Awakening

It's time I start making my spiritual quest as much a part of Joystory as my writing and reading. That was what I implied I would be doing in both my profile and the sub-heading here. And yet I've kept avoiding the topic.

I identified the reasons as two-fold. First, the experiences are very personal and my practice (if you can even call it that) has been hit-and-miss at best. Second, fear of scorn and condemnation from two fronts--the skeptics of all things unverifiable by scientific investigation via the five senses and the physical and mathematical tools created to enhance them; and the doctrinal fundamentalists of the Christian tradition I was raised in--which would of course include family and other members of the particular sect I was raised in along with the various Christian watchdog groups with a mission to war(n) against all thing 'New Age'.

But my reluctance to talk about anything related to this quest here has often made it difficult to prepare my daily posts because on the days when the most significant activity or thought or experience has been impacted by this I have to yank my focus away long enough to think up something 'safe' to blog about. This has become even more of an issue since the first of the year and the beginning of the big Creative Change project I engaged in with my sister-friend Jamie in which the two of us are committed to making the changes for physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health and identify and work toward our big dreams and goals and to encouraging each other and holding ourselves accountable to each other for following through on our intentions.

Creative Change was the impetus for the big de-clutter and organize project I began on Jan 1st and though I posted about that frequently I kept the spiritual aspects of the experience either muted or entirely out of it. For example, though I think I mentioned that I spent those first five days of the big room do-over tuned to Oprah and Friends XM radio I did not confess that I'd committed to doing the daily exercises of A Course In Miracles with Marianne Williamson and have stayed with it. This is the fourth time I started working with ACIM since 1993 when I first encountered Marianne's book, A Return To Love, but the longest I've stayed with it. I bought the ACIM book shortly after reading A Return to Love and somehow it survived the journey between then and now. I still have it though as I've mentioned here before the majority of my personal library was either sold or left behind in the Silicon Valley in 2001.

A month ago , when Oprah announced the new book club selection, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, and announced the planned ten week webinar course, I expressed an interest and Ed bought the book for me a week later. I have been reading it but have never mentioned it here. This evening was the first class in the webinar. I was so committed to this that I excused myself from joining the family for dinner at 6PM. I may be 50 years old but it is still difficult to opt out of coming to the table for a meal prepared for you; especially by a mother or mother-in-law.

I ended up spending the first hour of the webinar in total frustration because I was not getting the streaming video. Then Ed, who had returned from dinner and was watching news while I was staring at a black flash screen, put the TV back on Oprah and Friends Radio in preparation for turning off the TV and lo and behold they were broadcasting the webinar there. I wonder if that was a sudden decision due to the technical difficulties because I heard no announcement on either Oprah.com, the Oprah show or Oprah and Friends Radio over the last several weeks that such a thing was planned.

So it was nearly 8PM by the time I got to the table and I had to warm up my dinner and eat alone. I had gotten over hungry and a headache was nagging but I thought eating would fix that. It didn't. By the time I was done eating it was more than nagging and by the time I finished cleaning up the kitchen it was raging. I opened blogger to begin my post and the act of trying to think of something to post about that had nothing to do with what was really on my mind made me nauseated. I had to lay down. I didn't even close the laptop lid.

I woke up at 3:30 seemingly headache free and started staring at the blank post on the blogger WYSIWYG. As I contemplated options for topics to blog the headache started nagging again. I realized that what I was doing seriously lacked integrity which is one of the major themes of my Creative Change project as well as my spiritual quest--the two are essentially one and the same in my mind. I also realized that my efforts to stay committed to these episodic attempts to change my life over the past fifteen years have been continuously sabotaged by my efforts to keep them compartmentalized from my interactions with most of the people in my life--there are few in my circle of friends and family who would not be either, skeptical, scornful, disinterested or dismayed by these topics and especially so by knowledge of my interest in them.

I myself have been by turns skeptical, scornful, disinterested and dismayed. But I can no longer continue to deny that which is awakening within me.