Today is the first day of May and the beginning of this month’s practice of presence.
For those of you who have not been following along since the beginning of the year, 2020 is my year of presence. Each month I am creating a new heart-centered practice that helps me learn how to be more present to Love, to life right here and right now, to our planet, to my heart, to my spiritual practice, and to other human beings and all living creatures.
So far this is what I have learned: I January I dove into what it means to be present, fully present. And I realized that I needed to learn how to pause in order to be present. So that’s what I practiced in February. Pausing every day to be present. It was tougher than I thought. So I created a new practice in March: Seeing through the eyes of Love. I took a photograph each day of something that made me pause in Love. That was great! And it helped me realize that I wasn’t very good at just being. So that became April’s practice. Each day I shared a different heart-centered practice of being. And what became clear was that I have spent a lot of my life avoiding certain kinds of things — habits, behaviors, feelings, discomforts, fears, practices, people, ways of being. And that’s what led to this month’s practice.
May’s heart-centered practice of presence is Wholeness.
So, here’s the thing about these practices. They are practices — and that means they evolve. . . you guessed it. . .through practice.
But here’s the gist of how I think this is going to roll out.
One of my core heart-centered practices (it’s in my new book, Living Love: 12 Heart-Centered Practices to Transform Your Life, is witnessing. This is the process of learning to pay more attention to your thought patterns and all the actions and reactions they produce — without judging yourself or others.
Lately I’ve been witnessing certain things:
I sometimes have a much bigger physical or emotional reaction to something or someone than my mind is telling me I need to have.
I have a habit of avoiding certain kinds of interactions, situations, tasks, practices — and those avoidance patterns are often similar.
Fear can be both extreme and subtle — but it’s the subtle forms of fear’s suggestions that take the deepest root. . .and are the hardest to spot.
A lifetime of justifying certain behaviors and beliefs does NOT make those behaviors and beliefs okay for me or anyone.
The things we sweep under our mental or spiritual rugs need to get cleaned out — or pretty soon we start tripping on what’s under that rug every single day . . .and if we don’t pay attention pretty soon it takes over the whole house.
We all live as if the choices we make have no consequences, when in fact every single choice we make has consequences. Every single choice.
So, with that awareness as my starting point, each day I am going to address something that has arisen and prompted a fear-based reaction, showed an old pattern of thought/behavior, raised something that I would like to clean out and transform.
I hope that through this process I will begin to develop a very simple heart-centered practice for clearing out the cobwebs, shifting old engrained habits, cleaning out the dust bunnies, living with more integrity, facing our own fears. in other words living and loving whole as a heart-centered practice.
So, in essence, you’re going to see how creating a heart-centered practice happens. Through practice!
I’m going to start like this — and we’ll see where Love takes things.
Here goes!
WHAT HAPPENED: One of my closest friends got testy with me on the phone yesterday..
WHAT I INITIALLY FELT: Anxious. Upset. A little defensive. Confused. Sad.
WHAT I INITIALLY TOLD MYSELF: This reaction isn’t about this situation. It’s about something much larger with a lot of history — our history, together and separately.
WHAT I INITIALLY WANTED: To defend myself. To cry. To point out that this seemed to be an overreaction. To justify my behavior. To make it all go away.
WHAT I DID: I stayed quiet and tried to shift the subject to something more holistic, where we could find common ground.
WHAT I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO HAVE DONE: Been able to address what seems to be a pattern without being afraid of the pattern or my friend’s response to the pattern.
WHAT FEAR SAID: What if this is true? What if you are a terrible friend? What if you don’t know how to show up in people’s lives?
WHAT LOVE SAID: Be willing to find what you need to hear in this without being defensive. Turn the rest over to ME (Love).
WHAT FELT UNTRUE AND/OR OLD: A childlike fear of being wrong, bad, not a good person.
WHAT FELT TRUE AND NEEDS ATTENTION: The fact that I often am too busy for my friends.
WHAT IS NOT WHOLE: I am afraid of other people. I am particularly afraid of anger and big emotion. I avoid conflicts. I feel defensive and scared at the same time. I keep so busy working to avoid dealing with the hard stuff. I avoid people and situations that scare me or make me feel badly about myself.
HOW I WILL PRACTICE WHOLENESS:
I will lean into Love wherever I feel fear.
I will invite Love to show me how to face down these old fears.
I will invite Love to show me where I am in avoidance.
I will see others and myself through the eyes of Love.
I will be willing and eager to let go of fear’s stories and let Love write new ones.
I will witness the fear and not let it fool me into believing I actually am afraid. Even if it’s visceral.
And I will choose Love instead. Over and over again.
I’ll let you know how it goes! And here’s a little practice video with these steps so that you can try it yourself.