• What the H?

    • February 29, 2024 10:07 am

    Dearest Readers,

    The other day I was speaking about self-care with a resident in the Long-Term Care home where I work and in the middle of our discussion I said, “Most of us need to have a self-care plan at the ready before we cross the line into–”

    “Hell,” he said, finishing my sentence for me.

    That’s not what I was going to say but I laughed out loud because he nailed it.

    Yesterday, I started to watch a video on YouTube about a woman who “Met God and Saw the Future”. She’d come back to life after having a Near Death Experience (NDE) with a new understanding that the afterlife is actually “Home” and life on Earth is, in fact, “Hell.”

    Then, last evening, I had a meaningful conversation with woman who lives with pretty intense mental health issues. She talked about her struggles and her suidical ideation, summing it all up by saying, “Life is hell.”

    Okay, three mentions of “hell” in as many days? I thought I’d better write about it.

    I’ve never subscribed to the idea of Hell as a place we go after we die. But this idea that Life is Hell? Certainly in my darkest hours I have felt it to be true.

    People who have NDEs often experience a state of “overwhelming, unconditional love” (as the woman in the video did) and so it makes sense that life here, with its pain and suffering and confusion, would seem like Hell in comparison.

    Yet life on Earth includes this phenomenon called Beauty and despite the hell states of war, tragedy, depression and illness, Beauty is everywhere.

    And the one generator of Beauty that we all seem to agree on?

    Nature. Nature gives us so much Beauty.

    As I was driving home the other day, a luminescent split in the darkening sky was spilling forth the brightest light imaginable from a towering wall of black clouds.

    Despite the fact that this heavenly hernia was nearly blinding me and black spots in my vision were making it difficult to see the road, I kept turning my eyes back toward it.

    It seemed an apt metaphor for how human beings seek Beauty. We want to look at it. We want it to blind us. We want to be dazzled and blown away by it and reassured that it exists, that we can see it, that it is there for us.

    And it is. Beauty is everywhere. This is an undeniable, indisputable truth.

    With three mentions of Hell and two more of “the End Times” (that’s another Letter), it’s fair to say that we are living in an extremely challenging time in history. For those who are in the trenches of war (actual and political), it’s truly Hell. For those of us feeling powerless to make a difference in these situations and in our own lives, it’s hell.

    And yet Nature continues to abide and bedazzle us all, continually striking us with this mysterious paradox: Life is Hell and Life is unfathomable Beauty.

    Somehow we go on, knowing both.

    Blessings to you on your Healing Journey,

    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

    D-Day

    • May 21, 2017 8:44 am

    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.

    Dearest Readers,

    Language is meaningful and I’m careful about the words I choose, whether I’m posting them online or pronouncing them in speech. Watching my words is a mindful practice requiring constant awareness and committed intention. For example, I used to swear like trucker and I hated a lot of things. Now, refraining from saying “I hate” something is a way for me to transcend and transform the judging mind and not swearing upholds ahimsa or the practice of non-violence.

    I can still drop the F-bomb on occasion and my mind still judges but the Healing Journey has given me a better understanding of where my feelings are really coming from and why I react harshly to certain people or situations. Looking directly at my fears and attachments has helped me to untangle them and recognize how they will continually motivate my actions if left unchecked. This inner work has naturally resulted in a more intentional way of speaking and behaving.

    Finding alternative words to shift my attitude and energy has meant that I would never say I was ‘depressed’ even if I was. Instead I might tell you that my energy was very low (or completely depleted) or that my spiritual condition was not at peak. This refusal to name ‘depression’ as such felt like a way to conquer it or rise high above its lowly depths. But it never made it go away. So, recently, after a stretch of working hard to overcome the funk, something in me decided to call a spade a spade. “I’m depressed,” I said to a friend. It was freeing to finally name it with such frankness.

    Years ago, I watched a TV movie adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. The Mayor, played by Ciarán Hinds, has made some terrible decisions, most of them while drinking. His protégé, Donald Farfrae, on the other hand, seems to have had all the luck in the world. One evening, the Mayor confides in Farfrae and shares honestly with the younger man about his deeper troubles.

     “…I sank into one of those gloomy fits I sometimes suffer from… when the world seems to have the blackness of hell, and, like Job, I could curse the day that gave me birth.”

    Because I knew exactly what the Mayor was talking about I fully expected his friend to answer him with a knowing “aye, mate, I hear ye.” But Farfrae has no idea what the Mayor is talking about.

    “Ah, now, I never feel like it,” said Farfrae.

    His response knocked me over. You mean some people actually have no idea what the blackness of hell feels like? What it is to experience utter hopelessness? To wish for death to come swiftly and end it all finally and forever?

    “Then pray to God that you never may, young man.”

    The Mayor’s retort is right on because no one who knows that kind of mental suffering would ever want anyone else to go through it. It’s brutal.

    “So what are you using to overcome it?” my own friend asked me.

    “All my tools,” I told her. “I pray, meditate, do the next right thing, change the thought, watch it, repeat a mantra, have mercy on myself, share it, help someone else to get out of myself, work on my defects and assets, whatever it takes, WHATEVER IT TAKES to not succumb to the pit of despair and to move through it and beyond. In short, whatever I am capable of in the moment.”

    “Wow,” she replied. This sounds very effortful.”

    Well, it is. And it’s effective, too.

    One of the least effortful and most effective tools on that list is to ‘watch it’. While requiring a certain level of vigilance, watching the mind doesn’t require a lot of effort. Stepping back from what the mind is doing (or not doing, as the case may be) has taught me that I am, in fact, not my thoughts. I am not the D-word. I am not even the brain, which seems to be misfiring and malfunctioning in the D-state. Like watching my words, watching my thinking creates a shift in energy. Eckhart Tolle has cornered the market on this idea and it’s life-changing.

    That life-changing shift in energy enables me to respond to the D in a more enlightened capacity. I can even welcome it, saying, “Hello! You again. Thanks for the visit! Off you go.” I can also view D as a brilliant spiritual teacher who has led me down the path of humility, shown me how to surrender and how to soften, how to respond with compassion to myself and others and forced me continually let go of my attachment to what I think so that I may dwell more comfortably in That Which the Mind Cannot Grasp.

    What is That Which the Mind Cannot Grasp? It is the Energy Behind All Things. It is God. It is no god. It is Light and it is Dark. It is depression and it is freedom from the D word. There is no thing that It is Not. I like Maya Angelou’s word for It: All.

    So this is what I rely on to overcome the blackness of hell. I rely on ALL. And it works. For me. And whatever works for you is good, too. If you are working with D then I am with you. And if you’re not, I pray to ALL that you never may.

    May we continue to watch what we say and how we say it. And may we each learn to tell the truth about ourselves to others without shame.

    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