I'm writing you from my front porch. It's springtime in Southern
California so I still have bright green grass – it turns a brownish
green in the summer. The scene is not
quiet, peaceful or serene – folks
to my left are loading ceramic tile into a truck and the folks to my right are
pounding on metal with a metal hammer.
But, there's this soft caressing breeze and the temperature is just
right and I feel fabulous. This is one
of my creations that I love – a front porch office. Right in front of me strung across the
columns of my porch are African Peace Flags reminding me of love, oneness,
faith, leadership and wisdom as I write this post.
A couple of days ago I had the epiphany about the necessity
of physicality and challenge in my life.
Since then I've been faced with a couple of huge challenges which are
for the moment under control. The good
news is I see them for what they are.
The bad news is that I know I created them and I'd rather they went
away. So I'm experimenting with the
process of creating physical challenges for myself as a way to occupy the part of me that needs challenge. Yesterday I got back on my bike and did the
stairs I wrote about the day before. The challenge is
this was that my body was sore and my bottom was sore, too. At first I thought, there's no way I'm going
to ride all that way, but after a few minutes is all calmed down and I kept
riding despite a slightly protesting right knee. But, that calmed down too as I kept riding.
Today I decided I needed a different challenge. I'm preparing for the Advanced ThetaHealing
Class that I'm teaching this weekend so I needed to get manuals copied. The trip to the copy center via bicycle
seemed a worthy of that label. First I had
to find a box that fit the back fender and then I had to figure out a route
that gave me the least busy lunch-time streets to negotiate. The road to the center of Pasadena from where
I live is slightly up hill the whole way – with a couple of sections being even
more uphill, so the challenge in today's ride was to negotiate these hills with
sore muscles and a knee occasionally voicing it's protest.
I'm part scotch-Irish and one of the gifts from my ancestors
is that with any difficult physical
exertion my face turns a bright red.
That coupled with noon-day sun-generated sweat must have made me a sight
to behold because I kept getting reactions.
First the man at the copy place looked at me strangely, but pointed at
the machines that had the best rate.
When I asked to use the rest room to wash my hands before touching my
original he told me it didn't work. So I
went next door to Fed-EX Kinkos – they were 6 cents a page more expensive so
with an 80 page manual I'd opted for their competitor. As I walked in the door an
employee was rearranging things at a packaging table. When she turned around and saw me, she took a step backward as if my appearance frightened her.
When I returned to the Pasadena Image Center, I asked him if he thought I looked
strange. He told me no, then suggested
maybe it was the hat. Yes, I wear a bike
helmut. I love my brain and want to do
whatever I can to protect it. And, in
1996 my then best-friend Marcia fell from her horse and hit her head and never
woke up. Had she been wearing a helmut
we might be working and playing together today.
While I was riding I spent a lot of time thinking about challenges. If for some reason we need or desire the adrenaline of challenges in our lives and we are not intentionally creating them but leaving them to the devices of our sub-conscious, then how does that work? Does our sub-conscious have any kind of priority list for challenges? Does it have preferences. Seems like my sub-conscious really likes creating challenges in the arena of money. I did some muscle testing and it seems that money ranks as the best challenge, men comes in number two and time is currently number three.
That's were competing creations comes in. If money is a favorite arena for my
sub-conscious to create challenges, then that's going to be in competition with
my attempts to consciously create more monetary income in my life.
Last night on my teleclass, we worked on this topic and it
was so deep and powerful that the teleclass went over by almost 30 minutes. At this point I need to re-listen to the
class cause I remember having chill bumps at some of the downloads, but I can't
remember what they were. It was like
what to download was being brought out of the all that is, and through me with
no pause for my own internal recording.
Opps, I have errands and a client session so I'd better close this out. Tonight I'll be working on this in my West LA Theta Synergy class, so more to come.
Thank you for a very interesting post about challenges. It has brought some stuff up for me…
In my experience I choose to engage with challenges in my zazen (Zen meditation). I see them as my karma and I often have those "goose bumps" you mentioned when I am able to detach from my ego-consciousness and observe the “wily one” at work. It is often is a profound experience in which I transcend the relative mind and have connected with what? Self? Spirit? Universal consciousness? The label I find, isn't important.
I get that my karma is such that there are an infinite number of previous "programs" in my mind. And yes, I too have been recognizing recently how I have sabotaged my own wishes and desires...
My Zen experience tells me that desire is that state of mind that causes the conflicts and challenges. Yet paradoxically, I need to allow desire to manifest in order to transcend it. How else am I to get to grow? And whether or not there are past lives or just this life, I do not know, because that would be just another belief-system. What I do know though is that the challenges are endless, and I can really get to experience what the Zen masters mean when they say, "it is the journey, not the destination. Lose the desire to arrive!" There is part of me that loves the contemplation that your post has stirred up in my mind today - maybe tomorrow I won't love it so much, as I would be drawn back into my rational mind.
Posted by: Derek | March 20, 2009 at 03:19 AM