Return of Spirit

Dearest Readers,

As many of you know, I’ve spent the last six years writing a spiritual memoir called O My God: An Un-Becoming Journey, and am now in the final stages of assisted publishing with Tellwell, a Canadian indie company. Fingers crossed, the book will be available for purchase in June.

Am I over the moon with excitement? A part of me is doing a happy dance, yes, but the inner critics (there are more than one), released an avalanche of negative self-judgement while I was completing the penultimate polish of the manuscript, and with it came a pile of dread.

If you have your own inner critics you know they aren’t very kind. I struggled to finish the draft while the “voices of dissent” (as I like to call the barrage) went on and on. I listened to them, tuned them out, asked for help and took care of myself. It took me a while, but I eventually remembered that negative voices are not truth-tellers. They are fearful needs trying to get met.

Last week, I managed to complete the draft and submit it to Tellwell, and later that day I went for a massage. It was good timing. I could reward my achievement by doing something special and allow myself to receive intense self-care at the same time.

Just before getting on the table, the massage therapist asked me if I’d like to pick a card.

“Always,” I said.

He held up a deck in a black box, emblazoned with an image of a fluorescent, psychedelic phoenix on the front, accompanied by the deck’s name: “Return of Spirit.”

He shuffled, and held out the fanned cards. I let my fingers hover above them, feeling for the energetic pull. A card found my fingers and I slid it out.

We looked. The image matched the one on the box. The card read “Return of Spirit.”

“No one has ever pulled that card before!” he exclaimed. “That is the first time anyone has ever got that card! It’s the master card!”

I smiled. The Universe has its ways, doesn’t it?

Excitedly, he read the card’s wisdom:

“You have come a long way in your journey. No, it hasn’t been easy, but you have made it through. Acknowledge, for just a moment, the strength and courage that you have discovered within you. This is the card of triumph, heart-felt connection, and mastery. Hold your head high and feel proud of who you are … Your spiritual connection to Source is stronger now than it has ever been.”

Really? I was a little baffled. I wasn’t feeling anything close to triumph or mastery. The illness I wrote about in my last two letters is still with me, the inner critics had just spent days trying to kill me … oh, and there’s some other hard stuff happening: a pandemic, a war in Ukraine, nasty divisions bubbling up everywhere, climate change.

No, it hasn’t been easy. For anyone.

“But you have made it through.”

Well, yes.

Could you acknowledge just for a moment the strength and courage you’ve discovered within you?

Yes … I could.

Could you hold your head high and feel proud of who you are?

“Now wait a minute,” the critics jump in, “that is going toooo far into the corny-mushy-gushy zone.”

Shhh. It’s okay. Just relax already. You don’t have to police that zone. It’s not your job.

Okay. You’re right. I’m relaxing. Sigh.

Now. Could you trust that your spiritual connection to Source is stronger now than it has ever been?

Well …

Well?

Well, yes. I suppose I could. I pulled Master Card, didn’t I?

You certainly did.

Whoot-whoot! I pulled the Master Card! Happy dance! Head-held-high-and-proud dance! Goofy-silly-freedom dance! I’m-publishing-a-book-that-took-me-six-years-to-write dance! Yee-haw! Yippeeee! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

From the corny-mushy-gushy fires of love,

Celia

I Heart Therapy

Dearest Readers,

This past December, two years into a relationship (and a pandemic), and three months into an illness (post-viral syndrome, initiated by a gastro virus), I said to myself, “I need therapy.” I’ve been to therapists on and off over the years and I (virtually) see my own spiritual director on a regular basis but the last time I went to a therapist was more than eight years ago.

It was time.

I love therapy. In my teens, therapy helped me to say, “I love you,” to my father (and helped him say it back). In my thirties, therapy helped me to come to terms with my sexuality (I am a heterosexual-identified bisexual, yes!). In my forties, therapy helped me to figure out what to do with my life (quit my job and pursue my calling).

To illustrate how much I love therapy I will tell you a little story:

Once, during my spiritual direction training, I was the guinea pig for a “practice” spiritual direction session. My cohort was observing me in the session with a spiritual director who also happened to be a therapist.

I was talking about my spiritual journey, enjoying the rapt attention of a roomful of listeners, when I said something that made the director stop me and say, “Now I don’t want to go any further here because this is spiritual direction and I don’t want it to become a therapy session.”

“Oh, I love therapy,” I replied, confidently.

He looked at me, squarely. Was I really giving him permission to “go there” in front of all of these people? I looked back at him. Yes, I was.

“Alright. What’s ‘belonging’?” he asked me. I must have used the word when I was talking and he had knowingly (and artfully) picked up on it.

The question went into my heart like an arrow, penetrating my bravado. “I never felt like I belonged anywhere in my whole life,” I said, tears spilling down my cheeks.

He had seen something of my inner life and I had been willing to expose it. It was a powerful moment for every single person in that room and … healing happened.

And this is why I love therapy (and spiritual direction): healing happens.

In a recent session with my new therapist, I shared some of my latest struggles. “It’s sounds like the story of your life could be titled Life is Very Hard.”

I felt my defenses rising up because for years I’d consciously avoided saying “life is hard.” It had felt like a negative statement that needed to be transformed. Instead, I’d practiced saying “life isn’t easy” or “life can be challenging.”

But in that moment I realized something: I work with many people who find life hard and somewhere along the line I had let go of my practice of transforming the words in order to validate the statement for the ones who felt it to be true. “Yes, I hear you. Life is hard.”

“Maybe I’ve swung too far the other way,” I conceded.

“Or maybe that’s just my projection,” she said, softening. “What would you call the title of your life’s book?”

Never Enough,” I said, without hesitation.

It’s true. No matter how much healing I’ve experienced there continues to be that deep-rooted shame in my being that tells me I’m not enough. It doesn’t rule my life (most of the time) but it’s never fully gone away. Sometimes it even returns in a full-force gale.

“Maybe you need to learn to make friends with your shame,” my therapist said.

This was a new angle.

Healing the shame? Been there done that. But making friends with shame? Okay, let’s do it!

So, thanks to good ol’ therapy, I’ve renamed shame “Shamé” and we’re getting along great. We’ve gone for walks, watched movies together and next week we’re going to an outdoor show (weather permitting).

From the fires of love,

Celia

No Fixing Required

Dearest Readers,

On September 21st, I nearly fainted at the long-term care home where I provide spiritual care. I was in the middle of delivering a sermon for the residents during our homemade church service and the world started to go black.

I pulled up a stool and carried on, acting as if I was okay when I wasn’t. I didn’t want people to worry. But after the room cleared, I got help from the nurse and called for a ride home.

Because I had spent part of the previous weekend with a family who’d had “the gastro,” and because I was in bed for the next two days with nausea and a weak stomach, the sickness was chalked up to gastroenteritis.

The family who’d given me the bug got better in two days. Ten weeks later I am still sick.

What I want to write to you about is not the details of my illness but the practice of surrender. Because one has led to the other.

Twenty-plus years ago, when I got on the Healing Journey and began to seriously attend to my spiritual life, I unwittingly got on the Fixing Journey, too.

Give me a problem and I will give you the solution. You’re sick? Say affirmations. You’re sad? Be positive! You’re depressed? Change!

Apparently, I’m not the only one. There is actually an Instagram account called “Healing from Healing.” It can be a bit crass but the account holder is ultimately trying to illustrate the wider healing community’s compulsion to fix: if you’re not happy/healthy/whole you must be doing something wrong!

It’s taken me a long time to learn that healing doesn’t mean fixing and controlling. It means letting go, releasing, accepting, surrendering. And believe me, I haven’t finished learning the lesson.

Since getting sick, friends have offered me silent faith sessions, tried to perform distance healing practices on my body, and recommended shamans and psychics.

You would think I would be grateful for all of this support but my reaction has sort of been, hmm, how shall I say it? Irritation.

“Stop trying to fix me! Just let me be sick!”

Now, because I analyze everything, I realize that this part of me, let’s call her Resistance, might be the part of me that doesn’t want to heal. Maybe she likes being sick because she gets to check out of life.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Maybe there is another part of me, let’s call her Wisdom, that knows that this illness is actually teaching me something important and a miraculous cure would only eradicate the lesson.

So what’s the lesson?

There are a few:

Since becoming ill, I have had to say “no” a lot. Saying “no” is not one of my strong points.

Since becoming ill, I have had to let go of my fear of being judged. I imagine that people are going to see me as “less than” because I’m not working, I’m weak, I’m cancelling appointments, I’m falling behind. I have had to let these imaginary people think what they are going to think.

Since becoming ill, I have had to accept that my body is not able to do what it could do ten weeks ago. But I’m a yoga teacher! Too bad.

Since becoming ill, I’ve had to surrender to the fact that life has thrown me a curve ball and I can’t reach my arm out to catch it because the lymph nodes in my armpit are swollen and it hurts to much to stretch.

These are big lessons. Vital lessons, no? Why try to fix and control them away? They are teaching me well.

Yes, I would like to heal. Yes, I would like to have my energy back. And, what if it was okay to be sick? What if this sickness is actually healing me, one small surrender at a time?

If I was to be suddenly, miraculously healed by a prayer, a shaman or a psychic, would I not just go right back to saying “yes” when I need to say “no”? Would I not immediately return to over-giving my time and energy? To doing more than my body can handle so that I would finally be enough?

It’s highly likely.

In the first few weeks, when I was still fighting this thing and struggling to accept what my body was saying, I taught a couple of online yoga classes. Cancelling was unthinkable.

Then I remembered how I am always telling my students to “listen to your body.”

How could I teach this kind of wisdom and not practice it myself?

So, I cancelled. And the next week, I cancelled again. And the next week, again.

Ugh.

The only consolation was that I was living my teachings.

Listen, let go, accept, surrender.

That’ll fix it.

From the fires of love,

Celia

What’s the Point?

Dearest Readers,

The tough times continue. We are still grappling with the pandemic. Climate change seems to be worsening. In Canada we are coming to grips with a genocide. Racism and general xenophobia are frighteningly widespread.

Despite a whole lot of good work being done to transform our world, the current situation can feel overwhelming. When the overwhelm hits hard and things feel utterly hopeless, apathy arises. ‘What’s the point?’ is a question I ask, and get asked, often.

Not everyone feels this kind of despair but I’m pretty sure all of us are looking for meaning. What, exactly, is the point of all of this?

Lately, when this deep question of ‘purpose’ comes up, I have been thinking of Oliver Šteins.

I interviewed Oliver for Communion in 2016 after he told me he was ‘a militant atheist and a very spiritual person’. He was adamant that human life did not have any great purpose but he was nevertheless excited by the profound mystery of the human journey:

“Live for the moment,” he says in the interview, “It’s much more exciting. What’s happening now. Concentrate on what’s happening now and enjoy it because tomorrow it could be all over, right?”

Oliver was diagnosed with ALS a couple of years after our conversation and he died in March of this year. The thoughts he shared during the interview now seem incredibly prescient. He talked about his death and how he wanted to ‘go’ and, despite his anti-religious feeling, he felt deeply connected to an Eternal Energy:

“Where did it all come from?” he asks. “How did this all come about?” Then he answers his own question: “I don’t know. But I’ll keep asking and that’s what keeps me motivated, that’s what keeps me interested in life.”

Oliver found his purpose by asking the Big Questions. He didn’t need certainty to feel that Life had meaning. It was the uncertainty that inspired him. (I am a recovering controller and I find this incredibly brave.)

There is a poignant moment in the interview when Oliver is talking about the awesome Ogilvie Mountains on the Yukon’s Dempster Highway:

“Seeing just how elated I was, how all-inspiring, the hope… that I was this little speck on this planet and amongst all this… there’s nobody around… the sun’s beaming and there’s a cloud moving in and the wind, and… I just felt very moved, very spiritual at that point. I had that connection.”

That connection. When I find myself in what’s-the-point territory I know it’s time to make That Connection. I need to look at the Big Picture and orient myself within it. I don’t necessarily need to know that Life has a Purpose but I need to find purpose for my own life.

Oliver then goes on to say, “I’m insignificant, I really am. I’m not depressed about it. I’m very elated.”

For Oliver, being an insignificant ‘little speck’ in the Universe gave him a feeling of elation. That Connection. Watching shows about the Cosmos and reading books about astrophysics and cosmology are elating for me, too. We are not separate from That Vastness. The reason we feel that connection is because we are Inextricably Connected to Everything.

Oliver resisted the idea that God was a being but he embraced Being with passion and determination. Without knowing he would be dead in five years, he says, “When the time comes of my passing… I wanna go [back to those mountains]. That would be my final stop. Get in a lawn chair and just look over that. I would like to exit that way.”

Oliver died in Cobourg, Ontario. He didn’t get to set up that lawn chair on the Dempster Highway. But, amazingly, wondrously, purposefully, and very much with-a-point, his life is continuing to speak:

“Concentrate on what’s happening now and enjoy it because tomorrow it could be all over, right?”

From the fires of love,

Celia

(Watch the 10-minute Communion episode with Oliver on YouTube.)

Have Faith?

Dearest Readers,

A number of years ago, when I was just at the beginning of what I would now call the conscious spiritual journey, a friend said to me, “Have faith,” after I bombarded her with a fearful tirade of controlling remarks.

Have faith.

Her words had the right effect. I calmed down and took a breath. I knew I had to let go of whatever was causing me anxiety in that fraught moment and this little phrase helped me to do that.

‘Have faith’ can mean anything to anyone, really. It can mean believing in God but it can also mean trusting in the human spirit.

I work with a lot of people who have either lost their faith or simply don’t have any to begin with. Some of them once believed in a God that was ‘good’ but because they see so much ‘bad’ they no longer do. This makes sense. ‘Belief’ is fickle. It can be too easily eroded by the ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’ (That’s Hamlet.)

Having faith requires trust and trusting is different than believing. In what do I trust?

I trust that I am not the Power Making the Planets Spin. 

I trust that the Spirit of Goodness will prevail. It may take a week, a month, a year, century or a millennium but eventually things work out. This quote sums it up: ‘If it ends, it ends well. If it doesn’t end well, it’s not over yet.’

I trust that the Universe knows what It is doing. When looks like the world is going to hell in a hand basket I remember that a heck of a lot has happened before now and a heck of a lot is going to happen after now. We are still evolving. I trust that.

Have faith.

It’s easy to say. I could have had a different reaction all those years ago when my friend said those words to me (f*ck off comes to mind). But she wasn’t being flippant. She was reassuring me. And because I do have faith, not blind-everything-happens-for-a-reason-spiritual-bypassing-faith, but faith in the stars and the sun and the moon, in the galaxies and the entire cosmic dance, in the grass growing and the trees blowing and the unfolding of history and the miraculous present and the uncertain future. I have faith in the steadfast spirit of the animals, in the perseverance of people who continue to fight for justice and equality despite staggering injustices and inequality, in the kindness of strangers and the generosity of neighbours and, finally, in the Transformative, Radical, Unconditional Love that seems to permeate Everything and defies logic and intellectual understanding.

Have faith, she said. I listened. And I let go.

And I’m still listening and I’m still letting go. Because I still like to hold on. And I doubt and I question and I fear and I rage. And I have faith.

May we all have faith right now. Not faith that ‘everything will be okay’. But that everything will be. Because it is.

From the fires of love,

Celia

Un-Mask the Fear

Dearest Readers,

The last Healing Journey letter was written at the end of March when the idea of wearing masks in public was unthinkable. Now we are in August and saying, “Nice mask!” to each other and comparing fabric and patterns. Humans are, if nothing else, pretty adaptable creatures, no?

I’ve noticed that the lockdown has divided some of us into two camps: one, for whom the isolation is anxiety-producing, and the other for whom it is a relief.

I tend to fall mostly into the second camp.

Not that I’ve been isolated very much. I was in self-isolation for three weeks when I thought I had the virus but after I finally tested negative (way back in April when it took 9 days to get results), I was able to go back to work at the long-term care home and have been around people pretty much every day since then.

Those three weeks in isolation were very healing. The everyday anxiousness I feel at just having to participate in life went away. I don’t have to go anywhere? Do anything? Ahhhhh….

I’ve been hearing from some of you that you feel the same way: the forced isolation has relieved your own felt-sense of a pressurized world.

And then there are those of you who are really feeling the loneliness. The lack of social connection has been getting to you and you feel like you’re climbing the walls. It’s been all you can do to stay sane in a situation some of you have likened to being in prison.

(There might actually be a third camp: those of you who live alone and are retired and life hasn’t changed much for you. Regardless, it’s a time of change for everyone, whether personally or globally.)

There was a time in my life when I didn’t even know I felt anxious about day-to-day living. The anxiousness was masked behind overachieving and pushing myself. It was only when I began to do inner work that I realized my insides are often churning. About what? Oh, you name it. Just about anything and everything.

Ironically, the more conscious I’ve become and the more healing I’ve experienced, the more the anxious state has been exposed. It’s probably not the best advertisement for waking up, is it? ‘Get on the spiritual journey, folks, and you will discover how neurotic you really are!’

But ‘un-masking’ the fear has been a life-saver.

The literal masks we’re now wearing are also life-savers but they are a nuisance and, for some, a source of stress. Despite the attempt at making them fashionable, masks hide our smiles and facial expressions, which connect us to one another in important ways. (On the plus side, masks hide yawns and spinach in your teeth.)

Like the virus-prevention mask hiding the smile and the yawn (and the spinach), the masks of overachieving and ‘pushing through it’ can be hiding an anxious or a fearful part of the self. When I removed these protective outer masks, i.e. when I began to slow down, get quiet and ‘check in’, I began to discover what was really going on inside of me.

Becoming conscious of the fear actually enabled me to attend to what was underneath it: a desire for reassurance, support and self-acceptance. At one time, I would have died before admitting that I was afraid of life but admitting to the fearand exposing it continues to reduce the power it holds over me and provides me with an ongoing source of courage.

When I leave the long-term care home after hours of wearing a mask and finally get to pull it off as I cross the parking lot, I cannot tell you how liberating it feels. The fresh air on my face is like a kiss from God. When I remove the mask of ‘having it all together’ and share the fear, I feel a similar kind of freedom. The relief is like a Cosmic Thumbs-up.

So let’s keep our masks on to prevent the spread of the virus and let’s keep un-masking to discover ourselves. Sometimes what’s hiding underneath is actually what connects us to one another.

Keep G(r)o(w)ing

Dearest Readers,

How are you doing? Really, how are you? My own emotions have been on a rollercoaster ride, mostly stabilized in the last week, but definitely up and down. When I am up, I wonder about you, how you’re feeling about the changes in your personal life and in the world, how you’re coping with it all.

When I have these moments, when I wonder about you and if you’re okay, my own fear and anxiety decrease. Thinking of others is such a healing practice. So is caring for others. As the spiritual care worker in a long-term care facility, I am considered an ‘essential service’, and when I am with a resident, there is no thought of myself. The fearful, anxious thoughts disappear.

Deep Presence brings relief.

If you read the last Letter, you will remember my account of the Woodpecker, appearing at just the right moments in time to remind me that the Universe is as conscious of me as I am of It. Three days ago, I arrived back at the house after an endorphin-producing run to the rat-a-tat-tat of the Woodpecker. She was in the tree above our driveway and I stood and watched her hammer her head into the trunk at rapid-fire speed.

Impeccable Timing brings relief.

The above photograph of the snowdrops is evidence of a miracle, really, since the entire front garden of our house was dug up last fall to fix a leaky basement. All of the soil was removed, creating a 6-or-7-foot trench around the wall of the house. The dirt that had been removed was then dumped back in the trench to re-fill it. The result was a big, uneven pile of mud. Now, after a long winter, those snowdrops you see in the photo pushed up through the disturbed ground in the exact same spot as they always do, year-after-year. How?

Life Finds a Way.

In times of crisis, in times of despair, in times of great fear and crippling anxiety, I look to these experiences of Deep Presence, Impeccable Timing and the Unstoppable Life-Force Energy to keep me going and to keep me growing.

And I think of you, and hope that you are accessing your own inner resources and outer practices to keep going and growing, one moment at a time.

From the Fires of Love,

Celia

We Are Known


 Dearest Readers,

I would like to wish you all a very Happy New Year. Can you believe it’s been twenty years since Y2K? Astonishing.

Maybe I’m slow but it only occurred to me very recently that 2020 is a play on ’20/20′.

’20/20 vision’ and ‘hindsight is 20/20’ bring to mind a more clear way of seeing. How could we move into this new decade with a new kind of clarity? Perhaps by seeing ourselves not simply as individuals but as component parts of a Cosmic Oneness. Whether you are religious and believe that we are all Children of God or spiritual and believe that we are All One or secular/scientific and understand that we all share the same DNA, the fact remains: we are all intimately connected. We are not separate from one another.

This fact was brought home to me again and again when I attended an amazing conference in San Jose, CA called Science and Non-Duality (SAND) this past October 2019. The organizers of the conference are a dynamic couple who had a desire to share with others their mutual love of science and mysticism and set about creating a conference where folks could come together to celebrate the mysteries and wonders of both.

The pairing of science, with its fact-based approach, and spirituality, with its wisdom-based knowing, excites me almost like nothing else. When I was very little, I used to fall asleep by pressing my fists into my eyes so that I could view the kaleidoscope of colours that the pressure produced. When I did this, I somehow felt not only that I was seeing God but that God was living inside of me. In other words, my very first experience of God looked something like this:

A number of the guest speakers at the SAND conference were scientists who spend their research time asking the question ‘Is the Universe conscious?’ In other words, does that kaleidoscope of colours have a consciousness? Does it know itself? Does it know me? Does it know, period?

For me, the answer to these questions is a roof-top shouting ‘YES’. For how can the Mechanism Behind Consciousness not have consciousness itself? (The ancient yogis believe that ‘God’ is Consciousness itself.)


Science cannot yet explain consciousness (why we have it, where it comes from, what it even is) and so it remains the greatest mystery. Religion and spirituality fill in the answers. We get to decide for ourselves.

Einstein supposedly said something like, “Either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle.” To that end, either everything has consciousness or nothing does. Either the Universe is conscious (of itself, of me and you and all that is) or it’s not.

Living life as though the Universe is as conscious of me as I am of It makes life pretty interesting. It also addresses existential loneliness or the feeling that I am alone and unloved.

On an evening walk some years ago, I was stopped short by a large scattering of wood chips on the sidewalk. I looked up to see what had caused the mess and saw perfect, round holes in the tree, as if a large drill-bit had punched in and out of the bark. The very next day, when I passed the same tree I saw a woodpecker hammering its head in and out of the tree at rapid speed. I actually laughed out loud. No wonder an animation artist had invented Woody the Woodpecker, a comical, ridiculous bird!

I don’t know how long I watched that woodpecker. It had me completely mesmerized. I was transported by the power it had in its little head to bore holes in trees, by its determination to feed itself, by the absolute phenomenon of its being. By simply by observing the humble woodpecker, I had been awakened to something far greater than my own self-centered thoughts.

The amazing thing is, Woodpecker has continued to show up in my life, seemingly just when I need it. On more than one occasion, when I’ve been in a funk, the bird appears. Just this past July, when I was feeling despair at the state of the world, criticizing myself for being imperfect, tired of life in general, Woodpecker stopped me as I walked through a ravine to get to my destination. I first heard the rat-a-tat-tat of the beak-against-trunk and then saw it, high in a branch of an old maple. “I’m here,” it said. 

I wrote the above paragraph about five days ago. Two days ago, I was walking on the grey streets of the town where I live, feeling extremely melancholy. My mood had dipped, as it does, and I was heading to the shores of Lake Ontario for a boost. I caught a flash of a bird flying by and looked to the tree where I saw it land. Woodpecker. “I’m here,” it said.

Call these encounters coincidence. Call them nothing at all. Or call them a form of conscious contact from a Conscious Universe. When I choose the latter way of seeing I am bolstered by the notion that every conceivable thing is fused with Knowing. That means that I am Known. And You are Known. And We are Known. Kind of radical, know?

May this Knowing be the foundation of our 20/20 vision.

From the fires of love,

Celia

Let it Out

Detail from ‘Wrath’ by Celia McBride, Oil on Board

Dearest Readers,

I’m sure I’ve blogged about this moment in the past. It is a moment in the movie Milk when Sean Penn, as Harvey Milk, says to a crowd of protesters fighting for equal rights for homosexuals, “I know you’re angry.” He is shouting into a megaphone. He pauses. In that pause, as the viewer, I fully expected him to say, “But it’s okay,” or “We need to be peaceful,” or “We need to be calm.” Instead, he shouts, “I’m angry!”

As someone who has often tried to bypass my own anger with a spiritual remedy, it was a learning moment. ‘Oh, right, it’s okay to be angry.’ I forget this a lot. I know repressing my anger isn’t good but that doesn’t stop me from trying to transform it into forgiveness or acceptance before I’ve actually felt any of the the angry feelings.

The other day as I was doing the dishes I realized I was holding in some of those angry feelings and probably had been for some time. Having recently read an out-of-print book called Cry Anger in which the author, Dr. Jack Birnbaum, encourages people to get angry, I let the feelings out.

As I scrubbed the cutlery I shouted my grievances to the Cosmic Engine. Some were personal (a romantic rejection; a foot injury), some were more universal (climate change; human suffering). As the complaints poured forth out of my body, all prefaced with, “I’m angry!”, I immediately started to feel better.

Dr. Birnbaum, in writing about one of his patients, said, “His anxiety was a shield against his own rage and hostility, which he controlled with his perfectionistic way of living.”

After releasing my own anger, I could see it more clearly: perfectionism in disguise.

Perfectionism says: I’m getting it wrong (whatever ‘it’ is), other people are getting it wrong and the Cosmic Engine is getting it wrong.

That’s a lot of control. Or, lack thereof.

My desire for control is a natural instinct. It is just trying to keep me safe. But controlling doesn’t keep me safe. It keeps me angry.

Letting the anger out brought a new sense of freedom. Self-compassion flooded in. I remembered that when I’m expecting perfection, anger will not be far behind.

So let it out. If you can. In a safe environment. In a quiet kitchen, maybe, with your hands in the suds.

From the fires of love,

Celia

We’re Alive!

Dearest Readers,

After retiring from showbiz a number of years ago and then weaning myself off the dubious pleasure of award shows, I recently found myself catching snippets of the 2019 Golden Globes while staying with some friends. The happy couple was ensconced in their den and I, busy with other things, would come and go from the room to chat with them while the stars of Hollywood made their speeches and showed off their formal duds on the TV.

During one of my brief stop-ins to the den, Jeff Bridges was called to the stage to receive a lifetime achievement award. He was suitably humble and excited and after the requisite thank-yous to his agents and lawyers and colleagues and family, he shouted out his exuberance for life, waving his award in the air while saying, “We’re all alive, right here, right now, this is happening. We’re alive!” (You can jump right to 3:49 for that particular moment.)

Bridge’s words came out so joyfully, in such an unaffected and sweetly, awkward manner, that my friends and I could not help but laugh. Who does that? This wasn’t an arm-waving celebration of personal victory (for many before him have done that little dance with their newly-acquired statue) but a celebration of our aliveness, the astonishing, undeniable reality of our Being.

His jubilant affirmation reminded me of a spoken-word poem I’d written in the 90s, listing all the times I could have died and ending each account with the words, ‘I’m alive.’ One of the concluding stanzas goes like this:

i was born
i was given this gift
this life overwhelming
this blessing this hope
i’m alive


And the final stanza:

we’re alive
you’re alive
i’m alive


The poem remains my own hand-waving exclamation of childish wonder at the miracle of our inexplicable existence. Like Jeff Bridges, I am in total awe that This is Happening, right here, right now.

And yet not too many of us are gleefully whooping about the mind-blowing fact of our actuality. Humans can go through hours, days, weeks, months and years utterly asleep to ourselves and the absolute mystery and phenomenon of It All.

Not only that, many people feel that being alive is not a miracle to be celebrated but a sentence to endure. I know that feeling well and understand that it can be a quantum leap to get from ‘I’m done’ to being amazed by the fact that I am a breathing body with trillions of cells, held to the earth by a puzzling gravitational pull, traveling around the sun at unfathomable speeds in a universe that may or may not have had a beginning and may or may not have an end.

But this is one way to make the leap: Be amazed.

Be amazed by the breath. This constant companion, always there, coming in and going out of the body, whether I pay attention to it or not. There. It. Is.

we’ve got lungs cleansing breath is the life force giver
we’re alive


Be amazed by the weather (even while you’re complaining about it). How does snow fall from a cloud? How does a lake freeze over? How does the sun warm the skin even in frigid temperatures?

we’re rich without a penny
we’re alive


Be amazed by others. That person I’m judging has an entire story, a family history, a complex emotional life, common fears, desires and needs. That person is trying, just like I am and just like you are, to meet the challenges life brings.

we’re alive

Sometimes, when I’m riding on a bus or a train or sitting in an airplane, I will take a moment to open myself up to all of the people around me, imagining their individual lives, realizing that each of them has the same, full, rich complexity of human experience as I do. With this exercise, these easily-ignored strangers become my human family, fellow travelers on the Path of Life.

And I am amazed.

I provide spiritual care for dying people and being so close to death on a daily basis makes me cherish my aliveness. A dear friend of mine recently died in the middle of his own fantastic life and his sudden death now infuses my aliveness. Death is the unmentionable reality informing our lives. Let us all be amazed by that fact. And let us remember, as often as we can, that we are here, This is Happening. Right now. We’re alive!

From the fires of love,

Celia