Celebrating Mr. Clean, Celebrating Life’s Force


In case you’ve been following the story of my dad’s health, here’s the exciting update. He was photographed on Tuesday (cat scan). Technology peered into his body to articulate the progress of his recovery. The image that came back invites deep celebration as he is clean with no signs of cancer in the picture!! Yippee!!! Sweeth breaths of relief!!! For more details, hop on The P Train. For my own learnings and reflections, keep reading!

Leading up to yesterday, I felt the intense anticipation, fear and anxiety so many people were holding about yesterday’s doctor’s appointment… How much significance it had… The messenger delivering the verdict of my dad’s state of health… A defining moment when a specialist would read the results and share his prediction of the state of a man’s life. Each time I would feel into this scenario, I was struck with confusion. That just doesn’t make sense to me. Regardless of some person’s expertise, how can another human being have so much power and control to define how alive a person experiences themselves to be? How did we as humans get to a place where we allow other people to discern for us the quality of our life, the amount of hope that we should or shouldn’t have based on the data?

I have no idea what it’s like to be in such an incredibly vulnerable place where there is some unknown aggressor attacking my body and I am forced to join a fight that I wasn’t even aware was going on inside my very own skin. I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to be a person who is told that I have cancer or some other life-threatening idea*. Should a day like that ever visit my life, I don’t know how I’ll respond.

Yesterday, however, being in this process with my dad, my family, people I love deeply and my own reactions, I learned some important lessons. I felt my dad’s life force. I felt the strength and power of the human life force. The current of creation, vibrancy, beauty, yes!, generative movement forward, LIFE. As I try to articulate that now, I feel the pulsing vibrancy in my own being. Wow, that’s magical… that we each have that, we each have access to something so sacred, so powerful, so uniquely our own and so universal to each of us.

I called my dad yesterday and extended an invitation to him that was something like this:

I invite you to take a moment before you get to the doctor’s office to connect with your life force. There is a force inside of you that is so alive. I can hear it in your voice. I can feel it in your writing. I imagine I’d see it in your eyes if I were there with you. You have a life force that is vibrant inside of you and will be there when you walk into the doctor’s office and will be there when you leave. I invite you to connect with that and stay connected with that, including whatever it is that the doctor shares with you. And no matter what anyone tells you, you are the only one that really knows what that life force feels like, how strong it is, how alive it is, how vibrantly it is moving through your body. No one can tell you about that… only you can connect with and know its presence and strength.

I thank the universe for the arrival of that message through me. For me, it is powerful and inspires me greatly. An invitation that I hope to really integrate into my own being and believing, further allowing me to share that vibrant radiance with myself, others and the world. What a gift that we each have!!

And then, after the doctor’s appointment, when my dad shared the news with me…. sweet tears of relief, bubbling with excitement. His life force gets to shine on with the medical world’s blessing of a clean cat scan. THANK YOU!!!

*As I was proofreading, I was shocked to read the word idea there as I didn’t consciously use it. I meant to use some thing like a life-threatening disease or condition. But I’m struck. Are these life-threatening diagnosis ideas? There is concrete fact and data that there is something going on inside the body… but the notion that it is life-threatening… is that an idea? Our life is always threatened just by the nature of being alive… hmmmm….

photo source

Ride for Meaningful Climate Change Legislation

During the week of September 20th, my friend Jake Stewart, will be participating in the 1st annual Climate Ride. On Sept 20th, he will join others to start a 300+ mile bicycle journey from New York City to Washington, DC. They will be delivering a unified and non-partisan message to the Capital encouraging our government to adopt meaningful climate change and renewable energy legislation.

Jake shares a personal blurb of why he’s riding in this event and why he’s asking for support:

I sincerely believe there are few issues more important to future generations than ensuring a stable climate and healthy planet. This is not a partisan issue, this is purely a Human issue and there is nothing that we share more commonly than the planet that sustains us. In that light, I’m convinced that we can overcome the many standing hurdles if we come together in a positive way.

Progress is being made. In fact, despite fervent protest from oil & coal interests, even the few remaining figures that remained hesitant of climate change action (President Bush, etc) are now publicly acknowledging that the science is overwhelming: climate change is happening and it is being driven largely by human activity. The good news is that scientists have determined we can slow down and possibly reverse the global warming process that man has set in motion. But we must take substantial and immediate action to reduce the almost 10 billion tons of fossilized carbon we are releasing to the atmosphere every year.

I’m optimistic that we will rise to this challenge and that America will take a leadership role in this effort. In a small nutshell, that’s why I am riding and asking for your help.

If you’d like to donate to Jakes ride, you can do so here.

Some more background and info:

About Climate Ride
Today’s climate change reality
Why we must act now

Living with Radical Honesty

Living With Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton
Re-posted from Charity Focus

I learned that the primary cause of most human stress, the primary cause of most conflict between couples and the primary cause of most both psychological and physical illness is being trapped in your mind and removed from your experience. What keeps you trapped in your mind and removed from your experience is lying and we all lie […] all the time. We’re taught systematically to lie, to pretend, to maintain a pretense because we’re taught that who we are is our performance. Our schools teach us to lie, our parents teach us to lie. We’re all suffering from mistaken identity.

We think that who we are is our reputation, what the teacher thinks of us, what kind of grades we make, what kind of job we have. We’re constantly spinning our presentation of self, which is a constant process of lying and being trapped in the anticipation of imagining about what other people might think. Our actual identity is as a present tense noticing being. I’m someone sitting here talking on the telephone right now and you’re sitting there talking on the telephone and writing or doing whatever you’re doing. That’s your current identity and this is my current identity and when you start identifying with your current present-tense identity you discover all kinds of things about life that you can’t even see or notice when you’re trapped in the spin doctoring machine of your mind. So radical honesty is about delivering yourself from that constant worrisome preoccupation of, “Oh my god. How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing?” Then you can pay attention to what’s going on in your body and in the world and even pay attention to what’s going on in your mind. […]

Just look at what you notice in front of you right now, your environment, wherever you are in an office or wherever it is. Noticing is an entirely different function than thinking and what we do all the time is that we confuse thinking with noticing. When we think something we act as though it has the same validity as something that we see. I’ve got a bumper sticker on my truck that says, “Don’t believe everything you think.” It’s like your thinking just goes on and on and on and on.

–Brad Blanton, Center For Radical Honesty

Self-Acceptance

A strong part of my journey lately (always?) has to do with self-acceptance. I relate to what Dan Oestreich writes:

There is so much hubbub around us about self-help and improvement that the key precondition of personal change — self-acceptance — often gets completely lost.

With all the books and tapes and learning groups out there, it is very easy to fall into the pit of constantly attending to the gap between the ideal and the real — what I should be rather than what I am.

I can easily “over-focus” on my own ideals, losing sight of the fact that human change is mostly not a linear journey, but an organic one that paradoxically begins with awareness and acceptance of the parts that are not changing.

With acceptance comes grace, comes healing, comes change into our lives, and they come from someplace beyond ourselves and yet in a way that is completely intrinsic to who we are.

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am,
then I can change.”

–Carl Rogers

I came up with a new practice recently to help curb this tendency of mine. When I notice that I’m being particularly hard on myself or focusing strongly on the what-I-should-be rather than the who-I-am, I make myself stop every hour and write down one thing that I’ve done well in the last hour. Sometimes it’s easy and other times it’s hard to find something that I feel proud of, something that I recognize as being good enough… or especially great! The things I’ve written down vary in scale from making a healthy lunch, stopping to breath or notice a bird, or doing something kind for another person…. or even doing something kind for myself!

I love to grow… and sometimes I over-focus on all of the parts of me that provide me with opportunities to grow! This practice helps me notice what I’m doing well just as often as I notice where I could improve. At times I recognize that the hour is approaching and think, “Oh, quick… I’ve got to do something that I value!” And then I get to celebrate what I’ve done!

Here are a couple of other posts on change from Paul Cooper and Chris Corrigan that have caught my attention recently.

Can You Help Me Write a Song?

As a school counselor I host Friendship Groups in classrooms. In the past I was responsible for 15 classes (preschool through 3rd grade). This year my main focus is with 9 classes (1st-3rd) which is providing me an exciting opportunity to be more explicit in the curriculum that I use and develop. I imagine there will be more to share about that as the year proceeds.

At the moment I’m focusing on our starting rituals. An important element at the beginning of a group is some sort of shared ritual, shared experience. When I was a teacher with my own classroom, I used a song for this. When I entered this job with 15 classes that I move between I started my groups with a bell and moment of silence. Unfortunately, however, coming and going busily from one class to the next, I was inconsistent and eventually stopped using the bell regularly. This year I want the opening ritual to be sacred. To always start each group.

I would like to create a song that shapes the space and invites us to be connected to ourselves and connected to one another.

Qualities of the song that I am interested in:

  • I’d like the song to be punchy – to invite body movements and voice inflection, to invite us to wake up and be engaged! A celebration.
  • I’d like for the song to provide an opportunity to experience harmony with each other, a vocal sense of togetherness.
  • I would like the song to invite us to be in our bodies, connected to our hearts with open minds, ready to learn, and connected to each other.
  • I imagine that at the end of the song there is a brief moment of silence.

Below are some words I’ve been playing with… they’re not ‘right’ yet, but it will give you a sense of the direction I’ve been exploring.

And then comes the request (you knew this was coming, right!): Do you have ideas to add to the creation of this song? I’m not very developed in my musical sensibility. Are you? Do you have a tune to offer that this song could go to? Would you like to help me create this song? If you’re technologically inclined and want to share an audio idea with me, I believe you can sing into this site, odeo.com… or if you want to schedule a phone call, send me an email and we’ll set a date to talk (opening space (oneword) @gmail.com).

Thank you so much for any help you have to offer.

The latest version I’ve been playing with:

You and me are here right now
Alive in our bodies
I’ve got an open mind
Ready for new ideas

I’m going to listen from my heart
I’m going to speak from my heart

You and me are here right now
Let’s feel us here together

….bell….