Parinama

Although it is hard to acknowledge, fear accompanies us throughout our lives.   We may not be aware of the fear, may try to numb it with addictions, consumptions, deflections, to escaped it with more money, lovers, and chocolate cake. Fear won't be pacified for long by these things.  I am not talking here about fear that is tied to disaster, violence, or illness, fear from actual threat to a life or livelihood.   The fear I am writing about is the kind that runs like static through us even when everything is going as well as we would hope, when we are not in any real danger.   This fear may weave thicker through some more than others especially if there was trauma and loss in childhood.   Regardless, we all vibrate at some frequency with an anxiety that is at its root existential, intimately intertwined with the uncertain nature of our lives and our eventual death.     Advertisers knows this better than we do.   They find w...

  Will – devoted practice Grace – unmerited divine assistance   I have been thinking about the grace that supports me in my life and the will I must bring forth to support my own arising.   Grace is the unbidden, unmerited gifts from the universe.  Will is our courage to do, to bring forth what is in us out into the world.  Both are required for our fullest unfolding.   Grace has come through the strangers who provided shelter during my cross-country bike trip, the teacher whose encouragement filled me with purpose, the camp counselor who wrote me postcards filled with poetry and inspiration years after I spent a summer with her.   There were the jobs after months of unemployment when it seemed as if no doors would open, the people in the support groups who listened patiently and told their stories, the father who pushed me to do more than anyone in my family would have imagined appropriate for a girl.   More fund...

   Forgiveness comes when we are able to carry some of the burden of the person we are forgiving.   For forgiveness to emerge, we need to get a felt sense of the wound that led the person to betray, hurt, reject, violate. When we feel this woundedness in our own heart’s, the forgiveness flows to the one who hurt us because we come to know the burden of their limitations and unresolved pain.   It is not necessary that we forgive.   Rage and anger may need to be held for a long time, a lifetime even, for us to feel safe, to repair the boundary that was violated.   We may long to let go of the anger to be free from the violator and the violation.   But anger can’t be forced.   It dissolves on its own time, effortlessly, like a ripe fruit dropping from a tree.   Just as the fruit heavy from its own ripening longs for release into the earth, we too can come into a longing to let the anger go.     The ripening c...