Sacred Spaciousness

It's been a week since my sweet dog Maia died. I'm doing my best to carry on in her absence. There is a noticeable void in my world without her, an emptiness that can't be filled with just anything. The spaciousness that her death created feels sacred to me, like a holding tank of all the love and memories we shared. I don't want to fill it with anything else right now; I just want to feel the beauty of it.

I'm aware that her sudden death was just another one of her loving gifts to me. It's as if she said "It's time for me to go. It is not my intent or my purpose to burden you with slowly declining health, incontinence or neediness. It was my job to support you through some rough times, help you heal your heart and get you to the place where you could shine again. I've done that; my job with you is complete. And so I can go now so that you can go now too. My presence in your life was not about draining your energy; it was about helping you shine. So shine on..."

I sometimes wonder about some of the things she heard me talking about: "We can get her some doggy diapers and I can just take them off when she goes outside. It'll just mean that I won't sleep as much and she'll take more of my time and energy. I'll check on what other things we can do to deal with it. I'll feed her the vegetarian food she likes and give her the more expensive meat in between meals for a snack so it won't cost as much. She loves that meat! I'll make time to walk her every day. No, I don't want another dog; I love Maia but she has pushed me to my limits; I'm full-up..."

Sometimes I feel bad about these things. Did she take them to heart? Did she knowingly and lovingly spare me all the added stress by dying so suddenly? Was she ready to go or was she serving me yet again through even her death? I wonder...

I may never know for certain, yet I do feel that her death was a necessary part of what's next in my life. It's as if I couldn't take my next step forward and deal with her in the ways I wanted to. It would have created too much stress for us both. Wherever my life path is taking me, she couldn't go with me; that much feels clear.

I miss her every day and every night. I know the missing will soften, yet it's with me strongly now. I hear her noises all the time; I feel her presence. I mistakenly believe - just for a second - that she'll be in all her usual spots at the house as I move about it. I yearn for the touch of her soft fur and cold nose, and the way she pawed at me for attention. Oh what I'd give to feel that paw brushing against my leg now!

I miss looking into her eyes. It sounds like a lover, I know, but it's true! Her eyes were incredibly expressive with a depth and a sweetness to them that held sensitivity, compassion and raging love. They were forgiving, accepting, willing and allowing... What an incredible teacher she was; everything I strive to be as a person in this world was held and reflected in her eyes. She was a gift and a teacher. And I am truly blessed to have held such a gift and known such a teacher.

I've realized that she is the first death to me that was such an intimate part of my life. My grief around her death is more profound than it has been for other beloveds in my life who have died. But I've learned that my reaction to death has little to do with how long I've known someone or even how much I've loved them; it has to do with the nature of my relationship to them. The nature of my relationship to my dog Maia was deep, honest and unconditional. She was a big part of my daily life, and held a large part of my attention and energy. The void left in her absence is unmistakable. She is the first death I've experienced of this nature. I guess I can consider myself fortunate for that...

As I make my way through my grief at her death, I find myself feeling quiet, emotional, vulnerable and maybe even a bit empty outside of my typical busyness. I enjoy what I do but I enjoy the quiet of night even more now than before, so I can sit in the spaciousness of her love and memories, and honor the amazing beauty of the gift and the teacher she was to me, the extent of which are just barely beginning to sink in...

May my life become a more clear reflection of all the beauty she brought into it.

Don't Take It Personally

We are such ego-driven creatures. We take so many things personally when really, nothing is about us except our own experiences. This is one of the main teachings in don Miguel Ruiz's beautiful spiritual book The Four Agreements: don't take anything personally. The reason for this is that every Human Being on this planet perceives the world in their own unique way, through their own unique filters, based on their own unique perceptions, experiences, agreements and beliefs.

don Miguel Ruiz calls the agreements and beliefs we hold in our unconscious mind our personal Book of Law. This Book of Law is what our brain uses to dictate our behavior based on past experiences. It contains all the rules we have learned to live by - those that we created ourselves and those that were passed down to us through the adults in our lives. It says things like "To be loved I must be good" and "To be safe I must not have fun" and "If I do the wrong thing I will be punished" and "Other people's perceptions of me matter."

These rules are things we learn as children and then carry forward into our adulthood. They rest in the unconscious part of our Being and we live by them whether they continue to apply or not as we grow up. Since we are unaware of them, we can't know if they still apply or feel true for us as adults unless something brings them to our attention. And the truth is, unless they are brought to our attention by some kind of event, we don't care if they apply or not because we don't even know they exist! But they are our unconscious Book of Law and we follow our Book!

Usually it is when something happens that makes us question some part of our lives that we begin to look at the things in our Book of Law and decide if we still believe them, agree with them, and want to keep living by them or not. This is no easy task. Questioning the things we've lived by since we were a youngster takes courage. The things in our Book have been the foundation of our life. To question them means questioning our fundamental beliefs and agreements about life in general and how to survive it. This touches into a deep, primal part of our Being.

When we take someone else personally, it's because some part of us believes them or fears that they may be right about us. We fear that others will discover just how awful of a person we really are and will abandon us. We fear we won't be loved or that we are too broken to be saved. We fear the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves that we try to hide from the world will be revealed... and then, we will die a lonely death. This may sound extreme, yet it is surprising what hides beneath our brave and strong and righteous masks when we dig down really, really deep.

I first began to explore my personal Book of Law following a difficult and painful breakup several years ago. The ending of that relationship brought what was left of my crumbling life down. It seems that for me, my life had to disintegrate before my eyes for me to take a closer and deeper look at what I had created of it. And when I looked, I was shocked to discover that the life I'd worked so hard and followed all the rules to create had simply fallen apart around me, leaving me with nothing but my own wounded heart.

 I was even more shocked to discover that the old life I'd created hadn't really felt the way I'd intended it to, even with check marks by all the right rules in my Book of Law. I'd played by the rules my whole life - graduated from high school, worked hard, gone to college and graduate school, gotten a Ph.D. and started a career. I invested my energy into a professional job and my heart into an intimate relationship with a person I loved deeply. I built my life around my career and my partner.

One day I woke up in a cloud of heaviness. I dreaded going to work; my job was a nightmare. I dreaded going home; my partnership was a vacuum. Neither was inspiring or fulfilling despite my greatest efforts. In those days I described myself as the walking dead. I knew there must be more to life but I didn't know how to get it.

When it all came crumbling down in unexpected and dramatic ways, I was forced to take a radically honest look at my life and what I had created of it. The bottom line: I had not honored myself in my own life. I had listened to and done all the things that others thought I should do, the ways they thought I should do them, and had slowly but surely abandoned myself to the approval and love of others.

I learned a huge lesson about love from that: Loving others from a place of emptiness is not really love; it's need. And when we believe we are so empty within ourselves that we need the love of another to feel full and whole, we become willing to surrender ourselves to get their love. And when we surrender ourselves for love, eventually we lose ourselves to it - like a drug addict seeking out their next fix.

Today I believe (and it is just that - my belief) that we are all whole and divine Beings; we just forget who we are. We get wounded in life and we forget our true, loving and joyous natures. We forget that as children of a Divine Source, however you label that Source - as God, Great Spirit, Allah, Buddha, Creator, etc. - we are divine and whole and beautiful just as we are. We don't need anything from anyone else to be whole; we are already whole. We just have to remember that we are whole.

I like to say that we are all perfectly imperfect. And like drops of water in a divine ocean, we cannot separate ourselves from our divinity. We may forget our divinity, yet we cannot separate ourselves from it any more than we can separate the blood of our ancestors out of our bodies. We can turn our minds away from it and believe that we are somehow separate from the Divine and less than whole just as we are, but that is what spiritual mentor Marianne Williamson calls "error thinking." Forgetting who we are is not a condition; it's a mental mistake.

This past week I've been focusing on the old "don't take it personally" teaching. Today I send gratitude and love out to those who questioned my choices over the years because it gave me the space to deepen my connection to and trust in something bigger than me. Today I have faith in and trust that things unfold and evolve in a perfect way for the highest healing and good of all Beings, even those events that are scary, painful or uncomfortable to our human be-ing.

Today, this belief is in my Book of Law. It doesn't mean that it's true for everyone or even that it will be true for me forever; it only means that it's true for me today because I choose to believe it. No one has to agree with me for it to be true for me; it is true for me because I believe it to be true.

And as it's true for me, I find both Grace and Love interwoven in the dramas of my silly little life.

Good Dancin' & Glowing Wrist Bands

This past Saturday my Sweetie and I went out dancing with a group of friends. When we walked through the door of this particular bar, they passed out glowing wrist bands but we didn't get one. They were for singles only. I thought that was an interesting concept - to glowingly identify all the "singles."

Why would they do that? I wondered what the incentive was for this: So singles could find each other more easily? So there wouldn't be any question about availability? So no one would tread where they best not? To avoid any fights or bar brawls? To make girl/boy friend shopping easier?

And I wondered: What ever happened to dialogue and getting to know someone? What's wrong with talking to a married or coupled person? What's wrong with flirting with them? Dancing with them? Enjoying them? Is this not allowed? Did the glowing wrist bands signal "I'm open for business" or "Hands off?"

As I watched my friends dance with each other and strangers in the bar, I got this weird sense of isolation. Was it true that people avoided me because I wasn't wearing a glowing wrist band? I tried to see the wrists of all the gliding two-steppers on the dance floor but it was hard to catch a glimpse as they passed. And there was my Sweetie - wrist-bandless and taking turns dancing with everyone. I have to admit that for just a second, I felt the green-eyed monster that night, but it wasn't about my Sweetie having so much fun; it was about me feeling a little bit left out. I'm still recovering from an injury in March and I wasn't feeling all that great so was taking things slow. Not so for everyone else; they were beer-drinkin', two-steppin' fools!

It's a good thing to shake up your comfort zone once in a while. I got to see my Sweetie as a well-sought-after commodity that night - a fabulous dancer and partner that other people would snatch up in a split second if the opportunity was there. I deepened into my appreciation, gratitude and love for the trust and partnership we share as I watched all the energy swirling around that bar and dance floor to the beat of an old country song.

About halfway through the night I heard one of our friends say "We need to find me a girlfriend." And immediately everyone's eyes began to scan the room for the perfect girl. As I sat on my bar stool sipping a Boilermaker, the rest of our crowd were pointing and discussing the different women they spotted wearing glowing wrist bands: "No, not her; how 'bout HER?" Was it really that simple? Are girlfriends nothing more than good dancing or a glowing wrist band?

   

Later that night I considered what those glowing wrist bands really meant: nothing. It comes down to people's own integrity. If you want to sleep with a single and they want to sleep with you, it's gonna happen whether they are wearing a glowing wrist band or not. Being in a couple isn't a guarantee; it's an agreement, and that agreement is only as good as the two people who make it.

Today I am deeply grateful that the person I've made that agreement with is a person of integrity that I can rest into.

Surprise!!

Today I woke up early to see my sweetie off to a Saturday gig... I mean, early: 5 a.m.! That might not seem early to you, but it's early to my body, which is generally not ready to be up until there is a hint of sunrise outside.

Sometimes when I arise that early, I feel cranky and not quite awake. But today, I woke up feeling happy and full.  I saw my sweetie off and went back to bed to meditate and dream. I love dreaming just before sunrise because the content is rich and creative for me.

Maybe two hours or so later, I made my way into my meditation space. That's when I saw it: a beautiful surprise set up by my sweet Sweetie sometime outside of my awareness, which is a tricky thing to do because I spend the majority of my time in my office where my meditation space is, and I'm in and out of that space all day long until I go to sleep, generally.

But there it was - my Anniversary surprise: a vibrant yellow Marigold; a beautiful and sentimental card; a certificate acknowledging the day we met at a car wash; a red "Love" candle; a Chinese 6 Coin Hanger for abundance; and several of my favorite chocolates!

My heart burst open at the sight of all the love that was sneaked into my day...Oh - what a feeling it was! I cannot describe how such a simple yet deeply thought out gift touched me to the point of tears.

My sweetie got me; my sweetie got me really good with that surprise. My mind was not in the space of "anniversary" because we debated and ultimately agreed that our official anniversary would be what we both considered our first date: November 9th.

But we met on March 26th at a car wash. Yep, I was waiting for my car (which conveniently got "lost" in the back some place) and there we found ourselves sitting on a bench outside engrossed in conversation for an hour. My sweetie's car came out before mine even though I'd been there for some time before...

That's when I discovered that my car was "lost." When I asked about it, the college student girl with the drying towels in her hand said, "Oh - that blue Mazda back there is yours?? We were wondering who it belonged to!" Um, yes, that blue Mazda is mine. For some reason I'll never know, my Mazda wasn't driven up to the front like the rest of the cars. It had been sitting out back for over an hour, and I had been sitting at that car wash for two hours by that time, thoroughly enjoying the visit with my new sexy and sweet friend. I'm not sure who they thought that Mazda belonged to but it was parked out back, clean, dry and ready to go.

That "delay" gave me and my sweetie plenty of time to decide we kinda liked each other, and to make a date to reconnect in a month or so after I returned from some travels I had coming up. I like to believe that it was divine intervention so we could meet, but that's just the romantic in me...

So when I discovered this beautiful gift this morning, I was completely surprised. "Anniversary" was nowhere in my brain. Until I read the card, I had no idea what the surprise was for; and even then, I was a bit confused: "Anniversary? But we decided that was in November!" It was the perfect art of surprise.

I was reminded that love is simply that: a random expression that reaches out and unconditionally touches the heart of another, just to love. How blessed I feel to be the recipient....

I love love!!

Touched By Grace

On Saturday, I met a beautiful angel. I didn't catch her name because in looking at her, to name her seemed inappropriate for such an ethereal Being. To "name" her seemed somehow dishonoring of her magnificence.

I met her in a store. She was in the arms of her Nanny, a very loving woman who was enjoying this bright Being as much as the rest of us were. This angel looked at me with her clear blue eyes and in them I saw looking back at me... well, I saw me, in a way that I never have before: the undiluted, essential me. I could tell it was me because I felt it to the heart of my Being.

I looked back at her, feeling a subtle urge to bow my recognition, respect and gratitude to her. The more I looked at her, the more I felt something; the more I felt something, the harder it was to identify. Then it came to me: purity. This angel was the purest, most bright light I've ever encountered in this physical world. She was as close to Divine Source energy as I've ever gotten, and in her eyes, the truth was radiating out. My encounter with her touched me deeply, even if only for  a few moments through her eyes. (She looked a lot like this picture, although this is not her.)

 It was pure, unadulterated love that she radiated and that touched me so deeply. There was nothing whatsoever attached to her gaze; just pure and simple light and love radiating out - joyful and present. It was the kind of love that I aspire to achieve this year through my A Year To Love journey. Can I? Will I ever reach that place of innocence to the point of holding only light, love and joyful presence?

Ahhhhh. My teachers come in interesting packages these days and I am grateful to all of them :)