Typo “A” Personality

  • October 26, 2023 3:13 pm

Dearest Readers,

How are you doing in these challenging times? Our world is experiencing such unbelievable turmoil and unrest yet beauty and goodness continue to promulgate despite the great suffering around us. I hope you are finding ways to be okay.

Over the years, I have been sharing with you how perfectionism and control contribute to a feeling of “not enoughness” in my life and the healing practices that enable me to be enough. You’ve heard me say this inner work is an ongoing process and I continue to wrestle with insecurity and low self-esteem.

One of the most effective tools in my toolbox for battling the seemingly endless barrage of inner criticism is talking out loud to those negative voices (“Thank you for sharing, now f-off”) and speaking reassuringly to the part of me that needs encouragement (“It’s okay that things aren’t okay”).

For me, having a sense of humour about a situation is the ultimate goal and, if I can get there, evidence that I am doing well.

Recently, I re-posted an announcement for a talk I am giving at an upcoming event in my area. When I had first viewed the presenter’s original post, I noticed a pretty significant typo in the title.

My immediate response was to panic, stomach tightening and mind racing. What would everybody think??

Well …

Let them think it!

Do I actually believe I can control what everyone thinks anyway? (Okay, yes, I do. But this is an unsound belief.)

Instead of emailing the presenter to request that she take down the announcement, re-do the graphic and re-post it without the typo, I practiced a form of detachment, in this case, separating my self-worth from the mistake.

I decided to go ahead and re-post with the typo and make a joke about it. To my delight, many of the commenters also made jokes. One wrote about embracing imperfection and another expressed their preference for the mistake!

I can’t always make fun myself. Because I was laughed at and criticized as a child, there remains a very tender part of me that doesn’t find these things funny. But if I can reassure the more sensitive part and strive for detachment, I’m laughing.

From the fires of love,

Celia

The Ups of Down

  • February 16, 2023 9:50 am

This Blog was published first as The Healing Journey Letter. Click here to Subscribe.Dearest Readers,

As as child of the 70s and 80s, I would have considered 2023 to be “The Future” when I was growing up. It amazes me that The Future is now the present, and though we don’t have flying cars (yet), technology is boldly taking us where no one has been before.

That said, times are really tough. I sincerely hope that wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you are finding the love, care and support you need to live through the pains of this day and age. I know it’s not easy.

If you’ve been reading my letters, you’ll know that in September 2021 I began to experience health challenges. In mid-October 2022, just over a year later, I started to feel better.

Can I get a “hallelujah”?

Thank you. It feels great. Lifestyle changes definitely helped, but time, more than anything else, seems to have made the real difference.

Over the course of the year, some of you heard me describe my 3-part wellness program:

Turn people down; let people down; lie down.

A friend suggested I share it with all of you, so here is The Down Remedy:

1. Turn people down:

Someone asks you to do something for them.
You don’t want to do it but you are willing to sacrifice your well-being so they won’t be disappointed.
You realize the insanity of that line of thinking and understand there is no having it both ways:
You either honour your feelings or you please them.
You say NO.
They are disappointed but the world doesn’t stop.

2. Let people down:

People admire you.
You have shown yourself to be someone who can handle anything.
You start to make decisions (see #1) that shatter people’s opinion of you.
You are no longer a superhero in the eyes of many.
Again, amazingly, the world doesn’t stop.

3. Lie down:

You don’t want to rest.
You want to keep stimulating, keep doing, keep going.
Instead, you force yourself to lie down, to close your eyes, to let go and rest.
The world does stop, for a while.
And it’s a very good thing.

Take as prescribed, Gentle Readers.

From the fires of love,

Celia

Keep on Truckin’

  • October 25, 2022 3:47 pm

Dearest Readers,

When I was a kid, a friend of mine had one of those 70s-disco-prismatic stickers on his bedroom wall that said, “Keep on Truckin’.” Can you picture it? The holographic, pink-and-yellow prisms overlaid with a funkadelic font? For some reason, I’ve never forgotten it.

Keep on truckin’. This corny slogan came back to me this week because the Negative Nellies were going at me and it was all I could do to stay afloat. Sometimes, when the darkness descends, there is nothing to do but keep on truckin’.

For most of my healing journey, I have been quick to take action when my mood has started to go south. If I have felt like I was heading toward the pit, I would read something inspiring, call someone wise, listen to a motivational speaker, stand on my head, pray, meditate, walk in Nature, anything to avoid going down.

These days, because I’m still contending with post-infectious fatigue (from the stomach virus I contracted last fall), I am less inclined to do the work. It’s too much effort! I know taking positive action will help me to feel better but some days I just do not have it in me.

In my disinclination to motivate myself, I created a character called “The Un-Motivational Speaker.” Here’s a taste of her attitude and approach:

“What’s so great about being happy anyway? Being miserable is so much easier. You don’t have to do anything! Happiness is all do-do-do, and go-go-go. Why not take a break and enjoy wallowing in self-pity?”

“You wanna stay in bed? Stay in bed! Why all this emphasis on getting up? As if being awake is the be all and end all. Enlightenment is exhausting. Keep sleeping already!”

“Forget ‘Just Do it’. Too much energy! Work, work, work. Who needs it? ‘Just Give Up’ instead. It’s much more relaxing.”

“Who says you have to keep trying all the time? You wanna be down, be down! You don’t wanna change, don’t change! ‘Come as you are’? How about ‘stay as you are’! This transformation business is highly overrated, IMHO.”

I don’t know if The Un-Motivational Speaker is your kind of “funny” but she sure gives me a chuckle. Sometimes I need to make fun of my commitment to heal at all costs. And, ironically enough, laughing at myself is its own healing practice.

Mind you, I haven’t mastered the technique. Learning to laugh at my suffering, my mistakes and my less-than-attractive qualities has been a slow, semi-painful process. I got laughed at as a kid and it hurt. A lot. But the hurt turned into self-protection and the self-protection turned into rigidity and we all know there’s not much fun in being a concrete wall.

Over time, as I’ve learned to let down the barriers, make friends with the past, and soften my grip on control, I’ve also learned that it’s okay to lighten up. Even when I’m depressed! Being spiritual has to be funny. Otherwise it’s a joke.

From the fires of love,

Celia

Return of Spirit

  • June 7, 2022 12:22 pm

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

Keep G(r)o(w)ing

  • August 7, 2020 1:36 pm

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’re Alive!

  • February 12, 2019 6:51 pm

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

This and That

  • February 7, 2019 7:20 am

Dearest Readers,

The other night I was getting ready for bed with my 7-year old nephew who was visiting for the weekend and we had the most profound conversation while brushing our teeth in front of the mirror.

“Isn’t it amazing how we can look into a flat piece of glass and see ourselves doing the exact thing that we’re doing right now in perfect clarity?” I asked him.

“Yeah!” he replied with delight, “And how do our eyes even see everything?” he asked with genuine amazement.

“I don’t know!” I exclaimed.

“And who even invented words?” he went on.

“I don’t even know!” I replied.

“And how is this flat glass,” he said, motioning to the mirror, “Made from sand? How do you heat sand and get glass?”

I laughed and shook my head. He ran his electric toothbrush through his grinning mouth. We were both in a state of awe about How Things Come To Be.

What a joyful state. Taking time to experience this kind of childlike wonder is one of life’s great pleasures. It is truly a spiritual experience.

As an interspiritual person, I draw my inspiration from a number of traditions to get that kind of joy. One is astrophysics and I am a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and television host, and am currently reading his book Astrophysics For People in a Hurry. It is full of hard-science facts like, “Every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang,” [p.33] and humble admissions such as “astrophysicists have no idea how the cosmos came into existence.”

[p.32, p17]

In Tyson’s broad-minded view, “accepting our kinship with all life on earth is a soaring spiritual experience.” (Cosmos, Episode 2, 27:25)

I also follow Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk and brilliant spiritual teacher whom I had the great pleasure of meeting at St. Benedict’s monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. (As I write this, Fr Thomas is very close to death.) He, too, is a lover of science and feels strongly that religion has to listen to science because science is giving us up-to-date information about who and what God is. By Keating’s definition, God is “Is-ness”.

Yogic philosophy also informs my spirituality. I teach yoga and bring the spiritual teachings to my classes as well as sharing the physical practice. This weekend I will be leading a workshop called Yoga, Meditation and Self-Realization. Self-realization is waking up to who we really are. “We are stardust brought to life,” writes Tyson [p.33]. Our very essence is Cosmic. Whatever you choose to call that Essence, be it God or the Universe or All, It is the very nature of who we are. I Am That.

But even though I Am That, I still have to be this human being. I still have to be Celia on a daily basis. I am a person with a busy mind and an imperfect body. Self-realization, or enlightenment, in my view, doesn’t mean sitting on a cloud. It means understanding that even though we may not be our busy minds and imperfect bodies we nevertheless have to live with them both.

How do we do that? How do we hold both truths that we are human and we are this Cosmic Oneness?

It takes practice. And willingness. It’s easier to shut down the truth of who we are and just grit the teeth and get this business-of-being-human over with. But look how much we’re suffering. When we bring the reality of our inter-connectedness into our individual realities our perception will change. If we are not separate from one another or from the Creative Force of Life then why would we ever hurt each other? We would only be hurting ourselves.

“How do our eyes even see everything?” When my nephew asked that question with such sincerity and openness, he was in a state of wonder. He was also self-realizing. There is something else going on here. We are participating in an astounding phenomenon we call Existence. And we are not doing so in isolation from one another. The more we awaken to this truth, the deeper our human healing will be.

From the fires of love,

Celia

Forget It

  • October 10, 2018 2:47 pm

Dearest Readers,

Lately, I’ve been making a lot of mistakes.

Last week, I was supposed to bring the cash box to our Contact Dance Improv Jam and left it at home.

A few days before that, I was supposed to give a friend a copy of the memoir I’m writing and I didn’t remember to do it.

The other evening, I had a call scheduled with a friend and even though I’d remembered earlier in the day it completely slipped my mind at the appointed time.

This week, I didn’t bring the keys to the yoga studio and had to go back home and get them (luckily, one of the students gave me a lift so I could still start the class on time).

The list goes on: I forgot to feed the parking meter and got a ticket; misplaced my reading glasses; left the bagels I’d just bought behind…

When I recounted these events to a friend, she asked me how old I was.

“Are you implying that I might have early-onset Alzheimer’s?”

“It’s not inconceivable.”

No, it’s not. But rather than making a beeline to the doctor I’ve chalked up the mental blank spots to the following reasons:

1. My schedule has changed recently and I’m adjusting to the changes
2. I provide spiritual care for the elderly and the dying and there is some emotional shut-down happening (as a way of navigating the suffering and the grief)
3. Smartphone use

I’m pretty sure these are the main factors contributing to my current state of distraction. Change can be discombobulating. Grief can be overwhelming. Screens are taking over our lives.

I know I’m not the only one who is deeply distracted these days. There seems to be a whole lot of us walking around a little (or a lot) removed from our Selves. And why wouldn’t we be? Being a human being is challenging at the best of times and numbing out (whether intentionally or subconsciously) is a way to cope.

The real challenge, however, is to stay engaged with Reality as it unfolds.

This is easier said than done, especially when things are uncomfortable. I have such a natural ability to dissociate that I don’t often realize I’ve internally separated myself from my life situation until I’ve been shocked back into Presence by the appearance of a $60 parking ticket.

Turns out this is a good way to work with a distressing event. Be it a minor mishap or a major calamity, the shock can actually serve as a wake-up call:

Stop.
Notice.
Am I in my body?
Am I even aware that I am breathing?
What is happening around me?
Where did I disappear to and how long have I been gone?

Instead of beating myself up for the ‘mistakes’ I’ve been making I’ve been instead trying to see them as opportunities to wake up.

BING! You forgot the keys. BING! You lost your glasses. BING! You stood up your friend. BING!

Where did you go, Celia? Time to come back now.

The beating-myself-up mechanism still kicks in and sometimes the anger does, too. Pretty normal reactions to making mistakes. Those old friends simply need to be gently reminded that I’m doing my best. That usually settles them down.

When I view the things that shock me out of my numbness as opportunities to be fully alive then I become truly aligned with What IS. And What Is, is nothing less than the life force energy creating and sustaining all things at every conceivable moment in time and space.

What is that?

We don’t know.

We call It by many names and we make war over it. We ignore It, rail against It, deny It, fear It and try and try and try to explain It. But we cannot explain It.

We simply do not understand The Inexplicable Mystery of Our Being.

But just because we don’t understand It doesn’t mean we can’t align ourselves with It. And I am aligned with my Being when I am awake to my Self and to others and to what is unfolding in Reality right now.

So when you suddenly remember that forgot your keys, take it as the Cosmic BING! Take it as a moment to be amazed by the phenomenon of your existence and by Existence Itself. This moment of realignment Is All There Is and it’s worth waking up for.

From the Fires of Love,

Celia

The Agony of Nothing

  • January 5, 2017 12:12 pm

This blog post is the last issue of The Healing Journey, the letter I send out to subscribers. You may subscribe here to receive the email.

This past August my parents and our family suffered the loss of Maggie, our beloved Great Dane, to bone cancer. A few weeks after Maggie died my mother announced that she was getting a new puppy. I was surprised. When Maggie was deteriorating my mum had stated very clearly that she would never get another dog.

“You said you weren’t going to get another dog,” I reminded her.

“I know,” she answered, “But I can’t bear the agony of nothing.”

“The agony of nothing,” I repeated, impressed by her ability to name so aptly our existential human emptiness, “That’s it. Right there. That is what it all comes down to. If we cannot learn to bear the agony of nothing–”

“We’re doomed!” she interjected.

That wasn’t exactly what I was going to say. I was going to say that if we cannot learn to bear the agony of nothing then we are destined to get a puppy to make the pain go away. But what happens when the puppy dies and we are once again left with that “deep-down, black, bottom-of-the-well, no-hope, end-of-the-world, what’s-the-use loneliness”? (Thank you, Charlie Brown.)

Well, we can always find something else to temporarily relieve the dread. There is no shortage in today’s world: shopping, sex, TV, booze, dope, chocolate cake. On and on it goes.

Eventually those things stop working, too, and the Black Hole returns. What then? How do we bear the Agony of Nothing?

By spending time with it.

Yup. When when we stop trying to a-void the Void, when we make friends with the thing we fear most, it becomes transformed. Solitude is no longer lonely and Silence is no longer empty.

It takes great courage to do this. Exploring the foreign territory of our inner lives can be terrifying. It is the Great Unknown, after all. I myself have uncovered a hundred forms of fear living inside of me. By getting to know these fears intimately and confronting my terror head-on, their power has been massively reduced. And I’m happy to report that I have been liberated by at least eighty-seven of them. Maybe eighty-eight.

This is how healing actually happens. Interior freedom occurs when we walk through the fear rather than run from it, work with the pain rather than alter it. Entering fully into the Agony of Nothing creates, miraculously, the Possibility of Something. That Something is better than a puppy. Because it is, in fact, Everything.

Thus begins the astonishing process of living from our Everythingness instead of from the agony of our nothingness. And it is a process. And puppies are most definitely allowed.

From the fires of love,

Celia

Good Lock

  • July 27, 2016 3:34 pm

Recently, I got locked out of the house. It wasn’t my house so I did not know all of its little intricacies including the one about the front door bolt sometimes slipping down into the catch on its own. So I went outside to do a chore and when I came back the door was bolted shut.

At first I didn’t believe it. It was impossible. The bolt had to be physically turned from the inside to lock the door. In my disbelief I began to pull on the door shaking and rattling it to force it to open. It was definitely locked. Then I growled and noticed the panic rising. I had a full day that included a list of other chores before making my way to the airport to catch a plane.

Going around to the back of the house to see if I’d left the back door open was futile because I knew I’d locked it five minutes earlier when I’d let the cat out. I did it anyway. Then I checked all the windows and found one that could be opened if I forced it. I stopped trying when my arm began to bleed.

As I returned to the front of the house to escape the burning late-morning Florida sun I said a prayer. Well, barked one, actually. “Okay, what am I supposed to do about this?” Maybe I even said, “What the hell am I supposed to do about this?” I was highly aware of my resistance and lack of calm.

With that awareness I took a seat on the shady front porch and started to listen for the answer. I was locked out. What could I do? Not much. Did the rage help? Not a bit.

A lizard about the size of my hand sashayed out of the shrubbery and stopped a couple of feet away, watching me out of the corner of its eye, its tiny sides expanding and contracting rapidly with breath. That lizard did not have a big agenda. It moved again, stopped, moved again. Each time it stopped I stayed with it, with the power of its total presence, its utter lack of agenda. The lizard eventually moved on and I thanked it because it had brought me into the here and now.

Reflecting on my anger I saw that it had come from the fact that I was not going to be able to fulfill my agenda. My agenda had not only been meticulously planned (go inside, finish chores, accomplish tasks, eat some food, take a spiritual direction call, get to the airport and fly away), I was counting on the fact that it was all going to take place. I was upset because the future I’d planned was not going to happen. But that future was not my actual life. My actual life, my unfolding life in reality, was sitting on the porch, locked out of the house in +35C heat, learning life-lessons from lizards. There was nothing else. All the other stuff was just a bunch of thoughts that I had allowed to become expectations.

To commit to the spiritual journey means that when any challenge comes our way we stay open to the transforming opportunity being presented. I closed my eyes, went within and listened.

Let go. Wait. Trust.

Letting go of all my plans and seeing that the world would not come to an end by doing so, I went and picked some starfruit from a tree in the yard, thankful for the moisture it provided my thirsty mouth. With that action came an intuitive thought: Maybe I could knock on the neighbours doors? Fear rose up. I sat with it and then followed the prompt. Within minutes, two generous men were walking around the house with me looking for a spare key or a way to get in. Then one of them got a screwdriver and jimmied a window open. Hallelujah! I climbed into the cool, air-conditioned house, relieved and dripping with sweat.

As the rest of the day unfolded and the agenda got accomplished I kept meditating on a deeper question that came out of the experience: Where am I “locked out”? Or what am I “locking out” of my life?

Exactly one week later, while leading a retreat on the ashram in the Bahamas, I went to leave the little beach-side room where I slept to go to a yoga class. But when I turned the door handle and pulled, the door remained shut. I tried again. Nope. I was locked in. You know what I did? I smiled.

After trying a couple of tricks to jimmy the latch I pulled the screen off the window, lifted myself up over the sill, did a modified handstand to climb out, and went to reception to tell maintenance. Later, after the local man who repaired it explained that the salt-air had corroded the latch (happens all the time), I had the opportunity to do some more spiritual inquiry. Two episodes with locks in one week? Kinda hard to ignore.

Okay, so where was I “locked in”? Or what am I currently “locked into”?

There was temptation to go into shame. I’m doing something wrong. I’m being punished. This attitude will only keep me from looking deeper. A gentler approach prevailed: How did I respond to what unfolded?

My reaction to being locked out was rage, which came from being overly attached to my agenda. Fair enough, I had a flight to catch. But to assume I’m going to get to complete my plans at any given time is to deny the unpredictability of life. When I am attached to an agenda I am locked out of being present to life’s unfolding and I am leaping ahead of reality.

My reaction to being locked in was to smile. Made easier by some free time, certainly, but also by a willingness to accept what comes with an open mind and an open heart. When I am detached from my agenda I am locked in to reality. Life is unfolding before me and I am following with curiosity, presence and interior freedom.

Inspiring Message of the Day: May we all open ourselves to following the unfoldment of our lives rather than trying to leap ahead.