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.

Accepting...over and over again

How and why I write:

I love writing.
I never feel as if I get enough time for it.
I never feel as if I get enough time for it because:
It’s like a craving (or an addiction)
It’s more than writing
It’s about quiet time alone
It’s about feelings, soul, connection
I work a little
My husband likes to cook (and I do the clean up)
My adult daughter Angela is in school fulltime and she and her son Henry, the love of my life, live with us.
I have: two other adult kids, Mia and Ian and a large extended family
A dog Samantha, cats Simeon and Maximus, birds Quizzie and Jimmy Joe
A house, a yard, a car, bills

Because of this pretty normal, ordinary life, I get up early and listen for what comes in the dark, quiet, pre-dawn stillness.

This morning I realize that I accept certain things physically – like the ordinary life -- like having, at present, frozen shoulder, and all the various limitations of time, body, age.

I started thinking about this because a month ago I was excited about getting two of the three books of A Course of Love into digital book format for Kindle. Then I got stalled out by the frozen shoulder. Every day this task undone comes into my mind – the feeling of the need to get the final book done.

There’s a history to why the two books I have up are the 2nd and 3rd rather than the first and second, and why the first is difficult. Almost, (in print anyway) a never before told story.

It’s 2001 and New World Library, the first publisher of this course, is preparing for the American Booksellers Association Convention. They produce a sampler of the first chapter of A Course of Love. We (the four of us who’d formed a core group to get it out) started getting feedback. One said the tone was too strident. It would turn people off. Another noted that the first chapter was like an introduction. For these and various other reasons, we suggested that New World choose a different sample chapter, and the first chapter became “The Prelude.”

Getting back to the present, I hadn't ever adjusted my own manuscript to fit this change. In it, Chapter 1 is still Chapter 1 rather than the prelude, and thus, chapter 2 and each chapter thereafter, is not numbered in the same way as the book. Since each paragraph is numbered, this means going through the manuscript and renumbering each paragraph. It turns out that doing that is murder on my arm…a whole different thing that straight typing…which isn’t as easy as it used to be either.

I got the first five chapters done and then gave up. I accepted it. Now is not the time.

Yet everyday I think, maybe I could just do a page or two a day. And everyday I decide that, no, it’s not time.

I find this kind of thing fascinating…acceptance and the need…at least the one I have, to accept over and over. Things like acceptance aren’t cut and dried. This is what I’ve found. Like those I work with in eldercare, I chafe against limitations. I have things I want to do. I have strong feelings about some of them. Even without strong feelings and with a good excuse not to wash the floor, I still, at times can’t wait around for someone else to do it. I can use my left arm so it’s still possible. I’ve tried, but using my left hand with a mouse is a no go.

Over the years one of the biggest discoveries I’ve made is that timing is not something to mess with. I still fret over it (uselessly I know), but in the end it always makes me listen. It’s almost like an intuition aided by signs, which our bodies provide all the time. Basically it goes like this: if it’s too much effort, now is not the time. And as much as you’d like to have a reason, you don’t have to know the reason.

I think it’s called trust.

This time

At this time last year my new book, The Given Self was just coming out. It “arrived” on December 8, a few days before it’s official publishing date. Obama was assigned the Nobel Prize around the same time and a friend in Norway wrote me with the headline there that said, “It’s not his fault.” I was making occasional forays out to my back yard cabin in my down coat, just beginning work with a new eldercare client, trying to find the time to do all the things my publisher suggested I do, and beginning to get anxious about the book launch scheduled for January (which came on a day of bitter cold and perilously ice-slicked roads).

I had also just begun to have those feelings of – “How can I write a book like The Given Self and then go against myself and my own nature?” At the time those feelings were about the publishing suggestions. (Do I really want to try to do radio shows when I never listen to them?) The promoting didn’t feel as if it fit me, but I received advice from fellow author Nouk Sanchez, that she was an introvert and anxious about such things initially too, but that they were also exciting. It was funny because, as little as I consider myself a public person or public speaker, I was told, a month later (at the book launch) that I was “a natural,” and anyway, I’d know for a while that I can do it, it’s just…you know…the Do I want to question.

My life this year is different in a lot of ways but I still ask myself those questions. I’m still discovering who I am now. The books I’ve written and read, and the readers who share with me, keep pushing me to be true to myself.

I love books.