Sometimes Spaciousness Calls

If you’ve been feeling out of sorts lately – wanting “time-out” from frenzy and busyness – you’re not alone. In the increasingly frenetic pace of modern times, we who stroll to a slower drummer find ourselves longing for a simpler time. It may be fantasia. It may be our lives never were all that simple.

But we long for it just the same.

We long for lingering conversations that take the time to circle ‘round to a depth of feeling in which we know our souls have touched. We wonder, some days, what we’ve “accomplished”, though we’re sure we feel exhausted by the labor if it.

We yearn for the caress of a soft breeze on our cheek and a smiling sun that we pause to feel in our heart.

And we know there is something missing when we’re just plain busy.

How can this be? That when our time slots are the most crammed we can feel the most empty? We recognize that our nurturance and sustenance come from something other than “things”, including “things on our calendar to do”.

There’s a different math involved here. That which seems empty is full. The deep quiet is brimming with life. In us abides a secret longing to awaken to that quiet space – the Source of all the “things of form”. When we notice the lack of fulfillment in the clutter of busyness, we often gain the necessary motivation to commit to the arduous task of this awakening.

It is not that there is an absence of life in the things of this world. Rather, we can hardly notice the burgeoning life of “here” when we scurry along with the primary focus of trying to get to the next thing “on time”. Sinking into the depth needed to notice the fullness of the moment needs a pause. Enough time for the breath to get in before we shove it out and on to the next item on the list.

Some may have perfected the art of “being in the moment” so adroitly that they can fully fathom every pin’s head of experience. But, for most of us, we need enough time to gather all of ourself into the experience of the moment in order to plumb its potential juice.

Sometimes we want to stand still long enough to savor. This moment. This dialogue. This taste. This experience.

Because – sometimes Spaciousness is calling us Home.

Your Body Does not Lie

Your Body Does not Lie

This phrase has been bandied around a lot in recent years. What does it mean, exactly? There are so many layers of “truth”. Here’s how I think about it.

“Your Body Does not Lie” refers to a certain strata of experience. I believe that at the deepest level of Truth we are shining Light, free of ill-will. But covering this shimmering core is a layer of the muck laid down by decades of beliefs we have developed. Beliefs such as: “I am not good enough.”, or “The world is a scary place, not safe.” become like concrete over time.

Because our sense of self clamors to insist we are good enough, and we long to feel secure, there is often a superimposed layer on top of this murky place. The image we try to convey – and try even harder to believe in – is one that portrays us as “good”, “secure”, “with-it”, and maybe even “cool”.

This is akin to cosmetic surgery, covering only the surface, but it suffices for much of our lives to seduce ourselves and others into a complacency born of not “rocking the boat”. So long as enough people agree with the image, we can glide along as if it were true. Invariably, though, something happens to strip away our self-image. Loss of a job, a relationship, aging, disease. And we scramble to patch things up – at least for a while.

Then the inevitable happens. That underlying murk starts to rumble, and rather like a bad case of indigestion insists itself into our awareness. Mid-life is fraught with all sorts of self-doubt never visited on those of youthful all-knowing minds. For the first time we start to question the mask. The mask has often grown saggy for one thing. Our scramble slows to a shuffle until we, if we are lucky, stop full halt to stare right at the mess. What do we believe about ourselves in that subterranean territory?

It is here, at this level – the subterranean belief system – that our “body does not lie”. Once we awaken to the messages given to us by our ongoing bodily responses to life’s situations, we can start to question the underlying beliefs with greater clarity.

If we feel tension – there is a reason. There is always a reason. The body does not tense in preparation for something unless it thinks that something is going to happen! So, if there is no freight train (metaphorically speaking) in sight, yet the body is poised to leap out of harm’s way, we need to poke around inside of our thinking to discover what we think is surely going to happen. It is here we begin to strike the rich minefield of all the inner characterizations (of ourselves, others and the world in general) that set us up for these warrior or victim or whatever stances.

“The Body Doesn’t Lie” – is about this amazing body being the most perfect barometer available to find, unearth and debunk the myths that drive us.

Or drive us crazy – as the case may be.

“Spending Our Time”

Let’s presume your lifespan is finite. Limited. In other words, you only have a certain number of minutes to your name. What if you considered the days and minutes of your life as currency worth – say - $1 per minute? And, how you spend these minutes is how you spend your life. Minutes are the dollars you spend. What you do with and in each minute defines how you are spending your finite resources.


If this were true – and so far our “presumptions” are well-grounded in fact – it would give pause for greater awareness of how we spend our time.


It often gets dicey, though. Because we complicate things with ideas about saving, borrowing and interest. “I’ll work at this job that I hate for 50 years of my life so that I can afford to live the life I want when I’m 70.” Using basic math skills we can see that for this basic (well known) formula to work, the payoff at age 70 will need to be mighty hefty to be worth the price of 50 years of life. And, one could argue, would need to include “interest” to compensate for the suffering of the soul during that time.

This does not mean we shouldn’t work. But, what if we redefine “work” to mean aligning ourselves with what we can most aptly do that is true to our spirit in the service of contributing to others? If we feel like we need to check our true self in at the door when we enter our workplace, we are enforcing a heavy fine on our very life just for the privilege of doing that work. Asking ourselves whether we are contributing in the ways that also make us happy (the sure definition of being on track with how we “spend our time”) is a sane question.

There are many, many opportunities to apply ourselves in the world today – for good. Please do not restrict yourself only along the lines of what is familiar to you. If your heart is unhappy with the way you spend your time, open to the possibility of doing something different.

Because, in the end, what we have done each minute of each day is how we will have spent this one precious life that is ours.

Mindbody

If you’ve ever felt the stress of running late to an appointment, you’ve experienced the visceral impact of the mindbody connection.

There are several layers in which our thoughts influence our wellbeing. The first is related to our behavior based on our cultural beliefs. When I was a state epidemiologist, I helped with an outbreak of tuberculosis that was centered in an Asian community. It turned out that the color of the TB medication was inconsistent with the correct treatment that needed to be given for this illness according to this belief system.

When I began doing primary care, I realized that no matter how much education goes into nutrition, exercise, smoking/not smoking, etc, that there was a disconnect between the cognitive awareness and the behavior. We estimate that roughly 80% of what ails us has to do with lifestyle choices. And the decisive factor in our behavior? Our very personal beliefs – which is the second layer of influence of mindbody.1

A third layer of the influence of beliefs on wellbeing has to do with the direct chemical responses of the body to what we are thinking. My opening statement reflects this dynamic. Workshop attendees have said, in response to my question of “What is your body doing while you’re just sitting there in that car?” “My heart is racing.” “Body is tensing” Clearly there is something other than a physical cause for this. The mental pictures create a situation to which your body responds.

A fourth layer of the influence of our beliefs reflects our particular nuances of response to our internal messages. Some individuals tell me they would get angry if stopped at a train. Another person might get afraid. So, here we’re starting to bore down into our unique responses to the same stimulus. Human beings have the amazing capacity to create perceived danger based upon our history. We each have our own unique way of reacting when we feel anxious. We usually make decisions before we’ve gotten all the current facts.

I am often asked if it is possible to change this internal wiring.

The simple answer is, “Yes, it CAN be changed”–but not with just talk therapy. Once we find the history we still need to dismantle its grip on our actions. Mindbody methods help us gain awareness to the sensations that we have associated with certain belief structures.

Science continues to catch up to our common wisdom: the way we think, what we believe, and our fears and anxieties affect our wellbeing. Our sense of wellbeing and the entire internal chemical milieu of our bodies are modulated by our response to perceived stress. We have the enormous capacity for self-reflection – with all its nuances of bringing in the past and embellishing the stories of our lives – for better or for worse.



1Excerpted from the article, “Mindbody” by Mary Ann Iyer, MD. The full article, with examples of these layers of influence, can be found at: http://www.maryanniyer.com/articlesbydr.wal.html, for free download.

Changing the Patterns

Those who take my Mindful Eating class know that I insist that we not talk about weight loss. We focus, instead, on the roots of what we’re carrying around – whether it’s weight or something else – that is not something that we want. The first– and sometimes difficult - part of that is to love ourselves as we are. When we really get a good handle on that, when we can look at ourselves and where we’ve been and see it with great compassion, we are on our way home. “I know how I got here; I see what my experience has been –“. Not just as a neutral statement, but with heart bursting with compassion. As if we could see that earlier self, right now, enduring, doing all (s)he can just to survive. We aren’t focusing on “fixing” our weight, but rather on letting that scared, hurt part of us experience safety and what it feels like to be cared about.

We need to be extraordinarily gentle with ourselves when we feel afraid. And not have an expectation of self that is not realistic as well. Sometimes we can’t come back to inner balance until we get out into the car, or get home, or sit with our diary, or go for a long walk, or overeat - or whatever we need to do to get to a place where we can sit down with ourselves and say, “OK, let me get down to the root here and what do I need to do for me? What am I going to do to take care of me? ” And – not selling ourselves out as fodder to buy permission to exist.

As soon as we wake up to the pattern, itself, it starts to shift. We need to allow for the possibility that it can be different – especially if we’ve had a long-term condition. This can be one of the biggest challenges for us in making the necessary changes to authentically get out of the mire. To allow room for whatever it is – overweight, a chronic ailment, an ailing relationship - to be different. Whatever it is where we feel like “that’s the story of my life.”

Click here: http://www.maryanniyer.com/articlehome.html for the full article, which includes a meditation for integration: “Finding Your Innocence”.

Good Enough

I don’t know anybody who is free of the feeling that they are never quite enough — and it’s such a source of suffering. I don’t think anything can be more painful than living every day with the scorching thoughts of: “I’m somehow not OK. There is something wrong with me. I can’t quite figure it out, but I’m sure I need to fix something about me to make me OK.” That’s torture.

This topic has loomed especially large in my mind recently because my mother died last month. Most of us don’t feel perfectly mothered. But a very interesting thing happened when my mother died. She had increasingly lived her life as the martyr that the faith in her religion encouraged her to be. It became quite gruesome, and she died the way she had lived —suffering horribly.

Throughout my last two months with her, I focused on trying to release the chains of the patriarchal religion which had so convinced her of her unworthiness. I wanted her to taste what it was like to be mothered in a loving way as she became more and more dependent. At the very end — in the last two days — I held her and rocked her, as her breath became more labored and she could no longer resist. I reminded her: “Right here, God loves you. The Angels are holding you. You did nothing wrong. You are innocent.” She finally began to lighten in the last hour, tears streaming down her face (and mine).

Two nights after that, I bolted straight up in bed. I was feeling the most intense loving, divine Presence. It was my mother! I felt then, and it has been absolutely there ever since, “This is what it is like without all the --.” -- garbage of condemnation. “This is what it’s like to just feel loved!”

What so many of us are dealing with, I’m convinced, is all that garbage wrapped like barnacles around the skin of the feminine. I believe this is true for both men and women. By female energy I mean the soft, receptive, gentle quality of nurturance. I see this deprivation as the real starvation behind so many addictions and pains.

Often, our entrance into the awareness of this Divine Space comes unbidden. It is always there – always available, when we stop agitating against it, believing we have to “do something” to earn it, to deserve it, to find it.

Being loved has as its only prerequisite that we exist.

This is an excerpt from a longer article, found at: http://www.maryanniyer.com/articlehome.html

Happy New Year

I’ve been bathed lately with the knowing of – “just Space”.
Where giving and receiving seem like – what – only nuances of breath.

A recent example.
A homeless man in front of the PO. Shivering in the cold.
Asking for money – for wine I know.

The flash of overlay of an earlier thought ---
that I have too many blankets stuffing my closet -
accumulated through gifts of years’ past.

The obvious.

Going home. Emptying closets.
Having a celebration of blanket give-away where it matters.
Where the blanket belongs.

Where someone is cold.

One example.
On it goes. This breath. This moment. This calling.
Joy to you, Dear One ~