N
E W S L E T T E R JULY
2007
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LESSONS IN LOVING Namaste Staff Writer A man who is at least in his upper seventies asked, "How do you learn to show love, when all your life you were never loved?" He explained, "I've never been able to really express love all the years I've been married. When I was growing up, not once did my mother or father say they loved me. Not once do I remember them hugging me. There was just a total absence of love. I've been to therapy over the years, but I still can't really love. When you've never known what love is, how can you show love to someone?" If we look at our lives in terms of all the things that happened or failed to happen to us, we might well conclude we have no chance to undo all those years of not feeling loved. This man could probably spend the rest of his life in therapy, as could many of us, and never work through all the ways he was deprived of love. But we don't have to do years of “work on ourselves” in order to become a fully-functioning person who can love freely and expressively. There is another path, and it has nothing to do with the things that happened to us while we were growing up. It has everything to do with our lives right now, today. Deep within each of us, at our center, there is a spiritual essence that is who we truly are. This essence is quite distinct from the person we have always imagined we are, which is a product of the way our family life molded and shaped our thinking and emotions. This essence is the authentic you, and it is an incredibly loving entity. You were born loving, and you will always be loving. The only obstacle to experiencing yourself as loving is that your childhood caused you to lose touch with this aspect of yourself that is the essential you. I used to think that, as infants, we derived our sense of self from our parents. I saw it like filling the gas tank on a car. You can't get anywhere on an empty tank, so you have to first fill up the tank. Similarly, it seemed to me that if we didn't receive enough love as children, we grew up unable to love very well. I was to discover that the image of the gas tank is flawed. It turns out that just the opposite is the case! We don’t come into the world empty, needing to be filled at all. We come full, ready to express the loving being we are to the people whose lives we enter. Realizing that, as children, we come into the world with a wonderfully loving self, capable of expressing all the love we will ever need throughout life, changes how we approach becoming fully expressive of this love as adults. Let’s go back to the gas tank illustration for a moment. When we enter the world we are nothing like a gas tank. We are more like a gushing oil well. True, we have to learn to use our oil—to let it fuel our activities in all the many different situations life presents us with. But it's there at birth. It's not something we get in a reflected way from our family. Quite the opposite. It’s through our parents and practically everybody else that we learn to hide our loving essence. They also fail much of the time to help us tame our animal nature so that the love at our center can come through and direct the various facets of our makeup. The love is there. How to express it and allow it to control all aspects of our existence is a developmental process. I want to say this again, because it turns the usual understanding on its head. Parents and society don't give us the love we need in life. We already are a completely loving being. What the world we grow up in tends to do is teach us to doubt ourselves. It robs us of an awareness of our incredibly loving center. It also fails to reinforce our capacity to love. We then begin acting in unloving ways. There has never been a moment since your birth when who you are in your essence hasn't been utterly delightful and totally desirable. All any of us need for our loving essence to blossom is lots of opportunities to be in situations that draw it out, coupled with encouragement from our caregivers to choose to love instead of to react. This requires a variety of contact with people and situations that welcome our love, reinforcement of the love we show, and above all the encouragement to simply be who we are in all of our uniqueness. If your life has had a lot of pain, you can turn the tables on that pain. Instead of living with a heap of regret, you can begin this very moment to live with a heart of gratitude. It’s a choice—a choice to believe in your essence instead of in your conditioned patterns of behavior heretofore. But it doesn't’t work this way. As Michael Brown shows in The Presence Process, all that is required is to become conscious of who we truly are and always have been. When you open your eyes on the loving essence you are and always have been, it takes all the self-hatred, the self-flagelation, the despair and hopeless and hurt away. You find yourself feeling incredibly thankful to be who you are, and a deep sense of peace wells up within you. I have come to look at the path I have trod in life quite differently. I no longer bemoan it, I appreciate what it has made of me. I give thanks for all I have become and am becoming, as I more and more discover and enjoy expressing the love that has always been at my center. What do you feel is missing in your life? What deprivation do you tell yourself you are suffering from? What trauma from the past still dogs your steps? And what would you like to see happen in your life? Switch your focus away from your life situation—all that has befallen you—to your deeper, more authentic essence. And there you will find all that you have ever longed to be. Let me tell you what that man who was in so much pain shared with me as I explained that he was born full of love. When World War II came, and he enlisted, the day he left home his father went up to him and kissed him. It was the first time in his life he receive any affection at all from his father.
The love is there in all of us. It has always been our heritage. All we have to do is access it, and it will melt away the years of disappointment and regret. A new audio book from Namaste Publishing shows how to dive deep into your loving essence, so that your life and relationships become filled with beauty, wonder, magic. Recorded on 5 CDs, and spanning 7 hours, it is entitled, Lessons in Loving—A Journey into the Heart. It is available for immediate shipping, exclusively from the Namaste iStore.
PRESENCE ON THE PRINTED PAGE In his book How Then Shall We Live, Wayne Muller shares a handful of journal entries from Forrest Hallmark, four years old. At the end of each day, Forrest’s mother would ask him if there was anything he wanted to remember, and she would write it down for him in his journal: Thursday, May 5, 1994: I love dinosaurs. I love 'em, love 'em, love 'em. I love sharks. T Rex is the most fierce hunter. It is Thursday today. My days are getting different now 'cause we're doing different stuff. Why do bunny rabbits hop? I just don't know how bunny rabbits hop. Wednesday, May 25, 1994: I'm happy about my stegosaurus. I don't know why my pterodactyl's sick. I love my dinosaurs. Sunday, June 12, 1994: I'm happy today. I wish we'd go on a hike and I wish there were butterflies in rain forests. Is there a rain forest in Micronesia? I played on my tricycle . . . I slipped and almost fell, but I didn't. I ran over Sis's tail and hand. Sis growled. I said I'm sorry. I want to go to the rain forest sometime. When we read these entries, we are undoubtedly struck by the natural curiosity and thoughtfulness of this four year old. Forrest's parents were considering moving the family to Micronesia to work for the government, so he's wondering how it will be there. If our time with Forrest and his journal ended here, it would be simply a sweet moment in the life of a bright and vital young boy. But two weeks after this final entry, Forrest was killed in an automobile accident. He died at the age of four—as did his brother, Bryce, who was two, and his grandfather, who was 75. Forrest's mother, who was driving the car, somehow survived. Now, let us go back and read one of the entries knowing that two weeks later this boy would meet his death: "I'm happy today. I wish we'd go on a hike and I wish there were butterflies in rain forests. Is there a rain forest in Micronesia? I played on my tricycle . . . I slipped and almost fell, but I didn't. I ran over Sis's tail and hand. Sis growled. I said I'm sorry. I want to go to the rain forest sometime." Knowing now what was about to befall Forrest, what do you suppose his mother feels when she picks up his journal and reads this final entry? Do you suppose each thought has become more important? Do you imagine she hangs onto every little word? I picture her riveted to these recollections of young Forrest, treasuring each of these moments from his brief life. In all the incidents that make up your day, how aware are you that your life is also framed by death? Do you treasure your moments with the ones you love? I find that when death is truly seen as birth’s companion, each moment becomes more compelling. All those moments that make up your relationships . . . they will have an end. How Then Shall We Live is packed with moving insights and touching true-life experiences. It is available through bookstores everywhere, as well as online. Wayne’s book reminded me of Eckhart Tolle’s DVD The Dance of Phenomenal Existence, from Namaste Publishing. It is a powerful message about living consciously each moment of our lives. Recorded live and unedited, this DVD helps us come to terms with the transient nature of our present existence—and through full acceptance of the fact that we only ever have this moment, to embrace life and each other without holding back, without fear, and without regret. May we all learn to treasure each moment of this wonderful phenomenal existence.
PRESENCE IN MOVIES Set in Northern Alaska, The Fast Runner gives us a glimpse of a primitive society and the interpersonal relationships of life in the igloo. Puja, a spunky and promiscuous Eskimo, falsely accuses her husband in order to assuage the guilt she feels for her own behavior. Her brothers respond to the accusations with a plot to murder her husband. In the ensuing attack, her husband’s brother is brutally stabbed to death, but Atanarjuat, her husband, narrowly escapes because he is a fast runner. He runs for miles and miles across the frozen Arctic and his feet are terribly torn by the jagged ice. Months later, when Atanarjuat’s feet have healed, he returns to his village to find that Oki, his brother’s murderer, has also slain his father in order to become the leader of the tribe. It looks like Atanarjuat is going to exact revenge as he maneuvers Oki into a trap. But instead of striking down Oki, he strikes the ground with his weapon and exclaims, “The killing stops here!” He breaks the cycle of violence. Something in us knows we have the capability of transcending ourselves. We really do! I got a kick out of a Non Sequitur cartoon in the newspaper. It’s a single frame of a man saying to his wife, who’s still in bed, “I changed the roll of toilet paper, took out the trash and fed the cat without being told.” The wife’s jaw drops and the caption reads, “Mel launches his shock and awe campaign.” May this become the kind of shock and awe campaign the whole world turns to in the future. In August, Namaste Publishing will begin offering a new book by our publisher, Constance Kellough. It is entitled, “The Leap—Are You Ready to Live a New Reality?” It shows how the kind of world we have created does not reflect our essence, and points us in the direction of a quantum leap in our consciousness that we are about to take as a planet—a Leap that even now can transform our individual personal lives.
PRESENCE IN POETRY
Baton Rouge, Louisiana Spiritual Retreat with MICHAEL BROWN Friday Aug. 24 7-9pm - $25
7 Days a Week
SEPTEMBER 28 - OCTOBER 3 Workshop Presence Process MICHAEL BROWN
TUITION: $525 CDN $486 US (meals & accommodation extra), 5 nights. Michael Brown is author of The Presence Process. A student of personal experience, in 1987 his life changed drastically when he was diagnosed with an acute neurological disorder. After unsuccessfully seeking help from both alternative and allopathic fields, he set off on a journey into himself and uncovered an energetic pathway that enabled him to access the causal points of physical, mental and emotional discomforts. This discovery led to the creation of the Presence Process, a procedure now used by individuals, medical doctors, psychologists, and a wide range of health-care practitioners to enhance their facilitation and healing skills. "As deep as we can go into ourselves is as deep as we can invite another into themselves." Hollyhock Retreat Centre INFO/REGISTRATION/FREE CATALOGUE:
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The reality is, the affection was there all along in his father—he just didn't know how to tap into it. When his son joined up, realizing he may never see his son again, the father could no longer deny the love he felt. The love that had so long been hidden surfaced in that kiss.
The only way “north” from where you are
Free yourself from the ghosts of the past and step into a fully conscious, engaged present.