Fruition—Summer, 2006

Summer is winding down and I am a little sad to see it go.  I always think of summer as an easy time—a time for sleeping late and sitting on the porch; a time for reading and working in the garden, visiting with friends and talking late into the night.

But summer has a more traditional side.  Once upon a time, the importance of this sunny season was to unveil the fruits of our labors.   In springtime—the planting season—we would have been fretful of the outcome of those efforts. What will summer bring us, we would have wondered impatiently?

In a way, though, for us it is always summer. If you think of life as the passage of time and the passage of time as no more than the churning manifestation of everything we think and feel and imagine on an ongoing basis, a kind of constant unveiling, then we are always in this state of anticipation, planting seeds that are germinating and growing all the time. We live in fruition.  So, indeed, one does wonder, what will summer bring?

Imagine for a moment that life is a kind of summer salad, which contains all your thoughts, desires and emotions.  What does that salad (your life) tell you about how you think and feel?  Just as the form and taste and color and texture of a salad will change each time you add or subtract an ingredient, your life will also transform as you change your ideas and feelings about yourself, your relationships, your health, prospects and dreams.

When you stand back and look at your life objectively, you might see certain recurring patterns emerge.  Perhaps there is a pattern of feeling misunderstood by others, a pattern of projects losing steam midway through their process, a pattern of lack, a pattern of aloneness.  Why do these patterns in your life repeat and repeat even though you don’t want them to?

Let’s say there is a pattern of lack in your life, of feeling that there is never enough to go around.  Your childhood was spent always wishing and dreaming for things your family could not afford.  Your adulthood has been plagued with debt and constant worry about making ends meet.  You look at other people who seem to just attract money and abundance into their lives.  It seems effortless for them.  Why don’t they struggle as you do?

What if you were to examine that pattern in your life and list all the thoughts and emotions that make it up?  Say there is a fear of losing everything.  There is the feeling that you don’t know enough about money and that you will make a serious financial mistake.   There is the thought that people who have money are a selective, esoteric group of which you could never be a member.  There is the belief that if you don’t have money, then you must not deserve it.  And so on.

Suppose you were to sit down and list every thought or feeling you could associate with this pattern of lack in your life.  Where do all these thought forms come from? 

Okay, this is one of those chicken/egg questions.  Did your history of lack teach you to believe these things, or did your belief in these things create your history of lack?  In other words, are you informing your life or is your life informing you?

The other night I watched a rather silly movie on a surprisingly powerful subject.  I won’t reveal the name of the movie for fear of offending anyone* but it was a sappy Hollywood rendering of a very lofty question: what is the greatest gift we own as human beings living on this planet?   Answer: our free will.

And yet, many of us neglect to consciously exercise that free will, failing to take responsibility for the state of our existence.  We opt instead to interfere with the free will of others, complaining because others don’t act and think and believe what we would like them to.  We may even point the finger at God for allowing things to be so chaotic in this world, forgetting His/Her solemn promise that our free will would never be tampered with.  Yes, that’s right, we are, all of us, utterly free to make the most insane, harmful and foolhardy choices we can manage to think up at any given moment of the day.  Scary, isn’t it?

So what if you were to lasso the power of this gift in another way?  What if when you looked in despair at some corner of your life and didn’t like what you saw there, you would simply decide to choose something else, to change the ingredients of the salad, so to speak?

Imagine that the person who suffered from a pattern of lack chose to release her fears about money, chose to believe that the guidance and instinct required to make savvy financial decisions were well within her grasp, chose to see herself as deserving as the next person.   Suppose this person chose to paint a life in which money was not an issue, that whenever she needed money, it would magically appear.  What’s to stop her from doing that?  What’s to stop her from phrasing her experience in a completely different way?

There is a phrase I heard while visiting Ireland recently.  It goes: “there’s nothing resting in my pockets.” This is a charming, fanciful way of saying that the money’s going out as fast as it’s coming in.  As much as I liked the phrase, I decided to put a different spin on it, saying instead: “there’s plenty resting in my pockets.”  In life, whenever we make ongoing observations (or complaints) about the less than desirable state of our lives, we simply perpetuate that state; the challenge of life is to transform our lives by actively and purposefully choosing to describe something better. 

Now, it might seem nonsensical to state that there’s plenty resting in your pockets if there isn’t.  But we cannot create a state of abundance out of a state of lack.  Manifestation, or fruition, requires nourishment.  Just as your vegetable garden will not prosper from lack of rain and sunshine, your dreams cannot grow without emotional investment, conviction, creativity and love.  (And that salad will not be tasty with wilted lettuce and rotten tomatoes.)

Here is an exercise you can do to help you change the ingredients in your salad, to transform your life and eradicate patterns you are weary of:

Sit in a quiet room in a comfortable position.  Slow down your breathing and ground yourself to the space in which you are sitting by repeatedly pushing your out-breath down into the earth below you.  Create a connection with divine guidance by repeatedly inhaling through the crown chakra located on the top of your head.

When you feel relaxed and grounded, begin to paint a picture of one change you would like to create in your life ( e.g., abundance, a loving relationship, good health, a successful career, etc.).  See yourself living this altered life.  What does it feel like to be in this place?  Make the picture more real by investigating the various sensory aspects of the experience.  What do you taste, smell, hear, see, feel when you are in the space of this change?  Make the experience as tactile and vivid as you can.  Acknowledge how grateful you are to have this change in your life, and express that gratitude.

Spend as much time as you want living in this altered experience.  When you are ready to return to the room, say the words: it is done.  Take a deep cleansing breath and open your eyes.

This is an exercise you can repeat whenever you wish.  We all spend a good deal of time feeling bad about the problems in our lives.  Perhaps we should exercise our free will by choosing to spend that time creating a solution or alternative instead. Let’s not skimp on the ingredients for our salad!  We do have to end up eating it, remember.

For many of us, summer is the best season of the year and given what it represents, it’s easy to understand why.  At the risk of being redundant, (see my other newsletters) I turn once again in closing to Mary Oliver, who somehow always knows just what to say about everything:

The Summer Day

By Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

May Plenty Be Resting in your Pockets,

Jane

*A few overly curious souls insisted that I reveal the name of the film. Okay, okay, it’s “City of Angels” with Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan. (Don’t get me started.)