Positive Energy Guide

“It is of no use to try and prove to be what in reality you are not.” ~ Inayat Khan

“My bare feet! Step gently on life’s path, lest the thorns lying on the way should murmur at being trampled upon by you.”  ~ Inayat Khan

Self recognition and easier relations with others are the purposes of becoming aware of ones level of development. It is not beneficial to make comparisons with value judgments in mind. Ego must take the back seat so neutral observation can drive. Mind uses contrast to learn
discernment. Meanwhile, heart continues to seek Unity with all beings.

The transition from becoming confused about who we are, over-giving, or disappearing in an attempt to fit in with others to learning how to hold our own internal shape and space during personal interaction can be challenging. The focus changes from seeking external support to sustaining internal sources of support. This growth requires being able to recognize our own experience.

Highly sensitive and intuitive people with comprehensive values are often uncomfortable interfacing closely with people who cannot understand our experience. Clear observation of what an individual actually can and cannot do helps to create reasonable expectations and leads to easier interaction.

These elements tend to be overlooked by those who have not had such experience:

—The ways sensitivity is accommodated by the body, the including super-sensitive nervous, immune and hormonal systems that accompany super-keen sensing
—How hard it can be to arrive at self acceptance, without feeling something is wrong when one is uncomfortable and others do not understand it
—How painful, expensive, and shaming it can be to seek help and be told that nothing is the matter
—That symptoms are often positive adjustments to inner growth while the body and energy systems shift to support accelerated change
—That symptoms with neurological, energy, or karmic elements do not respond to ordinary measures
—How intense it is to be inundated with external energies and impressions
—What it feels like to have a cascade of hormones and emotions secondary to immune system over-activation
—The hugely varied and odd sensations, experiences, and direct perceptions some of us go through, and the unusual capacities that spring from integrating them
—How tiring and overwhelming it can be to process abnormal amounts of incoming information, and to sort what is valid, important, and meaningful from what is not
—The amount of Inner Work it takes to know one’s self well enough to do the above
—The Direct Knowing that can develop from acutely sensitive awareness of energy
—The comprehensive values that develop from having to do so
—What it takes to develop confidence in a world where one is not in the norm
—The discomfort of continually fielding projections, judgments and assumptions from those who do not understand
—How odd it feels to discover one has developed a new capacity or ability in which one has never really believed
—How confusing it can be to feel drawn through compassion to help others, even when doing so may be draining or harmful to one’s self
—How draining and isolating it can be to try to explain these things to people who don’t get it

Communicating these experiences be frustrating—and is often pointless. Someone without similar experience usually does not correctly assimilate or maintain what one tells them. They reinterpret what one says according to what they can understand, or suggest ways to fix things that are not problems.

Even with compassion for the person doing so, being given “feedback,” from someone who cannot see what is actually going on can be very annoying.

Speaking now for myself: When someone clueless is actively trying to impose their perceptual boxes onto me, and imagine they are talking about ME, I find this disconnect emotionally painful. I can keep my mouth shut, attune to their needs and limitations, take care of my own needs, or withdraw—but I do not feel close, respected, or at ease.

In a capacity of service, I am pleased to adjust myself to someone else’s world. I respect clients as fellow travelers. Being asked to explain and justify myself when I am off duty is work. Spending time by myself is often preferable.

Integrating spirituality into personal life brings up the kind of challenges we’ve been discussing in the last few posts. Stepping into the generosity of global service by sending positive energy to All Beings is a beautiful way to counterbalance the distress I have been describing.

A brand new spiritual dance using the words from a prayer of Inayat Khan showed up in my head recently: “Thy light is in all forms, thy love in All Beings.” This vision helps me move from discomfort back into Love. It exemplifies a profound respect that does not rely on personality.

How do you feel respond when people who cannot comprehend your experience give you advice that does not serve you?

What do you do to maintain respect for those who repeatedly and unwittingly disrespect you?

At my recent retreat I was doing a sound practice that generates a sense of spacious, eternal power. It was comprised of three different Divine Names, combining their energies. I chose to practice this one fairly loudly, while walking, to bring it into my body and integrate it.

Participants had been invited to use the main hall if it was free. I chose to practice there, to feel contained and focused, with plenty of space to move. Everyone else was practicing outside, or in their rooms.

So here I was, bringing in a quality of divine power, an intense flavor of longing for the Divine, and an attunement with Eternity, trying to ground all this in my body and taking up most of the hall. I heard the door click and feel someone enter. My eyes were open but my focus was right in front of me to eliminate visual cues. I glanced up for a second, saw that it was my Teacher, went “ULK!” inside, skipped a few beats, and went right back into my practice. I had forgotten that my Teacher planned to meet with individuals who had questions in the hall. He had come early.

I am kind of a funny creature. I know that he REALLY SEES me, and accepts me, yet I get awkward or glitchy if he watches me directly during group walking or energy practices. He made himself almost invisible, harmonious with my energies, soft, spacious, and fluid, and crossed the room without a ripple, seating himself in his customary chair. It seemed dumb to run out of there, so I determined continue. I thought he would want me to.

My Teacher began to meditate. He was very much in his own space, but probably noticed that I was walling him off. I was afraid I would get glitchy—which was stupid. So I connected, and let his energy in. As we connected it felt like he was enhancing or amplifying the work I was doing.

Suddenly I got so high I began forgetting the words. At first I would get something similar to the word, or reverse and combine two of the words. I was able to stop, feel for the words, kind of reset, and start again. As we flowed together more I lost the words completely. This was odd because I had just repeated those three words at least 500 times! I looked askance at him and said, “Oh no! Now I’m going to have to go get the sheet and read them!” I began to cross the room. He said them quietly, giving them to me.

In retrospect, I should have sat down and meditated with him on the energy behind the words, which was the next step of the practice, but I didn’t think of it. Instead, I resumed practice. I was starting to change it out a little, lightening it up and getting it smooth by speeding up a bit when his assistant showed up. She stayed out of the way as far as the energetics went, but I realized they were about to do interviews and got out of there. Someone was waiting in a chair outside.

This experience felt almost like a mini-initiation because it took so much effort to keep my mind and ego from butting in on the practice while feeling on display. It was also rather humorous, and at the same time staggeringly intimate and precious.

What events have intensified your ability to sense and magnify your awareness and mastery of energy?

How did you feel about these experiences at the time?

I recently attended a five day silent spiritual retreat during which most of each day was spent doing intensive practice on one’s own. Each day participants were given specific sound practice and meditations, tuned to suit our spiritual needs.

When I attend such an event, I initially feel confined. The practice schedule allows almost no point in the day to think whatever I might normally think, or use my mind in the ways I usually do. Starting the first retreat or two I actually felt panic. I also doubted whether I might be able to subdue or redirect my mind for the purposes of the retreat.

After several days of intensive spiritual practice, I begin to experience a sense of freedom. By the end of the retreat, I realized that what seemed like freedom in the beginning—like mind chatter, reaction, judging, and the various proclivities of an unfocused mind—are habitual, but certainly not free. Even using my mind intentionally, such as for planning and structuring events, produces a kind of confinement or restriction. Mental filters limit experience.

On retreat I have the opportunity to use my mind in open contemplation and to focus FEELING and SENSING to open to new experiences that have ongoing internal value. The mind is used to direct intention and to stay on track, and released if real mystical experience arises. The experiences that can take place are beyond what we think. BEing this way is ultimately much freer than we are when we let our thinking go along in the ways it generally goes. This freedom requires considerable discipline to access, but it has inherent beauty and value.

The rooms at the retreat center I stayed at have an upper walkway and a lower walkway, with steps connecting to the main building. Considering that everyone there is on silent retreat, and we do not necessarily want to encounter one another, walking around the center seems like moving around inside a huge Escher painting. Everyone is in motion within eternity, in their own universe, yet sensing one another too.

Far from being somber, there is something of delight in the way the group I am in relates on retreat. Anybody who feels like it and wants to will smile, share a glance, or send love on the way by. We can smile, or laugh, or share non-verbal humor and intuitive rapport, or point at what we want someone to pass at the dinner table. If someone is not receptive and keeps his or her energy pulled in, everyone respects their privacy and does not look at them directly. Communication is, mutually, on an Invitation Only status. I love the freedom of that!

It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to wander around in the woods on the property, feeling perfectly safe, and being able to open completely because there will be no encounters with people who do not support deep inner work. For an intuitive, the safety to stay wide open without having to erect social boundaries is a luxury. This allows for a peace that is difficult for sensitive people to achieve among the demands and projections of daily life.

I am coming to enjoy the freedom of spiritual discipline–or is it the discipline of spiritual freedom?

In what way has discipline increased YOUR sense of freedom?

Have you been in situations in which you could be totally open and be yourself without having to be anything for anyone else? What was that like?

The energy at some spiritual centers is very powerful. Every time I have visited certain places I have experienced strong energy activation. I felt somehow changed, felt lighter, and returned to my daily life—only to face various unusual challenges. The nature of these challenges has always been unexpected, unrelated to my behavior, and seemingly random.

My primary healer describes this phenomena as “push back.” Push back shows up as having to face significant challenges immediately following significant spiritual growth.

Pushback can be seen partly as training to be able to fully establish and maintain a new state, partly as resolving karma, and partly as resolving more completely ways of being that do not fit with one’s new state. It’s an opportunity to clean up leftover energy that no longer works with the up-level.

My last shakedown had to do with personal safety. When I was at the spiritual center I met a man within whom I had an almost immediate rapport, including a strong sense of safety and friendship. We also had background in common, in bodywork, service, and healthcare, and we are both truth-sayers. He also cuts hair.

During my stay at the spiritual center this man almost insisted in cutting my hair, to liberate me from my past, bring out my power in a new way, and reveal parts of me that I was holding within. This caught my attention because when I had my hair cut two weeks prior, I was thinking that I really ought to cut it short to release the past and move into a new framework. I didn’t feel like initiating it, and didn’t feel quite right. I didn’t feel safe enough. My new friend’s offer came n the terms I had considered, with good energy and with love. I gave him carte blanch to to what he was inspired to do.

Out on the beach, he cut my hair within an inch of my scalp. I avoided looking in the mirror for a few days, feeling, “OMG! He scalped me!”

When I got home, his intentions and his desire to reveal my beauty came forth in his work. Rather than looking butch or harsh, I discovered that I looked soft and open. I never got so many compliments on a haircut in my life! I had been afraid people wouldn’t like it, even though it felt like the right thing to do.

A few days after I got home someone tried to break into my house. He torn off a lock, pulling the bolts through the door with great violence. But he did not make it into the house. Push back on feeling safer to be more exposed in the world showed up this way, compelling me to consider personal safety in a detailed way. I reconsidered my related attitudes and energies and made some changes, including beefing up my home security.

In my healing practice I see push back frequently. It often shows up in the form of illness when someone is on the brink of a frightening life change, really doing it. It shows up when we decide to live differently, or to open ourselves in new ways. The way we respond clarifies our willingness and demonstrates our ability to make the changes real in daily life. It’s like passing a test.

When have you faced a strong challenge following spiritual opening?

What did you need to do to turn that challenge to your benefit?

Decades ago I worked with a spiritual teacher who read whatever I was thinking. He would give me practices to do, and leave the building. When he came back he would yell a me for something I was thinking half an hour after he left. For a few months I was on silence, or just “yes” and “no.” I was not allowed to ask questions. Every number of days, however, this teacher would sit me down and answer the questions that had built up in my mind. He answered them one after another, almost verbatim to the way I thought them.

This experience would be wonderful for everyone ready for it to have, say, for a good solid three days, at least once in their lives.

We carry on AS IF we can have castle walls and partitions. We partition off parts of ourselves and things we don’t want to know about or be in touch with; parts that we can’t have in the same room at the same time. Then we pretend that just because we ourselves are out of touch with a particular part, that other people cannot see it either. This is one of our various conceits. We try to look certain ways and imagine all the things we think we can get away with.

Our personality defenses are like a series of castle walls and partitioned rooms. Having someone view the contents of our minds, objectively and without partitions, is like helicopter-view access. From the top, all these partitions, walls and defenses do not matter.

The experience of being VIEWED like that is fascinating. After the first day or two of denial, testing, and so forth, comes the scrabbling terror, like a cat that seems to have twenty legs when a child tries to cram it into the toilet. The ego starts to freak out, thinking: No this person can’t possibly see in me what I refuse to see. Your defenses come up.

Suppose the person who sees you completely has no interest whatsoever in these defenses. They are unimportant. They are irrelevant. The person just carries on viewing you completely—and even has a sense of humor about it.

The horror of finding all of your conceits and defenses ineffectual finally begin to relax.

You then become able to realize a few things: You see how much time and energy and tension goes into maintaining these defenses. There is great freedom in this. You realize that your defenses stop self knowledge and growth from happening. You surmise that the person viewing you sees and has seen other humans before. S/he has seen minds and hearts much dirtier than your own. Maybe you’re not so bad.

The net result, to a rational person is: Maybe I can just accept myself as I am. Maybe I can relax and let these things BE here, because they ARE here. This other person sees them anyhow—maybe I can admit them.

Contemplating this experience, you can begin to imagine living without partitions, divides, and defenses; coming to peace with whatever is inside. You now have a real opportunity for sincerity and significant growth. After this experience you no longer assume that people CAN’T see inside your mind and heart. We never do know who can see, hear, and feel what is going on inside us. We transmit clues all day long.

Of our various conceits and illusions, not the least is that we have privacy of mind. As a society, we go along with this conceit, and protect one another within it. Graceful social buffering is often necessary, particularly with those who are not consciously on a path of growth.

I’ve been around quite a few people who routinely pick things out of my mind or read my atmosphere. If it used to make me uncomfortable, at this point I’m not sure I feel fully connected around people who do not.

For an advanced intuitive, it’s as if the contents of one’s mind are floating around in the room and they have to walk in it. It’s not as if they are going IN AFTER it, trying to FIND it, invading you. There is nothing to be huffy about.

You begin to realize when you are walking around that your mind is relatively accessible. Even if you think you are closing yourself off it does not necessarily stop someone noticing what you are thinking and feeling. This realization can change your relationship with people and with yourself. You have to relax with yourself or you will go nuts. You also have the opportunity to clean up the things that you are not happy about instead of thinking you can shove it in a corner. Moving through life with cleanliness of mind because you are not defending, protecting or denying anything is more joyful.

How do you react to being so open?

What does your reaction mean to you?

“Because true belonging only happens when we present
our authentic, imperfect selves to the world,our sense of belonging
can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.” ~ Brené Brown

Exposure to energies that promote rapid spiritual growth almost inevitably brings us up against the that prevent us from sustaining those energies within ourselves. When we are passionate about transformation, we view this as an opportunity to stretch ourselves with respect to these limitations. We are, however, rarely of one mind about it. When the going becomes painful, we are apt to view these challenges as an affront. Here we are, doing our best to be all that we can be, and it feels like we’re being tested or tormented, let alone receiving support.

One of my readers brought up what she aptly calls “the universal 2-by-4.” I would like to speak in part to those who have experienced sudden awakenings and transformational life experiences which they were not actively courting. My reader was brave and authentic enough to admit that she felt resentment toward God after having such extreme experiences.

I understand. In the face of this kind of experience it is easy to feel resistant to growth, fear of more pain, angry, and stuck.

About twenty years ago I went through an episode of acute spiritual agony. I was mad at God. Even if one kills one’s self, I reasoned, one could not escape suffering because it is nearly impossible to step off the Wheel of death and rebirth. I did not recall choosing to participate, maybe back at the beginning of being a distinct, individual soul, or agreeing to the intensity of the challenges. I resented that so much learning comes through distress. Why not through love?

Whatever we believe and however we couch it, intense suffering can bring up rage. On the bright side, rage can assist with transformation. It focuses a huge amount of energy. Rage itself is life-affirming. We do need to use this force toward positive ends.

While I do not hold with rigid belief, I do believe that the urge to grow is part of our nature. We experience fulfillment through growth. We experience fulfillment by cultivating our hearts, and meaning through involvement with The Greater Whole.

The more we feel separate from God, others, the Universe, etc, the more we suffer. When we feel at One with It, we feel better and are more likely to experience meaning. If we cannot feel it now, we can aim to remain open.

Life is what it is and does what it does. We want to think it could be “fair.” We attempt to apply logic, to hold life to human standards of what should and should not happen. These standards were usually taught to us as children. Sometimes we regress when we cannot understand Life with our minds.

Apparently The One Being That embraces Everything does not maintain our biases against suffering and death. Much that we can experience directly, through our hearts, cannot be rationalized or explained. This includes the paradox of Divine Compassion.

Life is a big fat mystery. It full of paradox and both-ands. It does not and will not conform to our expectations. When we resist, we hurt more. I can understand resenting that.

The more I do practices that increase my ability to remain in my heart the more I experience myself as participating instead of feeling done-to.

How do YOU feel about using difficult circumstances to grow?

What brings you a sense of having a choice?

To progress in our Inner Work, we need to be willing to observe
our resistance to reality, our attachment to our self-image,
and our fear. (Understanding the Enneagram)

This narrative follows and completes my story about grappling with the enigma of suffering:

Working in tandem with and being close friends with a powerful a clairvoyant, clairaudient healer I learned a great deal about energy. Unfortunately, when I began to confront him about various breaches of ethics, he did not address them and we parted ways. We had come to count on one another’s assistance in clearing our energy if we became too compromised to scan ourselves. Doing advanced energy healing without this safety net made me hypersensitive to energy.

Through Qi Gong, I was learning how to protect myself from energy that did not belong with me. At the same time, I was becoming even more sensitive, outstripping my ability to keep myself safe. Fortunately, ongoing work with several advanced healers and the accumulated results of my Inner Work were reaching critical mass. I learned how to cultivate positive energies to assist me both in staying clear and in clearing myself if I became compromised. Now I was able to strengthen my energy fields, effectively ground myself, and manage external energies. I quit having creepy energy experiences.

Before I began this blog, I wrote what would have been a long book. I intended to reach out to people who felt isolated owing to unusual energy experiences. I wrote autobiographically, to model the skills and attitudes I was developing in order to stay balanced and clear while encountering all manner of bizarre and unnerving energy phenomena.

I imagined people passing my book along to friends who had become isolated or felt crazy dealing with paranormal phenomena without support. After all my work I realized that publishing it might make me the go-to person not only for intuitives, but for those who were mentally unstable or ill. It is not my life work to serve in that particular front-line trench.

At this point I pursued and later co-taught some Gurdjieff-based spiritual work. It was very practical, emphasizing Inner Work rather than God. It felt good to engage in transformative work without worrying about belief. I withdrew when one of the main proponents of that work, a powerful narcissist, began to mess with my energy. He had asked me to co-author a book and I had declined.

Several years ago I was drawn to meet a spiritual teacher I had seen briefly when I was twenty. To my shock, I realized quickly and unequivocally that he was my Teacher. I had long before given up even the remotest desire for a spiritual Teacher. The several teachers I initially worked with were like stepping stones, without a deep inner link, full conviction, or any sense of permanence. My Teacher was not looking for students. I had to assert myself in a spiritually classic manner to forge a real connection. (How I managed that is a different story.)

Now I am extremely fortunate to have an absolutely genuine, astonishingly congruent Teacher. Treating each person as unique, he suggests specific spiritual practices to address distress and imbalance that stand in the way of experiencing spiritual Unity.

I used to fear that God or life would torment me in this way or that to make me grow. At first I formulated and reformulated several questions to my Teacher, seeking answers to make sense of suffering. His responses were the only things he has ever said that to me that didn’t quite strike home. They never in the slightest rubbed me the wrong way—which is a minor miracle. Neither did they satisfy.

Since then my experience has changed. It’s as if I absorbed the question into my growth, and don’t find myself circling in that particular eddy. Understanding encompasses more than the mind. Some questions are uprooted only through direct experience. My questions about suffering were formulated from a perspective that has begun to dissolve. It is not that I don’t have moments of fear, distress or overwhelm with the intensity of life. But such moments have less purchase on me. They have begun to dissolve into the Whole as I experience greater unity with Life.

Who do you know who accepts life as it is—including the trauma and atrocities—yet is able to remain genuinely positive?

What do YOU do to cultivate positive energy?

When it comes to learning to manage energy, let alone coming to grips with suffering, there isn’t a quick fix. I find myself drawn to share some personal background before proceeding with other commentary. This will take two posts:

In my twenties and for eleven years, I was intensively involved with a different branch of the mystical school with which I am now linked. A leader’s serious abuse of power caused me to leave that school. Oddly, an independent teacher from a path I had never heard of sent a student to find me. This was before internet and occurred totally through Guidance. This teacher did fairly extreme (and fascinating) work with me for about seven months. When our stint came to completion, I became involved with a different spiritual group for seven years.

That group does a powerful fire ritual during which participants throw something they want to renounce into the fire. They caution that this act can put in motion difficult processes necessary to bringing about renunciation. Determined to learn through joy rather than suffering, I threw “learning through suffering” into that fire. Whether or not I was fully in belief, I thought I’d give it a sincere try. My next seven years were even more difficult than the previous. I asked experienced members of the group how to come to grips with suffering. Few engaged my questions. No one shared anything useful, just platitudes or party lines.

During a spiritual camp I had an episode of agony, through which I encountered rage with God. I have heard it said, and agree, that engaging with God in rage maintains a relationship and is cathartic—which creates more possibility than does withdrawing. I did not find it loving to set up Creation so we learn through suffering. I wanted OUT. For those difficult hours I felt acutely that even suicide was futile because one would simply find oneself back on the Wheel of Life, probably in less salutary conditions. I let these feelings arise but did not dwell on them later.

For three years I led a committed small group. We met in secret to evade attendance by superficial persons who permeated the local chapter of the larger group. A significant trauma dismantled this group.

During this period I became involved with a man who began to use spiritual rhetoric in an attempt to force me to caretake him. When the title of a book called, “God Talk and Domination” jumped out at me in a book store, what he was doing suddenly became clear. I practically developed an allergy to spiritual talk.

At this point I was feeling rather defensive toward God. I avoided spiritual groups for more than a decade. I had withdrawn from belief. Sometimes I felt that I had lost faith, and yet I could sense it hiding, way down deep and private. This faith was not “IN anything.” It stands like a spinning top that rights itself if pushed over. Paradoxically, this faith—for lack of a better word—was completely hidden beneath a wry unwillingness to fake anything or take anything ‘on faith.’ I came to sense that real faith could not be shattered (it was like water), or lost (it was part of me), or influenced by conditions and circumstances (it did not stand upon them). This was not faith that something or someone would somehow save me, but a kind of internal compass that drew me in a wholesome direction.

I became flexible enough to support people in their spiritual processes, no matter what belief systems they engaged.

When I carefully took stock, I realized that in dismissing belief systems and spiritual practices because I did not fully buy in to groups’ dynamics, politics and rhetoric, I had a deficit of positive energy. Without intentionally bringing in positive energy, I was being exposed to the “stuff” body therapy clients were releasing. These energies were creating unpleasant experiences—whether or not I “believed in” them.

“The distress I am feeling is the engine that drives me forward.” RR

Have you ever been angry with God, or do you reject whatever “God” might be because the enigma of suffering is confounding?

What does “faith” mean to you? Can you locate faith as a resonance or vibration instead of a concept or belief?

During verbal communication we share many subtle messages: postural, tonal, pitch, voice modulation, energetic, atmospheric, and thought-to-thought. Whether or not we are able to “read” that subtle communication, we all know that it exists. 

Non-verbal communication includes the list above, and also what we “read” intuitively.

The greater our rapport and the more intuitively open we are, the more we are aware of that which is NOT said. This includes things that are understood already, clearly implied, and about to be said, as well as context and content we expect one another to read between the lines.

In this exploration I am referring to two distinct types of thought-to-thought or mind-to-mind communication, one clear and direct, and the other muffled and less direct. I am calling direct thought that one is willing to or about to share “text,” because it is easy to read, and calling thought that one circles about inside without necessarily intending to share “subtext.”

“Text” is available to be read clearly. “Subtext,” in this domain, is like inference or innuendo in speech. It is simultaneously communicated yet to some extent withheld.

“Text” is congruent, meaning body signals, emotional tone, and voice tone all match. “Subtext” is prevalent when someone is not internally congruent, or is unwilling to be clear and direct.

Note that I am not referring to all thought as either text or subtext. We are discussing thought which is taking place within the context of a conversation with another person. Personal internal thought occurs outside of conversation, without reference to communication with someone else. I am not drawn to track someone’s personal internal thought, and consider it none of my business.

Text exists in “Shared Space”. By Shared Space I mean the open place where meet mind-to-mind—to the extent we are able. Text may come across directly, mind-to-mind, as clear but unspoken communication.

Subtext is not fully in the shared domain. For this reason it comes across like a footnote in writing. Like text, subtext often occurs just before or after someone speaks—if they do indeed share. Subtext may contain information they do not intend to share, or are not sure whether they are willing to share. Subtext often expresses either some kind of self-protective worry, or a concern that the other person cannot deal with what one has to say. Subtext is not intimate. It often indicates a wall, hesitation, and perhaps even a negative judgment, of self or of the other person.

Within the most intimate friendships we convene at least some of the the time in Shared Space, where our thoughts are available within our shared domain, without separation, blocking or guarding. We may or may not ‘hear’ these thoughts, but the way they charge our shared atmosphere—their energy—influences what comes to mind and our direction of conversation. We may weave in and out of a number of conversations, leaving them all ongoing over an extended course of time, without losing any of the threads. We know what our friend is talking about without a new preamble or introduction to the topic.

Sometimes I say, “I heard you the first time,” when a friend clearly transmits a thought she is about to verbalize and then says it aloud. I can say how many seconds passed between thinking it and saying it, and they laugh with the fun of that intimacy. We are laying ourselves open to one another and the energy in the atmosphere usually stays very clear.

Subtext generates white noise or static in the mindspace. I sometimes experience subtext like a subtle pressure. Perhaps this experience reflects the pressure of the thought that is arising in the other person, or their conflict about bringing it out through speech. A thought may have arisen, yet s/he holds it back. Part of them wants to say it while another part does not. Subtext comes across without the clarity and definition of directed thought—but it comes across none the less. The energy this kind of subtext puts out is like static. It can cloud the atmosphere like unfinished business.

I find frequent and habitual subtext irritating. It draws my attention without satisfying my interest. The person is thinking something TOWARD or AT or ABOUT me or something else but isn’t sharing it WITH me. Excessive subtext is like muttering under one’s breath so it gets the person’s attention without them actually being able to discern the words. When habitual, this behavior can be distracting, draining or even passive-aggressive.

This reminds me of something the computer, Holly, said in the British SciFi Comedy, Red Dwarf: “If you have something to say, say it straight out! No innuendo or hyperbole.” I posted that on my door about twenty years ago when dealing with too much subtext.

Do YOU sense a difference between text and subtext?

How do you notice them and what do you experience?

This year I found myself longing for traditional Christmas music. As I spent some time in stores, it struck me that all of the music was Santa and retail oriented—and almost painfully politically correct. I did not see one manger scene or image of Christ in yard displays during my neighborhood wanderings. I had never felt any attachment to them until they almost suddenly went missing.

Well, that’s not exactly true. . .  For several years I would seasonally think about adding a Frankenstein to manger scenes, in general. Cough. This began with my favorite Christmas card. One of the wise men is dragging Frankenstein through the desert at night. The other two wise men are yelling at him, saying, “We said bring FRANKINCENSE, you idiot!” 

 Typically, I took this to mean something more profound. I figure that most of us have so many family skeletons that rise from our closets during the Christmas holidays, which follows these days—in the stores anyway—right on the heels of Halloween. By the time people take down one set of decorations it’s practically time for the next.

Those of us who are well aware of it when issues arise, and prefer authenticity are likely to find the forced cheer that some put on for Christmas rather grating. A nice Halloween figure to represent the random element of darkness is a humorous nod to Holy Wholeness.

Despite my quirky humor, Christmas seemed rather hollow or even castrated without Christ. While I don’t want Christianity down my throat, it weaves important threads through our cultural tapestry.

I surprised myself on Christmas Eve, finding myself at a candle light mass at St. Mark’s church. I did not set out to go. I was planning to go on a walk with a friend. Through the way my guidance works with timing and directions, we found ourselves heading right into the church just as mass was beginning, greeted at the door by a priest in his robes. We were even handed candles for the candlelight ritual at the end.

I looked at the schedule. They were going to sing—along with the choir and a huge pipe organ—the most beautiful carols, my favorites. I wanted to sing. We stayed, and found the service unexpectedly satisfying.

The sermon was engaging. The priest talked about darkness being an important aspect of Christmas, and suggested remembering that it is a part of the occasion instead of forcing total brightness and happiness. He talked about the interplay between darkness and light, the way too much light can overwhelm, and the fact that the divine is present in darkness as well as light. I found it gratifying to hear him say this in a traditional context with six or seven hundred people present. It made me want to tell him about the Frankenstein, but I just shook his hand and thanked him on my way out.

My belief system is flexible. I have a sense of the deeper underlying unity of All, so it pleases me to participate on occasion in the rites of different religions. While I am not religious myself, I’ve found myself paying respect in Buddhist temples in Thailand, Hindu temples in India and Bali, a Catholic church in Slovenia, Mosques in Egypt and India, and several Quaker gatherings in Seattle. I’ve enjoyed songs and dances from a wide range of cultures and religions.

Religion is deep to a culture. Participating is a good way to penetrate to the heart of a culture and share in a meaningful way. In my experience, mental agreement is not important as long as one brings respect and love for the Divine. 

How did YOUR Christmas go?

What is your relationship with tradition?