At dinner the other night with a group of friends, my friend Ginny shared pictures and stories from a trip she took to Bali.  For me, what was striking about the conversation was how she kept coming back to the word “freedom.”  Ginny also touched on something that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time now, that our freedom is also our responsibility.  She illustrated this with a great story about an elephant driver, Mu.

Mu

It seems that Mu was pegged to enter banking as a career.  Then to the dismay and hopefully eventual acceptance of his family, he chose to become an elephant driver.  He was insistent that he couldn’t be happy as a banker.  He needed to be an elephant driver.  Mu took up the reins of his life and chose his path.  Freedom.  Mu embraced the responsibility for his happiness in life and chose the thing that would grant him the most happiness – elephants.

Our freedom is our responsibility.  For Mu, freedom was found in taking responsibility for his happiness and choosing that which filled his heart with joy.

Freedom.  It’s a word we toss about in political conversation.  It’s used as a way to explain our wars.  It’s also something that people use as a reason not to be in relationship.  For me, it’s a deeply held core value.   It has played out in my chosen career, in my choice of partner, and in my relentless search for a lasting experience of God, of true Freedom, not just the single experience, but the steadfast awareness that transcends the daily dramas of life.

In many spiritual traditions, true Freedom, freedom with a capital “F,” is considered to be freedom from suffering.  Moreover, suffering is thought to ultimately be caused by our being wrapped up in our attraction to this and our aversion to that – a play created by the tension between pairs of opposites.  On the other hand, Freedom lies in our ability to transcend, to end the trance of being caught up in this play.

I see this playing out in my own life and in the lives of my clients.  When you or I feel some sense of things not being okay, to me, that’s an indication that there is a tension of some pair of opposites in play and out of balance.  Bringing those opposites back into balance has the remarkable effect of restoring a sense of well-being.  This has become even more evident after having completed the training to become a trainer of spiritual technologies.

Some of you know that I’ve been studying this work of Zivorad Slavinski for quite some time.  What’s remarkable to me about this work is that it gives us processes by which we can transcend the play of polarities in life.  I was initially skeptical at the veracity of such a bold statement.  But now, four years later, I’ve seen the difference with my clients and I feel the difference in myself.  I fully believe that aphorism, “s^*t happens, suffering is optional.”  Therein lies our freedom.

Funny, I have freely moved through a variety of spiritual paths in search of Freedom.  Perhaps by the time it’s all said and done, I’ll be a little like Einstein and know a thousand ways you cannot attain self realization, freedom.  It only takes one.  In the meantime, I am delighting in the journey more than I have in years as I’m feeling more free day by day.

What about you?  What is freedom to you?  What do you think is the relationship between freedom and responsibility?

I have a cracked flower pot on my front porch.  It’s far from perfect.  Yet, there is some beauty in its imperfection that fills my heart.  It reminds me of the sweet container that is my body.  Less than perfect.

My body at 52 can no longer do all the cool stuff it could do without effort in my twenties, thirties and even forties.  Yet, still it carries me around everyday.  It is a container for my life that sometimes feels like a cracked pot.  It carries old injuries and is the container for current pleasures.  Everyday, without fail, it carries me.

I have mourned the loss of former capacities.  I’ve rid myself of the old expectations of what this body can do, much like pulling old flowers that have long past offered their last blossom.  The last year or so I’ve embraced new ways of being with my body that honor where I am now, rather than where I was.  I’m learning to plant new flowers and pleasures into the container of my life.

Looking at this flowerpot reminds me to love and live where I am rather than where I was and where I might be later.  How do you remember to live where you are?  With what blossoms are you filling the container of your life as it is now?

These last couple of weeks, I’ve been hearing a theme in my work with people – “How do I disagree with my partner in a respectful way?”  A young couple I’m seeing in my practice have been going around with this one for a while.  I certainly remember being in the first years of my relationship with husband, David (going on thirty years now).  We sure have bumped up against the challenge of respectfully disagreeing.

It’s not uncommon when we disagree with someone to feel disrespected or not heard.  We can all easily make the mistaken assumption that our loved one’s disagreeing, their having another point of view, means that they either don’t hear us — after all, if they really heard what we were saying, how on earth could they disagree!? — or that they are simply being disrespectful.

Disagreeing is neither.  Disagreeing simply means that the other person has a different perspective.  Sometimes, the only way David and I could find our way through an argument was to take a deep breath and say, “You know, you and I just aren’t the same.”  That can feel like a hard fall from the sweet space of falling in love.  Others say, “the honeymoon’s over.”  Yes, and . . .

Learning to disagree and equally important, learning to accept that our sweet one doesn’t see life the same way we do is essential to fully respecting each other.  Cultivating the hard won appreciation that our beloved sees the world through their own eyes and not ours ultimately grants a kind of serenity you might feel after practicing a balance pose over and over and finally standing on one foot with complete equipoise.

Here are few tips to help you hold your balance when you are thrown off by disagreements:

1.  Listen, really listen.  Make sure you really hear what the other person is saying.  Listen for the content and the feelings beneath the content.  What are they feeling?  What need are they trying to express?  Reflect back what you hear to make sure you fully understand.  As much as possible, reflect your understanding with kind words and a kind open expression.  Sometimes, if you are still feeling charged up because you are not being heard, this kind of listening might be very very difficult.  If that’s the case, practice self control and/or take some time and clear the charge you are feeling so  you can listen more carefully.

2.  Practice being courteous.  One of the qualities that gets lost in many relationships is simple courteousness.  Everyday, aim to treat “your people” with kind courtesy.  This might mean treating each other like guests in your home, it might mean doing tiny kindnesses for them.  In disagreements, this means sharing your point of view politely in a calm voice.  Again, if you are feeling too charged up, learning to clear the emotional energetic charge can really help you listen to your beloved and express your point of view with heartfelt respect.

3.  Ask if your disagreeing partner is ready and willing to hear your point of view.  Be ready to wait as they really and truly may not be in a place that they are ready to listen to you.  If they are ready and willing, share yourself.  Share your thoughts and the rationale behind what you think.  As best you can, share your needs and your feelings.  Don’t make them guess.  Remember, you do not need to abandon or sacrifice self respect to respect someone else.  Share from a position of truly sharing, not to try to convince or persuade, just to share.  Part of your sharing might include how hearing your partner has influenced your perspective.  Or perhaps has you listened, you could hear some truth in what your partner shared.  You might even have clarity about what need of yours is in play. What need is being met or not met by your perspective.

4.  Finally, remember that coming to agreement does not necessarily mean that you will 100% agree with each other and it doesn’t always mean compromising.  There are gradients of agreement.  And from my perspective, the value of learning to disagree with each other respectfully is coming back to the sweet spot of truly seeing and being seen by the one you love.  That’s the true aim of disagreeing respectfully.

I wonder how our world might look if we all learned to disagree respectfully and honored gradients of agreement.  What are your tips for disagreeing respectfully?

Our lives take place in the context of relationships.  We have relationships with ourselves, with others, with life, with nature, with our work..the list goes on and on.  Relationships can be like a yoga mat that is slung over your shoulders in every moment of life.  It’s so ever-present, you might not even be aware of the presence and impact of your relationships on your overall state.

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I think that relationships are one of the most perfect practice spaces for yoga.  Ultimately, yoga is about releasing the deep tensions held in the body and experiencing union.  The tensions we feel in relationship inhibit that feeling of union, yet the tension itself is easy to release.

The first step seems to be to access awareness of any tensions you are experiencing.  Then, instead of looking outside of yourself for a fix, look inside.  Poke around inside yourself a bit and see if you can find the beliefs, old hurts or future worries that are adding to  your tension.

Then access any number of tools and resources to the release the tension.  A simple one you can begin with a 3 minute breathing space.  Begin by just noticing what you are thinking and feeling, like someone watching a movie.  Just notice, without judging or getting engaged.  Then bring your attention to your breath and take a few easy breaths, noticing the movement of the breath in the body, observing the breath.  After a minute or so with this, allow your attention to expand to include your breath, feelings and thoughts.

In just a few minutes you can release a bit of the tension that might have you in it’s grips.  The three-minute breathing space can be like one pose in yoga, like tadasana, mountain pose.  Your practice strengthens and grounds you.  Opening the way for you to enter the next moment of your life with greater ease.  In this way, you begin to learn and practice the yoga of relationship.  The idea is to use your relationships as a practice mat to release tension and move closer to a feeling of union.

If you find that you don’t really know where the tension is coming from or how to fully release it on your own, that’s where the support of a skilled therapist or coach can help.  Your part is then to show up and receive the support that’s available.  Just as you wouldn’t try to do some of the harder yoga poses without the support of a skilled teacher, there are aspects of relationship tension that call for skilled support.

Photo courtesy of a friend

I really appreciate a beautiful garden.  I love checking out books on gardening from the library and reading them on my couch, while my yard goes neglected.  As an army brat, I never learned and really don’t know the first thing about where you even start when you want to create beauty in the yard.

That’s all changing.  In fact, I now understand that it’s not about creating beauty, it’s about revealing the beauty that’s already there.  I owe this new found wisdom to, Shar, my gardening mentor/tutor/teacher.

I’ve long wanted to play with someone outside, someone who could teach me, but wasn’t really uptight about how things should be.  How do you find someone like that?  How does a grown woman ask another grown up, “Wanna come over and play in my yard?”

That’s just what I did.  And, Shar said, “yes.”

One of the things I’ve learned from her so far is how easy it is to create little pockets of beauty by “eliminating the negative.”  For example, I live in the woods, lots of shade and lots of tree debris.  Recently, Shar and I were playing in the yard and she was delighted to find a stump that I’d thought was an unsightly mess.  After cleaning away the debris in the stump, we filled it with some dirt, added some moss from another part of the yard, a few rocks and VOILA!  A little pocket of beauty.

Where are there hidden pockets of beauty in your life?  What might you eliminate to add to the beauty of your life?  Perhaps there are old habits, ways of being or thinking that you could eliminate.  Perhaps there are virtues you could cultivate.  Or maybe a little pocket of beauty could be revealed by your cleaning and rearranging a shelf or a cabinet or your state of mind.

Post a comment and share your little pockets of insight and beauty on my blog.

I can always tell the difference when someone is listening to me through their ego and when they are listening to me through their heart.  However, I’m not always so adept at discerning when I’m listening through the ears of my ego and when I’m listening through the ears of my heart.

Nonetheless, I’m practicing…a work in process.  Sometimes, people say how hard personal development is, for it seems to never end.  My response?  “What else are you going to do with your life?”  So these days, I’m attending to listening.

Along with a colleague, Michael Carter, I’ve been working with the leadership team in a local school to increase their collaborative leadership skills.  This team has committed to giving of their time and energy to devote to this program, “AWAKEN! Collaborative Leadership”  for the 2009 -2010 school year.  Ultimately, the time and attention of these committed teachers trickles down and touches hundreds of lives!  Yayyyyy Teachers!

Anyway, we’ve been exploring the leadership principles that make up the AWAKEN Program.  One of those principles is wrapped around a willingness to engage in authentic communication…so, here we are, back to listening.

Clearly deep and real listening, the kind of listening that most of us yearn for in our relationships, transcends the ego and comes straight through the heart.  This kind of listening is free of shoulds and demands.  This kind of listening waits patiently and asks questions that aim at helping to better fully understand what’s being said.

One participant in the AWAKEN! Program shared that she’s noticing that she has often makes up her mind about someone and what they are saying AND finds a solution before they’ve even finished talking.  She committed to the group that she will be practicing listening…deep authentic listening.

Her willingness to share herself so authentically with the group and their response to her inspired me and deepened my own understanding of listening.  Even though I spend a good deal of my day listening, I began to pay more attention to the quality of my listening.

Am I listening through the ears of my ego or the ears of my heart?

Are you?  How do you tell the difference?