Learning How to Float

Reading from The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have by Mark Nepo every morning has been and continues to be a positive way to start my mornings. I'll admit that sometimes the daily reading doesn't resonate with me so I'll skim to another day and find something that does. This morning the July 20th reading spoke to me and I smiled as July 20th is my mom's birthday so that makes it even more special to me. I want to quote some of what today's reading says verbatim as he says it in such a prolific way that I wouldn't want to lose its essence.

I've come to understand that this is the struggle we all replay between

doubt and faith. When thrust into any situation over our head, our reflex is to

fight with all our might the terrible feeling that we are sinking.

Yet the more we resist, the more we feel our own weight and wear ourselves out.

At times like this, I remember learning to float. Mysteriously, it required

letting almost all of me rest below the surface before the deep would

hold me up. It seems to me, almost forty years later, that the

practice of finding our faith is very much like that - we need to rest

enough of ourselves below the surface of things until we find ourselves upheld.

This is very hard to do. But the essence of trust is believing you will be held up if you let go.

And though we can practice relaxing our fear and meeting the deep, there is no real way to prepare

for letting go other than to just let go.

Once immersed, once below the surface, it is not by chance that things slow down, go clear,

feel weightless. Perhaps faith is nothing more than taking the risk to rest below the surface.

That we can't stay there only affirms that we must choose the deep again and again in order to live fully. That we must move through the sense of sinking before being upheld is what trusting

the Universe is all about.



I'm feeling some words that describe what this reading brings to mind for me: lack of control, surrendering, letting go, trusting, releasing, allowing.....

It's almost like until we trust and let go in a situation, we'll never have the experience of floating or being held up and therefore stay stuck in the fear and anxiety of non-trust. It's sort of a catch 22.  I must trust in the universe and let go of trying to control a situation in order to see that I'll float and develop trust yet how do I do this starting from a lack of trust. I guess it involves starting where I'm at even if that involves fear and doubt and anxiety. I guess it involves putting one toe in the water slowly but surely or does it involve diving in head first and throwing caution to the wind?

I like how he says, "we need to rest enough of ourselves below the surface of things until we find ourselves upheld" because it reminds me of putting one toe in, resting enough of ourselves....once I see I won't drown, I won't die from the experience even if it involves pain and suffering and disappointment. Then again I like the saying  "you're either in or out" and this makes me think there is no such thing as putting a toe in the water, testing the waters, I'm either in or out.

I really like "we must choose the deep again and again in order to live fully" because it is a gentle reminder that I must continue to take risks, face my fears, find trust and faith in the universe that I will float.

May you walk to the edge of your water (or comfort zone) and see it as an opportunity to sink or swim or in this case FLOAT......and may you feel the universe support you in your ability to trust that you will be upheld....







Reverse

What a New Year message!!

Thursday I came home from San Diego, California after attending the birth of my first grandchild, Sebastian Lyric Rangel; which I will be blogging about soon, trust me. For now, this message needed to be put out there because it has been on my mind all morning once I saw the symbolism in this experience.

I walked home from the Marta station after a 12 hour day of travelling home from California via 2 flights and a long layover in Houston. I unloaded my baggage and proceeded to drive my car after it sat for over 2 weeks in the street on the side of my house. After starting it and pulling out, it almost felt like I had a flat tire and some smell like oil or fluid of sorts was burning. The engine light flickered and I immediately thought "oh no, just what I need, car issues" when I can barely keep my head above water with graduate school expenses.

Upon pulling into a parking spot and realizing it was too small, I attempted to go into reverse only to discover the stick shift wouldn't go, no matter what. I thought oh well, I must really be tired so somehow I was lucky enough to have left room enough to get out of the spot without using reverse.

The next morning, I get into the car and try once again to reverse it out of the parking spot. Seriously, no reverse, this time I'm not tired, a little distressed, but not so tired that I couldn't manage to drive my car. I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out what to do to get my car out of this spot. I put the car in nuetral and released the parking brake and tried to push the car backward, in my pajamas to say the least, nothing but a few short feet and it would roll back to its original place. I'm not sure where I got the strength but I did and managed to push it far enough to run and jump back in and pull the brake up so I could start it and drive it forward out of the lot.

For the next 4 days, I set about getting an appointment with my mechanic to find out what the issue was. I was puzzled as my car was perfectly fine when I left, you'd think if it were a clutch or transmission issue, I'd have had some type of symptom before I left. I drove to an auto parts store only to be sent to the dealer to get transmission fluid per my mechanic's advice. He was going to call me Monday, today, to set up an appointment for a Tuesday drop off. I dreaded this as its money I really don't have to spend right now but I have to have a car so would have to deal with it somehow. Mind you I also spent a lot of time and worry trying to avoid parking that I couldn't get out of without a "Reverse" gear. Let me tell you, we take things as simple as this for granted. I didn't realize how many times I went to use my reverse without thinking just like turning on the light switch when the electricity is out numerous times forgetting that, duh, the electricity is out.

While laying in bed this morning, it dawned on me that my VW 5 speed stick shift is different than my son's Honda and I'd been driving his for the past 2 weeks. Then it hit me, what's different is that with my car, I have to push down the stick shift and go to the left and up for reverse. Oh my, did I really forget to push down on my stick shift, the one I'd been driving for 9 years, like it is a part of me??? So I jumped out of bed and ran out to see if this was the case and lo and behold, it was, human error, my inability to remember how to drive my car after 2 short weeks, wow...

So this is good news, no bad clutch or transmission. Good news in that after thinking about the symbolism of the issue with "going in reverse" I like to analyze my dreams so what's the difference between waking and sleeping symbolism, why couldn't something that happens while awake have just as much meaning as when we are deep in sleep. If we pay attention to our lives, minute to minute, there are messages everywhere.

So thinking about "Reverse" and the lack of being able to go into "Reverse" for these past 4 days
I've come up with 2 major themes I can learn from this experience.

1) What we believe, we experience. Since I thought I didn't have a reverse gear, I believed it and completely changed my way of doing things to compensate for not having this reverse. My belief that I didn't have the ability to reverse my direction in my car, made it real to me, no question about it, I was parking differently, choosing to avoid certain places if there wasn't adequate parking, not going somewhere because I didn't want to make the issue worse until it could be fixed, worry over money I'd need to spend to repair this issue....all of this time and energy put toward thinking and believing I didn't have the ability to use my reverse when in all actuality I did have it all along.

2) Also, that there might be something about how we really can't go in reverse, we can't go backwards. Once we have knowledge or experience, we can only move forward or stay where we are. There is no going back to a prior time. We are constantly evolving whether we know it or not, each moment that passes, brings change, change in the weather, change in the temperature, change in our mood, change in our perceptions, change in our experiences and the list goes on. There is no going back...

Though our thoughts and beliefs are extremely powerful and often feel like facts, they are changeable. We create our experiences based on our thoughts and beliefs. It might be too late to go back in time and re-create the past, but it's never too late to work on paying attention to our experiences and shifting our thoughts and beliefs to create the life we choose intentionally.

May 2012 be filled with rich experiences that challenge you to question your current beliefs and thoughts and most of all may you be aware and open and accept them. Here's to being aware, open and willing to evolve.....Happy New Year!