This was written in the airport and airplane on my way back from my spiritual class in Florida:
Blog June 14th
Well.
That was something.
I really should learn from the last two trips and make sure to schedule my spiritual retreats BEFORE my standard vacations. A good spiritual retreat never fails to uplift and inspire, and make the rest of life have more savor. I think all my uncertainty angst etc. about my future that came up during my previous trip would have been greatly diminished, if it existed at all, and I would have much more easily and quickly moved through it, if I’d been coming of the spiritual experience/class I just had. Hopefully I can learn that for some future time, if I have a choice about order.
I learned some valuable lessons from the last several days. A renewed commitment to trusting and surrendering to God, and a deeper experiential understanding of what that means. Ditto for the importance of gardening my inner experience. Honestly, there are an incredible amount of things I’ve learned, many very… small. Small is maybe the wrong word. Like the book ‘small is beautiful,' small does not mean insignificant. I got to be in the presence of what I think is an enlightened master. In a very intimate, small group.
Just watching them go about their life, the subtleties of how they interact and process, was illuminating, in this case, also freeing. This enlightened master doesn’t wear monk robes. They’ve got a great sense of humor, they’re a bit odd, they like dressing up, they have their own, very distinct personality, and it’s not what you would expect from an enlightened master. And yet, in their interactions, they are impeccable, in integrity, full of joy and love and an invisible transformative energy that infuses whatever they do.
Rather than their personality dissolving into a mushy nothingness that some books and teachers seem to give the impression is what enlightenment looks like, it’s more like their personality is made more vivid.
I think I read somewhere about geniuses, or people who have made some of the biggest contributions to the world, something like that. They all had what the book called ‘complex personalities.’ Meaning they could not be contained in a single trope. They had many, very distinct facets to their personality, they could be super focused and scientific, and then very artistic or intuitive, and then very practical and efficient. Loving and exacting. And these widely divergent facets were harmonized, integrated. They switched flexibly between them, with sensitivity and coordination. This seems kind of in that vein.
I’ll give one example that was refreshing, the mixture of deep rigor, and flexibility and play. I remember trying to be super disciplined in my spirituality, and ending up kind of hard and clenched in all aspects of my life, becoming kind of a rules lawyer. And I know many on the spiritual path who’ve gone through that phase. We can’t maintain both flexibility/ease/love, and discipline/focus/intensity, and we can’t easily switch between them. Switching from one to the other is like prying someone’s death grip open.
Seeing it modeled, is a bit of an aha moment, a realization that it’s possible to be that way, and what it looks like, feels like. Similar to working under my teaching mentor, who mixed extremely high expectations with great warmth, and the ability to quickly distinguish rules that needed to be enforced with exceptions that were fine to make.
This post is already long, but I wanted to talk about what I mentioned earlier, about gardening my mind/inner experience.
I’ve had a long battle with a school of personal development thought. The Tony Robbins, psych yourself up kinda thing. The smile when your sad so you can be happy kind of thing. It always made my skin crawl. I’m a very authentic person. Truth is deeply important to me. Sometimes this rubs people the wrong way, because if I’m biting it, I will say I’m biting it.
Perhaps it was a bit of a reaction against the east coast mentality I absorbed of the “how are you?” “Good-n-you?” sentiment. That is, it doesn’t matter if you’re dying inside, when someone asks you “how are you?” They don’t actually want to know. They would be very uncomfortable and perhaps even irritated if you answered anything other than a “good-n-you” equivalent.
I have a couple theories about what is going on, but the bottom Line is I feel suffocated by a “always say everything is fine” atmosphere. I am healed of my emotional ills by having a compassionate listener that I can share openly with, and be heard and accepted, sadness, anger, pain, and all. In sharing and being heard, the emotions then take care of themselves. Like a stream flowing by, the emotions are felt, acknowledged, and then move on.
When they are not allowed to do that, it’s like a clogged up stream, or, perhaps a toilet that people are refusing to flush.
I can theoretically imagine that some people don’t need this outlet for emotions. Maybe they actually deal with them in a healthy way using the Tony Robbins technique, or the ignore/don’t think it about technique. Maybe they’re doing something else entirely. But I need to keep it real and be able to say what I’m thinking and feeling, and the people I connect the most with are people who are similar.
However.
Both my number one teacher and the teacher I just finished a weekend with have said something along the lines of happiness is a choice and you should control your thoughts and attention in a positive direction. I had a very hard time understanding this. It always sounded like I was just supposed to pretend I was happy when I wasn’t, and that felt fake, inauthentic, and kind of nauseating to me whenever I encountered that.
What I’ve found is a kind of subtle mix of both styles. Acknowledging and accepting, but then also cultivating the positive. It does feel kind of weird at first, but I gave it a chance and, well, it kinda worked…
I don't think any explanation will do it justice, at least from me, at my current baby-steps level. That's why I needed a up-close and personal model, being walked through it (multiple times, it just clicked much more deeply this time.) But how it can work, and still be authentic, I think I've got a handle on it. And I understand the importance of doing that inner gardening for my spiritual growth.
OK, I out, this was for last week, let's see if I can get a quick one out for this week.
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