Open Heart Adventure

After days of rain, cold, and plain old gloom, the sun is finally shining again.  Beautiful, glorious fall day.  Sigh…  Which reminds me, behind all that gloom, stuckness, and funk, the sun was always there.  Okay, hear me out.  In the type of Buddhism I practice, there’s a concept called Great Eastern Sun.  It represents your basic goodness.  Essentially, no matter how bad things get, no matter what crappy stories are playing in your head, behind all those clouds, you have basic goodness and it does not go away.  Just a matter of remembering it’s there and perhaps a little house-cleaning to get back to it.

On that note, I heard Marianne Williamson speak this weekend and it was just what I needed.  I’ve read and re-read her book, A Return to Love, more times than I care to admit, but hearing it again helped.  It’s like, oh yeah, I remember that.  Of course, makes perfect sense.  Then, I don’t know, 5 minutes pass, someone cuts me off in traffic, and ohhh how I forget.

Marianne’s message is all about Love.  Love with a capital “L” because in her book, God = Love.  I like it.  It works for me, and really, whatever works for you.  My coach, Martha Beck, describes God as “Good Orderly Direction”.  This also works.  The gist for me is that there’s some larger entity out there, call it an interconnectedness or energy, or the force.  Which might be why I loved Star Wars so much.  Also might be why some many others did too – something about it resonated. 

If God is love, than God’s opposite is not hatred, but fear.  Fear is essentially the absence of love.  When you’re “in love” you’re aligned with the natural order of things.  So a few questions to get to some truths…  Do people respond better to you when you come from a place of love or anger?  Okay, I’ll answer.  Love.  How do I know?  Because I’ve come from a place of anger plenty of times to see some seriously bad results.  Second question, do you feel better when you’re loving or when you’re hating?  Okay, duh.  My only point is that God or no God, love feels better.

Another point from Marianne.  She asserts that love is light.  The opposite of light being darkness.  So how does one get rid of darkness?  Do you beat it, punish it, yell at it, threaten it?  Nope.  Can you imagine being pissed at the dark and swatting at it in an attempt to make it go away?!  Does not work.  The only thing that really does is to turn on the lights.  Which also goes for fear.  Threatening or punishing fear, or fearful people, DOES NOT WORK.  It only reinforces and strengthens the fear.  Best course of action in my experience is to turn on the love.  Granted, easier said than done.

As always, it’s all an inside job.  Sure there’s lots of fear, violence, unpleasantness (understatement) in the world, so how do we fix it?  As Gandhi says, “We must become the change we want to see in the world.”  This guy knows what he’s talking about.  Did he re-establish India’s indepenedence from the powerful British empire with violence, battles, war?  Nope.  Just the opposite.  He defeated the British Empire with peace.  In which case, “defeated” is probably the wrong word.  He basically turned the lights on and ultimately dispelled the darkness.   Not saying it was easy, but it works.  And now India and Britain have a pretty good relationship.  I’d say better than it might have been had a bloody war ensued.

So this is my new approach.  There are plenty (said w/emphasis) of things in my life that I’d like to improve.  Plenty of things I’ve said, done, that I do say and do, that could use heeps of improvement.  However, the way to remedy that is NOT to focus on what’s wrong.  The answer is to shine the light on what is good, what is working.  Beating myself up about stuff has yet to work.

So instead of the old, “jeez I’m such an idiot, jerk, etc…”, I’m going to make a concerted effort to notice and appreciate the nice stuff.  What I did or said that was constructive or helpful.  What in my life is good and working.  This is not a form of denial (well, not entirely), rather a way to enhance, encourage, and foster all sorts of goodness - good thoughts, actions, experiences, etc…  Because it really is true that what we appreciate appreciates.