• The Speed of Life

    • October 16, 2009 6:56 am

    I’ve blogged before about STOPPING when I am running ahead of myself and back in that frenzy of trying to get stuff done. I’d like to expand the analogy further.

    I was speaking with a friend yesterday and when she asked how I was doing I said, “I’m on FAST FORWARD and I’m doing my best to get back to PLAY.”

    It was one of those statements that just comes out without any real thought but somehow manages to nail the experience perfectly.

    Being on PLAY means allowing my life to unfold, moment by moment, without leaping ahead to see what’s going to happen next. Since actually knowing what is going to happen is impossible (for most of us), being on PLAY is really the only way of being that makes sense. I can actually only ever be on PLAY. It’s the thinking mind that tells me differently.

    There is a woman I greatly admire called Sister Helen Prejean. Her experience as an activist against the death penalty was dramatized in a film by Tim Robbins called “Dead Man Walking” with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.

    The film was based on the book, which she wrote, and it’s a very deep study on forgiveness and unconditional love. I read the book and was so moved by her account, so altered by her argument that I actually started thinking about following in her footsteps and becoming a nun.

    Crazy, I know. A playwright who becomes a nun. Stranger things have happened.

    It was my admiration for Sister Helen that prompted me to buy a book (the name of which I have forgotten and a quick search on the subject ended up in a dead end) containing a number of interviews with women of faith.

    In Sister Helen’s interview she said something that has not only stayed with me since, and it’s been years, but I use often in a prayerful way:

    Thank you for helping me to never leap ahead of Grace. Thank you for helping me to instead follow quietly with the gentleness of your Spirit.

    That’s being on PLAY. Following quietly, not leaping ahead, letting the moments unfold at the speed of life.

    It is not easy to move at the speed of life but I can practice this way of being every time I remember to do so.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: When I am on FAST FORWARD I can press STOP or PAUSE and then press PLAY. I can follow the Grace of being alive with quiet, gentleness and awe.

    Knowing

    • October 15, 2009 8:41 am
    May all things move and be
    moved in me
    and know and be known in me
    May all Creation
    dance for joy within me.

    ~ Chinook Psalter ~

    I had to look up the word “Psalter”. It means “book of psalms”. And the Chinook are a Native American tribe from the Oregon region. Though I could not find an actual book there are certainly a number of psalms to be found in a quick search, all worth a read.

    A friend sent me this psalm the other day and I printed it out and pasted it in front of me on the desk. It’s particularly helpful for the person (me) who has, since she was a little girl, wished to be known by the world.

    There is great comfort in a prayer that affirms that I may know all things and all things may be known in me through Creation’s joyful dance. It sure takes the pressure off!

    Inspiring Message of the Day: When fear arises from the need to be known I can rest in the solace of the Great Knowing. Creation is always dancing for joy within us and we are always and forever known, on the deepest level, by its sustaining Power.

    A Ray of Sunshine

    • October 14, 2009 6:09 am

    My plate is really full right now. I’m super busy with a number of projects on the go that I need to manage and stay on top of so the job(s) gets done. It’s very easy to get stressed out and overwhelmed during this kind of activity and I do.

    I do not enjoy the work that I do when I go into stress mode. What’s the point in working if I’m not having a good time? Am I not supposed to be enjoying my life? I’m self-employed, which means, one could argue, that I am deliberately choosing to be overwhelmed!

    Often I am. I think I need to be busy because if I’m not busy then it must mean I’m lazy. It’s this kind of thinking that led to an attack of shingles a few years ago.

    Shingles are of the same virus as the chicken pox and herpes. The virus lives dormant in the nervous system. People who are elderly, who have compromised immune systems or who are under an unusual amount of stress get shingles.

    I’m young (“Relatively”, says the doctor — guess that’s what happens after you peak at 35) and my immune system is good so I guess I fall into the last category… STRESS!

    Once I learned that shingles can come back I made a promise to myself to let go of my need to PUSH myself to ridiculous limits and I’ve been pretty vigilant about that ever since. I have not had another eruption of the painful blisters.

    BUT I’m not perfect and I still end up hitting the wall sometimes, though never as hard as the last time. We do get better!

    When I feel like I’m heading for that place of overwhelm I know what I need to do: STOP.

    Just stop. In the moment, wherever I am, whatever I am doing, just stop. Stop and breathe. Stop and let go. Stop and re-focus on what is important. Being here, now. Being in my life. Enjoying my life. Stop, remember this and return with strength.

    There is a film called “Sunshine” with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz about the fate of a Hungarian Jewish family throughout the 20th century. It’s an epic picture, made in the late 90’s and almost 3 hours long. I remember few details. One, however, sticks in my mind.

    The matriarch of the family, played by Jennifer Ehle, is a formidable woman and one who refuses, unlike her children, to hide her Jewishness. The last line of the film is given to her, in a voice-over by Fiennes. He tells us that his mother knew the secret to life and because of that, her own life was rich and full and she lived without shame or regret.

    She knew how to breathe freely.

    I often remember this line when I am madly running around trying to get things done, thinking that the key to life is accomplishing stuff and being recognized for it.

    No, that is not it at all.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: The secret to life is breathing freely. That is all I have to do.

    Song of Gandhi

    • October 13, 2009 7:29 am

    I woke up tired and cranky this morning. I have a full day of business ahead and I was sorely tempted to go back to bed and not deal with any of it. Instead, I sought to understand what it was that is really bothering me and I prayed for guidance.

    Then I saw Gandhi.

    As I bent down to pet the cat (avoiding this blog) I saw Gandhi’s face on the cover of a British magazine called Resurgence, his eyes cast downward in perfect humility.

    I opened the magazine and read:

    “Gandhi inspired so many because he practiced what he preached: he lived the change he wanted to see in the world and his message was none other than his life itself. He was an honest seeker of truth, a fearless defender of the weak, and an uncompromising practitioner of nonviolence.”

    Well, that is a tough act to follow. How did he do this? Didn’t Gandhi have challenging days? He was, after all, human.

    A quick search for “gandhi’s faith in god” and I find this quote:

    “When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and when I see not one ray of light on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow.”

    The Bhagavad Gita is one of the central stories in the sacred Hindu text of the Mahabharata, an epic Sanskrit poem from ancient India. I studied this text when I took the Yoga Teacher’s Training Course at the Sivananda ashram in the Bahamas in 2003. Bhagavad Gita translates as Song of God.

    So let’s do as Gandhi did, shall we?

    Randomly chosen, here is Verse 7 of Chapter 6, The Science of Self-Realization:

    “The being who has conquered the mind, transcending the dualities of cold, heat, happiness, distress, honour and dishonour, is firmly established with the Ultimate Consciousness within.”

    How do I conquer the mind? How do I transcend cold? Heat? Happiness etc.?

    By accepting that the Ultimate Consciousness within is, in fact, the only reality. And this reality, I firmly believe, is Love. Everything else is an illusion. Everything else is a projection of the mind.

    This is the great Hindu teaching and though it is difficult to grasp it will free me from my worldly concerns if I continue to seek its deeper meaning.

    And this is all I have to do. Seek. Not conquer, not master. Seek. I can practice these things. I don’t have to do anything perfectly.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: When I am tired and cranky I can always seek the wisdom of a Great Teacher to comfort me. I will be given the teaching that I need when I ask for it.

    Thanks for the Giving

    • October 12, 2009 7:44 am

    It’s Thanksgiving Monday today. Canadian Thanksgiving is very different from American Thanksgiving, which kicks off the holiday shopping season in the United States. Here in Canada it’s a quieter affair; a welcome day off for most of the workforce and a time to gather together to eat with family and friends.

    Last night I attended a potluck dinner with a crowd of about 20 people I didn’t know. My friend, who was turning 31, hosted the “do” in what has to be one of the best located houses in this fair city. Nestled in a well-populated neighbourhood but set apart from all the other houses, it sits atop a little knoll and is surrounded by a forested gully and 360º views of the mountains.

    What makes this house truly amazing for me is that it was the childhood home of a man who was my closest playmate for the entire time I lived in the Yukon as a kid. His and my mother were best friends so he and I were constant companions up until my family left when I was seven years old.

    Just this past summer my parents came to visit me and we drove to this neighbourhood to have a look at the house. Only we couldn’t find it. We kept driving around and around looking for the knoll, trying to figure out where it could be. We were unable to locate it and we gave up, deciding the house must have been torn down.

    When my friend invited me to the Thanksgiving/birthday potluck and told me the address I recognized it immediately. She gave me the directions and I realized where I and my parents had gone wrong. There was a sneaky turn-off we had not seen.

    Sure enough, when I drove there last night, I missed it again and drove around the neighbourhood in confusion. When I retraced my route I saw the secret road and made my way up the long driveway, experiencing what can only be described as total recall.

    The house has changed a great deal so nothing seemed familiar when I walked in. But I went up the stairs and into the bedroom that would have belonged to my young friend. I found what I was looking for: a closet where he and I had pulled down our pants and showed each other our pee-pees. We must have been 4 and 5 years old. Ha!

    So what am I thankful for this Thanksgiving Monday? The passage of time. Funny memories. Coming full circle.

    Being brought back to that room gave me the opportunity to pause, to remember that I was once a child, to connect to who I was at that age. I was a girl with her whole life ahead of her, exploring the unknown, daring and fearless. She turned into me. And I am still her, three decades later, alive, awake, astonishing.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: All of us were children once: bold, innocent, curious. Life is always giving us opportunities to connect to the past, which, if seen in the right context can make us grateful in the present.

    Hold On Possibilities Exist

    • October 10, 2009 7:43 am

    I’ve just finished reading my friend Leanne Coppen’s blog about living with breast cancer (I’ve written about her before) and her tagline at the bottom of today’s post is “hope”.

    Oh, goody, Hope is one of my favourite topics.

    I have a Buddhist friend who likes to say, “No hope, no fear, I am free.”

    But I like having hope. The above statement, for me, speaks more to the a state of hoping for something, which, indeed, can feel like the opposite of freedom.

    I believe Hope is less a state of being than a belief system in and of itself.

    Hope is necessary for our survival. Hope gives us a reason to keep on going.

    Hope is not about wanting something to happen but about believing in the possibility of anything and everything.

    People survive cancer. There is Hope.

    Addicts do recover. There is Hope.

    Gay rights exist where they didn’t before. Hope.

    The human race continues to evolve. We’re figuring it out as we go along. We get it wrong often but history has shown we eventually get it right. There is hope for the future.

    In my angry teenage years I was almost afraid to hope. “We’re born, we live, we die, who cares?”

    Without hope, I reasoned, I am safe.

    This reasoning was born of fear. I was afraid to have hope. If I had hope and something bad happened, then what? Better to have no hope at all.

    Can we still believe in Hope when “bad” things happen? We must.

    It takes great courage to believe in something as powerful as Hope when things go “wrong”. Hope requires Trust.

    When things do not go according to how we think they ought, we must remember that the end of the story has not yet been told. Things are working themselves out. H.O.P.E

    Hold On Possibilities Exist.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Teenagers and Sex

    • October 9, 2009 9:22 am

    Last night I facilitated a workshop for a program called Young Women’s Voices, which is propelled by Many Rivers Counselling and Support Services, a non-profit organization that serves Yukon children, youth, adults, and families by promoting healthy relationships within the family, in the workplace and the community.

    The young women in the program are aged 15-22 and they’re gathering at regular intervals to dance, do arts and crafts, support one another and create a live show, which is where I come in. I was there last night to talk to them about the structure of a play and how to move beyond the fear in order to perform with grace and humility.

    By way of introduction, we went around the circle and each gal talked about her history of being on stage, what she was passionate about and her vision for the future. I enjoyed hearing each young woman speak about her hopes and dreams and was struck by the staggering fact that I am now more than twice the age of most of them.

    I also asked each young woman to say what she hoped to get out of doing a live show for the public. One of them said, “To get the message across.”

    When I asked them what their message was going to be they all said, “Safe sex.”

    Though safe sex was a part of my world when I was young I certainly didn’t go out of my way to promote it or even practice it. To witness these gals actively involved in a public awareness campaign for their peers was, to say the least, awe-inspiring.

    Times have changed and they haven’t. For example, I learned last night that some of our schools still do not even have Sex Ed classes. As one gal said, “They’re teaching us about land animals in Asia but not about our own bodies.”

    These young women have stories about girls they know who get too drunk to care about using a condom or don’t even care in the first place, alcohol or no. How do we teach young people to care enough about themselves to protect their very lives?

    It’s a big question and these gals are on the case.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: There are teenagers out there who are passionate about doing the right thing. They are actively engaged in the process of educating their friends about safe sex because they truly care about protecting their bodies and themselves.

    Rain Rain Come Today

    • October 8, 2009 11:03 am

    It’s currently raining in Whitehorse and the temperature is +1 C, which means the rain is very close to being snow and the streets are probably treacherous.

    I could leave the apartment and head out to meet a group of friends for an inspiring lunch-time meeting or I could stay here in my cozies and plug away at my work.

    Staying here sounds good.

    I was never a big fan of rain. I actually used to say that I hated the rain. Imagine!

    I can recall saying those very words to a woman back when I was still living in Montreal. It had been a particularly dreary day and I was feeling inconvenienced by the rain so I was complaining loudly about the drizzle. Her response surprised me.

    “I love the rain,” she cooed, “Rain makes the grass grow, it nourishes plants and animals, it’s life-sustaining and renewing. It’s water falling from the sky for us. What a gift rain is!”

    I remember thinking, “Bleah. I’m soaking wet and it’s grey outside.”

    But her words began to have an impact. Every time it rained I would remember what she said and over time it slowly dawned on me that she was right. Rain is a life force for all.

    She had planted a seed and despite my sour attitude it had grown into a new way of thinking. The negative had become a positive.

    Time to get to that meeting!

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Try looking at something you don’t like in a new way. See the positive aspect and allow yourself to experience the gift it may have to offer you.

    Marry Your Self

    • October 7, 2009 8:56 pm

    I usually blog in the morning but my day was too full so here I am in the evening when the day is done, which makes the “Inspiring Message of the Day” rather redundant.

    I’m back in my hometown of Whitehorse, Yukon after a week in BC and there is snow on the mountains and the promise of winter in the air. It’s getting c-c-cold but the air is fresh and clean. I’m glad to be home.

    I just spoke to a close girlfriend who is getting married in two weeks and I was inspired by how committed she’s been to her own well-being during the long the build-up to the big day.

    “I can spend all my time focusing on the material details like what I’m wearing, the decorations and the food but I’d much rather look at how I’m affected by this huge rite of passage, what it means for me in my life at this time. Deciding to spend my life with someone has changed my whole world and I’ve been paying attention to everything that it’s bringing up.”

    It’s admirable to see a woman being so mindful of her inner process during such a dramatic time in her life. There is so much scrutiny given to how everything is going to look at a wedding and it’s wonderfully refreshing to encounter someone giving thought to how the wedding is making her feel.

    Today was a challenging day. Arriving home after traveling is never easy. I call this time “re-entry” and it usually requires that I be extra gentle with myself because there’s lots of stress and exhaustion. After a day of “to-do”lists and meetings I was uplifted by my friend’s determination to take care of herself in the midst of wedding mania.

    Inspiring Message of the Day: Nurture the inner process. Let it take precedence over all else. We deserve to put our individual well-being first. When we do this, everything else will be first class.

    In Kamloops I’ll Eat Your Boots

    • October 3, 2009 8:04 am

    I’m in Kamloops, BC, for a conference and being here reminds me of the Dennis Lee poem “In Kamloops”, which contains the line I’ve chosen as the title for today’s blog.

    I didn’t know where Kamloops was when I was a kid and when that poem was read to me by my parents but I imagined it was somewhere in boot country, where everything was made of boots, or looked like boots.

    From what I can see, most of the city is in a valley surrounded by low-rise mountains, which are brown like the desert and look just as dry. But it’s beautiful. I really like the way it looks. It doesn’t have the lush green of the coastal rain forest nor does it have the rocky magic of the mountains but it’s got Dennis Lee and it’s got my vote.

    Kamloops, visually impressive: check.

    For your Inspiring Message of the Day today I’d like you to visit my friend Leanne Coppen’s blog. It’s her one-year anniversary blogging for Chatelaine about her experience living with breast cancer.

    She’s a witty, honest scribe and I love her dearly. Check it out:

    http://blog.en.chatelaine.com/category/living-with-breast-cancer/

    If for some reason the link doesn’t work, Google “Chatelaine”, click on Blogs and choose “Living with Breast Cancer.”