Mondays Won't Be the Same

Neither will I after spending the last ten Monday evenings participating in the largest classroom in the world.

Tonight was the last of the Oprah and Eckhart Tolle webinars discussing Tolle's book, A New Earth. The experience has had a profound effect on me. I've been reticent to discuss it here besides the passing reference to it in the early weeks. I'm not sure why other than that old childhood superstition that if you talk about something precious to you it will jinx it somehow.

Or it could be that I wanted to see real world effects that I could pin on the insights before I tried to talk about them for it is more than a truism or superstition that those who do a whole lotta talking about something are often not those who are walking their talk.

I am starting to see those effects. But it still feels too tender to poke at with too many words.

I think I can pin the last seven weeks of new hot-off-the-keyboard poems and story snippets to insights from Tolle's two books (The Power of Now being the other one) applied to my real life issues with anxiety and perfectionism. But it is too soon to know if the last several weeks of a significant lessening of both is a trend or a fluke or just another fluctuation in the cycling of my mood swings.

The poems themselves, though, are the result of deep contemplation of the concepts in A New Earth and The Power of Now. The poems do seem to express those concepts much better than rambling posts like this one.

Maybe it is best to leave it to the poems.

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For Its Own Sake

You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity. Every role is a fictitious sense of self, and through it everything becomes personalized and thus corrupted and distorted by the mind-made "little me" and whatever role it happens to be playing.

Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth
page 107

I had an Aha! moment when I read this. I realized that most of my best writing had happened when I had slipped out of self-consciousness and into a zone where my awareness had zeroed in on the project and I was no longer projecting either hopes or fears onto it--success or failure became irrelevant as engagement in the process became enough.

But these moments have always come over me spontaneously. I was referring to them in my Monday Poetry Train post of two weeks ago:

The [poems] I've written just sorta happened to me like waking up or blushing. Now I'm hoping to see if I can learn to make poems happen on purpose like making the bed or brushing my teeth.

My aha moment was realizing that learning to make poems (or stories) happen on purpose meant learning to 'wake up' into that zone of unselfconsciousness on purpose in order to engage in the process for its own sake.

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Introducing A New Earth

Just like last week and the week before, I'm having trouble switching my mind off what has occupied it all day in order to post about something else. This is the third Monday I've participate in the Oprah and Eckhart Tolle webinar about Tolle's book A New Earth. Each time I spent several hours preparing by reviewing the chapter to be discussed. I don't know if I can keep coming up with something fresh to day about it for seven more Monday's but tonight I'm bowing to the inevitable one more time.

But I'm really too tired to organize my thoughts to write about it so I'm posting three YouTube vids. The first is a short trailer posted by Oprah.com:



The second, also posted by Oprah, is a clip of the discussion with the audience after the show the day Oprah announced the new book club selection and the planned ten week live web event:



The third is the first nine or so minutes of the first class and it was posted to YouTube by a fan. The entire ninety minute class each week will be available for download or streaming view on Oprah.com on the Tuesday afternoon following the live event.



I'm posting this opening clip partly to show a bit of the flavor of the event. But also there is an interesting comment he makes near the end of it about the process of writing both The Power of Now and A New Earth which I think is applicable for any writing task. It is about making the writing time/space available and honoring it each day whether the words are flowing easily or not. And something about being available for the thing that is trying to be born through you. Those are both mangled paraphrases from memory after one viewing of the clip a couple hours ago.

I haven't seen the video of the first class yet as I was among the thousands who, due to technical difficulties at their end and mine, saw nothing but a black screen that first week. I have listened to it on Oprah and Friends XM radio but haven't got around to watching the archived video yet.

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Splashed By Joy

This picture was taken of me in the spring of 1995 at Seaside, Oregon. I had just been splashed by a hip-high sneaker wave. One of those extra large, extra fast waves that seem to come out of nowhere. I had been walking on the wet sand at the edge of most of the waves; highest reach. It was an incoming tide. I had been dabbling my toes in the edges of the waves where the water barely covered the top of my toes. Then suddenly there was this wave that hit me at hip level and just about knocked me down. It splashed me in the face. I remember this moment of surprise that became almost exaltation and then laughing out loud with a spontaneity that was/is quite untypical for me. It was in that moment of laughter this picture was taken.

I am posting this picture today because I've been contemplating again lately the irony of having been named Joy and then having struggled from at least age four with anxiety and depression and volatile mood-swings. Somehow I don't think it is coincidence. And even if it was, at some point in my mid teens I invested significance in it, made it into a kind of quest before I knew what that term meant. And ever since then my life has appeared to have a central theme related to the access to joy.

Awareness of that theme is included in the title of my blog. It might seem like nothing but a playful pun but at the time I came up with it I was aware of and gave equal meaning to both these senses: Joystory= the story of the life of this woman named 'Joy' and Joystory=the story of one woman's quest to attain a stable consciousness of joy.

I like to imagine that someday it will be possible to say, and to the fullest extent of both those senses, "I am Joy."

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These thoughts were stimulated by today's musings and readings in Eckart Tolle's book A New Earth and the Eckart/Oprah webinar that I participated in this evening. I had some insights aka 'aha moments' that I'm still mulling.

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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.

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