What's the deal with drama?

So, what’s the deal with drama? I’ve never been one for drama…have never had much patience with drama... have never really been prone to drama...until recently. And I don’t get it. Is it about attention? Is it like the tree falling in the forest and the age old question of does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it? Does drama still exist if there’s no one there to be on the receiving end of it?

A few weeks ago, I had a Weirdness Gone Wild experience that totally freaked me out. If I had been a shrink, I would have had myself committed for being delusional. I was in deep space la-la land after doing the Gayatri Mantra one morning, when all of a sudden I was in someone else’s body… someone I know. I looked down and was wearing the clothes this person commonly wears, in a situation this person is commonly in, and I’m thinking ‘holy s***!!!’ I’m in so-and-so’s body! I even ran my hand through my hair to see if it felt like my hair or this person’s hair, and it wasn’t my hair. This went on for a few minutes, and when I started to get a sense of the thoughts that were coming into that person’s mind, I thought ‘ohhh, no no no… this is going to way too far’ and I brought myself out of it. It felt very invasive. And when I was back to full consciousness, I truly thought I must be crazy. And I created all of this drama around the experience for several days, calling people, telling people about it, trying to figure it out.

So, why all the drama? I’ve had so many other Weirdness Gone Wild experiences that I could just sort of observe and be ok with. Many years ago I had an experience during a network chiropractic session where all of a sudden I was in the water, looking up through the water, and could see a man in a wooden boat, poised with a harpoon ready to strike. And I heard my cohorts (Whales? Dolphins? I don’t know) yelling at me that we had to get out of there, NOW! Come on, come on, let’s go, we gotta get out of here. And my overwhelming sense was that the people in the boats had gotten my baby. And I kept crying out ‘they got my baby, they got my baby’. And my fellow creatures, kept yelling at me that there was nothing I could do about my baby, let’s go! And that was it. (Interestingly enough, many years later I was given an antique whale harpoon that sits in the corner of my living room) But the point is, I had this vision, have no idea what it was really about, but I wasn’t compelled to create this huge drama around it. And the Weirdness Gone Wild experience I had a couple of weeks ago about being gassed at a German concentration camp (see my first blog) didn’t create drama. In both of these my response was… hmmm, that was interesting. And that’s it.

A couple of weeks ago I had another Weirdness Gone Wild experience that also created a real sense of drama in me. Again, I don’t know what it was that compelled me to go into drama mode. Since then, I’ve been conducting an experiment. If I don’t talk about it, will that keep it from going down the path of drama? The results of my experiment are that it seems like I’ve shut down somewhat and that I’m internalizing the stuff that needs to come out, thereby creating this cauldron of ‘stuff’ swirling around inside of me. And it hasn’t been pleasant. Or fun. Or blissful. Anything but.

So what’s the lesson here? Go with the drama if it comes up and woe be on to those who happen to be around me? I don’t think so, but I don’t know what the answer is….

Grace Period at the End of the Road

My burning question since my mom was moved to a nursing home last year has been “why does the end of life have to be so hard?” Haven’t most people been through enough challenges by that stage in their life to earn an easy ticket home? (I have a bone to pick with God on this one…) Some people say it’s karma that determines how the end of life will be. And, of course, Francis says it’s because they ate dead animals all of their lives. My thought is that it doesn’t matter… by that time in a person’s life, it’s a moot point. It’s done. And I think everyone, no matter what kind of life they’ve led deserves a final grace period at the end. Maybe some people have earned a longer grace period from the suffering. I can agree with that. And I realize that some of this comes with our society, a society in which the accepted solution for the elderly is a nursing home. I know I’m not equipped to handle my mom’s needs. But I’m on a mission to do my part in making it better.

A few weeks ago in my Monday night energy healing class with Francis, he mentioned that going to a nursing home was good practice for the energy healing we’re learning, a good way to learn how different diseases feel energetically. And I thought, since I spend most weekends at my Mom’s nursing home, what a great opportunity for me to practice. But then later, as I was thinking about it, I realized that it’s not about the practice, it’s about helping these people. Every weekend when I walk through the nursing home, I see these people sitting around the nurse’s station, slumped in the wheelchairs they’re tied into, sad, lonely, confused, afraid, sick. It’ll break your heart…that is, until you desensitize yourself to it.

So, the next weekend when I went to the nursing home, I was actually excited to be there, excited that maybe I could make a difference. Until that point, I had kept what’s going on with my mom very compartmentalized in my head. With life’s challenges right now, if I let the emotional stress of her situation enter into it, it would put me over the edge of being overwhelmed. So I kept it in a neat little place in my head and only pulled it out on the weekends, when I would compartmentalize for those 2 days, the rest of my life.

But that weekend was different. I focused on opening my heart as I walked through the nursing home, sending out love and healing energy everywhere I went. And it was amazing. I’ve thought for a while that, in my mom’s current state, that the veil between dimensions has thinned, that she really is seeing the people, the children, that she claims to see. But as I went to get my mom water, or went back and forth to my car, I would send out love and healing energy, and the way the folks responded made me think that, indeed, the veil is thinner and they are more sensitive to the energy I was sending. At one point I went to get my mom a coke and walked down the hallway where they were all lined up in their wheelchairs to go into the dining hall and they all looked so sad and sick and lonely. I focused on sending healing energy, light and love. When I came back around the corner from the coke machine, and walked toward them, they all lit up and smiled at me. The difference was amazing, and it took so little to make that difference. And the best was yet to come.

I had decided the best way to try to get the ‘powers that be’ at the nursing home to let me do energy work on the residents was to start with the staff. I guess energy work in Tomball, Texas is not very common. A couple of people on duty were vaguely familiar with reiki after seeing it on the Discovery channel. When I explained it and offered to demonstrate, one person immediately wanted me to work on her sore ankle. So we went to the TV room and I started working on her ankle. There’s this one little old lady with piercing blue eyes that is too infirmed to communicate well, but she pads around in her wheelchair, always lonely, always sad. She came wheeling up to us and asked what we were doing. I told her that putting my hands on Ann’s ankle would make it feel better. So she padded up a little closer to us and reached out her frail little hand and put it on Ann’s leg to help it feel better. She still wanted to help, even in her condition.

I realized a couple of weeks ago, after my mom hurt herself during a bathroom transfer, that she is never going to get out of bed again. And since my family refuses to acknowledge the work I do, there’s nothing I can do to help her, except from a distance. But I guess that’s better than nothing.

So, for these folks that are on their way out, maybe it’s up to us to create the final grace period at the end of their road. And I’m on a mission to make that happen.

Spiritual Bypass

I first read the term ‘spiritual bypass’ in Joseph Dispenza’s book, God On Your Own, Finding a Spiritual Path Outside of Religion. He refers to using spiritual bypass to forge a personal spirituality without going through the process of healing the wounded psychological and emotional parts of himself. He says that according to Chogyam Trungpa, we try to treat our out-of-balance thoughts and behaviors by going to the spiritual realm through prayer, meditation or other spiritual practices. We think that God will take care of this depression, this phobia, this guilt complex, this chronic physical ailment, but in reality, if we don’t address these wounds at their own level, if they are left unhealed, the progress of our spiritual development breaks down.

Right now most of my world revolves around my spiritual development. And while I’ve always tried to address emotional and psychological issues head on to heal those areas of my being, I’m wondering if I’m using spiritual bypass with regard to my responsibilities on this earthly plane. You know, the plane that we are all on right here, right now.

I seem to be operating under the (misguided??) perception that if I surrender to God, that if I’m totally in the flow of a spiritual being, that I will be guided in the best ways to take care of my earthly responsibilities. And when it doesn’t happen, I wonder what’s wrong with me, what’s blocking that flow, what lessons am I not learning? And while my spiritual path is amazing and miraculous and awe-inspiring, my earthly existence is falling apart.

So my question is…. Is this a seeker’s spiritual journey or spiritual bypass?

What is Enlightenment?

I wonder how many people out there consider themselves to be enlightened? And I wonder how those people define ‘enlightenment.’

During a lunch discussion today we were talking about an excerpt from a publication where Sai Baba refers to the Sai Era and Golden Age, and how there will be a cleansing of the world and only those ‘awakened souls’ will experience life in the divine state. One of my friends was very concerned when I said I didn’t consider myself to be enlightened enough to make that cut. She immediately wanted to ‘boost me up’, making it sound like it was an esteem issue. I’m on a spiritual path, so I must be enlightened enough to be considered an ‘awakened soul’, right? Not in my book.

So, what is enlightenment? Is it reaching Unity Consciousness? Is it as simple as conscious evolution? Is it the release from the birth and death cycle? Is it the transcendence of material consciousness, space, time and karma? According to Webster, the definition of enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition is: a final blessed state marked by the absence of desire or suffering. Reading through all of the definitions of enlightenment in the various belief systems, is it really ever attainable?

For me, when the day comes that I can walk my path with an open heart, and sending out love is a reflex, a state of being, rather than a conscious decision, that’s my enlightenment. When I can let go of fear and anger and judgment and criticism, that’s my enlightenment. When I finally get it that my body is a temple, and I begin to treat it as such, that’s my enlightenment. If, at the end of the day, I was a better person today than I was yesterday, that’s my enlightenment. When I can hit the mark of clarity when I receive Divine guidance, that’s my enlightenment. And if that’s not enough, I guess I’ll be left behind.

My Grandmother's Gifts

If anyone had asked me a month ago what my grandmother was like, I would have said she was a mean and crazy bitch who made everyone’s life miserable. A couple of weeks ago, I had a Weirdness Gone Wild experience (look for it on a future posting) that, if I were a shrink, I would’ve had myself committed for being delusional. And I thought of my grandmother. She was diagnosed as being schizophrenic with multiple personalities and had several nervous breakdowns. And since it’s in the genes, I thought, and since she was crazy, maybe I am too…. And then I thought, or maybe she wasn’t.

Now I realize that she was, in fact, crazy but not the way my family thinks. The ‘gifts’ she had were not what the craziness was about. If she were a medium or a channel or a psychic at a time when no one knew much about, or accepted, these gifts, and living in a small East Texas town, she had no space to explore her experiences. She had no one to talk to… no one to share insights with. And, I’ve realized, that is enough to make you crazy.

I had another Weirdness Gone Wild experience yesterday that I don’t understand, and it’s that lack of understanding that’s making me crazy. It’s not the gift itself. So, my question is… how do you explore your gifts and not feel crazy?

During one of my grandmother’s nervous breakdowns, she antiqued her furniture burnt orange. Luckily, living in Austin, folks just think I’m a Longhorn fan. Think I’ll go paint some furniture….

Melissa

Weirdness Gone Wild! August 1, 2007

Since I've never blogged before, please bear with me while I learn this..... The purpose of the blog is to be an on-going way for folks to share their Weirdness Gone Wild experiences, questions, insights, etc. While I welcome any comments, I will edit anything inappropriate, offensive or derogatory toward another person or another person's comments.

So, for my first entry of Weirdness Gone Wild, I'll write about something happened last week.

In the 9 minutes between hitting the snooze alarm repeatedly one morning, I had an experience… I don’t know if it was a dream or what… but I wasn’t really asleep… I was gassed at a German concentration camp. There were only about 7 or 8 of us, male and female, and there was a female German officer (was there such a thing??). And she was tired of the men having all the fun of killing people, so she decided to gas some people…. Just to see what it felt like. And because she could. She wanted to feel the power. So she got a group together, and I was walking down a hallway with an elderly woman who was so sad, not that she was being gassed, but because she would never see her husband again. We were taken to a room of steel and cement that had some benches in it and we all sat around the room, waiting for the gas. I had the woman I was walking with sit next to me and put her head in my lap, and I sat stroking her hair as we waited… and that was it.

So, was it a dream or was it Memorex?? I know everyone has awakened from a dream and thought ‘wow, that seemed so real’. Well, this took that feeling one step further to a knowing that it was real. But what was real? Is it a memory? I might not know what these experiences are some times, but I know the difference between what the experiences feel like – visions, memories, traveling during meditations or during the state between sleep and wakefulness. I sure as hell don’t know what it is, but they’re not dreams….

Melissa