Sunset on a leaning tree

It’s the middle of the evening and I’m running out of gas. Funny how those expressions come about and stick with you. Maybe there’ll be a generation talking about running out of gas long after electric cars. I hope so. It’s not the expression so much as it is what it conveys. It’s nice, once in a while, to write an easy turn of phrase that is so universal. You know someone reading it can tell just how you feel.

As much of a sunrise person as I am, I’ve not been as poised for sunset. Tonight, coming out the back door, there was something about the light and the way it shown on this one tall tree just inside the woods side of the yard. It was standing out like an actress surrounded by a chorus line that no one was looking at. The spotlight was on her alone. It made me feel as if I’d never seen her before…and how could I have missed her.

This particular tree is a leaner, tall and slender. I suppose it was last fall that we had the branches cut that seemed to make her lean toward sunrise. She’s still leaning and now so bare. In the light she made an arc. Henry and I saw a deer cross the road yesterday and the tree reminded me of her: young and slender. Our deer crossing was at about the same time of evening and the light graced her too.

Sunrise and sunset feel like graceful, quiet times, and I’m glad of them.

Focus and multi-tasking

I’m not a multi-tasker. It was nice to hear of a report recently that said that even though multi-tasking was thought previously to be good for the brain, this is no longer considered to be true. There you go, another one of those studies like the ones about food that, just when you’re getting used to everyone looking at you funny because you still eat butter, reverses its findings so that, if you were so inclined, you could say “I told you so.”

Being as I’m not a multi-tasker, multi-tasking times wear on me. This month, just as I was starting on the first home improvements in fifteen years, I was called for jury duty. I had to quick finish up with my taxes before that started last week. The jury duty has been great actually, but I can’t talk about it. And even if I could, I’d be stymied by the way my brain gets when it’s had multi-tasking thrust upon it.

The great thing about any creative endeavor is that it requires focus. That’s also its curse in a multi-tasking world. One thing I can say about the beauty of jury duty is that it’s focused: cell phones off, previous obligations canceled, attention required and also appreciated. Ah. No wonder I’ve been liking it.

I’m in one of my periods where it seems stupid to share when no one’s sharing back. I’ve finally signed on with a new website company who assures me that I haven’t had the kind of blog that gets noticed. Then I feel the whole blessing/curse thing again.

If you’ve noticed, I’m also taking a break from writing on the practices of A Course of Love. Maybe doing that writing even started the “why do it” feeling because, when you write with a somewhat more serious intention of sharing, you have more a yen for response. With a nice obscure little blog, you can mainly just write for the fun of it, when you take your break from other things, when you can respond to the yen to spend a few minutes with that creative side of yourself that you’ve been missing – just to get back in touch with “it” rather than with anyone else.

I maintain that writers write for themselves. Sharing is a side benefit. If sharing were the major intention, most of us would be hopelessly disappointed. Our creative sources call us out. They won’t be ignored. They invite us to spend time with ourselves and to express that time in words (or music, art, wood). Don’t ask me why. But, since I know we’re all creative types of one sort or another, I’m sure you understand.

The Whole

Doing this writing on the Course’s practices is a grand experiment – or maybe a puny one. It’s just that I got done with “giving and receiving as one” and don’t think I spoke of it from the heart at all. Because what my heart knows about it wasn’t in there even obliquely.

Here’s what I mean and it goes to why I haven’t done this kind of writing before and why I’m questioning if I’m going to keep doing it now. When you take things apart, you miss the whole.

It was as if I “remembered” the whole today and then everything I’d written seemed so trite. True enough in a certain way, but not the whole.

I’ve said many times that there’s some way this Course comes to us as a whole. This is what has, for me, made it so fundamentally different. I’ve never gotten “stuck” in places, and I don’t know if I can explain what I mean but what I’ve written here gives me a chance to try, even if no one’s been listening all along (which may turn out to be a good thing).

Each time I’ve gone “back” to A Course of Love – doesn’t matter which book it is – I find something incredible. I’m awed.

A friend just wrote me about re-reading The Dialogues and he said – “I can’t understand why this isn’t a classic.” That’s how I feel when I go back. And being as I give talks once in a while and imagine that someday more people will be in awe and they’ll invite me to come and share with them – I wonder about all of this. These thoughts come, and they don’t come without an inner sense of excitement for how a day or a weekend could be spent on one particular thing: on “Dialogue” or “Freedom” or these beliefs/practices.

And then invariably I hit this wall of PARTS.

It seems if you pick things out and try to find the substantial in them, you’ve got less than the whole and it doesn’t work. You’ve missed the essence.

Case in point – these blogs on the belief/practices. This may just be me not being a scholar, or the way I came to these practices looking for something to help, or my lacks as a writer – but what I’ve written by focusing on this “part” of the whole…and doing 3-4-5- blog entries on Giving and Receiving as One, hasn't revealed the essence of it.

These chapters I'm writing on are, after all, in The Treatises, and the treatises aren’t the course or the dialogues. The Treatises – it is said right out somewhere – are practical. We are to have “gotten it” in A Course of Love, and then that inner knowing is followed up by these practical lessons. The Dialogues begin with a little more of that, like the confidence we’re sorely lacking, all the human stuff that gets in our way. But then they soar away/and twist back/and soar away again.

It is so confounding and so brilliant the way this Course begins at the end and ends at the beginning! Let’s just sweep you off into Never Never Land and then hand you back down into the jaws of life on the ground.

When we go “back” to A Course of Love after reading The Dialogues it’s like culture shock. When we’re into The Dialogues, just getting the hang of being on the mountain, we’re trust back to level ground. We’re upped and downed for nearly a thousand pages. Taken on a trip full of reversals and switchbacks and replacements, heights and depths, All and nothing.

We end in the land of “somewhere new” and we can’t quite go back, as I’ve tried to do, and pick out a few chapters, and stick with what’s in them.

Which leads me to what I wanted to say and that is that giving and receiving as one is so much bigger and broader than what I’ve said.

The essence of giving and receiving as one is the very act of intimacy, of being received, and of receiving. The ACT of holding your heart open for another and being open to be held. This is the embrace. Love to love inviolate. This is the deep mystery of our secret selves, perhaps our souls, meeting soul to soul.

Yes, there are practical aspects and I have needed to go back and touch them, to remember them. But that’s what I do. “I” touch “them.” When I’m not doing that, something vaster touches me.

The practical things aren’t what hold my heart. They’re not the things that moved me, touched me, let me feel received, or opened me to receive. “Helpful” isn’t holy. It’s not the miraculous.

Practices and beliefs may be needed at times, but they’re not the grand meltdown of the whole into one messy, murky, convoluted entity called me or you awash in the embrace of something glorious that lies far beyond the helpful.

No Relationships are Special

I remember how, on first receiving these short forms of these major themes, I felt that each contained a bit of the other, and as if none of them said what I would have expected them to say. This is true in this very short discussion of leaving special relationships behind.

I like that it’s short and sweet and that again the major thrust is on being who we are:

“Dedication to the goal of being who you are may at first seem selfish, but it is “the most sincere form of relationship. Relationship based on anything other than who you are is but a mockery of relationship.”

Being honest now is a “call to truth.”

Keeping our focus on being who we are aids us in this practice. There's no need to analyze our relationships for evidence of specialness. Our examination remains with ourselves and with living from the truth.

This treatise on the nature of unity begins with a discussion of treasure. What is treasured, both within and without, leads to an exploration of callings. Callings, Jesus said, come in many forms. We can feel a call – as to be a musician, doctor or priest. That’s one kind of calling.

In relationship, some of these calls come as demands and sometimes we’re “called out” in relationship. At times we might need to “call out” those we are in relationship with. It’s not that we ignore the richness or the conflict found in relationship, but that, in a sense, we mind our own business (or our own hearts). In sticking with what we truly feel, by listening openly to what is shared with us, by the very “give and take” of relationship, we are aided in seeing things about ourselves that we might not want to see. In sharing honestly with others, we can aid them. Keeping our integrity, we can’t lose or rob another.

“Your loyalty must be totally to the truth of who you are and not continue to be split by special relationships. While your love relationships will provide a rich learning ground for you now, they must also now be separated from all that would continue to make them special.”

Next: Loss, Gain and Change

(Sharing from the beliefs/practices in "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition," the second treatise in the second volume of A Course of Love. First on "No Relationships are Special.)

Giving, Receiving, and the discipline to express our true selves

The part of this belief that is about accepting needs has been challenging for me to put into practice in relationship. I may be pretty good at writing about my true feelings, but ask me to sit down with my husband and have an honest discussion about getting needs met, or to kindly but firmly express what I feel comfortable giving to other family members, and my mouth gets dry, clamps itself shut, and my cheeks flush as a heat rises in me. In not having the discipline to voice my needs, I am not being myself, and it is not even for reasons of censoring negativity or ceasing to judge. It’s about really needing practice at doing something I’ve avoided doing my whole life.

In this area, I’m happy to look at practice as being about developing skills and having the courage to practice them until I’m good at it; it becomes a little easier; or maybe even if it’s always hard. What I have found is that I no longer want to act in many of the ways that I do. I’m aware, painfully aware of this. Sometimes I feel as if an action is not good for me, sometimes that it’s not good for another, but after a while you’ve gotta’ see that both are the same thing. That’s a revelation and a relief. And I’ve begun to get a little better at seeing this since reminding myself of these beliefs/practices.

Our minds have a way of perpetuating our usual means of relating even after our hearts’ wisdom would have us leaving these ways behind. Mental patterns seem set in stone—imbedded in certain relationships like the air we jointly breathe, and so “in our faces” every day, day after day. This, too, is our opportunity to practice; to practice in life.

A call to practice is just that…it’s not a pronouncement that we’re failures or that we’re not coming from our hearts, or that we’re egoic. Our feelings can, at times, be precisely a confusion about what our hearts feel. As we reunite with our hearts, we can become so aware of our feelings that we’re like putty; getting shaped and at times sapped by every emotion that we meet.

Here is what Jesus has suggested as a means of practice:

“Bring the thoughts and feelings that arise to the place within your heart that has been prepared for them. Do not deny them. Bring them first to your Self, to the Self joined in unity at the place of your heart. From this place you learn to discriminate, to separate the false from the true…. With truth and illusion separated, you develop the discipline to express your true Self, as you are now. This is the only way the Self you are now has to grow and change. This is the only means the Self you are now has of giving and receiving as one. This is the only means available to you to replace the old pattern with the new.”

When we’re not honest, we get mad at other people half the time before realizing that we’re really mad at ourselves.

The very idea of practice being something we all need can take the sting from our unreadiness or initial less-than-successful attempts. We are “making known” not learning to play the piano or kick a ball.

As I’ve practiced extricating myself from my own pattern, some real shifts have occurred. I remember that I’m really doing everything that I do because of love…which ultimately is true…and then I can stop being so irritated that my husband leaves his socks on the floor or my daughter leaves her dishes lying around. When I pick them up, I feel more relaxed about it, and then the people around me are more considerate, and on and on.

Giving and receiving is not, I have found, saying: I do this for you/now you do that for me! No matter how much I’d like it to be, and to support these kinds of bartering feelings I’ve harbored, it’s simply not a wash.

Giving and receiving as one is deeper than that. It’s like drawing on that well of our truest feelings – the kindness and compassion that motivate us. When we trust that we’re acting from that place – not just for those we’re in relationship with – but for ourselves too, some of the things that bug the shit out of us will take care of themselves.

And yes, we’ll find the courage to talk about the others!

“Needs” are distinguished from “wants” by the simple idea that all needs are shared, and that this fact of life isn’t hidden to us. We’re aware of it. Our most basic human needs are shared. Not one human needs more water, air, food, love, freedom or dignity than another. Our needs are equal. Our essential equality is unquestioned.

This is where we begin to live out that certainty.

( Giving and Receiving as One, and the quote used here are from "A Treatise on the Nature of Unity and Its Recognition," the second treatise in the second volume of A Course of Love.)

Giving, Receiving, and Being

(Part 4: Giving and Receiving as One and the practices/beliefs from The Treatises of A Course of Love, 2nd treatise: "A Treatise on the Nature of Unity and Its Recognition")

One of the ways that accomplishment stands out as the “beginning” for me, is that it allows these other beliefs/practices to take root. What a reversal in itself – to have accomplishment come at the beginning.

Right away – at the onset of this Course of Love – we start to hear about our accomplishment. Let go of the ego, we are told. For sure let it go as our identity. We start hearing that we have a true identity. The ego is who we think we are. Our true identity is of God (by whatever name).

Kabbalist Marc Gafni and others, call our true identity our soul. In Soul Prints, Gafni says: “The human being is created Bezelem Elohim – in the divine image. What this means is that every human being is infinitely unique, dignified, and valuable. Our lives are about finding and living that uniqueness, affirming that dignity, and expressing and sharing our value in the world.” (xix)

It follows then, that continuing to think that what makes us feel human and unique is of the ego – whether these are uncomfortable feelings or distinct passions – isn’t going to jive with belief in our accomplishment, our uniqueness, or our needs. Belief in the ego (at least as ego is described in ACIM and ACOL) is like saying, “I’m not my true self…yet.”

Jesus says, also from the very beginning, that it is our true selves, not our egos to whom this Course is given. He says, in fact, that our egos can’t learn it.

And so…if our most vulnerable and human feelings are accorded to the ego, none of these beliefs or practices are going to sooth us, bring change, or propel us forward. Clinging to the ego breeds feelings of “not there yet.” “Not there yet” feelings keep us from being who we are.

“To proceed into each relationship as who you truly are, is to bring everlasting change to each and every relationship and thus to all.” 7.12

I watched a video of Earl Raj Purdy giving a class in A Course of Love yesterday. His style could be described as “all Earl” but it had shades of a rap artist and a Baptist preacher, an entertainer and a comedian. It was so lively. I felt, just briefly, as if Earl had what it takes and I don’t. But I was smiling even as I had the thought – so pleased was I that Earl was being “all Earl.” That’s what it’s all about. That’s what our many different expressions in the world are all about. That’s how – as each of us are uniquely who we are – we speak straight to the heart of anyone hearing our message.

Now Earl contributes his expression to getting out of the way and letting God speak through him, and I might attribute mine to getting out of my own way and then coming back. No matter how you say it, this is the journey most of us are on. We get out of the way of the ego and come back to our true selves (or the God within) – and there – we live, love, and express our Source in a way that only we can. It doesn’t really matter how we say it, think of it, or feel it, as long as we’re making that journey to being the unique expressions of love that we are.

As Earl read from ACOL Chapter 23: The Freedom of the Body, he read about our fear that when we lose our separated self, we’ll lose our individuality. He demonstrated that this is not so.

“To proceed into each relationship as who you truly are, is to bring everlasting change to each and every relationship and thus to all.” 7.12

Next: some observations from my own life about the challenge of needs

Giving, Receiving and Needs

Giving and Receiving as One (part 3)

A key in our cultivation of wholeheartedness is receptivity. Many of us are much more comfortable giving than receiving. Our tendency is to feel good about ourselves when we are able to give. But receiving? That is not always so comfortable. Receiving the help that meets a need can make us feel particularly uncomfortable – even weak or dependent. As strong as our desire is to have our needs met – our preference can still be not having any needs that can’t be meet through our own effort.

But this isn’t the way we were created.

According to Jesus, the overall plight about which we are mad and confused, and the major reason that we feel misled, is this way in which we were created. All our lives we seem to be assured that the ultimate maturity is either having no needs or being able to meet them ourselves. But our reality as humans doesn’t mesh with this goal. Human beings exist in relationship. For the first years of our lives, we need constant care. Even beyond those early years, we wither without love and care.

It is easier to accept that our being resides in relationship than that our relationships are necessary. Need has become a dirty word, associated with unhealthy dependency and lack.

The belief in giving and receiving as one can help us see need in healthier ways. And the practice can take us beyond the acceptance of needs to trust in needs being met.

“Real trust is not a trust that waits and hopes but a trust that acts from who you truly are. Real trust requires the discipline of being who you are in every circumstance and in every relationship. Real trust begins with your Self.” 7.16

The funny thing is that, in cultivating an identity for ourselves that is called “spiritual,” our tendency can be to become great deniers of needs, even those that are about expressing our true feelings. Our thoughts can tell us that some feelings aren’t worthy of our “true” self. A desire to hide all but our most attractive emotions can grow. If a thought is considered negative or bad, it is denied. From a desire not to judge, honest observations are withheld. This can lead to walking a tightrope of internal censorship. Suddenly we’re not being who we are at all!

Our thinking is full of unconscious patterns that can make us blind to the changes that begin to occur in us as we cultivate wholeheartedness. When our thoughts are joined with the feelings of our hearts, our intentions become more pure and there is less cause to suspect our motivations. We can call it like we see it. We must.

The discipline required in A Course of Love is the discipline to be who we are. Who we are can’t be denied in favor of who we will be. Being who we are “requires trust in self and honesty in relationships.” 7.19

Next I’ll share some personal observations.

(These sharings based on the beliefs/practices in “A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition,” the second treatise in The Treatises of A Course of Love.)

Giving and Receiving in Relationship

Instead of focusing on “others,” our practice, as we cultivate wholeheartedness, is to focus on relationship; on our relatedness. When our lives are centered in both unity and relationship, we are released from an idea of oneness that stands in counter-distinction to more than one.

In wholeheartedness, our relationships are essential; holy; and our interconnectedness is seen as the nature of our reality. Relationship is like a bridge joining opposite shores. It is a bridge to knowing and being known, and an end to feelings of separation and isolation. “Those you would view as being in relationship with you are not separate from you. The relationship is your source of unity.” (7.5)

Our relationships are not only physical, and so unity and relationship must exist together…a link between the closeness and intimacy of the physical world, and the equally close and intimate reality that doesn’t depend on what the eyes can see and hands can hold.

The amazing connections that I feel with people all over the world through A Course of Love feel like a demonstration of the power of relationship released through wholeheartedness.

Yet even in relationship there are needs. Jesus tells us that one of the ways in which we can embrace this belief and live it out is by accepting needs. An unlikely “tool”– one that is mentioned along with the tool of meditation – is needs. Our tools are anything that will help us bypass thoughts of independence as separateness –(unfortunately, the very ideas we were raised with!).

Needs, as related to giving and receiving as one, are what I’ll share next.

(This is part 2 of a discussion on the practice of Giving and Receiving as One as presented in The Treatises of A Course of Love, specifically, "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition.")

Giving and Receiving as One

(Continuing with the beliefs/practices from "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition," the second treatise in the second volume of A Course of Love: The Treatises of A Course of Love.)

The first sentence in this chapter on “giving and receiving as one” says this:

“We have talked much in this course of your desire to be independent without looking at the condition of dependency that you consider its opposite.”

It’s easy to think…okay…we’re not jumping right into what this belief is all about.

I’ve found this so often in A Course of Love. If I want to get at the basic thing that’s being said, I have to really dig. It seems that if you’re looking for definitions or something laid out in a straight line, this isn’t the course for you. Yet in the end, there’s logic to the theme, and sometimes I think, maybe this is the heart’s logic – a meandering that eventually ties loose ends together but doesn’t start out to make a point.

Part of the reason for this, I suppose, is that none of these beliefs are new. We’ve heard about them all throughout A Course of Love.

So, on along in the 11th paragraph, I found the germ of the idea and thought I’d start there and then back up. Here Jesus said that our “ability to go out into the world and remain who we are relates to giving and receiving being one in truth in a very concrete way. For to go out into the world with the desire to give, either expecting to receive in certain measure or to receive not at all, is to follow the old pattern, a pattern that has been proven to not have any ability to change the world.”

“You cannot be independent and still be of service. For as long as you believe in your independence you will not accept your dependence. You will not accept giving and receiving as one….” 7.13

We are to accept our needs and believe that our needs are provided for by a Creator and a creation that includes all others.

This is how we find ourselves looking at our fear of dependency. “Others” are the great unknown, those beyond our control, those who can influence and affect us:

“Others represent the accidents waiting to happen, love that is not returned, the withholding of things you deem important. This fear that you feel in relation to others is as true of those you hold most dear to you as it is of those you would call strangers. It is the very independence of others that makes your own independence seem so important to you. Dependency is not consistent with your notions of a healthy self. What, then is the alternative? The alternative is believing in giving and receiving as one.” (7.2-7.3)

Next – from “others” to “relationship”

Accomplishment and Discovery

This is my final post on the belief/practice of Accomplishment, as presented in "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition" from A Course of Love.

Earlier in this treatise, Jesus spoke of how, when we become aware that we have a talent, we say that we discover that we have a talent…as to sing or draw. We might also say that we discover we have a way with numbers or with animals.

This example of what we discover within is also about assuring us that not everything we are, or do well, or have to give, comes of learning. We can discover, for instance, our passion, or our goodness, our commitment or our devotion. We can discover our hearts’ desires.

In the same way, when we understand that unity is a given, when we feel and experience it in our lives – our acceptance and expression of unity creates our new reality.

“You are creating the state of unity as a new reality for your Self…. You are changing the world you perceive by perceiving a new world. You are changing from who you have thought yourself to be to who you are.” 6.9

As our ideas or thoughts change, they change us as we have known ourselves, and the world as we have known it.

This internal change is then the cause of external change. That’s what practice is for as well: first changing our inner world and the way we think and talk to ourselves, then living in such a way that the internal and the external merge, and finally realizing it in the sense of making it real. Jesus actually said that through practice, we gain experience, and from experience we gain true conviction. We gain first an ability to live our beliefs, and then that ability becomes an aspect of our identity and accepted as the nature of who we are in truth.

This is repeated several times. We gain experience, experience becomes ability, ability becomes identity. In other words, we don’t think in terms of beliefs anymore. We simply are the belief. We are the accomplished.

How much time will be saved if we quit seeking accomplishment outside of ourselves?

Our self as it was created and remains is our accomplished self. “The Christ is the accomplished Self.” 6.10

Accomplishment and Disclaimers

My second example of Accomplishment (stated as a belief and a practice in "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition, third installment on Accomplishment).

In Brene Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection, she tells a story of a woman who made fantastic jewelry. The woman had a booth at a conference Brown attended, and she was excited to go look at her wares. She was wearing a pair of her earrings. But when she talked to the woman, saying how gifted she was and didn’t she just love being a jewelry artist, the woman said, “Oh, I’m not really an artist. I don’t make a living at it. It’s just something I like to do.”

I’ve been like that too.

Now, this isn’t all the time. But when I’m with a friend who introduces me as someone who has published six books – the friend standing there, sort of glittering with pride – the first thing I want to say is, “Oh yes, well, my books aren’t popular and I don’t make a living at it.” Why do I want to do that? It’s like I want to cut short any admiration, any assumption that, having published six books, I’m actually a successful writer. And I’m as quick to say I’m not a spiritual teacher if an introduction implies that I am. You’d think I have no sense of accomplishment.’

It’s very odd because I do feel accomplished…and I don’t…which I think is what the whole thing we call “integration” is all about.

I know people just bursting with wisdom and talent and a desire to give. They know full well that they’re bursting with it, but what they don’t know is how to share it, how to share who they are. So they’re wondering – when am I going to be accomplished? Or when am I going to know who I am and what is mine to give? It isn’t a matter of not feeling wise or talented or spirited. It’s not that we have no sense of our accomplishment or that we don’t know we’re beloved. It’s more that we feel a vocational disconnect.

My friends who are bursting with wisdom, talent and a desire to give are doing it all the time. At least they’re inspiring me! Knowing them makes me feel absolutely grateful! I’m just delighted that we’re connected, that they share with me, that I know these incredible people.

Any of us can have a sense of our worthiness as a person or of the true importance of our work and yet feel this disconnect that leaves us feeling shy about claiming our accomplishment.

Maybe we’re not going to fulfill our potential until we find a way of expressing our inner sense of accomplishment. Or maybe we’re in a gestation period. It could be we’re finding our wings by sharing with each other. And it could be that we’re living on the edge, the cusp of the new, where who we are is a little ahead of the times. There’s all kinds of reasons of timing for the feeling of “not there yet.” Many of them are soulful. We’re finding our way.

Of course, this belief in accomplishment doesn’t only apply to worldly things, but it is in the way we see ourselves and our expression in the world – not just in the big stuff, but in our daily lives – that some of us most need to live out this belief.

It does no good to beat ourselves up for behaving foolishly. Disclaimers aren’t a great thing. They do just what the word implies – they disclaim who we are. I know this. I don’t plan to do my disclaiming thing anymore. I don’t need to hinder myself.

But I want to acknowledge that many of us have an inner yearning that says we must meet with that which we need to feel fulfilled. Essential worthiness and need fulfillment aren’t contradictory.

The story isn’t that of seeing one side of the coin as “bad” and the flip side as “good” but holding the tension of our yearning and our accomplishment.

We are enough, we are accomplished, even when we hinder ourselves, behave badly, or disclaim our gifts. That’s what we are to accept. To look at accomplishment, to see it, to catch a glimpse of how we feel, of what leads us to say the things we do, to demur or to boast or do any of those things that aren’t quite true to who we are, is to begin the work of acknowledging that we’re already accomplished, and no more so than anyone else.

I’ve seen that when I’m standing firmly in accomplishment, it results in a feeling of empowerment. I know that’s what I’ve felt from time to time, and it’s a wonderful feeling.

But it comes and goes.

This is why I’ve turned to practice. Why we practice. So that when such feelings arise, they stay a while.

We are already accomplished. The practice is for our benefit. So that we might feel empowered more often. This is great for us personally, and it aids us in giving our gifts to the world. Without that empowered feeling, we struggle more.

But we’re still accomplished. Born that way. Can’t ruin it.


Next – this belief/practice as it relates to our movement from learning to discovery.

Accomplishment, Our own wisdom, Authenticity

Before I give you my every day examples, let me just say a word first about the overall idea of accomplishment so that I don’t give an erroneous impression. This belief is, simply put, that we’re already accomplished.

Not realizing this, and worrying over being accomplished is a problem for us. Early in A Course of Love (chapter 6) Jesus said that with peace, accomplishment is achieved in the only place where it makes any sense to desire it. With our accomplishment complete, we move on to the freedom and challenge of creation. I take this to mean that when we quit worrying or thinking about our accomplishment and feel it and believe it, we are free…and oh…then, what we can create! We’re not wasting our energy on something that’s a done deal.

Accomplishment is linked to peace. This course is about wholeheartedness: ending the divisions within ourselves, joining mind and heart “in wholeheartedness” and joining the human and divine so that we have one self. It all comes back to this. With wholeheartedness we can gain the peace that is inherent in our accomplished self.

But…we’re accomplished even when we’re about as far away from peace as we can be. That’s the paradox that we must embrace.

Now that I’ve given a bit of a broader perspective, here’s one of two ways I have seen Accomplishment at work in my life. This first one I’ll share today is about when it’s shown up in a way that I could easily see as a help. The second one, that I’ll share next, is about when it showed up in its opposite form, which I’ve seen as a hindrance.

Owning my own wisdom

Last year, when I was invited to give a talk, I was having a fine time preparing for it until I had a sudden realization. The realization was that I wasn’t owning my own wisdom.

I’d had an awareness of this for a while – probably for as long as I’ve been the receiver of this course. When I first ventured out into hosting a Course of Love group at a Unity church, the minister who inspired me to try was a woman who told me a story about owning her own wisdom. She’d felt the same way as me once upon a time – sort of tentative about it, and then she had a realization much like I’d had. After that, she practiced owning her own wisdom – or put another way, her accomplishment…by… well, practicing it in her ministry.

The realization that came to me last year was different than the earlier “awareness” that I wasn’t owning my wisdom. It was so clear that “it was time”. It was like a shift. As if I was suddenly a person who could no longer not do this – not be accomplished – or authentic.

The reason that I was no longer feeling at ease with preparing for my presentation after the realization was that I felt brand new, and too unfamiliar with my new self to be out and about trying to say anything coherent. The newness was total, as if a change had already occurred. It had happened. The realization seemed to come with a full blown agenda of its own. I couldn’t wait, couldn’t pass. It was time. I was ready and I couldn’t continue to ignore my readiness.

This is what I mean by the way things come to us in life. The talk was the call that told me I had something to say – not something derivative – but something that came of my experience, knowledge, heart, soul and that could be expressed as “my own” and in my own voice. And it coincided with the opportunity to practice it. I had to dig for my courage to do it. It wasn’t easy. But I did it. This was a life example. I accepted my accomplishment and put it into practice.

In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson tells a story of asking a man to fill in for her when she was unable to make a presentation. He said, “I can’t give a speech as good as you.” She told him, “Of course you can’t. I have had a lot more practice at it than you.”

Our practice comes in many forms.

The call to our own wisdom, and being authentic are a couple of the ways I’ve seen this belief in accomplishment show up in my life.

Next: Disclaiming – my second example

Accomplishment

Accomplishment

Jesus said that we are never separated from our accomplishment.

I pray that I become aware that I am never separated from my accomplishment. I need help seeing that nothing I have done, or haven’t yet done, can keep me from it. I need reminders that the accomplished self is who I am, even right now, with all my faults and failings. I desire more than anything to carry this idea of being accomplished into my life so that I don’t have to worry about what, or who, I will be. So that I can relax, be as I was created, and serve with the gifts I’ve been given. I exist in unity. In unity, I know I can express who I am safely and beautifully. I can remain as I was created and grow into my full expression of that creation. I do not want to lie to myself and pretend to feel this way when I do not, and so I know I’m looking for the grace that will take me beyond belief to knowing and living my accomplishment. That, for me, is the practice.~

Our learning has us used to thinking that what we would like to accomplish stands apart from us in time. Someday…we’ll be accomplished. We believe that when our treasures, such as talent, have come into full expression (when that book is published!)…then we’ll be the accomplished. When we have reached enlightenment…then we’ll be accomplished.

But this belief in accomplishment says I Am rather than I will be.

Our beliefs can tell us of all that can be accomplished – or – of what is already accomplished. In this idea of accomplishment, stated as a belief and a practice, we are given the example of the tree that exists fully accomplished within the seed. The tree grows and changes but that does not mean that it does not begin and remain what it is.

There is a great emphasis from Jesus on time within these beliefs. Learning is what takes place in time and is what it is for. Accomplishment exists in Unity, devoid of time. It takes some getting used to – to envision our potential as something that is already accomplished – but the germ of the idea, like that of the acorn that becomes an oak, is that of an already existing accomplishment that doesn’t depend on time. Our accomplishment doesn’t wait but is fully there. It grows into it’s own…into it’s full expression.

Next I’ll share a couple of ways I’ve seen this belief (or the lack of it) affecting my life.

(Beliefs and Practice from The Treatises of A Course of Love, "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition".)

The basics of practice

I’ve said I’d like to share some from the practices of “A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition.” I’ll start with just the basics.

These are practices to cultivate wholeheartedness. They are very practical, human-centered ideas, stated as beliefs to be practiced:

"As you move into the world with the end of the time of separation and the beginning of the time of unity taking place around you, practice the beliefs that have been put forth in this treatise." 13.4

The beliefs are:

Accomplishment
Giving and Receiving as One
No Relationships are Special
No Loss but only Gain
We Only Learn in Unity
We Exist in Relationship and Unity
Correction and Atonement

What practice is:

“To practice…is to make known. Practice is the merging of the known and the unknown through experience, action, expression, and exchange. It alters the known through interaction with the unknown. It allows the continuing realization that what you knew yesterday was as nothing to what you know today, while at the same time, aiding in the realization that what you come to know has always existed within you …” (from The Dialogues, Day 15, Entering the Dialogue, p. 217)

Even though this definition of practice doesn’t emerge until near the end of The Dialogues, and even though it’s not an easily understood definition, I’m including it to suggest why, for me (as a person not prone to practices) it is so helpful. I’ve always tended to view practices as something you “do.” You sit down and meditate. You practice yoga or Qigong. When you say such things, many people will have an image of what you’re talking about, and so will you. Even with meditation and Qigong though, viewing the practice as only the hour in which you sit, meditate, or do exercises, is inaccurate. With this practice of beliefs, even such a view as the “hour of practice” doesn’t make much sense except perhaps in taking time to be attentive to them.

I’m always saying how in this course, our lives are to be our curriculum. These beliefs are to be practiced in life. Another view of practice that I like comes from The Dialogues. It’s the image of “carrying.”

“Carry,” Jesus said, “what you have been given.” Carry it like “air carries sound, as a stream carries water, as a pregnant woman carries her child.”

“What you have been given is meant to accompany you, propel you, and to be supported by you. You are not separate from what you have been given, and you do carry what you have received within you.” (p. 246)

So you can see where I couldn’t really begin without referring to these ways our practice is spoken of, even if they come later in this course.

I like particularly that what you have been given is to “be supported by you.” That really translates into support of ourselves…support or nurture as opposed to an idea of obligation or responsibility.

I guess you could say that what I’m looking to do through these practices, is get myself in a mood that supports what I’ve been given.


I’ll start next time with Accomplishment.

Deep Root Investigating (and The Practices)

As soon as I get any kind of idea of changing myself – with change basically meaning self-improvement (only phrased in a way I find more palatable), I get loaded down with negative feelings and a certain kind of focus that, believe me, does not help me change. The same is true of goals. If I get determined to accomplish something, I’m in trouble. All I do is think about it more.

Just ask my husband and kids how I act, and even worse, how I look when I get determined. I am told, “You should see your face.”

Being as I know this about myself, I lit on the idea – prevalent in AH Almaas’ Diamond Heart Series, Buddhist thought, and even Centering Prayer in a more roundabout way – of investigating what arises. If I find myself with a concern that’s weighing on me, or a feeling that seems to reach back and push buttons with memories from another time, I stay with it and investigate…but very loosely. I don’t declare myself to be investigating; I just stay with it.

I can’t say that this makes me feel good, but I will say that it brings insight, and the insight feels good. If I feel like I’m getting at the truth of the matter, I know that’s what I need. I’m seeing what I’m really dealing with.

So here’s the drill: I feel uneasy in some way…sometimes due to a particular circumstance, and sometimes for reasons that are very vague but still insistent. I investigate. You could say I feel worse, but I’m going deeply into the feeling as if pulled. I don’t feel crabby about what I’m feeling and I’m not berating myself for it, because it came up of its own and, the benefit I get for staying with it is it pulls me down where it needs to take me. I might feel all kinds of feelings – sad, or lonely, or humiliated, but I’m definitely interested. It’s like the feeling has roots and stories attached to it and what started out as a feeling caused by a spat with my husband sends me back to feelings that I had about my dad and some long buried pain that gets released for being looked at. It’s rarely an instant healing but it lets me see where the pattern originated and what it’s really about. Without seeing the origin of the pain, it is like treating the symptoms without finding the cause, and you might feel better, but only for a while, and only as long as you lean on the treatment.

I’d call this deep root investigating brutal but gentle and still, I prefer it to the self-improvement style of change.

A self-improvement idea would look like this in me: I’m going to once and for all figure out what I do wrong with men so that I never again feel this icky feeling, and so that I always keep my sense of self at the forefront. Something like that.

I’d start out crabby and remain crabby. Crabby, determined, hard, cold, already feeling wrong, and in my head. What might come out of it is new rules: I’m going to do this or that and if things don’t improve the consequences will be this or that. (My thoughts go to that sterile place often enough even without ideas of self-improvement – or maybe you could say with ideas of “others-improvement.”)

So you might ask why I’m writing of practices, and I’ll tell you the truth – I’m doing it because I’m still feeling the division between seeing the truth and living from it. I turned to these practices with the hopes that they can help me. I’m sharing them because maybe they can help you too.

The practices of A Course of Love are about coming to know the unknown, and so, right off the bat, they don’t have that disadvantage of coming at me like a self-improvement dictum. We all have our ways and this is probably the only way that might have a chance of working for me. (Our favorite spiritual messages are our favorites for a reason! They fit us!)

A Course of Love is all about wholeheartedness and I’ve been practicing wholeheartedness for over ten years. All that was said about it is in me, rattling around, messages sending me signs and clues and reminding me of who I am. The practices in the treatises are about the beliefs of this course and they’re there to lead us beyond belief to knowing. I don’t have a doubt about these basic descriptors of what it’s all about. But if I’m not living by what I know, then maybe there’s a disconnect somewhere, and this is what I turned to these practices to find.

Even as I say this, though, I want to add that I think it’s the rare person who is not working through things, basically, for a lifetime. It’s part of the beauty and challenge of being human and I truly wish spiritual texts didn’t make it sound so easy.

I believe what they’re saying is that once your motivation has moved from fear to love, you’ve done the hard part, and that’s the part that can happen really fast – even before you’ve realized it. In fact, realizing it – making real what it means to live from love instead of fear, is the basis of the rest of the course work – which is basically defined in ACOL as a life curriculum. (I would add, as a curriculum for our whole, entire lives!)

It goes something like this: Return to love. Then work out the details.

(Some of those pesky details, i.e. life practices, forthcoming.)

Consistent Practice

Tuesday. I am so grateful for Tuesdays, to have time to walk around and pick up all the detritus of the weekend, to spend one hour on wiping, sweeping, washing, and have the house back in order. It is a marvel to me and I wonder how anyone does without it.

I remember in my single mom days, visiting my cousin Lynn who had a husband and a home daycare. She got up an hour before the kids came and got everything in order. She had shag carpeting (it was the 70’s) and she even combed her carpet. It made me kind of sick to my stomach to hear all this. Could my whole chaotic and messy life be vastly different with one quiet hour and consistent use of it to keep order? It seemed too simple, too doable, and I knew I wouldn’t do it.

I have only recently gotten the quiet of empty-house Tuesdays. Not long after this new routine came about, I started using the first hour to putter around the house, setting things straight.

I have three mornings of empty-house quiet and I do the same thing on all three days, but on the others also throw in the laundry and do other chores that fall less easily in the category of puttering.

If I only had an hour, I wouldn’t do it. But I have six. The other five are mine.

I’ve been thinking about consistent practice lately as I review the practices detailed in the Treatise on Unity (from A Course of Love). They’re not exactly things you can do in an hour. There’s the proverbial “get still and listen,” which could encourage you to your meditation hour, but the practice examples are more situational while at the same time they’re based on beliefs that are too broad to pin down easily.

I thought maybe I’d share these in coming posts.

When it's all turned off

It’s late, (well it’s dark), it’s quiet, and I’m hanging suspended between sitting here and going out to the dining room to tackle the mail and bills I usually address on Tuesdays. When I’m not feeling particularly inspired is when I start hovering between rooms. I do this out of hopefulness. Tomorrow, I might be really inspired, so if I get the mail-chore out of the way tonight (when I’ve got nothing much going on creatively), then tomorrow I’ll have more time.

It is probably no wonder that I value the creative spark so highly since, when it’s missing, I go to my least favorite tasks.

I didn’t get up and go to the dining room. I came instead to the blog where, sometimes, writing without inspiration I hit upon something worth sharing. And sometimes don’t.

The thing is, is that it’s the idea of “hitting on something worth sharing” that bogs me down often enough. I think it’s why we write blogs and e-mails and short quips back and forth. The pressure is off.

I go to bed.

I get up in the morning. It’s dark. It’s quiet. It’s early. Everything is off. This is sacred time.

What stories tell me

I have this aunt called Aunt Margaret. My given name is Margaret too. I am the third generation of Margaret Marys after my grandmother and aunt. There is not yet another Margaret Mary, but there is a Margaret Rose.

My mother used to say, “If your Aunt Margaret would fix herself up, she would still be pretty. She has a nice figure.”

At Christmas, a brother I haven’t seen since I got my haircut told me I reminded him of Aunt Margaret. I remembered my mom’s comment.

Aunt Margaret’s hair was dark and going about halfway toward gray or white, wirey and shoulder length (like mine now is). She had a long, slim torso (somewhat like my dad and me) and wore jeans that she sinched around her waist, often with checkered, button up tops.

Her car was a big boat of a car. She had three husbands. The last one left her for her former daughter-in-law, then divorced. It is said that she climbed a tree to spy on them. If the story is true, it happened when she is older than I am now.

She was a feisty Catholic woman of a breed that still exists even if you wouldn’t know by the way the Church goes around acting. Sometimes you wish women would claim their power. The Church would change, or it would pretty much quit functioning without them.

Anyway, I told my brother that what he said was probably true, and that I didn’t mind so much, (I could still be pretty!), but I hoped I wasn’t like my aunt in another way. Then I recounted a story recounted to me by my Aunt Dee, my Uncle Owen’s wife. She said Aunt Margaret and Dad had gone to visit them and dad was sitting out in the yard on a trunk her dad made her. As soon as Aunt Margaret was out of earshot, he slapped his cowboy hat on his knees, swore, and said, “All I wanted was to visit and get a sandwich at the bar in town.” Aunt Margaret had other plans for seeing bed-bound relations (not exactly relatives) and saying the rosary over them. She’d say, “Come on, Jim, we’ve got to get moving.”

Another time when Aunt Margaret visited from Missouri and set about scrubbing Dad’s kitchen floor on her hands and knees, my dad was fit to be tied. She was simply a whirlwind of “doing goodness.” It was very tiring for my dad to be around.

My dad was a good man. He was known to visit the sick all on his own. He took me along when I was little to scary and sour smelling places. I could remember women of that era saying the rosary around those beds. They had dry lips that never stopped moving.

I didn’t want to be like them either. There was just plain something unrestful about them.

I feel at times that I’m predisposed to both following in their footsteps and trying not to.

When people write me about A Course of Love, I really like it when they say something about kayaking, or having a shoe fetish, or going to jazz clubs. I want a beautiful woman to tell me she loves clothes and jewelry, or a guy who hunts to admit to owning a gun. I like stories about pets. I like to hear about the lousy economy and the ire it arouses. It cheers me up to hear a good complaint about the healthcare situation.

What those stories tell me is that saying the rosary hasn’t been replaced by pious readings or meditation, and that doing good or being spiritual hasn’t put people on a one-track route to annoying their siblings.