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.

We come into this form of body and experience our world.  We receive sensations, interpret them into perceptions, create thoughts that lead to emotions, and build a ‘map’ to what we imagine is ‘the territory’.  Our spiritual masters and great scientists claim the territory is all connected.  Yet, our thinking mind continually pushes us to a sense of being separated.  We dedicate so much of our living to separateness and defending ‘our map’.  Perhaps our greatest obstacle to love, peace and joy is the judgment that our map is the ‘right’ one.  Yet, when we embrace the Divine, the Law of Unity, God, the Territory, we clearly see we only carry a map.  The curious mind wants to touch the territory.  The alive, vital person wants to ‘touch the Territory’.  This takes a different kind of belief.  It’s the belief that comes from the felt experience of touching the Territory, in full knowledge that separation is an illusion.  It’s not belief in another’s map.  It’s not an emotional attachment to a thought.  It’s a surrendered moment of peace that allows us to harmonize with all that is.  It’s real intercourse of lasting joy.  It’s the ‘great fullness’ that comes from emptying our map to ‘feel’ the territory.  It’s movement from the intellect to the belly or heart brain.  It’s willingness to silence thought’s incessant noise.

Our judicial and political system reward those most effective at selling ‘their’ map.  Various religions sell ‘their’ map.  Parents steal the creative minds of their children by instilling ‘their’ map.  Spirits are stolen by authoritarians forcing ‘their’ map and we endure monologues from egocentrics pushing ‘their’ map.  We endure wars, sports events, advertisements, and mindless consumption caught in our thought (map).

So where do we find peace?  How do we ‘touch the territory’, beyond notions of like and dislike?  How do we enter the realm of ‘flow’ in full arrival to our Being?  It requires suspension of ‘our’ map.  This is something foreign to politicians, attorneys, most pastors, and most in authority.  Perhaps someday we can raise the courage to deeply listen to one another from a ‘suspended map’, touching the territory of Oneness in gratitude for the opportunity to participate.

The calendar says this is the last day of July, 2010. The journey deepens for us all, and this will be my only July entry. Each day I’m amazed at how Source presents events to humor us, enliven us, and challenge us to grow into deeper territory. This summer has been particularly pleasant for me as I’ve been honored to witness the ‘freshness’ of my one and three year old grandchildren in our house. They live in joy, unencumbered by the weight of the intellect. They receive each moment new, in wonder to what’s coming. They’re in constant movement, stretching their bodies and movements to new levels each day. You can smell their curiosity. And when they hug, they really hug. If we were to wear smile meters, my grand daughter would be off the charts.

I’m not sure where I was before I was some body (manifested in this body). I’m certainly not sure where I’ll be when I’m no body (not manifested in this body). Yet, the longer I live, the deeper I practice living, the more I experience, the deeper I ‘feel’ that nothing ends. My observation and experiential ‘feel’ is that we change, and then discover we’re somebody else. The more I silence my thought, moving from head to belly or heart, the more I experience this moment to arising moment. There it is…poof…and now the next moment…poof…and on it goes. This happens in everything I see. We come into form from formlessness and then surrender form to a new arising, moving from light to heavy to light, from a felt sense of being joined, to ego’s draw to a sense of separate identity, back again to felt sense of being joined. There are a lot of markers along the way. Perhaps the most evident are found in our degrees of greed, fear and ignoring versus our degrees of compassion, gratitude and forgiveness.

If we truly come to experience our connection with all things, we more easily see the folly in trying to accumulate more than we need at the expense of another, of trying to achieve against comparison to another’s loss, of fearing from others that what we have will be taken, or of numbing ourselves to the territory for fear of facing it. Once we know we’re all connected, why would we harm another, harming ourselves. Why would we steal from another, knowing we’re stealing from ourselves? Why would we greedily try to hold our ‘stuff’ at the expense of stewardship to the welfare of those who follow us? Cultivating our felt sense of ‘oneness’ and our courage to face impermanence, we live more meaningfully and prepare to die without regret. While this is a common thread among great spiritual leaders, it’s now carried forward with validity from some of our greatest scientific minds. Albert Einstein, in 1950, wrote the following:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe. A part limited in time and space, he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion from his consciousness. Striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion; not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the one obtainable measure to achieve peace of mind.

It seems we all say we want peace of mind, yet all our attempts at control work against peace. My grandchildren meet the moment, here and now. They find joy, heaven in this arising moment. I may try to change things to the way I think they ‘should’ be. The more I push the further I seem to travel from peace. The deeper I listen, the longer I hold silence, and the stronger I love (developing felt sense of oneness), the less I seem to harm. I can lock into my notions of ‘rightness’ or be in joy. I can embrace my restless mind, experience how things change, pause, and then take action that minimizes harm. The pause is big. This is where I can touch Big Hope, where I can ‘feel’ my Being that lives beyond the limits of this body, and where I can raise my vibration (energy) to once again experience the impossibility of separation. This is where I can once again touch what Carlos  Castanada has called ‘the active side of infinity’.

The weight of our cultural mind, the never ending monologue in my mind, and the challenge of relationships forever works me back to the bifurcated experience. Basically, I’m once again caught in the delusion that I’m here and you’re there. I’m once again tempted to convince you that ‘I know that’. I may fight to convince you that I’m right and you’re wrong. Yet, my Divine Self is forever evolving, humored at my missteps. Louis Hay has said:

The Universe waits in smiling repose for you to get your thinking right so it can pour its abundance down upon you. And it waits…and waits…and waits. It may not be this lifetime or the next, but someday.

This is what meaningful living is all about. Waking up to our Bigger Self, cultivating our sense of Oneness, practicing compassion, gratitude and forgiveness, and courageously catching up with our bigger Self, our Divine nature. As we empty we meet a new fullness, an openness that awakens dormant forces not previously accessible. As we experience ‘great fullness’ in this arising moment, we present an ‘allowing’ for new to arrive. We catch up with our Divine when we fully arrive to the ‘feeling’ of the future breathed into the present. There’s no yearning for things different, no restlessness for anything other than deeper love for all, gratitude, and letting go the weight of past events. This is true relativity, when we jump outside of time and space to the paradoxical. In loving feelings of ‘alone’ we feel ‘all one’. Outside of space in ‘nowhere’ we feel ‘now here’. Outside of the fear of ‘beware’ we cultivate ‘be aware’. We can surrender the ‘in form (ation) age’ to the ‘in spirit age’. Surrendering our temptations to ‘have’ and to ‘do’ we drill deeper into our ‘be’ nature. The dis-ease from thinking we’re separate from God (Source, Universe) heals as we nurture the gift of the Divine within and without, beyond notions of in and out.

Your Somebody is your body, given to your stewardship. Please never criticize it. Catch up to your greater Self and honor your body for doing everything it can to catch up to the beauty of response for the gift of your materialization. If you have any sense of lack-ness, stop it. Move from this ‘dis on grace’ to cultivation of gratitude for the grace bestowed upon us to manifest. Move forever from complaint to no complaint. Work forever to be in the sustainable felt experience of ‘joy’ rather than forever seeking the fleeting pleasure of ‘enjoyment’. Surrender attachment to second and third hand information and cultivate first hand experiential knowing from the Laws of the Universe, forever reducing the number of felt moments of separation.

In the process of catching up to our greater Self, we leave the ‘ant in a sugar bowel’ consumptive mentality. We enter the realm of or best creative expression, knowing the results of our actions remain as we return to ‘no form’. Our practice at ‘pause’, deeper in silence, reverently offers our vibration to the song of the Universe as we arrive. The arrival is beautiful, outside of the intellect’s desire to separate. The beauty changes us and deepens our living as we touch the soil that Source served to seed our Divine nature. Life is celebration, not cerebration. Life is feeling, not thought. The real question is whether or not we’re strong enough to surrender our love of thought for our love of the Divine.

So what instrument(s) do you use to deepen your expression? We give birth to the Divine with our creative artist of life. As we remove our thought obstacles, let go our critical mind, we drill deeper. Our emptiness paves the way to our receiving and our fullness. In breath, we’re inspired from silence and emptiness. Breathing out we participate. In affirmation to this very gift, we’re filled with ‘Yes’. In sustaining joy, we scream ‘Thank you’. This is wild work that doesn’t know the peanut gallery. It doesn’t feel the need for approval from others. It just dances in the realm of the creative, touching that experience of joined response in the Divine song of life. This work is grounded from a deeper sense of Being-ness and it knows the gravity of conformity.

So if life is a song, and if it’s all vibration, can’t we assume that all we need to do is open to the harmony and rhythm that’s found throughout all things? And if it’s song, again, what is your instrument? Can you step aside from your mind and ‘feel’ the depth of song spring forth from you belly? Wayne Dyer has famously said, “Don’t die with your music still in you?” I don’t like the word ‘die’ because it implies an ending, a sort of separation. How about, “When you surrender your material form, will you have regrets for holding un-played music?”

Finally, if you’ve traveled with me through these words to this point, please know I’m deeply humbled by this work. It’s a never ending challenge. People may wonder what’s the point? Why cultivate a deeper sense of Just Be It? I don’t have the three minute elevator speech, but in the words of famous bluesman, Otis Spann, “I gotta a feelin’ everything gonna be alright. I gotta a wonderful feelin’ my baby (Divine) coming home tonight.” Sung from the belly, Otis had the present moment feeling of the future in the present. It’s a wonderful feeling. Just let go the things that grow your restlessness (greed, fear, ignoring) and be aware of those things that make your life more meaningful (love, gratitude, and forgiveness). There’s an army of cooperative vibration just waiting to hop your train of creation as we participate in this joyous song. It’s here, now.

Final quote of the day from Reb Anderson on the Second Precept:

In uprightness you see that everything is you. If there is one thing about yourself that is obscure to you or feels separate from you, then you will feel some dent in your wholeness. That one small dent will force you to inevitably try to fill it.

Does it make sense to continually yell at one another, trying to persuade another that we’re right and they’re wrong? Wouldn’t ‘common sense’ direct us to start with what we have in common rather than focus on our differences? Drilling for what’s ‘common’ with those who have many differences with us seems to be the essence of any spiritual practice. We’ve been instructed to experience others as ourselves, to ‘feel’ our interconnection and interdependence upon one another by all our great spiritual masters. We now have science substantiating the very notions that everything changes and everything affects everything. Nature functions from balance, harmony and rhythm, yet we continue to contribute to the noise created from our focus upon difference over what’s common.

Common sense is curios and helps us develop the capacity to converse, to listen deeply without aggressive desires to change another. Common sense directs us to not harm, given our knowledge that we’re all connected, and thus, hurting ourselves when we harm another. It directs us to treat one another with reverence. It acknowledges that we’ve all been manifested in these bodies to participate in the joy of life, fully appreciative to the fact that our actions had nothing to do with making our body/mind. It recognizes the repeated failure of our attempts to ‘fix’ someone or something when it’s driven from our greed, fear, or ignoring of truth. Common sense asks us to explore the ground work that always works, the guts of faith, love and hope. Recognizing these seeds to gratitude, common sense would direct us to extend our moments of joy rather than feeding our restlessness and sense of lack.

An application of common sense presents an authentic motivation to explore what we ‘really, really, really, really want’ from a perspective on non harm and contribution. It asks in honor to one another how we can share our divine talents to the fullest of our potential. It steers clear from ‘right’ vs. ‘wrong’ and conversational stoppers like ‘I know that’. There’s shared recognition that we’re on a journey to delve deeper into the mystery of our life opportunity to participate. It recognizes that no one escapes the pains of life. It asks us to base our inquiry on direct knowing rather than second and third hand information that’s not substantiated. Rather than blocking debate with fixed belief systems, pushing an agenda of ‘knowing’, common sense carries the power of joyful expectation for deeper meaning through the virtue of curiosity, love and the discipline to not cause harm.

Some day I’d like to see common sense driving our politics, business, churches and education. I’d like to see law schools teaching deep listening skills rather than focusing upon the violence that comes from persuasion and ‘notions of rightness’, of winning and losing. I think we all have a desire to minimize our mistakes. Fortunately, mistakes can be corrected through the deeper awareness that comes from sincere inquiry into what we have in common.

I’ve often been presented with belief systems that are based on second hand information. I have no problem allowing another to hold these belief systems. For example, many religions have beliefs about what happens when we shed our bodies. Wars have been fought and millions of people have been killed defending or pushing these beliefs. Can you imagine the results if we had the courage to explore these beliefs without the blocked learning that comes from thinking we’re right? Personally, I have a deep, felt sense of Jesus, of my ancestors, of those spirits whose actions live forever through the power of their contributions. I know much analogy and metaphor has been written about our future and what happens when we shed these bodies. And I also can’t forget Brother David Steindl Rast’s directive about thought and speech:

Go deep into clearly exploring what you mean before you speak.
If you don’t know it from direct experience, probably best to be quiet.
If you are clear about what you mean, and you know it from direct experience, “So what?”

When it comes to events after life in these bodies, until someone comes back and substantiates it, I will not speak about it, speculate about it, or try to push any beliefs on another. My personal experience has best served me and those around me when I joyously treat each present moment as heaven. When I can let go ‘ordinary’ to ‘surprise’, experiencing the ‘gift of the given’, cultivating joy for the opportunity to participate, this is truth of direct substantiated experience.

I find greater vitality to life when encountering those of difference as long as we can commit to open, active listening. It makes common sense to first explore what we have in common, cultivating our joy in the shared life experience. It gives us opportunity to steward the purpose for our unique being. As we become conscious to the fleeting moments of life, to our relationship to the present moment, we more deeply touch the sacred ground above the battle field.

While we now see the tremendous harm done from the mental thought of ‘drill baby, drill’ pertaining to off shore oil, perhaps this could be a great directive to use with one another before we resort back to our unproductive addictions to fight. If I can only discipline myself to forever drill deeper in exploring our common ground, perhaps we can better steward our contribution to ourselves, family, community, nation and planet.

Exploring common ground is harmonic. It helps join in rhythm and balance for better community. For me, common sense is all about exploring our ‘joined’ response in this miracle of life. Fighting, aggression, debate, persuasion, and other forms of pushing have generally produced harm, noise, distortion and movement away from the music of this precious moment.

Being in the present is the opposite of trying to be in control.

The mystery of life deepens as the ordinary experience is extraordinary and the extraordinary increases in frequency from more vivid awareness.

Seek and do not find.

Do you want to be right or at peace?

Embrace your restlessness. Look at it and still in silence to your ‘inner knowing’. Then let go your desire to have things other than they are. This is hard work, this letting go, but it’s how we learn.

The poisons:

Greed: If I only have enough, then I’ll be happy.

Fear: If only things were different from what they are now (either from past…victim, or fear about things not turning out as hoped for). My expectations were not met somehow and I’m locked into negative feelings, or my hope for the future is gone, faith lost.

Ignoring: This moment is so uncomfortable that I’ll just ignore it and I’ll not take the opportunity to participate in it. (get drunk or drugged, TV, spectator sports, gambling and other activities aimed to numb our restlessness)

Good food, bad food. If it results in sustained joy, probably good food. If it results in short term pleasure and consequent pain, perhaps bad food.

Sukka…the Sanskrit word for ‘to be at peace’
Dukka..the Sanskrit word for un-ease, lack of peace.

Our advertising and news feed our lack of peace. In advertising, the message has transformed from, “Buy this and you’ll be happy.” to “You can’t be happy without this”. Our news focuses almost completely on what’s gone wrong rather than celebrating all that’s gone right. Advertising and conflict news breed un-ease, dukka. Compassion, gratitude, and embracing the gift of the present moment feed lasting joy.

Where’s the pull come from, love or fear? The heart only knows love and requires the practice of stilling the restless mind. In silence/awareness practice we deepen to hear the divine truth the heart knows. Fear pulls from the reasoning mind, creating more suffering and seldom helps us. We become our fullest expression when we’re forever pulled to the edge from deep heart listening. The challenge is to forever remove the obstacles created from a restless mind so that we may go deeper in our life journey. It’s about cleaning ourselves from the ‘mind junk’ so we can be more effective through deeper felt interconnection, often referred to as compassion (meeting one another’s dis-ease in love and felt connection).

What drives you? Are your actions fueled from a sense of push or pull? Push fuels from greed or fear? Pull fuels from deep knowing resulting from deep heart listening. When we make space for the practice of gratitude and listening, curiosity opens us to hear the Divine within. This fire that needs no wood, passion, forever feeds. the courage to take action on the pull. You’re not ‘doing’ to please others, from fear or to fix others. Your ‘doing’ is completely tuned to your ‘being’ as you become the fullest expression of yourself. In gratitude you experience lasting joy for seizing the opportunity to participate in 100% attention to the present moment. Finding the gift in the given (this arising moment) comes from a non-obstructed mind. An non-obstructed mind comes from a practice of deep listening, stilling the myriad of aimless thoughts rushing through the mind, touching the core of heart knowing.

Allow heaven’s arrival, here and now.

Pray for conversation, removal of obstacles, the curious mind, and the lasting joy the comes from the courage to drill deeper.

Joy…just be it. Curious…just be it. Open…just be it. Grateful…just be it. Here and now…just be it. Heart…just be it. Divine…just be it.

Just Be It, Inc.

9597 North Shore Trail

Forest Lake, MN 55025

Phone: 612-590-0970

Principal: Randy Johnson

Email: randy@just-be-it.com

The temptation of feeling loved is to blame another for the loss of that feeling.  When suffering happens, when things fall apart, and when change happens in such painful ways, maybe then I’m tempted to question my faith.  In her book, Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett references the authentic words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.  She references his questioning of faith in a passage from Wiesel’s Night. He spoke to a loss of desire to live and horrific moments when brutal human acts seemed to murder his God.  Yet, he went on praying, and presented her with the following prayer:

I no longer ask You for either happiness or paradise; all I ask You is to listen

and let me be aware of Your listening.

I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You.

I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship.  Love?  Love is not Yours to give.

As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers.  If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers.  But not Your countenance.

They are modest, my requests, and humble.  I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land.

I ask You, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me:  God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too.

I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith.  I only beg You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together.

Wiesel’s words highlight the tremendous power of gratitude and forgiveness practice.  This practice is founded in deep, open listening.  It’s grounded in the ‘felt’ sense of never being alone.  Can it be that lasting joy is cultivated through our awareness to and relationship with the present moment as we forever drill deeper in gratitude and forgiveness?

So what do I want?  Short term limited pleasure or long term unlimited joy?

How has my quest for short term pleasure impacted my quest for long term joy?

Unlimited lasting joy sources from gratitude and the ‘feeling’ of never Being alone, always being listened to.

Meeting the arising moment in felt sense of belonging

It seems that two of our most important questions are:

1. What’s my relationship with this present moment?
2. Do I feel loved?

Most of our restlessness and stress revolves around a bad relationship to the present moment.  We’re either wishing we were someplace we were or anticipating a place we’re going to, missing the surprise of the moment.

The next question is perhaps more tricky.  If I ‘feel’ loved, then by whom?  If it’s a feeling from another being, am I preoccupied with what it was or fear about it’s possible loss?  Or is it a bigger feeling?  Perhaps it’s more a feeling of Big Hope and a bigger belonging.  As the surface events of the day encounter a variety of rapids and eddies, can I hold a ‘feeling’ of being loved, with one foot on the ocean floor, grounded in the joined response, not taken by life’s surface disturbances?

This may be the big pull for theistic religions.  It’s something that works me deeply.  I feel great joy and comfort in a personal divine Being who has my best interests at heart.  The arms of sacred love can never betray me if I dedicate to cultivating my relationship and my gratitude for the gift of the arising moment.  Yet, a feeling of  ‘being loved’ from a smaller group will always run the course of entropy, tied to the realm of form and the material.

So, here I am in deep loving relationship to Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and the other great divine Beings who’ve blessed me.  My physical response to this love seems to resonate most with Jesus, yet my most intimate spiritual experiences have had a distinct feminine feel to them.  So I pray and give thanks for this gift of opportunity to participate, to curiously explore the realm of spirit, mind and body, forever drilling deeper in this journey.

I see the poison in greed, ignorance and fear and how they play one another.  In greed, I’ve lost my relation to the present, forever thirsting for ‘more’.  Poof, another moment lost, another unintended harmful action.  In ignorance, I’ve locked into a static notion of an answer.  This is different from living faith.  This is fixation on thinking I know, holding to my notion of being ‘right’.  Ignorance is overcome by a curios mind, forever willing to actively listen for a deeper question.  And fear is expression of my lack of ‘feeling’ love.  It’s a response of feeling separate, unjoined from the Divine.

So, if I can embrace the present moment in surprise, in felt sense of being loved, my only response is that of full gratitude for the gift of opportunity.  Now, this breath.  Again, this breath…knowing I’m loved…knowing these breaths are limited…knowing it’s a rare gift to experience consciousness…this moment…knowing I’m in you and you’re in me and all is in all, forever bathed in the feeling of ‘being loved within the divinity of the moment’s arising’.

Cultivating the ‘Feeling of Being Loved’

When I can reflect on the ‘presence’ of ancestors who came before and upon future ancestors I’ll never meet while in this body, I’m warmed.  Friends who’ve loved me beyond conditions, parents, grandparents I may never have met, someone I touched who may never had a chance to say what it meant…this ‘feeling’ comes up.  And it’s my fuel for ‘Big Hope’, for knowing nothing disappears, I’m never separated, forever, each moment, filled with a deeper sense of belonging, of mattering.  This ‘feeling’ of the Divine within all comes and goes.  But I can grow it by taking pause, reflecting on the felt response of being loved…of Being…filled with gratitude for the opportunity of this breath, of this consciousness.

As energy dissipates, it’s easy to slip into depression.  There’s great pain in feeling things will never be the same.  The Law of Impermanence seems to be what fuels our drive to ‘wake up’.  Wherever we look, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is at work, energy dissipating and the apparent felt separation from what was.  We hit the bell and perceptually notice the disappearance of sound.  And yet, we now know the sound never disappears.  We now know that nothing disappears, it just dissipates its energy of vibration.  No doubt, we can grow a louder vibration when conditions are right, yet we know it will entropy naturally as conditions become ‘not right’, the inevitable.  It’s why we have a multibillion dollar plastic surgery industry, why some try to freeze their bodies, and why we spend fifty billion dollars of our health care budget with valiant efforts to stop this process, trying to save people during the last two months of their lives.

So what to do?  We can hide behind myth that’s clearly out of step with our contemporary ‘knowing’.  We can numb ourselves with media consciousness shaping, glued to the TV for hours.  We can immerse ourselves into the spectator sports world.  We can join an organization dedicated to the belief that change can be stopped and we can become very angry as a result.  We can numb ourselves with various addictions that temporarily comfort us only to bring us further from our life vibrancy.  We can pursue increasing amounts of pleasure and consumption, only to realize the happiness is fleeting and the collateral damage very painful.  We can try to escape our awareness to the demise of heath care and education at the expense of morally exempt capitalism and militarism.   In effect, we can retreat from participation in stewarding the unified vibration because it hurts too much.

With courage, we can hold the curious mind.  We can ask the deeper, heart driven questions.  We can study those who’ve gone before with a sense of deep stewardship to those who will follow, knowing that we can never be ‘disconnected’.  We strike the bell.  We can all sense it, but some of us don’t hear it.  We’re too busy or too distracted.  Yet, the bell sounds and the vibration dissipates.  Yet, our deeper awareness takes great care in slowing our perception of the dissipated energy.  The music is alive.  Time and occasion, outside the realm of our known three dimensions, outside notions of beginning and ending.

The vibration is here and always will be here, penetrating all things.  Awareness is our security. Participating in the art of taking care is our action.  Home. Free. Free at last.  Vibration…Just Be it.

Perfect balance requires proper form.

It’s been said our attachments to a sense of ‘correctness’ grow our suffering and diminish our happiness.  It also seems that what we put attention to grows stronger.  So how does this play when learning a new skill set?  With proper attention to correct form our growth accelerates and we more easily remove obstacles to deepening our practice of a particular field of study.  Without proper initial instruction we may ignore correct form and place more and more attention to doing something that becomes an obstacle to deepening our practice.  We may develop a limiting habit obstructing our growth, simply because we’re placing more and more attention to incorrect form.  This has become a problem in our more liberated society where almost anything goes in the name of freedom.  Yet, we can see that real talent deepens with a resolve to disciplined practice under the guidance of a teacher well versed in proper form.  The illusion is that great talent just happens.  For sure, some have greater aptitude to develop skills in certain areas.  Yet, anyone who’s achieved greatness has a long history of associating with masters of form dedicated to precision on the road to style and liberation.

We’re born in harmony and rhythm, with a deep felt connection to all that’s around us.  And then we’re exposed to form.  There’s a correct way to do things.  We put attention to movement, we study how others move, we learn the structure of language, and we deepen our sense of connection with those in our presence.  Much of this is “pre-wired” and at some point we wish to explore a specialized skill. Anyone watching American Idol tryouts can see how we’ve lost our attention to discipline and form.  Contestants show up for audition with no previous discipline and instruction to singing.  Correct form is missing as they fail to find the harmony and rhythm of the song.  Correct form is necessary to find that felt sense of connection in the rhythm and harmony of life.  A lack of regard to form results in dissonance, a separation from harmony and rhythm, and suffering to those in its presence.

I once had a teacher working with me on proper form for meditation.  After years, the instruction became more and more subtle, forever directing me to correct bad habits, improper form.  Slight adjustments were made and when, after long sittings, my shoulders rose, he’d wake me to proper form with a loud crack of a stick on my shoulder.  Proper form is good because it requires our full attention.  With deepening practice, dedicated to proper form and one hundred per cent attention, we find our ‘best’.  Put another way, our dedicated practice allows us to face our tendency to separate from awareness to form and eventual ‘flow’.  This ‘flow’, ‘in the zone’ experience is once again touching the depth of nature’s harmony and rhythm.  It is the deep felt experience of connection, of our interdependence with all things.  Eventually we reach a level of performance where we disappear, no longer separated from our instrument, teammates, audience, environment, etc.   This place, achieved through deep attention to correct form, is a place of distinctive quality recognizable to all in it’s presence.  The individual’s vowed attention to deepening inspires us all to a felt sense of interconnection, touching Big Hope.  It’s a ‘feeling’ that relieves us from our suffering, from our sense of separation.  The creative artist’s deep work has given us a taste of the joined response.  This brief taste is the core of Just Be it and recognized as quality.  Good teachers recognize bad form as an obstacle to learning and know how to break the obstacles created from bad habit.  Good teachers know how to nurture the student’s passion, once again igniting the fire that needs no wood.  And good teachers know it may not be helpful to waste time on those students who refuse to dedicate to a deepening practice of proper form.  Learning correct form is difficult and uncomfortable.  However, once learned, it’s the foundation to finding comfort in the uncomfortable, the ingredient necessary to wrap around the uncertainty inevitable in the next level of performance.

Breaking Obstacles to the 'Felt' Sense of Joining

A basic premise of ancient spiritual teachings and contemporary physics is that “everything changes and everything is connected”.  Some have called this the tension between the law of impermanence (The Second Law of Thermodynamics) and the Law of Interdependence (Everything affects everything).  The joy we find in our lives can be directly related to our capacity to face the uncertainty of change and our cultivation of the ‘feeling’ of being joined.  While greed, ignorance and fear continually work us to feelings of separation, we’re repeatedly challenged to move past the temptation to separate.  In what seems to be accelerated change, the illusions of things not changing has been shattered.  A few conservative talk/TV hosts and politicians receive popularity by playing to people’s desires to ‘the way things were’.  In the face of a rapidly changing economy, facing challenges to meet change in globalization, immigration and stewardship to the planet, their responses to facing the uncertainty of the future are simply a child’s scream of “No, I don’t want to go there”.  Yet, the train’s moving and it’s moving faster than ever before.  And so we tend to polarize on our willingness to meet change and uncertainty, creating the unproductive stalemate in our mind’s separation from one another.

So where do we get our ‘feeling’ of connection?  How big or small is it?  My childhood focused on family, church and the community.  There was a sense that the authority within my circles of belonging had the answers to change and uncertainty.  It was simply a matter of belief.  I carried a peace in thinking we didn’t need to drill deeper in our curiosity about impermanence and interdependence.  This was not helpful when facing the rapidly changing social climate of the late ’60’s and early ’70’s.  My ‘feeling’ of separation grew as the foundation of most authoritative beliefs was shattered by observation.  The lack of congruity of action to belief was too big and I temporarily separated from my history, simply denying my beliefs rather that taking it as challenge to dig deeper.  My sense of security had been replaced by the realities of uncertainty.  My sense of connection had been replaced by an angered sense of separation.

It’s been a long road back, forever challenging my mind’s temptation to stop, to hold out on the surface, deflecting the depths of life.  Yet, life happens.  People die, suffering doesn’t go away, and conditions present us directly in the midst of uncertainty and our total interdependence.  It becomes a continual battle between willingness to explore or sliding back to the obstacles I grow in preventing a spiritual deepening.  Some of us try to grow our sense of belonging through technological advancements, working every social network we can.  Others define a sense of belonging by number of returned text messages.  Our media seems to push our sense of success and belonging in definitions from dollar worth.  And all the way we seem to be losing our real capacity to connect with one another as ourselves.

The real litmus test for one’s ‘felt’ sense of interconnection can be seen in the level of curiosity.  The love carried forward is evidenced by one’s genuine desire to go deeper through skilled listening.  It seems more and more rare to find those willing to break beyond the veils and obstacles of ‘busyness’ and ‘fear’.  While it seems safer and easier to lock into our safe routine and fixed beliefs, eventually life presents the challenge to drill deeper.  Whether in sickness, injury, job loss, natural disaster or any other upset that pulls the rug from our sense of security, we eventually meet the choice of digging deeper, burying our head in the sand, or swimming upstream against the laws of nature.  At some point we come to see our health is dependent on other’s health.  Our depth of being is dependent upon others’ depth of being.  Our spiritual security is dependent upon other’s spiritual security.  Our capacity to show up, pay attention and be our best is  dependent upon others showing up, paying attention and being their best.  In short, our best is found in breaking the barrier between you and me, us and them, as we arrive to a bigger belonging.  We come home to the ‘felt’ sense of our connection through Big Hope, not pollyanna wishes for things to be different than they are.  They just are and can we meet the very ‘is-ness’ of this moment in loving gratitude for one another?  Can we openly explore our differences in search of our similarities, touching the essence of our interdependence?  Can we connect with our perceived enemies through the simple courage of asking, “Can you tell me more as I try to stand in your shoes for a moment?”.  Can we acknowledge that perception is deception, that the problem is never what we think it is?  Can we breath in “yes” to the rare opportunity to meet in this moment, breathing out “thank you” for our courage to participate?  In review of the day, can we be specific about actions, thoughts and speech taken to move to deeper joining?  Can we honestly review those areas where we’ve contributed to harm, feeding feelings of separation?  Can we humble our selves, pledging to aim away from thoughts of judgment and opinion?  Can we raise ourselves to be the mountain in the face of uncertainty, forever willing, ready and able to show up in full attention, aiming to be our best?  Can we cultivate gratitude and big sense of belonging, standing in the consequent feeling of joy?s