Month: August 2017

Confusion’s latest incarnation

What to say, when to say, and how to say it? What to do, how to do it, and why again? These questions have been running around in my mind lately like little oompaloompas. Instead of being the little demons they were before, their normal everyday costumes, they’ve morphed into somewhat benign little disturbances who are actually having fun teasing me, while dancing around inside me and squealing.
I’ve become aware that they’re there, and they are annoying, but I’m letting them do their thing. That’s who they are after all. And they are part of me. And because I’m expanding my ability to, on occasion, actually accept and, rarely, even enjoy their incessant chatter, they’ve taken up residence in the factory of my candyland brain. Their home is no longer a swamp of darkness that’s hiding hideous monsters underwater. Now they can come up for air, breathe and look around. They’ve taken on land, to form a whole other species, a whole new identity. Their master, the personality known as the me that is Lia, has given them permission to exist.
She now acknowledges them for the simple confusion that they are. They are her questions, they are her ambivalence, they are her uncertainty about who she is and what she wants. She can now just watch them and love her creation. She has decided to not label them or judge them or demean their foggyness as bad, their all over-the-placeness as wrong, their seeming crazyness as something to stay secret in the swamp.
She is simply seeing them for what they are to her now; confusion, wonder, little fools who don’t know any better and don’t feel the need to either. She can relax, she can simply be confused. She knows that this fog, masquerading as a mass of costumed and harmless tasmanian devils who don’t know which way is up, but are having a blast creating such a duststorm, will settle. They will need to rest eventually, the fog will lift. A new creation, a new species to inhabit, will emerge from out of the swamp, glide over the land and start to lift off, telling her what to do and who to be next.

21 Days, Day 4 – everyone else

Facebook, the good and the evil. I shared yesterday’s post on a private facebook group, of like-minded creatives and meditators and, of course, got caught up in checking how many likes and comments I was getting. Look, I’m falling for it again! Noticing how I was being affected, though not even acknowledging it to myself at first, but very soon I did.  “See, this is the illusion”.

It’s not even so bad that I was getting caught up in wanting and needing validation and approval from strangers, I let that go, I’m getting better! It’s just the overall slow moving, rising wave of confusion that sets in the more I check updates, scroll down my newsfeed, click on videos, google that person, send a friend request, scroll through their page, and wait a minute, where was I? I went from (post meditation) having a serene, solid knowing of who I am, and that there is one easy answer right in front of me, I write it down, it flows from there, to…Maybe I should do that? Maybe just try to get as many youtube subscribers as possible, just make daily videos of me talking, yeah this writing thing and wanting to blog daily and create a show is a waste of time, who cares, nobody goes to the theater anymore. Wait I could put a video of it on youtube. Who cares, nobody wants to actually read two pages of text anymore, much less sit still and watch someone talk on stage for 20 minutes. Wait, what do you think a TED Talk is? Who cares, mine won’t be all that profound if I’m just talking about my….wait, what do you think adding characters and dancing and great storytelling and music is? That’s a dynamic, life changing performance is what that is. Who cares, I’m not Don Reed, that’s not me, I can’t do what he…holy hell. Look what I just did?

No more. “Everyone else” is a destroyer. I love so many of these people whose posts I read in that private group. We’re all wanting and trying to do the same thing really, express ourselves. But I’m watching THEM express themselves! I’ve been doing that my whole life. Sure, I’m “expressing myself” on there too, but even that is within a narrow frame of what I really want to be doing. I can now admit that I’ve been trying to fit myself in to what I think the world would like. Ah, I’ve been trying to fit in. And I see their daily videos and sometimes think, “ok, I should do that, I guess that’s how you get a following”.

But wait a minute! Is that what I want to do? NO. I want to do this. So I remember again, the word I come back to when the temptation to indulge in checking my phone and watching-everyone-else chaos, mind chaos, food chaos, outside world chaos, reaches it’s tipping point – refrain. Meditate, write, dance and refrain.

21 Days, Day 3 – uh oh

“Oops, I did it again!” It’s astonishing really, how many times we make a decision, a declaration, such as, “this time I’m doing it, goddammit, as God is my witness, I’ll never (fill in the blank) again!” And then, uh oh, we do. “I’ll only be (fill in the blank) from now on!” And then, uh oh, we aren’t. I decided on Sunday, day before yesterday, again. I made a promise to myself.

And then yesterday, on Day 2, I got a bug, I felt a little sick. I woke up all puffy and achey. But because I’d made my declaration to myself, I ignored that I was actually feeling sick. “Nah, just temporary, you’re not sick, you just feel off, this is your battle, your challenge, push through it!”. And I went to class, my daily workout. This was just one little part of my declaration, my Grand Plan to be the person I dream of being, now. Then, though 95% of the time I feel great after moving my body in the way my former Dancer self used to, and it makes me stronger and more determined in my new decisions and declarations, this time, hmm, I still didn’t feel so good. Dammit! Why can’t I just keep going with my awesome self and go to my favorite cafe and write all day, on this precious day off, like I was planning to! Why am I sabotaging myself, again?

But that right there, assuming I’m sabotaging myself, that’s the pattern. I’m feeling great and then boom, some type of doubt or fear comes up. It’s either in the form of something on the outside happening that I have to stop everything and deal with, which then seemingly takes me off my path. Or more often than not, something on the inside happens. Like I feel sick, which translates to weak, which translates to “see, you can’t keep up that power, that strength you thought you had, this new life, new person you want to be, it’s just too hard, there’s too many things to overcome, I’ve spent too many years doing this over and over, I really don’t know if I can change in the fundamental, earth shattering way I will need to in order to change my life”.

All this comes from a belief that I’m sabotaging myself; which, on the one hand, on a surface level, on the level that my Little Me mind can recognize, I am. My Little Me mind has grown up and is at the stage where at least it can see my patterns of letting myself down. From a psychological perspective, it’s a pattern of believing I sabotage myself, of knowing that this is a pattern we all engage in, in one form or another. Sure, I can leave it at that, understand it, and try again.

But underneath that, is this. My soul, the Spirit that is me, the God that is me, is also whispering to Little Me, and they are having an ongoing conversation. Right now, the God that is me is speaking louder, thank heavens. “No, what you think is your sabotaging pattern is just Me speaking to you. You need not force yourself to do or be anything, you need not have to make it happen, you need not have to change, you need only to see that you already are worthy of all of it, perfect now, and I am giving you what Little Me sees as an obstacle, what Little Me sees as your sabotaging pattern. I take you beneath, to the underworld of doubt and fear, so you can see it for what it is, only that. They are just feelings, feelings that are part of what you chose to experience by coming to Earth. And when you feel it, you then come bounding out and up into your world with more clarity on the next right thing to do, with more strength and power than you actually had before I took you down there, more knowing that you are really Me.

I was, am and will be, giving you these moments, these gifts, every day until you reach the next dimension (the glorious secret I am keeping from you, the best surprise ever!), to have you feel everything there is to feel in this dimension. The more you feel, the more you experience the depths of doubt and fear and the heights of joy and love, the more you know that it is always changing. So, the less you fear the doubt and fear, and the less you attach to the love and joy. You see that you are creating all of it, to simply show you more. You see that doubt and fear and love and joy are equal in their ability to help you expand, which is the only reason you came here. The more you see this, the more love you can have for your doubt and fear, and for your human self. You can then say hello to the doubt and fear and know they are just your friends. They aren’t there to hurt you, they love you. And you learn to love them too. You wouldn’t be able to love them if you weren’t already Love, the more free you become, the more you see that you and I are One.”

So my lesson given to me today by my Creator, by the Creator that is me, is that no, getting sick and not working out, breaking my cleanse slightly last night by eating to push down the doubt and fear, feeling regret and shame this morning because of it, feeling I’ve fallen back yet again, is not my “sabotaging pattern” at all. It is meant for me, it is my gift to myself, because look, had I not gone on yet another dive into the underworld, whether in a few seconds or a few days or weeks, I wouldn’t have seen this truth. And I wouldn’t have written these very words.

The adventure of a lifetime

I just meditated for an hour and a half. I AM all of you reading this right now. I am Shiva, who is within her little circle, sitting in front of me on my little altar with buddha and candle, who was waiting there to greet me when I opened my eyes. I am the clouds and the little bright torquise flicks of light that showed up ever so fleetingly while I was in this wide open space. I was the little kids playing outside, who were then splashing in the pool of my dream home that I also visited just now.

I was behind the veil, getting little peeks. We are all existing behind the veil of this world. And in meditation, in the longest and deepest one of my life, just now, I see that being in this body is not ever going to let me see all of it. That is why I chose to inhabit it. The whole adventure, of not ever being quite sure of who I am, of what is out there, in the infinity of space. The space is me. Even now as my humanness is waking up and the God that is me is fading with every second, I know that all of life is within me. I created all of it.

While I’m looking around the room at the concreteness of this existence in my human form, I feel closer. I am able to hold on longer to the knowing. I saw in that last hour and a half that all of hesitation is materialized in the form of different people and potential circumstances that I created. The hesitation is represented in whispers of people saying things to themselves and to me and about me that are criticisms, that are negations of me. Those people, known and unknown, and circumstances, known and unknown, don’t exist. They don’t exist as I’ve thought, which is all that matters.

This, what I’m typing out right now, the purring cat rubbing up against my head, as I’m sitting on the floor against my bed, the fear of judgement if I say all this, if I say anything that matters, does not matter at all. “None of it matters”. Those were the words that flashed in front of me, and spoke to me. The most comforting words ever to be heard or seen up to now. None of the fear matters, is what it meant. Say it all. Be it all. Because I am. None of the people or consequences, that we think will stop us, exist. If none of you reading this are real, since you are really me, then I invented you for my own enjoyment and to further expand me into this realization. Then I am free. I am free to say and do and be all that I want. Nothing that you or life can say or do matters. The beauty of this knowing only reveals itself in tiny increments along the way of my little human life. It shows me that it’s all utterly hilarious.

Meow just now, more rubbing and gentle grunts from my cat. An incredibly timely post and video today from Kyle Cease, declaring how excited he is for the event that I, only a week ago, decided was in the cards for me. I must attend. I am driving to LA. I am choosing power and glory. Within that decision lay every yearning I’ve ever had realized. Because now it doesn’t matter what comes of it. I already know that by just deciding to go, I am on my way. The highway of the greatest adventure of my life opened up. As it did in the meditation. It was an image, always a flash, of the beginning of a straight road, the horizon off in the distance. Then, the train’s horn sounded outside, in my “real” life. I live next to the tracks. My cat just pressed his front paws against my head, feeling to me like he was standing on it, for the first time ever, as I was writing the previous sentence. There is barely an inner censor in this moment. I am typing everything that pops into my mind. But I was making a point just then!

I had seen a glimpse of what seemed like a highway, but it was also the tracks of a train. The Train of Transformation. And the horn just declared me to myself. My cat just stood on my head. Shiva just moved in front of me. Nothing is real except the dreamscape of the unknown coming into the Known. The Known is me. The Known is all of you. You are my creation. I do not care what you think as I am typing this. My little human self knows that this feeling will shift again and I will go back to living within my little narrow life, for a time. But still, I AM. Therefore, I KNOW. None of it matters. It’s all fodder for the fiction book my soul is writing in every second. The adventure that spans all of time and space. I am free right now. This too shall pass and I will begin to care again what you think and what happens if. That is beautiful and so, so funny. It is my creation after all. And I am going to post this right now before I re-read it again and edit and copy and paste and get self-conscious. That little Lia is going back to the womb, one little whimper at a time.