Chaotic Energies: Personal Choice and Responsibility through Meditation

Over the past many years I’ve read books and articles and listened to many audio presentations by Pema Chodron, Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher, now 84 years old. I make efforts for myself to understand and practice her teachings. I have used her practices of realizing our shared humanity of harmony and chaos in my work with individuals as a mental health therapist and as a Reiki practitioner.

I’m again listening to her audio “Coming Closer to Ourselves” (please see reference below) I would like to share my thoughts and recommendations for support with chaotic energies you might be feeling as an individual or as part of a collective experience of discomfort and distress. I am feeling high levels of both these types of energies at this time. I find I need lots of space between tasks for quiet and calm. Meditative moments of quietness. How I make decisions about my day are often about choices that are less active rather than more. Because I’ve found myself more focused, with a feeling of necessity, on the tragedy and chaos of world events and political wrangling causing internal distress in me. I recognize it as levels of a form of “ubiquitous nervousness”, a term Pema refers to in her teachings. Therefore, I’ve decided to review some personal practices that have been helpful to me and share them.

Pema’s gentleness is refreshing, as is her intelligence and humor, as she guides you to understanding the practice of meditation and how to be gentle and kind with yourself by accepting yourself just as you are right now. Her teachings as a Buddhist nun and teacher of Buddhism are about practicing meditation and bringing or settling into and staying with yourself with honesty. Developing clarity and courage as you become aware of your own feelings and thoughts at a deeper level through meditation and reflection. Pema guides us to consider being open to the harmony and chaos within and learning to say no as you learn to understand and stay with negative emotions as just energy. Nothing to do beyond noticing and being curious of your thoughts and emotions to whatever arises and letting them go as a practice of being with the engery within, and not as a solution necessarily.

I just want to say here as a Baha'i for fifty years now, I began studying the Baha'i Writings in 1974. There is a teaching that states, "One hour of reflection is worth 70 years of pious worship." (Bahá’u’lláh, The Kitáb-i-Iqan, p. 238). There is no direction on how or if one should meditate in the Baha'i Writings. I have learned that I need some guidance in understanding myself as it relates to meditation, and my path to my own spiritual practices and development. In the book, Paris Talks, a question was posed "What is meditation in reality and how do we meditate? ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains the process in simple and clear terms: "It is an axiomatic fact," says He, "that while you meditate you are speaking with your spirit. In that state of mind you put certain questions to your spirit and the spirit answers: the light breaks forth and the reality is revealed. You cannot apply the name ‘man’ to any being void of this faculty of meditation; without it he would be a mere animal, lower than the beasts." ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris talks, pg 174-175.

So as I understand it, in learning meditation as it relates to one’s self emotionally and spiritually Pema states, “Emotions are the combination of energy and thought. You let the thoughts go and what’s left is energy. This is the practice, not the solution, but the practice of meditation”. I recommend studying her work, resources are below. In my opinion her teachings on the practice of meditation and her guidance in general can be considered a self care choice. One way to define this principle and practice of choosing a meditation practice of self care is to consider it as choosing to take a “five step self time out”. We write about this on our website at www.selftimeout.org. As I become aware of the struggle and discomfort in my body, I can choose to reflect and ask myself, what do I need? I can ask, are my choices in this moment life giving and confirming or are they life threatening and full of fear, anger or confusion? Very subtle meditative question to sitting down and moving closer to yourself.

The guidance then becomes more about learning to not struggle with the uncomfortable feelings of push and pull, for and against, the perceptions of the natural dualistic thinking of the mind, but of actually discovering a curiosity about myself. Do my choices bring comfort or escalation within myself and my relationships with others? The insight of noticing my feelings and needs through meditation is a gentle shift of awareness. As uncomfortable as it might feel, it’s only energy. I have more information to choose to make a plan to take care of myself, to be with myself by listening to my feelings and needs, this shift helps me to choose better self care.

This is what I am feeling and ever learning and why I feel the need to share these spiritual principles as tools for self care once again and at this moment in time. I believe we need to each take personal responsibility to become aware of and awake to this rapid and increasing human transformation that feels like mass chaos, now, together, as a process of healing for ourselves and our families and communities, and ultimately as a pathway to the healing of our Mother Earth.

Here are a few resources to study her work:

The particular audio is https://www.soundstrue.com/products/coming-closer-to-ourselves (from Sounds True publications, soundstrue.com, which I love.)

Another talk from Sounds True is: “Unconditional Confidence, Instructions for Meeting any Experience with Trust and Courage.”

There are utubes you can listen to that are free when you Google her name.

She has written many books. One of her books I’ve found very helpful over the years is “The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness.”

I suggest reading any of her articles in the magazine, Lions Roar. The most interesting current article of Pema’s is: https://www.lionsroar.com/from-suffering-to-awakening-3-ways-to-transform-your-emotions/ you may need to create a free account.

Finally often in Pema Chodron’s talks she will refer you to her recommendations for readings that led her to becoming a Buddhist nun and one of the main writings and authors she refers to is on the subject of “negative negativity”. One such writing is:

https://www.thezengateway.com/culture/choegyam-trungpa-working-with-negativity

Photo at the top is of Deception Pass, Salish Sea the Summer of 2017. Homelands of the Coast Salish People.

Photo at the bottom is of the Quileute River as it runs into Rialto Beach the Summer of 2019. Homelands of the Quileute Tribe.

taken

7/04/24 “Turn away from the latest distractions and come home.”

NOTE: Today is July 4, 2024. I am updating this writing from June 25th and sharing some further insights. Originally written to share adout summer and how I now need to protect myself from the sun with a hat due to my age. The pretty hat here is a gift from my beloved husband♥

I'm not able to celebrate Independance Day with much joy today. Im freightened because of the direction we are going right now. I am very cognizant of the responsibility each and everyone of us has at this time to stay alert and build community wherever we can that is safe and nurturing and healthy for our children and grandchildren!

Therefore, I am going to try and make since of a few things for myself with my updated writing today about what I am feeling at this moment in time after the last few years of the many changes that have occurred in my life.

2021 was the first year of our semi-retirement (fully retired) at the end of June in 2022. It coincided with the selling of our home and business of 24 years and our move to Sudden Valley which occurred in December of 2020. The plan to move started with my back going out for the first time in my life and the realization that we could not care for a three story house and business on a 1/4 acre lot any longer. We put our house up for sale and it sold in three weeks. There were very few homes for sale that would give us the freedom to "age in place" so we began looking at condomniums. They were few and far between as well. We found one we liked and in just two months we had put our home up for sale and moved to our new place.

Well the first few months were very difficult. I was still healing, could not drive yet and the move had exhausted us to say the least and it occurred during covid. The year of 2021 was also the first heat dome I'd ever experienced. After the heat dome experience in 2021 my husband and I decided to use some of our retiremnent funds to have heat pumps installed in three of the rooms of our new condominium. We were put on a waiting list and finally in the spring of 2022 we had air conditioning and a much more economical heating system. The electricity and heating system had gone out five separate times in the winter of our first three months and it was very costly at that. With only electric heat, when it went out it got pretty cold after eight hours on a snowy day. So to offset no heat at all we used more of our retirement savings to have a gas fireplace installed so we had heat when the electricity went out. We learned quickly that the electricity going out in Sudden Valley was an all too common experience in the winter.

I am updating my writing today to gain focus on my life at this point, right now. Maybe my experiences and story of my life in general might be helpful to others. For example, recently in the past year I've been noticing how my diet effects inflammation in my body and how I'm gaining weight, which has never been an issue for me before the age of 70. I will write more about how I am trying to manage this issue in a later post.

Here then is the little updated vignette about how I needed to change how I spend time in the sun came about.

Before my seventies the warm weather and even very hot sun was never much of an issue for me. I love the sun! Here in the PNW we sun worshipers gravitate to any sun we can get. I was raised in Northern California from the time I was 2 1/2. My mother is from Colorado and my father, who was born in New Mexico, was raised in the pan handle of Dalhart, Texas where I was born. When I moved to the PNW the climate was very different and while I love it here and really do like the rain, I quite enjoy the sun, the smells of the dry land and the heat of the day.

Climate change has changed much in the way I believe we need to choose to take care of our Mother Earth and ourselves. Tracey Chapman writes in her song, The Rape of the Earth, "The sun is hotter than ever before," and that was in 1995, from her New Beginnings album. Long time big fan of all of her music! So anyway, on the day the amount of time I spend in the full sun, even in the PNW changed, I really did not realize the damage to my skin until the next day. I've learned that because my skin is thinning, I burn more easily. When we went to Bowman Bay on my birthday at the end of May in 2022, I did not wear a hat all the time and I was surprised the next day to discover that my face had sun burned. My forehead and nose later peeled and my lips burned causing blisters that took over two weeks to heal. Very unusual for me. So...Wearing a hat is a must! Sunscreen of course. New ways to consider self care.

The other thing I noticed is how easily the heat effects my body in general. In June of 2021 when we learned the heat dome was coming we went shopping for cooling fans at the hardware store. This was still during covid remember and we did not go inside stores at all or on any regular basis. We needed to make sure we had plenty of food, fruits and veggies and ingredients easily prepared for simple protein meals. With no ice maker I made ice all week filling up the one tray we had, while making batches of green tea to keep in the fridge. I gave Chuck a haircut at his request! Really not sure what the expected and unprecedented 95-105 degrees over the next few days would be for us here. We learned we could not go for walks after trying to go out in 90 degree heat. We limited the times of days we chose to walk. Not something we would have ever considered in the past.

Somewhere too there is much to share about what happened in 2023 and the first six months of 2024, however Im still processing the last year and a half which as I think about it has been stable finally and continues to be filled with blessings and grace from God as we build friendships in our new community while at the same time continue to nurture ourselves and family and long time previous friends ♥ I have done quite a bit of writing recently and getting back to writing on my blog this last year or so has been very inspiring for me and does actually reflect my thoughts on life over the last year and a half.

While I now believe that these experiences might be about the thinning of my skin as I age, along with the many transitions of what it really means to slow down and do better self care as we practice aging in place, my gravest concerns are the choices we make together to take care of each other. It is of course about Global 🌎 Warming and what we need to understand about our choices...which ARE real...all of it is frightfully real and it is certainly not business as usual...by celebrating our freedom with out conscious awareness of what we are all facing. Now. At this time in our lives!

We each have a responsibility to ourselves, to each other, to the least among us, to our children and grandchildren and to all of humanity to stand for the right and freedom of choice to continue to build a peaceful society. A coalition of peace built on strength that nurtures each other in good and caring ways that were taught to us by our ancestors from their sacrifices...as we nurture and care and heal our blessed home...Our Mother Earth. Our collective community. A community free from anti bias retoric and brutal hatred and malice and violence at every single turn and corner. Peace to live in a non-violent society.

This is what The Grandmothers mean in their message: "Turn away from the latest distractions and come home."

I dedicate this writing today to all my beloved friends who are grandmothers and all I do not yet know who are standing strong in their heart power of home for themselves, their families, and humanity. Thank you for calling me back home today♥

The Light at Our Door

New mothers, mothers in delight, mothers missing their own, yearning a loss beyond words.

Grandmother’s heavy load with feelings of sorrow untold. Mother’s gone before us.

Those who are childless mothering the ever constant needs of humanity through birthing yourselves with your timeless gifts to the world.

We are here.

With deep joy for all of our children, each and every one.

We hold heartbreak, unmistakable in its rage. Yet we hold no regret.

We smile eternal at the memories and blessings that we hold in our hearts for our dear ones.

We are mothers holding Light for our sacred ones, wherever they might be...whether far off and away or traveling with the stars.

We know you, we feel your presence deep and close by and listen to your precious messages with our hearts.

Whether close enough to touch and to laugh and hold or at the distance of a day.

Our love for our children is never a burden, and yet we might feel burdened, while in our hearts we are never alone.

We carry you always, even when we know it’s time to let you go.

Our children, all children, are gifts of wisdom that grows within us each and every one.

Lifting us, teaching us, honoring us with each step taken along the way.

Each door that’s opened, each road traveled, each heartbreak you hold, each victory that unfolds,

our hearts carry abundant joy and love beyond measure flowing eternal, an endless treasure.

Photo taken 5/7/2024.

Not Without Choosing

Let’s not Forget. Each day is a Ceremony. Each day is Holy. Healing continues through Awareness. The Earth Day Celebrations are not over. Planting seeds is Eternal. Our ancestral Grandmothers sewed them into the hems of their skirts. Over seas, through famine, and land migration…forced against their will. Yet they knew. Healing is an Act of Resistance.

Not Without Choosing.

Taught from one generation to the next. Prayers for Peace and Reconciliation must carry forward with each heart, into each new day. Through all our actions toward each other.

In all we choose to be.

Astrology says we are in a New Day. New Energy. Higher Consciousness is showering.

Strong upon us.

Ancient Indigenous Prophecy…is Now they say.

Full Pink Moon today. Pluto aligned with Uranus. Reflection, Meditation, Realignment.

Each day is a Ceremony of Healing.

Not Without Choosing.

Connie Bonner-Britt. Spoo-Pi-Aikii, Turtle Woman. 4/23/24

My Blakfeet name was gifted to me by my Blackfeet sister, Cheryl Ibarra, Pikuni Aakii, Piegan Woman. It was in the Spring of 1998. We drove from Anacortes, Washington to Cheryl's home land on the Blackfeet reservation, in Browning, Montana. We traveled to visit Cheryl's mother, Margy. During those days of visiting, Margy adopted me as her daughter, and Cheryl and her two young daughters gifted me my name.

Photo taken March 3, 2023.

Whatcom Lake, Sudden Valley, WA.

Touching into The Soul

When I was in my twenties I bought Anis Nin's book "In Favor of the Sensitive Man, and Other Essays", 1976. Her writing introduced me to Rainer Maria Rilke"Letters to a Young Poet", and Otto Rank, "Truth and Reality, a Life History of the Human Will." I went to the library to find their work. This was during the time when I was studying the writings and theories of the pedagogy of Dr Maria Montessori for my teaching certification. My reading and insights gave me an understanding of my souls reality and my responsibility to my soul development. At that time I also was studying an Eastern Yogi philosophy book I found in a thrift store, "Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy", by Yogi Ramacharaka, 1931. I was taking transcendental meditation classes and in a transformational wilderness of the unconsciousness and on my own, often making poor choices and not fully taking personal responsibility for the consequences. Role models at this level of spiritual development were only in books for me at that time. The reality of transformation, the work of the soul, the development of self.

This morning I came across some writing that brought back these memories of my life as a young woman and my studies that gave insight and purpose to my many confusions of life that I was experiencing at the time. A process that is ever on going from one season of life to the next.

Here I am now, in the season of my elder years and for me, right now, over the last weeks and months, I have been sharing the mystery of life's confusions and gifts with my husband and friends. We have been sharing soulful insights trying to grapple with the tragedy of the wars of humanities creation, along side the joy and beauty of nature during this blossoming spring. Sharing life's gifts, and our individual and collective responsibilities.

Feeling thankful for trusting relationships and the memories of past and current soul work that continues through the seasons of my life. Like a flowing body of water that changes course and rushes in, creatng new streams. Streams of soul consciousness.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Rainer Maria Rilke

"For the only therapy is life. The patient must learn to live, to live with his split, his conflict, his ambivalence, which no therapy can take away, for if it could, it would take with it the actual spring of life."

Otto Rank

God’s Abundant Grace

For the last week we have been cleaning and rebuilding these three small framed garden beds. The surrounding ones are part of the community garden we have joined. In December 2020 we sold our beautiful three story home of 23 years that we purchased in 1999, the year we were married. It was built in 1926 and we were constantly upgrading and doing repairs and creating more beauty to our beautiful garden areas. We loved it! Where for all those years we served hundreds of individuals and families together as licensed mental health counselors, in the business space we created in the lower portion of our home, "Skagit Family Study Center" and our art gallery, "Ullulate Gallery." Where over those years our children and all six of our grandchildren have joyfully visited many, many times and both of our parents joined us together in celebration. In 2020 the pandemic was changing everthing for everyone. We had both turned 72 that year, me in May and Chuck in October. Our health needs were changing.

It was time to retire. We bought a one story condominium. I put us on a waiting list in February of 2021, to be a part of the community garden around the corner from us and along Lake Whatcom. We were 24 on the list. As we settled in it took a couple of years to adjust. Especially during the pandemic. Loosing close friends to covid, and this past June, loosing Chuck's brother to lung cancer, has been daunting for the family. In the last few months Chuck has begun to prioritize his years of poetry writing, preforming and media magic into his own utube site: "Chuck Britt Poems, Into The Neuron Woods". It's wonderful to witness!

To continue the community garden story...I bugged the lead person in charge of the list every so often and after three years we came to the top in January, 2024! We completed all the necessary paper work, agreeing to three pages of rules and paid the minimal annual dues. Since then we have cleaned the three unkept beds we were given, removed the old fallen fencing and completely rebuilt the framing. It's been very difficult work. We are focusing on safety for ourselves as we work. This week we are building fencing and a gate to keep away the critters. This morning I came across a piece of writing by Emerson. It reminded me to notice the blessings of the day as it ends and not let the hard work get in the way of the beauty of the deer wandering around our place and the redwing black birds singing along side of us as we work on our garden space together. Chuck said the sound of their singing is like listening to good jazz. Then there is the sound of the beautiful creek flowing along the community garden into Lake Whatcom. And just today we witnessed two magnificent great blue herons flying into the huge fir tree to greet us as we entered the garden to start our day.

After 25 years of marriage we continue to be filled with the beauty of God's abundant grace!

Here is the writing by Emerson that inspired me.

Finish Every Day

"Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day for all that is good and fair. It is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the rotten yesterdays." Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 2, 1836 - 1841

Blocks of Time

Over this past winter I have been creating these quilt block hangings from quilt blocks made by grandmother, Deedee mom, Audrey Mae Bonner. My grandmother was a quilt maker and these blocks were part of her precious belongings passed on to me by my father after she passed away September 6, 1976. She was born on July 17, 1902 in Argos, Indiana. She was 74 years old when she passed away in Santa Clara, California, where she had lived for many years. My last visit with her was in early 1973, before traveling to Anacortes, Washington, where I would live and raise my children for the next 20 plus years. Deedee mom had just returned from the hospital and I and my two young babies, ages nine months and three years, stayed with her for about a month.

Now that I am fully retired and turning 76 next month, I have found creative time to honor her quilt blocks by framing them in various colors of fabrics. Her quilt blocks here are hand stitched. The white muslin fabrics are made from flour sacks she would save. As a child and young adult I learned to sew and quilt from her. These hangings have been gifted to family members.