Clotheslined

I felt high after my last post.

It actually worked, this E-Squared business, and I couldn’t wait to try the next experiment.  I spent a day just BE-ing and it felt amazing.  I was ready to call up a tattoo shop and get’er done.  I felt more present and open.  I felt free from the long list of things that I had felt splitting me apart… the to-do list still existed, but I had really only one assignment.

Be.  In each moment.

I was like Maria in the Sound of Music.  Heart full, skipping down a path with my guitar in one hand and carpet bag in the other, singing with gusto…

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I have confidence in sunshine!
I have confidence in rain!
I have confidence that spring will come again!
Besides which you see I have confidence in me!

Strength doesn’t lie in numbers!
Strength doesn’t lie in wealth!
Strength lies in nights of peaceful slumbers!
When you wake up — Wake Up!

Butterflies fluttered and birds sang.  I was super happy, people.

I quickly ate up the next chapter or Pam Grout’s book, E-squared…. ready for my next experiment!

And that is when I was clotheslined.  Hardcore TKO.  Maria, sprawled in the dirt unconscious.    I don’t remember that part of the movie, but that is what happened.  Yeow.  Just typing the words, my heart beats painfully in my deeply bruised chest.

So the last few days I have had to regain consciousness, and access the injuries.   When life clotheslines you, it is natural to ask, why?  I didn’t have the words at first.  But yesterday, and today, the why has come.

“WHY!!!!??????”  (Shakes fist at the sky)

I forgot about E-Squared.  I forgot about almost everything but the hurt.  Just Be.  In the hurt.  It has taken all of me to not curl into a ball and turn this hurt into a hard nugget of anger, a stone that I would carry with me forever.  That was my old pattern.  And I am trying so hard to stop that.  But what do I do with this hurt?  How do we deal with grief?

I found this on my Facebook page, posted by Cheryl Richardson on Sunday.

“Today I invite grief in. I welcome its teachings, its benevolence, and its ability to connect me with my vulnerable, tender heart.  After all, that tenderness is important. It’s the aliveness we all secretly long for every single day of our lives…”

Then, I decided to listen to a good, uplifting radio show.  Something to boost me up, hold me a tiny bit higher than the lowest vibration.  A caller called in with a question for the guest doctor on the show that could have come right out of my own mouth.  About being clotheslined.  About my hurt.  The answer was so uncanny, so exactly what I needed to hear that my husband, who walked into the kitchen as the host was giving the answer turned to me and asked if I manifested this radio program.

Huh…. did I?

We went to meet an incredibly inspiring woman, Colleen Alexander, and her husband on Sunday.  It was the first time we have met, and she brought me a book…an unexpected gift… Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh.  I was touched by her story and bravery and sensitivity.  I tucked it in my bag after we said our goodbyes.

Last night, Lydia woke with a terrible nightmare.  She was out of sorts this morning, being sassy and angry, over reacting, and was in tears by the time she got into the car to go to school.  I tried wrapping her in love as I pulled up to the curb, sending it back to her from the drivers seat.  But  she jumped out of the car and slammed the door, and took a few angry steps to walk away, looking dark and sad.  And then she ran to me, and I opened the car door and pulled her to my lap and held her.  I suddenly asked her about her nightmare.  It felt relevant in this moment.  She said she dreamt that someone took me… stole me. Her fear was real and still present in her eyes.  I hugged it away, reassured her that I would kick anyone’s butt that tried to take me away.  I pulled away from her, and said it again, but this time I gave her a delicious pebble of emphasis… “I would kick their ASSES Lydia.”  She smiled then, and went to school.  Lydia has always been the mirror, reflecting me…

Then it was off to work, and I exchanged a smile with the kind cashier as she expressed concern for me, saying I didn’t seem like myself.  Am I really this transparent?  So I sat with my coffee and the book Colleen gave me and asked the FP  (the field of infinite possibilities) to give me a healing message from the book to help me.  I opened it, and this is what it said:

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Come Back To Yourself

“Most people are afraid to come back to themselves, because that means having to face the pain inside of them.  With the practice of mindfulness, the situation changes.  We come back to our pain, but now we are well equipped with the energy of mindfulness that has been generated by mindful  breathing and by meditation.  We use that source of energy to recognize and embrace our pain.”

Ok.  So I was clotheslined.  It happened.  And then I brought a whole slew of healing messages and moments into my life to help me hold the hurt.  I am going to choose differently than I have before, when feeling broken by something in my life.  I think I am realizing how powerful we all are.  In the sense that I called in these healing moments, I also called in the branch that knocked me out…left my inner Maria reeling from a lesson that needed to play out.  But, oh LORD how it can hurt, this business of reaching for wholeness.

I just re-read the second experiment in E-Squared.  The Volkswagon Jetta Principle.  This is what it claims:

You Impact the Field and Draw from It According to Your Beliefs and Expectations

I read this for the first time last thursday,  just an hour before I hit that branch.  And reading it now, it is funny how the incident, the pain, the clothesline… it demonstrates this principle in the most absolute possible terms.  It exposed to me in no uncertain terms how powerful we are…when we are looking for messages of love and support and healing, they come.  When we are looking for messages to confirm our deepest fears and insecurities, betrayal and rejection… they come too.  And our intention can not direct what others are manifesting in their own lives.

Because of the seriousness of the injury and the obvious way I feel this principle was shown to me, the actual experiment seems funny.  But I will participate in it, if only to give me more time to breathe and come back to myself.

If you missed the first experiment, The Dude Abides, you can see the set up here and the results here.

So here it is, the Lab Report Sheet.  Once again, for clarification, the words in red come from Pam Grout’s book, E-Squared.  The words  in black, are mine.

LAB REPORT SHEET

 

The Principle:  The Volkswagon Jetta Principle

 

The Theory:  You impact the field and draw from it according to your beliefs and expectations. 

The Question:  Do I really see only what I expect to see?

 

The Hypothesis:  If I decide to look for sunset beige cars and butterflies, I will find them.  

 

Time Required:  48 hours

 

Today’s Date:  Tuesday, November 12, 2013          Time:  10:25 am

  

The Approach: According to this crazy Pam Grout girl, the world out there reflects what I want to see.  She says that it’s nothing but my own illusions that keep me from experiencing peace, joy and love.  So even though I suspect she’s cracked, today I’m going to look for orange cars.  Tomorrow, I will look for purple hats.

       a.  Number of orange cars observed _________

       b.  Number of purple hats observed _________

Here we go.  Breathe.  Be.  And play seek and find.

“You will not break loose until you realize that you yourself forge the chains that bind you.”

                      -Arten in The Disappearance of the Universe, by Gary Renard

I Feel Like I Peed My Pants and God Made Me Do It

“Man’s chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.”

                  -Neville Goddard, Barbadian Author and Mystic

 

I am sitting in my office… a Panera Bread booth.  And my jeans are wet, from the knees up.  My undies are wet.  Grateful for the long sweater I chose this morning, I tried to hide this unfortunate fact as I ordered and squeezed lemon in my tea.  When I stood up to retrieve my squash soup, I tried to act cool, despite my suspiciously wet butt.

 It’s all GOD’s doing.

 

Let’s explore.

 

I bought a book over the weekend.   I love to buy books…. they fill my shelves and boxes in my basement and weigh down my bag.  I do my best to read them, but the trouble is, I don’t have much time these days. I schlep them everywhere just in case an hour falls into my lap.

This book has  been calling to me since I first heard about it in May at a writer’s conference.  It’s called E-Squared by Pam Grout.  I went to another conference this weekend, and a speaker there mentioned the book again. There was a large stack of them being sold at the back of the room,  whispering to me.  I finally gave in and  bought one, and added it to the thick, teetering tower on my nightstand last night… wondering how I would find time to read it, along with the other VIP material on the list of must do’s.

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This morning, I had a doctor’s appointment.  And uncharacteristically, I was a half hour early.  What?  EARLY?  Yep.  Go ahead and send me a nice warm pat on the back.  And if you know me personally, you can dab at the tears in the corners of your eyes.  Before I left for the appointment, all the books in my nightstand stack  were transferred to the passenger seat of my car, as I am incapable of prioritizing before 11 am.   I have already begun to read three of the books, ones that have information I know will help me in my work.  So naturally, I plucked E2 out of the stack, a book I know almost nothing about, and took in into the doctor’s office with me.

 

The doctor was an hour late. I sat in his waiting room staring at the white printer paper sign he has taped to the door, kindly asking us out here in the waiting room to give 24 hours notice if we need to cancel, or pay a $30 charge and please don’t be late.  And instead of being annoyed, I realized with pleasure, that I had no other choice but to read my new book!

 

I cracked it open.  And it turns out, it’s one of those “your thoughts create your reality” books. In it, she talks about the science behind this fact.  And she talks about GOD…aka Heavenly Father as I was taught to call Him.  In the book, she gives assignments, or experiments that will prove the claim that we create our reality by our own thoughts, and Heavenly Father is actually a  scientific law, like gravity.  She calls this law, or God, the “FP,”  short for “Infinite Field of Possibility.”

 

This is not the first book I have bought on the subject.  And I am not a world-famous author, (yet) so maybe I have some more to learn about this practice.   Thus, the idea of doing specific things to prove that FP was out there, just waiting for me to plug-in with intention… intrigued me.

 

After I left the office, I decided to run into the Stop and Shop across the street and buy some hand soap…we were out at home, before heading to the “office” (Panera Bread).  These days, driving my car was like getting into a  giant garbage can with wheels, and it was at this moment that I exceeded my tolerance level for sitting on crumpled preschool worksheets and struggling to keep the luna bar wrappers from flying out the open door when I grab my purse.   So, while in the store, after buying my soap and an inappropriately large  bottle of lime seltzer, I grabbed a brown paper sack to use to collect the trash heap in my car.

 

I spent my shopping time contemplating whether I would follow through with reading the rest of E-Squared and doing Pam Grout’s assignments.  Have I bought in to the idea enough?  I have so much work to do!  Should I spend time on this?

 

Should I?

 

Should I?

 

When I got out to my car, I took a moment in the cold November air to gather up all the empty seltzer cans, gum wrappers, Halloween candy wrappers and old receipts floating around in my car and tossed them into the paper bag.  I picked up a very, very old white plastic ziplock bag full of wet wipes.  This bag has been stepped on a thousand times,  it did not close properly, it had been living on the floor of my car for well over a year, unused…because surely the wipes were a brick of filmy, dried out towels by now.

 

My mind said, “Do not throw this out.  You will need these wipes.  The minute you finally throw it out, inevitably, you will want them back….” (said every hoarder in the universe).

Not wanting to play into my inner hoarder any longer, I tossed it in my garbage sack.

 

I got in my seat, put my iPhone in my lap and then wedged my 1 liter bottle of lime seltzer between my legs.  And I thought, “it’s a mistake to put that beverage so close to your phone” but I rolled my eyes at that inner rule-follower… she annoyed the crap out of me…and I had had enough.

 

I began my drive to Panera.

 

You know what happened, right?

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I opened my seltzer and it exploded, as carbonated water is wont to do at the most inconvenient of times, while you are driving a car and it is in your lap and sitting on top of your key to the universe-your cell phone.  And the bag of dried out wet wipes that have been getting crusty on the floor of my car since Stella wore diapers in 2011 had been tossed out.  So I drove to my office as my ass soaked up the lake of seltzer I was sitting in.

 

After waddling into Panera, I decided to crack open this E2 business again.  Just a hunch.

 

In the first chapter, she redefines the word GOD as being the infinite field of possibility, and instead of being a He that judges and rules us, GOD is more like electricity… an energy to be used for our benefit.  Just as we use electricity to curl our hair, wash our dishes, toast our bagels. This energy responds to our thoughts and intentions just as our hair dryers turn on when we plug them in.

The fact that I feel and look like I just peed my pants has me nodding in agreement here, as my first lesson on manifesting things had obviously begun this morning.  I also had a strong urge to set down my soup spoon and applaud after each point she made about the myths we tell ourselves about God.  The one about God looking like ZZ Top is particularly accurate.

 

So I am going to do her first experiment, which she calls “The Dude Abides” principle  and I will let you know how it goes… I figure, you may not be convinced that GOD, or as Pam Grout calls it, the “FP” created the exploding seltzer and my wet pants, so I will accept her challenge to do this first experiment to prove it.

 

She has named each principle of the “FP”  (remember, the infinite Field of possibility).

She also includes a “lab report sheet” for each experiment, which I will fill out here so we can all see the results.

 

For clarification, the words in red come from Pam Grout’s book, E-Squared.  The words  in black, are mine.

LAB REPORT SHEET

 

The Principle:  The Dude Abides Principle

 

The Theory:  There is an invisible energy force or field of infinite possibilities.  And it’s yours for the asking.

 

The Question:  Does the FP exist?

 

The Hypothesis:  If there’s a 24/7 energy force equally available to everyone, I can access it at any time simply by paying attention.  Furthermore, if I ask the force for a blessing, giving it a specific time frame and clear instructions, it’ll send me a gift and say, “My Pleasure.”

 

Time Required:  48 hours

 

Today’s Date:  Monday, November 4, 2013          Time:  12:54 pm

 

Deadline for Receiving gift:  Wednesday, November 6th   12:54 pm

 

The Approach:  I hate to break it to ya, FP but folks are starting to talk.  The’re starting to wonder, “Is this guy for real?”  I mean, really, like it’d be so much skin off your chin to come down here and call off this crazy hide-and-seek thing you’ve been playing.  I’m giving you exactly 48 hours to make your presence known.

 

I want a gift – something unexpected.  I want a clear, unmistakable, obvious sign…something that cannot be written off as coincidence.

 

Research Notes:

 

(I will fill these in after the deadline!)

 

Three cheers to GOD, Heavenly Father, or the FP… I have ordered myself up a gift in the next two days.  Let’s see where this takes me!

 

Onward.