Fishing For Soul
Angling for Spiritual ReconnectionArchive for spiritual awakening
Amma Love: Like No Other
For the past five years, during the second week of July, I have spent many hours in the presence of (and even oh, so briefly and memorably in the arms of) a small, slightly round, smiling woman from India, immersing myself in an energy that has only one name: love.
“‘Amma’ as she is known all over the world today, has inspired and started innumerable humanitarian services. She has earned international recognition for her outstanding contributions to the world community. She is recognized as an extraordinary spiritual leader by the United Nations and by the people all over the world.
For the past 35 years Amma has dedicated her life to the uplifting of suffering humanity through the simplest of gestures – an embrace. In this intimate manner Amma has blessed and consoled more than 25 million people throughout the world.”
The first time I received a hug from Amma, I wept uncontrollably. The force of her loving embrace was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Each time I see her the tears flow. They are tears of joy, remembrance and gratitude. In the presence of a woman who emits absolute love I also smile, bow, and stare transfixed.
Last week, sitting with thousands of others in New York City’s Manhattan Center, I watched as Amma hugged an endless stream of devotees and curious first-timers. As I happily approached Amma for darshan, I smiled and witnessed the embrace of people in front of me. I saw many of those people break down in tears before the hug began. “Looks familiar,” I thought. My smile stayed on my face as she drew me close and I whispered, “Thank you”, countless times. Kneeling on the floor a few feet away afterward, I felt dizzy and could not focus my eyes. For several minutes I knelt, my eyes closed, hearing Amma’s voice in my head saying “You are love. You are love.”, as I prayed for guidance.
I found my friend Robin sitting in a chair nearby. She had come to see Amma for the first time. “I feel like my life has changed,” she said. I nodded in understanding. We barely spoke for the next 20 minutes, each of us taking in what we had received.
Today I am grateful for Amma, my friend Deborah for encouraging me for years to experience Amma, all of my friends who have sat with me through Amma’s programs, unconditional love, profound awareness, waking to a new day, silence, the Dunbar garden, my fellow gardeners and neighbors, summer, and abundant success all ways.
Amen!
Thanks and peace.
Joe
Love In The Supermarket
I shop at Fairway Market on 74th St. and Broadway in Manhattan. I’ve shopped there for several years because I like the selection of foods, the prices suit me, and the location is convenient. I hop off the #3 train at W. 72nd St. on my way uptown, grab my groceries, and head back to the #3. Easy.
Lately the Fairway has become something more than just my favorite market for groceries. It has become a place for enlightenment. Yes, it’s true, I’ve been having mystical experiences in a grocery store. Last night, for example, I went to Fairway to get my favorite Sabra hummus with roasted pine nuts and found myself wandering around the aisles in a state of bliss.
I was on my way home after a workout at the McBurney YMCA and decided that I must have that hummus. I sat on the subway reading Byron Katie’s (there she is again!) Question Your Thinking, Change The World, and was letting the following passage sink in as the train reached my stop:
‘The advice you’ve been giving your family and friends turns out to be advice for you to live, not us. You become the wise teacher as you become a student of yourself. It stops mattering if anyone else hears you, because you’re listening. You are the wisdom you offer us, breathing and walking and effortlessly moving on, as you make your business deal, buy your groceries, or do the dishes.’
Waiting for the light to change at 73rd St. so I could cross Broadway, I called a friend. We chatted briefly as I approached the rows of flowers, fruits and vegetables that line the street outside the market. I said goodbye to Lynn, grabbed a few apples and pears, and headed for the entrance. As I walked into the store I noticed how vibrant the colors of the oranges, broccoli, brussel sprouts, and Odwalla juice bottles seemed. Then I thought of my dear friend Lynn and how much I love her. A warmth filled my chest. I strolled down the aisles looking at the abundant variety of food and felt so grateful. I filled my small basket with a dozen eggs, chocolate, coconut water, several cans of cat food, rice pasta, grilled artichoke hearts, and two containers of hummus. Every time I placed something in the basket I smiled. I looked people in the eye and smiled. I thought of Lynn again, and Fred, Leslie, Eduardo, Holly, Mary Anne and Lou. Such amazing people! Such sweet souls! How blessed I am to have them in my life. I thought of my family and how good it is to finally let them be who they are. I felt lighter and lighter with every step as love poured over me, into me.
By the time I reached the checkout I was utterly peaceful. “Everything is perfect,” I thought. “I have all that I need. That’s the way it’s always been.”
Amen.
Thanks and peace!
Joe
The Door Is Open. Will You Walk Through It?
On Wednesday morning I was talking with my wonderful teacher, Rosa. I have known Rosa for almost 16 years. She helped get me started on my spiritual path.
At the beginning of our conversation Rosa asked me about my experience with Byron Katie two weeks ago. For several moments I could not speak. “Breathe, Joe,” Rosa advised.
“It was like meeting you for the first time,” I whispered as tears of gratitude rolled down my face. “I feel like a different person. Now I know deep inside what you have been trying to tell me for so long. What was I doing for all of those years?”
Rosa and I laughed. “Well, you know,” she said, “the door was open and you kept shutting it.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I guess I just wasn’t ready or able to take it in this way.”
In truth I have been getting closer and closer to this moment of clarity for a very long time. It’s the next step on a fantastic voyage. Fishing for Soul never ends, and that’s a humbling and beautiful thing for me to know.
Here’s what I’ve taken away from watching Byron Katie’s video clips, reading her books, spending a weekend in her presence, and from years of study with Rosa, Lorna Roberts, John Beaulieu, Sandra Ingerman, Mallku, Victor Estrada, Val Lordi, my family, friends, lovers, students, clients, neighbors, coworkers (all and more have been my teacher and I am so grateful):
- I’ve tried in vain to suppress ‘negative’ thoughts. When I do that I get exhausted and experience pain.
- If I don’t love all of my thoughts then I am rejecting a part of myself and have less love to offer others.
- I’m at war with myself when I try to suppress anything I think should not be thought.
- It is easy, with practice, to just have a thought, notice it, and allow the next one to come with love.
- An attachment to a thought is a belief and can lead to suffering.
- I am what I believe I am.
- The world is perfect.
Rosa and I talked some more about our journey together. As our session came to a close my throat tightened, my chest became heavy, and my eyes once again filled with tears.
“You saved my life 16 years ago,” I told her.
“Joe,” Rosa said in her softest voice, “you saved your own life. I just offered you a light and you took it.”
Amen!
Thanks and peace.
Joe
Fishing for NOW
I sat on the subway last Thursday devouring Byron Katie’s book Question Your Thinking, Change the World. Reading her words and recalling my experience with her in the Loving What Is workshop several days before, I started thinking (again!) about what it would be like to live every moment as if it were the only moment. I allowed myself to get excited and confused by that recycled thought. “I know it’s possible to be in the moment,” I said to myself, “because I’ve experienced it.” It’s only when I ‘over-think’ it that I take myself out of the moment, or as my guides put it: “Every time you think about what was you move away from what is. Every time you think about what might be, you move away from what is. Every time you think ‘I should’ or ‘I shouldn’t’ you move away from ‘I am’. What if you took the time to see what is in front of you and enjoy it, examine it, explore it as if for the very first time?”
On Friday night I gathered with the New York Shamanic Circle for their monthly Drumming Circle. Along with about 40 other people, I drummed, rattled and sang from my soul. Moving around the room I was aware of how grounded and joyful I felt. The beating drums pounded in my chest and I experienced exquisite contentment. “Be still,” I heard. I stepped outside of the circle and waited. “Listen.” At that moment I felt something peel away from my body. “You are not your past. You are not your future. You are nothing and everything. Enjoy that.”
I went on a date on Saturday night. We went bowling. I hadn’t bowled in several years and before we even started I worried about my performance. Would I make a fool of myself? Each time I picked up the ball I heard a voice say, “You only have to be here, now. You are standing with a so-called bowling ball in your hands. Nothing else matters. Have fun.”
Yesterday morning, Easter Sunday, I trekked downtown for Sacred Center’s weekly service. As I shifted restlessly in my chair, barely paying attention to what was being said and wondering why I was there, I watched a very young child playing with a cell phone as she sat on the floor. She put the phone in her mouth, dropped it in her lap, pushed it along the carpet, and turned it over and over in her hands. “She has no idea that she’s playing with a phone,” I thought. “She doesn’t know to put it to her ear or talk into it. To her it’s just a thing to be explored, to have fun with. That’s incredible.”
Later in the afternoon I sat in Soy Luck Club, a café at 115 Greenwich Ave. in Manhattan (try the vegan, gluten-free Chocolate Crunch cookies and Red – Rooibos tea – Latte with Hemp Milk) with my friend Lynn discussing the way we perceive our thoughts. I told Lynn that, as a child, I used to look at my hands and wonder if they were real. If no one had told me they were hands, what would I think about them today? Would I judge their size and shape, and what they could or could not do, or would I be constantly in awe of what they were capable of?
And so I listen.
“If you think that you ARE, then you ARE. What will you believe NOW?” – At One
Peace!
Joe
I Am As You Believe Me To Be. More Work with Byron Katie
This is what The Work invites you to ask yourself about your thoughts:
Is that true?
Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without the thought?
I spent two days reviewing those questions with the help of Byron Katie and about 300 other people this past weekend. I find that it’s not always easy to take an honest assessment of myself without having someone else there to be my witness, and to hear my stories (those very old, very tired, very tattered, and very alive stories that keep me in a place of suffering). According to The Work of Byron Katie web site, “The Work is meditation. It’s about awareness, not about trying to change your thoughts. Ask the questions, then take your time, go inside, and wait for the deeper answers to surface.”
What I discovered on Sunday was that I am unwilling (I’d like to say ‘at times’ here, but if I were to stick to a yes or no answer I have to say “Yes, I am unwilling”) to allow myself to have negative thoughts about certain things such as money, past relationships, and family. I spend an extraordinary amount of time trying NOT to have them when the fact is they are there in picture form in my mind, as words racing around my brain, as feelings stuck in my gut. There’s a war going on in my head when I try to push away thoughts that I judge as bad. What if I could, as the work invites, be willing to think, be open to having, and even look forward to experiencing those negative thoughts? That’s radical to me, and extremely liberating.
As I practice this new way of being I notice that there is much more space for me, for stillness, for listening, and for receiving. Yesterday I walked around Manhattan having thoughts as I always do, positive and negative, and not judging them, just watching them go by. What a relief! I feel like I have discovered a secret, one that I have been stalking for 16 years, one that I have had bits and pieces of but wasn’t quite ready to fully accept as truth. How exciting! What next?
Peace!
Joe
Did I Just Say That?
For the past week I have noticed an alarming trend: Foot-in-mouth disease is on the rise and it has infiltrated the life of yours truly.
I first noticed the symptoms last Wednesday as I was crossing the street near The Plaza on Central Park South talking to a co-worker on my cell phone. A judgment about a woman in front of me caused me to pause and reflect. Half an hour later I was heading into the gym and made an off-color remark to a friend, again on my cell. The next day I was frantically running around my apartment trying to find something that the cat was obviously hiding from me and in my craziness I began to yell at the ‘f@#$* idiot’ outside who was talking loudly ON HIS CELL PHONE! In a fitness class an hour later I was shocked as yet another bizarre comment forced itself out of my mouth. And then there were those pronouncements over the weekend. Geez! What is going on? Am I possesed?
Hopefully I am possesed with Awareness that will allow me to change my behavior. In those moments when my not so tactful comments emerge, things seem to move in slow motion and my voice reverberates in my ears. It is as though I am being called upon to pay very close attention to what is happening. At the “Uh-oh” point I hear the Universe say, “Do you really want to continue to think and speak like that?”
I often get embarrassed by my words and pray that no one has picked up on what I said. However, the lesson would easily slip away if my comments were not pointed out to me by those within earshot. Quite often those people are my friends who courageously phone or email me with their diagnosis of my affliction. At that point my ego makes an appearance. In surprised outrage it says, “Who me? Yeah, I may have said that, but, did you ask yourself why it’s bothering you so much? It’s really less about me and more about you, OK. Think about that.”
Dear ego: Take a hike!
As I meditated on my condition, some messages came through.
“You are noticing a rise in your inner critic and your old sense of entitlement, and are experiencing a re-emerging of your commitment to grow beyond your current frame of mind. Think of it this way: Now is a very good time to say goodbye to thoughts, feelings and actions that have caused you to think less of your self and that have created a chasm between you and your best self. It is truly a victory for a more power-filled you. Celebrate! Don’t exacerbate this by dwelling on the negative aspects of what was.”
So be it.
Thanks and Peace!
Joe
Burning Away the Past: Shamanism and Radical Openness
Last night I was prepping for my final Radical Openness Teleclass and received the following message:
“The very essence of Radical Openness is a willingness to go beyond what you think is normal, even proper or correct. It is your ability to allow yourself to grow bigger, bolder, and brighter in a very new and exciting way. Even the everyday things can turn into an adventure when looked at from that perspective. How willing are you to step outside of the box and experience your self differently? The treasure is available to all when you open your eyes. The treasure is there when you allow your self to think that you can all ways have what you want. The treasure is there in front of you. NOW. Ask it to reveal itself. NOW. Go on. Ask and you shall indeed receive. That’s LIFE. That’s LIVING.”
After class I was thinking about my next blog posting and came across a story I wrote in 2003. ‘Living Shamanism’ describes my first experience in a Shamanic Fire Ceremony with Lorna Roberts, who was a mentor of mine for eight years before she passed in 2001 (and who continues to influence me today). The story takes place in 1993 when I first stepped onto the shamanic path and started to peel away layers of guilt, shame, doubt and fear, and began to understand that there is far more to life than meets the eye. I was truly Fishing for Soul and Lorna paved the way for Radical Openness to emerge.
Living Shamanism
The darkened room began to fill with smoke from the burning sage. The cold New York City winter outside suddenly seemed far away. The smoke, I was told, would cleanse the room and all in it. I looked around at the circle of faces. Besides the friend who accompanied me, I recognized one other person.
Lorna Roberts, a shaman I had met a few months earlier, loomed before us. She was talking about the significance of the ceremony we were about to perform, a fire ceremony, a ritual of purification and transmutation. Working with the fire in this sacred way would release us from the energetic bonds that tied us to the past. I had read her written instructions beforehand, and was ready to shed a bit of personal history. My mind began to drift and fill with images related to the issue with which I was working. I remember thinking how interesting it was that faces, places and circumstances from 20 years ago, and supposedly long forgotten, were now very vivid. Lorna’s commanding voice carried me back to the room.
“Oh winds of the south,” she was saying, beginning her invocation of the four directions, her words at once mystical and poetic.
“Is this woman is a witch?” I wondered. “How did I wind up here?”
Several months earlier I had experienced intense and upsetting spontaneous psychic phenomena which, combined with other upheavals in my personal life, had left me emotionally raw and questioning my sanity. My old ways of trying to keep things together were not working. Things seemed out of control. And that’s how I came to be sitting in this dark, smoky room, with a strange woman who was now blowing smoke from her pipe. I was searching for answers. I was looking for myself.
Soon it was my turn to approach the fire. Having never done this before, I was a bit nervous and self-conscious. I knelt before the fireplace. Staring into the flames, I saw and heard again many of the images and names that had appeared to me earlier in the evening. I’d brought a small piece of paper with some names written on it to put into the fire, and I gently placed the paper in the flames and watched it be consumed, thereby releasing that part of my personal history to the universe.
“OK, I felt something,” I thought as I walked, still self-conscious, back to my seat. “Now what happens?”
What happened over the next few weeks was astounding, life changing and affirming. Years of guilt and shame seemed to be lifted. I was functioning in a way that I’d been praying for.
I spent the next eight years learning from Lorna, her magnificent fire ceremonies, and an ancient body of knowledge. That night proved to me the power of shamanism, and it put me firmly on a path of self-discovery. It taught me that the unseen world is alive. But shamanism is not all about smoke and fire. Ritual and ceremony are often an important part of it, but the work really begins when the fire goes out. We must then return to our everyday lives, and integrate the energies that were called forth and released, or absorbed, during the ceremony.
Shamanism, according to Wade Davis, is arguably the oldest of human spiritual endeavors, born at the dawn of our species’ awareness. It is a system of direct revelation, without dogma or doctrine. A shaman, writes Michael Harner in The Way of the Shaman, is a man or woman who enters an altered state of consciousness, at will, to contact and utilize an ordinarily hidden reality in order to acquire knowledge, power, and to help other persons. The role of the shaman is to bring balance to a person, a community, or the earth.
Do you need to be a shaman, or have the assistance of one, to tap into the wisdom of non-ordinary reality? It can help, but I believe that we are all wired to do the things a shaman does. I’ve seen it happen countless times, whether it is at the fire, or through a seemingly unrelated incident afterward. Perhaps in the future we will all rediscover our own inner shaman.
Peace and light!
Joe
Fishing for Change: The Power of Listening to Our Dreams
Last week I was in Hawaii at Kalani Oceanside Retreat on the Big Island. It rained a lot. In fact, in rained non-stop for the first 48 hours I was there and then started again several hours later and continued for another day and a half. After that there were intermittent showers and an abundance of gray sky. I did get to see the sun, but it was not one of the main attractions of my week.
As the rain pounded my cottage on Day 2 I felt compelled to sit, stare out the window, and watch the wind and water sweep across the land. I decided to meditate on the element in front of me. “OK Rain, I’ve traveled thousands of miles to come to this beautiful island and I think you are here to teach me something. I am open to knowing what that is.” The answer I received was, “Listen.”
I spent the next five days doing just that. I walked in the rain until I was soaked to the bone and listened to the squish of water in my boots. I participated in an intimate Kirtan and listened intently to the quiet call of each chant. I had a massage with Jared and listened to my body say “Ah, thank you”. I took a yoga class and listened to my Higher Self say, “Hold that pose. Don’t think you have to push any further.” I ran along the coast and listened to the roar of the Pacific waves, talked with my friend Deborah and listened to the newly found strength in her voice, watched night fall and listened as the frogs sang their song, and shared three, delicious, vegetarian meals each day with retreat volunteers and staff and listened as they told tales of the fire goddess Pele who rules Hawaii’s volcanoes, and the magic that could be found all over the island.
I had many vivid dreams that week. On my last night I had a dream about a large, dark woman in a beautiful, black and white, floral print headdress and matching gown sitting at a desk writing a letter. I recognized her as the mother of a friend. She did not turn to look at me as I approached, but I knew that she was aware of my presence. She continued to write and I felt a deep sadness coming from her. “Where is my son?” she asked. I saw her son running around New York City, in a suit and tie, acting very important and ignoring his mother’s cry. I then saw a small, yellow-domed apartment complex snuggled between many tall office buildings. As I looked at the building from above I knew that the woman writing the letter and asking for her son lived there. As I realized that, the building imploded. I was startled by what seemed to be a horrible disaster and found myself searching the rubble for my friend’s mother. I found her lying on the ground, bloodied, wearing the same clothes as in the first scene, her head turned away from me, and asking the same question, “Where is my son?” Again, I saw her son rushing through the streets of New York City, dressed in a suit and tie, this time being pursued by several armed men (also in suits and ties). The sense of danger grew as the scene unfolded and I was aware once more that my friend, in his frantic state, could not hear the call of his mother and never would if he continued to run around around the way he always did. I then saw myself sitting on a throne, dressed in a robe that was very much like that of the mother. My friend appeared, dark and naked. He crawled into my lap and I wrapped my arms around him as he wept and wept and wept.
I woke, breathing heavily, sweating and feeling incredibly sad. What did it mean? The scenes haunted me all day and I prayed for the meaning of the dream (all meanings of it) to be revealed.
Hours later I was on a plane heading back to the Mainland. As I sat, I reflected on the art of listening and my intense dream. Meaning began to emerge. The mother in my dream seemed to be the Earth or Nature beckoning to me. Was I going to ignore the call?
Images of my life in New York surfaced. “How am I living my life there? Am I truly happy and thriving in the way I want to be?” I asked myself. “Is it time to look for a new place to live outside of the city that I’ve called home for almost 19 years?”
I thought about what it would take to move to a quieter place, to live closer to Nature, to have a car again (it’s been 16 years!), to not ride the subways, to be away from my incredible family of friends. How many times over the past 10 years have I said I wanted to leave New York and live by the beach? I squirmed in my seat. My palms started to sweat. My heart beat faster. “I can’t think about that right now,” I heard myself say.
To distract myself I opened the book that I took with me to Hawaii, but never read, Paulo Coehlo’s
The Devil and Miss Prym. On page 34 (hardback copy) I came across the following passage:
“She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, all our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full of new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything that is familiar.
People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same.”
I slammed the book shut, clutched my hands to my belly, drew a sharp breath, and closed my eyes. After a few minutes I opened the book and read those words again: “…setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full of new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything that is familiar.”
It’s time to leave New York.
Peace!
Joe
Think and Grow Rich (It’s Not Just About Money)
The book Think and Grow Rich, written by Napoleon Hill and first published in 1937, is a must-read (or just browse) for anyone interested in learning how to use the power of the mind to create positive change and prosperity. The DVD and book The Secret expresses the same ideas and presents them in a more modern, almost mystical context. The principles in either body of work are not new, nor do they need to be thought of as unusual or overtly spiritual (although the concepts have been discussed in Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, and other religious traditions for centuries). I like to think that if you can convince yourself to buy a Starbucks coffee seven days a week, you can certainly train your mind to believe that so-called bigger things are attainable.
This week I have dedicated my postings to The Power of Positive Affirmations. I believe that you are only as good, happy, sad, healthy, wealthy, spiritually strong, lonely, unloved or loved as you think and say you are. Tell yourself the story of your best life – NOW! One of my favorite spiritual thinkers, Byron Katie, puts it this way in her book Loving What Is:
“I often use the word story to talk about thoughts, or sequences of thoughts, that we convince ourselves are real. A story may be about the past, the present, or the future; it may be about what things should be, what they could be, or why they are. Stories appear in our minds hundreds of times a day—when someone gets up without a word and walks out of the room, when someone doesn’t smile or doesn’t return a phone call, or when a stranger does smile; before you open an important letter, or after you feel an unfamiliar sensation in your chest; when your boss invites you to come to his office, or when your partner talks to you in a certain tone of voice. Stories are the untested, uninvestigated theories that tell us what all these things mean. We don’t even realize that they’re just theories.
Once, as I walked into the ladies’ room at a restaurant near my home, a woman came out of the single stall. We smiled at each other, and, as I closed the door, she began to sing and wash her hands. “What a lovely voice!” I thought. Then, as I heard her leave, I noticed that the toilet seat was dripping wet. “How could anyone be so rude?” I thought. “And how did she manage to pee all over the seat? Was she standing on it?” Then it came to me that she was a man—a transvestite, singing falsetto in the women’s restroom. It crossed my mind to go after her (him) and let him know what a mess he’d made. As I cleaned the toilet seat, I thought about everything I’d say to him. Then I flushed the toilet. The water shot up out of the bowl and flooded the seat. And I just stood there laughing.”
Th title of another Byron Katie book captures it all: Who Would You Be Without Your Story?
Louise Hay says, “Explain to people that everything they say is an affirmation. Everything they think is an affirmation. Everything! What you want to do is to get control of what you are saying and thinking, so these things bring you good experiences in life rather than rotten experiences.”
What will your affirmation/story/prayer/thought be today (all day, every day)?
Peace!
Joe
The Healing Power of Facebook (and time), Part 2
“Placing the blame or judgment on someone else
leaves you powerless to change your experience.
Taking responsibility for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them.”
~ Byron Katie ~
Why do we sometimes wait so long to make amends to ourselves and others? Is it because we are busy taking care of other things and we get distracted? Is it that we don’t want to look at the dark, scary stuff? Or is it that we don’t truly realize what ails us until something comes along and forces the issue? For many of us, Facebook has forced the issue.
Roll back the years and meet your former self! You’ve just become Facebook Friends with your long forgotten high school pals! Or were they your pals? It may be time to find out. Let Facebook (and time) help you!
Here’s what some readers discovered:
“I was what “I thought” not so fabulous in high school. Boy have I changed and grown and healed ..Also, I have had many apologies given to me here on Facebook from people who have changed as well. It’s beautiful and I am full of gratitude.”
“I think it’s very cool to revisit our former selves. I wonder what we can teach each other.”
“I started getting friend requests from college friends…then high school friends. I was still pretty insecure about asking people to be my friend on FB. I felt like a skinny nerd in HS and thought I could reinvent myself in college… I am now addicted to reconnecting with old friends – and am overcoming my insecurities.”
“One of the aspects that I am surprised and delighted by is that I am coming to know some people who were just on the margins of my view back then. Now I am seeing them in a new light and loving it. And maybe people are seeing me differently, too.”
“FB really does heal . The wounds of time vanish more if completely. I had the same kind of experience recently with someone from senior year h.s. who hit me up as a friend. We all felt separate, weird, in our own ways. It took me right back and I was able to bridge a gap that I haven’t looked at in a while.”
“To see all these faces, some I knew very well in junior and senior high and some I didn’t, and to have discussions with all these people who helped to shape who I am today has been wonderful.”
Two weeks ago I posted the first part of this story. The night I wrote Part One I was aware that I just might be having a cathartic experience. I signed off on the post and went to bed feeling quite vulnerable. I woke up feeling more so. Then the responses started coming in and my fears began to wash away. Hey, I’m no longer the skinny, misunderstood, confused, tortured guy I thought I was in 1984. After many years of spiritual studies and practice I know that my thoughts about myself created that reality. I could never have known what “those Ridley people” truly thought or what was motivating them 25 years ago. Thanks to the Facebook friends who knew me then I have allowed myself to be Radically Open to changing my perception, to embrace the past with joy and gratitude, and truly move on. Amen!
Peace!
Joe
