Archive for February, 2012

Truth That Sets Us Free

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Valentine’s Day is also ‘V” Day – a day when theatre groups around the world, professional and amateur, perform The Vagina Monologues. This creative performance piece has become the anthem of the vast and disturbing numbers of women who have experienced sexual violence.

The play’s author, Eve Ensler, has said that she started talking to women about their vaginas and quickly realized that too many women have conflicted feelings about their genitals and that way too many women’s sexual lives have been hijacked by male sexual violence and aggression.

The redemptive power of telling their stories motivated Ensler to create a work that gives voice to this largely unspoken aspect of women’s experience and has, over the years, attracted the imprimatur of many big-name actors. Ensler soon realized she had tapped into a deep well of silent suffering but, as she recently said on Australian radio, women found freedom in telling their truth.

The transformative power of truth telling is unexpectedly enormous. Recently a friend confided in me, telling me of an experience he had had which few knew about and was a source of shame for him. After talking about it I was able to point out to him that this experience was the way he chose to learn, and there is absolutely no shame in that.  The experience had the effect of changing the direction of his life, and he acknowledged that was a good thing. I think this lessened the intensity of the shame at the time, and now it has almost disappeared entirely.

I then shared with him an experience that I had never told anyone before. It was a secret I had carried for several years, not realizing what a burden it had been, and how heavy it made me feel.

No sooner had I finished relaying my story I felt instantaneously lighter, freer, and happier. I immediately felt the weight and power of the secret dissipate till it no longer had power over me. I was now free to let it go. To steal Gotye’s line from his international hit song, it quickly became only ‘[something] that I used to know.’

I once read this passage somewhere: That which has light shed upon it, itself becomes light.

Truth telling liberated me from the constraining and limiting effects of darkness. Shedding light on what was lurking in the dark corners of my memory not only caused the shadowy secrets to dispel and diminish, it transformed them into a source of light, freedom and expansion.

Both the secret and its revelation became a source of inspiration by expanding my understanding of the human condition. The emotional effect was to shift me from shame to compassion, for myself and others and, like my friend, it has left me grateful for the lesson.

Telling the truth does indeed set us free.

Posted in Acceptance and Non-Judgment, Awareness, Health and Physical Well Being, Love | No Comments »

Timing

Monday, February 13th, 2012

One of the most difficult things we struggle with is waiting. Having the patience to allow things to take their natural course without trying to force and speed things up is a major lesson to learn.

So often we emotionally commit ourselves to a particular timetable and outcome. We use our very best rational thought, we make good, sound choices and decisions until we think we have conjured up a sensible course of action with a desirable, though realistic, goal which we then dedicate our hearts and minds to.

But then things don’t work to plan. We don’t really understand it and it defies rationality and logic – because we did everything possible to make it a good and reasonable plan. Yet something is awry and all our planning seems to be out the window and there is little we can do to get the whole project back on track. Initially we become impatient, and then anxiety sets in.

If I’ve learned anything in this life, it is that we never have any control over timing. It is as if the Universe has its own sense of time and it rarely looks anything like ours. In fact the two are about as alike as the proverbial chalk and cheese.

And one thing we need to understand about Divine timing is that it is intractable. Unlike human timing, there is absolutely nothing we can do to manipulate it, force it or hurry it along. It is what it is, and the more we fight it the more nothing changes except our own state of mind – usually from peace to panic to panic attack! The only thing we can do is relax and let go.

About 18 years ago we moved to Sydney and were looking to buy a house. I found one that we thought had huge potential. It was less than our budget because it needed some renovation and I was confident that we would be well within any reasonable price range at auction.

What I didn’t allow for was another bidder who wanted that house, and only that house. We ended up in a bidding war – something I swore I would never do – until I finally came to my senses and backed down. I was so disappointed. I never saw being the underbidder as a possible outcome. It was a huge blow.

In the meantime a friend suggested I look in an area closer to the harbor. I hadn’t looked there because I assumed it would be too expensive for us. But I took the advice and started my search. I found a house that we ultimately bought, at a price within our budget, but only because the vendors had had two failed auctions and was unable to sell at the higher price they initially sought. If I had found the house only a couple of months previously it would have been too expensive.

Of the six houses I’ve lived in, it turned out to be my favorite house of all. My bedroom had what the real estate agents like to call “harbor glimpses,” something I never thought I would ever be able to afford. The house pretty much ticked all of my top ten requirements that I wanted in a house, and anyone who has bought a house knows that things are good if you can get the top five!

And it was all because of (Divine) timing.

Posted in Acceptance and Non-Judgment, Awareness | No Comments »

Reinventing Community

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

Last week I went to shul. My friends’ daughter was getting married and on the Saturday morning, the Jewish Sabbath, prior to the wedding the bridegroom was ‘introduced’ to the Torah according to Jewish tradition.

The service was held at a relatively conservative synagogue where the men and women are still kept separate during the service. In this case, the men were downstairs and the women upstairs.

Draped in their prayer shawls and sporting the traditional yarmulke, the men paid close attention to the prayers, exhortations and ceremony conducted by the rabbi and various male congregants. They actively participated in the service, only periodically glancing up at their women above.

For the women this was a perfect opportunity for a good catch up. Multiple generations of several family groups who have been closely associated – by blood and otherwise – seemed to delight in the opportunity to add another happy event in their long shared history together. Older women absolutely revelled in seeing the little ones and poured a shower of affection over them all.

I sat and observed this wonderful community as they celebrated the happy union of two of their own. It reminded me that this sort of intense experience of a community that embraces more than just ones’ family is almost totally absent in my life and I momentarily became slightly regretful. Community is a major casualty of the fast-paced, geographically disparate life I, and so many people these days, lead.

I’m convinced community is one of the relics of our past that needs to be resuscitated, and reinvented. The time is rapidly fading for social groups that exclude on the basis of insufficient connectivity – blood, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender or socioeconomic class. The time has come for new and expansive forms where everyone who desires to participate is welcome.

A society where everyone feels unconnected to those around them, where anonymity and emotional distance divide and separate us, is not a society to be aspired to. There needs to be some care for the needs of the group, not just for those of the individual.

I’m not sure what the answers are, but I think it’s about time we wrench the debate that currently excludes all voices other than the large corporations, who have a deeply vested interest in a large and densely-populated metropolis, and the politicians who are in their grasp.

In his novel Her Infinite Variety, Louis Auchencloss writes:

“Before the Renaissance, men looked for God in the sky. Since the Renaissance, they’ve looked for God in other men: Napolean, Lincoln, Hitler, Stalin…But in the Renaissance, men looked for God in themselves. Consider this wonderful young [protagonist]…He doesn’t trouble himself with visions of heaven and hell or dream up ideal societies to make the miserable creatures around him more miserable than they already are. He will settle for the one life he has and make it a beautiful thing.”

The predominant, if not the sole, concern of most people is survival. But life has to be more than just survival. How to make life a ‘beautiful thing’ is something we need to ponder.

We all pretty much know what we need for a healthy body, and we even have a good handle on what we need for a healthy mind. But a healthy soul needs connection and a sense of oneness, an appreciation of the ‘God’ in all of us, which community helps to foster.

Posted in Awareness, Coping with Change, Family, Love | No Comments »