love Archives - Francine Kelley, LCPC, SEP, RYT500

The peace that is always here…

So the holidays are here and maybe the stress is starting to settle in a little deeper. For me there is the hustle and bustle of the gift-buying and preparations and the general collective stress that sets in, there is the excitement and anticipation of the kids hoping for wonderful presents, the holiday lights and the darkness of winter and Nature’s stillness that underlies all of this activity. All this is available right now in this minute – all at the same time. So, since I get to choose where I place my focus, I choose to place it on the peace – the stillness and silence – and sometimes I’ll chose to focus on the excitement and anticipation.

Even though I’ve had a sense of this underlying peacefulness, to focus on it is a big departure for me this year. Usually I just get stressed worrying about travel plans, what to get for whom, whether the receivers of gifts would like their gifts, and on and on. This year, everybody gets tie-dye (my kids’ idea) and the kids and I are excited to get started on this make-at-home project. They’re already picking out which designs for whom and which colors. It’s fun. Hopefully people will appreciate their gifts, and the love with which they were made and offered. But none of us can control what others think or feel. All we can really control is that we do our best to love, we place our focus on what nurtures us and those around us, and we give ourselves a break, every so often, to check in with the peace that is always here.

Not sure how to check in? Try this: Notice that you have a body, and that your body is breathing. Begin to follow the flow of your breath. Notice that each time you inhale and exhale, the breath comes from stillness and goes back to stillness. You may also feel that it arises from silence and goes back to silence. Just notice the rising and falling of the breath, from stillness and back to stillness, from silence and back to silence. Now instead of focusing on the breath, focus on the stillness, or the silence. You might begin to feel that it is always there, and that your body begins to feel more peaceful as you focus your attention on the stillness or the silence – the peace that is always here. Doesn’t take long to check in, but it feels pretty good, and you can even do it in line at the mall!

Happy holidays!

Taking Responsibility…

One of the teachings of A Course In Miracles is that, like a hologram, our external world is the reflection of our inner world. Said another way: the challenges you face in your external world are essentially the externalization of your inner world. This outer experience gives us the opportunity to take responsibility for our world. It gives us a mirror with which to look at ourselves more deeply and begin to welcome and work with the parts of ourselves that we have hidden from the world and even from ourselves.

So, as an example, there is someone at work who is so arrogant that you can’t even stand to be around them. Yet it seems you can’t avoid them no matter how hard you try. This is an opportunity for you to look inside to see whether there is some arrogance or intolerance in you that you’re not admitting to. This is an opportunity to take that out, look at it, stop resisting or hiding it and maybe even come to terms with it or let it go. But this will only happen when you stop blaming the other person, and take responsibility for your own part in the creation of your world.

It is easy to blame our behavior as a reaction to other people, “society,” the economy, or even as caused by Satan. It is not so easy to look at the parts of ourselves we most despise. The truth is that until we look at those parts, they will keep visiting us through other people, and we will continue to be revolted or angered by them. When we take responsibility for what is being triggered in us we have an opportunity to stop being victims and actually make a change – since it is really only possible for any of us to change ourselves.

Of course, it might be difficult to see the seemingly ugly parts of ourselves, and this is where it is helpful to proceed with patience and gentleness. Cultivating loving-kindness towards ourselves helps us to see ourselves honestly. The Metta practice is one way of cultivating gentleness and kindness towards ourselves and others.

The Metta practice uses 4 phrases.: May ___ be free from suffering; May ____ be healthy; May ____ be happy; May ____ live with ease. You start off repeating these phrases for yourself (May I be free from suffering… etc.), then you do them for a loved one, then for a friend, then for a neutral person or a stranger and then for a difficult person. In this way we begin to soften towards the difficult people in our lives and also toward ourselves. We do not say these phrases with artificially contrived emotion, we just offer them as they are – no strings attached.

As we soften towards ourselves we do not need to run away. As we soften towards others we can see that they are us, and we can begin to take responsibility for our own part in this play we call Life.

May you be free from suffering. May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you live with ease.

Namaste.

Making friends with yourself

What would you do if a friend confessed to you that she felt really badly about something she had recently done, or really didn’t like something about herself? You would probably feel some compassion for your friend and try to think of something to say to help her feel better, right? And yet what do you do to yourself when you feel badly about something you’ve done? What thoughts come about when you think of the things about yourself that you don’t like? For most of us those thoughts aren’t about being compassionate!

It’s not a secret that we tend to treat others better than we treat ourselves, often to the point where we can offer compassion to others, but have difficulty offering it to ourselves, or even receiving it from others. How much we are able to love ourselves, I think, is directly related to how much we can allow others to love us. If we beat up on ourselves, on some level we begin to think of ourselves as inherently flawed and unlovable. This breeds suspicion and disbelief when others see us differently. We might even back away from people or relationships because we aren’t used to allowing the light of love and compassion into our hearts. To be loved or lovable is unfamiliar.

A few months ago I told someone that I felt I had made friends with my mind. The person responded first with surprise and then with disappointment. “I wish I could do that,” she said. In our culture we tend to think it unlikely that this could ever be possible. Instead we believe that we need to control, cover up, pretend, medicate and distract. And yet, it is possible. In Buddhism, this acceptance of self is called ‘maitri.’ Pema Chodron, a wonderful Buddhist teacher describes maitri on this youtube video as “unconditional friendliness toward oneself.” She describes maitri as “the basis of compassion.”

Think of it, what if you were able to just think of yourself as being okay? What would your life be like if you were able to cut yourself some slack and just love yourself as you are without trying to be more perfect, more knowledgeable, more attractive… How much stress do we put on ourselves trying to be more or ‘better’ because we are so dissatisfied, so averse to what we are now? And yet, have we even looked to see what is actually here or is it just an assumption that what we are couldn’t possibly be enough?

So, how to go about cultivating this self-compassion? I think the first step is really to welcome the possibility that you could be unconditionally friendly towards yourself, that you could be worthy of loving. From there, I’ve found that the universe is only too happy to lead you into more and more lessons and revelations. Sometimes the lessons are easy and sometimes not. It is not that life suddenly becomes a bed of roses, but that you begin to see the difficulties as more ways of deepening in relationship with yourself and with others. Any relationship takes effort and most relationships work better if the focus is on the other person’s positive qualities vs. judging their flaws.

In my experience, a simple way to begin to cultivate self-compassion is to spend some time acknowledging the aspects of yourself that you actually do appreciate. Since we have such a tendency to judge things as good or bad, let me be clear that the other aspects aren’t bad per se. It is just easier at first to love ourselves based on those things we perceive as ‘positive’ qualities. It might take some time (it took me days the first time I tried to come up with one thing), but just finding one thing you appreciate about yourself is like clearing a little hole on the grimy window of our past perception so that the light can begin to shine through.

Make a phrase with your one ‘positive’ quality (or more if you have more than one). For me it was “I am compassionate.” Notice how your body feels when you say this phrase. And when you find your mind going into the place of self-judgment or self-criticism, let this phrase be your ray of light. Once that tiny ray of light is experienced, the shadows become less dense and the darkness begins to give way. Repeat your phrase whenever you think of it. Eventually you might find it pops up on its own!

In the next few blog entries I’ll be offering more tools that have helped me to bring light into my shadows. If you have other tips, comments or experiences to offer, please feel free to share those as well by clicking on the Comments link below.

Until next time, may you live with ease ☺

Is there such a thing as “negative energy?”

Realizing this topic can rub people the wrong way, I offer the disclaimer that this post, like any other I might write is simply meant to cast a few ripples and see where they settle. I’m not preaching or saying it is definitely so, just offering my ponderings on the subject and hoping to clarify as I learn from others.

That said, years ago I attended a lovely talk at Unity in Chicago with Katerina Pellegrino. She is a spirit medium who works with John of God in Brazil. Someone asked a question about how to deal with evil and she presented the notion that what we call evil is actually just a separation from God. As a Reiki practitioner for many years, I was taught to clear “negative” energy from the person I was working on before sending Reiki to them. It always seemed a little awkward to me, all this clearing and containing and disposing of other people’s negative energy. Then I heard Eric Pearl speak and read his book and he had the opposite view. He said all this avoidance of ‘negative energy’ was fear-based and unnecessary. I came to the conclusion that he thought there was no such thing.

So now that begs the question. What is it that you feel when you walk into a room where someone has just had an argument? What is it that people feel when they go to former sites of epic battles or mass human suffering? What is that icky vibe you get from people sometimes? Isn’t that negative energy? As humans we like to categorize and simplify. So light and dark become associated with good and bad, positive and negative. It’s also very convenient to label someone as being “negative” or having ‘negative energy.’ Then we can feel very positive and separate and good.

But what if we looked at it a different way? What if we thought of energy according to the principles of expansion and contraction, as the yogis have? When we are afraid, we tend to contract – physically, emotionally, energetically. The more fear, the more density and darkness. When we are feeling joyful, we feel expansive, connected, light and free. So what if all that ‘darkness’ and ‘negativity’ is really just fear that we are unwilling to face. We avoid the fear within ourselves, we are repulsed when it appears in others. Yet if we could connect with our own fear compassionately, maybe we could see that contraction in others with the same compassion, rather than with aversion. Then, instead of feeding the fear with more fear, we could allow the possibility of light and love.

Whaddya think?

Are you a karma buster?

I know its been a while since I’ve posted! 2010 has so far been a fascinating year of insights, observances, wonderful experiences and deep internal struggles. Sometimes I’m not even sure what part of the mix to write about. So, this possibility of “karma busters” peaked my curiosity recently and seemed just “light” enough that I won’t use too many words 🙂 Lemme know what you think…

It’s no secret that we’re influenced by generations past. Even on a purely scientific level, there’s the issue of hereditary transmission of genetic conditions and disease tendencies. So when I learned the concept of ‘family karma’ years ago, it had a ring of truth to it. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that many of us are on the planet right now to be karma busters – breaking the chain of reactivity that has characterized much of our individual family histories.

If you think of karma, not this “eye for an eye” concept that it has become in the popular culture, but as a simple system of cause and effect, generational transmission of behavioral or even disease tendencies is not so strange. One generation’s parenting affects the choices of the next and often leads to reactive swings in parenting strategies from one extreme to the next. A family with a history of trauma or addiction (or both) might be able to trace the manifestation of that traumatic effect through generations. Sometimes the original cause of the seeming disfunction is lost in time, and yet the effects remain.

I had a fascinating Reiki Therapy session last year where an ancestor from generations past spoke about the legacy of fear that she had unwittingly released into my maternal line. She said we were at a point in time when this legacy could be let go. During that time I felt energetic ‘chains’ being released from my spine. I realized after communicating with her that I had been working for years to break up that legacy – to “bust up” and transform that karma.

I am blessed to be surrounded by wonderfully mindful and present individuals. Talking to people, I’ve realized that many of us seem to be involved in this karma busting process. Not satisfied with just reacting to the family history, we are mindfully creating a different way – whether it be through parenting, spiritual work or ways of thinking about ourselves and the world. We seem to have come to the planet with a mission to make a change, not just “in society,” but in ourselves. It feels as if we are releasing those bonds so that we can move forward into a different type of future. There is a sense that going forward our children should not have to carry the burden of the past. This is all pretty exciting to me. I wonder, how will this affect the future of our planet?

Are you a karma buster?

Celebrating Gran

I’m writing this post in honor of my grandmother, Alice McKenzie who transitioned last week at the ripe old age of 90. I’m not much for grieving, as strange as that might sound, maybe because I believe that this life is just a stop along the journey of our souls. Or maybe I just need therapy! Sometimes a person’s life can be really sad, and we mourn the circumstances that they had to endure. Sometimes we just miss the person who has passed and we wish to have them still with us. My Gran lived a long and full life, and instead of grieving her passing, I feel more inclined to celebrate her life and give gratitude for her amazing contribution to the world as I know it.

Many years ago, I heard Carolyn Myss talking about living your purpose. She said (to paraphrase – as I remember it) that we always imagine our purpose to be something big, but for many of us, our purpose is simply to live our lives as we are, being a shining light for those around us. My grandmother was such a light.

Gran didn’t have a fancy degree or an impressive resume. She raised cows and sold milk in Jamaica to support the education of her children. When the last one graduated from University, she got on a plane – alone – and moved to Brooklyn to start a new life on her own terms. It was a spunky move, she was a spunky lady. She got a job as a domestic worker with a family in Westchester and worked for them for decades. When they retired to Florida she got a job delivering lunches to partners in a law practice. She retired when she was 80. My Gran’s life was difficult at times. Yet, she had a strong faith in God and wasn’t one to feel sorry for herself. She was a woman of action. As a single woman working a simple job when she first arrived in the US, she often sent us barrels containing goods that were not available in Jamaica at the time, or were too expensive there. Eventually, she made it possible for all of us (her children and grandchildren) to join her here in the United States to have the opportunities we might not have had in a small island nation.

There was never a doubt in my grandmother’s mind that we would all “make something of ourselves.” She was strong in her conviction – tenacious if you will, and her tenacity fueled our family. She died leaving 5 children, 22 grandchildren, 11 great grandchildren and 2 great-great grandchildren (as well as the many in-laws whom she welcomed with open arms). We have a collection among us of various fancy degrees and impressive resumes, but my grandmother left us the gift of seeing beyond all that to our shared humanity. She celebrated our accomplishments, but I think she was always more concerned that we be happy, responsible, able to care for ourselves, and willing to care for each other and those who needed our help. My grandmother suffered in her life at the hands of another. Her response to her suffering has always been a great lesson to me. First, she took action. She made a plan and as soon as the time was right, she left the situation. Then, instead of becoming bitter, she became more compassionate and understanding of the suffering of others. Instead of hating the one who hurt her, she turned her energy to loving us all and to helping us become the best we could be.

My grandmother taught me that strength is not hard or uncompromising. She taught me that strength is knowing right from wrong, loving fiercely, and making the hard choices to always follow what you think is right. Though sometimes firmness is required, she taught me that a woman can be strong and still compassionate, loving and kind. She taught me that a legacy is more than large gestures and public acclaim. A true legacy is born of living your life in truth and in love. This simple and uncomplicated woman, barely 5 ft tall, affected the lives of so many with her tenacity, spunk, kindness, generosity and open heart. Hers was surely a life well lived.

My you fly on the wings of the angels, Gran. I love you now, as always.

From Resistance to Appreciation

Yesterday I took my 4 year old daughter son and 9 year old to my meditation teacher training. I couldn’t find a babysitter and my teacher was gracious enough to suggest bringing them and letting them stay in a room close to our meeting room. Her suggestion brought an immediate feeling of resistance and fear.

For some parents the thought of bringing their kids is a non-issue, but not so for me with my disciplined Caribbean upbringing. I had visions of my daughter laughing out loud in the middle of a meditation segment; of people in the class being annoyed by these pesky kids; of having to constantly leave class to attend to them or quiet them down; of them trashing the room they were staying in and in the end of my teacher being displeased with them being there.

Ah, the workings of the mind and the scenarios it creates to reinforce its resistance! None of these fears were justified! My children, though they can be raucous and challenging at home are generally very well behaved in public. The class is full of other parents and gentle, loving souls who might actually enjoy the sound of a child’s laughter in the midst of their meditation. And my teacher suggested I bring them! So the fear, like most fears, was not logical at all. In fact when examined closely, it was a manifestation of the ego worrying: “What will people think of me?” So of course I had to take them! I also didn’t want to miss the lecture on Chapters 7 & 8 of the Bhagavad Gita (definitely worth reading if you haven’t already!).

Amazingly enough, pushing through my fear actually helped me appreciate my kids even more. Neither one complained when I explained what was going to happen. My son did a wonderful job of monitoring and helping his sister. They occupied themselves with the activities we brought, and he was very quiet the two times he did need to come and get me. We had to leave early to take him to soccer (especially since we were bringing snacks!) and he kept track of the time so that he changed into his soccer gear before we had to leave. My daughter made lots of little foam crafts and cleaned up all her scraps. She had pretty much reached her limit by the time we had to leave (in the middle of the lecture), but still they were both very considerate of being quiet as we left.

Later that day after soccer, my daughter handed me a juice pack and straw, and sweetly asked: “Mommy, would you help me with this please?” In that moment I recognized again the sweetness of their presence in my life. Even though there might be actual (rather than fear-imposed) limits to what I am able to do as a result of having to care for them, they are such beautiful beings and I am so blessed to know, love and be loved by them.