Tag: faith

The Question “Why?”

One of the most arresting questions in the world is “Why?” We asked “Why?” a lot when we were little kids because we were so full of curiosity, and we earnestly and honestly were trying desperately to understand all of the new things which we were experiencing. We asked “Why?” so much that it annoyed our elders and more often than not, we would get shut down. And then we got older, and we stopped asking “Why?” all that much. We found it got easier to stay in our indoctrinated and conditioned beliefs because it created a framework for us to navigate our lives. Questioning everything, and exploring the answers that resonate, takes work. It is exhausting and sometimes even emotional and chagrining. This ignoring the “Whys?” is fine until it isn’t fine. These times that we are living in right now are tumultuous because more and more people are asking “Why?” about a lot of things, and these “Why?s” can be witnessed and communicated all over the world via computers and social media. Also, as this is happening, more and more people are keeping their feet firmly planted, in their (sometimes relatively unexamined) beliefs, mostly out of the fears of the new “Why?”s cropping up, and of the changes that could arise from these “Why?”s. Some people are deeply fearful of their loss of power.

Last weekend we went to a wonderfully creative sand art show with friends of ours. I noticed a large group of Amish people walking along the path on the beach, admiring the art, like we were doing. They were all dressed head to toe in dark clothing, so that few of their body parts were showing, on a day that was sunny and clear and close to 90 degrees out. Now to be clear, this isn’t a call-out on anyone’s faith. There are many, many paths to God (or not) and throughout all of history, the only one unifying belief that all of the different paths seem to believe is that they, themselves, have total ownership of the one “right” path. And that’s okay. In my life, what is most important is that I believe that I am on the path that is “right” for me. But the only way that I can make sure that I am on the right path for me, is to find out, and to deeply explore my own answers to “Why?” Why do I believe the things that I do? Are these truthfully my own beliefs from the deepest core of my own self, or are they just “facts” which I’ve memorized to “pass the test” and get approval? If I had gone up to the group of Amish people on the beach and asked them “Why do you dress in this regale, even on a hot beach?”, I am sure that I would get some fervent, well-examined answers from Amish people who fully believe in the modesty, and less attention to bodies, and less focus on individuality, as it relates to a deeper connection with God. But I also believe that I might get some robotic, unexamined answers that said something to the effect that is what our religion/ancestors told us to do, and I am fearful of the consequences if I get brave enough to ask “Why?” And I am more fearful that the answers won’t resonate with me, and then I will either have to do something about that fact, or I will have to live with the uneasy feeling of not being true to myself. I will have to knowingly live a lie.

Again, the most arresting question in the world is “Why?” because it is often the precursor to change, and to the opening up of realizations about ourselves, and how we have been living. It is a “wake up call” question and that’s scary for us. We don’t like to admit when we may have been wrong in our thinking, or even worse, that maybe the answers to our questions aren’t as simple as we would like them to be. Asking “Why?” makes us feel vulnerable and less sure, and that isn’t a framework that feels good in a big, wild, unpredictable world. However, at the opposite side of the scale, asking “Why?” can also deepen our connection to our beliefs, and make us fully realize why our particular beliefs are so valuable to our own thinking and the way that we go about living and creating in this world. Either way, asking “Why?” is extremely valuable to us, and how we authentically and fully live our lives, going forward.

It is my own (fully explored) belief that a lot the world’s problems could be solved with more questions. Why do I believe what I believe? (about anything – God, family, government, leaders, romantic relationships, economy, friendships, environment, laws, rules, health, etc.) Are these beliefs serving me? Are these beliefs servicing my family, and my community, and the world at large? Are these beliefs honestly part of that inner “knowingness” that when I get real, real still, seems to just naturally navigate me to what is right for me, and thus also for the connected world at large?

If you have something in your life that has been pinging you for some of your attention, give it that attention today. Give it attention by asking questions surrounding the situation. Get brutally real with yourself. It’s okay if you give yourself a little shock of awakening about some things that you may have just been going through the motions about, or trying to ignore or rationalize. Freedom is daunting, but freedom of thought is the one freedom which no one else can ever take from us, unless we hand it over to them, mindlessly, on a silver platter. Don’t ever give your freedom away.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Just Decide

I read an excellent piece by Jill Donovan yesterday, discussing decision making when the answers just don’t seem particularly clear. She gave an example of her daughter trying to choose between two colleges, that she had been accepted to attend. Her daughter did the tried and true “Pros/Cons” and “Advantages/Disadvantages” lists about her decision, and yet the answer was still not completely clear to her. Jill wrote this:

“This is because life’s complexities cannot always be simplified into tidy lists of advantages and disadvantages. If every decision could be made so effortlessly, our lives would lack the vibrant tapestry of experiences that provide us the opportunity to rely fully on and deepen our trust in God.” 

We get so many conflicting messages about how to make decisions. “The mind can play tricks on you.” “Trust your gut.” “Feelings are not facts.” We get so caught up in trying to find the “perfect answer”, that we forget that very often, more than just one path can lead us to our destination. There isn’t necessarily just one, ‘right’ decision. And even if we get off course, the ever-patient Universe has a way of guiding us back to where we need to be, when we willingly surrender to the Great Compass inside of us.

When making decisions it is best to use our analytical minds, but also to listen to the sensations in our bodies. Holiday Mathis recently reminded her readers of this wise tome: “How you feel around someone is as important as how you feel about them.” We can love, and admire, and be totally charmed by different characters in our life, who are really not particularly healthy for us to have relationships with, in our daily lives. I remember many, many years ago, my sister-in-law was deciding between two men whom she was dating. She told me that the first guy looked “great on paper”. He checked all the right boxes. But the other guy, just felt great to be with, like the perfect “glove-in-hand” fit.” Spoiler alert: My sister-in-law is happily married to, and has spent many adventures with (including raising two sons and living in Australia for a few years) the “perfect fit” guy, for a few decades now.

When making a decision, using the mind, and creating plus/minus checklists can be very helpful and wise. Feeling what decision most resonates with our guts, and which decision feels most peaceful and “right” to our Inner Compass, is also important to pay attention to, and to figure into the decision. However, in the end, if the answer is still not entirely clear, it is best to make a decision and move on, with a deep faith that Greater Forces will gently steer us, and keep us “on track” to the lessons, epiphanies, experiences and destinations that are meant for each of our individual lives.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Let Myself Be Happy

I’ve spent some time the last couple of days going through my daily journals. I wanted to get a sense of the sequence of some events that have happened in my life, mostly in my forties. My forties were tumultuous times for me. I think they are a time of tumult for a lot of people. In your twenties, you are still figuring things out, and that fact is expected, and accepted by you, and by the grace of everyone else. In your thirties, you are in go-go-go/do-do-do mode with very little time for real and honest introspection. It is typically in your forties when the cracks start to show, and the internal questions start banging in your head, such as are you happy with the directions your life is going in? Are you living a genuinely authentic life, true to your own intrinsic values?

It was in my forties, that my husband and I started to take things in a different direction for ourselves and for our family which was truer to what we really wanted in life. In truth, we were sort of forced into it. The dramatic moment of becoming “the poster kids for the Great Recession” (against our strong, and stubborn wills at the time) helped facilitate that movement. And what once seemed like the worst thing that ever happened to us, became the best catalyst to project us towards being more real and conscious about our choices for our family and for ourselves. (The Universe knows what it is doing.) When I read over the journals (I only started consciously journaling on a daily basis in 2013, when I was 42), I am grateful to my younger self. I admire her. She had to make some really hard decisions about where to live, and how to live, and who to remove from her life for the health and the protection of herself and her family. I also feel some pangs for her, because she had a hard time letting stuff go. She did the tough stuff, but she lived in too much fear and worry and doubt and even sometimes sadness, on a daily basis. And the interesting thing is, that everything that my forties-self worried about, has long since resolved itself. In fact, some of the events that were jotted in my journal, I don’t even remember happening.

I think that I decided to look up the sequence of events in my life in the past decade because a couple of weekends ago, my husband and I were sitting in a hospital room with an extended family member who is quite ill. Despite having trouble speaking, she wanted to talk. She talked and talked. And we listened. And what she talked about, were the different experiences that had happened throughout her life. It was like a highlight reel of the truly impactful, proud, emotional, interesting events which had happened in her own life. I think this reminded me that I don’t want to wait until I am facing down my own death, to reflect on my life. I want to do spot checks. I want to end on a high note with very few regrets, and so it is important for me to do the course corrections along the way.

In my Twitter feed this morning, Moral Philosophy, asked their readers, “What are some common regrets people have when they get old?” Interestingly, although there were many people answering the question, most of the answers were repetitive. One reader suggested everyone read the book, Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware. Bronnie Ware is an Australian palliative nurse who has spent a lot of time caring for patients in their dying days. This is what Bronnie Ware says are the biggest regrets of the dying, and most of the many answers from Moral Philosophy’s question of today, fell into these categories:

The 5 Greatest Regrets of the Dying are:

  • I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
  • I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
  • I wish I had the courage to express my feelings
  • I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
  • I wish that I had let myself be happier 

“I wish I had let myself be happier.” From going through my journals of the last decade of my life, it was certainly full of happy moments. But many times, I allowed those moments to be clouded with fear, worry, guilt, rumination and righteous anger. When I am 62, I hope to look back at these next ten years of my journals, and I hope to be as proud as I am of my younger self, for her bravery, and for her honesty and for her authenticity, but I also hope that another thing that stands out to me, from these reflections of my future journals written throughout my fifties decade, is the sense of serenity, peace, faith and surrender. My deepest self inherently knows that the Universe knows what it is doing. It is time to shed all of the fearful parts of myself who want to doubt, and who want to try to control the uncontrollable. When I read my journals of the future, I hope only to read the words of my truest, deepest, eternal, peaceful, loving Self.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

The Passing of Storms

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Honestly, these past few weeks, I have been feeling really good. But one of my good friends from college is having one of those weeks in which everything that could go wrong, is going wrong. It’s at the point where I can tell that she’s almost embarrassed to tell us, her friends, what else has gone wrong, because it’s almost become unbelievable, to have that many things go wrong in a short span of just a few days. I texted her a mantra which I’ve used to get myself through my rough spots, my entire adult life, “Just hang on. One Day at a Time. The clouds always pass.”

As my regular readers know, last fall, I may have experienced the worst time of my life, to date. Our youngest son’s epileptic seizures were not being controlled by medication, and he was having major seizures, at least once a week (after experiencing many seizure free years). Our son had to come home from his university, and stay with us. Ask a 21-year-old man what it feels like to be “babysat” by his parents. Ask a 51-year-old woman what it feels like to fear for her child’s life on a daily basis. Both answers would be nothing short of “pure hell.”

However, as scared as the superstitious part of me is to write this, our clouds have passed on, from that dark period of this past fall. Our son’s new cocktail of medication has kept him seizure free for a couple of months now. He is back at his university. And I am starting to let myself exhale. I am also reflecting on how different I feel right now, in this moment, than how I felt back then. I clearly understand now, that I was pretty depressed last fall. I was just surviving to get to the next day. The contrast in my optimism, my energy levels, and my overall excitement for future goals and plans, from where I was this past fall, is night and day. I have gone through some harrowing, dark periods before in my lifetime, but going through last fall, desperately worrying about the well-being of my baby, was probably the darkest that I have ever felt, in my entire life. At the very least, it is the “freshest” dark period, in my mind’s eye.

Those of you who are suffering from depression, I want you to know that I empathize with you. It is such a draining, harrowing, soul injuring, exhausting, frustrating experience. And honestly, I was never diagnosed or medicated for depression, during this past fall’s upsetting events. So if it gets even darker than how I felt (such as a clinical depression), my heart bleeds for you. Know this: You are strong. You are brave. This is not your fault. You deserve better. Do whatever you need to do, to get help to feel better. And please know that “The clouds always pass”. I’m experiencing the blue skies right now, after the storm of my lifetime has passed. I am not so naïve to believe that I won’t have more storms roll through, but I have proven to myself, once again, that I have the faith and the fortitude to get to the other side of storms. And so do you. Believe it. Hang on. One Day at a Time. The storms always, always pass. They always do. And even through all of the destruction that the storms wreak, they do leave tiny, little unexpected lessons and gifts in their wake. If nothing else, the storms leave you with the gift of the realization that you are stronger than you ever believed yourself to be, and the joy in savoring the feelings of relief, and peace, and even some happiness, as you bask in your blue sky moments, with your face tilted towards the sunshine.

Monday Fun-Day

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I hope that everyone’s summer adventures are full of “contentedness” and that the memories that spring from these wonderful adventures, add more contentedness to our lives, for years to come.

I love Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s Question and Answer column in Spirituality and Health magazine. I think that he answered this question, superbly. See below:

I used to be a believer, but COVID robbed me of that. How can I live without faith?

Rabbi Shapiro’s answer: “It’s important to make a distinction between belief and faith. Think of belief as a map and faith as a compass. A map tells you where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going. If the map is accurate, there are no surprises along the way. A compass simply orients you in the direction you wish to go and tells you nothing about the going itself. What you have lost is belief: You no longer trust that your map is accurate. But you can still cultivate faith and the qualities of curiosity, openness, humility, and not-knowing that faith embodies. Walking through life with a compass, rather than a map leaves you open to engage with each moment as it is, rather than as your map says is should be.”

Keep the faith, friends!!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

You Are The Sky

Fortune for the day – “All things grow with time except grief.” – Jewish Proverb

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Today, I woke up feeling really good. After a few nights of really good sleep, my energy is starting to come back. My daughter and I sang along to songs today, on the way to school, and we laughed at each other’s goofy renditions of the songs. It feels good to feel good. Yet, honestly, it’s hard to feel good on a consistent basis in this very fast-paced world, a world that offers up a constant onslaught of information (real or fake or misinterpreted or emotionally charged or all of the above, or who really knows?) coming at us, at every level. We learn about the hardships and tragedies of everyone we care about, at the flick of the open button on Facebook or our text chats or emails. We feel the anger and divisiveness and righteousness, rolling out at us like a raging fire, from our TV screens or our computer screens, when we watch the news channels’ reactions and Twitter feeds, about last night’s state of the union speech. It’s hard for anyone to stay above the crazy storm of emotionality that fills our world these days, and that storm is hard on all of us – physically, mentally and spiritually. The growing, ferocious storm sucks us in, and it drains us of our vitality and of our strength.

For today, I think that I am going to very deliberately handle anything that pulls up an emotional charge for me, in a very conscious, considered manner. I will let myself briefly feel that feeling that got churned up inside of me, and then I will put the situation into my prayer box with a knowingness that it’s all going to be okay. It always is. It’s all going to be okay. I believe, with my whole heart, that Forces bigger than me have this whole Life thing all figured out, and I must walk the talk of my faith. I will let that faith tinge every reaction which I have, to any bit of the storm onslaught that comes my way. My compassion for myself and for others will be filled with a confident faith. My awe for the beauty of the natural world will be filled with a confident faith. My desire for those whom I love and care about to have peace and healing, will be filled with a confident faith. My guilt-free laughter will roar with a confident faith. My gratitude for another day of miraculous life will be filled with a confident faith. I will go to sleep easily and soundly tonight, because I will have let myself feel good all day long. These good feelings will allow me to fall asleep soundly, because like a squirrel collecting his nuts, I will have created a pile of well-being for myself, all coming from the Source inside of me and surrounding me – my over-spilling, confident faith.

Take the Next Step

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

The above has always been one of my favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes. Honestly, it has always been one of my all-time favorite quotes, all together. There are so, so many times in life when we have had to take that first step, leading to a lot of unknowns. When we left home for a school of our choosing, our relationships we have nurtured including our friendships and marriages, each time we decided to have a child, the jobs and career decisions, where we have moved and lived, the list goes on and on – all becoming the steps, in our own individual Life’s staircase. The truth of the matter is, that we don’t see the whole staircase, ever. We surmise what is coming up as we ascend the steps of our lives, but we really don’t fully know or understand, what lies ahead. There may be obstacles on a step ahead that can cause us to trip, fall and to get hurt. There may be a gorgeous, large, landing on the next step, where we can rest and relish how far that we have come. We can make educated guesses about our next steps in life, but in the end, we do all of our ascension, in Faith. Faith takes us up the ladder of our lives and most of the time, we don’t even realize it. Faith is a strong force inside each of us that allows us to trust ourselves and to trust forces greater than ourselves, to know deep down, that whatever is ahead of us, as we climb the stairways of our lives, we will be able to handle it all, and we will grow. Knowing this, we can anticipate the next steps with hopeful anticipation and wonder, while holding on to the handrail of our Faith.