kiran trace

Already Is My Favorite Word

Later, I was talking to a friend about how the word ‘tool’ also implies something separate from us that we pick up and apply.. and how that doesn’t quite describe Kiran’s tools (check out her book Tools for Sanity), because the tools are already here, already inside of us, occurring with no action on our part.

Most fundamentally, the tools are a noticing of what Life is already made of, of what is already happening—right in front of our eyes—that had previously gone unnoticed.

After these chats I realized again how much I love the word already because it describes the essence of reality, of what IS. Truth, clarity, fulfillment, love, peace, information, innovation, solutions, insights etc—these things are already right here. The word ‘already’ helps to cut the legs out from under the doer, the seeker, the achiever—i.e. the various separate selves—from heading out to get something, do something.

For a chronic doer like me, this realization is an immense relief.

There Are No Nouns

The lack of separation in reality is not a new observation. It’s ancient knowledge. It’s got names like Shiva. Oneness. The Great Mother. Nonduality. Ultimate Reality. True Nature. Ubuntu. God. The Tao. The ‘I Am.’ Every mystic tradition of every religion talks of this Oneness.

It is built into the stories of our indigenous ancestors, the world over. There is a Navajo saying, “If you kill the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for rain,” pointing out the invisible link between prairie dogs tunnels and weather/soil health. Truly, there are endless parables and lessons along these lines, as it is an essential truth. Check out a couple videos of African folk tales on the subject here.

But somehow, somewhere, the vast majority of humans on Earth hooked into a paradigm of separation. Of us and the world, us & God.

Instead of seeing differentiation in life, we saw division.

I can’t imagine in the history of all things, a more colossal mistake.

Spiritual Treats

Divination tools, astrology and tarot tend to be my favorites in the ‘spiritual’ category. I’m a big fan. I follow several spiritual people on Instagram. Tarot card readers on YouTube. I’ve got four oracle decks and Dolores Cannon books and Reiki runes and votive candles and archangel cards and spirit animals and tarot symbols tattooed on my arm(!) I burn sage and palo santo and I clear my energy regularly.

I am a FAN.

But I want people to know there is much more at the ‘spiritual’ table.

I looked up a few definitions of spirituality. Most of them include a ‘belief of something larger than one’s self.' The spiritual books I found were wide ranging—from Buddhist and Taoist classics to ‘The Secret’ and Gabrielle Bernstein. They included books on topics from my list above, as well as energy healing and ancient/indigenous nature religions, past lives, crystals, yoga, tantra, modern Christianity, astrology, re-wilding and magic.

Spiritual stuff is, in my experience, a bit like candy. Or at least, not the whole meal. Spiritual experiences are the amuse bouches, snacks, dessert plates and palate cleansers of a meal. They greatly add to the experience, but they are not the main dish.

The Great Hack

So much of our current self help & wellness tools, medical & psychological interventions, spiritual practices, dating advice, business/financial coaching etc are, in their essence, big old system hacks. They are attempting to hack our programming—to tweak our physical, psychological, or financial systems to work better, to get us more.

And that’s cool.

Tweaks and hacks and new angles are great. Essential, even. Hackers are brilliant—they shake things up and help us see things differently. And we need that. Perhaps we especially need that now, in this topsy turvy world.

But hacks aren’t always sustainable; they don’t necessarily garner long term gains in and of themselves. Moreover, the tweaks aren’t necessarily in our favor—they are sometimes tricks, for another’s gain. Plus, a hack might not take you out of a corrupted system—many are the equivalent of rearranging deck furniture on a sinking ship.

The Party Line

So often, society’s ‘party line’ is completely backward, isn’t it? And we kinda know it.

We sense the Orwellian quality of, let’s say, our food system. Or our money system. Or our military-industrial-complex-mess-of-a-system. Here’s a few examples of recent party lines we’ve lived by, vs the realities we’ve later discovered (buried under the advertising for the party line).

Party line: GMOs are good; we can feed more people.

Truth: GMOs (& the pesticides used with them) increase soil toxicity and depletion, yielding less food & much more disease.

Party Line (a silly personal one here): Acne is caused by too much oil on the skin, so we should dry the skin out.

Which Card? What Game?

When a fear card is played it sounds abstract, hard to follow, and often dramatic. It might feel pressured and urgent (eg. Bush selling the Iraq war), or kind of hazy and hyped-up (Obama’s Hope). It might feel exciting, like a high. Or it might be syrupy sweet—like a cheap wine that leaves you with a headache. There can be a kind-of religious fervor (eg. evangelical self-help gurus & angry mobs) or a checked-out quality (eg. flat recitations of verse in church).

Fear doesn’t have solution in it. It isn’t built for that; it’s built as a zero-sum game—to zero out the identified enemy. So it stays in place. It often talks a lot. Frankly, a lot of therapy does this—lots of processing & ’coping mechanisms,’ but not much forward movement.

When truth is played it will sound clear, precise, non-personal, non-dramatic, and light. It will simply feel true—you already knew it. You won’t need to ‘try and understand’ what someone is saying.

The Flywheel

There is a flywheel underfoot. It is nature’s rhythm and pulse. It is God’s divine orchestra.

And you are less than a hair’s breadth away from it.

You just have to scooch …every so slightly …out of those old, rusty rhythms of your life. Move just to the left of those grooves—those ideas about what keeps your life in order. Maybe it’s a pattern in a relationship or at work, a meditation or workout regimen, a particular coffee in the morning (like me!). These are the controlled, mechanized aspects of your life.

For the Sake of Itself

We go for what is meaningful, versus what is true in our bodies, what is deep in our bones.

Meaning is in the land of the separate self. It exists in a mental landscape, in the story of me. But we are not this mental self. We are not a concept.

Meaning is conceptual, not actual. It isn’t here, on planet earth.

I do a lot of inquiry with clients—we question thoughts or drop words out of our vocabulary. I often ask this question, with regard to meaning (a variation of Byron Katie’s ‘The Work’):

‘If nothing that ever happened—nothing you did or didn’t do, nothing you’ve ever thought, felt or experienced—had any meaning whatsoever, what remains?’

I usually get a smile or a surprised look. Maybe a moment of panic. But then the client tastes a bit of freedom and says something like, “God, I don’t know!” And we just hang out in ‘I don’t know.’ We sit and feel. We see what arises. Invariably, something true (and utterly practical) comes up…

The Road to Hell

I’ve never much liked the word ‘intention.’ 

Like…

‘What are your intentions for this week/month/year?’  ‘Let’s set our intention for this meeting.’  ‘My intention is to be loving to my family this holiday.’ 

Blech.

But I’ve felt like an asshole for not liking the word, because it is such a part of psychology, spirituality and self help.

I’ve been reflecting on my dislike. Here is the crux of why I think we should toss this word out:  The word ‘intention’ is mental. It’s not embodied. 

And therefore it is a movement of fear.

The Strangest Pleasure

Pain’s got a bad reputation, no?

The worst, maybe.

No one wants this dude at the party; he’s the thief of pleasure, joy, & peace—not welcome to hang out, even for a little while.

But let’s—just for the length of this blog post—let’s consider that this bad reputation may be unfair. And let’s notice that we haven’t really found out for ourselves. We’ve just assumed pain was no good.

A Healing Estuary

This process, along with caterpillars turning into butterflies and frogs regrowing legs (and a billion other mysteries in our biological reality) doesn’t make sense from a materialist worldview—the worldview that says things are separate, operate themselves, and are disconnected from the rest of Life, with one DNA packet code per separate, solid life form. 

But major internal change—this kind of smoltification process—including completely new shapes & operating systems, is more the norm than the exception in Nature. And it is actually the norm for us humans (though we are taught the materialist worldview—that we are nouns instead of verbs). 

It is the natural process of evolution—a radical transformation in which our whole Being alters, finding a much bigger space to occupy, as we drop old constrictions (limiting beliefs) in our system. And this evolutionary process is built into us, just like the salmon. 

But it takes some healing, some time in the brackish waters—letting go of old patterns, old internal systems…eating some salt, as it were. 

When You Open

Recently, walking in the Tennessee mountains on retreat, a grasshopper leapt across my path and I exclaimed “You’re so pretty when you open!,” dazzled by the yellow & green of its wings.

And I thought—Isn’t this true about the natural world?  

Butterflies. Birds.

A full Lion’s mane. 

Every flower ever.

A puppy’s pink tongue. 

A luminous geode (looking like a dumb ol rock before it’s cracked open). 

Lolling cats, upside down with their underbellies showing. 

The more open, the more enticing.