Four days ago I had surgery on my hand.

After diagnosing me six weeks ago, my doctor began telling me about the surgery to correct my problem by telling me it was the most painful surgery they do.  That information had an odd effect on me over the following six weeks.

For a while it was a badge of honor.  I’m sort of wired to seek credit for pain and suffering.  It’s an old pattern, and one that’s taken some healing.  I noted in the past six weeks that it wasn’t very active anymore, but it was still there.

After that, the high level of pain my doctor warned of was always part of the information I mentioned when telling people about my impending surgery, but I was always sure to down-play it-saying that I didn’t really believe it. But  I was clearly still looking for credit of some kind.

Later I left it out completely, usually saying that it was a very common surgery, although the ailment itself was actually very uncommon.  (Boy, is my need for specialness big!!)

Then about two weeks before my surgery, I got an email from Joe Vitale recommending a book by David R. Hawkins, who I’ve loved since I read, Power vs. Force, several years ago.  Hawkins’ new book is called Healing and Recovery, and I ordered it immediately.  (Thanks, Joe!)

Hawkins says some very enlightening things about the relationship between the mind and the body.  But he’ll be the first to tell you that the whole mind-body thing is only a fraction of the story.  This is paraphrased from Healing and Recovery:

• The Body is not sentient, meaning that on its own, it can have no direct experience of itself. That means there’s really no pain in the body itself. There may be physical sensation, but the body itself cannot report pain or pleasure.

• The Emotions are not sentient either, meaning that on their own, without a mind to tell us stories about them, our emotions are meaningless-just emotional sensations.

• The Mind, however, does lots of reporting about the body and the emotions. Now if your mind was the sum total of who you are, that would mean the mind was the determiner of all of you experience. But the mind is not sentient either, meaning that on its own, it cannot experience itself.

• It is Consciousness that determines what is held in your mind. (That’s why when you’re under anesthesia; you are effectively without body, emotions or mind.) And finally…

• Beyond Consciousness, in which you still experience yourself as a singular self, there is Awareness, in which you experience “yourself” as a collective with no boundaries, internally or externally. This is the place from which you can see that you are not body, emotions, mind or even consciousness. This is where you know that you’re the same stuff that God is.

So how about that for timing?  Two weeks before undergoing “the most painful hand surgery know to man,” I bump into information that helps me to understand and deeply internalize that pain is essentially optional.  If I can see my way clear to tell the truth about who I really am and how that relates to the body in a way that completely lacks any sense of cause-and-effect, I’ll be golden.

Hawkins offered a method of telling the truth that went something like:  “I am an infinite being.  I am not subject to physical pain.  And that is a fact.”  I told it to myself a few times in the days leading up to my surgery.  The truth of it was so obvious that is sank in pretty easily.

But you never know if the truth will stick around when people start cutting into your flesh.

But you know what, Brothers and Sister?-It did.  After four days-two without any pain medication at all-I have not suffered one moment of pain.  There have been physical sensations and awareness of the incision point, but nothing I have even been tempted to lie to myself about-nothing I’ve been tempted to call pain.

I had some trepidation about sharing this experience with people-remember I have that need for specialness issue, and I didn’t want this to be about some accomplishment of mine.  The truth is, if you’re crossing paths with this information, really it’s an accomplishment of yours.  David R. Hawkins told me that he was able to use this simple truth-telling to endure the reattachment of his thumb (severed in a carpentry accident) without anesthesia.  Now I have told you another story about how pain is optional.

It’s becoming clear that this web site is reaching into every corner of this big world of ours, so I’m thinking this might somehow drop into the inbox of someone who might really love the opportunity to understand and deeply internalize that pain is essentially optional.  If it’s you I’m talking about, I wish you one thing:  the ability to tell yourself the truth about how pain is a story that has nothing to do with who you really are.

I am an infinite being.  I am infinitely appreciative
of all physical sensation.

Namaste,
Rebecca

A few days ago my daughter and I went to see 8 All-American superstars of beach volleyball.  Among them was Olympic gold-medalist Todd Rogers.

The evening was arranged so that the four women played three sets and rotated partners after each set, so every woman got to play on the same team as every other.  The men did it the same way and the finale was a 4 against 4 match, with two women and two men on each side.

The only person whose team won every match that evening was Todd Rogers’ team.  I think I know why.

Beach volleyball is a fast sport.  But with Rogers on your team, something extraordinary happens.  When the ball comes to him, everything slows down.  I’m not sure if the physics would bear this out; perhaps I’ll research whether anyone ever did a credible study on the Michael Jordan “hang time” phenomena.

What Rogers does is very similar.  When he gets the ball, time slows to about half its normal pace.  He sets the ball for a teammate, and the teammate goes in for the kill. When it’s Rogers who’s set up for the kill, he’s just as likely to tap the ball over gently (to exactly the right spot) as he is to slam it down the collective throat of the opposing team. He’s known in beach volleyball circles as “The Professor” for just that reason.

He thinks first.  And he thinks for as long as he damned well wants to.  Then he takes action.

Once I noticed this phenomena, something I hadn’t been aware of while watching him on television, I studied the degree to which the other players were able to slow the ball down.  No one did.  Could it be that no one had noticed what Rogers was doing?

It was like watching Eckhart Tolle at quarterback for the Green Bay Packers.  I can just imagine him out there among those huge padded brutes (and in my imagination he’s only wearing a light cotton shirt, a sage vest and kahki’s) using nothing but the force of his own presence to buy all the time he needed to toss the ball gently to whomever would then do whatever football players do…

I like seeing flashes of enlightenment in the sporting world, as well as in other unlikely places.  It makes me realize that it’s not so impossible, and that it’s really just about finding a single enlightened response when the ball comes your way.  On the court and off, it’s about answering love with love, and it’s about answering a cry for love with love too.  That takes some slowing down, and I’ll take my slowing-down lessons wherever I can get them.

A friend of mine who does spiritual counseling once gave me a little card that had a few sentences on either side that were supposed to help me through any difficult conversation I might have.  They were supposed to help me frame what I was saying with something like, “What I’m experiencing is…”  And then ideally, I was supposed to refrain from adding, “…that you are a complete butt-head and I hate you.”  I was supposed to just share my perceptions-as nothing more than my perceptions-with the other person.

It struck me today that we always only share our perceptions (what else do we have?), but that in most cases, we believe that our perceptions are accurate and real and that they matter.  We forget that our perceptions are just our perceptions and nothing more.  We forget that there’s no such thing as “accurate” when it comes to perception.  There’s just, “What I’m experiencing is…”

If you were a fly on the wall at a coffee shop and could hear the conversation of the couple in the corner who appear to be having a disagreement, you could probably be pretty objective about it if I asked you to listen to them.  It would be easy for you to remember  that they’re just sharing their perceptions, but they don’t know it.  You could see pretty easily that they both believe themselves to be right-they both believe themselves to be perceiving everything accurately and that it matters tremendously that the other person doesn’t see things the same way.  But you could also see that really, they’re each just telling the other what they perceive.

Now imagine bringing that kind of objective awareness to your own conversations.  How much easier would it be to hear a complaint from someone you care about if you realized that this person was just sharing a perception.  How much easier would it be to respond with love when someone important to you “came at you” with a perception about something you’d just done that was “just plain wrong” (according to that person’s perception)?  Couldn’t you just share your perception in return?  And maybe, just maybe, could it be a perception about how you care so much about that other person that you’d like to hear more?-maybe just let that person spew as many perceptions as he or she wanted to while you just listened and experience love and compassion?

It takes objectivity.  And it takes an unwavering awareness that everything is perception.

I’ve been practicing this for a few days, so I’m no expert, but I can tell you that it’s been impossible to have an argument with me this week.  You can vent, but I’m just going to keep loving you until you’re done (and beyond, of course.)

Here’s my wish going forward:  Meet even the smallest “attack” with authentic, loving concern for the attacker.  I know that nobody attacks anybody when they feel good, so maybe I can start a conversation about how this person has been feeling lately-maybe what kind of stresses he or she has been dealing with lately.  Sure it’s “justified” to attack back, but I’d rather be loving than justified any day.

Yesterday I was inspired to write an email to a great spiritual teacher with whom I’ve had a lovely chatting relationship for the last few years. Our last encounter, several months back, had left me with some judgments–just my “stuff,” I know now (and knew then too), but it really bugged me.  I’d reached out to him in friendship (or at least that’s what my conscious mind said), and I perceived him as reaching back with a very persuasive pitch for me to spend several thousand dollars to attend one of his workshops.  To me it had the ring of the old Woody Allen bit that goes something like, “See this pocket watch?  You like it?  On my grandfather’s deathbed…he sold me this pocket watch.”

But there was nothing even remotely wrong about what he did.  He offered me what he had, and I have no doubt he was offering something far more valuable than what he was asking in exchange for it.

Anyway, it left a bad taste in my mouth because I’d judged him and judgment tastes bad.  So I sent an email to both of the addresses I had for him talking about what I’d learned about forgiveness.  I know what forgiveness is, so it wasn’t like I was forgiving him. I was forgiving my error of having thought of him as separate from me.  I was forgiving my error of having forgotten that he is Me and that he is God.

But the email came back from both addresses with this in the subject line:  Forgiveness: Undeliverable.

So it’s clear that the Universe is a lot smarter than I am, right?  The Universe knows that writing someone to tell them that I’ve forgiven myself is just a passive aggressive way of reminding that “other” person that I was mad at him before but now I’m not, right?  The Universe knows that true Forgiveness is in absolute fact, undeliverable.

So here’s my note to me:  Do your forgiveness work and shut up about it, at least around anyone you’ve ever judged.  (Which is, like, everyone.)  If forgiveness is internal and personal and heartfelt, the entirety of the Universal body is healed by it.  If I tell others about it, it just loses its effectiveness as I use it to seek approval or some other irrational want of the ego.

I want forgiveness to become my daily practice, then my hourly practice, then my constant practice.  I want a seamless experience of forgiving the illusion of separation now and always.  Attempting to “deliver” forgiveness is a distraction to the one thing I want, and at least for today, thanks to the genius of the Universe, I can set it aside.

I’d had a rough day.  Ever have a day where the number of petty annoyances you have to endure is just so astronomically high you can barely stand it?  I think I cut myself five times that day-just doing normal activities.  I reached behind a cabinet to tuck in some cords and cut my finger open on a splinter of wood.  No big deal, right?  So multiply it by 5 and add a big fall on the ice and the realization that your checkbook is empty and you’ve got almost a week before payday and you might start to feel a little victimy…

And where exactly did my spiritual practice go at this time?  Gone.  Just gone.  My practice, my practice, why hast thou forsaken me?

This feeling lasted for days, and the petty annoyances kept coming-spilled coffee, splattered marinara on a freshly laundered rug, you name it.  It got deeper and deeper and I kept watching myself sink deeper into depression, seemingly powerless to stop it, feeling like I was in the grips of something that hated me, all the while knowing that I had every bit of power necessary to change direction.

I think the only thing that kept me afloat was that I have a fair amount of experience that tells me this feeling is never permanent.  For me, at least, it never lasts long and it always goes away.

A good cry helped.  Maybe I was grieving something-the recent end of a romantic relationship?  The end of my marriage, a mere 5 years earlier?  The fact that I’m 45 years old and still living paycheck to paycheck?  Or maybe, as my friendly astrologer says-it’s that Pluto is on my Sun and it’s the death of everything all at once.

I’d noticed that one of the catch phrases of the recent economic downturn has been “recession proof.”  We all want jobs, relationships and living situations that are recession proof.  But I’d had no thought of any of those things; all I wanted was a spiritual practice that’s depression proof.

Then I woke up.

The problem was not that my spiritual practice had forsaken me. The problem was that I was getting distracted by my spiritual practice.  It’s not my spiritual practice that makes me feel good; it’s God.  My spiritual practice is just a means to an end.  It’s an experience of God I’m after.  Nothing else.

I’d let myself feel like I was the victim of my petty annoyances, and the big lesson is about the pettiness of my practice.  It’s been too much practice, not enough God.  Too much wrapping, not enough present.  Too much talking and writing about Divinity, not nearly enough actual God-time.

To be honest, I’m still in the throws of a major case of the “icks,” but I do feel a little better having come around, yet again, to the realization that Divine Connection is the cure for everything that could ever ail me.  Let’s make a deal:  As I finish writing this, and you finish reading it, let’s close our eyes, breathe deeply and allow ourselves to fully experience the Divinity that’s all around us and filling us completely all the time.

I’m in.  You?

I live in Minneapolis, and I’m writing this on February 3, 2009.  It’s been cold here.  Really cold.  Like the coldest weather you can possibly imagine living in, by which I mean the coldest weather you can possibly imagine living in without it killing you as soon as you step out into it.  It’s almost never 27 degrees below zero, but sometimes it is.

When it’s that cold for that long, there is ice everywhere-or at least the great likelihood of ice.  I live in a Mary Tyler Moore type house high on a hill about two blocks from the actual Mary Tyler Moore house.  I have dozens of potentially icy stairs, several yards of potentially icy pavement, and usually about 10 feet of perpetually icy, snow-slicked road surface between me and my car.

As a result, I’m really good at walking on ice.

It’s a real consciousness-heightening experience too.  The likelihood of slipperiness makes you really have to pay attention to literally every placement of your foot.  Now add some high heels to that picture, and you’ve got a daily practice that requires extreme focus.

Somehow, right in the middle of this months-long cold snap, we had a 48 degree day.  The sun was bright, ice and snow melted, and while I didn’t see any convertibles with their tops down, I did see some open sunroofs.  In the late afternoon I decided to walk about a block to the mailbox on the corner.  As I looked around me, marveling at the balmy temperature and how much melting had occurred in such a short time, I hit a patch of ice with my right foot and took what felt like a slow motion body slam to the pavement.

So what’s my big insight?

When times are challenging, like they are in the bitter-cold-ice-covered world of my Minneapolis winter, my consciousness is heightened.  I move forward with great focus.  When everything’s going along swimmingly, I abandon my focus, relax my consciousness and take a header to the pavement.

But there’s more here than just a cautionary tale.  I don’t want this to teach the lesson, “Pay attention, kids; it’s a dangerous world out there no matter how good you feel!”   I want this to be more uplifting than that.  I want it to be some version of, “You’re going to make it after all,” and then for every reader to throw his or her beret’ into the air.

I want this to be about allowing the wake-up call to really wake me up, but in the future I want to allow the wake-up call to come without pain.  I want to believe with all my heart that enlightenment doesn’t have to come through a year-long depression, a cancerous attack on my pancreas or my untimely crucifixion.  Nobody finds fault with the person who eventually wants to die in his sleep-to just die peacefully and never wake up.  So what’s so wrong about me wanting to become enlightened in my sleep?  I just want to experience enlightenment and never wake up from it-let it just take hold and that’s that.

But I’m a Minnesotan, and was raised Lutheran to boot, so I don’t see that happening any time soon.  While it’s pretty deeply imbedded in me that literally anything is possible, I think it’s equally deeply imbedded in me that everything comes at a cost.  The more seemingly impossible the accomplishment, the higher the price I have to pay for it.

Byron Katie would ask me, “Rebecca, who would you be without that thought?”  And I’d think about it for a while, and maybe cry a little before I finally answered her, “Well, Miss Katie, I guess I’d be a person who’s fully capable of receiving all the love that’s offered to me and of amplifying it 10 fold before sending it back out.  I wouldn’t have any blocks to fully experiencing people.  I wouldn’t have any blocks to fully experiencing God.  I could just give and receive with complete freedom.”  “Nice work, Rebecca,” she’d say.

But the question remains, can I go there?  Today I’m glad that at least I know where I’m pointed.

“I am completely receptive to the Love of God and all beings.  I am a fearless giver of Love to God and all beings.”  And I’m going to make it afterall.

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