Do you ever feel like you’ve been sprinkled by the rule fairies?  It’s that feeling of being boxed in by all the things I should be doing and all the expectations I should be meeting. Or when I’m working on one thing, but don’t have any peace because I’m thinking about all the other things I should be doing instead.

For me, this feeling occurs as a result of primarily two situations, both of which I create:  1) when I’ve said “Yes” and I really wanted to say “No” and 2) when I’ve procrastinated on something to the point of it becoming urgent either because I didn’t really want to do it in the first place (see Situation #1) or didn’t prioritize the things to which I did say “Yes”.

So I end up feeling overcommitted and resentful because I feel like I’m doing what’s important to everyone else and nothing that’s important to me.  It’s like indentured servitude for which I’ve volunteered!  I get caught in this endless loop of missing the opportunity to do better because I’m trying so hard not to do worse.  Yuk!

But I know a solution!  When I am working a plan based on the inner guidance I have available to me, actively setting priorities, conscientiously evaluating opportunities to determine if they are right for me at the moment they are presented, and have some semblance of when enough is enough, I feel healthy and balanced and grateful and vibrant and engaged in life.  Yeah!

Then, amazingly enough, I have time for things that aren’t ever in the plan.  Like when that friend calls and wants to do a last-minute lunch because she’s in town, or my grandmother calls because she is lonely and just needs to talk about nothing, or when I unexpectedly run into someone I know and feel free to chat a while, or the trip to the store took way longer than I thought.  When I’m already in the loop of “Yeah”, these kind of “life things” don’t have the power to throw me into the loop of “Yuk”.  Yeah!

The danger of not being or having gone very far down the scale is that it makes it easy to rationalize a continuance of what we were already doing, thereby perpetuating a longer stay in the neighborhoods of frustration, exhaustion, despair, difficulty, bewilderment and terror.  At best, we get a situational band-aid.

The danger of being or having gone far down the scale is the risk of getting stuck in a morass of self-pity so great that seeing any hope of a better life becomes impossible.

The grace in either is that our only hope for recovery from these experiences is assistance from God.

Do you ever have this experience when your “ego-self” looks at your “God-self” and wonders why you are not acting like a maniac over a situation that would normally throw you into fits?

I am completely intrigued with this idea of remembering what we already know.  I believe we have all the answers to our unique life lessons already lurking within the residence of our Spirit and the process of maturation is really a process of discovery–like a treasure hunt where we are finding our personal truths along the way.  At first many of these truths relate to the laws of the physical world–how to get fed, how things work, how to ride a bike, etc.  As the process of life continues, though, much of our discovery becomes a spiritual quest, whether we realize it or not.  Things like choice of career, how to raise a family and seeking a deepening in understanding the role of God in our lives start to become the object of our thoughts.

The laws of the physical world remain and still hold evident.  They do not suddenly become untrue just because we enter into a strata of life that is spiritual in nature.  We still have to abide by physical world laws. And we now get to transmute these laws into a spiritual application while residing in a physical world. We learn to apply the laws of our physical world into an understanding of how to interact with our world from a spiritual disposition.

So how does this relate to anything having to do with practical everyday living of life on life’s terms?

As I have continued to have personal clarity on this philosophy, or theory if you prefer, I have concluded that my level of peace is directly related to my level of acceptance of this natural transcendence of life–from physical into spiritual.  I am finding that perpetual quietness of heart comes with a willingness to let this process take its natural course.  So many of those things we learned to hold evident in the physical world are really metaphors for spiritual applications and yet we have to first know the lessons in the context of the physical world before we can apply them in any spiritual context.

As we mature in years, our serenity and that feeling of comfortableness in our own skin becomes directly linked to our willingness to surrender the living of a life only by that which we can see and predict; and instead live a life by faith.  Living by faith is really a way of letting ourselves be guided by what we already “know”.  It adds a new dimension to our lives.

If we do not remember the past, are we condemned to repeat it? I think what is emerging true for me is “No, we are not condemned to repetition by forgetting; we are doomed to repetition by choosing to not accept the natural transcendence into a spiritual strata of life.”  When I am not practicing this acceptance, what I am really doing is putting the brakes on any spiritual growth and condemning myself to be stuck in the physical world; and then I am doomed to perpetuating the same cycles out of which I despair.  Let me explain:

Living in only the physical world as we mature works, and it is by design.  We have spiritual grace without any effort on our part. Our minds and bodies are consumed with making sense of our surroundings and how to interact with them.  And then we reach a certain point where there is this deep longing for something more.  Beyond that point, the physical world does not sustain us in the same way it did before.  There must be more.  Our sustenance must begin to come from a higher place.  And once this process begins, any time I put the brakes on it out of fear I am essentially limiting myself to what is familiar (i.e., the physical world) and thereby choking off a new source of sustenance.

This new source of sustenance (i.e., the spiritual strata) is so rich in nutrients because its entire nature is predicated on a type of “coming home”–an honoring of what we already know, a coming into our true selves, an acknowledgment and acceptance of what we have always known and have temporarily forgotten–a remembering of what we already know.

Recently, I crossed paths with a friend and we were talking about my recent blog post, The Reality of Perception.  As I was listening to her verbal commentary on the idea of creating your reality by taking responsibility for your perception, I heard myself say aloud “I know, it’s like we forget what we’ve already learned, like we fall asleep or something.”  And in that moment, a light bulb flickered on for me.  Our physical sleep/wake cycles are a metaphor for our spiritual sleep/wake cycles.  My frustrations with supposedly making no progress in certain areas of my life and the feeling of constant do-over’s was not some spiritual learning disability on my part, but rather it was the nature of the cycle of spiritual learning.

In the same way our physical bodies must have sleep so that we can experience “wake”, and we must have “wake” so sleep has purpose; new realizations about our personal life lessons only have meaning in the context of having had a period of “sleep”.  I have to keep “coming back” [to life] to remember what I already know!  Everything is always revealed in its divine timing. Sometimes I have heard the same thing from many different messengers before I finally “got it”.  It has nothing to do with the messenger whose message finally “sticks”.  They are just an instrument for the divine voice-mails I needed for that moment in time.  At that precise moment, I was capable of hearing and receiving my personal, divine messages, because everything that led up to that moment prepared me of being capable of recognizing something that rings as a personal truth for me.  Alas, a moment of clarity–a new realization, the finding of the puzzle piece for which I’ve been tirelessly searching!  And yet, as holds true to spiritual law, I will temporarily forget that moment of clarity until either that lessons cycles back around or I find myself in someone’s path that is in need of that morsel of clarity.  In sharing it with them, I am reinforcing my own spiritual learning.

Wow!  What grace!  And how about that for an answer to my frustration?!  Accept and embrace the nature of the process instead of participating in my own frustration by attempting to bend the natural course of a spiritual process to what I think I need.  The way I try to bend it is not really how I want it anyway.  I really like it better the way it is.  There is more grace in that.  It is the way it’s supposed to be.  We are all exactly where we are supposed to be, doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing, even if we don’t like it or understand why.  We all get to experience life through its lessons. Thank God for do-over’s!  Maybe now I can stop participating in retarding my own growth!

Have you ever heard someone say “People’s perception is their reality.”?  I have heard this practically all of my life, but in the last few weeks I have been thinking about it on a deeper level as I have wiggled my way thru a cocoon of change.  I am discovering that I choose my reality–my experience–by being vigilant over my perceptions.

For many years, I have wanted to see different results in several areas of my life.  Wanting or wishing for different results is not the same thing as actually being willing to do the work necessary to get the result.  Change is always an inside job and much of that change has to do with the neighborhood of our inner thoughts and perceptions.

If, for example, I am thinking about how hard a project is going to be, I am really sabotaging myself and setting myself up to see only the difficulties and frustrations.  If, however, I am thinking about how exciting a project is going to be and focused on all the gifts in store for me, then I am setting myself up to see only those things, which in turn minimizes the difficulties and frustrations, or at least my perception of them.  It’s not that the the gifts don’t exist in one scenario or that the difficulties don’t exist in the other; they both exist in the essence of the same project.  The only thing that changes are those things on which I choose to focus and it is precisely those things that determine what my judgement of the outcome will be–good or bad, enjoyable or miserable, fruitful or disasterous.  As an aside, praying for happy memories at family functions was some of the best advice I think I’ve ever received.  It truly makes all the difference in the world!

So I can choose to believe in the result I desire, direct all of my thinking toward that result and it is likely that eventually I will get that result.  Or I can let the fear of the undesired result dominate my thinking and eventually I will get that result.  I am discovering, though, that some desired results take longer than others, even when pumped with consistent focus.  It is not always a matter of thinking the thought and Presto!, that thought becomes a reality.  Sometimes that is the case, but not always. Sometimes, there are other iceberg beliefs that, in the process of focusing on my desired reality, will get untangled so that the focus of my thoughts can become a reality.  There is some stamina required here.  I have learned to keep focusing on the result anyway and surrender the ultimate timing of its arrival.  And I have also learned that, because it is not predictably always the case, I enjoy the element of surprise sometimes when the Universe does grant me the desires of my focus quickly.

I have always known that I have choices; we all do.  We all have the power to choose our realities.  But where I have fallen short is in being able to choose the desired results in the face of fear so potent that I can feel the feelings in my body as if the circumstances are presently happening.  At times like this, the possibility of being able to believe in something different, especially a more desirous result, seems virtually impossible, if not bleak.  However impossible it may seem though, it is critical to my getting out of the fear, even if it is a “start and start over” process.  To me, this is where faith enters the picture–believe even when it seems bleak.

I’ve discovered that I must be conscientious and vigilant over my thoughts at ALL times.  Doing so affords me insurance–a sort of mental insurance that when the fear of life’s circumstances shoves me on its merry-go-round, I can say “No, thank you”, get off and choose a different reality.  Those trips on the merry-go-round of ugly and scary thoughts that feel so good or even prudent at the moment are, in fact, an erosion to my mental insurance.  Without this insurance, I have very little reserves of stamina.

The reality of perception is that I choose the perceptions that become a reality in my life and the reality of my life is on the inside of me, not in the circumstances outside of me.

One of my friends, Rick Morgan, made this comment on my post about Depression:

Now, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole… Many leading quantum physicists agree that there are an infinite number of parallel universes that exist in very close proximity, and that our consciousness exists in the universe that matches our vibrational frequency. I believe that we shift through these universes at will by changing our own vibration/emotional state. So, when I force myself to be happy and expect good things to happen for me and my family and friends, I’m actually shifting to a reality where those things exist. So, do you want the blue pill, or the red pill, Neo?

I thought the commentary was too good not to share and I suppose I feel like going down a rabbit hole this morning with deep thinking.  I have often pondered the probability of what he presents here and I am coming to the conclusion that, while it may defy logic, the experiences I’ve had support this theory to be true.

I frequently find myself vacillating between what feels like different worlds.  From all outward appearances, I am still present, but it’s like the inside of me has gone somewhere else.  “Lost in a daydream” does not quite describe the experience, although I do experience being momentarily lost in daydreams and I do think that is probably a “short trip” form of time travel.  What I thought was so striking about Rick’s comment was that it presents time travel as the movement of our consciousness, rather than our physical manifestations.  I think “time travel” as we define it here happens to us all the time as a very natural thing that occurs without our awareness.  I think we all experience it, we just label it as weird, freaky, unbelievable, unexplainable, coincidental, bizarre…anything but time travel!  Time travel seems to have acquired this taboo reserved exclusively for the mad scientist, not to mention the assumption that it must be our physical manifestations that travel, which of course, makes the whole deal very un-plausible, hence the madness!

Back in March 2006, a poem called “This World That” chased me down demanding to be written.  It was an explanation to my lover addressing his frustration with my attentiveness or lack of it.  It describes my vacillating between worlds and how he can tell it in my eyes. You can read it HERE. The movement of our consciousness between realities is not really paranormal, it is only perceived as paranormal because we put so much of our stock into only the things we can experience with our five senses.  What happened to the validity of our sixth sense?

What is “depression” anyhow?  Is it really real?  It most certainly feels real in the midst of it and yet our feelings are not our facts, or so I’m told.  And why is “depression” seemingly destined to plague writers, artists and scientists?  Is this a special designation that would otherwise be honorable if we didn’t, as a society, judge it different?  If society was built around the eccentricities of artistic and scientific madness, wouldn’t that then be the norm and we might perceive the rest of the world as walking zombies, maniacs engaging in pointless activity, autistic, obsessive-compulsive, lepers or a bunch of heathens???  And in that sense, the word “depress-ion” hardly seems apropos.  It seems “alive-sion” might be better suited.

Is “depression” only perceived as “depression” because of how it looks from the outside?  Would it still be called “depression” if you could see it from the inside?  And for the one who is “feeling” it from the inside, does it feel “depress”ing because it is a battleground between calling and purpose and desire vs. expectation, obligation and responsibility?  And then further compounded by the act of depressing the former in the interest of the latter?

So, for about a week now, we’ve had these wasps outside my door.  At first, I was really annoyed (which I figured out later was really fear–funny how our mind can disguise our emotions), and was busting down their nest with a broom and spraying them with bug killer.  All the while I was doing this, I recognized this slight feeling of guilt registering somewhere deep inside of me, but my mind shrugged it off as “Nah, there is no reason to feel guilty for killing such pesky creatures. After all, they might sting you!  You are just protecting yourself.”

As much as I wanted to believe what my mind was telling me, so I could justify my actions, I just couldn’t shake this odd feeling. It kept bothering me.  A day or so later, with the same mind that was attempting to justify my actions, I thought “I wonder what the symbolism is of the wasp totem?”  So I promptly looked and it here is what it said:

“Animal symbolism of the wasp deals with:  order, construction, communication, involvement, development, progress, team-work and productivity.”  Source:  www.whats-your-sign.com/wasp-animal-symbolism.html

In that instant, I no longer saw the wasps as pests (this was the point I figured out that my annoyance was really fear in disguise). I suddenly saw their presence as a gift because I realized they were bringing me the energy of the things with which I am most struggling right now.

I continue to be amazed (and hopefully always will) at how quickly a new understanding can change our perspective. And with a new perspective, our behavior changes, too.  So now when I go out of my door or return home, I stop and observe the wasps in all their glory, honor them for what they represent and how they remind me of the lessons that I am trying to learn.  I can even get up close and peer into their nest as they alternately work and rest, and they don’t rustle about.  It’s like there is mutual respect. And the thing that really amazes me is that the whole time I was out there trying to clobber them and kill them, they never once swarmed me or tried to sting me.  They just gracefully flew away and came back after I was gone.  They rode the merry-go-round with me long enough for me to get the message of why they were there.  And if you are reading this and thinking I’m nuts, you are not the only one.  As I type my experience and thoughts here, I think it’s a little “off”, too.  But, hey, people’s point of view is their reality, so if you want to change your reality, change your point of view!

And here is the real kicker…I am observing that the presence of the wasps is really helping me.  For many, many months now, my desk has been cluttered with stacks of papers, unfinished business, project ideas, etc. and as much as I’ve hated it, I also had taken no action to change it.  Since the wasps came along, and I made my peace with them, I found myself inspired to clear my desk and do some organizing. And I actually did it, instead of just thinking about it!  And now, when I walk in my office, I dance a little jig because I am so thrilled to be there instead of immediately being overcome with a feeling of dread and defeat.  How I put up with that feeling of ‘defeat before even getting started’ for as long as I did, I really don’t know.  But then again, that’s not the first time I’ve observed myself defaulting to what is familiar, in lieu of what might be in alignment with my truth.