.

Within the event of present moment awareness comes a deeper knowing. Not only do we find balance, but we touch the yoga moment, that instant where we break past our illusions of separateness. One teacher describes this as a ‘bounce’, because as soon as our conscious mind recognizes this awakened state, poof, we’re back in the dual world. Yet, the more we meet the present moment fully, the more we smash the illusion of division, the more our faith brings us back to dedicated practice. There’s no notion of attaining an end to our restless, verbal mind. That kind of grasping just works against the peace we so enjoy. Rather, there’s an urgent sense to be more careful with a deeper commitment to not cause harm. This moment of awakening brings us to realization that we are each other, that everything is connected, and when we cause harm to any thing or being, we’re causing harm to ourselves. It’s within a deeper awareness of the arising present moment we find our best action. Finding balance and rhythm is finding that spaciousness between thought, touching the nonverbal in a deeper awareness.

A ‘verbal detox’ is about being our best in action, thought and emotion because we’ve deepened our sense of awareness to the interconnected nature of all things. It’s about rhythm, balance, harmony and moments of stillness as we witness the opportunity of each arising moment. It’s about cultivating skills in dismissing the storehouse of negative thought and emotion and growing the storehouse of positive action and thought in deepening experience of gratitude, forgiveness and compassion.

Gravity from the negative mind of dissatisfaction works us throughout our day. A ‘verbal detox’ retreat is meant to be your opportunity to heal from the energy drain of these thoughts. It’s designed as a space to refresh, clear, and build an inner confidence in facing what’s coming up, no matter what, with a new found grounding. That’s our vision, to ‘show up, deepen our attention, be our best, and let go our grasping for control of the results’, touching a deeper balance, a deeper peace.

The verbal mind can be quite a toxic place to hang out. It’s of our human nature to be dissatisfied with things. We know the power of the present moment and the joy to be found in simply finding gratitude to ‘be here now’. When I meditate, I’m continually finding myself coming back to the present with the indicating words of “I just want to be here”. As I observe the mind, restlessness comes up and I want something different. It can take the form of greed (I want more) or fear (I’m afraid of losing what I have). My mind is either pushing back on something or grasping for something. The very nature of language reinforces the illusion of our separateness. It’s easy to see how I can objectify others when caught in the necessarily time bound elements of ‘subject and object’ language. Even the use of personal pronouns feeds this dichotomy. We know thoughts are linguistically based, so finding space to settle the verbal mind down seems essential to a well balanced life. That’s why I like to practice nonverbal prayer. Real alignment and balanced posture seems to best be found in that space between words. Yet, few people have developed this skill given the incessant chatter that goes on around us and inside our heads. That’s why I believe a verbal detox is such a healthy thing for our body/mind/spirit development.

A verbal detox retreat is much like a cleanse we would do with our bodies. Just as we consume items we know harm our body, we also consume thoughts that are toxic to our bodies. The more we feed the seeds of fear, anger, hate, greed and division, the more we harm the body and slow our spiritual deepening. A verbal detox is like taking a disciplined break from the complaining, negative mind. It’s also taking a break from the mind trying to force joy and happiness through ignorance to the suffering of others. Just as a fast or juice cleanse aims to reawaken the body to it’s natural balance, a verbal cleanse aims to settle the mind in stillness, allowing an awakening to deeper alignment of posture. Sitting in that space between words we can see through the illusion of ‘us vs. them’.

A verbal detox retreat minimizes language activity. There’s greater focus on simply witnessing what comes up, moment to moment. This is perhaps best accomplished through mutual breathing exercises. The breath is always coming up. It’s a precious gift of the moment. When the restless mind arises, we are simply instructed to come back to observing the breath. Another activity is toning. It’s nonverbal, draws our attention to the nature of sound, and allows us to explore outside of words. If language is used, it’s used sparingly to help deepen our awareness to the present moment. It’s a language of curiosity that deepens our allowing. For example, a yoga teacher can describe the moment to moment elements of an asana (balanced posture) as the student stays present and focused to balance, movement and rhythm. In effect, we deepen into our posture as we surrender the verbal and touch stillness. We fall out of balance and rhythm to the extent we awaken the critical mind. There’s a new discovery of nature’s precision in harmony and balance.

A verbal detox is much like any other tune up. The participant becomes more aware of the nonstop verbal chatter that tends to imprison us. Most of us experience thoughts popping up throughout the day and many of them grab hold of us. We then elaborate on these thoughts and often come to a point where we’re willing to fight others over our sense of being ‘right’. While it’s often estimated that we all have close to sixty thousand thoughts a day, it’s also been estimated that over ninety-five per cent of these thoughts are not new. We can grow our creative mind tremendously simply by growing our awareness to the limitations of an out of control verbal mind.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of all is that of equanimity. How well do we hold our posture in the face of difficulty? Do we have the training, courage and awareness to carry a balanced, upright posture when the earthquake seems to be happening? Can we stop, touch the space between words, fully embracing the moment in our ‘uprightness’ before making a mess of things? Or will unbridled fear, greed and ignorance rule the day?

Many of us take better care of our cars than we do of our bodies and minds. We know that salt, sugar and trans fats are toxic to the body. Yet, our super markets are filled with products which we willingly buy and consume. Some estimate that over fifty per cent of the products sold in our grocery stores today should be classified as poison rather than food. This is also the case with the news and entertainment we consume. It’s hard to find entertainment that’s nonviolent. It’s almost impossible to find news media that doesn’t stress the worst in human nature with endless speculation driven from fear and greed about how we must protect ourselves from one another. Perhaps the best test of our awareness training is to tap into ‘how we feel’. If I feel bad after eating toxic food, it’s perhaps best to find foods that make me feel good. If watching violent entertainment lowers my sense of wellness and grows my own violence, it’s perhaps best to not watch it. If the news media I watch is toxic, growing anger, fear and greed, it’s perhaps best to temper it so that I don’t contribute to growing the toxicity. We need to examine all that we consume and assess how it makes us feel and how it makes those around us feel.

Our reactivity to one another from negative emotion can threaten our very existence. Our capacity to hold balance grows our strength in meeting one another’s suffering. A verbal detox brings us to that place where we see the critical importance in aiming to ‘not cause harm’. That space between words deepens our relationship with the unknown, what many have called God. A verbal detox grows our courage to bear witness to the violence of the world. We can stand with a solid, aligned posture, and stand strong in the face of those who would rob opportunity and freedom through acts of violence.

Today, so many ask what can be done. So many have buried there heads in the sand having given up hope. Yet, today may be the greatest opportunity ever to grow awareness through stillness training, through a verbal detox, through cultivating harmony and balance between the words.

I’m fortunate to have friends in Minnesota and California that live for the joy of music and water. Here’s a link to the guys I get to play with in Minnesota. “You can’t stop the wave, but you can learn to Ride It!”