Tag: awareness

Expectations

by Davin Franklin-Hicks

On January 29th my wife arranged a shin dig for something rather different. I had started to lose my hair from chemo and we wanted to shave it. Her awesome life affirming self invited some of our peeps over to shave my head. It was a very awesome day, actually. Lots of love and humor.

In the last few weeks I have had my nearest and dearest tell me why they didn’t shave their head when I shaved mine. Each time this revelation was presented to me, it was a bit confessional like they were getting something off their chest. “Here is why I didn’t shave my head… but I love you…”

What I loved about this is that I never wanted them to shave their head and I never knew they thought I wanted that.

It’s made me laugh to myself when I think of it. It has made me happy to know that they love me that much. And it’s also got me thinking about expectations.

They can really change things. Truly.

Expectations can pause a relationship and freeze a moment that never really existed anywhere but in imagination.

Expectations are created to get a perceived need met in a very specific way. We place these on ourselves and others. All 7 billion of us on the planet have an agenda and most are based on the same wish: to know we matter, to know we are safe, to know we are loved. Yes, there are those in the world with nefarious motives, but most are not. Most just wanna feel love.

I have learned a lot about living this season of my life. I have learned about relationship, fear, sickness, self-love, compassion, hope, anger, grief, affirmation.

I have learned about our responsiveness to mortality and fragility. I have learned we can make hard stuff even harder.

The last 16 months have been ridiculously hard for the people who love me as we fumbled about post trauma and now, post cancer diagnosis.

Sickness is made worse when there is unspoken expectation. It makes it so much worse when already it is incredibly hard.

We are scared.
We are angry.
We are hopeful.
We are moved.
We are tired.
We are all the things that happen when the worst happens.

I find it heartening, funny and real to find out my dad and my best friends all thought about shaving their head and worried that I wouldn’t feel loved by them if they didn’t.

Such a tenderness in that…

And we could laugh together because they admitted this expectation was in the mix.

So how can we know we matter in relationship without expectation? I think it starts with knowing expectations don’t foster closeness.

The expectations we place on ourselves to know the end of the story and see it coming removes us from the best of life. It removes the mindfulness of being. It removes the spontaneous love that happens when we are present to each other.

We create something new when we are truly present with each other. We are never truly with one another if we are constantly rating our relationships based on expectation rather than being aware of what is happening in the present moment.

A healer in my life talks about skillful response rather than being reactive. I like that a lot. I have learned we can meet our needs much more skillfully if we remove expectation and see it as limiting.

If we set down the expectation we have room for other things that truly meet our need for connection:

Authenticity
Honesty
Invitation
Kindness
Vulnerability
Relationship
Love

And amazing hair.

image credit: Dax: “Some of my peeps who shaved my head on January 29th. Our son Angelo did the bulk of the shaving but he had to go be a grown up at work before we got the group pic.”

Roll Call

by Amos Smith

There is something subtle and profound that makes us uniquely human. There is something illusive, yet extraordinarily powerful, that animates human genius. In its pure form it “hovered over the surface of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). At the world’s genesis it separated the day and the night by name (Genesis 1:5). It is a power that arrives with the age of reason (about twelve or thirteen years of age). It is what some refer to as “full reflective self-consciousness”. This is a more technical phrase for the familiar term, “awareness”.

It is amazing how many times we can hear the word “awareness” without fully recognizing its penetrating primal meaning. For a long time, I thought I knew what awareness was. I thought I was aware. Yet only recently have I discovered how little I can claim hold of this illusive powerhouse of a term.

I like so many people, slip into unconsciousness on a regular basis. On some level I tune out, space out, check out. “Out” is the key word here. I am no longer present.  If there was a roll call, an astute observer would record “absent” after my name.

If I am honest, there are many intervals throughout the day when I check out. When I make my breakfast I am most often absent. I have made breakfast so many times in the same way that I now do it in my sleep. When I talk with loved ones, the people I most want to be present to and to listen to, I sometimes fade out. I stare out the window and lull my awareness to sleep. When I sit down to eat after a long day I sometimes pull my chair out without thinking—it is unconscious—I am not aware of what I am doing. Then I chew my food while thinking about something else, without really tasting it. And when I sit in front of the television, like so many Americans, I check out. I just take in the sound bites and CNN’s glossing of the news. I do not reflect and think about what is coming into my senses. I allow mental laziness to creep over me like a fog. I then just accept what is being said wholesale, even when it insults my intelligence.

It is always easier to tune out. It is always easier not to question – to just accept what we are fed through mass media. It is always easier not to look beneath the surface, not to listen when it stretches or hurts, not to be present when pulling up a chair after a long day. It is also easier not to check in on our familiar destructive habits. It is easier just to let things slide. It is effortless to pop the tranquilizer that shuts off awareness – to simply go on autopilot. It is always easier to cut class. But when we get older we can no longer obtain the permission slip to be absent. We no longer have an excuse to check out. To be an adult in the best sense is to be present. It is to be attentive to our children, to the written and spoken word, to dinner, to brushing our teeth, and to our world.

It is when people check out and appeal to instinct that our world turns to indifference, apathy, and violence. It is when people check in and appeal to reason that our world turns to compassionate understanding, beauty, and poise.

Even when we read, we are distracted and check out for a paragraph or two. This is normal. But, do we know that we have checked out and do we know which paragraphs were missed and why. Or are we so absent, we don’t even know that we are absent.  

Roll Call! Are you in or out?

Why Doing Nothing Can Be Good

by Amos Smith

A number of my peers are devoted to fishing and sailing.

I’m convinced the primary motivation for these activities is an excuse to do nothing – to just sit waiting for a bite – to just get carried by the wind. Rarely, in our industrialized world, are we afforded the time required for our minds to still – to settle into the desert quiet that fertilized the minds of the prophets – the minds of shepherds like David who wrote “God leads me beside still waters. God restores my soul” (Psalm 23:2-3).

Christian tradition, especially Protestant tradition, emphasizes revelation from scripture. Yet, at its root, revelation in scripture begins with silence. Silence is the fertile soil where God’s word originates. To discover the revelations of scripture we expose ourselves to scripture. To discover the revelations of silence, we expose ourselves to silence.

In silence there is revelation – revelation about ourselves. We come to the frontiers of silence and we find a number of things. Some feel discomfort, some anxiety, some feel tension in their bodies, and still others feel emotional turmoil. And most will discover above all else the wondering monkey mind and how difficult it is to still it. What we experience reveals something about our nature. The revelation of the wandering monkey mind is itself a great gift of awareness.

When our mind finally stills and enters deep silences we come to understand more and more about ourselves.

Summer Reading

by Amanda Petersen

Summer is the time I do most of my research and dreaming for the rest of the year.  When it is 110 outside I spend a lot more time indoors reading. As I stack up the books to read and create lists of blogs to read a constant theme keeps coming up. We are, as humans, always looking for that “thing”.  That part of our life or understanding that is going to make everything make sense. We have to go find it.

In this search we encounter obstacles that make it impossible to find this “thing”. There is a period of blaming the obstacles – parents, spouses, bosses, weather, money etc. If only they had not happened the thing would be here. And there is a time of wishing if only the right person, place or money would arrive then……

As I search these books, listen to others lives, and just observe, a central truth arrives. The “thing” is not out there. There are no big obstacles blocking us from reaching it. We already own it. The thing is Love, and it resides within us. Every teacher from every age points to this fact. If we would just stop and listen we would hear this Love saying we are already right where we need to be.

The problem is we need ears to hear, as Jesus would say. Learning to hear Love, really hear it, is not easy. There are so many other voices calling our name. We need other people through books, blogs, signs, notes, sermons, Ted talks, etc., to tell us in 100 different ways. We’re all saying the same thing. Love is big, Love is in us, Love is meant to be given away.

There may be someone in your life that you wonder if they will ever hear it. Or you may be wondering if you will ever know this Love. My encouragement is keep speaking it, keep writing it, keep living it if you want others to know. If you are looking, keep reading, keep journaling, keep connecting, keep listening. It’s already there; the right sounds just haven’t arrived. It’s vital we don’t stop learning to listen to and share Love.

In honor of this quest for awareness, please look at the summer groups we are offering. Many revolve around a book. All revolve around the quest of being aware of love!

Exercise: Send a note of encouragement and Love to someone.  See what happens.

Embrace

by Davin Franklin-Hicks

Every year, thousands of people develop a dependency on opiates. Most go through some form of treatment which means that they have to endure detox. There are medications out there that can lessen this severity, but there is withdrawal when those are stopped as well. It’s gonna hurt to quit the thing that the person started using in order not to hurt.

Unless there is secondary vulnerability, we won’t die from withdrawing from opiates. We could die withdrawing from benzodiazepines or alcohol, but not opiates. The line used by some professionals who know a few things about addiction and recovery is, “You won’t die from withdrawing on opiates. You will just wish you were dead.” What they are saying here is that opiate withdrawal is one of the hardest things a person could endure.

I have withdrawn from opiates on a couple of occasions. I can assure you, it is the truest, most brutal kind of suffering ever. Don’t do drugs. The after-school specials of yesteryear were right. They were poorly acted and scripted, but they were right. Like Jack, getting high on that beanstalk, I didn’t heed the cautionary tale.

I’ve written about the disease of addiction already and this is actually not what this article is about. I know, we are four paragraphs in and it has been about addiction, but it’s about to merge into something else. So, check your re-view mirrors and let’s merge.

I came to a friend some time back who knows a few things about addiction.  I said, “I think I am addicted to opiates.” He assisted me in finding treatment, getting time off of work to withdrawal, and walked me through withdrawal one step at a time. He is a good man, that guy. I won’t say who he is but his name starts with an E and ends with an “verett”. One thing he said over and over again during my withdrawal was, “Embrace the suck.” I hesitated to write that line in a faith-related blog, but any other word to replace “suck” just would not do.

What my friend was telling me in that moment was that embracing the suck means walking through it rather than struggling against it. It means acknowledging the reality of where you are at physically, spiritually or emotionally without having it be the place you will forever stay. It means that if you are in the habit of embracing the worst moments, you will most certainly be in fit position to embrace the good when it comes. And it will come back.

When hurting, it is a good idea to develop some mantras. I use some mantras in my own life, in addition to the one in the paragraphs above.

“This too shall pass.”

“Breathe.”

“Be here now.”

“God is Love.”

These are anchors to truth when I feel untethered. When the extreme happens in our lives, it creates an awareness that we are at risk. A healer in my life says, “The vigilance we experience after an extreme event puts us in touch with how fragile life can be. We generally don’t walk around thinking about that or experiencing that because it would be too much and too debilitating.” Scary, unwelcomed, hurtful life stuff makes it feel like we are only fragile. We are only vulnerable. That is not true.

We are fragile. We are sturdy. We are vulnerable. We are powerful. We are all of it. And what a range of emotion that can be. If it feels hard it’s because it is hard. If it feels easy it’s because it is easy. All of it. No binary, no either/or; all of it. Improv comedians actually know this reality well. They teach you to say “Yes, and…” rather than, “No, but…” They utilize that concept to be in a flow with the other folks doing improv. It’s basically, “I accept that and here is what I can contribute.” Back and forth, flow…

The pain will come and I am sorry for that, I wish it were different for all of us. The tears will well up. The sadness will seep in from time to time. The grief will take a seat at the most sacred place in your life at some point. And it will so suck.

The ease will come and I am so happy for that. The smiles will come again. The laughter will find its way back. And peace will take a seat at the most sacred place in your life at many points. And it will be so joyful.

So I say to you, as I also say to me, “Open your arms. It’s time to embrace it. All. Of. It.”