Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Wild Geese 

You do not have to be good. 
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Dreaded God Complex

     So, then I asked myself, well, what is stopping you today from settling down with one person? While I'm SURE that there are more reasons, I came up with one answer. Well, because you are special, and you need to DO special things with your life. What's most important is that you live your life in an extraordinary way, you must write that book, change the world for the better, and in a big way. You need to get to the end of your life and be able to point to the work you've done. You need to be GREAT.
    When I heard myself say this in my head, I asked myself this question, WHO SAYS I DO?
Do I want to be great or do I want to be happy? Well, I want to be happy of course!!! So, can I let all that garbage go about who/what I want to be and just enjoy who I am?!!!
 Wow, I can be so unaware, this is huge!

I found this helpful link. It's about the God Complex. I think it's all about needing to feel like we matter, that we're special, that there's something immortal about us. Which of course there is already. In all of us.
Thanks for reading.

http://lifedev.net/2008/07/god-complex/

The If Only's and my God Complex!

         Since one of my very oldest friends is getting married and I'm headed to the shower, I've been suffering from a case of the 'if only's today. Why am I not still with this one, or that one? Why didn't I stay to make it work? Could it have worked? Then I started making the calculations, well, if I had stayed or if it had worked out, then x wouldn't have happened, leading to y, to z, today's situation.
          Reminded me of this great American Indian story I know. Here goes: Two older women run into each other one day. They knew each other as girls and are eager to hear how the other's life has turned out. As they learn about the way the other woman's life unfolded, they begin to look at their own life and wonder, If only I had done this, I would have the wonderful happiness that the other one has... They are so sad thinking about this great loss that they decide to go to a shaman for advice. The shaman listens to their concerns and sends them both home with a task: weave a tapestry about each of your lives and come back in a month. The women do and when they return, they both are bearing a tapestry that reflects the important parts of their lives. For one, who had travelled the world learning about art and culture, her tapestry showed the important monuments she'd seen and the friends she'd made in the different cultures she'd visited. For the other woman, who had raised a fine family but never left her village, the tapestry showed her wedding and her children's first steps, birthdays and holidays and so on. Taking both of these tapestries in her hands, she said to the women. How your life could have been different if you had only made different choices? That is like pulling just one string out of your tapestry and by so doing, you've undone the whole thing.
         I can't pull the threads out either, I placed them their with my own hands, imperfect as they might have been, it is all my handiwork.
               

Astrology

Wow, even my disbelieving aunt found her description of her 2010 TOTALLY correct. These guys are really good, no kidding.

http://www.cafeastrology.com/

Ever since high school when my friend Anna introduced me to Linda Goodman's sun signs I've found that the character descriptions based on horoscopes are pretty true. But I never believed in those daily predictions in the newspaper. BUT, I found their horoscopes and forecasts on here  to be eerily true for me. Also their love sign compatibility ratings. I also looked up some of my friend's horoscopes and they were right on the money. Wow, I guess we are influenced by the moon and stars, huh?

Focusing Technique

This is by far my favorite mind body technique. Spending 5, 10, 20 minutes 'focusing' is a gift to yourself.

From the website:
"The Focusing process is based on research ...done by Eugene Gendlin and his colleagues. They compared successful therapy clients with unsuccessful ones, discovering that success in therapy could be predicted from client behavior in the first few sessions. If at some point in the session the client had an unclear bodily awareness, and slowed down his or her talking in order to refer to this and try to symbolize it, then the psychotherapy would ultimately be successful.
Gendlin named this unclear bodily awareness the "felt sense," and the process of attending to the felt sense, in such a way that meaning emerges, he called Focusing."

And that link:

http://www.focusing.org/fot/cornell_focusing_technique.html

Compassion allows for growth!

This morning I had the strangest dream. Before I went to bed I was reading about self love and compassion. I read this in Conscious Loving by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks:

The hallmark of wholeness is the ability to love yourself. In the realm of love, a paradox exists: you can effectively love others only when you can love yourself. If you cannot love yourself, you will try to fill the void of your own lack of self love with the love of others...the same problem exists if you try to give love to other people who do not love themselves. You will turn yourself inside out loving them  but it will not help. We all must learn to give ourselves the love we want. Then other people can love us and it will feel satisfying because it is not filling a void. It become love dancing with itself.

So I dreamed that I had this sort of ball of energy and growth in my hands. Kind of looked like little clear bubbles or balloons. I knew that it had been sort of minimally growing the way it should because it had not been tended to with mindful care and attention. At times it became my dog Delilah. At some point I realized that I could project images of a waterfall from my laptop onto the rather boring wall in front of us and that would entertain Delilah, it fulfilled her need to interact with the natural world which makes sense to her. Then I remember that I held that ball of energy close to me, extending love to it, creating a field of peace and love around it for it to grow  and I sat back and watched the 'waterfall' show with this being, this thing. And it was so pleased at being held and loved that it started to grow miraculously, it starting to put shoots out and up and flowers began to sprout in every direction. It was so happy! But then one of the balloon like shoots got in my mouth and it was not pleasant, I wanted to get rid of it. So I bit down and as I bit down I realized that this was still a piece of the whole, that it belonged to this organism and that killing it would kill the whole thing. Sure enough I saw it began to wither away and dry up and I tried to do what I could to bring it back to life. Then I woke up

Any thoughts???

Poetry!

Now that the leaves are gone

The forest is alive with wings.

The heart in silence sits

Sees the shattering of sound.

Feels the heart beat of the raindrops,

And the sun that meets the ground.

The joyful lungs press outward,

And the universe inhales

The breathing of the thunder on the face of woods and vales.

The heart in silence heals

The heart in silence mends

All that is rich and deep

All that is true and clear

Flower that is opening,

The mind of God made bare.

Magician

Magician.

To you I owe all that burned and left no smoke.

I owe you:

Every excavation, painful gouging of the earth,

I owe all the cliffs, the shadows,

And the burning of the hearth.

I owe pine forests for the burning,

And sand and sea and dirt

The wonder of the soil, the forgetfulness of hurt.

 

To you I owe you the fortress,

As it crumbled to the sea,

And I dropped my pick and hammer

To see what was left of me.

I owe  a supernova,

As it clamored in my ears

And all was dark and wonder
'fore the dawn of days and years.

 

Dalai Lama - Compassion makes you happy!

I love how clear he is here. It's like he's feeling like this is a self evident truth, like come on folks!!! It's just our training and fearful mind that keeps our attention on our own little story. Btw, has anyone seen this movie?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QvVaZfFDKw&feature=related

My first post!

       As my friend Maria would say, whoo hoo! Did you ever have one of those things that you've been saying you should do for years? Everyone has, and here's mine-finally creating a blog! This is a sacred place to share quotes, videos, and life experiences that are changing and altering our lives for the better. My hope is that I can share what I'm learning with you, that it might help you to see something in you that you hadn't seen before, and change the way you see your life, your self, your loved ones, or maybe only your day. You can help me to learn as well by commenting and sharing- I'd LOVE that!


         What kind of learning? Well, did you ever read or listen to or attempt something that just illuminated an enormous truth for you? Like "We are in charge of our own happiness," or  "You can't make someone love you who doesn't" or "All knowledge is self knowledge" and you just go, 'Wow! How the bleep didn't I realize that before? How have I been stumbling around creation with this totally wacked out idea of myself/relationships/society, etc.???' This is a space to share those  moments.

 Also, from time to time I will put up a short story or a poem I've written along the way, probably about themes that books/friends/life have put on my plate.


Where's the beef???
   
    Okay, so, here's my first offering. Today's broadcast of  Dan Gottlieb's Voices in the Family, on NPR in Philadelphia. Dr. Gottlieb is my hero and the person who inspired me to train as a counselor. Is also living as a parapalegic after a really horrible car accident. If you'd like to hear a voice of unconditional love in the middle of your workday some Monday, definitely tune yourself in. 90.9 at noon or online, whenever.


    On this week's show the topic was self compassion. Self compassion is something I've been in short supply of these days but I'm working on gathering it up because we ALL deserve some.
 
Here we go:


http://www.whyy.org/91FM/voices.html


Loved it when Dr. Gottlieb's guest, Dr. Kristen Neff (The Horse Boy) says that during difficult times she likes to have a mantra. I think it ended with "During this suffering, may I be compassionate and kind to myself in this moment." Also,  when Dr. Gottlieb asked a caller who she loved most in the world (hard question, no?) and how when her voice broke, he said he felt like his heart was breaking, because he could see her humanity and feel compassion for her.


    Me, I think that compassion or love has got to be akin to a making yeast for a batch of bread. All those really elementary forms of life need to start with something, with a stored amount in order to make more out of. As my dear friend Ike put it simply, "You can't give away what YOU don't got!"

    This week I hurt someone's feelings that I love, projected things on him that were unfair AND untrue and said things I didn't mean. I'd eat the southward end of a northbound horse if I could take them back,. How do you take back moronic things you said because you were acting like a 'douchebag'?;-)

    Thanks for reading my first post guys. If you have any thoughts about that broadcast or if you'd like to comment on something from your life, just give a holla. Maybe you'd like to see me eating the aforementioned horse's hind quarters. I would if I could. Or maybe you can think of an alternative. Still, send me a message.

Sending big hugs to everyone, especially to YOU. Here's to working on making some yeast this week, y'all hear? Then we can get together and FEAST!!!
           
            XOXO,
            Joanna