Spring

I want to come back to life today.  I want to feel the new Spring.  The grass is growing under my feet; it is soft, sweet and vibrant.  The flowers are showing colors vivid and wild, even in the grey morning sky.  There is a sun behind those clouds, I don’t have to see it to know that it is there, sustaining life. St. Patrick’s Day has passed, but we are getting greener every day.  I salute this special moment with sun salutations and breath of fire.  I swallow the marine mist, and dance until dusk.  Life is upon us today, let’s try something new.

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Harmony

I will approach this day with a determined heart, meeting my task with an anticipation of harmony and mutual support.  Those anxieties that like to crop up in my mind will be given very little attention, washed away in the tide of calm breath.  The light of love will shine from my heart, a beam so bright each will take notice with a warm smile, like a small child that realizes you totally understand what it is that they see.  I offer patience, gratitude and joy in each passing moment, for I know that it is passing, and I do not want it to pass by unnoticed.

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Self Forgiveness

Today I must rise above the sadness and cynicism that is stored up inside of me so that I may enter into my true nature.  In that space of love and forgiveness I can set the boundaries that I need and not give into the desires of neediness and the want of things that do not support my true nature and that of my higher being.  All is one, all is alright inside.

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Powerlessness

Of my own devices I am powerless.  When I talk about the gift of recovery, I am talking about a shared power. It is through others that I receive the power to stop drinking and using, to practice yoga and meditation, to learn of God, to sing, even to pray.  When I was taken to my first meeting in recovery by someone that loved me, I found the strength to tell a room full of strangers that I wanted to get sober and didn’t know how.  It is because they surrounded me with their love and guidance that I am alive today. Their strength carried me forward in times when I could not have gone on.  They gave me the power to persevere.  A young man walked into one of the rooms last night and mentioned that it was his very first meeting, that he did not want to keep doing what he had been doing.  We came up to him after the meeting, each giving him our cards, taking his number, offering him our strength.  I wondered where he had found the willingness to come into that room in the first place.  I know for myself that it was the most difficult threshold that I ever had to cross.  Perhaps something deep inside of him awakened and in his moment of clarity he was given the power to come in.  Believe me, the power to live through all that we have survived, and to come through that door, is a gift.  We don’t really know where it comes from, we are just grateful that we found it within us.

Faith and Trust

Faith becomes more realistic through experience.  Trust gets easier through hardship, because no matter how difficult the lesson is, in hindsight I come to a complete understanding of how the experience is just what I needed at the time to develop into the person that I want to be.  Before I can be able to trust, though, trust that the Universe has my back, I have to develop faith.  I have to know that I am connected to a benevolent Higher Power that wants me to live, to love, and to grow.  Without that faith and trust, I would be lost in the illusion of fear, which may lead me to anger, and hate.  Perhaps all I can do is go by what feels right, what feels good, by what works for me.  Today I choose faith.

Giving it Away

Everything that I have ever been given was not for me alone.  If I am given a gift it is so that I might share that gift with others, that is how the flow of life operates.  If the flow stops, it stagnates, and becomes a cesspool of all kinds of poisons and disease.  Materialistic greed has never worked for me, but spiritual greed would throw everything out the window. The gift of recovery will dissipate and fade into relapse without a dedication to serving others with the opportunity to cultivate the tools that I have been given.   Yogi Bhajan said that if you want to master something that you must teach it.  What can I do today to help, to teach, to serve?  How can I dedicate my life to this question?

Leaving the Day up to God

Leaving the day up to God is not about kicking back and just seeing what happens; that is leaving the day up to my personal whims, and getting away with as much as possible by doing as little as possible.  It is really about taking the next right action, and letting go of the results.  It is allowing what happens its due, without freaking out, and contemplating the oneness and beauty of it all in the back of my mind.  Leaving the day up to God is about giving up control of the controversies that surround me, not judging or ordaining, just letting it be.  Giving the day to God is surrendering to God’s will, doing that which will improve my life, and the lives of others, rather than indulging my basic instincts at every turn.  Co-creating the day with God is suiting up, showing up, and being present for the wondrous gift of the day, and all of the little treasures that it has in store for me.

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24 Had 3.19.12

I am not completely proud of all the things that I have done.  Each day it seems that there is that something something that I say, something that I do, that I wish I had not.  I am able to justify it at the time, perhaps for weeks at a time, but when I get clear, there it is, looking at me and telling me that I can do better.  When I made amends to my father, it was just a look across the room when I told him that I apologized for everything that I had done to hurt him.  Inside of me I was still thinking about the things that he had done to hurt me. He just looked at me and said that he was sorry that I had been hurting myself, much more than I had hurt him.  He meant it.  He was one that would stay up all night in bed worrying about me.  He was genuinely sorry about how badly I had treated his only son.  Many of us believe that God is like that.  Not judging us, just sharing in our pain.  When I pray to have my shortcomings removed, it is not to please “Him”, it is not so that I become a saint; it is so that We may live in loving harmony, at peace with ourselves and one another.

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24 Had 3.16.12

I have an earning job, or jobs, and I enjoy the work that I do, but that could be all gone tomorrow.  My Job, though, I have earned, and will have for the rest of my life.  I adore my earning jobs, and I do them well, but I am not attached to them. The Job is what is important to me is the Work that I do to bring myself closer to divine Love and Spirit; to elevate my Brothers and Sisters, Mothers, Fathers and Children, and to allow them to teach me.  That includes everyone that I know, and everyone that I have never met.  There is probably less than 6 degrees of separation today.  With the internet linking us all together, is feels like there are only three.  The things that I say and do, and even feel, have a ripple effect.  Perhaps the butterfly wing does affect the existence of the hurricane.  The Work that I do must have meaning.  It must have purpose.  It must serve the common good.  The Good Lord pays the mortgage, I show up to serve.

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Coming Down the Mountain 30

We all have our crosses to bare.  The cross is a structure of right angles, which, in astrology, represents a challenge.  It is two opposing forces coming together to create a structure, one aligning horizontally, and one vertically.  One plane defines the earthly horizon, one the journey from the ground to the heavens; and that is so much of the struggle, to do that which keeps us earthbound, or that which elevates us into the more spiritual dimensions.  When I was drinking and smoking pot, I was actually seeking a spiritual solution to my earthly problems.  I felt as if I were closer to God, the higher I got.  They don’t call them spirits for nothing.  In getting loaded I was running away from my responsibilities to myself, my family, my work, etc.  Every time I lit a joint I was communing with the divine, Jah Rastafari.  Nothing wrong with that, but I was doing it alcoholically, everyday all day.  The spiritual solution that I embrace today, prayer, yoga, meditation and praise keeps me grounded, yet God centered.  It is truly the best of both worlds.  I am able to take care of myself, my family, my work and my life, quite well, mind you, and being just totally blissed out, at times.  When there are problems to overcome, I seek out the solutions, and they come, in time; I don’t stress over how that is going to look, because you see, it’s all in God’s hands.  I am just here to do that which is set before me, like Casey Kasem always says at the end of his broadcast "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."

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Coming Down the Mountain 29

The class that I teach is called Kundalini Yoga and the Tools for Recovery & Transformation, that is because I teach Kundalini Yoga and Meditation as a system of awareness and growth so that we can overcome life’s struggles and addictions to substances, people, unhealthy thought patterns.  Addiction is a powerful force that binds and overwhelms so many of us.  Rather than asking you if you are an addict, perhaps a more appropriate question is “what is it that you are addicted to?”  What is creating an unhealthy balance in your life?  I have to ask this question to myself each and every day, because I know that just because I have put down the bottle and the pipe does not mean that this disease, a shape shifter, won’t appear on a daily basis in the form of something or someone else.  I won’t go into the possibilities, they are endless.  The next question that I have to ask is “what am I doing about it?”  In my class the focus is on the 3^rd and the 11^th Step, yet all of the Steps are points of discussion, as are the various remedies that are prescribed in many of the 12 Step programs.  I teach Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan, who brought this practice to the West because he saw how drugs, alcohol, and life itself was overwhelming us, and wanted to offer a transformative solution, and at the expense of everything that he had, he did.  In program we learn to give our will and our lives over to our higher power, which can also mean, to our higher purpose.

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Coming Down the Mountain 28

I had another one of those dreams last night where I was stuck in the airport and could not get on the flight, this one bound for Berlin, because the customs personnel made me lay my credit cards out on the conveyor belt and they rolled inside of the machine. I made them tear apart the device, but they could not find the cards, and once again, I missed my flight.  I was flying out of London, I seem to be in London a lot in my dreams lately, and there is always an airport, and I am always missing the flight, stuck in the airport, on the way out of the dream.  I do feel most alive when I am travelling overseas.  These dreams seem to be telling me that I am not fulfilling my soul’s desire; that I am ready to go, but that something is holding me back.  I am there at the airport, but I can’t seem to get onto the plane.  Perhaps that can also be seen in a spiritual sense. I am meditating, but do not feel as if I am getting up there in that transcendent sky.  One of these days I will get on that plane and it will fly away, if I keep showing up to the airport.

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Sometimes “shoulds” get in the way of my life.  My mind tells me what I should think.  That is my mind, thinking, about what it should think.  That gets a little crazy.  How about how I should feel?  The question is always, how do I feel about this, that or the other.  The answer is not in the question.  How I should feel is a statement, it instigates a pre-approved answer.  It tells me who I should and should not be, based on concepts, usually belonging to others. If my behavior is morally acceptable to me, it is because I have a conscience, that small still voice within that lets me know if I am off in any way, or right on; not because I have bought in to someone else’s opinion.  I often value the opinion of others, but it is in letting their opinions become my “should” that leads to confusion as to whose life am I really leading, mine or yours.

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Coming Down the Mountain 26

I came home to an empty house last evening, first time in a while.  The kids were out on the town and Brooks is heading back East, so it was just me.  I have noticed that being alone can trigger feelings of emptiness for me.  A lot of people love being alone, and I’m not talking about unhealthy isolation, rather, spending time pampering themselves, without having to interact, just to be. I have always avoided this, and when the occasion occurs I begin to look for distractions.  This is not a conscious decision, because I know that I enjoy alone time, it is relaxing, self-satisfying; but there is a part of me that wants to run away from myself, the part of me that tells me that I am not enough, that I am not whole, that I am not One.  So I had the bath and the book and the computer TV and the food and it was just lovely.  Take away those items and I might just jump right out of my skin.  I had set aside a meditation to do last night, how perfect would that have been?  Didn’t even cross my mind.  The fears and the stress that comes up from whatever abandonment issues that are embedded in me are not resolved over night, but slowly, and with certainty, they are being washed away as I learn to love me and to be.

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Coming Down the Mountain 25

So many of us want to help better the world, to do what we can to make it a better place for all peoples to be a part of.  One way to begin is to do what we can to better ourselves, to think about how we can become healthy, happy and holy by balancing out our stressful lives with healthful consumption, exercise, prayer and meditation.  The most obvious next step, and perhaps the most difficult, is to improve our relations with those closest to us, our partners, our children, our siblings, our parents, by listening-loving patience-kindness-generosity.  By saying what we mean, without saying it mean;  by holding a space for compassion while setting our boundaries.  By caring.  Then we can look out into our community and follow our heart outside of our homes and into action.  How can I be of service to my local school, homeless shelter, or library?  For many of us the call to activism is an important step towards change. Some ideas may include gathering petitions, campaigning for socially aware candidates, or cleaning up the park or the beach.  Wall Street has absorbed the funding for social services, complaining does not solve the problem, it takes action.  Bringing awareness through protest is only a beginning.  Reaching out a hand to a broken brother or sister, to a broken home, to a broken system, can make all of the difference in the world.

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Coming Down the Mountain 24

It is important for me to remember that although I am gathering a great number of wonderful tools, they are infinitesimal in comparison to the infinite number of spiritual tools that exist, have existed and will exist. I can barely pray.  My meditations are filled with thoughts of breakfast, lunch and dinner.  My body won’t stretch into full lotus, and these are the few methods of growth and awareness that I know to practice.  There is much to learn from each and every religion, movement and spiritual practice.  I know only a little.  I must watch for signs of bigotry and doubt regarding anyone else’s beliefs, or disbeliefs. Rather than shunning someone else’s stand, I must open my heart to the notion that before me stands my greatest teacher, if I but have ears to hear, eyes to see, and shut my mouth.

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Coming Down the Mountain 23

The first twelve step program that I attended was Al Anon, this was in 1999, and I was having an emotional breakdown.  I was drinking and using, in a bad relationship, the kids were becoming teenagers, and, in retrospect, I had no idea what I was doing.  As most life changing decisions that I make, I do not remember how I got to my first al anon meeting, I just know that it was conveniently located across the street from my office, it was ACA oriented, and it began my rocky journey into recovery.  It would be another 4 years before I got sober, but the seed was firmly planted. There are so many tools that I am given in that program, and because the work is subtle, I often forget their importance.  Al anon symptoms include a compulsive tendency to be controlling, while being a people pleaser.  This can get messy, sticky, and lead to a lot of passive aggressive behavior.  Learning to set boundaries, keep the focus on myself and not on someone else, and to state my truth while being kind, yet firm, and not easy lessons to learn; for many of us they require a whole new mind set.  Once I have heard what it is that I need to learn about myself and my behavior, I have to continually repeat the exercise so that it sinks deep into the subconscious and rewrites the script within me.  Reading the material, working one on one with our sponsors, talking it out in meetings, and working the steps are how we change and grow.

gregorysgardner.com

Coming Down the Mountain 22

When I was to begin Teacher Training Level 1 in Kundalini Yoga and Meditation, I was feeling some major physical resistance in my stomach.  It was Friday evening, and there were knots in my gut.  Something inside of me was telling me that this was a bad idea and that I needed to just stay home and take care of myself.  This was beyond the nervousness of fear, this was physical pain.  The next two days, over the course of the weekend, I literally could not breathe through my nose, and that was all that we were to do all weekend, breathing exercises, and I could not get a clean breath through my nose to save my life.  All of this physical resistance was my body warning me that I did not want to go through the emotional hell that was about to be unleashed through me for the next year.  As I began to transform and become the me that I was meant to be, I had to let go of everything; everything that I thought that I wanted, needed and loved.  The grief was not constant, there were ups and downs, but it was monumental, earth shattering and life changing.  Today I see that I had to go through all of that to find the peace and tranquility of who I am today, and I am still changing, evolving, and not afraid, physically, mentally or emotionally, to move through it.

gregorysgardner.com

Coming Down the Mountain 21

Last weekend I began Teacher Training Level Two; Vitality and Stress in my ongoing Kundalini Yoga and Meditation studies.  Classes began on Saturday and Sunday at 7am, ended in the evening, and were filled with mind numbing  kriya (a yoga set) after kriya of asanas (postures) and meditations, some of which were somewhat excruciating. Why do we do yoga?  It isn’t always easy, and certainly not often comfortable. What is easy is how we feel when we are finished, when we are complete.  The sense of vitality and the reduction of stress only begins to describe where a wonderful yoga set can take us.  It truly can bring us closer to Spirit.  I was certainly tired leaving those workshops, but not spent; rather, I was filled to the brim, in fact, spilling out.  The hardest kriya for me was the Pittra Kriya, which has me seated, holding my arms straight out in front of me and crisscrossing them in the air for 11 minutes while chanting.  I have not been able to yet get through the 11 minutes without short breaks, but as we say, we are not trying to prove anything, we are trying to improve everything.  I have taken this particular kriya into my daily morning practice; because it is the most difficult, it is the most rewarding in reducing the stress that I am confronted with throughout the day.  I have been walking on clouds all week.  It is truly remarkable.  I take on spiritual disciplines because they bring me closer to God, and because they make me feel soooo good.

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