Beloved

I lay awake in the wee hours this morning, unable to go back to sleep. This is a fairly regular occurrence for me at this age. Perhaps aging is part of it, but also perhaps decades of not being able to sleep because of abuse, trauma and loss set a hard pattern after nearly 60 years. Now it’s different. It isn’t waking up in terror or grief, it’s about waking up and realizing I’m listening to something else. Something that feels more like a guide, a help, something intuitive, reaffirming and beautiful. These sleepless portions of the night are now messages, and the messages always have such clarity and reassurance that I can’t be frustrated about losing any sleep. They are messages of love. What a difference that is from the dark decades.

I stopped praying a long time ago. I couldn’t believe in a god that was defined as just another hateful human. God loved that person, hated this person, and I lived in terror of what that vengeful god would do to me. As if I hadn’t suffered enough already. The trauma and losses were too much for me and they literally drove me insane. I was on all kinds of medications including psychotropics leading up to my suicide attempt in 2005. (I am no longer on any medications for mood stabilization, and have not been since the latter part of 2005.) It wasn’t until after that event with years and years of deep counseling that I could finally let go of god and everything I was taught to believe and finally fall into a universe that I discovered was not only benevolent but absolute love. As I forgave and healed, I discovered that love is only two-dimensional until there is forgiveness. With forgiveness, there is grace. Grace is simply everything that is impossible for us to undo, correct, to have or obtain but still, somehow it happens. It’s impossible for us because we are so finite, so fragile and unknowingly ignorant, unable to comprehend the depth and height. I discovered that as I embraced forgiveness and love, love doesn’t simply become three-dimensional, love fills every dimension, every particle, everything until it is all love. That means you don’t have to look for love, you have the choice to become love. That’s a paradigm shift that blew my mind. The paradox is simply that we have a choice to become love or to pretend that there is something else. When we pretend there is something else other than love, we wander. We disconnect from ourselves and our source and we get lost. Actually, paradoxically, we’re supposed to wander. We’re supposed to go and discover, and create, test boundaries, and get lost, and then we’re supposed to feel the loss and reconnect with ourselves first, and then grace, always on time, connects us to our benevolent, loving universe and we whole again. It’s designed this way. We are not just sinners looking for forgiveness. We are creators, explorers testing everything, testing and pushing our bodies and our minds to break new ground. To feel new things, to fill voids, to be on the leading edge of human experience. If that doesn’t describe the mess of our world and civilization, I don’t know what does. Of course, there are going to be terribly tragic things that happen. Things go wrong in order for us to learn to make them right. How could we gain the understanding or knowledge otherwise? If god handed all this to us, we’d have no experience with it and it would be useless to us because we would not be able to comprehend the gift. We have to do it for ourselves. But experience brings comprehension and understanding. We need the contrasts of light and dark in order to understand the power of both. Without contrast, we lose options to create and discover.  

That’s my take on it. That’s my experience. And because it is my experience, no one else’s will be identical to mine. Opinions of my experience don’t matter because I own them. They are singular to me.

As I’ve healed and these sleepless portions of my night became more friendly than frustrating, I began to talk to Beloved. I couldn’t talk to god. I have enough issues with authoritarian commands and definitions that god is not an option. So as I listen to the Beyond I made a decision that for me I needed to name it something and that something is Beloved. And they are complete and absolute love. They. I don’t know why it’s “They” but it is. Mostly They don’t answer, and I just do my talking and meditating with them and I get a few new ideas. I get connected and I’m able to go about my day and choose kindness and love rather than spew some awful, knee-jerk response to all this messy human condition.

I’ve had long talks with my sister, Evelyn. She’s a “woo-woo” gal and I’m a “woo-woo” guy. We get each other. I’ve questioned whether I’m completely bat-shit cray-cray many times, and as I’ve told Evelyn my concern she basically said that all humans need a mythology. We call it religion, but in reality, it’s a mythology. The reason is simple: if we don’t connect to something greater than ourselves, we have no reason to discover and become our best selves. We descend into a self-made hell and treat ourselves and others with hate and contempt because there is no purpose or reason to do anything else. But a mythology, a reason to discover and become our best self is the highest in us. It’s a way to connect the dots that don’t make sense. Without a mythology or religion, it’s not that everything happens for a reason, it’s just that everything happens. And it makes no sense. But with a mythology, there is a reason for things that happen. We connect the dots and life has purpose and meaning and we gain understanding. I don’t know that there anything more beautiful in the entire universe than to discover that there is meaning and purpose behind everything, and it’s all based in love. As I expressed my concern about whether or not I’m making all this up she said basically that who cares if you’re making it up? If it’s bringing you healing, love and connection with your planet, your human family and the universe, isn’t that what you’ve hoped for all these decades? And you know what? I suddenly realized how beautiful it is to honor other people’s journey, to love them on their path, to let them have the joy of their own mythology or religion, or whatever it is, and become love on the journey. My journey. Their journey. Our journey. I no longer worry if there is a god or if Jesus died for my sins. The symbols and meaning of all these things really are beautiful. So I have no regrets for being so religious that I was obligated to adhere to and enforce every bit of religious doctrine whether I agreed with it or not. I can look at the beauty of a loving god sending someone like Jesus to offer us atonement and grace, and I can still weep my tears of gratitude.

When I wake, it’s usually between 3 am and 5 am. Sometimes I can fall back to sleep.  Not this time. I asked Beloved if it was time to write about this and there was nothing. But I felt a smile. That’s all it was. Who cares if I’m making this stuff up? I’m more sane, happier, more at peace, and I treat others with kindness and love. If I’m batshit cray-cray, then this is the only way to live for me. And as I imagine any of you out there reading this, I imagine me smiling at you, sending you love, near or far.

Inspiration, Play, and Failure Bring Success

To me, the most critical elements of success are inspiration, play, and failure. Not drive, not ambition, not an insane list of unachievable goals. Just inspiration, play, and failure. We are not efficient machines. We are humans. We have good days and bad days, productive ones, and unproductive ones. Pushing too hard, making unachievable goals, and constant drive without built-in rest will kill success quicker than anything else I know. And when you hit burnout, it’s relaxation and play that will make things right again, giving inspiration a chance to return. When we “work” we refer to the adult drudgery of duty and obligation, usually for money. But it’s play that will help us discover, experiment, learn, and progress.

Think about it: when a child experiments and learns, it’s called play. And it’s play that leads to discovery, inspiration, and those remarkable “aha” moments that lead to success. When children play, they learn about the world they live in. They learn about everything around them. They learn about relationships that not only include people, but they also learn about form, balance, design, space and proportion, light, dark and color and so much more. They are experiencing, and therefore, there is no failure, and they create and achieve at their level. They are wildly creative, uninhibited and the world is a canvas on which to paint their experiences.

As adults, we have been lead to believe that play is reserved for children. Adults rarely even refer to “play” except in association with children’s behavior. Play, then, by inference, is childish. Work has replaced play for adults. Therefore, if work is not “success,” it’s “failure.” Note how these two words are directly associated with “work” but not “play.” I think this is a perfect example of a very bad perception which society has created and embraced.

I taught piano lessons for over two decades. I taught many ages, including several adults. The students who had the most difficult time finding any joy at the piano were teenagers and adults who were driven to succeed, and could not tolerate making any kind of mistake (which they believed was failure). I remember one particular student who often arrived with furrowed brow, who tormented the piano. However, she would play perfectly many times, despite her harsh style. But even then her performance was mechanical and somewhat lifeless. She played ferociously no matter what the mood of the piece was. She finally admitted her fear of failing to please me which made her so tense that her muscles would only allow her to play as if she were attacking the keyboard. Finally, it dawned on me what to say to her:

“Thank you for working the piano. But we call it playing the piano for a reason. Please don’t work the piano. Please play it.”

I asked her to close her eyes and see herself playing this beautiful piece she chose, removing me from that picture altogether. After a minute or two, she opened her eyes and began playing. She was utterly amazed at the transformation of music she created. It came alive to her! The missing puzzle piece in her music was the rediscovery of play. The piano sang with emotion and feeling. Even when her playing wasn’t perfect, none of the beauty of her performance was minimized. Fear of failure was eliminated.

Play restored her joy. Failure no longer existed for her because she was playing. The stress of performing disappeared.

Did you know it’s actually failure that we need most (despite that we think we need success the most)? We fear and despise failure. We think it makes us look bad. Think about that last sentence. We don’t want to look bad because it’s embarrassing and we don’t want to feel or appear to be incapable. But that idea is always rooted in our insecurities. It’s because 
of or insecurities that we believe that “failure” is negative. In truth, even if we do fail, every failure is a lesson, a furthering of our education, a course correction pointing us back to inspiration with a modified outlook and a slight change in direction. That slight change of direction is the revolution in your life that both frightens and exhilarates you. Embrace it.