The keys

Today is Mother’s day. One of the most bittersweet days of the year for me. I’ve been estranged from my parents for several years. Most days it still seems like the right thing. When relationships are not healthy despite the best efforts of the parties involved, it’s better to sever them. That might sound harsh to some, but the ones who understand it, most likely understand because they have been through trauma in their relationships with their parents.

Not everyone has an easy childhood. And when you haven’t had a good relationship with your parents, it’s really hard to relate to things like the deluge of Facebook posts that happens on days like Mother’s day.

I’m not saying it’s bad for people to honor their mothers. It is absolutely the right thing to do. It’s just important to recognize that not everybody honors their mother in the same way. Some of us honor our mothers by choosing not to continue a relationship that causes pain on both sides. And that’s okay. It’s certainly preferable to giving or receiving guilt, blame, anger, and resentment.

I posted something on Facebook today acknowledging that this day is not easy for everyone. Several friends have lost their moms, a few are estranged from their mothers, and a couple have children who were lovingly given up for adoption. This day brings a vast array of emotions for many of us. It felt important to acknowledge those whose hearts have a bit of heaviness today.

Someone posted a comment to my post on Facebook, thanking me for the things I post in general as well as that specific post. It was nice to read those words. I’m mindful of what I share with people and daily work on keeping my personal energy clear and bright. To know that my words make people feel better means a lot to me. The compliment got me to thinking about something that’s been on my mind quite a bit lately.

How many times have we all heard (or read) that in order to love others we must first learn to love ourselves? This is one of the great mysteries of the universe in my opinion. It took me a really long time to learn what those words mean…a lifetime, really. But a few days ago, I had a moment of insight in which I realized I think I may have reached a place where I am mostly my own best friend. Coming from the other end of the spectrum, of being my own worst enemy, this feels very good, by comparison.

This realization came in a roundabout way. It was through others’ recognition and seeing that I am actually helping people. People I know over Facebook and people I’ve never met over Twitter and through this blog. And the most amazing and beautiful part of it is that I set out  on this part of my journey as a way to help and heal myself because there was nobody else in my life at the time. I was always open to the idea that if even one other person felt a little less alone in the world because they read my words, that would be a blessing multiplied, but my primary concern most days was soothing my own troubled soul and getting through the day each day.

I’ve been on this path for a while now and for a lot of the past several years I’ve carried a burden on my heart of having people in my life I haven’t been able to forgive. Again, myself first, but there are others. Recently I decided to stop worrying about the people I feel this way about and work on forgiving myself, strengthening my relationship with God as I understand it, and choosing to live a happy life, come what may. Miracles are starting to  happen as a result.

My feelings toward someone who has caused a lot of harm in my life have begun to soften. And a few nights ago, I found myself praying sincerely for my parents. In a way that a heart with even a shred of unforgiveness would be unable. In that very moment I knew a miracle had happened. I knew that miracles do happen in our lives and the only thing that keeps miracles away is unwillingness.

We humans like to place a lot of limits and conditions on things. When we let go of the need to do that so much, the world opens up like a flower.

The Buddhist metta meditations always starts with oneself. We radiate kindness that we first give to ourselves. It’s lovely.

Figuring out how to be your own best friend, and how to let others be exactly who they are without needing anyone to do, say, or be anything other than what their heart tells them to be, that is true freedom. When you are free, truly free in your heart and soul, you have the keys to the kingdom.

And in my humble opinion, when you find yourself in possession of the keys to the kingdom, the right thing to do is make copies and pass them out to everyone you meet.

Amen.

Kindness

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

~Naomi Shihab Nye

Tough love

The words tough love came up recently related to the reaction I received to some information I shared. It got me thinking about what it means when people use that phrase. I feel much the same about it as I feel about people being proud of their ability to be brutally honest. Some people think that brutal honesty is a virtue. I disagree.

“People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.”  ~Richard  J. Needham

Tough love is an oxymoron in my opinion. Love is gentle, there is nothing tough about it. Real love anyway.

As I have written previously, one of my goals is to speak the truth in love. It is my belief that the truth should only be offered from a place of love. I try never to tell people things about themselves with any intention other than to bless and uplift. If I feel judgmental, which I can tell by the negative feelings it brings up, I try to remain silent. If I feel self-righteous, which I can also tell because it comes with a creepy feeling of self-satisfaction that is coarse and ugly, I try to remain silent. If I feel morally, intellectually, or in any other way superior, I try to remain silent. The moment I think that some other person is an idiot or any variation of that kind of frustration, I know it’s time to focus on myself and not them. I do not chastise people and I do not feel the need to force my perception of the truth on anyone because my view of the truth is just that, my view. Nobody has all the facts about another person, so it can be extremely misguided and short-sighted to think it’s possible to have the answers to another person’s problems.

This is why I write this blog from the perspective I do, my own experiences. I try to let other people be and focus my energy on learning my own lessons. I share with the hope that my life experiences and observations about them will help others going through similar things. To the degree I fail to do that, or even worse, when I write out of self-pity, I fail to fulfill the purpose for this blog.

I appreciate honesty and I can handle it however it shows up, but when it is given gently, it is much easier for me to receive the message than if it comes wrapped in judgment and assumptions. I do not believe I am unique that way. Nobody likes to be told they’re wrong, especially in a haughty, self-righteous, judgmental way. Think about it. How do we really reach an accurate judgment about another person when we don’t have every single one of the facts (hint: it’s impossible)? The only way is through assumptions. And since there is no concrete truth behind assumptions, any judgments that arise from them are inherently flawed.

In the most practical sense it seems to me that communicating with kindness is a matter of efficiency. What’s the point of sharing your thoughts and words if your intended audience cannot receive them? As for me, if I am given a gift wrapped in garbage, I will still unwrap it, but it might take me a lot longer to recognize it as a gift than if I am given just the gift itself.

It’s good to be truthful. It’s good to be helpful. It’s even better when it can be done with kindness, compassion and grace. The ones who are able to deliver the truth gently are the true peacemakers of the world.

If you cannot communicate with kindness, whatever you have to say is not important enough to be shared. That is my opinion. But it is just that, my opinion. You get to have yours too and it is equally valid.

“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” ~HH Dalai Lama

Choose your weapon

A couple of days ago I was really feeling the weight of the life path I have chosen for myself. But I need to remember it is my choice and that is the reason it feels like work sometimes. Many people go through life on auto pilot and life sort of happens to them by default. That’s how it felt for me up until a few years ago. Deciding to show up for my own life requires me to build muscle in areas of my life where I was completely sedentary for many years. Now life presents challenges and I have to meet them using tools I previously didn’t even know existed.

Life does get easier in ways as I continue to practice my beliefs. It is largely due to the greatest reward of mindful awareness–the power of choice. The knowledge that I don’t have to just let life happen to me has been the most liberating piece of information I have ever received. That I am not at the mercy of a God who is separate from me and is keeping tally of my screw ups in order to punish me properly at the end of my life. Once those shackles came off, life got a lot easier for me.

The thing awareness does is allow one to choose how to respond in any situation. I appreciate being able to choose how I interact with people. I’ve been fortunate enough to experience what happens when I choose kindness in situations when I’ve had other options.

I have figured out there are two ways to lighten one’s burden in life–give away your garbage or give away your gifts and blessings. Giving away garbage seems to cause the generation of more garbage, but giving away blessings not only brings more blessings, it allows a person to transform the garbage…into even more blessings.

I like blessing people. Those are the times when I feel most alive and blessed myself.

When you are placed in a situation where you must choose how to respond, look inside yourself. What do you find there? There are many choices–ugliness or beauty, judgment or compassion, indifference or kindness. It does take a moment to sort through the options and make a decision sometimes, but what’s the hurry? We have all the time in the world.

Be careful what you wish for…

“To be nobody-but-myself–in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else–means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.” ~e.e. cummings

It’s been one week since I started working again. I knew it would be hard in a lot of ways, but a lot of the ways in which it has been hard are new to me. This is the human drama as it plays out for the awakened person walking with awareness in a world full of sleeping people.

Some of this is vaguely similar to the way I have felt my entire life, sort of generally uncomfortable and odd. It gets old, this feeling of being different. It makes everything feel like more work because in addition to whatever else is going on, there is the struggle to appear to be coming from the same place as others when it’s not even close to true.

What’s so wrong with being different? Why do humans find diversity so hard to embrace?

A big part of my new job involves communicating by phone with the public. This afternoon I was assigned to listen in on the phone calls of someone who has done the job for many years. There were phone calls from people who were confused and people who knew exactly what they wanted. The person taking the calls was equally impatient with every caller regardless of how they came across.

The thing is, I have compassion for the person whose calls I was listening to. She’s been doing the job a long time, it’s not rocket science and answering the same questions over and over gets old. I get that. This does not make her a bad person. But in the 90 minutes I sat with her I knew I was with a person who is sleepwalking through life. Life is happening to her and all she can do is react. I know what that’s like because that used to be me.

The last phone call of the day was from a person who identified himself as Robert, a 100% disabled veteran. His difficulties with speech sounded like someone who’d had a bad stroke. He struggled with understanding what was told to him, yet here he was, trying to take care of his business on his own. The representative I was learning from could not contain her frustration. She threw her hands up in the air, rolled her eyes, signed heavily and was nearly pounding on the desk. Thank goodness it was a phone communication.

As Robert worked and struggled to complete the transaction and understand all the information he was being given, I was very quickly endeared to him. He was simple and kind, thanking the frustrated phone rep for what he perceived as her kindness and patience with him and his disability. Perhaps to him, her level of frustration was kind and patient compared to what he normally encounters.

This person was so amazingly gentle and grateful that it was not hard for me to glimpse God in him.

As I sat listening, eyes filled with tears of compassion, Robert thanked my coworker for her assistance and expressed gratitude that he has an advocate at Veteran’s Affairs who would be able to help him with the forms we were sending him. Then he explained that he has difficulty because he had been shot in the head.

More than one person noticed I had an emotional reaction to listening to this phone call. For some reason, the person I was learning from felt guilty when she compared my reaction to hers. She said: I know, I’m a bitch, I admit it. To which I replied: No, no you’re not, don’t say that. Because my reaction to Robert was not meant to be a judgment on her. She was frustrated. She’s been doing the same job for more than 10 years and was admittedly tired and out of sorts today.

Some days it’s not our day to get it. I try to get it every day, but I don’t always. When I miss out, sometimes seeing someone else get it causes me to see things differently. I suspect my coworker got it today because she saw my reaction to this customer. I’m new there, I can afford to react that way. I haven’t taken a single call yet. And yet, just as she taught me some things about our job at this organization, I think I may have unwittingly taught her something about our job on this earth.

Part of the reason this spiritual awakening happened to me is because I asked God for certain things, compassion being one of them. Just as asking for patience will bring situations that invite impatience, asking for compassion will bring people, like Robert, who need compassion and caring.

As I was crying about this phone call on my drive home, I had a moment of wondering why I have to be so weird. Why do I have to think so differently from the people around me so much of the time? The answer to that question came to me this evening in the bathtub.

I have always wanted to change the world. How can I ever help anyone see things from a different perspective if my perspective is exactly the same as everyone else? When I realized that this is precisely the reason I have to be so weird, I knew that God was just giving me what I wished for.

God, appearing as Robert, the 100% disabled veteran, helped me show someone a different way of thinking today.

Thank God I am so weird.

The love of truth

Speak the truth in love.  That is the main thing I took away from my 5 years as a member of a Lutheran church.  It’s very interesting that leaving that church, which for me was leaving the Church, did not cause me to have bad feelings toward the church, its members, or Christianity in general.  I was more involved in that congregation than the one I had belonged to for the 15 years prior to it and I still love the people I knew there.

I am a lover of the truth.  And I am a lover of kindness.  Which leads me to ask: Is it possible to consistently deliver the truth with kindness?  Is brutal honesty ever necessary?  I say no, it is never necessary.  I think if a person can’t find a kind way to express whatever it is they need to say, then the thing is not important enough to say in the first place.

“People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.”  ~Richard J. Needham

My ex-boyfriend believed brutal honesty was the only way to go.  Consequently, he proceeded to tell me some of the most miniscule faults he saw in me.  It was very hurtful at times.  He called me clumsy and weak and once asked me if I ever loaded a dishwasher before in my life because I put a wooden handled steak knife in the machine.  He also told me fairly early on in our relationship that he didn’t love me and when I was away on business once, he told me he didn’t miss me.  Why?  I don’t even understand the point of it really. 

He and I never agreed on this topic.

There is an old saying that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.  That’s a very good (and simple) rule of thumb regarding communicating with others. It reminds me of something I often say about my fellow humans and that is: I have never met a person who needed me to show them their faults, but I have met many who needed me to show them their beauty.

The other reason I disagreed with the ex-boyfriend about his need to deliver the blunt truth without consideration for feelings is the futility of dispatching a message that cannot be received because the recipient feels attacked.  Why bother telling someone something in such a way that they won’t be able to hear you?  Most people shut down on some level and do not process information from a rational perspective when they feel defensive

When I am telling someone something, I want them to be able to hear me, so I deliver the truth with kindness and compassion and I do not bother with information the sole purpose of which is to hurt.  If the only thing that can be accomplished by saying something is to hurt the person you’re saying it to, then that thing doesn’t need to be said.  Because those kinds of things are usually about something that isn’t going to change or the person has no control over and they often contain no truth at all.

When some of the ex-boyfriend’s friends said bad things about him to me after the breakup, this was information that served no purpose but to hurt.  To hurt him and to hurt me.  I was doing all I could to keep an open and forgiving heart and give him the benefit of the doubt knowing that he did the best he could.  Like the situation with my parents, it was a pretty poor best by most people’s standards, but he did his best with the knowledge and awareness he had at the time.  His friends’ attempts to console me by bashing him is understandable given the society we currently live in but nonetheless, not helpful.

Speak the truth in love.  Anything that does not come from love should not be spoken.