Rise

The Sacred Middle

Today’s reflection is about daily practices and the impact they can have on our lives.

I’ve been all over the map with mine trying different things. Sometimes more strict and prescribed, other times nothing formal at all. Just being present and seeing what unfolds with the day. Sometimes I’ve focused more on my physical body and yoga postures and loved it and other times it felt like the last thing I needed so I rested.

Let’s zoom out and today I’d just like to share a few reflections and ideas that have really helped me see things differently and may help you too, especially if you are struggling to keep up a consistent practice even though it’s something you think you’d like to try.

I love the time of day, right before sunrise or right after sunset when the sky turns that pinkish hue, then an orangey red. I took this photo last month on Georgian Bay just before sunrise.

It was so breathtakingly beautiful.

In a sense, it may not be the main event, but it reminds me that sometimes it seems to be the temporary or edge states, the beautiful and sometimes painful transitions in our own lives that often get overlooked where we can find a new way of being and a new kind of freedom we didn’t even know was possible.

That liminal twilight space that leaves us feeling like we’re in the in-between. Empty of one but not yet full of another.

Living in the act between our awakening and our ability to surrender.

It’s neither day nor night.

It’s just now.

It’s the middle place. Although, maybe the middle is the wrong word because is there anywhere worse to sit on an airplane?

This in-between place feels different than being in the middle seat of a commercial flight. You don’t feel trapped but like a loosening or a more expansive feeling filled with possibility. Joy. Peace. Contentment. You’re not trying or wishing to get somewhere else, you feel right at home and exactly where you want to be in a potent process of becoming.

I’ve observed over the years when I do repetitive morning practices my life seems to flow a bit better. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I feel more energetically on top of things. I’m less reactive and more patient and so they’ve become something I look forward to in the same way we can look forward to going for a run or doing yoga for the feeling we know we’ll feel afterward.

I even look forward to getting up out of bed. A warm drink, or bringing my husband one in bed. Sitting by a lamp or candlelight and reading something that inspires me.

When life gets difficult I either double down or sometimes let them slide. When I’m able to keep them a priority they remind me of who I really am. What I am. Why I’m here.

I feel free.

When I don’t make time or other things or people come first in my life, I’ve observed that very often the wheels come off by mid-afternoon. I forget who I am and I start identifying with my thinking and for lack of a better word I just forget.

I get caught up in the drama. It’s like everything in my own mind becomes real, the thoughts ARE me, not just a helpful part of an ancient and evolving biology to help me prioritize and create through life. I attach. I suffer.

When the pressure is off, it feels like a call to beauty.

The other thing I’ve observed is that when I miss a few days it begins to feel like a chore. I feel resistance.

Often now I wake up at dawn at the same time without setting an alarm feeling fully rested and sometimes even earlier than planned.

I’ve also noticed that it seems to me to be MUCH easier to do things when they are aligned with us.

At this stage in my life, anything to do with God is my jam. Does that seem boring to you? To me, it’s so exciting but I can’t show you a picture it’s just my FAVORITE THING in the world to do. I feel so compelled it’s all I want to do is understand who we are and why we’re here.

For my husband, it’s running or doing something active and trying new things. Last week with a friend he ran 50km on the trails at Hardwood Hills then drove down to North Carolina to Cape Hatteras to learn how to kite surf with friends. He loves it! it’s HIS jam…look, he’s even smiling and it’s raining. (He’s on the right). He’s often out the door before 6 am with his runners laced up meeting friends to run up the mountain.

When he doesn’t, he feels it. I hope he doesn’t mind my saying this but may be a bit irritable sometimes, and less patient with work, traffic, and things get to him. When he does it’s like he’s energized, has a sparkle, and is living fully. He’s himself.

It’s not that it’s easy always to do what we love. Scott had to drive 15 hours yesterday to get himself to the airport to be in Ottawa today for meetings.

Honesty, if I had to get up to go and run hill repeats these days I’d probably want to hide under my covers. There was a time that I did want to do that and it was easier to get up, I HAD super exciting physical goals which fired me up, so I showed up and met up with friends enthusiastically.

The word enthusiasm is embedded with the word entheos which means God. The divine essence that is flowing through you when you are jazzed up about something is why we all love listening to someone when they’re excited and passionate. It feels like they are tapping into a field of potential just not available to us in our common hour thinking state. It feels contagious and now we know scientifically that it is.

The other things I’ve struggled to do or implement may not be for me right now.

Maybe they were at one stage of my life, or they may be down the road, but I’m happy to let them go for now to have more time to do what I love with my days at this moment and follow the clues from there.

It reminds me a bit of the concept of using a “Drishti” as it’s called in Sanskrit. It’s a gazeless gaze like you have a focal point and you’re aiming for something but you’re not dominantly staring it down and taking no prisoners. It’s less intense and more of a softening and it makes it easier to find your balance. It’s a means for developing concentrated intention.

Less force and fight. Less resistance.

It also reminds me of a flying term that pilots use “Fly loose”. When turbulence is hit the flying instructor will advise that if you tighten your group on the yoke, you reduce the aerodynamics of your airplane.

How can that be?

And yet it’s the same with life. We can make our own flights through life less safe, less stable, and much less steady when we constrict and force. When we’re anxious or we’re somewhere doing something we don’t want to do or with people, we don’t want to be with.

So how do we relax? What if we’re unhappy or miserable with our circumstances and they are not going to change in the near future? Don’t we need to do more to fix how we feel?

How DO we change?

How can we possibly find some peace and make a fresh start?

Today I’d like to reflect a bit more on our daily rituals, routines, and practices in this light that can help us support these changes.

I recently read a poem by Seamus Heaney called "Scaffolding". It dawned on me the importance of scaffolding our days with structure and then building our life from the safety of that structure. We erect them or bookend our days with these sacred rituals so that, like masons, we can build a solid life. At first, the structural support is there to ensure a sturdy structure but it all comes down when the job is done. It’s like a temporary hand to help us get the job done. We won’t slip, our ladder is secure and we can reach new heights that never would have been possible without it.

A good structure to our days doesn’t mean we’re not intuitive. We’re MORE intuitive because we live in a society and culture where most of us are well aware that silence is becoming more and more challenging for us to find. To hear that still small voice.

Structure and discipline get a bad rap but they aren’t bad words. I’ve heard Mary Oliver point out in interviews that even good poems have structure and the structure of a poem enables you to be free to be creative inside that structure. She was teaching this concept as an exercise with her course takers and in helping them understand this concept she ended up writing Wild Geese one of her most famous poems. She would argue that it takes LESS effort to create poetry or art with a structure in place. We can be quiet and feel safe and held which allows us to sink into the deeper unseen dimensions inside of ourselves.

Any of us that have raised kids and a regular bedtime routine or pets have seen this magical energy at work in our lives. My friend Sarah Hepburn recently wrote a beautiful reflective little book called Walking Forward and she made me belly laugh at a story where she was trying to drive her kids home and keep them awake for naptime and would go to great lengths and resorted to tickling their toes, singing at the top of her lungs and eventually tossing cheerios at them because I have TOTALLY done that!

We all know the power of a routine in our lives.

And newsflash you really don’t have to get the worms to live a good life. I personally do it, but it’s just not for everyone and that’s okay. It also wasn’t always the case for me so I can see that we’re all in a process of evolution.

Apparently, Elon Musk goes to bed at 3 am and Descartes wasn’t a morning person either.

Benjamin Franklin rose at 5 am.

James Joyce at 10 am.

Even Tim Ferris Mr. life hacker himself gets up at 9-10 am.

You don’t need to do something that’s not aligned with your own rhythms including rise at dawn if it’s not your time to shine.

To be perfectly honest, it’s something I’ve personally struggled with on and off for most of my life, especially in the evenings. I know how great meditating and breathwork feels in the morning and yet sometimes I’d rather just watch Ted Lasso on the couch with my husband or go and watch the sunset. If I lived alone maybe it would be easier, or maybe it wouldn’t because my mind wants to bookend my days but the deeper part of me really doesn’t.

Toda, I feel compassion for it all. The wanting and the not getting.

If I’m being honest, I’m really writing this for myself today. I’ve slipped away from myself in the past few weeks and I’ve been getting in my own way and feeling it. I just needed to gently remind myself of the bigger picture today to help me find more ease and beauty in my days. It’s only been a few days but I already feel better.

I also think I finally just figured something out that’s been haunting me for years.

For the longest time, I assumed that some of us are just better at routines than others. And yes, for sure there is some skill to habits. But one example that comes to mind, is that my husband just celebrated his 1st entire YEAR of doing French language lessons on the Duo Lingo app daily and my mom celebrated her SEVENTH year doing Spanish every day. Wow. It makes me happy to see their excitement at not breaking their streaks and they ARE learning. They do it first thing or before they go to bed. I confess I started Spanish but it died off around day 43. Looking back I also took it in high school and then dropped it after a week in first-year University because it just is not something my heart really wants. My brain told me it would be a good idea to be fluent in Spanish and it can’t hurt to ever learn and do more, can it?

Maybe it can. There’s nothing wrong with it, but maybe it’s just not for you.

It takes you off your path. We only have so much time in a day so instead why don’t we just give ourselves permission to do more of what feels aligned as far as building our own practices are concerned based on where we are right now?

We can learn and adapt based on what works for us. Loosen our grip and stay flexible, open, and relaxed. Stop worrying about what others think or believe is best for us.

The ability to learn in this way is a principle common to the whole of humanity. Thus it is well known that a child learns to walk, to talk, and to know his way around the world just by trying something out and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (or thinks) in accordance with what has actually happened. In this way, he spends his first few years in a wonderfully creative way, discovering all sorts of things that are new to him, and this leads people to look back on childhood as a kind of lost paradise. As the child grows older, however, learning takes on a narrower meaning. In school, he learns by repetition to accumulate knowledge, so as to please the teacher and pass examinations. At work, he learns in a similar way, so as to make a living, or for some other utilitarian purpose, and not mainly for the love of the action of learning itself. So his ability to see something new and original gradually dies away. And without it, there is evidently no ground from which anything can grow.”
― David Bohm, On Creativity

Before I really understood this, I really forced this issue. It was stressful. It felt like something was wrong with me. I had a lot to do to overcome myself before I left in the morning and I made lists. I didn’t love my job so I force myself. I read the books. I took the courses. Good grief, I must have listened to or read James Clear’s Atomic Habits about sixteen times. I know about never missing the second day and habit stacking. Starting small and yes I can start but I can’t seem to stick to it.

A part of me just wanted a change so badly and so if I needed to be exacting like the British cycling team and take control of every little damn thing I would if I was sure that research would lead me to win at the game of life and then when I arrived at my goal, I could finally rest. Or feel like I had arrived. I wanted a navy seal admiral to tell me what to do. To tell me to make my bed because if I DID it would set me up for a better day and life. I felt lost.

I was very “all or nothing” and I was convinced it was just the way I was made.

But I finally realized something.

There is no course, no book, no coach that will help me get there if it’s not aligned with where I am today no matter how badly I want it if it’s not where I’m at. If they do with herculean efforts it won’t be sustainable for me when they leave because I need to build my own scaffolding.

How do you do this?

The first thing is to gently surrender everything you don’t love. It’s time to write some Dear John letters to anything that doesn’t light you up. No amount of control will create the conditions needed to permanently change anything that you don’t really care about.

I’d also like to take a few minutes before I wrap up to zoom in to focus more on our spiritual practices now. If it’s not for you or you don’t feel called to have one yet then just rock on with your bad self, you are right where you need to be.

“The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.”
― David Bohm

Most if not all spiritual and religious practices are about transcending our small selves, egos, and sole identification with matter or our physicality to something bigger.

It helps us see that life is happening, our brains think, our hearts beat, our lungs breathe, but we are NOT those things.

There’s a sacred space in the middle there between those two worlds of visible and invisible.

This does take some work to see things differently. Yes. There are spiritual texts and teachers at every turn waiting to help you.

What we can ALL do is what most spiritual traditions call “walking a path”. Choose one that feels right to you where you are now, and DRILL down deep. In most cases, if you ask for help, it will find you. The teacher comes 100% of the time and they often have a lot of free content if they are truly aligned.

In fact, how you spend your days is YOUR BUSINESS.

What if we stopped trying so hard to be something we’re not?

The curious paradox is that when you accept yourself just as you are, then you can change.

Psychologist Carl Rogers

I don’t think it matters if you listen to binaural beats and guided meditations or the soundtrack to Mulan to feel good but it HAS to be something you love.

Something that rings YOUR bell.

Do Native teachings tug at your heart? Or do you LIKE yoga and want to learn more about the 8 limbs? Or maybe you want to try sound healing. Read the bible a bit every day or do you prefer the Buddhist philosophy and are drawn to the concept of emptiness? Or do you love Jesus and the concept of fullness? Doing the rosary because it reminds you of your grandmother? Does going on a silent meditation retreat excite you or fill you with dread?

You can learn more about anything for free.

Maybe you don’t care about anything to do with spirituality or God, but you’d love to try an ultramarathon.

Maybe you want it all.

You’ll know where you are because it’s what lights you up.

I’ve noticed that 100% of the time when it’s something I really WANT to learn, it’s easier. It flows. I meet the right people and resources fall at my feet.

It’s the feedback we need to move forward.

If not or it’s hard or I avoid it like the plague it’s usually my ego driving things from a fearful or needy place and my mind trying to convince me to do or eat something in a certain way for a certain outcome that I think or perceive as desirable.

It always feels good, and there’s no remorse afterward.

It’s like someone telling you to exercise or exactly how much and what to eat, or not to be anxious or depressed, or to love your body when you don’t. That unfortunately never works, but you do. You know what to do. You’ll find your way 100% of the time if you soften your stance with compassion and listen to the whispers and just keep showing up for life.

We have a built-in kinesthetic bullshit meter of what is really true deeper beneath our surface or egoic desires and that is what will guide us to what is beautiful and life-giving every time.

Truth makes us stronger.

And what if you still feel persistent resistance? Not the garden variety but the giant avoidant procrastination kind. You sign up for the online course and you really don’t look forward to going or doing it at ALL. You never use it. You don’t need motivation, you need to find something you actually WANT to spend your time doing. Maybe it’s painting or gardening.

Your body cannot lie and it’s trying to get your attention. If you don’t listen you may find you feel unwell in some way. Lacan’s idea of how our physical symptoms derive from the word “Sintome” which is like a “Saint-Homme” - the French word for Saint or a prophet that has come in the form of a symptom to show you what you can’t allow yourself to see.

Maybe what you really want to do is rest.

I think we’re afraid we’ll get swallowed up by the couch, but the thing is, even the couch gets uncomfortable after a movie or two. We were born to move and do what feels good to us.

I don’t ever want to tell you what to do with your days.

I used to think I knew better for others, even for our kids. Instead of asking them when they were young we just tried everything to see what would stick like spaghetti on the wall. One of our sons hated ice skating so much that the instructor finally told us when we would drag him and bribe him that in 30 years she’d NEVER met a child that didn’t like skating as much as he did. Enough said.

We need to be that skating instructor for ourselves and let ourselves OFF the hook. Trust that you know what you really need.

Lord knows we are fed and sold a constant stream of ideas and ways we can overcome ourselves, from others. It’s the ones that jump out at us that are for us. We feel a deep resonant YES in our gut and we want to hear more from that teacher.

In fact, even King Charles III reminded me of it this morning at his coronation.

It was moving.

Okay, I cried. More than once.

I’m not sure what I loved so much. Probably just the energy. The echoed clip-clopping of horses’ shod hooves on pavement. The roaring crowds. The genuine enthusiasm. The colorful procession, the giant drums beating in time, the outfits, the rituals, and iconic objects. People there seemed to be loving it and I felt it.

I hope the BBC doesn’t mind, I took a few scene shots from my phone so you can feel their morphogenetic field too.

Right from the start when the young boy invited him as a child of God to when Charles was thanked for his many years of service.

In particular though, the prayers about encouraging Charles to live a life of service in body, mind, and spirit. Being reverent, faithful, filled with hope and joy for the future, and vowing to serve others with love.

In a sense, it’s what we’re all being asked to do as the heads of our own personal Kingdoms.

The spine-chilling moment where it felt like something really profound was happening for me was during the anointing. There is a part of the ceremony where there’s an intimate moment where Charles is hidden behind big screens and hidden from view.

His knees, his head, hands, and breast are anointed with holy oil and blessed in Jerusalem. The screens are traditionally stitched by hand with the names of the 56 commonwealth nations as leaves on a tree.

This is a private moment between King and God.

A pause in the program.

It struck me as a sacred pause. It’s done and it’s no one else’s business.

What if we create our own daily rituals this way?

That’s the promise of every religion ever. Total freedom. Not just live for our own desires and try to satisfy our insatiable egos. It doesn’t need to be fundamental and judgemental. We can simply soften into what is pulling us forward.

I’ve learned the hard way that it’s in a silent mind that truth reveals itself. That reason alone can’t take us there.

Looking back, it wasn’t until I surrendered all of my more formal practices that things began to click. It often felt forced like it was something I was doing because it worked for others and I wanted so badly to free myself from this uneasy feeling I felt.

This emptiness or yearning for something I couldn’t describe.

I even became a yoga and meditation instructor, a holistic nutritionist, and a pranayama teacher…all in a sense seeking what I was told would help me through my hard times. Through my compulsions, and my feelings, to work through my trauma and my pain.

I did it with all my heart.

But while it felt good at times, even exhilarating, it was always temporary and I never felt totally free. It felt never-ending and exhausting. I’d feel better and life would happen and have to start again.

There is another way. The middle way.

The Buddha discovered it.

What struck me about his personal story was that after the Buddha (the name means awakened or enlightened one) had spent many years of his life seeking and learning all he could and trying so hard that he nearly starved himself to death, he surrendered. Stopped. He gave it up and found some middle ground. He was hungry and tired. He did his own thing.

His disciplined practices seemed too harsh and it wasn’t until he decided to listen to his body and eat. To nourish himself, and find a balance he had his realization under the now very famous Bodhi Tree.

Scholars argue that it may have all been necessary and a part of his journey in the same way that some of us may need to suffer struggle before we’ll ever be open or willing to have a spiritual practice.

I think we all have an incredible desire for coherence in our lives so when we look outside of ourselves to others to find the answers while it can fill us with hope to find solutions to our seeking, but in the end, it could also just be a giant detour that successfully distracts us but never really gets us to embody the sense of love and peace we’re hoping to achieve.

Maybe we don’t need to walk out on our families and live as ascetics to find our way. We can fall in LOVE with our daily routines and practices wherever we are, know they are enough, and leave some space.

Hold them loosely for life to take us where it’s guiding us to go. We can miss a day and it’s okay. Even Duo Lingo has a streak freeze which is a kind of digital mulligan.

We’re initiated into the world to be productive and yet I’ve discovered the hard way that beauty really is our deepest nature. We were created not to simply be productive functionaries but to be creators ourselves.

When we enter into our own creativity then the beauty or beautiful becomes available to us.

Beauty is a free spirit.

It delights and surprises us and can sneak beneath the strategies of our functional minds and egos. We don’t need any more critics, more analysis, or life hacks what we need is to return to our ability to experience and be engaged by life for ourselves.

The older I get something is becoming very clear to me. None of us really even like being told what to do. We’re cleverly designed that way or we’d all be the same. Of course, we’ll swallow the horse pills and beat someone else’s drum when we really need help and we’ll do it when we’re most vulnerable and desperate or have made a mess of things. We’ll allow ourselves to be put in rehab or hospitalized if need be, but while other people’s ideas can be helpful in the short term as a scaffolding to keep us safe, they are their own and usually work very well for them, but not always for us in the long term.

Simply because we’re NOT them.

Here’s the truth that can’t be sold…. We want to experience joy. To feel loved and to love others. There is something we CAN give our attention to that doesn’t cost any money.

That no one can sell to us and it’s simple.

Beauty.

And not what we’ve come to call or think of as beautiful. In the western world, we’ve often confused beauty with glamour. Beauty is this bigger concept of becoming not just the aesthetic of the day.

Beauty is the opposite of all kinds of fundamentalism.

To experience beauty is to experience unity.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion”.

~quote from Mary Oliver’s final collection of essays “Upstream”~

It comes from the threshold between where our souls and minds meet. Between the finite and the infinite. The place where all the dimensions of your life are brought together.

It breaks us out of a controlled linear kind of day-to-day life. It’s a continuous presence in every single one of our lives and every life is braided with luminous moments.

The earth is teaming with concealed beauty.

It’s present through the kindness of strangers.

The Greek word for beauty is “Ta-kalon” and comes from the word kaline which means “to call”. So in a sense, beauty is a call. It’s always calling us to warmth and wonder of some eternal embrace.

Kathleen Rein the English poet in an essay on the use of the beautiful says:

“Strangest of all is the ease with which the vision is lost. Consciousness contracts, we forget over and over again until recollection is stirred by some icon of that beauty, then we remember and wonder why we ever forgot”.

Make time in your days for what is calling to you.

Experiment, find, and create beautiful rituals that fill you up and do them behind a screen where no one can see you.

If you do, you will have no trouble motivating yourself to do them.

This is between you and the God of your understanding.

When we serve, we have compassion and bow to all of life, we forgive and we become free. Even kneeling in your garden and thanking the earth is a reverent and spiritual act for the greater good.

All of life can be spiritual. Even your long trail runs and riding the waves on the ocean. Imagine your soft self being held by the strong backbone of scaffolding on your days with your new habits that excite you, and fly loose dear friends!

The crowning glory is your own life fully and well lived.

Long live the Sovereign in all of us!

With love,

Rev Nona