Sunday Sermon [The Global Trance]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Well, it seems our goober cousins from Texas have done it again. In case you haven’t heard, the good people of the Texas school board have banned Thomas Jefferson, evolution, Latino/as, and anything resembling reason from their curriculum. I know, I know: this is Texas we’re talking about and you can’t squeeze blood out of stone (nor intelligence), but the Texas decision will affect your school-aged children no matter where you live. More on this later...

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-=[ Awakening from the Trance ]=-

The planetary crisis we’re facing is an awakening signal. If we don’t shift our consciousness... we can destroy ourselves.

-- Barbara Marx Hubbard

I am a radical, but I understand that the only revolution that’s going to make a real difference is one that transforms us into human beings more capable of intelligent responses to the many crises we face.

Though we have confronted major problems throughout our shared history, the challenges we face today are unique in one important aspect -- they now affect the entire globe as a whole system. Never before has humanity been on the cusp of wiping out the earth’s biosphere and crippling its ecological foundations for countless generations to come. Never before have we been faced with the very real prospect of being the first known species to make itself extinct. Never before has the entire human family been called to work together to build a sustainable and meaningful future. Never before have so many been called to make sweeping changes in so little time.

Today monarchs, dictators, or even elected governments no longer control the world. We live in a world controlled by multinational corporations. Most of us work for them, we eat and drink their products, we are exposed to their pervasive assault on our senses via their advertising campaigns, and we live on an earth that provides the raw materials for their endless “production” and the storage for their endless garbage. Corporations have become more powerful than the governments that are supposed to regulate them, and in fact, they pay for the process by which a government can afford to be elected.

Throughout the world McDonalds, Coca Cola, Nike, and corporate marketing are invading local cultures. The danger of this encroaching corporate presence lies in its basic motivation. Corporations are primarily responsible to their shareholders. Profitability has more value than the health or well-being of a population. Creating and satisfying short-term goals and profits are more important than environmental sustainability or social justice.

In this way, the gifts of the earth are all being patented and made into commercial products.

Oppressive regimes such as the British in India or Nazi Germany exploit a population and can be eventually rejected by revolution or the intervention of an outside force. The power of commercial interests, however, is more insidious. It’s a power similar to the relationship between a drug pusher and an addict, a power that runs on the addictions of a population, without necessarily serving their deeper well-being. This is the collective trance of a consumer society and the global economy it creates. It works only because our collective feeling of lack. It thrives on the inner sense that something is missing, that there is something wrong with you and your life.

It’s quite simple, you’re compelled to believe that you need to buy their product. Drink this soda, this machine or pill that will make you less fat, this car, this house, this grill; fly to this great place for a vacation and you will feel better. Look at all the happy people smiling in this photo here. They feel better. See?

The global economy as we know it would not work with a contented population. You would have a hard time selling endless plastic gizmos to people who feel connected to themselves, to their environment, and who feel whole, who feel generous and grateful, and who know they have enough. This trance of lack recreates itself endlessly; it never reaches a level of contentment. You want more, and more, and more... and it does not bode well for our future. We live in this trance from birth to death.

It will take only a very small percentage of the world’s population to wake up for there to be a global awakening. This isn’t some pie in the sky optimism. There is evidence that one man’s stand against gang violence, for example, was directly responsible for the decrease of overall violent crime in New York City. The more people raise their consciousness and wake up, the more those people will be affected by a collective awakening. And the more they are open to that, the more it will facilitate their own awakening, and that of others. So it becomes a positive feedback loop. It is like a snowball gaining momentum as it rolls down a hill.

If you awaken from the trance, then one of two around you will resonate with your awakening. They in turn will affect one of two around them, and that’s how real change happens. It’s always been like that and it is the only thing that will save us.

Love,

Eddie

Responding to Fear

¡Hola! Everybody...
Ever simply feel that someone or some thing, or some situation is just right? Have you ever followed that inner feeling? How was that? Then again, I know many people who had children on account of a “feeling.” LOL!

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-=[ Responding to Fear ]=-

Nothing in life is to be feared; it only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

-- Marie Curie

A shadow is created by blocking, deflecting, or otherwise obstructing light. Wherever fear comes into existence, it lives, grows, and remains a part of us by embedding itself between the light of creative vision and our intuition. It is the shadow, not a lack of ability, that is the biggest obstacle we face today as a global community. The shadow, as I see it, is the space between what we want and what we get. It’s the distance between who we are and who we are meant to be, with the biggest, deepest, and widest gap occurring between the present crisis and our vision.

Look around at what has so many of us mesmerized: paranoia, worry, doubt, disease. They cast a spell on almost every aspect of our lives. Fear prevents us from seeing or feeling clearly. It blocks the natural flow of our creative energy and hampers our ability to be radically innovative. We seem to be caught in a state of generalized anxiety that makes solutions impossible or paralyzes their implementation. When we do manage to get started, it is fear that often calls us back at the first sign of disappointment or problem. Fear, as a friend likes to say, keeps us “stuck on stupid” as in the example of the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. It stunts our growth and suffocates our awakening, causing us to repeat painful and habitual patterns of behavior and making us lose sight of our vision (or uncommon sense). In order for us to envision and create a better society we must get past this fearful landscape.

Historically, creative people have often felt separated from their communities. It’s as if their ability to see clearly between what is and what could be serves to stigmatize them. Innovators are often ridiculed, their ideas and insights too far ahead of the curve of the mainstream culture. This isolation strikes fear within us: we fear that if we express our ideas, or rock the boat a little, or act on them, others will ridicule us. the truth is that our visionary thinking is the only thing that will save us. But people are afraid to follow their own ideas. They’re sure they will be perceived as crazy, or radical, or -- gasp! -- outside of the political norm.

We are defeated not by our uniqueness, but by our fear of the unusual, the new, the strange. We live in a society obsessed by numbers and norms, with its averages, means, and medians spurring us to believe in something called “normal,” which has little to do with being real. The idea of “average” or “typical behavior” is nothing more than a mathematical conceit.

Similarly, we fear information that challenges our ingrained worldview. Most of the resistance we see today is really about killing the messenger than a defense of reason. Those yelling about fictitious death panels, or decrying marriage equality, or those who have made it their business to discredit all forms of science are protecting hidden agendas composed of fear and loathing.

We fear losing as self-doubt zeroes in on the space between our potential and insecurity. We’re not thin enough, smart enough, or committed. As a nation too many focus on what we can’t do, rather than what we’re capable of. We’re too late with too little. Such doubts and fears make us hesitate at a moment in time in which we can ill afford to hesitate. Others fear something actually succeeding and taking hold because it means their worldview was wrong -- fear of success. Many fear death, or loss of control. Whatever the case, it’s fear-based living at a time of crisis.

A sure recipe for catastrophe.

The people who insist that nothing needs to be done demonstrate a complacency that’s both ignorant and disempowering. Awakening to our full potential is not a spectator sport. If we’re going to respond the challenges we face, we must act and act thoughtfully with foresight. Whenever a group tries something different, there’s an initial period of turbulence. Many people, fearful of new ways, mistake the turbulence for change itself and decide they would rather go back to the “good old days.” In this way, we dismiss the world of potential and vision for a past that never existed.

If we allow ourselves to be led by a creative vision, we will never lose. We can let go of right and wrong, winning and losing, approval and disapproval. Right now, we are on the cusp of a new world emerging and behind us an old world imploding upon itself. The only rational response to fear is to fully embrace this new world. Our potential can only be realized by us collectively. This new world has been hovering over us for a long time and it has nothing to do with some bullshit calendar and everything to do with being awake, and we have heard it speaking all our lives:

Seize the day. Go for broke. Walk the walk. Try your wings. Do unto others...

Stop the fear.

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Community]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m going to find a way to avoid the whole Superbowl Day frenzy.

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-=[ What is Community? ]=-

Prison isn’t merely a physical structure, it is, more than anything else, a state of mind...

We hear a lot these days about “community.” More and more of us, we’re told, are seeking it. There is talk about the African-American, Latina/o, and Asian communities; the gay and lesbian community; the political community; a community of peers; the local community. But what is this thing called community? Why are we seeking it? Heck, how will we know when find it?

I have found that a central human quality is this yearning for the company of others. A desire to find meaningful connections, to be with and be touched by family, friends, and clan, is wired into us. As a formerly incarcerated person, I know too well the feeling of being alone and isolated. I think if we’re all honest enough, we can all admit to a familiarity with the sense of being stuck in our own skin, apart from others. I also know that one of the principle factors in my successful reintegration has been my struggle to reconnect with loved ones and the community at large. To be incarcerated is to be removed from society. All too often, unfortunately, to be released from prison is to continue to experience isolation from a sense of belonging or community.

To complicate matters further, in this world gone slightly mad, we rarely find time to extend ourselves to our neighbors and loved ones. Today we work longer hours for less money, and it’s almost as if living without an appointment book (or PDA) is an impossibility. Add to this the fear and anger at the outrages committed by narcissistic public figures that serve to drive us deeper into isolation. It is true that taking the time to look within can help us learn to live with this deep alienation, but the only way to live genuinely and fully is by making deep connections with others.

This is what I mean by community.

I was raised in a community of extended family that included family members, adopted friends, and neighbors. This is not the same reality my now adult-aged son experienced growing up. Indeed, many people today dismiss community as an unrealistic ideal that is destined to fail and we close our doors a little more securely. Expecting or anticipating disappointment (or worse), we shy away from trying to find or build community. But the truth is a little more complicated than that, however. Throughout history, both recent and distant, there have been many examples of successful communities. But even these communities weren’t perfect and every group that comes together in community will experience its own unique set of problems, challenges, and opportunities.

I find myself writing and speaking of community a lot these days because much of my professional work is deeply connected to community. As someone working for social and economic justice, I come into contact with men and women who have a burning desire to reconnect, to find their place in a society that mostly spurns them. My professional and personal experience informs me that there is nothing more valuable in the difficult work to “re-enter” society than a sense of community. And this is true not just for people looking to reintegrate -- it seems these days as if a great many of us live lives of quiet desperation... I have come to think of community as a kind of vitamin. The experience of connectedness with others is as necessary to a fully healthy life as the minimum daily amount of nutrients is to a balanced diet. We isolate from one another at a great economic, physical, and spiritual price.

There’s much talk about Polarization these days, but if we’re to survive we need as a community to have an honest and intelligent conversation exploring how our social policies negatively affect our ability to educate our young. We need to fully explore the many different possibilities that lead to a better experience and sense of community. We need to explore examples of how our communities can work for the benefit of all, becoming more inclusive, empowered, and safer in the process. Where are the ideas about helping to make community a part of our future and the future of our children?

I would like to end with the following for the entrenched cynics among us. The problem of community, as with all of society, is in saving and expanding the priceless value of freedom, while at the same time maintaining a mutual respect, mutual regard, and mutual responsibility, as well as a common effort for common goals. This much is true: if we are to preserve and pass on to our children basic human values, a wholesome community life is imperative. Unless we choose to work and live together in connectedness of community life, there can never be a truly unified nation or a community of humankind.

If you do not love your neighbor, whom you know, how can you love the human race? If you have not yet learned to work with a few people, how can you be effective with many?

Love,

Eddie

Feelings, pt. III

¡Hola! Everybody...
I promise! After today no more about feelings! LOL!

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-[ Angels with Dirty Faces ]=-

It’s scary as hell to make our self be known, the parts that are unlovable, the parts we don’t love, that no one else will love, that are just too messy, that are unworthy. Yet we’re dying inside to be completely loved and received and forgiven.

-- Jennifer Garcia

I operate under the assumption that almost everything you have been taught about finding happiness is inaccurate, misleading, and false. Furthermore, I believe those very beliefs are making you miserable. My challenge is thus: what if you discovered that your very efforts to find happiness were actually preventing you from achieving it? What if almost everyone you knew turned out to be in the same boat -- including all the “experts” and self-help gurus who claim to have answers?

In part, this series on feelings is my answer to that challenge...

Recap time, girls and boys! First, I tried to explain how feelings are different from emotions. Feelings are based in the body, waves of energy, that we experience. Emotions are the stories we attach to these waves: “I am angry,” “She makes me sad,” etc. So, there was this discussion around feelings and emotions and what happens if we practice experiencing the waves as they are, rather than attaching the stories (what I called the “personal novelas” -- soap operas). Next, I discussed what that does to feelings -- how being fully present with feelings act as a liberating force from the drama of our lives. I consider this something of a miracle, or at least an awakening.

There is a second awakening, or miracle: the realization that our feelings are our children. As with real children, some are well behaved, clean, polite, and socially acceptable. Others are little monsters -- little diablitos. The issue here is we tend to nurture the children we like, give them food, dress them really nice, and pose them for our family “Christmas Card,” and trot them out when our neighbors come to visit.

The ones we don’t like, we push out into the yard, into the doghouse, with no nourishment and barely protected against the elements, in the cold. Occasionally, we might see them, their dirty and hungry faces pressed against the windows, the early stages of malicious intent reflected in their haunted eyes. Sometimes there is a mutiny and a few of them break in through the windows. Or, we might let a pleasant feeling out to play and a few of the juvenile delinquent feelings rush in uninvited. Our abandoned feelings haunt our dreams and make horrible noises in the night. One thing is for sure: they will completely sabotage our every attempt to look good or socially acceptable to the neighbors.

This is true no matter how hard you fight. The more fences and barbed wire you erect, the more they will plan schemes to disrupt your neat little life.

Once we begin to awaken to who we really are, into our natural state, we are no longer threatened by our feelings and we slowly begin to invite our abandoned children back inside. This is a slow, gradual process, as you open the door of your heart to your exiled children, one by one.

Invite Grief inside and sooner or later, you are sitting down to dinner with Anger, having a “Blockbuster night,” enjoying yourselves. “I’m sorry,” you say. “This was a misunderstanding. I realize now you are my child. I gave birth to you. Come inside, sit by the fire, and have something to eat. Look. Your bed is right over there and you can stay here.”

Initially, your abandoned, bleary-eyed children will not believe what’s going on. Hey! They might even be a little bit pissed off, burning holes in the couch and insulting people on the phone.

They will need reassurance. You assure them that they can stay forever, as long as they want. We might say to Anger, “I’m sorry I pushed you away, and I’m really sorry that my father did before me, and my grandfather before that. I’m sorry my entire culture has made you feel that you don’t belong. But now, you are welcome, come on in.”

As soon as you welcome the banished, they are transformed. This is a lesson almost every parent knows. I learned it with my own son. It seemed that as a young boy whenever I was busy with work, or on the phone, my son would suddenly decide he wanted me to get him something or to play with him. If I pushed him away, he would become more demanding. But then I learned that if brought him close to me, his apparent need would quickly disappear. His real longing was for attention, and once that need was fulfilled, all else receded to the background.

And so it is with “emotions.” When we are fully present with them as they arise, and draw them close to us when they seek our attention, their agenda is upset, and the cycle of drama is thwarted. Here’s an even better recap on this series on feelings:

Feelings arise

They are embraced

They pass again

… and we are free o be spacious and empty, and to be available to life and connected to the world.

Evolving people embrace this process over and over again. It is an awakening and it is our birthright as human beings. The miracle is that by welcoming feelings, we can transform them. For example, Anger, when welcomed, embraced, given a good meal, and clean clothes becomes authority and power. Sexual desire, when all moral charges are dropped and the fingers of accusation have stopped wagging, becomes our basic life energy, our chi. Having a friendly relationship with Grief lets us uncover our depth, the very core of our selves. Fear reveals excitement and energy, Boredom uncovers our desire for meaning. By consciously dropping the “personal novela” -- dropping the drama and returning to pure feeling -- we discover a great truth: there is no such thing as negative energy. Even the most catastrophic emotional tsunamis, abandoned for lifetimes, which seem capable of destroying us and other people, are transformed when accepted and given as gifts.

Let me use anger as an example. At first, I was a little hesitant to let anger out of its cage. I was afraid of what might happen. But this was when I was confusing feeling with reactivity. Anger thrown onto another person without first being deeply felt (embraced) can have disastrous consequences. I am learning, with practice, to breathe deeply into the belly and allow it to be just as it is, that I can experiment with anger, a little bit at a time. Once I felt the raw, savage beauty of anger, I felt a deeper connection to the earth; my body opened and came to life. I learned and experienced that I could feel my anger repeatedly, each time more deeply. The more I allowed it, the deeper the anger took me into myself. Now it can be given as a gift to others and myself. The gift of authority, of waking up, of integrity, of speaking truth to power in the face of social injustice.

When Anger is felt and given, free of resistance, it can be received by others as a gift, as a blessing.

When I experience anger in this way, I am truly conscious when I am pissed off. There’s no “personal novela.” It happens

BAM!

And then it’s finished, and then I’m back. I give myself permission to get pissed, I ride that wave of anger, and then it becomes a gift for whomever I’m pissed at. Once we become willing to disengage the feeling from the drama, there is an immediate liberation. Without a story, of victimhood or a wound (sometimes we become our wounds), there is nothing left to defend, nothing to resist, and we are liberated from the addictive bitterness or niceness a response to all that we have repressed.

Real love can be ferocious, it can be deeply honest, and it can be a gift in a million different flavors.

When we feel fully, and free ourselves of the shadows of our past, every feeling fully felt, without resistance and freely given, then we express true love. Anything else is just candy.

I hope you, the reader, has found something useful in these three different posts on feelings. I hope that it may have somehow touched something within you to question the everyday, knee-jerk, manner we are conditioned to respond to feelings. I f we become like an ocean, then a wave is merely a ripple on the surface of things. If we choose to remain stuck to a narrowly defined sense of self, then our emotional lives will be forever doomed to resemble natural catastrophes.

Love,

Eddie

Feelings, pt. II

¡Hola! Everybody...
It is cold out here! But I’d rather be here than there. LOL!

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-=[ Emotional Constipation ]=-

Everything is always washing into my heart. And I have a choice in any moment to open to it or close to it, to resist or allow it to protect myself from it or to open to it and let whatever response comes just be.
-- Amy McCarrel

Feelings aren't facts, but it's a fact that you feel.
-- Popular 12-Step fellowship slogan

When I first wrote yesterday’s blog, I posted it with some trepidation because understanding being present intellectually and actually experiencing it, are two different things and takes practice. However, awakening, another word for being present, is an option for anyone at any time. My own experience tells me that everything necessary for your fulfillment exists right here, right now, this very moment. All you have to do is awake to that potential and actually experience it, rather than to continue to conceptualize it.

Judging by the responses over the years, my initial feelings were unwarranted. When I began this series, I mentioned that my work brings me into contact with literally hundreds of people every year. And I am always amazed by the number of people who have chosen to take responsibility for their own awakening outside the context of organized religions. There is a wave, a movement, of people seeking to find their own answers and that is one of the most remarkable things about the present historical period.

There are two knee-jerk (conditioned) responses to feelings, and they both have their price: to run from them, or indulge them. In addition, as I wrote yesterday, we attach stories to our feelings, creating our own personal novelas (Novelas are Spanish-language soap operas with titles such as Amor Salvaje! [Savage Love], or, Deseo Bestial [Savage Desire]). This does not mean, however, that feelings are not real. Moreover, I do not mean to imply that the awakening process results in a super calm person floating an inch above the ground offering benedictions to everybody.

Let me state two myths about awakening:

Myth #1 Awakening means not having feelings, especially “negative” ones like anger, fear, jealousy, or greed. Instead, the process leads to an unchanging, always calm, state.

Myth #2 You have to choose between feelings and presence. When you have feelings, you have lost who you are.

These two myths are stereotypes and quite laughable, if you ask me. Being awake is to feel completely, to love passionately, to become transparent or translucent. Awakening to what is (rather than arguing against reality) leads one to feel more fully but in a way that doesn't make us prisoners.

Two reactions with a heavy price attached: running (aversion) and clinging (desire). Two sides of the same emotional coin. We live in a male-dominated society in which feelings are viewed as inferior. To be “emotional” is considered unprofessional and we spend much time and money constantly “processing” our feelings away. I think in this sense, women (or rather, the feminine essence) offer a lot in teaching us to be present with our feelings. I have a simple technique when I am working with people. Ask anyone what he or she is feeling and I have found they usually will proceed to describe to you what they are thinking. So what I do is to ask them to tell me where they are feeling it in their bodies. This usually works to center someone in the moment, rather than describing his or her emotional novelas.

This is where the feminine principle can help us: that wonderful capacity to experience everything in the body can become repressed when our little “mini me” starts its whispering.

But I digress!

We pay a high price when we avoid our feelings as they arise. They then become sticky and gooey and don‘t pass through us as cleanly. What happens is that we first create a tension in the body and literally cut off the free flow of sensation. In order not to feel anger in the belly, we clench the solar plexus and block feeling, blood flow, and energy. To avoid feeling fear we contract the pectoral muscles and collapse the chest. The consequence is that, over time these attempts to stop feelings leads to imbalances and stress-related illnesses. We literally create body armor to protect ourselves from feelings.

Another consequence of avoiding feelings, especially the ones we view as negative or threatening, is to become “rational.” We develop strategies to control or stop feelings. As an answer to the question, “Why am I feeling this?” we often quickly say something beginning with “Because”: I am angry because of you… or: they made me feel sad when they…” And in that way, we get caught up in the endless rollercoaster of cause and effect.

The other option is indulging our feelings. Sometimes this happens right away (I was infamous for this. LOL!) and sometimes it simmers for a while before boiling over -- maybe after a few hours, days, or even years. The point is that once the floodgates open, there is hell to pay and a big mess to clean after. You can even cause permanent damage. Indulging is just another way of rebelling against the tension created between the feeling and its repression. We have to compensate for our initial response with an explosive mixture of emotion and willfulness:

Angry?!! You’re damned right I’m angry, and you’re going to sit right there and listen to why!”

Exploding is just another way of attempting to have control over feeling and avoid being overwhelmed. You think you are managing the feeling, but in fact, you are not feeling, but doing emotion. We create drama. Rather than experiencing feeling as a wave, we constrict our sense of self and become the wave itself. Instead of feeling anger or sadness, we become it. Listen to the language we use to describe these states: we say, “I am angry,” “I am sad.” This emotional experience has temporarily taken over our very identity.

Once in the possession of our small, fearful selves, the only choice we think we have is either to repress our feelings or to be taken over them and become reactive. Either way, we are still trapped. We are still run by our personal emotional novelas disconnected from the reality of the world around us, and we are still unable to give ourselves and others our deepest gifts.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow: our emotions as our children...

Love,

Eddie.

Feelings, pt. I

¡Hola! Everybody...
He’s dying a slow painful death... they’re not giving him more than a few days...

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-=[ Feelings & Your Personal Novela ]=-

Tears are always like a breaking. When tears fall, it is like a rain of grace. It means that something has actually touched the truth of your heart, has actually cracked and caused some rain.
-- Sofia Diaz

I think once you start the process of awakening, you learn how to embrace feelings. As we begin to dissolve rigidly held, or what I call “frozen,” beliefs, we begin to make room for all feelings, both those we perceive as positive and those we have abandoned as negative. Developing the capacity to remain present, fully in this moment with whatever arises, instead of resisting feelings, leads us to a direct and powerful gateway into a deeper love.

First let me clarify what I mean by “feelings.” People often confuse the words feelings and emotions to be synonymous. However, they have quite different roots. I am a huge word fan and sometimes this pays off in ways I would never dream of. Feeling comes from the Old English word, fellen, the physical capacity to experience something as it is. Feeling is one of the five senses, along with sight, hearing, smell, and taste. It is also closely associated with being present and in touch with the sensations in the body. Emotion comes from an Old French word, emovoir, to stir up, to create agitation. Emotion then, creates movement within the mind, or better put, it creates movement within consciousness.

Feeling is passive, a capacity to experience, while emotion is fluid and leads to action and expression. Feelings occur within the here and now-- in the present -- and come in all flavors. If we remain open and receptive to them, they can lead us home to peace, to a deeper love. Emotions usually become attached to a story in time that then leads us into a whirlwind of drama. By assuming that every internal feeling has an outside cause, the purity, power, and mystery of feelings are lost. They become dramatized into a personal soap opera -- what I like to call our personal novellas -- from the Spanish-language TV, over-the-top soap operas.

When every feeling becomes a self-centered emotion referenced as “me, me, me,” it becomes a habit and we react (becoming reactive) instead of settling into the experience. In fact, we can be very emotional without feeling at all. We can also feel in profoundly without becoming lost in the emotion. The truth is, if you practice enough and develop the ability to drop the drama from the feelings, you begin to develop a much greater capacity to feel, and in the process, you become less reactive emotionally.

The woman I quoted above, Sofia Diaz, is a mentor to literally thousands of people, mostly women. She says that feelings are neglected in our culture, dominated by the emphasis on rational thought. She goes on to say, “… If you feel the trees from your belly, it is an entirely different universe than if you think about feeling the trees.” Once you begin to practice, she says, an entire universe reveals itself. A universe you never knew existed before.

Let me try to clarify that a bit. Usually we need to say: “I am angry because of what of so-and-so did.” Most of our energy then goes into changing the individual and very little into what we feel. It is extremely rare for anyone to be willing to feel without logical cause:

“How are you doing?”

“I’m so mad I could kill with my bare hands.”

“My God! Why?”

“No reason, just a wave passing through. Feels great, actually. I love it!”

Imagine how liberating a response like that would be. Imagine being with a feeling as a vibration, like listening to music. If we are honest, we really don’t have a fuckin’ clue about why we are feeling what we feel. Is it really the guy who cut you off? Or was it that funny remark your co-worker made yesterday? Perhaps you’re really angry with your father.

What I am submitting here is that the stories we attach to our feelings are often inaccurate. Like old maps to territories that no longer exist. The more agitated you become the more complicated things get and the further away you are pulled from your actual feelings.

When we remove the drama -- the personal soap opera -- attached to our feelings, the feelings become less distinct, and they begin to defy labeling. Someone reading my daily rants may get angry and see me as a pompous ass possessed by a need to show off my pseudo intellect to the world, for example. Another may attach the story that my posts are motivated by a need to share my experiences and create some form of dialogue. Who’s right?

Let me offer another example that most here will identify with. You are getting ready for a first date. You feel a quickening in your heartbeat, a tightening in your belly. Label it fear, and you have the beginning of one story: I might be rejected. I know I’ll say something stupid. Now, label the same feeling excitement, and spin a different story: Maybe he’s the one. However, if you leave the feeling undefined, and just feel it as a mystery, you will discover that fear and excitement are a hairbreadth apart, separated only by a different story. They easily change into one another.

Try this the next time you feel afraid. Ask yourself if you know, for sure, that what you are feeling is fear. Could it be equally labeled excitement? Can you leave it without any label at all? The same is true of grief and gratitude. The next time you feel deep grief, see if it is possible (just for a moment dammit!), to feel it more deeply while thinking less about why. Then look around at anything, a flower, a color, a bird, and see if your tears are only of regret or also of thanks. Fear, and excitement, grief and gratitude, anger and power, sadness and vulnerability: they are all separated from one another when we make them into an emotional drama, but they become one when we feel them as pure energy.

This is the first miracle when we awake: the more deeply we feel -- the more present we are – the more at peace we become, and the simpler outer situations become. When we become less of a knee-jerk responder, we can give the gift of a pure response to a situation instead merely reacting to it. We can express what we are feeling in tune with the present moment. In this way, grief or anger or overwhelming affection can all be gifts to enhance the world, to bring it more color, more aliveness. Feelings become a generosity of spirit.

Love,

Eddie

Dying

¡Hola! Everybody...
People are always asking for solutions, it seems. You mention an injustice, or document an inequality, and right away, people will pounce on it, or skirt the issue by braying for a solution. Never mind that issue hasn’t been adequately defined or discussed, it’s uncomfortable, so let’s move on!

LOL

It’s a common enough trait, the tendency to be uncomfortable with ambiguity, just as it is to live with an open heart. But then we bemoan lives without intimacy, while we erect moats around our poor hearts...

I live in that neighborhood. The truth that will set you free lies within paradoxes. Today, I will explore one...

* * *

-=[ Dying to Live ]=-

“Everything you know is wrong... ”

The Disinfo Company has a book with the above title, and Ill start my rant from there. I had a professor once who hired me as an assistant. The first day at work, she instructed me to take all the files from one of her cabinets and throw them in the air. “Make sure you get them good and mixed up, Eddie,” she added.

::blank stare::

We spent the rest of the day going through the resulting mess on her office floor. I was terribly confused, thinking that perhaps my dear professor had either lost her mind or, more likely, was playing a head game with me. But as we sat there on our haunches sorting through her files -- saved articles, notes from books, newspaper clippings, jotted post-it notes and all manner of scraps -- she started making connections with ideas that weren’t previously considered congruent. Eventually, we created a mandala of sorts on her office, an intellectual map.

I didn’t know it at the time, but she was teaching me an intellectual exercise that would serve me in what she said would be my “knowledge workbench.” My professor was the daughter of a carpenter and she approached her work much like her father did: getting and learning about tools and how to apply them.

Clearing out her file cabinets in such a way was her way of clearing her head from all the “isms.” She taught me that our primary disease is our addiction to intellectual knowing at the expenses of experiential knowing. If we want to save the world, we will need to begin by undefining it. Only by giving up all our ideas, beliefs, values, morals, ethics, hopes, agendas, blah blah blah will be able to survive. The fact is all these things are static -- frozen snapshots of a reality that is in context flux. We freeze reality in order to conform to it, but maps tend to get outdated.

People ask me why I know so much, and I really don’t, but I think what people are noticing comes from my basic premise: that I don’t know anything. LOL! I remain teachable because though I am well-read and an intelligent individual, I always entertain the notion that I really don’t know jack. I start from the assertion that everything I know is wrong. Well, almost everything.... *grin*

You want peace on earth? Stop fighting reality. Stop trying to become something other than what you are right now. If you surrender your defenses, you will become more effectively you and your relationship with reality will become more intimate. More than you can ever imagine. Our survival doesn’t depend on our actions. Our survival depends on our willingness to surrender, to give up trying to control anything and everything.

Many of you know I am a “recovering addict.” Ands I am truly grateful because my addiction taught me this lesson in a profoundly life-changing way. In order for me to survive I had to die. Yes, you read that right: I am alive today because I died. Think about it: we are the ones killing us. Like me at one time, we are killing ourselves, making ourselves extinct. Like me, we must sacrifice ourselves in order to save ourselves.

Man! I love a good paradox! LOL

You might wonder if I have lost what little claim to insanity I can claim, but listen just a little longer. The form of dying I am talking about comes from creating new relationships to everything.

That’s all.

All the old relationships were based on either our conditioning or our responses to our conditioning, in which case, they very little to do with reality. We’ve been living in a fantasy world. In order for us to make this next evolutionary quantum leap, the old world, our way of relating to it and the identity connected to it must be pushed away so that we can find reality. That’s what I mean by dying.

I can already hear you saying, “But Eddie, I don’t want to die.” But that’s it right there: the you that is afraid of dying is the very same you that is disconnected from the stream of reality. It’s the false you, the tamed you, the you stripped of all of its essence. It’s the mask that you wear so that you can pretend you’re in control. It’s the persona that you adopted in order to manipulate those around you to accept you. All those isms, all those frozen thoughts -- all there to keep you stalled.

The only way to break out of the prison of your mind is to leave that tidy, managed world behind and go live. It’s not so simple or as painless as it sounds here, but the alternative -- a form of mass neurosis -- is more painful.

Love,

Eddie

Dream Woman

¡Hola! Everybody...
With the coming of the Christmas comes the now annual whine from the anuses claiming that there’s a plot to do away with Christmas. Please don’t make me embarrass you in this forum -- first bullshite “libruhls and femi-nazis are killing Christmas” post I see I’m going for the jugular. Shoot, I think I’ll do it anyway...

I will be gone all day at a senior staff retreat working on a five-year, organizational-wide strategic plan. It’s not going to be a pretty sight since I intend to rock the boat, think audaciously, and question everything! LOL

I’m only half kidding... ::grin::

I wrote the following a couple of years ago...

* * *

-=[ Goddess ]=-

She emerges from the trees,
the earth,
the rocks beneath my feet.
She is the air I breathe.
The unborn breathe of life.

Why is it I never saw her before?
Was I... so blind?

I am aroused yet humbled
I am satiated yet hungry,
desiring more and
more
and more...

At every turn I am met
with her brilliance.
As of the Earth,
the Clay,
the Rivers and Streams.

Before this journey
I was no one special.
And after,
once more,
I am no one special.

And this, I know, is grace.

* * *

I was saved by a dream.

Literally.

Not a figure of speech. I rarely ever remember my dreams and maybe this is a good thing, considering what the fuck kinda shit dwells in my subconscious. However, there was one unforgotten dream about seven years ago that had a tremendous impact on my life. In fact, after that dream I was never the same person – changed me completely. And, get this, I don’t even remember its details!

Nonsense, you say? Read on…

Several years ago, my life was imploding. Everything that I had worked towards, or valued, seemed to be unraveling before my eyes. My marriage of about seven years was on the rocks. Actually, it was barely breathing, it was waiting for someone to mercifully shoot it. I was in my senior year of my undergraduate studies and I was so burnt out that I couldn’t retain any more information. A straight A student, my grades were plummeting and I was having a hard time finding meaning in it all. To complicate matters, I couldn’t get a job to save my life.

It was a strange time, looking back, because though I realized things were coming to a head on many fronts, it seemed as if I were just floating around there for a bit. As if it were all happening, and I was there witnessing all of this, but unable to do anything about it.

I divorced, barely escaped my senior year, and had to leave graduate school for a job and that’s where it all started. I was working for an East Harlem non-profit as a life skills trainer where I met this young lady. A co-worker, she was half my age, and I really didn’t think she was interested, but eventually she let her feelings known. Actually, what she said was, “Don’t you ever get it?” during dinner once. Yes, I’m dense and sometimes I don’t “get it.” LOL!

Anyway, I’m dating this really young lady and at first, my attraction to her was minimal. I mean, she was pretty, intelligent, and we shared common interests. We spent a lot of time going to museums, discussing poetry, reading books together, taking walks, etc. Still, I never felt any overwhelming feelings of love.

But I digress, I need to make my point!

Well, one thing led to another and she let on that her feelings for me were more than casual. I think the “L” word was mentioned somewhere in there, and though there were red flags and alarms screaming all over the place (too complicated to discuss here), I allowed myself to entertain the possibility that the feelings were mutual. This woman was 25 years old to my 43. And while, yes, age is only a number, the fact was that my priorities and frames of reference were much different from hers. As a result, eventually she “fell out” of love and I was stuck. I had talked myself into love! We split and I was taking it pretty bad. Looking back, I realize now that what I had was an obsession, not love. I mean, I didn’t do anything overly stupid like stalk her, or act out on my compulsions, but I was definitely in a lot of pain.

So, there I was, a cold, rainy Friday night and I go home, just wanting to lay down and pull the covers over my head and sleep forever. And that’s when The Dream happens…

I’m in deep pain and I go to sleep. Maybe it wasn’t just this girl, but the accumulation of everything that had happened over the previous year: divorce, education, not being there with my son everyday – I felt like I was in a boxing match and losing big time. I went to sleep shrouded in a deep, intense sorrow.

I dream. I don’t remember the specifics of the dream, the content, but the feelings – Oh my God! – the feeling of the dream is what I remember. In the dream, there is a woman in my life, I don’t know or remember exactly what she looks like. I remember her eyes and her smile. But that isn’t important. What’s important is that in this dream this woman loved me in a way I have never experienced in my life. The love is so palpable that it infuses me with joy, washing away my sorrow as if it were mere dirt.

I get this very real feeling of being loved so completely, so totally that it seems as if my very being is transformed on a cellular level. In the dream, this woman knows everything about me: from my most insightful thoughts to the most pornographic. She knows it all, the good and the bad, everything, and yet she still loves me completely, without condition. In the dream, I remember hearing her voice because all I remember is that she was walking laughing with some of my friends -- she was walking to meet with me. But I get the real sense that she loves me and I am filled with a total, pure, unconditional love in this dream and I’m ecstatic!

Then I wake up…

But this is the kicker: the feeling in the dream? It’s still there! I’m filled with this incredible sense of being loved that seems to come from the very core of my being. It’s not an over-the-top “gee-I’m-so-happy” type feeling, but rather a calm presence at my center, washing away my fears and doubts. It’s as if the woman in my dream connected me to the very essence of love itself.

I never tried to analyze this dream, but without thinking about it in words, a part of me sensed that that woman in my dream wasn’t someone else, but an aspect of myself.

Really.

I didn’t get this by thinking about it; I sensed it in my body.

At least that’s how I remember experiencing it.

Since that day, yes, I have experienced sadness, anger, disappointment – the full catastrophe of life – but nothing, not even death and loss, has ever taken away this joy at the core of my being. It is truly invincible.

Now I have discovered that I was mistaken about the nature of this dream. It wasn’t an “aspect of myself” that loved me in this powerful way. Not really. The dream was pointing me to a road I needed to travel. It was pointing me to the opening of my heart because the more I open, the stronger this presence is in my life. When I close, I lose contact; when I open, the contact becomes stronger. It’s not about “me.” It’s about the dissolving of the fake wall that separates “me” from you.

Perhaps, in a way, it was about the Woman of my Dreams…

Love,

Eddie

Extinction Spasm

¡Hola! Everybody...
Tony has a heart condition and a problem with obesity and yet he (excessively) spends his time online threatening people.

Just recently, he attacked someone here by divulging shared intimacies as a way of attempting to humiliate that person. If he does this to someone else, what makes you think he won’t do it to you?

You’re a real man Tony...

SMH

* * *

-=[ Species Extinction Spasm ]=-

The new world is not only possible, she is on her way. When I am quiet I can hear her breathing.

-- Arundhati Roy

I was laughing along with some friends about the whole e-thuggery phenomenon. Almost none of my friends are on the internet and they think the energy I put into the “blogging thing” could be better put to use actually writing. Well, blogging helps me write. If I didn’t blog, I probably wouldn’t write. I am lazy.

Anyway, laughing about what kind of person would go to the extreme of threatening bodily harm to another human being on account of something as irrelevant as a blog, made me think about the very real crisis we’re all facing as a species. We may very well be the first species to make ourselves extinct. And it’s this type of thinking -- this narcissistic wish fulfillment of doing harm to others, that is at the crux of our problem.

Anthropogenic global warming is a fact and it has some of us thinking. Recently, I read an article stating that basic human needs are destroying our planet much more quickly than previously thought. The article cited a four-year multinational study, “The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,” which found that humans “have ruined approximately 60 percent of the earth’s ecological systems to meet our demands for food, fresh water, timber, and fuel.”

Research shows that we’re in the middle of the fifth or sixth largest species die-off in biological history. What naturalists call an “extinction spasm,” which to me evokes an image of the earth purging itself of unhealthy organisms.

It appears that we do have something to fear and it is us.

I would ask why, but I think I already know. We can’t handle our technological advancements. It’s as if evolution has given a child a loaded gun and we’re playing with it with the safety off.

When I reflect on this mindset, I am reminded of the paradox of the egomaniac with low self-esteem. It’s how I used to describe the addictive personality, but I am confronted with this narcissistic behavior too often, and I have to wonder if it doesn’t apply to our society. The issue at hand today, ladies and gentlemen, is that we have to do something. If crisis is danger mixed with opportunity, then opportunity abounds!

Many of my friends were moved by the last election to decide to become more politically active, through dialog or local politics, and that’s where we all have to start. Each of us has our own temperament, but we engage we must. Perhaps your way is to picket an oil company. Others may fight to save an endangered coral reef. Maybe part of the challenge is bringing back as sense of awe and reverence to everyday life. So you might want to engage in some nature-loving pagan ritual. Go ahead, hug a tree, or bow down and kiss the earth.

We race around in these little boxes of steel, chasing after instant gratification and in the process we’ve forgotten our own humanity.

Stop... look... listen... breathe.

I have one suggestion that I think will help the most and you can begin to implement right now. Here in NYC, some companies give away tiny squares that unfold to a large map of the NYC subway system. It’s the size of a credit card and not much thicker. What we need in order to save ourselves is keep a bigger perspective in our pocket, just like the NYC subway map. A big perspective that you can unfold in your head at a moment’s notice. Too often, I see comments in my blog and from people in the real world that betray a singularly selfish perspective. We seem to have lost the ability to understand things from a larger perspective. “Don’t bail out the auto workers!” we screech, resenting the fact that as small business owners, we’re not getting any “handouts.” But if we were to hemorrhage all those jobs, who would buy your services/ products?

We seem to want to demonize those we see as different, forgetting that in denying a gay or lesbian couple the same rights we enjoy erode our own rights. Too many are willing to allow tens of thousands die simply because we want to cling to the concept of health care as a privilege than a basic human right. We decry taxes that could make our schools better, but are blind to the taxes that funded the land-mine some child in some far-off land just step on...

This very moment... and the next...

Think! Or rather, think differently. Think with the larger perspective. Consider -- from a more panoramic perspective-- that denying others their rights erodes yours. Think that if we all would stop using plastic bags, it would have an immediate and tremendous impact.

We need to hold a big perspective to remind us that nature is one tough bitch, and life has so far survived the collision of continents, mountain ranges erupting in volcanoes, murderously cold ice ages, the plague, your ex mother-in-law and even Bush Jr. (well, the jury still out on that last one).

The Big picture also carries your inner understanding that you are part of it all, and so are they (<--insert anyone you hold resentment towards: immigrants, blacks, whites, men, women, etc.). My father had a great phrase he used to describe people he didn’t get along with, “friendly enemies.”

This is a species-wide problem -- we live in interesting times with plentiful opportunity and need to act wisely and with compassion. If your Big Picture doesn’t include a Bigger Love then we’re doomed for sure.

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness [Emotional Healing]

¡Hola! Everybody…
Well it’s back to work for yours truly. I took a two-week vacation in which I did… nothing. Yup, that’s right, I did nothing. Do you know hard it is to do nothing? I mean, it’s, like, a sin or against the law to do nothing in America. People would ask and when I informed them that I was doing nothing, they would look at me as if I’d just developed a third eye and immediately offer “solutions” to my “predicament.” Some people actually looked resentful that I had the audacity to do nothing – or at least admit that I was doing nothing. People: don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

SMDH

I think we all should do nothing more often.

Today’s art work, titled Emotional Healing Reprise, is by James D. Lewis (click here to visit his website).

* * *

-=[ Emotional Healing ]=-
“We must take care not to make intellect our god. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot rule, only serve.”
-- Albert Einstein

Emotions get a bad rap in our culture, but without emotions, life would have no meaning. In fact, without emotions we would’ve ceased to exist as a species a long time ago. Emotions give direction to our thoughts and are integral to our decision-making process. Furthermore, without love, beauty, justice, truth, dignity, honor and the great satisfactions each of these provide, what worth would life hold?

These experiences, and the emotions that drive them, gives us our direction. They compel us toward more love, more beauty, more justice, and to distance our selves from their opposites. Without emotions, we lose our ground of being – our fundamental bearings – and we cannot make choices that truly reflect what matters most to us.

People with serious mental illness lose this ability. Like, Emilia, for example, a young woman who came to my office one day. Part of my training involves listening at a level most people are unfamiliar with. One of the things I look for is an individual’s ability to stay “on task” – to demonstrate some measure of focus. Initially, she seemed quite normal, though she had problems making eye contact. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that Emilia eventually attempted to stab me with a letter opener. Luckily, I was paying attention and realized, after a while, that she seemed to be listening to voices. I also noticed she was taking quick glances at a cup on my desk that held the letter opener and scissors.

As the realization that I was with a disturbed individual dawned on me, I went to take the cup out of reach as subtly as possible. That’s when she lunged for the letter opener. I was able to wrest the cup for her grasp, but it was a harrowing experience nonetheless.

I was able to get Emilia some help, but the next time I saw her, there was no life in her eyes. And it was sad to watch her. While the antipsychotic medicine helped take away the voices and hallucinations, she seemed more like a zombie than the vibrant, intelligent young woman her family remembered. And that’s the whole thing: no emotion, no life. Today, there are antipsychotic medications whose side effects are less disturbing, but side effects are always a concern. We just don’t know enough about the way the mind/ brain works.

On the other hand, emotional over indulgence does not make for skillful living. Emotions must be tempered by the rational analysis that the cognitive brain provides. Otherwise, rash decisions made in the heat of the moment can adversely affect our relationships with others. I’m willing to bet that many of you reading this have probably had children off a feeling. LOL

Emotions without focus, thoughtfulness, and planning leave us at the mercy of the vicissitudes – the random ups and downs -- of life. If we are incapable of controlling our existence, life loses meaning too.

Your life is unique – every life is unique. It is also true that every life is difficult. Too often I hear people comment that if only they had more money, were better looking, or were more talented, that they would then be happy. By becoming someone else, they seem to be saying, they would not have to face their obstacles and problems – and that is true. But they would have other problems – theirs!

I say, if you’re not happy now, then you’ll never be happy no matter what. You will always have something to bitch about; something will always bother you, or stop you from your happiness. You will always say…

If only…

Marilyn Monroe was perhaps considered the sexiest, most famous, and most desired of all women of her generation. Yet, she could never escape a deeply embedded sense of loneliness which she drowned in alcohol. Eventually, she would die of an overdose of barbiturates. Jimi Hendrix became a superstar and changed the very way the guitar was played and no one today can pick up a guitar without being influenced by his playing. He too died from an overdose of drugs. One of my favorite writers, Earnest Hemingway, won a Nobel Prize and led a life full of adventure and excitement and yet that didn’t stop him from putting a gun to head and pulling the trigger.

Neither talent, nor glory, power, money, nor the adulation of men and women can make the essence of life easier.

Still, there are people who seem to live in harmony. Most often they have a feeling that life is generous. They are able to enjoy the people around them and the mundane everyday pleasures: meals, sleep, projects, and relationships. They don’t belong to a cult or a specific religion. Some are rich, some are not. Some are married, others live alone. Some possess extraordinary talents, others are quite ordinary. They all have experienced failures, disappointments, and dark moments. Nobody – nobody – escapes from hardships.

However, overall, these people seem better equipped to overcome obstacles. They seem to have a special ability to get through misfortune, to give meaning to their lives, as if they had a closer relationship to their lives, with others, and with what they have chosen to do with their existence.

I believe that we all can learn to live in this way – to live in harmony with our environment and our internal values. My experience has shown me that we can learn to heal ourselves, that there is a vast reservoir of healing energy within all of us. I also believe that this healing power is within our grasp and that it lies in learning to harness the power of our emotions.

Love,

Eddie

Twat Out Or Twit Out

Class: the Twitterers are revolting!

Transformation is happening.

CHANGE is in the air. Butterflies fly to Friend Feed.

WTF!!!!

This goes on "Humor-blogs.com".