24-3-7

Winter is the season of mending and tending. Relationships need care all year round, but the dark season somehow illuminates where we need to clearly say NO or YES to people and situations that are not right for us.

One of my teachers Angeles Arrien has a 24-3-7 rule. When a problem arises, it's your responsibility to address it within 24 hours. If you can't do that, do it within 3 days. And if you can't do that, do it within 7 days. A week is enough time to be unresolved with yourself and with another.

24-3-7 holds space and time for a truly creative response to the problem. For visually dominant people - those who sense the world most strongly through sight and images - it takes a long time to even realize that something off-kilter happened. Then it takes more time to know their feelings about it and to get clear on a creative response. 7 days gives even slow processors a limit to being swamped by a problem.

If you are somatic or kinesthetic, you are at an advantage in knowing sooner that something needs to be addressed. The wise body does not lie, gives clues to what is amiss with common symptoms like insomnia, upset stomach, or headache.

This happened to me recently with a client.  It took telling the story many times to colleagues before I heard what I was saying. I did not feel good about working with this person, and my body symptoms were saying NO. My process unfolded slowly over the week, and by the time I was clear, I had to wait a few more days to be able to reach this person.  I said what I needed to say to this person, and it was done within 7 days.

Even if you are a slow processor, fearful of speaking up and rocking the boat, do it. Take that 7 days if you need to, but listen to your wise body and practice saying NO to people, places, things that are not right for you. It opens the door to be able to say YES to what is nourishing for your journey.

Call and Response

Always the world is calling to us with beauty, with love. Are you there? it asks. Are you alive? Do we take time to see, hear, taste, touch, smell what the world offers? If we are at least a little sentient and awake, how do we respond? We need to share our stories: Yes, I'm here. Yes, I'm alive.

My body is still resonant from a recent kirtan led by Jai Uttal and friends. We friends and strangers gather to sing and chant Hindu devotional songs. The meaning of all the songs is the same: I love Creation, Creation loves me; YAY Universe; thanks to the Gods/Goddesses. And because it is call and response, you just listen and receive this passionate music and respond with the purity of your heart. The room was alive with all kinds of voices. From afar the meditation hall must have pulsed like a giant heart.

Each round builds in energy, and the group entrains. The full-bodied ecstatic waves of energy are so wonderful to feel as air and sound travel throughout my cells. One cannot sit still. We are literally moved. The silence is full and delicious during meditation between songs. And the frogs outside harmonize with us throughout.

Yes, I'm here. Yes, I'm alive. Yes, I'm grateful. Yes, it's wonderful to be together. Out loud and in silence. Yes, this is my body. Yes, this is us.

Being Love

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

- Raymond Carver

Magic happens when we are busy being love. I don't mean being 'in' love, as if it were a substance we swim in. But being love, the walking talking ocean itself. Touching everyone and everything with our gentle wave, bringing love to everything we do.

A friend described her life of late: providing great service to people at work, realizing some visionary projects and handing some off to others, paying off debt and saving for the next big thing, tending the relationship in a new way with her life partner. She is happy, excited about life, and at peace.

Part of me is pure envy listening to all this wonderfulness. And still I am awake enough to recognize that she is Being Love. She's crossed into new territory. And she is making a difference. I am Present enough to be happy for her.

I try to remember moments of being love. Setting out for a hike, anticipating adventure. Making my husband laugh. That still, crackling point when a counseling session opens up and my client and I are deeply moved by discovery. Making art when I let it make me. Allowing myself to be all broken in front of other people. Letting their compassion mosaic me back together. Noticing that my cat has hypnotized me once again into giving him a belly rub.

How do I get back to this being love when it feels so far away? The envious part of me desperately needs to know. Does the self-care routine come first? My friend has fine-tuned her nutrition, rest, and yogic spiritual practice. She actively loves herself with the basics every day.

Or is it an internal action? A surrender to love, a YES to life, a declaration of I am here. It probably doesn't matter where it starts, as acts of self-love or reaffirming belief in love and the goodness of life. Just that it starts. In deep winter, with our much needed rains seeping into thirsty earth, seeds of being love are being fed.

Y is for YES

How do we know when we get to YES? People often say, "I just know when it's right." But what tells us this is so? As always, the body is our ally here. What we're looking for is a felt sense in the body - an image, phrase, movement, gesture, sounds, texture, sensation, emotion, any and all of these.

I once experienced that internal YES as one of those wooden ball-on-a-string toys, as if I had one inside my belly. You let the ball drop, swing it upward a little, and try to catch it with the cup in the handle you're holding. The trick is not to try too hard. When the ball lands, when it's caught itself, there's a satisfying CLICK. I experienced that sensation of things falling into their right place at the right time. That YES clicked deep in my belly. I could feel it, even almost hear it. So satisfying, content, fully present. And trusting in something beyond my trying to control the pace of things.

The shift from NO to YES is palpable. I'm paraphrasing my dear friend Howard DePorte*, a gifted mediator who says this about his clients getting to YES:

People know they've gotten to YES when they no longer feel the energy in their brain. Many people come to mediation intent on outsmarting someone, getting the advantage, winning. They sit pitched forward, ready to
do battle.

Through transformational mediation, a shift happens. People become more receptive and drop down into the heart. They often find empathy and connection with their former opponents and identify with them as fellow humans. You can actually see their shoulders relax as they sit back. Internally, they may feel more liquid and experience relief rather than resistance. With greater fluidity things move, like smiles, laughter, even tears. They tend to think better then, more creatively, because they are now thinking with the heart. Ultimately that awareness can drop even lower, from heart to belly, that other place of knowing.

*If you'd like to experience that transformation in a dispute or conflict you are having with others in your life, please contact Howard through www.pointmediation.com

So consider what felt sense let's you know it's a YES. Deciding what to eat for dinner, choosing how to spend your day off, discerning what you need to say to your colleague, making love, making art. The body will speak in different ways at different times, but it surely does speak. How do YOU know when you're at a YES?

X is for X Marks the Spot

X marks the spot. We hold a picture up at eye level on the wall, then adjust it higher or lower. We then move it laterally, until we instinctively know That's it! So we mark it, nail it, hang it. We step back and savor where and how it wanted to be all along. 

We can do right placement with objects, and we can practice it with ourselves. I moved to San Francisco somehow knowing it was the right environment for who I am and who I'm becoming. We are beings existing in space AND time, so right timing is just as important. I wrote about that some weeks back, that timing is often beyond our control. But we can try. I suspect right placement comes first, having some physical place to show up and say I am here. When we place ourselves well in space and time, with intention, life just opens up.

A friend and I are both redecorating rooms in our respective homes. Getting current by recreating our external places to match our insides. Her touchstone is that the parts and the whole should make her heart sing. This phrase and its accompanying emotions and sensations allow her to check in: Does this material's texture do it? What about that color? This style of furniture? This heart singing is an essential quality to creating a home that feels like it's really hers.  

I'm seeking to create and experience a grounded and uplifted feeling in my new healing space. That means putting in a chair rail, with a darker color below and above it all warm light and possibility. Something soft under foot, no clutter, a gauzy curtain to block out the ugly light well. The room's palette comes together, all with the sense of that grounding and uplifting.  

When placing ourselves well, we take time to check in with ourselves to find what is just right. Like Goldilocks, we assess:  too this, too that, just right. We muddle our way through by trial and error.

But how do we know we've gotten to YES?  More on that next week... 

  

U is for Uplifting

Within the voting booth and beyond, we are asked to choose well. The major personal and collective consideration seems to be: do we choose to act with loving intention or to react out of fear and anger? Can we be uplifted and uplifting AND stay grounded and rooted?

Visionary leaders use the power of the word to uplift and inspire people to mindful action. Imagination is so important, to dream what has not yet come into being, and to call it forth with our words and actions over time. Forty years ago the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated a vision of true equality, and with Barack Obama and all of us, King's dream is taking form in an unexpected way. Obama himself has captured the imagination of many, welcoming participation with just three words: Yes, we can.

Uplifting oneself and others is not a Pollyanna, goody two shoes endeavor. Uplifting is sensing the whole, seeing the dangers, and choosing the good anyway. There's courage and rigor in choosing again and again into creative possibility. We can determine much about our lives just by where we place our attention and invest our energy.

So just notice if you spend your time and energy and thoughts on being connected, whole, uplifted or if you let yourself be bound by hopelessness and helplessness. And notice what you would prefer. You have the power to choose. In what way can you uplift yourself and someone else today?