Friday, April 29, 2016

FOBI

Road rage. Why does he drive that way?  My son asked about a man who was driving with no sense of logic and obvious anger. The man was a bully on the road. He used his vehicle as an instrument of aggression and intimidation. Mom? He was waiting for my answer. FOBI, I said. Fear of being insignificant.

FOBI is a very existential fear. We fear dying. More to the point, we fear dying having been insignificant. I think of what Irvin Yalom has written about the myth of specialness, about the defenses we build to protect ourselves from that fear. In response to that fear, we build defenses to give ourselves meaning, self-worth, and a sense of power. We don't know ourselves well enough and so we look for validation outside of ourselves. We force that validation in many unhealthy and maladaptive ways. Yet if we become aware and remember who we are, we realize that nothing others do can take away from us. Nothing. If we become aware and remember who we are, we find our meaning, worth and power. We find our significance. We minimize our fear.

Road rage is not the only way in which we manifest our FOBI. We act out of FOBI, knowingly and unknowingly, when we terrorize others for their different beliefs, when we try to subdue others through violence, when we punish others or seek revenge, when we are dishonest in order to gain an advantage, when we censure, discredit, defame or do not give due credit to others, and many other ways in which we we act out of pride and ego.

Let us take a few moments today to go within. Let's be still. Let's be quiet. Let us listen. We will die, someday, eventually. But, when we do, we will not die insignificantly. We have meaning and significance. We have a purpose and we are important. Let us be aware of that. Let us act from that place of knowing.
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© Millicent Maldonado and www.soulcerer.com. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Alchemy, the art of change

I cannot do wheel pose. That is a fact. For a long time it frustrated me. I became disappointed with yoga. I grew tired of trying and what could have been something good for my body and my spirit, became a difficulty, a hindrance, a limitation. That was so until I let it go. Then everything changed.

I still am not able to do wheel pose. It turns out the structure of my shoulders does not allow for it. But it does allow for so many other poses. My yoga practice became something else, something wonderful,  when I released my insistence on what should be, my resistance to what is. Everything changed, even if nothing didn't. That is alchemy. It begins with willingness. It begins with releasing resistance.

Alchemy, psychological and mystic, abides in an absence of resistance, allowing knowledge, guidance, inspiration and synchronicity in. It changes everything, even if nothing changes. Yet, everything does. We change. Our perception changes and expands allowing for deeper wisdom and understanding.

Resistance is a wall we hit ourselves against. We feel awful when we do. Yet our tendency is to keep hitting the wall. Nothing changes while we do. We don't change. We don't grow. We become stuck behind that wall. Nothing flows. Our energy, our frames of mind, our creativity, and our productivity become stagnant. There's a physical, psychic and emotional blockage. When we resist, we don't progress, we don't learn, we don't grow, we don't enjoy.

Resistance creates anxiety and anxiety creates inflammation in our bodies and in our emotional systems. Willingness, though, releases the anxiety. It allows us to flow. We move. We regenerate and enliven. We change. Everything changes.

Today is a good day to alchemize an issue we have been resisting. Let us be willing for it to be, whatever it is. In doing so, we allow it to change. Let us release our resistance to the state of the economy, the course of the industry we work in, that our children have minds and beliefs of their own, that there are certain things we cannot do, a loved one's homosexuality, the death of someone we love, the changes we have to make to be healthier, to forgive someone who has hurt us, to apologize for something we have done, to make amends, the next step to meet a goal, learning something new, forging al alliance, doing something awkward, to make a commitment, letting go of a bad habit, starting a new exercise program, meditation, change. From resistance, to willingness, to alchemy – our perceptions change, our thoughts change, our circumstance change, we change, everything changes.

Image found at radiovalencia.fm.
© Millicent Maldonado and www.soulcerer.com. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

The notch

There's a little notch on a wall in my dressing room that serves me just fine when I want to hang up my small towels or any small fabric item. However, many times as I walk by it, I catch my elbow on it...and there goes my mood. Scraping myself on something I know is there feels so clumsy and foolish. I get mad. I know it's not that big a deal, but, in the moment, I react with such harshness. I then get mad at my reaction. I get hung up on such a minor incident.

We do. We get hung up on things that scrape us – our image, our ego, our self-esteem. We get hung up on things that happened this morning, yesterday, a week ago, year's ago. We get hung up on things that really do not matter. And we stay hung up. Hung up, we do not move forward. We stay. We become stagnant.

Today is a good day to release ourselves from the notches that we have hung ourselves on. Let us be mindful of the present moment. Let's keep moving. Let us be productive and creative. If we scrape ourselves along the way, let us heed the lesson and let it go, let ourselves go.
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© Millicent Maldonado and www.soulcerer.com. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Shadow forms

When I was a little girl, my parents used to take us on weekend trips to the beach on the westside of this island. They would rent a cabin or we would stay at a hotel. These were fun trips. Except at night. Though I have never had problems falling and staying asleep, on some of these trips I would wake up in the middle of the night and stay up for a while, motionless on the bed with my big eyes open in the pitch–dark. On one particular trip we took when I was around six years old, I woke up while we all slept. I stayed on my bed. With the little light that was coming from under the door, I saw a shape on the floor. It was pudgy, arched, with four legs, and a tail. It was a giant rat. I was terrified. I was frozen in place by fear. I kept staring. Hoping, wishing, praying that it wouldn't jump up to my bed and eat me. And then I heard I sound. My heart stopped. It was my dad. He woke up, got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, guided by the same little light coming from underneath the front door to the room. He walked right by the rat. It was all too much for me.

He closed the door. There stood the rat. Time ticked. And then the door to the bathroom opened. The light was on. It shined on the rat. But it wasn't a rat. It wasn't even alive.

There are so many unpleasant and fearful things we imagine, and there are so many unpleasant and fearful things we ignore from our own personalities. These unpleasant and fearful aspects of ourselves can be monstrous or not so much. But we will not know until we shine a light on them.

Today is a good day to illumine that which we fear so much. By shining a light on those shadow forms, we disempower the shadow and empower ourselves. You may find that the giant, evil, hairy, scary rat is nothing but a bundle of dirty beach clothes.

Image found at robertwcorkery.wordpress.com.
© Millicent Maldonado and www.soulcerer.com. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Leaky sounds

I am sitting by myself in this apartment. This apartment subdivides us from other families in the building. And though I am by myself in this space, I am certainly not alone. As I sit here writing, while everything is seemingly calm and quiet, I can still hear the faint sounds of other living spaces in this building. I hear the trickle of water through pipes, the drop of some object on someone's floor, a distant radio. Sounds permeate through the walls. I can't help but think that whatever we do, seeps in some unintended direction.

Whatever we do in one area of our life bears in other areas, whether we intend it or not. Any imbalance will reflect in other areas. Too much of anything is not necessarily good. It lopsides us. We can pretend to keep it together, but at some point we will hear the trickles into other areas of our lives. W
e will feel the thumps. This is so true of workaholism, shopping, religious fanaticism, recreation or any other behavior we take to excess.

The other side of this is that any healing we do in one are or our life will also flow into other areas of our lives bringing us closer to wellbeing. Today is a good day to start bringing balance into our lives. Let us begin by asking ourselves: What areas of my life are impacting the other areas strongly? Is it a healthy impact? Is there a change I would like to make?
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© Millicent Maldonado and www.soulcerer.com. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.

Friday, April 8, 2016

Mute

I lost my voice. Don't worry. It's not permanent. I got one of those colds that makes your whole body quake and tremble when you cough. After the third day, my throat became very soar and, at some point, I lost my voice. I have now been without full use of my voice for ten days.

This is very difficult for me. I have classes, speaking engagements, work commitments and a family life. I need my voice. Yet I had no choice but to be quiet for a while. My life was on mute.

After the first few times I tried to speak and made it worse, I heeded. I became quiet. I can be quiet. That is not a problem. But outside of my meditation room, being quite is weird. It feels unnatural. It also feels powerless. Yet after a few days, it wasn't so bad. Being silent gave me bigger eyes, more sensitive ears, a wider heart. I laughed more too.

Today is a good day to be quiet on purpose. Let's look around. Let's see something new. Without our interjection, somehow our senses are heightened for us to perceive more fully. Let's listen more intently without planning a response. Let us listen to more than our own voice. What will we hear? What will we discover? What will we enjoy?

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© Millicent Maldonado and www.soulcerer.com. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Our power over suffering

Suffering is resistance to what is. For as long as we resist what is, we agonize. Only when we acknowledge and accept what is before us, we can release the discomfort, dissatisfaction, and frustration we feel when things are not as we want them to be. We suffer. We hurt. And we don't think clearly for we focus on what should be. Moreover, resisting what is dampens our potential for growth and self-realization.

Resistance is an opposing force. If we open ourselves up, there's no more pressure. If we open ourselves up, resistance forces itself away. And with it, goes our suffering. Today is a good day to release ourselves from our own resistance, from our own suffering. The only way to move from where we are is to face what is. Name it. Allow it. Give it permission to be. Then we can either change it or change ourselves. Resistance is a force, but we have power over it. Ours is subtle power. Our power is in our acknowledgement and our acceptance of our circumstances, our feelings, and things as they are. This allows newness of thought, perception, feelings and circumstances to come through. That is our power over suffering.

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© Millicent Maldonado and www.soulcerer.com. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved.