new – unabashedly female

Life is a mystery – Â a big, bold, beautiful, pregnant, gracious, infinite, and sacred mystery.

Life isn’t a logical process. It’s not a machine that we can make run smooth and efficiently. It’s not controllable. It doesn’t bend to our wants. It doesn’t take commands.

Who decided it was a good idea to put the analytical, logical, reasonable thinking mind in charge of trying to navigate life?

Poor logical mind. No wonder it gets so stressed out, so burned out, so controlling and fearful. It’s trying to do a job it just cannot do. How can you possibly use logic and reason to live the mystery and stay sane? It’s learned ways to cope with this job (we all have our ingrained coping mechanisms that really aren’t so great at doing what they are intended to do!), but coping and hanging on just isn’t living, is it?!

No wonder we keep thinking up the same old ideas, creating the same old stuff, digging ourselves as a species deeper into our own worn-out, status-quo ruts. The thinking mind is very good at perpetuating its ruts and stories, dragging out its outdated ideas and beliefs. It’s not good an honoring the mystery because it just doesn’t ‘get it’. It’s not designed to ‘get it’. It’s designed to handle the places where rationality and logic are needed…and there are many places…but it’s not designed to birth what is completely and utterly new. The thinking, logical mind can help midwife the new, but it can’t get pregnant. Pregnancy is for womb’s, the source of the mystery, the source of Life itself.

If we want to birth the new, we must listen to Life and what is trying to be born. If we want to be loving midwifes to what can be, we must feel for new life stirring, feel for the first heartbeats, and be willing to support this new life into being.

Like deep rich soil, like a teeming ocean, the place of gestation shimmers with a wordless, graceful essence we will never fully know; yet, we can know what is emerging from this wordless, graceful ocean as it emerges…as it is born. To do so, we must learn to listen and open, to be ready to bring forth, to be used as vessels for this Love that is Life.

Our bodies know the way. Our hearts will guide. Our minds can rest and when they are needed they can be ready to serve. Every part has a sacred part to play in this mysterious dance, and when they play their natural parts, the really do play.

Find what feels like play – to your body, your heart, and your mind. Find what brings that quiet joy, that aliveness that causes a whole-body smile. Put your ear to the big womb and listen for the heartbeat of life and find the place in yourself where you long to midwife it into being.

This is where the new world, a new way, will emerge…from the dark that we all can once again learn to trust. It isn’t the enemy…it is Life teeming with Life.

And, this is where the old world, the old way, will die back into – the dark that we all can once again learn to trust. It isn’t the enemy…it is Life receiving into itself what has lived its course.

We really do love the New – it’s why we get so excited for these New things like New Years Day. The real beauty is that it is only an illusion that this New Year will lose its newness. Life never loses its newness, just as it never stops letting go into death. They are bedfellows – the New and the Dying. If you feel into this, you’ll feel the whole arc of Life, this shimmering graceful essence.

May this New Year – a construct of the logical mind that need dates, times, goals – be a turning point for us all to become lovers and midwives of the New, the fresh, the playful innocence of Life wanting to know itself anew – and lovers and midwives of the dying.

May you hold your womb with just as much love, respect, and kindness as you hold your logical, rational mind.

May we love all. May we love well.

***

Womb Update!

I’ll be co-leading a day-long retreat with my friend, Simone de Winter, this January 25th in West Marin County. It’s all about ‘A Woman’s Belly!’. It will be the perfect way to bring more health, strength, and creativity to your life by way of your Womb!

Take a look here. If you aren’t in the Bay Area, but know a woman who is, please pass this along.

God is always the new. ~Osho

It’s a new year. There’ always so much excitement about the new year. What will it bring? What will transpire this year?

As we approached 2010, just like in past years, I heard and read many comments about possibilities and opportunities, intentions and resolutions, hopes and desires.

I’m struck by how excited we humans get about the possibilities we feel for the new year. It also happens when school starts each year. It happens when we move into a new home, begin a new marriage, start a new job.

It is in the beginnings of things that we connect with our longing and natural comfort with newness.

As I awoke this morning, this first day of 2010, with the fresh scent of new. I came across this post by Nicola Warwick at The Whole Self. Nicola’s post was prompted by a quote I had written on my post ‘Craving Words, My Only Job Is To Serve’. As I read it again, under her blog banner, The Whole Self, a felt a spark of insight.

The quote by Martha Graham, speaks to the blessed unrest, the divine dissatisfaction within us as creative beings. As I mentioned in my comment to Nicola, I used to think this unrest signaled something wrong with me, this constant desire for something new. Usually, alongside the unrest was the unwanted handmaiden to the new unknown, fear. I feared my desire for newness meant I wasn’t disciplined enough, wasn’t like other people who seemed so much more settled into the routine of life.

I have come to discover that this blessed unrest is longing and the yearning to remember our nature, to live our true nature as creative beings. It is my natural comfort with the new. I feel energized and vibrantly alive when I dive into something new.

In his book on Courage, Osho talks at length about the new. He writes,

“That is the whole meaning of prayer or meditation – you open up, you say yes, you say, ‘Come in.’ You say, ‘I have been waiting and waiting and I am thankful that you have come.’ Always receive the new with great joy. Even if sometimes the new leads you into inconvenience, still it is worth it…The new will bring difficulties. That’s why you choose the old – it does not bring any difficulties. It is a consolation, it is a shelter.

But, here is the kicker, the piece that pulls at my longing, my blessed unrest. I believe this is why we somewhere deep inside, love beginnings:

“And only the new, accepted deeply and totally, can transform you. You cannot bring the new in your life; the new comes.”

Somewhere within, we long for this transformation. We long to open to the ‘throbbing, streaming life’ (Osho) that awaits us.

So what happens. When does the new year turn into the not-so-knew year? When do we settle into the old complacency of this year as it unfolds? How does what seems so full of opportunities turn into the same-old, same-old where we close ourselves off to this ‘throbbing, streaming life’?

Time. The sense of time takes us out of the new. In the new, there is no time. There is just life. ‘We can only use the present…It is always fresh, virgin. And it has ingress in you.’ (Osho) The present comes into you, if you are open, if you are receptive, if you are willing to meet it and embrace it.

Fear. Fear of what the new will bring, that it will be risky, that it will be inconvenient and difficult. Yet, when was transformation ever easy?

Habit. Our habits were created to keep us from this newness, this risk of transformation, for the habits are solely the not-so-fertile field of the ego. (Habits are different than discipline. Discipline allows for the opening that embraces the ingress of the new).

For me, this embracing also means embracing the blessed unrest as an open-arm desire for the new, a yearning to dance with the mystery that is always longing to dance with us, inviting us into its dance of possibility.

Stay present and notice when the mind turns the new into the repetitive dance steps that are safe, but oh so boring and dulling to the senses.

Wishing you a happy new year, that is no year at all, but rather the constant invitation to live into the transformation of your soul that can only come with the creative emergence of the new.

Tag: new

May you hold your womb with just as much love, respect, and kindness as you hold your logical, rational mind.

The New