Month: January 2020

33 Days

As promised… a week late… today I’ll give some insights into my 33 Day Process. As I mentioned in my last post, my childhood friend Chausey Leebron is offering this new online course. Chausey has shown up in a few of my previous posts, so maybe I could start by telling you a little more about her and our relationship. Chausey and I lived in the same neighborhood growing up… literally around the block so to speak. We’ve known each other since we were five. Not only did we go to school together from elementary school through high school, but we were on the same gymnastics team early on, again when we were five. We went on to be cheerleaders- yes, I said cheerleaders- together in both middle school and high school. Oh and we were on the yearbook staff together in high school as well. This is all just to say that we go WAY back.

Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of us playing at each other’s houses or at the neighborhood playground or pool, being at massive slumber parties together in elementary school, and going to gymnastics camps together. As time went on we each fell into our own paths and, well, I wouldn’t say drifted apart because we were like these fixed datums in each other’s lives. We were both just kind of always there, even if we were no longer really interacting on an authentic plane. I remember thinking in the midst of one of my last conversations with Chausey at the end of high school that I didn’t even know who she was anymore. It would be more accurate to say that I noticed she was simply checked out. Then again who isn’t at the end of high school… myself included. At any rate, I was heading east for college and she was heading west. Our lives were taking us to opposite coasts and I assumed that we would never see or hear from each other again.

To be honest, I didn’t give it a whole hell of a lot of thought after that either. I had moved on to the rest of my life. That was, until social media caught up with us about five or so years ago. Turns out Chausey had met my best friend Micki at a therapist shindig and they had become FB friends. Our paths crossed once again. Life moves in mysterious ways. I was shocked, actually, at the person who had emerged out of my childhood friend. Chausey had gone to LA to become an actress and had come back this deeply wise, spiritually connected, authentically loving, and super gifted therapist. Who would have guessed? Not me. But I am here to tell you, she’s got an impressive handle on this life gig. Truly, she does. In fact I find myself completely fascinated by the fact that anything that I might be able to share about moving into interbeing, she could speak to equally as well if not better. What’s even more fascinating is how our lives have been woven together at critical moments that we have had next to zero idea about at the time. Yet here we are. There are no coincidences in life.

All of that is to give my resounding endorsement of her new online course, 33 Day Process: Loving Your Beautiful & Miraculous Body. Here is the link again:

33 Day Process

While the entry point of the course is to open up communication channels with your own body, this simply serves as the portal to exploring the territory that I am covering in this blog- interbeing. If you are interested in this work, then I do highly recommend taking the course. I am on day 22 and have found it extraordinarily helpful. But before I speak a little about my own process, I’d like to put the territory covered into the context of what I speak about here.

I’m going to do that by taking you back to your middle school science class. Let’s talk atoms. Most likely your image of an atom involves something that looks like our planetary system in which electrons move in fixed orbits through a whole lot of space around a nucleus. Right? This model of the atom originates from the “Bohr model,” not to bore you, as proposed by Niels Bohr in 1913. In this model, the space that the electrons orbit through accounts for about 99.99% of the atom. That is to say that all material things- yourself included- are barely more than nothingness. Forget the fact that the human body is about 60% water. How about the fact that it is 99.99% nothing! Well hold on just a second. That was 1913. Unfortunately, that is the model of the atom still floating around in your head, isn’t it? Incidentally, I asked my Middlebury students if that was what they were taught and every single person confirmed that it was.

So what gives? Well, if you just take a second to check trusty ole Wikipedia, you’ll discover the words, “This model is obsolete.” Indeed it is. It has been for almost 100 years now. It was replaced in 1926 thanks to quantum physicists Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. Let me just cut to the chase. What quantum physicists discovered is that subatomic particles (such as electrons, protons and neutrons) are not quite as solid as we once thought. That is to say that they sometimes show up as particles (physical matter), but more often than not they show up as waves (energy). The thing to understand here about waves (energy) is that they are essentially everywhere at once. Think about the cell phone waves that your phone can magically pick up anywhere… actually, if you live in Vermont then scratch that. But seriously, just try to imagine for a second the infinite volume of waves inhabiting the space you are sitting in at this very moment: light waves, sound waves, cell phone waves, wifi waves, heat waves, etc and so on. Are these waves in some discreet part of the room? No. They are everywhere at once.

Cut back to the atom. It turns out that electrons are not so much particles orbiting in empty space so much as they are waves that inhabit the entire electron cloud around the nucleus… and just happen to show up as particles in orbits of probability. Which is why it is just easier to just continue to teach the old model… we can’t handle the uncertainty (principle)! I won’t even get into the observer effect here, but suffice it to say that the two together upend our entire objectified worldview. For the sake of this post, it’s enough to simply understand that you are not 99.99% space. You and every material thing you encounter is 99.99% energy… as in NOT material.

Context set, I am now ready to talk about these 33 days. Should you decide to delve into the course, I recommend taking with you just a little uncertainty about the worldview we were all given. You know, the one that says that your body is your body and your mind is your mind and that the former is just a host to the latter. Or perhaps you are of the mindset that it’s all just a matter of matter and when the body dies, so goes the mind. Either way, what Schrödinger and Heisenberg discovered ought to give us pause. We know even more now than then, and from multiple realms of inquiry. But I’m going to keep this simple. The bottom line is that there is no separation between mind and body, or energy and matter. The one is the other, and vice versa. There is only one thing. In order to heal ourselves and the planet, we must come to grips with this at last.

But now to bring it down to earth. As I have talked about many times in this blog, I have been working intensely for well over a year to heal my inner childhood wounds. I have been doing this by stepping myself back in time, one step at a time. However, my wounds extend all the way back into the womb. I have no conscious memory of that time through the first few years of my existence. But you know who does? My body. Yup. She sure does. So all I need to do to figure out what needs to be healed is to talk to her. She knows. After all, she is the one who has been carrying the brunt of it all this time. Rest assured, she knows!

One thing that Chausey does is to help us to identify the various aspects of our body/being so that we can get to the specifics. This also helps us to recognize and support each aspect of our body/being in the role that it is playing to keep us alive. I say “keep us alive” intentionally as for the most part this is what the various primordial aspects of our being think they are doing… fighting for our survival. The issue with being stuck in survival mode is that it precludes us from stepping into our full potential, or thrival. That is why our healing must involve revisiting our old patterns and way of being. These patterns are so deeply ingrained that we are hardly aware of them. We function largely on autopilot. In order to get to thrival we have to reprogram, shifting to patterns that better serve us.

I’ll give you one personal example of the many things that are coming up for me. My Solar Plexus has been functioning in overdrive to protect me since my inception. This is due to the fact that I started life in a blood battle, my red blood cells being attacked by my mother’s immune system while in the womb. I was truly in a fight for my life and my Solar Plexus was given the job of doing the behind the scenes work to get me the intel and energy that I needed to survive. As a result, nothing and no one was to be trusted, leading to an intense guardedness carried out via my power center (Solar Plexus). The role that my Solar Plexus has been playing is to be my very own highly trained Secret Service. Good luck getting past that!

Well, these days you do have more than a snow balls chance in hell! But if I want to truly move into a state of interbeing, to evolve into a state that will support the world that I want to live in, then I need a new modus operandi. That new M.O. involves a new role for my Solar Plexus. It is going to take some time to implement with a whole lot of practice and reinforcement necessary, but my Solar Plexus has been promoted to Sensei. No longer is her job to keep me safe via separation. Her job is to keep me safe via connection. She can now be who she always wanted to be…a tai chi master. Instead of shutting out all of that energy- 99.99% of everything surrounding me and moving through me!- her new role is to learn how to move with all of that abundant, beautiful energy in such a way that helps both me and everything around me to live into our true potential.

So that’s the work. Establishing new roles and new patterns takes time and dedication. That is why this particular process takes 33 consecutive days. It’s worth it. We are worth it. Huge thank you to Chausey for sharing her gifts with the world so that we all might live into our true potential. You go, Girl!

 

The Bridge Home

Today we took a hike in one of our favorite stomping grounds, the Taconic Mountains Ramble zen garden. It’s unseasonably warm here, but not warm enough for this little guy in the photo above. My heart stopped a little when I saw him perched on high, overlooking his beautiful home, where it is difficult to tell if he had taken his last breath or if he is just hibernating. This is one of the bullfrogs who I talked to during my morning runs over the summer. So that’s the first thing. If he is indeed dead, then I have lost a friend. If he is not dead, then he is in a precarious situation to be in a state of hibernation. On top of those concerns, you might recall the cover of my inner child work journal (see “Done” post). Here it is again:

Yes, that’s a bridge from my adult self to my inner child, here represented as a frog. I drew frogs like that in elementary school, in part because my first nickname was “Froggy.” So all sorts of things come up for me. Mainly, I get the sense that this little guy, or gal as the case may be, has gone Home, leaving this home in a state of peace.

Then there is the question of what in the hell she was doing up there in the first place. Was she confused by the unusual warmth and then got caught as the temperature dropped overnight? Is she just another casualty of climate change? Or is she just surrendered to what Is, without a concern in the world? Who knows? Whatever the case, my sense is that we all need to find this bridge home, this bridge to peace, sooner rather than later, alive rather than dead.

So with that in mind, I was fortunate this week to have had conversations to help me move in that direction. One set of conversations was with my new students. That new job that I mentioned in my last post is as a professor in the Architectural Studies program at Middlebury College. It’s a dream job at a place that has spearheaded our consciousness surrounding climate change through the efforts of people like Bill McKibben. Middlebury has a joint degree between Architectural and Environmental Studies, which is where I will find my home.

For starters, I get to help students set off on the right foot from day one, reframing what role architecture has to play in healing our relationship to nature and to each other. Within a liberal arts context, I get to address the broader issues. That means that I get to dig down deep into the primary issue, a worldview that pits us both against nature and against each other. That is to say, I get to talk interbeing. One week into Winter Term, I have already addressed how self-actualization must be hitched to system-actualization if it is to be successful. This is the key to evolution. If we learn nothing else, that understanding alone will guide us home.

The good news is that the students are responding at Middlebury just as they did at Prairie View A&M. Let’s face it, these institutions represent two radically different demographics. One is for the academically elite and the other is for the academically underserved. One is overwhelmingly white and the other is overwhelmingly black. We need both fully engaged in forging our way home to each other. We need both sides of the equation to understand that, in fact, they are both panthers. Literally… that is the mascot of both schools. And they are ready to embrace our sociological-ecological challenges. This generation is eager to step up to the plate. It’s heartening.

Already this week I have had students, some of whom will major in architecture and some of whom will not, convey back to me that they are excited about my class and that already they are seeing things in new ways. And I’m teaching an introductory design studio! The vehicle hardly matters. Their chosen majors or professions hardly matter. No matter who you are or what you do, the question is quite simply: how is the actualization of your own unique potential meant to actualize the potential of the system at large?

For me, part of the answer to that question is to help others in discovering their own unique potential through teaching. To do that, I have to actually learn what each student has to offer. I have to be their student. I have three Chinese students in my studio. Two are here just for college and the other moved here with her family when she was fifteen. It occurred to me, as I was discussing the relationship between self and system-actualization in relationship to political systems- capitalism, socialism, and communism- that I really don’t know the first thing about China. I have zero first hand experience. I only have the stories that we here in the United States are told. So when I had the opportunity to sit down with the latter student, I asked!

In the context of the Hong Kong protests and trade wars, China is not high on our list at the moment. Not that it ever has been. We have routinely called the country out for “crimes against humanity” that we believe are inevitable with any communist system. In fact, Congress just issued a report on China again calling them out for such crimes, in particular in regard to a lack of religious freedom… for Muslims specifically. You can read about it in Reuters (which ranks high as being a non-biased media source):

“U.S. congressional study urges sanctions on China over ‘crimes against humanity'”

Incidentally, my measure of any political system is the same as my measure of anything else: how well does it tie self-actualization to system-actualization? The Soviet version of communism severely oppressed self-actualization. That is why it no longer exists. So I was curious how my student felt about the opportunities for self-actualization in China. Perhaps surprisingly, she reported not feeling all that repressed. In her account, the government doesn’t really get in your way. You might argue that she has been brainwashed, but let me remind you that she went to high school in Brooklyn and is in the midst of a liberal arts education that asks us to question everything.

She acknowledges that not everyone gets to vote and that there is only one party, which is why we call it communism. But to her, the government feels more like what we call socialism. Nonetheless, in order to “earn” the right to vote, you must gain admittance to the one and only party- the Communist Party- which is as difficult as gaining admission to an Ivy League university and encompasses only approximately 6.5% of the population. Virtually everyone who has the right to vote in China does vote as opposed to only about 60% here in the U.S., but still. China is not a democracy, although they are slowly moving in that direction.

To me, the larger questions tie back to the self + system-actualization framework. If crimes against humanity are occurring, there is a serious breakdown of self-actualization. The problem with us throwing stones at China, however, is that we are also guilty of such crimes here in the U.S. Sorry. I know the truth hurts. If you are struggling with this assertion, just think about what is happening at our southern border, not to mention the mass incarceration of our black population. Again, sorry, but our truth isn’t as pretty as we would like it to be. Hence, if you read the above article, it should come as no surprise that China threw it right back at us. And we deserve it.

Now back to my student. Her question is this: who is anyone to tell another country what is in their own best self-interest? Who are we to tell other countries what is the best form of government for their particular situation at any particular moment in time? China has a hell of a lot more people than we do. In her observation, China has “too many people” and they have “too many people” problems. We know nothing about that situation, although it is easy enough to observe that when those of us who have been dominant in this country start to feel outnumbered, we tend to want to restrict the “other’s” right to vote, and we do.

If you want my honest opinion, I don’t think any of us have it figured out just yet. Although if I gauge which countries are doing the best at self-actualization, I would have to give it to those practicing a version of democratic socialism. If you feel inclined to dismiss my observation, I invite you to check out for yourself how we rank in any of the metrics that we have to measure self-actualization: upward mobility, education, freedom, happiness, etc. Check the numbers before you decide how we are doing. The UN 2019 Human Development Index ranked the U.S. as 15th in the world. Fifteenth. Not first:

http://hdr.undp.org

I’m not saying that we can’t get there from here. In fact, I would argue that it is the mandate of the United States of America to get there. It is our founding vision. I am saying that we are not there yet, nor have we ever at any moment in our history been there. I am also saying that it is not guaranteed that we will get there. That will depend on how well we remember our vision, update our vision as we learn new information, and take the steps to move toward that vision. Most pointedly, we will not achieve the conditions that support self-actualization if we do not hitch it to system-actualization. That’s a Law of Nature that is as real as gravity.

Abiding by that Law of Nature is what will lead us home. And if all of this sounds overwhelming, the main thing to remember is that it all starts at home- with you, with me. This leads me to the other conversation that I have been having this week- the one that I am having with myself. I have been working intensely this year to heal my inner child. At the moment I am doing that through conversation with my body through the guidance of my childhood friend, Chausey Leebron. Chausey is a Psychotherapist who practices Spiritual Psychology. As the new year approached she asked her friends if anyone would be interested in a course on healing our relationship with our body. She got an overwhelming “yes” which led her to launching an online course, which you can find here:

http://33dayprocess.com

As the name indicates, this is a 33 day process, which I will leave to Chausey to describe in the introductory video. I am 8 days in and what I can tell you is that I have been deeply dialoguing with the parts of my body that have been holding my wounds, stresses, challenges, worry, judgements, etc. You see the thing is, if we want to heal our relationship to Nature, we have to, have to, have to start by healing our relationship to our own nature- to our body, our emotions, our thoughts, our energy… which of course are all interdependent and interrelated. This post is long already, so I will leave more about my experience of this for next week. For now, let me just express my desire for the highest self-actualization possible for me, for my students, for you, and for every single human being on the planet. If this sounds like too much to ask for, I would like to counter-offer than anything less is too little to ask for.

Resolution

Scratch that. A resolution implies impending failure, doesn’t it? In essence it’s saying “I’m really going to make it happen. Really I am. No matter the odds!” It’s that odds thing at the end that dooms it from the start. It suggests that we don’t really believe that things are going to go the way we would like them to. It implies that we are going to have to fight our every impulse in order to make it happen. It sounds exhausting from the get go. Nevermind.

Intention sounds better. It’s not quite so frantic. There is an openness about it that leaves room for adjustment and creativity. It further allows the Universe to conspire on our behalf. Yet my preferred word is vision. In the words of Conversations With God:

“The purpose of life is to create your Self anew, in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are.” – God

With that in mind, Shannon and I have for years been attending the Burning Bowl Service at Unity of Houston on New Year’s Eve. It’s a two part ceremony. In part one you write down everything that you want to release to close out the year. Then you throw your list into the fire. In part two you set your vision for the new year. For me this is neither a declaration of who I want to be or even who I intend to be. It’s a declaration of who I am. It is the greatest vision that I can muster for myself in the moment.

So since we did not make the trip down to Houston for the holidays, Shannon and I performed the ceremony at home last night. I had a lot more time to think about both lists, so they both got quite long – 18 items each! I notice that each year I get better at my release and more daring in my vision. Watch out 2020!!! Just sayin.

I am not going to share either list with you as they have both been released to the Universe at this point. After I finish my vision, I place it under the altar in our meditation room. Now since we moved this year, I was a little shocked to discover that my 2019 vision had made the move and found itself back under the altar. So what I will do is share that vision with you now. Here goes:

The top of the page that Unity gave us said this, “Dear God, I co-create with you the following intentions for 2019…”

  • a new beginning and new home in Vermont (check)
  • a new job which will better support me in playing my role in healing the planet (check… more news forthcoming!)
  • an expanded, fully creative version of myself (check)
  • a new, joyous experience of everyday life (progress made!)
  • light-heartedness (progress made here too)
  • a free spirit (and here too)
  • a deep, sacred interbeing, or at least recognition thereof, with everyone who crosses my path (this is definitely escalating)
  • writing that serves our collective evolution and salvation (check)
  • Heaven on Earth (well, I never said I wasn’t ambitious!)

At the bottom of the paper it says “This or something better.” This year marked a major life transition for me on so many levels. The Universe is fully supporting me in my becoming, and I am so grateful. The best way that I can express that gratitude is by continuing to release all that no longer serves me while expanding my vision of Who I Really Am. I know that when I sit here next year looking at my 2020 list, I will be checking the extraordinary state of Being in my vision. Won’t you join me?