War and Peace

The sky is gray this morning, but the birds keep on singing. They spin their symphony alive each morning, and even on days when I haven't had enough sleep, I am grateful to be pulled back into wakefulness by their song. Here I am, alive for another day on this Earth. Near me, a sweet little kitty, purring his song gently as he sleeps on my pillow. Mornings like this are such exquisite gifts. I appreciate days when I don't have to rush off to be somewhere in particular too early, and can just sit and be present with the morning.

I awoke following dreams that have left my heart heavy, and my belly churning. Dreams of Laura, who died of cancer last August. Dreams of hollow, empty places and echoes of the past, of things that are never the same after they are touched by loss. And I feel that in my heart, even now. When I got out of bed this morning, I was heavy with the sadness of these dreams.

I've been reading a lot of amazing books lately. Dear Lover by David Deida. A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson. The Bhagavad Gita. But the one that has touched me the most deeply has been Practicing Peace in Times of War by Pema Chodron. It's a book I kept meaning to read each time I heard someone read from it, but kept forgetting to get it. It came into my life last week at the perfect time, and touched me deeply with her messages of deep, inner peace. Removing the seeds of war within myself...that's the process.

It's not a lack of love that keeps me from living in deep peace. On Sunday, as I listened to the guidance of the universe in Ceremony, I could see that there was no more love to be found within me. Only the ways that that love is blocked. The feeling that came to me was pain in the heart. Before, I had always understood that heartache comes from the heart caving in on itself, deflated, empty of love, and needing to be filled. Now I clearly see that heartache comes from a heart being so filled with love, filled to bursting, but not able to freely share it, to let it pour forth. Holding back love is the source of this pain. And I can see that the holding back of love is only the beginning of suffering - when the mind tries to process what is happening, to find some solid ground, a whole reality is created. Separation is created. I am this and you are that is created. Conflict happens.

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday that really brought me into contemplation. His point of view was one of embracing radical authenticity and honesty, which are practices that I deeply value. But the question that came into my mind that has lingered was of the real nature of that authenticity. Am I most authentic when I embrace my personality and ego as they arise in each moment? Am I being authentic when I honor the voices inside of me, even when they may not be the voices of my highest self? Am I being honest when I let those voices direct my life? Am I being authentic when I choose restraint, and see the motives behind each thought and action? Am I being authentic when I choose to speak and act only from my highest, finest self? Am I being authentic when I listen to my own dark voices, but do not let them move me? I have been exploring the fine line of difference between repression and restraint in my life for weeks now. These questions have been alive in the unspeakable reaches of my mind, but through reading Pema Chodron, I have found some understanding that has really touched home.

The mind is a hamster wheel. It is a biocomputer that processes whatever it is given. It spins and churns sensory input, and intellectual input, and whatever other kinds of input that appear. It is a tool. It is not the truth of who I am. I am not what I think, I am far deeper than that. However I choose to discipline my mind - or not - will affect my entire life. Feeling is a barometer and emotions are the weather. Feeling, deeper and embodied, is my true north, and will guide me into the truth of my life. Its sense impressions cannot be easily named, but located within the body. Emotion is different from feeling in ways that I find it difficult to articulate. It is reactive, it is nameable, and can often be traced to a particular thought or experience. But all of this - mind, feeling, and emotion - is a swirling soup of life experience. I see how very deeply I get caught up in it all. Personally, I trust feeling the most, and mind the least. I know there are others that revere the mind for its potential for logic and evaluation, and find it much more consistent and trustable. But when I touch in more deeply, I find that beyond the closing and opening of the mind, beyond the changing faces of feeling and emotion, is choice. If I choose to be disciplined, and commit my life to something greater than my own moment-to-moment changing experiences, the whole picture shifts. And this comes back to war and peace. If I choose to step beyond my small perspectives of mind, and beyond my ocean of feeling and emotion, I find that the battlefield is always internal. Whatever battles I am choosing to enact in the world - righteous or justified or not - are battles that are occurring within me first. And I also see that whenever I am choosing to enact those inner battles in the world, I am feeding war.

I don't want to feed war. There is nothing within my little frame of reference that is worthy of war. None of it. All the yearning for personal authenticity and radical honesty is not worth it. All the longing to truly know myself and be myself is not worth war. And this is where Pema Chodron has blessed my life so much. She says, a good definition of peace: "Softening what is rigid in our hearts..." war is never going to end as long as our hearts are hardened against each other. She continues, whenever we harden our hearts, what is going on with us? There's an uneasiness and then a tightening, a shutting down, and then the next thing we know, the chain reaction begins and we become very righteous about our right to kill the mosquito or yell at the person in the car or whatever it might be. We ourselves become fundamentalists, which is to say we become very self-righteous about our personal point of view. Yeah. Is finding the authenticity within my own personality worth that? No. Not hardly. Rumi inspires me here, Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field; I'll meet you there.

It's all about what I choose to practice. Pema Chodron continues, We label our story lines "thinking" and let them dissolve, and we come back to "right now" even when "right now" doesn't feel so great. This is how we learn patience, and how we learn to interrupt the chain reaction of habitual responses that otherwise will rule our lives...From your side, you can keep going in the conversation, but now with a kind of innate intelligence and wisdom called prajna. I am such a beginner with this. I have been reading about this practice for so long. Since I was 22 perhaps. But I am only now just beginning to understand what she's talking about, to feel it in my life. I have wanted peace, but I have fed conflict. I have hated war, and I have lived war. I am not willing to do that any more. I lay down my resistance like a pale corpse and surrender to the truth of Love. And now, the practice begins.