To speak up or not to speak up....that is the question

Recently started a new job where I was immediately immersed in training events.  While I enjoyed the content, the presentation wasn't really suited for adult learners.  By this I mean that to engage adult learners, as a presenter/teacher, one has to be interactive, inclusive and elicit the participation of adult learners by asking them to share their own intrinsic wisdom and experiences, both life and learning experiences.  I realize that perhaps this is an approach that I have because I have been educated in adult learning theory through my Masters degree program in Adult & Higher Education at USM, but I also think that this approach to teaching and learning in adulthood is very intuitive, and in all honesty, much more interesting for the presenter/teacher.

So, in my feedback to the training department, I gave them very specific ideas and suggestions about how they could improve/change their way of presenting even basic orientation material.   Well, the shit hit the fan as soon as I sent an email to the Training & Development Manager!   She immediately shared my email to her with my direct supervisor who called me and basically chewed me out and gave me a lecture about how the way they do things is "necessary" for the material in orientation.  Yikes! Why is it that people get so defensive when you hit a nerve of truth in them and their way of doing things??!  Why bother to give honest feedback when you get that kind of reaction?  Now, I feel like I have a "black mark" on my record....Catherine is that upstart, uppity smarty-pants that wants to rock the boat!  Story of my life!  I take my personal power and intelligence and power of observation and critical thinking and apply it, and where does it get me?....in the corner, as if I should be in detention for thinking for myself and sharing my ideas with others!

So, my question to any of you out there is:  what do you do?  Do you speak up about your opinions and observations in any given situation, or do you just eat it and shut up to leave the status quo?

I'm tired of being silent, shutting up and putting up....with the status quo!  I want to speak my truth and be respected for that and taken seriously, with acknowledgement and acceptance!  Maybe it's a pipe dream....but I'm not going to give it up!  Thanks for listening :)

Love II

Love protects us from nothing, even as it unexplainably sustains us in all things....

Love

"You, O Love, are the eldest of all, altogether mighty.  To you we pay homage!" - Vedic hymn

What frightens us....

“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”  - Rainier Maria Rilke

On Suffering (from Richard Rohr)

Suffering

Transforming Pain
Wednesday, October 17, 2018

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain, with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime. If only we could see these “wounds” as the way through, as Jesus did, then they would become sacred wounds rather than scars to deny, disguise, or project onto others. I am sorry to admit that I first see my wounds as an obstacle more than a gift. Healing is a long journey.

If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become cynical, negative, or bitter. This is the storyline of many of the greatest novels, myths, and stories of every culture. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.

Scapegoating, exporting our unresolved hurt, is the most common storyline of human history. The Jesus Story is about radically transforming history and individuals so that we don’t just keep handing on the pain to the next generation. Unless we can find a meaning for human suffering, that God is somehow in it and can also use it for good, humanity is in major trouble. Because we will suffer. Even the Buddha said that suffering is part of the deal!

We shouldn’t try to get rid of our own pain until we’ve learned what it has to teach. When we can hold our pain consciously and trustfully (and not project it elsewhere), we find ourselves in a very special liminal space. Here we are open to learning and breaking through to a much deeper level of faith and consciousness. Please trust me on this. We must all carry the cross of our own reality until God transforms us through it. These are the wounded healers of the world, and healers who have fully faced their wounds are the only ones who heal anyone else.

As an example of holding the pain, picture Mary standing at the foot of the cross or, as in Michelangelo’s Pietà cradling Jesus’ body. One would expect her to take her role wailing or protesting, but she doesn’t! We must reflect on this deeply. Mary is in complete solidarity with the mystery of life and death. It’s as if she is saying, “There’s something deeper happening here. How can I absorb it just as Jesus is absorbing it, instead of returning it in kind?” Consider the analogy of energy circuits: Most of us are relay stations; only a minority are transformers—people who actually change the electrical charge that passes through us.

Jesus on the cross and Mary standing beneath the cross are classic images of transformative spirituality. They do not return the hostility, hatred, accusations, or malice directed at them. They hold the suffering until it becomes resurrection! That’s the core mystery of Christianity. It takes our whole life to begin to comprehend this. It tends to be the wisdom of elders, not youngers.

Unfortunately, our natural instinct is to try to fix pain, to control it, or even, foolishly, to try to understand it. The ego insists on understanding. That’s why Jesus praises a certain quality even more than love, and he calls it faith. It is the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold the contraries, until we are moved by grace to a much deeper level and a much larger frame, where our private pain is not center stage but a mystery shared with every act of bloodshed and every tear wept since the beginning of time. Our pain is not just our own.

Gateway to Presence:
If you want to go deeper with today’s meditation, take note of what word or phrase stands out to you. Come back to that word or phrase throughout the day, being present to its impact and invitation.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (CAC Publishing: 2016), 199, 120-121.

Rilke

 

Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you:  beauty and terror.

Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

I, 59

Rainier Maria Rilke

Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Translated by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy

On Art and Artists

Adapted from Martha Beck:

A lot of artists – filmmakers, writers, painters – specialize in showing how people land in hell.  Their work plumbs the recesses of human depravity and despair, shows lives disintegrating into chaos, unsparingly depicts the madness of relationships and societies gone awry.

Big, fat, hairy deal.

I’ll tell you this for free:  anyone can go to hell.  Most of us do so regularly; it’s a very short commute from ordinary life.  No one has to tell me that pain is ubiquitous and we’re all going to die.  I respect the talent of artists who dwell on this message, but they are worlds away from wayfinders, artists who Form creations that take their audience to hell and back.  Bad artists ignore the darkness of human existence.  Good artists often get stuck there.  Great artists embrace the full catastrophe of our condition and find beyond it an even deeper truth of peace, healing, and redemption.

To Hell and Back (adapted from Martha Beck)

A lot of people say, “I need to find my passion.”  They rarely realize that the word “passion” is from the Latin pati, “to suffer,” or that passion originally meant “pain” (as in The Passion of Christ).  Knowing that, it becomes much easier to track your passions; even if you feel no interest in anything, odds are you have suffered.  Wayfinders of all cultures know that healing the self from any kind of torment is the groundwork for healing others, for creating a positive change in the world of Form and thereby establishing your career, your life’s work.  Let’s track your true nature along this path of passion.  It’s often the clearest trail.

Think of the worst thing you’ve ever survived.  Describe it.  Then think of the next-worse thing.  If you’ve had a long and eventful life, you may be able to make a list of several ways you’ve been to hell:  being jilted, being jilted at the altar, having a miscarriage, developing tennis elbow, getting robbed at gunpoint, accidentally pressing “Send to All” on a very private email involving photographs of your special body parts.  Pick your top five, in order of awfulness, and then write them down to consider.

Though these experiences were dreadful, because they were dreadful, they are also precious.  Pain gives our true nature an objective we can pursue with genuine passion.  Whatever ways you’ve been to hell, you can make the experiences meaningful by leading others out of the same grim spot.  The most motivating thought for a suffering wayfinder is “I can help other people who’ve been through this.”  This is a win-win-win-win idea.  It helps heal the healer, transforms the tragedy itself into a gift of grace, blesses and repairs other beings and radiates healing outward to the entire Great Self.

Language and Transcendence

Our scientifically oriented knowledge seeks to master reality, explain it, and bring it under the control of reason, but a delight in unknowing has also been part of the human experience. Even today, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists find that the contemplation of the insoluble is a source of joy, astonishment, and contentment.

One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. 

We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to slide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence.....Language has borders that we cannot cross. 

When we listen critically to our stuttering attempts to express ourselves, we become aware of an inexpressible otherness. “It is decisively the fact that language does have frontiers,” explains the British critic George Steiner, “that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.”

George Steiner, Language and Silence (London: 1967), 58-59.

Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (Alfred A. Knopf: 2009), xiv, xviii.

Quiet surrender (for Jim)

You know that time with someone, when you can truly approach them, I mean who they are, the part that they've been holding to themselves for protection.  But sometimes there's an opportunity of quiet surrender when you can get close and be peacefully, lovingly, with deep acceptance with that person.  I love those moments of knowing, of being, simply two people loving and trusting each other unconditionally and without reservation....

LOVE DOES THAT

All day long a little burro labors, sometimes

with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries

about things that bother only

burros.

And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting

than physical labor.

Once in a while a kind monk comes

to her stable and brings

a pear, but more

than that,

he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears

and for a few seconds the burro is free

and even seems to laugh,

because love does

that.

Love frees.

- Meister Eckhart

Me and my sis and bipolar

When I was six years old, I was looking at a photo album my mother had put together of our family, and I started crying; crying because I knew someday that everyone in that photo album was going to die.  I felt their mortality, and mine with it and I was overwhelmed by a profound sense of loss and loneliness that I had no words for, no expression for, no way of talking about to my parents, or to anyone else.  I thought there was something wrong with me.  Of course there was; it was either the dawning of an existential being, or the beginning of a life of crazy! 

            Years later, I had an equally profound, yet different experience.  Somewhere around age twelve, I was walking with my family on a warm spring afternoon, right after the rain had subsided.  My sister and I were ahead of my parents, running and splashing around in the puddles, laughing and having so much fun.  Suddenly the sun came out, streaming through the trees; I turned around to look at my parents and I was overcome by a penetrating sense of joy, even beyond joy; it was something like ecstasy.  I felt beyond myself, as if I was looking at my family from a distance and seeing them as they were from the inside out.  I felt full of love for them…they were beautiful; everything was beautiful and I felt connected to all that was around me, at one with the world that surrounded me, that was beside me, inside of me, part of me. Energy was coursing through my body and I felt truly alive – I was trembling with electricity; the light was brilliant and there were rainbow colors hovering around me. The feelings were real, more real than anything I had ever felt.  I felt whole; I was connected to my self, my family, to nature, to all of my surroundings in a way I had never experienced before.  I was free and full and deep and open and full of beauty and joy.  That lasted for what seemed hours, but it was only minutes and then it dissipated and I felt bereft, as if I’d lost something precious, essential to my being.  I felt confused and lost and lonely again, as I did when I was that six-year old.  There was obviously some strange force working in me, right?  Later in life, my psychiatrist would tell me I was bipolar because of these swings from “mania” to “depression,” but I went somewhere different than that damaging diagnosis....

Aesthetic bereavement

"Live and create. Live life to the point of tears." - Albert Camus

Why do we cry when we see and experience art and beauty?  Perhaps it's the fact that, in representation, art and beauty, point to the ideal, hints at the exception to our everyday life, allows us to reach to the full potential of our being.  There is a deep, wrenching poignancy to the beautiful, to the art that shows us the vulnerability of ourselves and our world.  When you witness an architectural form, a painting, a landscape, a spectrum of colors, the ineffable in words, you enter into an altered state of consciousness; an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace and awe....imagine walking into the Sistine Chapel and looking up at that ceiling....it's breathtaking, or a Gothic cathedral where the light coming through the stained glass windows is like the sunlight filtering through the trees....memory, recognition, transcendent understanding....

Go chase beauty today....I am....

Breaking open

"I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world."  - Mary Oliver

Where have you been so that you have fallen deeply in love with that place that conspired to crack the shell of your usual quiet emotional isolation?  Do you remember that feeling of being broken wide open, no resistance left, no hesitation to go forward, no regret that you left the hesitant, scared, ashamed, choking part of yourself?  You're free and full and deep and you can finally breathe the sunlight, taste the air, see far into the distance where you're safe and alive and full of wonder and awe....

That happened to me when Africa came into my life.  I remember it first started with watching "Wild Kingdom" as a child - all the amazing and mysterious and gorgeous animals of the wilderness there.  I waited impatiently every week for the show to come on, for the hour of escape to a mesmerizing land of beauty and wildness.  Then, I discovered the movie, "Born Free," about Joy Adamson and her husband, George, who was a ranger in a wildlife park in Kenya.  One day he was out hunting for a lion that had killed local herdsmen's cattle, and suddenly came upon a lioness that attacked them, only to find out after killing her, that she was simply protecting her cubs.  The Adamsons adopted the cubs and named the runt of the litter, Elsa, who was the sweetest and cutest of the bunch.  As we watched them grow, with their mischievous stunts and endearing affections, the Adamsons finally had to decide to send all the cubs except Elsa to a zoo in Europe.  Elsa stayed with them, as part of their family.  After awhile, for a variety of reasons, the Adamsons decided that they needed to help Elsa to go wild again.  It was the most heart wrenching process to watch, but finally she became free again and joined a pride of her own.  I remember as I watched the whole process of Elsa finding her freedom, I cried profoundly, deeply....even now, as I think about it, I feel a lump in my throat....and why?  Because for those moments, watching that film, I felt free too, free from a childhood of feeling different, strange, shy, sensitive, awkward and what seemed like on the outside of everyone else around me.  For months after watching Elsa, I played the theme song to the movie on the piano, over and over and over again.  Just recently, I looked up the words to the song....here they are:

Born free, as free as the wind blows
As free as the grass grows
Born free to follow your heart

Live free and beauty surrounds you
The world still astounds you
Each time you look at a star

Stay free, where no walls divide you
You're free as the roaring tide
So there's no need to hide

Born free, and life is worth living
But only worth living
Cause you're born free

What slavery and colonialism did to Africa

Move Your Shadow

moulded from liquid dust burning

vermilion under African sun,

black soul of earth bleeds

through skin sweating onyx rivers

burnished hips of women flow

indigo chitenjes over fields

of okra and cassava root

where pounding feet dance

to invisible drums

of an ancient memory:

crimson jacaranda sea

of blood rising mercilessly

over splintered amber hills.

here, the light eclipsed blackness

and white days of darkness

lifted this beautiful skin

to strangle the unbearable soul

Catherine S. Duclos