Seasons of the Soul

The Frog Story

There were two frogs that hopped along a path, and lo and behold they found themselves leaping unexpectedly into a deep well. Although they pondered the situation and tried hopping out, the depth of the well made their circumstances seem hopeless.

Other frogs arrived, hearing their croaking cries for help. However, as the new frogs appraised the situation, it appeared to them, too, that there was no way out.  So they called down to the two frogs who were hopping as high as they could to forget it, accept their fate, and live out the remaining time of their lives in the bottom of the well.

One of the frogs, hearing the advice of the others, decided after a few more tries that they were right. He stopped and sat dejectedly at the bottom of the well.

However, the other frog seemed undeterred. The more the frogs at the top told him to stop, the more he jumped. The more they waved at him to give it up, the more he attempted to go just a little bit higher.

All of a sudden, with one extraordinary leap, the frog leaped over the top of the well, freed from his entrapment. The other frogs were stunned and amazed.

The frogs circled him and asked how he’d done it. However, he couldn’t hear them, for he was deaf.
The frog who freed himself thought the other frogs who were discouraging him were actually cheering him on, and because of this he did not give up.

Steps to Increased Mental Wellbeing

A recent study in Britain concluded that in order to strengthen our mental wellbeing, there are certain things we can do to develop greater equilibrium. As most of us can relate to, in today’s world of cell phones, computers, television, and constant distraction, we rarely take time to appreciate where we are in the moment. This focuses our attention to an interior world that is detached from our surroundings, and in the long run has a detrimental effect on us.

By taking a little time every day to be present in the moment and develop some of the criteria listed below, we can enhance our own sense of wellbeing and contribute to the betterment of our relationships with others and our community.

Steps to happiness

Connect
Developing relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbours will enrich your life and bring you support

Be active
Sports, hobbies such as gardening or dancing, or just a daily stroll will make you feel good and maintain mobility and fitness

Be curious
Noting the beauty of everyday moments as well as the unusual and reflecting on them helps you to appreciate what matters to you

Learn
Fixing a bike, learning an instrument, cooking – the challenge and satisfaction brings fun and confidence

Give
Helping friends and strangers links your happiness to a wider community and is very rewarding

Growing Into Ourselves

I was looking at a plant that had outgrown its container, and realized it was time to re-pot it. This lead me to thinking about little plants in small clay pots that grow beyond the capacity of the container to hold them. What was just the right size and offered just the right elements at one time becomes outmoded as the plant grows. It is then time to transplant or re-pot them into a container that will give them the additional room to grow so that they remain healthy and vital. As long as a plant is potted, it will need this transplant procedure periodically in order for it to thrive. And so, too, will we.

 

When we become accustomed to the space we inhabit, albeit attitude, framework, or outlook, we come to the point of getting root bound if there is no larger context for us to grow into. When we become self-satisfied, we cannot reach and stretch as is needed for growth and further development in our lives. Therefore, it’s important to remain open to possibilities and new modes of investigation or ideas that challenge our view of the world and cause us to question.

 

Growing older does not mean calcifying into any particular form. To remain stuck is a choice. We can expand and vary our interests with each phase of life. We can express changing convictions as we grow into new containers that present wider opportunities and expanding horizons. Life is meant for living, not stagnating, or choking off precious possibilities. As we view ourselves as a plant that needs different pots at different phases of our lives, we are more apt to allow for the necessary changes that will come. We will benefit by growing into them and allowing our roots to deepen and spread. 

 

Remaining in a container that is too narrow, too small, or too root bound keeps us from the joy of discovery and the delight of fresh experiences. Willingness is a great part of remaining fresh, growing into the next container, and the next, until we have filled all the pots of a lifetime.

From Seasons of the Soul Autumn edition 2002

God Is In the Atoms!

Perception. I've written about this again and again....but everything is the outworking of our perception. We are constantly playing out the scenarios and taking them in, because they are what we expect to see. If we chose to see differently, we would perceive differently.

Have you ever noted when you want to buy a new car and then choose one,  suddenly you see many of the same ones on the highway, whereas before you hadn't noticed them? That goes for everything. We find what we seek.

I received an e-mail about someone’s near death experience that was very important. The individual who had it commented about how everything was an atom of God....every single atom has God imbued in it and has consciousness. And he remarked at how incredible it was to be given the gift of being a human being....this VAST collection of atoms! Not just one....a universe of them! And in that, the gifts of all the bombs, all the adversity...everything to help us realize that we are co-creators and that God lives in and through us. Suddenly, we stop seeing ourselves as error. We see ourselves for what we really are....a magnificent creation, not a fluke. We were crafted with intention, and when we get the ego separateness out of the way and allow ourselves to move into our true nature, we don't have to chase after anything. We just let ourselves be...we observe....we pay attention....we wait if necessary. And when it is time for an insight or an opportunity, it will come. WE DON"T HAVE TO MAKE IT HAPPEN! What an incredible idea! What a revelation! Something is working within and without that is bringing cohesion to this whole system of energy called the universe. IT knows. IT engineers. IT crafts and dispenses. We just have to show up, shovel all the excess manure out of our mind field, and allow ourselves to be planted and to bloom as we are intended. Yes, we have to do our part. But our part is not to control. It is to be receptive...to hear the still, small voice within. And to follow....with love and with gratitude.

It's that simple. And it's that hard.

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses towards the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the ledge of the water
Or stand under the trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring,
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same,
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim - the rocks - the motion of the waves - the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
      ~Walt Whitman

The Road to Peace

When I was the Acting Director for a foundation during the 1980s, we did a study of the root causes of war and peace within an individual as well as society. We determined that peace is not a static love and light state, but a dynamic process that involves conflict. We found that there is a point in the process where conflict either leads to a greater degree of understanding and tangible peace, or deteriorates into further misunderstanding and in its extreme, war.

We were looking for the root causes of the state of peace and war within an individual as well as a society and world. One of the people I interviewed in our process was a negotiator who mentioned that you always have to go to a point upon which you can agree. Sometimes it is the most basic and primal point such as an agreement that I am human and you are human. Hard as it seems, that is at times the only point upon which agreement is found. Yet it is an opening. That piece of information has always stayed with me and reminded me to keep going to the place where I can find agreement within myself or with another. 

And within ourselves when we are in a conflicted state, it is equally important to find a place that we can use as a point of agreement between the warring part of ourselves and the part that longs for peace. In the study we did, it was found that peace is certainly not the absence of war. It is the dynamic process of growing and questioning, and the willingness to confront the hard issues...not a love and light statement that often masks underlying tension and resentment we really feel.

When we pick up the gauntlet of tension and work with it, not against or in denial, we find some powerful possibilities in that raw honesty. Just as we find in successful relationships, peace is not based on passive reaction or giving in to keep the peace.
 Real peace is achieved through dynamic interchange and willingness to honor differences, to air them, and the strength and bonding that comes when we surmount the bumps in the road together.♥

Yes, I Can!

I've had a problem with driving for several years. I start to get tense when I'm going on a long trip. That causes constriction in my neck, and pretty soon I am hyperventilating and having a panic attack. I feel like I'm going to pass out, and driving becomes torture rather than a pleasure.

Recently my daughter had minor surgery, and I knew I needed to go to help her. She and her family live 2 hours away, and it's not a pleasant drive because of the major traffic I have to go through to get there. However, I wanted to be with her, and this trip was not negotiable.

On the morning of my leaving, I was trying to figure out how I could handle the problem. I had come to think that part of it was caused by the way I hold my head when I drive, so as I got in the car and started the journey, I had to cross a bridge that is under construction. Lots of traffic, only two tight lanes, and I started to feel tension and constriction. I was aware of my neck; did shoulder rolls, I paid attention to my breath. It kept constricting. 

I began praying. "Please, God. Help me to deal with this and release it once and for all. Help me to drive with joy, not terror." And I had a thought to put on a very peaceful CD that I use when I'm tense. It is Carlos Nakai playing his flute. So I did. And then as I prayed, I paid attention to my breath, and then I looked at the road with gratitude. "Thank you for this road. Thank you for having a bridge here. Thank you for the beautiful bay, and the clear water, and the good weather. Thank you so much for letting me live here in the Bay Area, thank you for the gift of a wonderful family that I am privileged to go to see and help. Thank you for the trees, for the good weather we have, thank you for my home, for living in this space, for being in this country, for the gifts you give me on a daily basis that I take for granted. Thank you for my relationships" (and I noted all the ones including the tough ones with a feeling of gratitude) and on and on I went with my litany of gratitude, noting that the tension had fallen away. I was not hyperventilating. I was feeling a sense of peace and almost a drugged warmth that flowed through my body. And soon I was calm, I noted that traffic seemed to part as I came to major interchanges where there was a need to merge onto other highways. I began to cry because I could see the gift of life and the benefit of all that was working for and with me, not against me. By the time I reached my daughter's home, I was in a state of bliss.

We had a wonderful time, and when I headed for home, I thought about how I'd come up, and I practiced the same procedure going back...and had no problem driving. I’ve driven up and back to my daughter’s several times since that trip. Each experience has been a joy.
From Seasons of the Soul Fall Print edition 2002

Messages From the Garden

As always, my garden is a constant source of insight. 

I’m going to have the back area of my house landscaped, and in preparation, the landscaper asked me to water the Bermuda grass for at least an hour a day so that it would be lush enough for him to use Roundup on. He told me it is the only way to get rid of the unwanted grass. So, I did. And an amazing thing happened. In the process, plants on the side got watered for the same duration, and began growing by leaps and bounds.

I’ve always watered my garden, but not for that long—and it made me realize that plants respond just like we do. What we focus a lot of attention on is what grows. What we only give little time to grows little.  If we want results, we have to provide the appropriate nourishment.

It seems so  obvious, but I missed it completely until I got the message from the garden.

From Seasons of the Soul Autumn edition 2000

Quotable Quotes

O Gift of God!
A perfect day
Whereon shall no man
work but play,
Whereon it is enough
for me
Not to be doing
but to be.
~Henry Wordsworth   Longfellow

 
Your vision will become clear                                                                                                           only when you can look into your heart. 
Who looks outside, dreams.                   
Who looks inside, awakes.
~Carl Jung

It's Absolutely Perfect

Recently I had some health challenges, and noticed that I often berate myself for what I perceive I’m doing wrong. In the midst of my latest self-critique, it dawned on me that my life is absolutely perfect EXACTLY as it is, and that the fault does not lie in circumstances, but with my perception of them. As I shifted my attitude and saw my body as a most incredible intelligent self-correcting universe, I felt love for everything I'm experiencing health wise, rather than anger. Some of the issues seemed to dissolve with this newfound awareness.

As I look outside of myself and am discontent with current circumstances, I turn resentment into a strand of yarn that leads back into the core of my being. What am I really upset about? What do I really resent about myself or fear I won’t have? Where am I not giving myself enough love, respect, compassion? And beyond that, seeing that my own "failings" are also part of the perfection of this life script. Each thing I do and don't do has a purpose. Instead of berating myself for what I'm "not" doing, I begin to see the opportunity in the "not doing," and realize that I don't have to hold fear or control or need to fix things for everyone else. I see life events as being in divine perfection because something is working at soul level to grist the mill, wringing out limitation, and replacing it with a clear view. It's like squeezing a precious drop of oil from something that takes a long time to relinquish its fragrance, but once released, it remains forever.

Universal timing and our timing are often at odds. But the universe is not and cannot be wrong. Everything we see is the projection of millions of particularized viewpoints, and as each of us clears ourselves, the collective will begin to reflect what we all say we are looking for – peace, love, and harmony. When we create that internally by accepting who we are and stopping the war we perpetrate against ourselves, or berating the situation we find ourselves in at the moment, we can create heaven on earth.

We will return to the garden. But in the meantime, the wilderness experience has its purpose. And “in the meantime” is the real time we are given right now -  our daily opportunity to express gratitude for what we do and don't have, knowing it is absolutely perfect just as it is.

When the time for change is ripe, it will occur. As I practice loving instead of fearing, gratitude instead of resentment, life takes on a whole different flavor. Fear has an odor. Love has a fragrance. I prefer the latter.♥

From Seasons of the Soul Autumn 2002 print edition