Hari Om

I found a teacher in the toaster at a hostel last week. Moving through my morning like I was on rails, I was barely pausing, let alone stopping. I stepped into the food line, and, without much thought at all, filled a plate with all of the options I could eat. A few orange wedges, cut bananas, a scoop of peanut butter, and some bread. I was on a sort of automatic mode because it was not breakfast on my mind, or in my body at all. I was miles away, living in a what-if world someplace else. I put the bread slices into the toaster and stood. I was not waiting. Waiting implies a level of patient understanding and intention. I was annoyed. I was ready to move through this experience in as utilitarian fashion as I could. A minute or two later, I reached out and forced the slider upward, ejecting my lukewarm bread, entirely untoasted.

I’d like to say I stopped, smiled at the absurdity of my unwarranted haste, but I did not. I pushed it down, frustrated and seething, and did it again. Stood for a minute or two, barely breathing, and threw up the slider to again find the undercooked bread, a symbol of my impatience. Then I began to laugh. Laugh at myself, with myself, and to myself. I figured it out that the problem was not the toaster, not the bread, not the celebrating youth in the hallways of the world until 3 am: the problem was not even me. The problem was not a problem at all. Simply a habitual way of behaving and reacting to my own set of beliefs.

What I learned from the toaster, to stop, to breath, is the greater lesson for all of my behaviors of fearful control and pretextual inner violence.

To allow the world to be as it is, is to allow myself to be as I am.

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

Today I return from my trip. What a lovely thing it is to be able to go home, to find that connection to who you are from the umbilical cord of your understandings. To see the ways in which you have grown to accommodate more and in doing so, made more room for yourselves, and all of your loves. This is the practice.

Today I share a poem by Padraig O’ Tuama called:

Talk about dynamic. This poem is everything I ever wanted to hear in church, but I just simply could not—not from the place I was sitting. And maybe it was never really spoken, but I think it was, and it is spoken in subtle ways. The poet is amplifying that voice through Mother Brendan, and thanks to the breath, the silence, the forgiveness, the kindnesses, the boundaries, the distance, and the closeness, I can hear it well.

I want to write more today, and I have to keep my obligations and be mindful of the time to do so right now. The last two lines of the poem really seal the deal for me. I am here, because this is where I want, maybe need, to be.

All In Love,

Michael

Mother Brendan's Opening Words at Ash Wednesday MassDarlings, look around.Nest to you's the nurse, the cleaner, the doctor, the child-minder, the waiting, the hoping, the barely surviving,the can't-get-out-of-bed-can't-sleep-can't-cope.There's the teacher out of work, the disaffectedpriest, the taxid driver, the shopkeeper, broke shareholder,tourists, retirees, waitresses, bankers, administrators,the tired and committed, the excited and the stressed.I know you expect me to bless you in the mysteries of God,but I prefer the strangeness of each other, darlings.Look around.In the name of whateverreason brings you here. In the name of anythingthat works. In the name of nothing.Are you burning yet? You will be.Take this cup and drown your sorrows.Take this bread and butter it. Lick it.Taste the salt. Nothing made you come here.Nothing stops you going.Dear Reader: Where are you? What made you come to there? What stops you going?

Hari Om

Today I return from my trip. What a lovely thing it is to be able to go home, to find that connection to who you are from the umbilical cord of your understandings. To see the ways in which you have grown to accommodate more and in doing so, made more room for yourselves, and all of your loves. This is the practice.

Today I share a poem by Padraig O’ Tuama called:

Mother Brendan's Opening Words at Ash Wednesday Mass

Talk about dynamic. This poem is everything I ever wanted to hear in church, but I just simply could not—not from the place I was sitting. And maybe it was never really spoken, but I think it was, and it is spoken in subtle ways. The poet is amplifying that voice through Mother Brendan, and thanks to the breath, the silence, the forgiveness, the kindnesses, the boundaries, the distance, and the closeness, I can hear it well.

I want to write more today, and I have to keep my obligations and be mindful of the time to do so right now. The last two lines of the poem really seal the deal for me. I am here, because this is where I want, maybe need, to be.

Dear Reader: Where are you? What made you come to there? What stops you going?

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

Today’s poem is by Kate Baer, and is called Advice for Former Selves:

Today, I share what it is for me to have panic. I am curious if this is similar to what you may experience when your entire central nervous system launches into a coughing fit, seemingly out of nowhere, rendering all of your usual copes or dissociation techniques absolutely useless. The flood of emotional overload takes over.

This morning, I had this very experience, and the trigger? A potent and quite serious concoction of a cluttered table and a missing credit card. Haha, now THAT’S serious. Right? Well, at that moment, it sure was because at that moment, and now, it was NEVER about the clutter, the credit card, the this or that. It was always about me.

I was spilling what I was carrying, and in the case of panic, what we are carrying is a lot. Too much even. This is the nature of panic: to be far too much to carry and too much to handle when it spills out. It is a torrent. A flood of insecurities, abandonments, rejections, attacks, offenses, mockeries, impotencies, and shame. It is our muscle memory of failure. It is the magnum opus of the ego. At that moment, Ego Uber Alles. There is nothing more self-important than a flood of being attacked by our own identities that we so carefully craft and hone, measuring it out in coffee spoons. We are the center, and we are besieged on all sides, from the top and bottom, and from within. A perfect war.

This is the flood that we need—the cleansing, the releasing of the stores, and the watering of our garden of awareness. I appreciate the presence of water in this metaphorical journey. Often, panic feels like a raging fire, but the shift to the way of water in this case helps me see its form and formlessness as congruent.

The levee is broken and the waters have risen, and then there we are, treading water or marooned on the rooftop of our home, that centered place that didn’t allow us to be completely washed away. Then the shame.

We are embarrassed. How could simply dropping a credit card unknowingly and not being able to find it bring so much internal insecurity to the front? Most of your identity does not care about a credit card in the slightest. You could rationalize it a thousand ways, and still, you know it is not that important. So, then, what does that mean? It means that the trigger is not the bullet. That ordeal was simply the one place you forgot to build fortified armor against the walls of your avoidance. It is the pretext.

Years ago, maybe lifetimes ago, I was in a band. Angela was also in this band, along with about eight other young, fuming anarchists poised to change the world, one naked mosh pit at a time. There were fifteen of us on tour together, all in one converted school bus. We were traveling through the US through the spring and summer, putting us into New Orleans at the end of June. Sweltering torturous heat with waterboarding levels of humidity, mosquitoes and biting flies, and no A/C to comfort our suffering souls. You can imagine that the smells and the proximity to one another took it’s toll more than a few times. Coffee was the currency of sanity on those mornings, and if it wasn’t made to someone’s standards, or if there wasn’t any saved for the person sleeping two hours later than everyone else, there was an eruption. The morning fights got to be so problematic that we insisted those fighting acquire their own personal instant coffee to act as a liferaft. This worked, but only so much as the fighting wasn’t really about the coffee.

Not at all. It was about our personal discomforts and lack of ability to associate how we feel in our bodies with how we feel emotionally, and vice versa. We were discharging our ramped-up systems onto one another. It was ineffective, to say the least. Only years later have I begun to do the deeper work on myself to mostly release the pretext. Mostly. There are still days when some good old-fashioned blame and shame is just what the body ordered. This morning was one of those days. Until it wasn’t.

What is the shape of your avoidance?

What happens when that shape cracks open and it all comes tumbling out?

Let us know in the comments, and get the conversation going!

All in Love,

Michael

Hari Om

If you can picture your life, your body, home, city, continent, planet, and existence as a self-recycling wheel, you will begin to understand how eternal we are. Imagine a wheel spinning down the road, and as it spins, it collects all that was and turns it into all that will be. Meanwhile, you are right in the center of this recycling, which is what we call life. We call it now. We call it here. To Be. So ‘be here now’ in this sense is a repetition of three.

Now, maybe that existence is made of memory so that puts here and now on a timeline that we can measure only by our understanding. How far back then are we going? 10,000 years to the first planter we know of? 100,000 to the beginnings of our diasporic journey to consume the earth? 2,000,000 to the time, consciousness may have begun to split into what will become ‘us.’ We can go back as far as we would like here, and it really doesn’t change the metaphor.

We are recycled.

We are what was to be and will be what was.

My body stuff and your body stuff are made of the same old stuff that everything has been made from for a very long time. So what are we? If you can keep the visual of the wheel moving along, you can see us in the hamster's place of nowness, treading the wheel as it turns. Those who came before walked this place, and their footfalls made impressions time and again. These imprints in the clay of existence is what we now appear to be.

Nothing but the emptiness in the shape of the foot of our ancestors.

Not only our long-dead forebearers of DNA but also those in our lives who have left those tiny footfalls all over our personalities. The way we laugh. The way we prefer toast over bread or salty over sweet, all finely crafted little footprints of those who impressed upon us something we call “me.” We are actually made of all that we experience, and maybe that is because all that we experience comes from within us, from that spark of consciousness that sends and receives the transmission. Maybe. Or, we are simply creatures of habit, and when we learn anything, we stick to it out of an impossible laziness. Maybe.

Either way, we know this: we EXPERIENCE LOSS. We can KNOW all day an idea of “nothing leaves” or “all is one,” sure, but then someone steps away, and we say Hey! Wait A Good Godamn Minute! You weren’t supposed to go! That is the reality of our sensational being. We FEEL things, and we feel them DEEPLY. So deeply that they are the impressions that leave tracks in the path. We become apparent by our losses because of what we once had. This is where our meaning lives. On one plane, I am part of something meaningful and like it. My mind likes it. My sense of justice likes it. My ‘I told you so’ loves it. And, on another level, I am unimpressed by any bit of it.

This is where we are, at any moment, in the liminal spaces between drama and calmer, between coming and going, breathing in and breathing out. We can exist on all of these planes simultaneously and still be only the lily breaking the surface of the water. Maybe we are the water in this analogy. I really don’t know from moment to moment where I am swimming or if it is swimming in me. I do think, though, that it is a lovely way to spend a day, to sit and ponder the ripples in the pond that a moment of movement can make. And this brings us to today’s poem:

The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water

Thanks for reading, and sharing, and commenting, and all of the ways that you, too, are burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

So much of our shared culture in the United States seems predicated on blame. Our punitive notion of community and accountability cultivates a more profound culture of imprisonment. The belief of "the other" imprisons us, and in such a prison, our ability to be inward with our awareness becomes stifled at best.

The poem today is by Kim Stafford:

The practice of going inward with the breath is a gentle way to bring our minds and bodies together to begin a practice of wholeness.

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

So much of our shared culture in the United States seems predicated on blame. Our punitive notion of community and accountability cultivates a more profound culture of imprisonment. The belief of "the other" imprisons us, and in such a prison, our ability to be inward with our awareness becomes stifled at best.

The practice of going inward with the breath is a gentle way to bring our minds and bodies together to begin a practice of wholeness.

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

Have you ever just felt like you had no capacity for anything more? Most of us have. The feeling of being ‘fed up’ is a really wonderful reminder for us to release. I tend to use metaphors a lot for the way my abstract brain tends to understand this world, and for me, this one works well. Think of you triggers as backup warnings in a vehicle. Our family recently found ourselves needing a vehicle. The one we decided upon came with some bells and whistles, and this I mean literally. When one is reversing, there is a shield of digital nuisances telling you exactly how far you have until disaster. This annoying beep is similar to my bared patience triggers that I sometimes have. They are both letting me know that it is time to pay more attention, and probably to just stop. Stop driving towards that light pole, or stop cannonballing yourself through the day with a total lack of awareness of your own needs and emotional state.

Dissociation is the cruelest defense. That moment of near spilling over of my resentment, my anger, my anxiety, my disappointment, what have you, is my backup warning, imploring me to just STOP! It is my practice to listen to both of those signals. In the case of my personal tolerance levels, this has been crucial to returning me to healthier ways of relating to those in my life. I am more often conscious of what I am ‘filled up’ with, therefore giving me agency to focus on releasing myself of the belief that I must carry this any further.

Sometimes it is very easy. Get cut off in traffic, cut in line at the bank, choose the bathroom stall with no TP? voice frustration, then simply let it go and get back to your day.

Sometimes it is very difficult. Communicate with a person you have built an alligator-filled mote of resentments towards in a way that releases your perceived need to be right and find intimacy in the forgiveness while also taking full responsibility to yourself for dissociating from your own body, thereby ignoring your own needs.

Wherever I am in the day will somewhat predetermine my capacity for release. Truth is, though, when I take those few breaths, relax my belief system, stop doing something, and just sit there…well…there is a much higher likelihood of my ability to do right by myself and the world around me. This is THE PRACTICE!

All in Love,

Michael

Hari Om

Have you ever just felt like you had no capacity for anything more? Most of us have. The feeling of being ‘fed up’ is a really wonderful reminder for us to release. I tend to use metaphors a lot for the way my abstract brain tends to understand this world, and for me, this one works well. Think of you triggers as backup warnings in a vehicle. Our family recently found ourselves needing a vehicle. The one we decided upon came with some bells and whistles, and this I mean literally. When one is reversing, there is a shield of digital nuisances telling you exactly how far you have until disaster. This annoying beep is similar to my bared patience triggers that I sometimes have. They are both letting me know that it is time to pay more attention, and probably to just stop. Stop driving towards that light pole, or stop cannonballing yourself through the day with a total lack of awareness of your own needs and emotional state.

Dissociation is the cruelest defense. That moment of near spilling over of my resentment, my anger, my anxiety, my disappointment, what have you, is my backup warning, imploring me to just STOP! It is my practice to listen to both of those signals. In the case of my personal tolerance levels, this has been crucial to returning me to healthier ways of relating to those in my life. I am more often conscious of what I am ‘filled up’ with, therefore giving me agency to focus on releasing myself of the belief that I must carry this any further.

Sometimes it is very easy. Get cut off in traffic, cut in line at the bank, choose the bathroom stall with no TP? voice frustration, then simply let it go and get back to your day.

Sometimes it is very difficult. Communicate with a person you have built an alligator-filled mote of resentments towards in a way that releases your perceived need to be right and find intimacy in the forgiveness while also taking full responsibility to yourself for dissociating from your own body, thereby ignoring your own needs.

Wherever I am in the day will somewhat predetermine my capacity for release. Truth is, though, when I take those few breaths, relax my belief system, stop doing something, and just sit there…well…there is a much higher likelihood of my ability to do right by myself and the world around me. This is THE PRACTICE!

All in Love,

Michael