Love letters mirror my internal world

 

Love letters happen on the inside first

 

All the world is a mirror for me. Whatever I see and react to mirrors something in my internal universe.

When I respond positively to something, I am seeing something that stimulates my internal universe in a positive way.

When I respond negatively to something, I am seeing something that does not fit into how I think the universe should be.

Despite the fact that I can make split-second decisions on what I like or dislike, it’s actually an amazingly complex procedure to describe.

For example, what do you think of Tiger Woods? Bill Clinton? George Bush? Sarah Palin? No matter where you go in your thoughts with any of these people, you’re making all your judgments based on your internal universe and the data you have fed into it. Unless you know these people personally and intimately, you are getting all your data through filtered, mostly opinionated sources. You may make snap judgments on them without even thinking. It doesn’t matter whether they are heroic or demonic to you.

Being different is nothing to commit suicide over

As are many people, I am saddened by the recent suicides of gay teens.

Being gay is just one flavor of being different. I wish it were more commonly known and appreciated that there are so many ways to be different.

I have found it quite ironic that we who live in America and think of the US as the “land of the free” have a peculiar intolerance for people who are different. That’s a bit absurd when there are so many flavors of difference.

People young and old tend to focus on the one or two areas where they are the most different. Often they obsess on these differences and use them as a means of self-punishment.

I have had an uncanny ability in my lifetime to hang out with a lot of different people. This could include such stereotypes as nerds, gays, lesbians, fatties, polyamorists, hippies, near-death experiencers, unpopular kids at school, celebrities, artists, sex workers, religious fundamentalists, and basically the “fruits and nuts” of Northern California as the popular expression went.

Of course, to my mind stereotypes don’t mean much because everyone is unique. Everyone is a composite of different characteristics and predispositions. It’s common to lump all people together, such as all gays think alike, when clearly that’s not true.

I have spent hours upon hours in various workshops and intimate conversations with people who were greatly bothered if not traumatized by their special brand of being different. It is sad to see so many people with such diversified differences feel so similarly weird, alienated, alone, and unloved. We’re really all in the same boat, although most of us don’t recognize that.

Of course, the problem comes when we listen to other people who do not appreciate our flavor of being different. Often, the people who criticize us the most are people whose role is supposed to be a support person like a parent, priest, or teacher. This gets extended out to God and Country and is communicated to us by proxy. So, for example, if parents and preachers condemn a kid for being gay, or virtually anything else, the withhold of love and approval cuts to the core. Some religious people imply that God hates gay people and the laws often make it criminal.

With all our technology and know-how, we as a society should spend more time and attention helping people feel better about who they are, about the blessings of individuality. I think we must recognize that so much of our mass entertainment is based on deriding, ridiculing, and shaming people who are different. The superstars of news, opinion, and even religion often pit one group against another, playing demographic favorites that market research tells them is the right move. If it’s popular to bash gays, they’ll do that. If it’s popular to call near-death experiences psychotic fantasies, they’ll do that.

So much of our economy is based on using fear to stimulate buying products and services. Commercials constantly tell us that we won’t live happily (ever after) if we don’t have what they’re selling. I did not realize the extent of all the negative messages bombarding me until I quit watching commercial television and got a new perspective.

Ultimately, however, everyone who feels bad for feeling different for whatever that difference is has to find his or her own way out. That, I have come to believe, is part of the spiritual challenge we all take on. While we might easily be able to point our fingers at people who damned us, shamed us, or beat us down, the ultimate responsibility to rebound is ours alone. Don’t wait for the world to change.

Learn to appreciate the differences you have as part of your unique gifts and blessings. Being different does not make you wrong or inadequate. You are the ultimate authority on what is right for you. A Facebook friend describes her transformation this way:

“When I judged myself as being different, I made myself wrong. I was rejecting me and judging me saying I am wrong for being who I am…different. I was not loving and accepting me for being me and I felt bad, unloved, not accepted, and I didn’t feel I belonged or fit in. As I began to love and accept myself more, others changed in response to my changes in myself. Others are just a reflection of what is inside of you that they are mirroring back to you!”

When you accept and love yourself for who you are, the negative voices drop away and you find yourself attracting people into your life who get you.

On soul hugging strangers

I recently wrote a blog post on soul hugging, and something I touched on was the idea of hugging total strangers for a whole minute. Gasp! It was just a minor chord in the piece but it seems to have captured people’s imagination and I thought I would explore it further.

I wonder what the psychic impact on the world would be if we had places where it was socially acceptable to hug strangers. In my mind, the ambiance would be more spiritual like a church than like a single’s bar. Embracing strangers would be respected, even revered. Whether it was free-form or facilitated, people could visit this venue to give and receive long embraces with anybody.

Hugging as souls would hug

Hug from the soul

Have you ever hugged someone for a whole minute? A whole, long, no-cheating sixty ticks?

That might sound like a piece of cake, especially if you envision or remember hugging the love of your life or if your minute-long hugs were simply a prelude to steamier activities. But what about hugging a friend or relative or (gasp!) even a stranger for a whole minute?

I’d love to see the changes that would occur in our society if we made hugging more prominent and acceptable. I’m not referring to the fleeting body collisions many people in our culture produce for the occasion (“give” would be the wrong word here). You know, the A-frame, don’t blink or you’ll miss it phenomenon.

I’m talking about a true connection, a long pause at the traffic light of time to hold someone in your arms and be present with that person for a whole minute. Hug that person with reverence and respect and empathy. Hug as a prayer and give thanks for our existence by taking the unusual step of holding a kindred soul close.

Love is all about energy

Energize!

Sometimes I look at someone or their photo or something they have created and inside my soul I feel a warm glow of pure love. Sparkle, crackle, pop, zssst!

This glow is a hunger to bask in that person’s energy. I see something in them I want to experience. Maybe it is a loving look in their eyes. Maybe it is the brilliance of their creative mind as shown in something they wrote or drew or painted or photographed.  Maybe it is something they said or something they reflected in an action they took, which may be something small like smiling kindly at a lonely stranger or big like riveting millions with miracles.

Love is energy. When you feel a burst of it, it’s like having a power snack. It’s a wave of vitality sweeping through you. You instantly feel uplifted, inspired, and empowered.

Yet in this dualistic world of good and evil, black and white, we are frequently conditioned to think that love is nothing if it is not shared. If we feel love and cannot share it, we are trained to push back on positive feelings with negative thoughts and “appropriate” (this era’s big buzz word) behavioral modifications. For me that generally means that I shut down, at least insofar as my public behavior goes.

The precious gem of true friendship

Friendship is the bridge to another soul

Whenever I see It’s a Wonderful Life and get to the ending that never fails to make me teary-eyed, despite knowing exactly what’s coming, I still find myself both nodding and cringing at the part about no man is a failure who has friends. It tugs at my heart because close friendships have been rare in my life.

How do I explain this? How do I rationalize this? Most important, how do I overcome it?

The idea of true friendship has always been powerful for me, yet ever since encountering the famous sentence “Let’s just be friends” from girls back in high school, I recognized that as a culture we don’t think much of the institution of friends. “Just friends” is an insult, a buy-down, a limiting of a relationship. But then “more than friends” usually means becoming lovers and in a strange way, sex sometimes inhibits intimacy. Lovers frequently keep secrets from one another as a strategy for not rocking the emotional boat with confessions or sharing their vulnerabilities. The result is that lovers are often less intimate than friends and the sex that lovers have is often more like acting in a movie than being real.

Smiling as a gift of spiritual beauty

Send a smile as a gift of spiritual love

Well over a decade ago, I was walking around San Francisco down by the wharf area. My eyes were drawn to a woman with a shaved head who was being pushed in her wheelchair. I did not want to stare nor be impolite, but the sight of a woman with a shaved head was still unusual enough to compel my attention.

Before I could tear my eyes away, she looked up and caught me gawking. Rather than scowling or grimacing, she gave birth to the most glorious smile. I felt as if I had been zapped by a hot shower of love energy.

There were no words exchanged between us. The truth is that I had been melted on the spot and was too shell-shocked to say anything. I suspect that I had been looking at her with something like pity and she pulled a quick reversal, giving me a smile that would warm me whenever I thought about it for years to come.

Thoughts on falling in love (even if it’s for five minutes)

Loving you is easy

Part One

I have a personality something like a nice mellow golden retriever. I quite simply love to love. Love to love you, Baby. Yeah.

If I had my way, I would openly love anyone. I’m aware how unrealistic that is on our troubled planet, but in my dream world, loving openly, freely, wildly, and enthusiastically would be a brilliant way to live. I have a natural inclination to look for the good in people; it simply feels better to me to look for good than to look for bad.

I think it would be great not to have to censor my attraction for people. If I liked something about someone I would like to just say so. I could talk about anything without filtering for political correctness or worrying how the other person might misinterpret my words.

Can I tell you how great you are?

I am a big believer in delivering positive reinforcement. I like to give people compliments for free, no strings attached.

I love receiving nice words, too. I receive a delicious blast of energy when someone says something nice about me, especially when the comments are unsolicited and heartfelt. Especially when they are given as candies for the mind, not intended to be followed by a sales pitch or a demand disguised as a request.

I love giving unsolicited compliments and yet I also fear giving them. My social environment conditioned me to be very concerned about what people think. I was trained that many people use compliments as a technique for buttering up someone for a come-on, and I didn’t want my sweet words to be construed as that.