This post comes out of the ILP retreat and follow-up, but also my year-long slow read of Wise Heart, the many conversations I have with friends about our relationships to ourselves, others, and the world, and the psychological work I’ve done in group. More than ever I believe that the psychological work and the spiritual work are the same. “Faith” in a greater consciousness or greater good or God or whatever you want to call it, is something I have never understood or felt, although I know I have felt the longing for it. This year I have experienced a glimmer of it. I don’t believe that it’s something I can or will pursue in and of itself, but it seems to be a natural development of other work I’m doing, and I can see how once this door is open it’s probably impossible to close them again.

Thanks are not enough to express to Lezlie for organizing and hosting ILP retreat and giving us opportunity to learn from Andrew Cohen and each other. How blessed are we to have the Border Collie, always gathering and herding us towards the next interesting place in our lives!?

I’ve been thinking a lot about my intention (small i) for the coming year. I don’t know that I have made the big I Intention, the evolutionary kind Andrew Cohen describes. Honestly, I’m not sure I truly understand what that means. As I say, I have experienced glimmers. But I can’t quite hold onto those glimmers—yet, anyway.  If I am part of the evolution the greater consciousness as Cohen describes it, I believe I am in the amoeba contingent.

But I’m not going to get hung up on where I am, because right now it feels too much like trying to measure up to some standard, and that kind of thinking is not useful. Evolutionary or not, I am committed to change and growth. I feel incredibly fortunate to have friends who support and encourage that and compel me to think and feel in different ways.

As you know, I’ve been involved in group therapy for almost two years. I cannot fully express how important this work has been and how much I have been changed by it. Most importantly I feel like I have finally acquired the tools for what is really the life-long, never-ending work of a conscious human being. Godsends, these tools. I’ve done a lot of work with  mindfulness meditation, with recognizing my limiting beliefs and defended behaviors, with uncovering buried feelings and memories that have driven those behaviors, and with recognizing my life experiences are not personal. All the work I’ve done with group has also been supported by my reading of Wise Heart Way.

Although I’ve taken giant steps, in the great stream of things, I know they’re really baby steps. (When I get upset with myself for not making more progress or falling back even my son will remind me—it’s practice, all you have to do is the practice.)  I am committed to continuing this work and remaining in the process. I feel a deep trust that my practice will continue to help me grow and change my relationship to myself, others, and the world. That’s my intention, my commitment for the coming year and for all years and every day to be in this process of becoming more aware.

The most important thing I have learned over the last two years is how blind and deaf I have been and continue to be in my own life. Using the tools I’ve acquired, I can continue to practice increasing my awareness. But frankly, I’ve learned  it’s best for me to assume I am always deluded. Always, always deluded.

I love what L suggested we do at our ILP retreat—calling each other on expressions of limiting beliefs. I want to reiterate an open invitation to you, my friends, to point out where I am deluded. Just don’t be surprised when I don’t seem to hear you though. I know there is a lot I don’t hear or see, and I also know I am a very slow learner when it comes to my own life.

As important as you, my friends are (Holy Friends as L would say)—incredibly important  —my therapist and my therapy group are also important to the change and growth process. I would still be blubbering out of control in L’s living room, as I did two years ago, if it weren’t for P compassionately holding my feet to the fire ,or if I hadn’t learned from the inner lives revealed by others.

Thanks to L for nudging me towards therapy and thanks to providence for creating a venue that seems perfectly designed for me. (Mindfulness based cognitive therapy with a group dynamic.) There is a level of openness and accountability that happens in group that is unlike anything I have ever experienced, and it just doesn’t happen, probably can’t happen, even among friends as close as the Peppers are.

I’m surprised and grateful for the therapy group experience which inspired exponential growth in compassion for myself and for others. The group experience allows me to take myself seriously and not so seriously at the same time. That’s huge. My spirit and my heart are palpably lighter. And I’m like a kid with a new toy, wishing everyone, my friends and family, could experience what I have experienced in group. (Maybe you already have—but don’t be too sure.)

Anyway. End of summary. Onward and upward.

Besides an ongoing commitment to stay in the process of becoming more aware, I do have a specific area I want to focus on (open to) this coming year: acceptance and forgiveness. Those words came to me several weeks ago and they stuck, like lighthearted did this year, but the words make me uneasy and I’ve been reluctant to commit. I realize that’s because acceptance and forgiveness are hiding behind who-knows-what in the dark, dank, cobwebby cellar of my mind, a place I don’t like to visit.  (I am absolutely sure it’s also hiding in fat cells on my body, by the way.) So yes, Cohen’s directive to face everything/avoid nothing is a good one for me in 2010. My intention is to open myself to acceptance and forgiveness.

My slow-reading book for the coming year is Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. It’s been on my list for years, and I think it will be perfect for me now.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about truth-telling. We’ve also been discussing advice-giving in my group. So I had already been pondering  this. In particular I’ve been wrestling with a situation where I have the urge to offer unsolicited advice. I’ve come to some conclusions. As if there are conclusions to come to!  Ha ha. For now, anyway, this will do for me:

1) It’s easier for me to see someone else’s participation in their own suffering than it is for me to recognize my participation in mine.  I should, in all cases, just assume I am deluded.

2) When I see the “truth” about someone else’s situation and feel the urge to advise them or share what I’ve observe I may act—believing that I am trying to help relieve their suffering. But, more honestly, I am acting to relieve my own suffering. Their situation somehow makes me uncomfortable.

3) Rather than act on the urge to tell someone a “truth” about themselves or give them advice, a better idea might be to look at my discomfort as a sign that I need to look inside myself. What is  it is about me and my experience that the other person’s situation stimulates?

4) The more I resist the idea that it’s all about me, not them, the more it is probably all about me. It just seems to work like that. Chances are if I am stirred up enough to feel urgent about “helping” the other with advice or observation, it’s because I have recognized something about myself in them. I live in a glass house, and I have the urge to throw stones.

5) It does no good to hold a mirror up to someone else  if they are not ready to look in the mirror. More importantly, how can I  be sure that the mirror I’m  holding up will show a true picture? I think it’s wise to assume the mirror I want to hold up is just as delusional as I am.

6) I can say from my experience on both side of this truth-telling business that battering often masquerades as truth-telling, and blindness often masquerades as awareness.

7) I’d like to help my loved ones by getting better at active listening rather than trying to give advice or tell about my own experience. I’d also like to be a better model for the principles I believe in. Show, don’t tell, Mary Ann.

Principle #19
What we repeatedly think shapes our world. Out of compassion, substitute healthy thoughts for unhealthy ones

I am behind in my reading and commenting and feel nagging guilt and  anxiety about it. A lot of nagging anxiety—as if I had some Blog Boss to report to who is threatening to dock my pay, or as if I was being graded for Frequency and Quality of Blogging.

Man. I find it so easy to beat up on myself!

Here’s an opportunity to replace that unhealthy thought that concentrated on failure, with a healthy one: So far, as a group, we’ve created 82 thoughtful posts and 9 comments here. And I have participated in that.

2/21/12 Note to my dear self. Not only that, sweetie, remember you conceived the blog and made it happen. Take your due!