What if…?
Posted on November 17, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
Image by StabArtToDeath1
What if
I saw you as nothing less than
love’s perfect design?
What if
I heard you as
a perfect note?
What if
I smelled you as
intoxicating fragrance , flooding my being with love?
What if
Upon touching you
I dissolved into the softest pillow of spaciousness?
What if…?
In love, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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To Blogging Awards and Beyond!
Posted on October 19, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
One of the pleasant surprises in the blogging world happens when a reader of your blog, whom you are completely unaware of, turns up at your blog one day, leaves a comment and, as if that were not pleasant enough, hands you an award! It’s more than pleasant. It’s a joy! Yes, I have been very pleasantly surprised by your comment, Searching Within, and this award:
Thank you!
I have often stopped by your blog to treat myself to the stunning drama of a wild ride into the subconscious as suggested by the image on your blog. Sometimes an image like that is enough to leave one grasping (and gasping!) for the ‘other’ world while straddling the nebulous divide between the finite known and the vast unknown! It is thrilling – excitement served with a tincture of fear!
Giving and receiving awards is a wonderful thing. It can heighten our sense of appreciation for one another. However, awards are one-off events. They stir up a bit of excitement, interest and enthusiasm for a few brief moments and then, their impact fizzles out, rather like the sparklers on a birthday cake!
While greatly appreciating this award and another that I’ve been given this week (which you can read about here), I would like to use this opportunity to encourage the practice of posting about each other’s posts.
Let me explain. As bloggers, we post. Most often we post about things that interest us. As bloggers, we also read. At least I hope we do. Read each other’s blogs, that is. Why not then post about the posts we read?
The value in doing this is that we reference another person’s writing more specifically. It encourages us to take the time to read each other’s posts and seriously and sincerely interact with the ideas therein. In so doing, it encourages readers of our blogs to visit the blogs whose posts we may have discussed or referenced far more frequently than an award would.
It’s an idea. Do you think it could work? Would you like to find out more about what I mean? If so, please check out this post.
Alright, now that I’ve got that off my chest, let me proceed with the delightful duty of sharing this award with five others. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that I could easily pick more than five and that those I am picking just now are not necessarily better than those I haven’t nor do they always contain content that I personally agree with. They just happen to be more in my attention just now. As for their content, well, every idea is worth considering, if only to help us become clearer about what we do believe and what we want to believe!
To all who have joyously received this award as well as those who are about to, may we all enjoy and allow the energy of appreciation, respect and celebration that we offer one another!
Before I name the latest recipients of this award, let me alert you to the PROTOCOL surrounding this award:
* Put the logo on your blog or post.
* Nominate at least 5 blogs (can be more) that for you are Uber Amazing!
* Let them know that they have received this Uber Amazing award by commenting on their blog.
* Share the love and link to this post and to the person you received your award from.
HERE WE GO: LET US CELEBRATE THE WORK AT:
Daily Blissings
Creating Wealth And Health Info
Born To Succeed
Zen Tricks
Cloud Pillows
In love, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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The Awakening Mind is…
Posted on October 17, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
Artwork by Tim Seaward
The awakening mind is
Disinclined to consumption
And more inclined to caring
For the world, after all, is its physical enchantment!
The awakening mind is
Intrigued and enchanted by the inner journey
And less driven by the debilitating treadmill of social, economic and individual pursuit
For the inner journey, after all, is the inexorably thrilling voyage in eternity!
The awakening mind is
Less prone to the vicissitudes of existence
But awe-struck, inspired, energized and enlivened in the constant, creative stream of consciousness
For existence, after all, is densely conditioned
The awakening mind is
Done with accumulation, complexity and control
And instead, holds its poise in presence, elegance and freedom
For poise, after all, is the undergarment of love!
The awakening mind is
Unimpressed by exhortations to fight for peace or justice or an end to poverty
Yielding instead to its natural state of tranquility, oneness and abundance
For fighting, after all, is fueled by the illusion of separation, powerlessness and lack
The awakening mind is
The mind of creative contentment
Not destructive discontent
For the awakening mind is, after all, love in full-filling bloom!
Awakening, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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What decisions have you made today?
Posted on October 16, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
Photo by BlueSkies_02
What decisions have I made today?
Where I am, it is after 9.30 in the morning. It is a good time to be asking myself this question. In fact, it is even better to ask myself this question upon rising and as part of my meditation practice and this is, in fact, what I do everyday. Today, however, I am asking myself this question again as part of the process of writing this post.
If you are a little surprised that I make it a practice to ask myself this question at the start, rather than at the end of the day, perhaps the following may help explain my practice.
A day, which is a period of time, is one of the most basic resources we are given. How do we choose to use it? And use it we must for it is gone in 24 hours. What inspiration do we live our day by? What seeds do we wish to plant each day? And if we have already planted seeds, how are we nurturing and nourishing them each day?
Let me be a little more specific: What decisions have I made for this day that I have? What intentions have I chosen for today? Have I intended happiness for myself and all else? Have I intended peace? Have I intended the experience and expression of greatness, abundance, freedom and goodness? Have I intended mindfulness, wisdom, beauty and the sense of oneness with all? And having intended all of these, have I decided to allow them?
When we fail to decide how to use each day, we effectively subject it to the decisions that were made yesterday or the day before or the year before or ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty etc years ago.
What decisions were those? Were they decisions made from love? From a place of power, freedom and peace? Or were they made out of fear, anxiety, guilt and/or constraint? And even if they were made in a state of love, power, freedom and peace, have we remained in this state? In other words, have we remained mindful? Have we remained aware? For if we haven’t, then we need to return our attention to this state. We need to regain our love/peace/freedom/power consciousness.
How do we do this? By deciding, intending and allowing it at the start of each day!
Decidedly, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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In Crisis there is Opportunity!
Posted on October 14, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
The last week and a bit have drawn my attention and energy away from my routine blogging. Believing, as I do, that everything, without exception, is purposeful, I allowed myself to engage as fully as I possibly could in what was happening. It was also no coincidence, of course, that my laptop suffered a broken screen and was at the repairers for just under a week! Working on the laptop of a friend, I did not feel motivated to post.
If you have been visiting this blog and feeling a little disappointed (am I flattering myself?) at not finding fresh posts, I hope that this one will assure you that I am back in business!
Taking a break from routine, whether consciously planned (desired/voluntary) or unconsciously planned (forced/involuntary) often provides unexpected benefits. In my case, it has allowed dormant seeds of unrest and disquiet to surface, making themselves known. In my personal time of crisis, albeit mild, these are the seeds of opportunity, of change! And change I am being!
During this period too, the world’s attention has been seized by an apparent financial crisis. By and large, I tend not to offer my attention to things that I do not perceive to be life-giving. By ‘life-giving’, I mean enriching, motivating, consciousness expanding.
It is enough for me to know that many people perceive a financial crisis. I do not need to be told that repeatedly. Neither do I do need to be told repeatedly that many people are anxious and afraid and that some are desperate and destitute.
I do not need to see or hear (of) frequent commentaries, speculations, disenchantments and political exchanges which seem to have become the culture around these types of crises. None of these add to the sense of gravity and commitment that I have towards living as fully and freely as I can for the good of all and helping others do the same.
Yet it is in this climate of crisis that seeds of change, indeed, opportunity, planted many, many seasons ago, can finally germinate and bear fruit! This collection of seeds include the seed of altruism, the seed of awakening and expanding consciousness, the seed of oneness, the seed of true empowerment for all, the seed of true freedom from old, institutionalized fears, social systems of enforced dependency or debt as they call it in the film, Zeitgeist Addendum, and the freedom to be all that we truly are – godly!
If you haven’t yet seen the free, online film, Zeitgeist Addendum, I encourage you to watch it, if for no other reason than to see how the same social, national and global events can be viewed differently from the more dominant views most of us have been exposed to.
And when you have watched it, may I invite you to consider the following questions:
• Who am i?
• Who is my neighbour, brother, sister?
• Who or what am I indebted to and why?
• Who or what is indebted to me and why?
• What is the primary purpose of each human being, including myself?
• What or who is god and what is my relationship with god?
• Are my beliefs infallible?
• Is it important and useful for me to desire the wellbeing and greatness of all, including myself? Why? Am I prepared to? How do I intend to do it? When do I intend to do it?
Blessings, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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Have you got time to Love?
Posted on October 4, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Mother Teresa
It is so easy to judge, is it not? It happens so automatically because our mind has been conditioned to judge.
Judgment is always based on past experiences, and most often, using information we have collected from age-old experiences. More recent experiences merely trigger old responses, including old judgments.
The judging mind is never a peaceful mind. It is restless because it is not accepting of the way things are. It is in constant quarrel with the world. Such a mind, as Mother Theresa so succinctly says, has not time to love.
You cannot judge and love at the same time. To judge is to believe in and reinforce duality and consequently, separation, whereas the essence of love is oneness.
I have never found judging to be a pleasant, fulfilling or loving experience. On the contrary, I have always felt more angered with and distanced from the people I claim to love or at least seek to love. Sadly, for a long time, I was not even aware of these unpleasant and often painful associations with judging.
As I said earlier, the habit of judging is so ingrained in us that unless we remain mindful, we may not be aware of our habit. And even when we begin to develop greater awareness, it tends to be over the more obvious objects of judgment such as the pedophile or the war criminal or a particular race or culture.
But what about the judgments we make about ourselves or our partners and our children? Somehow, we seem to think that we have a right and even a duty to judge! That, without our judgment, we/they may stray from what is ‘right’ as we have deemed it.
Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves: Is there a different way? Is there a way I can respond to the world, to people and things, to myself without judgment and its associated sense of separation and distance?
I believe there is. I believe that the consciousness of love, of awareness, gives us the freedom of true choice; choice which is not governed by judgment but guided instead by our feelings, our good, joyous, peaceful, and yes, loving feelings.
In love, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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The Soul squeals in utter delight!
Posted on September 29, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
Hello again!
Yesterday, I posted here about the profound experience of a soft gaze, a Peace Gaze. So moved was I by my recent experience of just such a gaze, only a few moments long, that I posted about it at my other blog, Longings Enchantments and Sacred Space.
Today, I wish to share with you another experience of joy and relating to the soul, aroused this time (as it has countless other times) by the rapture of Rumi’s soul:
No one knows
What makes the soul
Wake up so happy!
Maybe a dawn breeze
has blown the veil
from the face of GodTranslated by Coleman Barks in The Soul of Rumi
Ah, the soul gazes into the face of god, into all that it is, into eternity itself! How could the soul be anything but joyous? Ecstatic? It re-cognizes its beginlessness and endlessness, its limitlessness, its sheer beauty, goodness and greatness - unenhanceable and incorruptible! How could it not feel rapture? Exquisite, unstoppable rapture?
God has revealed its face and the soul squeals in utter delight as it sees itself! At last!
In love, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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Look into my Eyes and meet me where we truly are!
Posted on September 28, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
Have you ever looked softly, yet deeply into the eyes of another person? And have you ever done it while holding yourself in a state of peace, joy and openness, which is really the state of love?
‘Peace Gazing’ is something that I invite people to engage in during certain meditation practices. For one minute, people sit in pairs, facing each other, gazing softly and deeply into each others’ eyes. Prior to this, I would have guided us into a more peaceful and open space, so that it is from this space that we engage in the Peace Gaze.
Sometimes, the Peace Gaze can be far from a peaceful experience. After all, most of us live in societies where prolonged eye contact is discouraged and considered threatening.
Have you noticed how we tend to avoid eye contact with strangers as well as friends and loved ones? We even act as if someone we are passing on the street or in a shopping mall or on our way to the living room or kitchen is not there.
Yes, we do acknowledge the physical presence of the person by either giving them space to move or allowing them to pass first but we don’t really acknowledge their spiritual presence in which the eyes play a significant role.
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect
G K Chesterton at thinkexist.com
It is not that we must make eye contact to be spiritually attuned with another. Not at all. In fact, the sense of connection and oneness is often most strongly felt when we close our eyes and allow our thoughts to settle.
However, in our waking and walking moments, our eyes offer us the means to experience the deep and profound spiritual communion we have with another. That contact, held in a soft, open gaze penetrates effortlessly, the layers of conditioning that our individualized personalities are built on, taking us directly and instantly to the seat of our very being – that open, expansive, lush, vibrant field of foreverness, of eternity, of endless lifetimes. That field, which Rumi says, is ‘beyond the concepts of rightfulness and wrongfulness’! In fact, let me give you the full quote:
Beyond the concepts of rightfulness and wrongfulness, there is a field. I will meet you there!
Jalal Ad-Din Rumi
When we gaze into the eyes of another, the ‘windows of the soul’, as the eyes are sometimes described, we gift ourselves and another, the wondrous experience of a few moments in eternity, in bliss, in the truth of who we are.
I have noticed on many, many occasions that by softly gazing into the eyes of another, agitated, fearful, nervous, defensive or even hostile behavior or words instantly cease. It is as if we are meeting for the first time in that place beyond judgment, beyond duality, beyond separation. We meet in the truth of who we are – One!
If you have never done it before, or never done it with certain (types of) people, do try it. It doesn’t even have to be a minute long. Neither do you have to be seated opposite the person. Instead, you might try it with your neighbor, your spouse or your child or the person at the check-out counter, the last of whom was one of the people I exchanged a gaze with yesterday!
For about three seconds, we gazed softly and deeply into each other’s eyes even as he was handing me my receipt. What a beautiful experience that was for me and I sensed it was for the young man too!
Meeting you, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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What, my Human Being?
Posted on September 25, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
What draws me closer to you?
Or am I afraid to get too close?
What allows me to enjoy your being?
Or do I believe that I cannot afford such luxury?
Or that there are others more deserving of my time and attention?
Or that I cannot possibly enjoy your being when it is so different to my being, my beliefs and my values?
What encourages me to wish only good things for you?
Or do I believe that you can jolly well wish good things for yourself?
What persuades me to cease passing judgment on you?
Or do I believe that it is my business to?
And that, if I didn’t, why, you would spiral into moral decline or take advantage of me or act in ways that I do not approve of and ultimately, give me less and less reason to feel righteous about myself?
What compels me to listen to you with a wide open heart, with a mind willing to be changed, with a spirit basking in the wonder of your being?
Or am I too caught up in composing my response, or recalling my old arguments, or marshalling my defenses and launching my attack, ultimately seeking to prove you wrong or less or worse and me right and more and better?
What, in other words, my human being, convinces me that you and I are One?
Unmistakeably, unenhanceably, incorruptibly One?
Built of the same atoms and molecules as we are?
Spawned of the same cosmic dust?
Birthed by the One consciousness?
What?
One, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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Interconnectedness - It is I!
Posted on September 22, 2008 - Filed Under Blogroll
If there is any lover in the world, 0 Muslim, it is I.
If there is any believer, infidel, or Christian hermit, it is I.
The wine, the cup-bearer, the musician, the instrument and the music,
The beloved, the candle, the liquor and the inebriation, it is I.
The seventy-two religious sects in the world
Do not really exist;
I swear by God every religious sect-it is I.
Earth, air, water and fire: do you know what they are?
Earth, air, water and fire-and the soul as well; it is I
Truth and falsehood, good and evil, pleasure and suffering, beginning and end,
Knowledge, learning, asceticism, devotion and faith-it is I.
Be assured that the fire of hell and its flames,
Paradise, Eden and the angels of heaven-it is I.
Heaven and earth and all they hold: angels, demons, and men - it is I.Jalal Ad-Din Rumi at www.onelittleangel.com
In the poem above, Rumi expresses the transcendent consciousness that is all-encompassing, god-consciousness, if you like, for god is all-pervading. The divine is present in all through each.
Such a state of consciousness must be of practical use if it is to be of any use at all. How are we inspired by it? I know that it inspires me to ask questions such as these:
Where am I not? Where are you not? How does the dominant perception of separation affect us? Does it draw us closer to one another? Does it help us experience the wholeness that we are? Does it help us go beyond the culture of ‘blame and shame’? Does it make us more likely to see goodness and greatness rather than pass judgment?
It is I, Lucy
For Online and Offline Mentoring/Meditation/Workshops/Retreats Contact lucy@lucylopez.net
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