WHAT IS LEFT?

Each of us will physically leave this realm, and yet something very real will be left behind.

Whether we are intentional or not, we each leave behind us a legacy. That legacy is comprised of the energy that we have emitted while here interacting on earth. The energy is formed into thoughts, feelings, words, and actions. As energy can neither be created or destroyed, we are conduits of an Infinite energy that is constantly being molded and exchanged within the Field in which we dwell.

Energy comes into us, is informed either consciously or unconsciously, and goes forth from us. We are holographic beings, and so technically the energy doesn’t come or go anywhere. We seem to be separate distinct beings in this realm, yet we forever remain atone. We are granted access to the Infinite energy to have a free experience of it. We choose what to do with this energy. We ether enhance or detract from the Universal Field based on what we do with the energy given.

Enough of the foundational theory.

Let’s get personal.

My friend Pat was killed in a car accident last week up in Georgia where she had a second home. I am still in the process of coming to terms with her sudden passing. While I termed her my friend that may not be the best moniker for her. We were not friends in a traditional, though we were extremely friendly. We did not socialize or engage in chit chat. I was never in her home not she in mine.

We were spiritual comrades. Spirit-companions.

That does not minimize the sadness I feel relative to her sudden passing. I grieve and I miss her already. I know my life experience was enhanced by her place in it. I sense a dimming now that she has left.

And yet…

The reason that I began this tribute with a mini lesson in quantum physics Is while Pat is no longer with me and us in a physical way the energy that she left behind is vital, tangible, and unmistakable. I can feel her as I type these words. As I fumble to capture her energy in form I am uplifted and amped up by my direct experience of the wondrous woman she was and somehow is.

When I think of Pat I immediately think of prayer.

Pat loved to pray. Loved to pray! She loved praying and sharing prayers so much that she did not just pray, she was a prayer. A living prayer. A lilting prayer. A dynamic prayer. A somehow musical prayer. It had a feel like no one I have ever known. It was impactful in a most beautiful way.

As I reflect on a world without Pat in it I also know with certainty that every impactful, beautiful, living, lilting, musical, vital prayer that Pat ever offered is still here as an imprint upon the Field. Her praying transformed energy that is here with us, though she no longer is. In fact, what was most essential of Pat still remains. Still lives. Still vibrates. Still prays on in this realm. Her body is gone, and her spirit prays on.

The world is better because Pat prayed.

Pat was also very funny. Very kind, compassionate. Pat was passionate and relentless in her emotional and spiritual inner work. She owned her “stuff” like few people I have known. She took responsibility.

Pat was also intensely human. She could drop an f-bomb with the best of them. She spoke honestly of what was real for her. She called out the inconsistencies of others, while also being accountable to her own. She occasionally danced about. She quipped and joked and uplifted a room. She was awesome and ornery. Jokeful and joyous. She was real. She was very, very real.

And mostly what I will remember about Pat is how she prayed.

Pat served in many capacities in our Unity congregation. She served and she gave generously and lavishly. She showed up. Repeatedly. Consistently. She applied the Principles and acted upon Truth.

She did it all with a prayer.

And now Pat has left this realm, and she indeed has left something very real behind.

Pat has left an ocean of transformed energy that benefits all living beings. She has left traces, a trail of prayer energy that remains though her physicality no longer is. Prayer for me is Pat’s greatest legacy. Her living, vibrational memorial. I am better because Pat prayed. And so is the world.

And so, I honor Pat by typing these words, imbuing them with as much Pat energy as possible. I double down on my own commitment to being a living, vital prayer. I pray Pat forward. I will celebrate her by streaming prayer energy every time I think of her. While I could never lilt in the same way, I can vibe at my frequency to make my own unique contribution. Pat and I were indeed spiritual comrades who deeply knew the unparalleled power of prayer. It united us. It magnified us. It will always live as us.

Prayer is what is left now that Pat has gone.

That vital truth invites me again into my own personal inquiry as to what will remain when I am gone? And what, dear reader, will remain when you yourself have left this realm?

Thank you, Pat, for making me and this world better because you lived.

And because you prayed.

THE HEART KNOWS

“The longest journey we will ever make is from the head to the heart.”

I am certain that most of my readers will have heard some version of that declaration before.

I am equally certain that hearing it and applying it are two very different things.

I have indeed found it to be a long journey. It has and continues to be for me personally. And in my thirty years of ministry and counseling I have witnessed it to be an arduous dynamic for most people.

The head to heart journey begins with some sort of notion that it is a desirable and even necessary sojourn to be taken. At some point we hear a version of the opening quote to this blog post. Something internally clicks. The innate wisdom of the heart stirs at the potential reenactment of its power. Heart intelligence is primal. The heart beats before the brain is formed. This intelligence is always seeking to be directly known. Directly experienced. Directly applied. It is a call that can be delayed yet never fully suppressed.

Because of mind-identification the whispers of the heart are rarely noticed. This is the overriding dynamic of the current critical mass. The incredible prevalence of people staring at device screens mirrors perfectly how most humans are staring at the content streaming on the screen of the mind. These two factors combined obscure the wisdom of the heart. The language of the mind is commentary while the language of the heart of feeling. Herein lies the foundation of the predicament.

We are at a place in consciousness development where feeling is combatted and suppressed. The truth of the heart is that it is the portal of All Presence, Power, and Intelligence. All that Divine data is at the center of the heart temple. It is energetically encased in emotional wounding that is also a part of the heart atmosphere. To have a sustained experience of heart intelligence and Divine data we must move through the layers or veils of this wounding.

And this is central to why the journey from the head to the heart is indeed the longest. The most challenging. The most arduous. The most difficult. And the rarest.

Another common yet seldom applied slogan is that “we must feel to heal.”

I know it to be so.

Mental commentary is not primal. It is not original. In human development it occurs some years after our emotional wounding. Fundamentally the habitual narrative that loops through our mind streams up from an underlying emotional signature. While it is true that thought prompts feelings, in its original orientation feeling comes first. We are emotional beings before we are cognitive. The emotional signature is layered over the Vibrational which is our inherent vital Self.

We are called to reverse the order of our development. That could be called the journey of the head to the heart. We shift our relationship to mind-content, moving from identification to witness. We literally drop our attention down into the heart. We allow ourselves to feel the veils of raw emotions that shroud the essential heart. We disengage from the story we have attached to the feeling.

Hence, we feel to heal.

Hence, we move from the head identification to a centering within the heart.

This is clearly not for the timid.

It requires courage. It requires commitment. It requires humility and bravery. It requires a deep trust. Living from the heart and its primal knowing requires much. Yet is also gifts us with clarity, resilience, fortitude, deep connection, and compassion. It gifts us with wisdom, which is synonymous with heart knowing.

My own long journey from my mind to my heart is fundamental to my life-journey and central to my purpose. As I have dedicated myself to my own heart journey for decades, I feel qualified to join others on theirs. I am not afraid of the pain I have found in my own heart, and I am not fearful to experience the pain that is within yours. This is assisted by my intimate knowing of what is Vibrationally available just below the veils.

I believe that this journey is the journey back to the “God” we never left. Experientially we have been cut off because we have become deadened at the feeling level. We are a pain-averse culture. We prefer mind-spin to felt experience. We can somewhat control the mind. We cannot control mystical emergence. It is what we both long for and fear most.

And it is inevitable.

Heart-knowing mystical realization is inevitable because It is what we are. It may take lifetimes. It may come in a quantum moment of Grace. But it will happen. And it will come as direct felt experience from the heart, and not as thought stream from the head.

Whether you believe me or not I assure you that you already know everything that is knowable. You know it because it is the Essence of your being. Of All being. It is deep within your heart, awaiting your sustained attention. It requires feeling. Feeling without storytelling. Sustained unflinching feeling. It is for me the longest yet also the best journey I have ever made.

And you can make it too.

The heart knows.

The heart already knows.

Go there. Right now. Listen. Feel. Open to it. Allow the movement.

I am right here with you.

BEST FOR LAST

What will I be saying when I depart this life?

Not in a literal sense.

Stay with me.

After over seventeen years as a working minister my beloved Richard gave his final sermon in early September of 1995. It was to a small group of devotees gathered in our living room. Calling it a sermon may be a bit of an overstatement. It was a sharing. His health was declining, though we did not think at the time that his passing was imminent.

Though we did not know it would be his final lecture it did have a very definite energy to it. If not ominous it did feel somehow monumental. Circumstantial. Consequential.

Richard spoke about what are called the “fruits of the spirit.” The particulars of what comprises those are not so relevant. What was and is striking to me about his subject matter that day is that the aspects that are termed “fruits of the spirit” were central to the way Richard lived and served. He lived seeking to become more fruitful in his living and in his expressing. He wanted to align with and embody spiritual attributes in his human experience. He continually stressed this form of “ripening” in what he taught and in how he served.

I realized after his passing that while not a conscious choice he sermonized on what was most central to his heart in his final sharing.

He saved the best for last.

It was what Richard’s Soul was saying when he departed this life. What he was cosmically communicating. The energy his Soul was emitting. Being fruitful was a Soul mission and so he left behind a trail of spirit Essence in not only word but also form.

The best for sure. And it came at the last.

I do not currently have a prognosis that would lead to think that I am at the final days or months of my lifetime. I am not really that old, at least in terms of current life span statistics.

Yet I know for sure that I have way less time left than I have already lived. I know I am nearing the end of my active vocation in its current form. I ponder and contemplate purpose and legacy while giving little thought to goals or accomplishments.

If I were saving the best for last what will that be?

If I knew I was going to give my final sermon, what would I preach about?

If I were to laser focus my energy this day, knowing it would be my lasting emission, what would I choose to emit?

If this was the last blog I would ever compose, would I choose this topic and these questions?

What has been central to my living expression and to my personal ministry?

I pose these questions to you, dear readers, rather than supply my answers.

While you may not compose sermons or blogs, I assure you that your life is a ministry of sorts. You are always emitting energy. You are always leaving a trail. Traces in your path. That trail and those traces are indeed your legacy. They are what you will leave behind.

Richard left behind the fruits of the spirit. He continues to do so via my remembrance of him and his lasting best.

I am clearer by the day about what I consider to be my lasting legacy.

I am under no illusion that I have endless time left.

I get up every morning with a prayer in my heart that I will be of useful service while I am still here, embodied. I seek to become the best that I can be. I arise willing to forgive and open to evolve and thus uplift this world.

In living thusly, I know that if this is my last day on earth it will be my personal version of the best for last.

PRELUDE TO ANOTHER DIGIT

“I am older than I ever intended to be.”

That is a line from the wonderful play and subsequent movie A Lion In Winter. I first heard it in college, which I freely admit was a long, long time ago. I thought at the time that I had an accurate perspective on what it meant.

I did not.

As an aspiring performing artist, I believed at the time that getting “old” was the worst thing that could ever happen. I of course did not stop and consider the alternative. I also ignored the inevitability that if I lived long enough I too would one day be “older than I ever intended to be.”

One of the biggest surprises of my lifetime is how much I like being a man of an age. I will soon be sixty-seven, and the disbelief I sometimes feel around that is not accompanied by any unpleasantness or dread. I feel a greater freedom than I have ever felt. My priorities and sense of purpose are crystal clear. There is a certainty about why I am here, and what I am about. I dwell consistently in a spiritual reality that fuels my living and feeds my serving. I awaken each day with a granular gratitude that I have another day to awaken and contribute more.

There is way more sand in the bottom of my hourglass than there is in the top. Much more of my life experience is now downstream than what is flowing toward me. That does not trouble me at all. It gifts me with an urgency about how I choose to spend my remaining days. It clarifies the importance of applying my values and navigating via my priorities. Purpose is my compass, and my life experiences my map of awakening. I rarely lose a sense that regardless of what circumstances are occurring there is always something greater than the manifest realm with all its challenges and dramas.

My body and physical capabilities are not what they once were. I admit to having more cognitive pauses than in previous years. I see very little detail without the aid of my glasses. What used to be up there is now down here. What used to be tight and smooth is now saggy and crepey. And I humbly embrace that I also experience more clarity, maturity, and wisdom than I ever have. I let things slide off me easily. I have clear boundaries which also grant me a deeper sense of connection. My belonging is free of attempts to fit in, which is liberating beyond measure.

I appreciate deeply that against all odds I am older than I ever intended to be.

In a mostly youth obsessed culture I relish that I have lived long enough to proudly wear the moniker senior citizen. I do not hesitate to flash my Medicare card. I hold no shame around the disability placard that hangs from my rearview mirror. The feet that used to so frequently wear Capezio dance shoes and the latest fashion almost exclusively don Sketchers and Crocs. I have lived long enough to choose comfort over trend, and it tickles me more than I can say.

As I am poised to add another digit to the length of my incarnation I do so mindful that aging is no longer the adversary it once was. I am clear that I have no more mountains to climb. The fact that it is no longer physically possible for me to even climb stairs is secondary. Goals and aspirations have faded as my present moment experience is what matters most. How I am relating to life as it is, is what matters most. While I once wanted to change the world, I now want to simply love it as it is.

To those who say age is merely a state of mind I choose not to disagree. I know what it is to me. I do not identify with it, but neither do I deny it. I have been young. I have been middle age. I already experienced those places in the human experience. I do not need to pretend that I can somehow magically have that again. From this perspective I realize I did not fully inhabit those timeframes. I took them for granted.

And now I am committed to being a vital, awake, contributing senior who is content to be older than I ever intended to be.

TO to FOR

It has finally landed.

Life is for me.

Nothing in at least my world prepared me to know that, let alone live from it.

I was taught that life happened to me. The best I could do was to fend off what was coming at me. Life was largely something to defend against. It was dangerous. People were dangerous. That was the programming. It was not exclusive. But it was there for sure. It saturated my experience from an early age.

I also watched almost continuous attempts at control. I mean, defense is one form of control. Constant scrutiny for danger is a form of control. High level reptilian living is misguided control. Natural, but in many ways not helpful. Of course, these are all attempts at what can never be controlled. Life is happening to us, and we reach for the tribal tools we were provided with to try and deal with it.

Even as a child I suspected there was something very off with this “to” approach. It did not sit well in my gut or in my heart. I always felt something stirring and moving in and as a more expansive inner reality. My intuition was at odds with my familial and cultural programming. Yet I also knew I was on to something.

Religion in many ways only supported the notion that life and God happened to me. Praying to have things be different rarely resulted in changed effects or circumstances. God happened to the Biblical characters of old and God was happening to me, my family, my world. Trying to appease a God that was happening “to” me resulted not in increased faith but in increased anxiety.

The shifting in my perceptions and experiences was slow but also steady and sure. My suspicions gained traction and I gathered more and more evidence that life was not only happening to me. At first, I began to feel the way that life was not only happening TO but also THROUGH me. This was subtle at first, but by focusing energy into it, it began to gain momentum. Velocity. It came in tangible waves.

I began to surf the growing waves of intuition and my sense of cooperation increased. I began to live in a felt awareness of a Life bigger than “me” or “mine.” There is really no such thing as “my life.” There is Life, and there is my experience of it. This for me was quantum. It opened an entire new world of experience.

This for me was quantum.

And there it was. A quantum shift in my consciousness and in my experience.

This FOR me.

Life was not happening TO me. Life was happening FOR me. I only needed to choose to see it that way. I needed to go beyond standard reasoning and look FOR the hidden good in all things. It was always there. It had to be. FOR life was already FOR me. Even when I was not.

My constant defense against what was happening to me prevented me from perceiving the ever-present movement of Good that was always for me.

My constant attempts at control prevented me from cooperating with the Essential movement of Life in all Its grand orchestrations. In trying to fend off what I feared might happen to me I was also blocking what was seeking to happen for me.

And so it has finally landed.

Life is for me.

I know that to be true.

I trust it to be accurate and active.

And so, this is the perfect year to dedicate to knowing even more fully for myself and sharing widely with all who choose to listen that:

Life is FOR you! I invite you to join me in an embodied and actualized movement from Life happening TO you to Life happening FOR you.

2024. TO to FOR.

Let it be more than a concept. Allow it to be the Reality that it is.

Life is FOR you.

Let it be so.