A Day in a Life: I Am Here

I focus on staying present. I am doing yoga.

“I am here,” I say. “I am here in this body, in this moment.”

“I am me,” I say. “I am me in this body.”

“I am this body,” I say. “I live here on earth in this body.”

“I am here,” I say. “I am me.”

I am present in this moment...

As I move and breathe, I bring my attention back again and again to the moment, to being present in my body. I thank myself for giving myself this healing time and I thank the universe for providing the paths I took to get to this moment of this day. I take each moment as sacred, as ritual.

I take a moment to write down my thoughts of awareness of being, of being in my body, of being in the moment of doing yoga somewhere in the world, a small speck of awareness in the universe, one small speck of knowing that I am alive, intent on being fully present in my body.

Sometimes I am pretty aware of being present in my body, but most often I am not. Most often I am somewhere else, my body along for the ride. But in this moment, I am aware that my body is my natural environment, my beingness resides in it and depends on it, needs it, trusts it. I am in the moment, present and enjoying the rituals of doing yoga, of breathing, and of being consciously aware.

Ritual of Fire

After I do yoga, I carry the wood from the woodpile. I build a fire and light it, another ritual. I am aware that this is a ritual performed by millions of others. Since fire became a part of human life this ritual has been important. As I carry out the steps of making my fire, I am aware that I am partaking in an ancient practice of firemaking for the same reasons that eons of people have made fires. I do not cook over my fire, but I seek warmth. I am part of an ancient ritual today as I make my fire. I honor the ritual and I honor myself in the process of partaking in this ritual. I honor all who have done this before me.

I take time to notice that I am present. I am me. I am in my body, present in this moment doing this ritual. In the next moment the fire is burning well. I can turn to other things now, back to my writing, back to preparing for other rituals that come throughout the day, if I care to see them as such.

I remind myself to slow down and take the time to feel myself in my body often throughout the day, present in the moment and in my awareness of being, as often as possible. I remind myself to remain aware that my daily activities and chores are part of my ritual life too.

Honor and create ritual

I remind myself to invent new rituals as I go along, making life sacred, simply because it is and it deserves to be lived in sacred fashion. I deserve it, the earth deserves it, all creatures—man included—deserve the honor of sacred ritual. If we all slowed down and made our personal lives sacred rituals, if we all invented our own personal rituals—honoring and thanking ourselves, our bodies, others in our lives, the universe—perhaps we’d end up with enough pauses full of calmness and peace to temper the otherwise busy and fast-paced world we live in.

When we slow down enough we realize we don’t really need that fast-paced world. We discover we don’t really want to live like that. When we slow down we discover that we, by our very animal nature, are more connected to the earth and the sacred ritual of a simple life than we realized. When we slow down we walk and breathe the pulse of the earth and it calms us and nurtures us beyond anything else we might have available.

We desire our vacations by the ocean, a lake, in the calmness of the mountains or meadows because we are animals who crave nature’s slow pace and the beat of our heart knows this. By establishing our personal rituals we automatically slow to the beat of our heart, and automatically our perception of our personal place in the world shifts too. We actually become one with nature, connected and aware of being in the moment, in our bodies, in the right place: in total beingness.

The Sacred Beat of Nature

No matter what is going on around us or inside us, when we slow everything down and take a sacred moment we are at peace. Even if only for a moment, it is enough.

Tomorrow I will build a different fire, but the ritual, the process, will have the same ancient energy in it. Whether I focus on the ritual of it or not, whether I am as aware as I am today, I will still be tapping into the energy of ancient ritual. I know this energy of infinity, as ancient as the tapping of my own heartbeat. It is as ancient as the tapping of your own heartbeat, one pulse, beating for eternity. The ritual is already present. We just have to make ourselves available to it and tap into it.

As humans we have so much available to us. Our creative energy begs us to pause and pay attention to its insistence that we are not so modern as we might believe. We are ancient energy and we know instinctively how to connect with it and what to do with it.

Find sacred ritual in life, in nature, in self. Be in the moment. Be present in the body self. Breathe with awareness. That too is ritual. Be thankful to the self and the universe and then pause and listen to its reply. In the calm beat of your own heart you will hear its resonant beat.

Present in the moment, in calmness, in beingness,
Jan

Readers of Infinity: Patience

Continue the process of inner work, recapitulating the deepest aspects of self, utilizing patience as a means of slowing down the energies of turmoil and rigidity that seek to dominate.

Anchoring in patience

It is time to fully accept all aspects of self as valid and necessary, to allow the inner process to become the means for outer change. Seek not change outerly, for such change will have no lasting effect. Only inner change will have potential. However, use the outer world to gain stability and anchoring.

Be responsible for the self in all aspects of life, as it must be lived according to where you are in your life. Accept that certain needs must be met, certain requirements upheld, and that many issues will need attention. Such is the case with the outer world, but do not let the outer world overwhelm you. It is merely a tool to inner growth and evolutionary advancement.

In addition, your inner world must be handled in similar fashion as the outer world, for you are equally responsible for and must meet the needs of what comes from within the self as well. Balance but also deep awareness of both of these worlds as necessary must be accepted.

Consideration of the self as a journeyer on a deeply challenging and truly evolutionary journey must become acceptable but also the intent of every human being upon that planet. There is no time to waste in blame, regret, or victimization. In a sense you are all victims of the world you live in, of the life you lead, and of the decisions made by others, but that is only so that you may seek a deeper meaning for life, self, and world.

It is not a time to wallow in self-pity, even as you accept the truths I speak of. It is a time of accessing the deeper knowing and purpose of life in general and your own life specifically. Although it may not be clear where you are heading with the work you do in resolving the issues of the self, it is perfectly clear that it is the right road to take. For in your release of self to take the journey of change, you have, each one of you, experienced the glory of changing moments. You know the feel of shift in your bodies, your minds, your psyches, and your spirits. Each one of you, no matter how sad and dire your circumstances, no matter how deeply engrossing your process, have experienced something new.

Patience must anchor you now. The world around you asks for it. Steady pacing, tending to all the details of life, and attention to the truths that arise, calling for the self to accept them, means that progress will be made.

Anchor in patience. Pull up this anchor of patience repeatedly as you keep moving, but resettle in its stillness as you feel your way through everything that arises to challenge you over the next few days. Nothing is too much to handle when you sit in anchoring patience. Everything will become clearer and you will know what is right.

Let actions come from the rightness of knowing that is achieved in patient anchoring. This is the next step. You already know it. Now is the time to work it. It’s right and it takes so little to enact. In patience comes clarity.

Chuck’s Place: Parallel Lives, the Maze, and the Ego Self

The Big Bang

In the beginning, so say the scientists, was the Big Bang, and the universe was born. In his seminal piece, The Trauma of Birth (1924), Otto Rank describes the Big Bang experience of human birth and its psychological impact throughout the life cycle.

On a soul level, many have retrieved their journeys through infinity; their lives lived before the big bang birth into their current lives in this world. These soul retrievals point to a parallel life, a soul of many lives that gives birth to the Self of this life.

The decision as to what life to be born into is made at that soul level, as part of that soul’s evolving journey and needs in infinity. Some have called this process Karma.

For most of us, the big bang experience of our birth trauma into the life we are in is a shock that severs us from the knowing of our soul and our many lives previously lived. We are born into a maze with huge walls that seal off the memory of prior life and our connection to our greater soul that continues to live in tandem with the self we become in this world.

A hint of previous lives

We are here on a mission, and that mission requires a blank slate maze-of-unknowing. A maze is a definite, constrained life: a family, a culture, a set of circumstances, a world within which to encounter specific challenges, and a world within which to develop an identity, a sense of self, an Ego—a point of consciousness.

That ego will become our working definition of who we are and also our engine to accomplish our mission in this world, that is: the reason we came here, the reason we were born into the circumstances we arrived into.

Had we the full awareness of our greater soul coming into this life, our mission would be compromised. We’d be unable to fully inhabit the role we need to experience in taking on the challenge of this life. However, the ego does, in its separated state from its greater soul, experience a deep underlying sense of insecurity and separation anxiety. The ego retains an awareness of its orphan state and part of its mission in this world is to reunite with its true birth parent, its greater soul.

The circumstances we are born into

Life for the ego is a fragmented self in a fragmented world—life in a maze—a neatly constructed world, but only a fragment of life at large.

Traumas beyond birth continue the fragmentation of ego self into Ego States. Ego states are separate senses of self that coexist and live in tandem—parallel lives in tandem, parallel lives within the ego’s life in this world.

Ego states may be hidden from or known to each other. Some ego states remain largely in the closet, holding frightening traumatic memories. Some ego states suffer arrested development, child states necessarily pushed aside or denied for adaptive reasons. We discover and live the parallel lives of our ego states in our symptoms—i.e.: ailments, diseases—hinting at and suggesting the truths of our parallel lives. We discover and live the parallel lives of our ego states in our mood states—i.e.: depression, elation, hope, hopelessness, fear, etc. We also discover our ego states in obsessive projections—those we are drawn to in admiration or those we abhor. Somewhere in those projections are the mirrors to our unknown, unloved, or forgotten ego states. We also discover our ego states and our connection to our greater soul in dreams, active imagination, and synchronistic phenomena.

Parallel lives

If we can suspend our rational judgments and explore the characters and messages of dreams, synchronicities, and other psychic phenomena, we begin to step outside the maze of our narrow selves and access the fullness and resource of all that we truly are.

This is the process of integration that unites the fragments of this life and potentially the fragments of all lives lived—our greater soul—within this life. This is a mighty task though, as it asks us to truly take in the Big Bang realization of all that we are: We are much more than our orphan ego clings to in its neatly defined maze.

Though the knocking down of the walls of our mazes may shatter our “known” selves, it is not without its rewards. We discover a-maze-ing resources and a life of magic now freed for fulfillment beyond the maze, a once needed but now much too small home.

Out of the many become one: Parallel lives united, beyond the maze, continue the soul’s journey in infinity.

Chuck