ALL IN THIS TOGETHER I have been repeatedly hearing that we are all in this together. Why does that often not feel like good news? I am making the choice to follow the CDC guidelines during this prolonged pandemic. I go to my office once a week to sit alone in front of a camera and live stream a Sunday service to countless people I can’t see, and many I do not know. I choose to wear a mask coming and going from my office. I am washing my hands and sanitizing my surfaces. I am primarily engaging these practices so that I remain available to be of service, and so that I do not risk infecting anyone else. I do not seek approval or applause because

LOVE: STAT! I have never been clearer that the time to love is now. With a global pandemic keeping us locked within our homes it does seem the only way to survive is to distance and to disconnect from others. In the physical realm this indeed is having a measurable effect. But even as we distance there has never been in my lifetime a more crucial time to connect at a deeper level and to love with a broader and more expansive love. My last blog post was entitled Serviceable Disconnection. I feebly attempted to describe the ongoing mechanics of both disconnection and connection. I will not elaborate further on that missive except to say that both are essential to how we unfold and evolve as human

SERVICEABLE DISCONNECTION Staying connected was never my strong suit. Because of things that happened very early in my childhood people were scary and intimacy was polluted. I learned down in my emotional body that when I was open and available, I got hurt. Before I had the right and the voice to say no things happened to a child that simply should not happen. People who said they loved me used that promise to compromise and abuse me. And so early on I learned that openness was dangerous, and love could be tormenting. If this is already too much for you, please feel free to scroll on or hit delete. If you have heard or read me at all you know that I often remind us all

GROUNDED “You are grounded, young man!” “You will stay at home until I tell you that you can leave!” “Go to your room!” “You have just lost your privileges!” “You go sit and you think about what you have done.” I actually was only grounded once as a young teen. The threat was ever looming, however. I always tended to be the good kid. The responsible one. The one my mother could always count on. I had an extremely short career as a rebel at about thirteen. I found out was grounding was all about. It actually wasn’t so bad. But back to good kid I went. So, it is a truly shocking experience to be, at age sixty-two, grounded for the second time in my life.

SICK AS YOUR SECRETS I am a somewhat public person who greatly values privacy. Privacy is not the same thing as secrecy. Someone once pointed out to me that when I die countless secrets will die with me. I guess at a level that is true. But whenever I am sitting with someone and they share something with me that they had been holding in secrecy the release of energy is palpable. When they say what they have feared to say to another living being, and I do not run shrieking from the room, the relief is beyond description. The knotted energy of the secret is untied in the telling. The shroud of shame is vaporized in a moment of vulnerability. What had seemed so solid and

SOME SLACK “Hey, cut me some slack.” It was a familial request that I rarely saw actualized. It is often difficult to remember that people are doing the best they can based on their current level of consciousness. It is even more difficult to remember that I am doing the best I can based on my current level of consciousness. And that later awareness is the bridge to the former. Today I am choosing to cut myself some slack. I watched in fascination recently as something occurred for someone that threw them into a total shame storm. It wasn’t really what occurred that caused the storm. It was the ensuing narrative. I could literally see the shades get drawn, the doors get locked, and the lights go

IT'S SAFE It is finally safe to stay in here. When I say in here, I literally mean in here. Inside of me. In my experience of me. In my moments and in my relating. An undivided sense of self. A state of being that knows it is enough as is. That it is okay to welcome whatever arises. That everything belongs. That there is nothing to try to hide and suppress. Nothing biting at my heels. No uh-oh waiting to consume me. Nothing to correct. I could weep just typing those words. The weeping is relief, it is not sadness. It feels like a huge exhale after holding my breath for decades. I have finally realized how much of a fugitive I was, always on the

CAPITAL SELF-DEFINED The ability to be Self-defined is a superpower. Please note the capitalization of that Self. I grew up in a family where I was robbed of the privilege of learning what it is to be self-defined. As a result, a big piece of my personal evolution has been learning to be Self-defined. It has been a rough and rocky road. Part of Part of a healthy maturation process includes detaching from parental or other authority figures and learning to think, decide, and define from a place of choice and autonomy. Though inextricably part of a tribal system we are each born to grow into a place internally where we decide what is right and what isn’t right for us as individuals. We are to take

REALLY GONE I guess sometimes when they leave, they are really gone. My mother left her body four years ago today. That is 1460 days. Not one of those days has passed that I have not thought of and felt her absence. When my mother left, she was gone. I have experienced the deaths of many significant people in my lifetime. It began at a young age and has been a constancy that I have learned to live with. I have become increasingly friendly with grief as a result of these many losses. I have also become increasingly comfortable with the ongoing vibrational relationship with those who have moved on. I cherish the ongoing “visitations” with people who are no longer on this plane of experience. Those

LOOKING AT I am always looking at what I am looking with. I heard that phrase for the first-time decades ago. After pondering it for months I thought I knew what it meant. After grappling with it for years I realized I did not know what it meant. And all these decades later I still dance with what I suspect is one of the most confounding and yet liberating notions that I have ever heard. I am always looking at what I am looking with. We as human beings are emotionally imprinted and carefully programmed and conditioned. We are not responsible for these imprints or filters. We are, however, responsible TO them. Human consciousness evolves via the way we relate to our imprinting, programming, conditioning. We are