This has been a season of puddles, and as the sun begins to show up I don’t want to forget what I’ve learned from exploring my inner puddling. It all began with a small injury, to which I added lots of insults. I mostly rained on what could have been a perfectly nice parade by thinking that I should be more evolved and enlightened than to feel disappointment or frustration.

I’m reminded of a time when my three-year-old daughter wet her “big girl pants” on a cloudless summer day, then claimed they were wet because she “sat in a puddle. A very big puddle.”

I had been sitting in a very big puddle of feelings and beliefs while I stayed dry in my mind, in my image of myself as someone who had evolved past lowly messes.

So I took a good hard look at where I was getting stuck and asked myself some hard questions about where I’m still arguing with reality. I took a close-up tour of what’s going on behind the façade of enlightened perfection that I sometimes wear. I took classes in inquiry. I led a small group as we got serious about living into our answers.

At the bottom of that puddle of disappointment I found a great gift. There’s a peace and clarity in discovering  what’s behind thoughts like: This situation is a problem. I need to take care of it now. There’s not time. It’s somebody else’s fault that the world isn’t perfect (from my point of view). 

As I poke around in the yuk of lies I sometimes believe about myself or the world, I keep finding how much easier and kinder it would be to just take a giant step to the side and discover how good my essential self really is, away from all the mental chatter.

Here’s the big surprise: When I strip away the façade of enlightenment, what I find is enlightenment.

A big part of this process has come from actually seeing and allowing some hidden feelings that I had not felt seemly in someone of my stage of evolution. Now that’s a relief. The relief that comes from being on the same page as reality, which contains all things natural. Like feelings.  Puddles of tears come, sometimes. And then the sun shines.

When I allow for all that messiness, I find myself in a big puddle of relief….and joy.

Where do you puddle up? What might you allow yourself to do or if you weren’t trying to be wise or enlightened? A big subject. Touch in and poke around gently. Hold what shows up in kind curiosity. What do you notice?

 

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Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.    ~ Rainier Maria Rilke

I’m an impatient sort. So I’ve been living my way into answers right now. Fascinating insights.

To do this, I’ve taking a class the last six weeks that has rocked my world. Funny thing is, it’s one that I led. And it’s hard to write that without it sounding like PR. Which it definitely isn’t.

What does it mean to live in inquiry? You’d think after walking this path for the last ten years I’d have a simple answer, but this feels new, like I’m just beginning to find out. So far the world seems far kinder, simpler, and more compassionate to me. I like who I am when I actually LIVE the answers that come when I don’t believe who I am without my story.

This teleclass is one that came along after I stated publicly I was no longer going to offer teleclasses.  It’s been much like a late-life baby, but this birth was much easier, and the results have been a delightful surprise. An alchemical concoction of deep and intimate inquiry with folks from around the world, the experience has widened my world and my opened my mind.   I’m even thinking of having another baby…next fall.

We’ve been dipping into the Four Questions and the Turn-Arounds of Byron Katie each session, with a focus on how we can take our insights into the next week. At how we can live into the questions and our answers.  It has been deeply transformational for me to be to witness such radical honesty and practical wisdom at work in each of our lives.

I have the impulse to offer some quick and easy questions in blog form, some quick tips that readers can take and bake at home. But the process has been far more profound that this.

I can offer this: a testimony to the powers of “warm observation” of yours own sweet self, foibles and all. When I truly understand that I don’t have to believe everything I believe about the world or about myself, I’m free to “live into the answers” with warm curiosity. I can see for a time where I cause myself misery and what’s on the other side of that.

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Brain Rats

April 12, 2012Questioning the Mind

The monkeys in my mind have been a bit quiet lately, probably because I’ve been putting in more time calming them and listening to them. But I’ve lately been taking some big personal and emotional risks, and they’ve been joined by their cousins, the Brain Rats.

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Story Blindness

April 2, 2012About the Oasis

I just emerged from a bad case of story blindness. It’s not as painful as snow blindness, at least most of the time, Usually it’s more like driving in a whiteout. I’m navigating along, appreciating the emerald moss or the birdcalls of spring. My life is going bloomingly. There’s a sense of equilibrium, a deep [...]

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Law of Distraction

March 22, 2012Questioning the Mind

I have nothing personal against the Law of Attraction Except for the painful shadow it casts when it becomes your direction-finder and distracts you from what needs to be learned or done about your current reality.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s much to be said for hope and belief and positive intention. Leaning into life’s possibilities, as a way of walking the planet, offers joy and curiosity.

But imaginative envisioning is half of an equation, and it can be a distraction to sit in wishful thinking when a lot of life perspiration and determination. It’s really true what they told us when we were little: Almost everything that has any worth and personal value requires work, and that sense of accomplishment is its own reward.

But the darkest shadow of the Law of Attraction is the way it seems to trigger the belief that if bad things happen, I must have done something wrong

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Goodbye Cruel World

March 7, 2012Inquiry

  Goodbye, Cruel World. These words came drifting into my mind while I was walking the beaches of the impossibly beautiful Oregon Coast last weekend. The rhythms of the ocean have a way of opening my inner ear to wisdom, so I didn’t take this lightly.   Goodbye cruel world? Since I wasn’t in a suicidal frame [...]

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A Personal Prescription for Happiness

March 5, 2012Getting Unstuck

I love a good fight. Whether I’m “fighting traffic, fighting the Battle of the Bulge, or having a disagreement (aka “fight”) with my husband, I know that somewhere in there is my “prescription for happiness,” as Byron Katie describes what happens when you turn a painful belief around and discover what’s there that you might have been missing.

He should be more sensitive? Once I can really see how that deep belief causes suffering in my life, really close-up and personal, the little slights and unkindness it creates, I’m more than ready to let go.

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Emotional Weather Front

March 2, 2012Inquiry

There’s an old saying here in Oregon. “The only people to predict the weather are fools and newcomers.” Guilty on the first count. It’s March 1st, and I had planned to wake up to warm spring breezes and beds of daffodils swaying. Instead I get this blanket of pure white beauty tucked softly over the hills. Lovely. But hardly what I planned. Fooled again.

The last couple of days the weather has brought other surprises. Sleet. Heavy winds. Chilling to the bones. I didn’t like that surprise. But one thing that Oregon has taught me is not to take the weather personally.

I’m noticing the same thing about feelings. We humans have these pesky emotions that seem to come through just like weather fronts. When we don’t take them personally, each one of them leaves a particular gift or shows us something we need to see. And then it moves on.

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It’s the Glue

February 23, 2012Byron Katie's Work

I recently heard of a Tibetan Rinpoche who said “it’s not the thought. It’s the glue.” Body and mind shouted, YES!

I’ve spent a whole lot of time in the last seven years looking for THE thought that would bring freedom, finding thought after thought that opened the doors of truth. Painful beliefs have a way (only always) of not being true.

But, dang it, some of those doors are pretty determined to slam shut again. It’s as if there is a very viscous and sticky substance that allows them to open just enough to get a peek of possibility, but then pulls them closed. So I’ve been getting curious about that glue, poking a stick in it and then pulling it out and seeing what happens, as I sit in my own inquiry.

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Subtracting Insult from Injury

February 5, 2012Byron Katie's Work

Instead of adding insult to injury, I’ve been learning to subtract. Three weeks ago I broke my collarbone in the middle of the night on Day 2 of a long-anticipated tropical vacation with my husband. I slid on some slippery Mexican tile and catapulted down three steps to land on my collar bone. At three a.m. on a Sunday morning. The story of How I Spent My Vacation starts with that event, with riding a ferry from the island to a hospital and harnessing myself into a splint for the next two weeks.

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“Aha’s” on Epiphany

January 6, 2012Confusion to Clarity
Reaching the Top of a Mountain

Jan. 5th (or 6th) is my favorite holiday. For years I thought I had it all to myself. Having already failed at whatever New Year’s Resolutions I had thrown at the dartboard, I would try again to envision my next year after the decorations were put away and the rich holiday foods were consumed or thrown away.

When I was raising a family, this would hit after the kids were back in school and we were once again held by familiar routines. I discovered that arranging some time for myself and myself alone on this day was the last and best day of the holiday. It was like my own personal clean-up, my revisioning time.

Later I was giddy to learn that there was a date on the liturgical calendar called “Epiphany,” and that it coincided with my private holiday.

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Dipping Deeply Into the New Year

January 3, 2012Coming Home
Honey dripping from a dipper

It’s pretty darned hard to miss the flashing ads and headlines that remind me, and all of us, that this is the time for resolve, discipline, will power. My own natural desire to get more in touch with my healthy body through diet and exercise at this time of year always finds plenty of support from the culture around me. I don’t mind riding that wave. But anybody at my gym will tell you that the new spurt of activity lasts about six weeks.

What makes it stick is when I dip deeply to discover what’s been in the way of change. I’ve discovered for myself that any resolutions for the new year just don’t take unless I spend some time thinking about where I’ve been, getting my bearings for what’s ahead.

Because the unquestioned past seems to have a way of becoming in the future.

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Putting Yourself on Your List

December 13, 2011Questioning the Mind
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In this chilly and bustling time, where do you freeze yourself out of your own heart? Maybe you check the holiday list and check it twice, without even noticing that your name never happens to appear. Your Inner Santa doesn’t see you, even if you’ve been nice rather than naughty. And so you leap through the holidays and to the end of the year without ever bringing yourself along.

Despite the exhilaration of the season, there’s often something inside that just longs to be heard, to be seen. It can be naughty by overeating or overdrinking to get your attention. Or it can have a meltdown or get sick. Then maybe you’ll stop and appreciate it. Instead, it usually waits quietly to get noticed.

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Not Forgetting

July 28, 2011Getting Unstuck

This poem has been on the marquee in my town for a long time. A wonderful mantra. I’m so glad it’s there. Because it’s so easy to forget. Remembering. That’s the trick.

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Building a Kinder World

July 26, 2011Getting Unstuck
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There’s a line in the recent Sherlock Holmes movie that grabbed my attention.

“Give me some evidence, Holmes. With a little mud I can build bricks and from there I can build a case.”

I’m struck by how often we use the evidence we have to wall us into a world view that isn’t kind to us or the people around us. Someone cuts us off in traffic and we take it personally. Our kids are acting out. Proof we’re a bad parent. And so it can go, if we believe our case that we’re failing or not measuring up, somehow.

What I’ve been discovering as I work with my own mind and assist others in inquiry is that there’s another choice.

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Hitting Refresh

June 6, 2011Coming Home

Have you ever wished you’d come equipped with an Auto Refresh button? If I had one, I’d use it today. Where was I before the weekend? Oh, right. There. A place to start on Monday morning. A place to Begin Within. This is the time of year when Things come up. Things to prepare for. Things to complete. Friends and family, too. Their things. All of those things we call life with others, life of community.

I’m one of those people who needs to stop and listen to my own directions before I can go into the world and do my thing.

Simply dropping in to a deeper level of connection with my own needs, wants, and inner promptings can be….well, a little more difficult than hitting Reset. There are days I’d give anything for a little curvy upward arrow that I could click and magically reset my screen, putting me back in the loop of my own deeper thinking/knowing.

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Shifting the Lens

May 17, 2011Getting Unstuck

There’s a color commentator in my head who spins me this way and that with a play-by-play of how I’m operating in the world. I call her Ethel. Ethel touts all the stats she remembers from the past and predicts the future.

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Baja: A Whale’s Eye View

March 28, 2011Creating Community
Whale's Eye

I just arrived home from a pilgrimage to the birthing lagoon of the gray whale in Baja. I had heard rumors about mother whales there who introduce their calves to humans, much as we take our offspring to meet other species. This image had lived in my imagination for several years, increasing its ranking in my bucket list. But my watery imaginings didn’t begin to match the experience of being in their presence—the power of a whale’s eye view.

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“Exploding Head” Remedy

March 2, 2011Confusion to Clarity

Last week I co-hosted a cross cultural dialogue with Balinese visiting San Francisco. The focus was on Tri Hita Karuna, the ancient principle of balancing relationships with community, spirit, and nature. When I asked a beautiful Balinese singer to share. she said,

“All this talking and talking makes our heads explode.”

Then she led a long, lovely chant. A sense of connection with each other, with the world, with spirit, saturated the room. We were singing our world back in balance.

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Truth Serum

February 18, 2011Inquiry

Some moments, even some entire days, I can catch myself in the judgements and lies that keep me from the truth. There’s such grace in that kind of clarity, that kind of peace. That is, when I can catch the lies.

And then there are the other days. The days I actually believe that “they’re” at fault. By “they” I mean anybody (or anything) out there that I can judge or blame. Like my dog for barking too much, my husband for not shutting the door, the weather for not being warmer or drier. Not to mention the theme songs I play in my own brain. Number one right now is There’s something wrong, and it’s because I’m not enough or there’s not enough.

These are the days I need a truth serum. Or some loving but stern Zen master to rap me up the side of the head. One question can usually do that: really? Is it true? When I’m aware enough of that feeling of shrinking inside, the way I’m living from a small self, that’s usually enough to bring me back.

Sometimes Truth shows up in harsher ways: the illness or death of a loved one can take me right there. To an opening of the heart big enough to embrace and allow the beauty around me to teach me to heal. What a shame that this is what it would take.

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