The first over nigh shift

I finished my first pay week of working at the treatment facility. What I feel from 4 days work is that the work they do there touches my spirit deeply. This morning when I was scooping cereal into the young peoples breakfast bowls before they woke up was a deep amount of real spirit stirring gratitude. I measured the sugar and put a scoop in each bowl and then place small plastic containers of whole milk beside their place settings minutes before I woke them up.

I've been on their side of treatment countless countless times. I knew the night staff was busy doing things to allow our day time care to take place and it was other worldly being on the other side. I felt like a parent, putting things out, doing their towel laundry and folding them with the client number on each one visible. Even as I shined a small light into each of the dorm rooms to check and see if they were in bed, I remembered the sensation of waking up in various facifacilities I was in when the night staff shined the light in. It never made me made , it never irked me it in fact made me sleep more soundly knowing I was being looked after. Now I have the flashlight. Funny how life can swap the roles for you sometimes.

I like taking care of things for people in my everyday life but doing things for these kids who have been so lost makes my chest warm. Even when I was leaving the facility and I looked across the pasture where one of the actual foster home that houses students sits. It's a giant stone multi-story that looks like some farm house in Scottland. I was grateful in a different way than I had known before. Even though my home life was really messed up and one or more of my parents never could step up emotionally for me. I never woke up an an unusually cold spring morning without two people there that I knew where my parents, that food was in the kitchen that power would come on when I flipped a switch, that clothes were clean and they fit me and I never worried about someone coming to kick us out of what I knew as home.  I never NEVER touched a light switch and wondered if we had electricity, and have that be a regular normal thing that I dealt with as a young person. Those were my basic physical needs and they were always met. 

How can you relive a whole lifetime is 3 minutes. Pain is pain and lonely is lonely. I guess I have just enough similarities to those parent-less children to  see my pain reflected in their circumstance. I'm grateful I know how to feel that and even as I type this, I could burst into tears if my family weren't bustling in the house .  I'm humbled by the fact that I can feel so deeply for strangers. I'm grateful that the pain of youth didn't get the chance to finish me off as an adult so far. I left good thoughts on each of those cereal bowls as they slept this morning, light barely breaking as tall skinny pine trees danced in the bitter cold wind of a spring time cold snap. I was present. Really present and even if  the staying awake from 12-8am slightly skewed my senses, it was an experience I wouldn't have wanted to miss. I've never been a parent or even wished to be but on a very small scale I got a glimpse into the care parents show their children when their children aren't looking. There wasn't a job detail I was shown to do last night that I couldn't find  care for. It was humbling to do what I could to help those young men's chances at finding some piece of information or hope to hold onto and maybe, just maybe make a difference for themselves. At 16 could I have been intervened upon? Probably not, but I was very desperate to be seen and acknowledge and I just as easily could have found it in a program like this. I just wanted someone to see me and say, "Hey, I see the real you andyou are okay". When Branch Dividian in Waco went up in flames and they talked about David Koresh, I had a small hunch that had I ran into a religious sect and they could convince me they loved and valued me, I could have been sucked in. So if I had been shown the 12 step program when I first began to bleed to death, I think something about it would have spoke to me. I like making someone Else's way a little bit easier. I like being support team. It is the spirit of service I guess. If your going to be possessed by a spirit, all in all, it's a pretty good one, but also pretty frightening at times.

Grateful, grateful, grateful. Moved and moved and moved. Thank you for this experience.

Had a talk with a friend of mine. He keeps recycling old girlfriends that weren't good choices to begin with. It made me thing of this quote, " We trade what we want, for what we want now". That is why we never get what we want because in the moment when it is uncomfortable or lonely we trade something that makes us feel better in the now and get further away from what we want in the long term. Sticking it out, waiting, surving the "in the MEAN time" is hard. IT's why we settle for what is available now. It's clear to me when my friends to this but hard to spot in myself when I do it. Take food for instance. I want o be fit, but I settle for a large pizza NOW.  I hope today, just for today, I keep my sights on my goals and don't settle or stop because it doesn't get here fast enough. I  also hope i'm willing to wait, even if it's painful or boring. I want want a freedom for settling for what is convenient and learn how to wait things out that take time. I"ll never get anywhere if I trade what I want for what I want now.

Ideas that excited me from the book "Darkside of the Light Chasers"

Everything we hate, resist or disown about ourselves takes on a life of it’s own and it undermines our feelings of worthiness. 

When we make peace with ourselves we instantaneously make peace with the world.

We choose to forget who we are then we forget we have forgotten.

Find compassion in your own mistakes then the mistakes of others will not affect you.

We attract whomever or whatever  we need to mirror back the aspects of ourselves that we’ve forgotten.

Within ever desire is the mechanics of it’s fulfillments.

Our fears stop us.

We see in others what we like and what we don’t like in ourselves.

We cannot see ourselves. I am your mirror and you are mine.

The Ego is our false and ignorantly assumed identity. So ego then is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with it’s result : a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and to, to keep alive the fiction of it’s existence.

Transformation itself only takes seconds. It is a shift in perception, a change in the lenses we look though.

When you come face to face with an aspect of yourself that you hate, express it. Express it with the same intention of releasing all your judgments, your shame , you pain and your resistance to taking back this disowned aspect of yourself.

The pain of perceived flaws cause us to cover them up. When we deny certain aspects of ourselves, we overcompensate by becoming their opposite. We create entire personas to prove to ourselves and others that we are not that.

We are dominated by everything from which our self becomes identified, We dominate and control everything from which we DISidentify ourselves.

You must be willing to spend time exploring your own inner world. “If you do not go within you go without”

Pain is passed down from generation to generation and if it’s not questioned will never break the cycle.

The pain you experienced when you were 3, 5, ,6 and so on is just beneath the surface of your consciousness. Until it is transformed it is always there driving your life.

                                                                                                                             

Prejudice is passed down and so is pain, guilt and shame.

Pain has it’s purpose, it wants to guide and teach us about higher levels of awareness.

Every word, incident and person that still has an emotional chared needs to be retraced, faced, replaced and embraced. Then we face the incident, owning up to it’ss reality as part of your past.  We need to become fully aware of the influence it ahs on our life.  Then we look at the incident from a different perspective which allows us to replace our negative feelings with positive ones.  We take control of our lives by choosing our interpretations. That enables us to embrace our disowned past and unplug ourselves from other people.

It’s our perceptions and our interpretations that affect our emotions not the incident itself,. It’s our perceptions and interpretations that deny responsibility and lay blame..

Each of us has to make a conscious decisions to alter our world by altering our interpretations.

To overcome fear we must overcome our fear and we FACE IT and REPLACE it with love.

We have to set aside our harsh judgments and come to terms with the mistakes we’ve made.  We must know that we worthy of forgiveness . This divine gift teaches us that part of being human is making mistakes.

Forgiveness comes from the Heart not the EGO. Forgiveness is a choice.

Desperation comes from the gulf between God and Self.

                                                                                             

If we don’t challenge our most basic beliefs we won’t grow as spiritual beings.  Our lives will simply run along lines established by our parents and we will never go beyond those boundaries that were set when we were kids.

Boldness has a genius, power and magic to it.

When we realize that no one is coming to save us or do it for us, and that our old wounds are there whether we love them or hate them, we realize that we are the ones who have to fulfill our potential.

I knew that to truly change my life I would have to be uncomfortable.

Prayer without action is dreaming.                    

If you tell yourself that you are going to eat healthier foods and don’t do it you are broadcasting to yourself AND the universe that you can’t be trusted. If  you say to yourself your going to get a new job next year and don’t do it your sending a message that you cant be counted on . Even if it is a small task you are saying to yourself and to the universe  you don’t keep your word.  These broken promises wear down our self esteem. Each time you do what you say you are going to  you are telling yourself and the universe you can be trusted and counted on.  Then you can work on larger goals.

Notes I have taken from my re-reading of Eckhart Tolle's "New Earth" so far

Notes from the re-read of “A New Earth” by Eckart Tolle, thus far.

Cam human’s defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form  that keep the ego in place and condemn them to imprisonment within their own personality.

Ego is no more than identification with form, which primarily means thought forms.

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much

Language consist of 5 basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. Do you believe some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you are or the ultimate purpose of the universe or even what a tree is or a stone at their depths?

You can only feel the joy of being when you are out of your head. Being must be felt. It can’t be thought. The doesn’t know about it because thought is what the ego consist of.

Whatever the ego sees and gets attached to are substitutes for BEING it cannot feel.

Letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.

 How do you know this is the experience that you need? Because this is the experience you are having.

The ego will quickly find a new for of identity, it doesn’t matter if it is a deeply unhappy one or not. The ego craves to latch on to anything it can use as an identity.

                                                                                     

If the shutters of the house are closed, the sunlight cannot come in.

Awareness and ego cannot coexist.

A long standing resentment is called a grievance. To carry a grievance is to be in a permanent state of “against” and that is why grievances constitute a significance part of many peoples ego.

A grievance will also contaminate other areas in your life,. One strong grievance is enough to contaminate large areas of your life and keep you in the grip of ego.

The past has no power to stop you  from being present, only your grievance about the past can do that.

What is a grievance? The baggage of old though and old emotion.

Every ego is a master of selective perception and interpretation. Only through awareness can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see.\

What constitutes insanity? Complete identification with though and emotion, that is to say your ego.

Whatever you fight, you strengthen and what you resist , persist.

Awareness is the power that is concealed within the present moment. That is why it is called THE PRESENCE.

Me singing 6 sings from the past two appearance at the Opry House

I watched this amazing program on wildfires and how they are just as important to the planet was rain and sun. In Yellowstone they have nearly stopped fighting wildfires at all. What they found was they interfered with the cycle of nature. He explained that in the top of these old pine trees are pinecones that have been there for 40 years in the center of the tree. They are coated by the tree itself with hard wax. The only thing that removes that wax is fire, and when the fire melts the wax, the pine nut/seed is released and that is how new forest come about. He said that nature is full of booby traps that insure the survival of the forest and the plants of the forest. This gives me great comfort to know that what looks to me like devastation is in fact the clearing of the land so that new growth may take place, and the fact the seeds are there but hidden from hands that those that "mean well". Orchestration of growth is not necessary ,, rather don't fuck up anything because you think you need to help things along or speed the process. Why dont we all just trust in the process. Bitch