A New Earth

Three years ago (I think?) I read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. The language he used and his way of explaining things was kind of new to me but I loved so much of what I read. Looking back, it was for me, kind of the beginning of waking up. Yesterday during lunch I was looking up Tolle quotes online and thought I’d share some.

-Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.

-Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.

-Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.

-Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.

-You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge.

-Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" --- and find that there is no death.

-Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

-The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.

-A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever.

-Accept - then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.

-When another recognizes you, that recognition draws the dimension of Being more fully into this world through both of you. That is the love that redeems the world.

I did something scary on Sunday. I sang my first solo, something I probably at some point swore I’d never do. It went fairly well except for the part where I was completely unsuccessful at flipping into falsetto. I probably should have avoided anything that required falsetto but the arrangement that I sang had special meaning to me so I did it anyway. Thanks for accompanying me through so much, JK.

I have a secret...

When I was little (maybe around age 7), my family did a short, 5 minute, still frame video for the LDS church. The man who was making them lived in our ward and he asked our family to do it. The title of the video is Eric's Secret Prayer and I play the part of Eric. Yes, I was a child actor. Maybe that's why I got so messed up. Hmmmm. Anyway, I did a little research and found out that the LDS church's distribution center still carries the video and that it is now available on DVD. Of course I ordered it and now I'm sharing it with you in all it's 1980's, correlated beauty.

To answer your questions, no, my mom really isn't in a wheelchair and I'm not sure if the soundtrack for the video is available. I showed this to some friends recently and Christina made the suggestion that a sequel probably should be made called Eric's Secret. Eric is much older now and begins to realize he has feelings for the same sex....

Lars and the Real Girl

Last night I watched the movie Lars and the Real Girl. I. Loved. It. After Kathleen Flake’s talk on the importance of symbolism, I hesitate to explain what I saw in the movie, so that I don’t shut don’t the symbolism or do it a disservice, but I’m going to go ahead and share anyway. If you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it and then reread this after you’ve seen it. A few things I loved about the movie…

I love the big and magnanimous spirits of the townspeople, that they are willing to live Lars’ delusion with him. Some are hesitant at first, but those are the ones who probably learned the most. I love how fully they live the delusion, but gracefully and beautifully introduce bits of reality to Lars. They help him live symbolically. Lately, I love the concept of living a symbolic life. Lars’ delusion is just the tip of so much more that lies beneath. It’s a symbol. So many in the town are willing to explore that symbol with Lars, to help him understand himself and, I think, they understand themselves more in the process (Gus).

Of course I love Dagmar, Lars’ doctor. From the beginning she recognizes the importance of letting Lars live out his delusion. Gus, the brother, is more than hesitant to do that but the doctor tells him that the delusion is a communication and that they need to listen to what it’s saying. Maybe not those exact words, but that’s how I remember it. In America (and probably other places too) we seek to eradicate mental and emotional illness (or anything we find uncomfortable) through ignoring it or medication or any of a number of unhealthy coping strategies. It’s there for a reason. Take a walk with it. Sit down with it and get to know it.

All of us are walking around carrying our own delusions; the only difference is that it’s probably not in the form of an anatomically correct doll. We all have our own versions of reality, our roles and games that we play and our perception of things that gets tainted with our own baggage. We call it reality, because to us it is.

Let's get physical

I’ve been thinking off and on lately about physical intimacy and appropriate boundaries. I guess probably because I went from having few boundaries to developing some over the last few years. It’s also been spurred by a fairly recent Skype conversation with MNJ and MH and a brief conversation in the parking lot after church yesterday with a friend.

I was taught the law of chastity repeatedly all through my adolescent and young adult life. I knew it well. I prided myself in my youth in the fact that I was very respectful of other young women and had never defiled one. That’s like someone who is severely allergic to sugar being proud about staying away from sweets. It makes no sense. I was never able to engage in situations that tested and helped me explore my understanding of chastity. As a result, the principles surrounding chastity weren’t able to sink in to a level any deeper than having it taught to me and being able to regurgitate it.

Then I got home from my mission and realized my attraction to men was only increasing and I wasn’t aware of any healthy ways to explore what that meant for me and was kind of left to my own devices and started getting more and more curious and…yada, yada, yada…very few boundaries…yada, yada, yada. (This paragraph has been edited for content and length)

As I’ve gone through the process of creating boundaries, I’ve been learning some things about sex. I’ve learned that emotional intimacy is much more fulfilling and enriching than just physical intimacy, and that a better developed level of emotional intimacy can lead to more fulfilling and enriching levels of physical intimacy.

I’ve learned that physical intimacy is a powerful thing that we aren’t very good at understanding. So powerful, in fact, that it can make you fall in love with someone before you know him well enough to know that you shouldn’t fall in love with him. Physical intimacy releases powerful bonding hormones. It’s best to hold off on physical intimacy with a person until you know that person well enough to know whether or not you want to create a bond with him; otherwise, your physical bonding will outpace your emotional bonding and things will get messy fairly quickly.

I use the vague term “physical intimacy” on purpose, because I don’t think any one person can draw a specific line for anybody else. Each of us has to figure out that delicate balance for ourselves, but certainly with the help of outside sources. Trust me; don’t leave yourself in a vacuum of your own devices.

A while back I read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I know, I know, it’s that book that my friend Ninny Beth called "travel porn" that has been made into a movie starring none other than Julia Roberts. Who else was going to play that role? Anyway, there are actually some fantastic gems in that book and this is one of them:

“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”

We can dance!

My sister is obsessed with this video. She has been watching it so that she can learn the dance, and when she does, I'm making her teach it to me and all my friends so we can flash mob a mall near you. We will be the biggest thing to hit shopping malls since Tiffany. Happy Friday!!

Girls and Boys

I went to dinner with Ariel last night and she gave me a poster that I love that was apparently adapted from a poem by Nancy R. Smith and this is what it says:

For every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable.

For every boy who is burdened with the constant expectation of knowing everything, there is a girl tired of people not trusting her intelligence.

For every girl who is tired of being called over-sensitive, there is a boy who fears to be gentle, to weep.

For every boy for whom competition is the only way to prove his masculinity, there is a girl who is called unfeminine when she competes.

For every girl who throws out her E-Z-Bake oven, there is a boy who wishes to find one.

For every boy struggling not to let advertising dictate his desires, there is a girl facing the ad industry's attacks on her self-esteem.

For every girl who takes a step toward her liberations, there is a boy who finds the way to freedom a little easier.

I'm so glad I wasn't the only one who wanted an E-Z-Bake oven. Wait, I wasn't the only one, right??

Why the shift?

Recently, Reina posted a link to a Gallup poll that showed that American's acceptance of "gay relations" had crossed the 50% threshold. While eating lunch, I read this op-ed piece in The New York Times by (ahem) Charles M. Blow. He says that not only have Americans crossed that threshold, but that for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do, with the biggest shift happening with men between the ages of 18 and 49.

Charles speculates what might have caused such a dramatic shift among men with the help of a couple of experts on human development and men and masculinity. One specuation he called the contact hypothesis. As more and more men become more open about their sexuality, it makes sense that more men in general would come into contact with gay men. Once you get to know a person, it becomes harder to discriminate. This doesn't really explain why the dramatic shift specifically among men.

The second hypthesis is that men are becoming more egalitarian in general. They are becoming more comfortable with people who are different than they are. Also stated is that we are realizing that embracing diversity doesn't necessarily cause the disaster scenarios that are often presented.

The third hypothesis is that those who so forcefully speak out against homosexuality are being exposed for engaging in homosexuality themselves. People like Ted Haggard and George Rekers.

On Reina's post, we also discussed that shows like Glee and Modern Family (and I'll add Brothers & Sisters) are probably doing a lot as well. Glee and Brothers & Sisters especially are exploring the more intricate details of what it means to be gay and the difficulties that arise as a result. They are putting a more human face on the issue of homosexuality.

What do you think? Do you think there really has been a significant shift? What do you think has contributed to the shift?

Also, I had dinner with my friends Lanie and Justin and their kids. We were talking about someone and one of us said that the person was a little bit different. Lanie's oldest, who is 8 asked, "What do you mean different? Does he carry rats around in his pockets?" Yeah, I guess that qualifies as "different".

The importance of symbol

Sometimes I'll experience something, like a talk or a book or a movie that takes me several days and maybe even weeks to digest. It will come up often in conversation and shift the way I view things. I can even revisit it years later and digest parts of it that I was incapable of digesting at the time I initially experienced it. David recently sent me such a talk. It's a talk by Kathleen Flake that she gave at a gathering of Mormon counselors and therapists and it's called "Facilitating Change Through Symbols". Kathleen is brilliant. Her background is in law. She was a litigation attorney in DC and then retired from that and got a doctorate in American religious studies and now teaches at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.

I kind of don't want to sum up the talk, because I think you need to experience it for yourself. I am embedding the audio file so that you can do that. I realize though, that many won't listen, so there are some things that I would like share that I loved from the talk.

I love what Kathleen opens up. I love what she doesn’t say. I also like what she does say, but I love how she chooses to be vague on certain things. One of the main thrusts of the talk is that the gospel is full of symbol and that we often try to explain these symbols as though we know definitively what they mean, when really we are using language that isn't able to come anywhere close to accurately explaining what symbols mean. At the same time, we kind of have to do that. That's part of why we're here. To learn and grow and understand, and therefore hopefully one day become.

One large, general example of this is the plan of salvation. We think we have this all nailed down. We have flowcharts with circles and arrows and weird terms like "pre-earth life" and "spirit prison" and "kingdoms". We've got it all very well laid out and explained. Ask any Mormon to give you a run down of the plan of salvation and you will get the very specific and correlated run down. And it's a good place to start. We have to define it somehow, right? And we are human and need to use our own limited language to explain and attempt to understand eternal things. Fred's things. (That joke will make sense after you listen to the talk.) What holds us back is when we sit back and allow ourselves to think that we have sufficiently and effectively explained the plan of salvation and that there's nothing more to it. All our flowcharts and words and definitions are but a small, small shadow of what the "plan of salvation" really is.

Kathleen says that one of the reasons that she loves the temple is because there is no one there telling her what things mean, like what happens at church. There is a lot of symbolism in the temple and the ceremonies performed there. We say that we don't talk specifically about temple ceremonies not because they are secret, but because they are sacred. Kathleen takes it a step further and says maybe it's because we would shut down the capacity the symbolism has to teach us. We would limit our own potential for understanding.

This is just one of the powerful themes in her talk. I'll let you discover some of the others.

Sometimes you learn things the hard way

One thing that I learned recently is that if you get three traffic tickets within an 18 month period in the state of Oregon, then you get a letter in the mail telling you that you can’t drive between the hours of 12:00 AM and 5:00 AM for a month, and that if you get another ticket in the next six months (for a total of four tickets in two years) then you get your license suspended for a month.

I received a letter like that just before going to Hong Kong. Right after I got the letter, I became a super vigilant driver, like almost to a bad extreme at first. If I saw any flash of red anywhere, my instinct was to slam on the brakes. The threat of having to rely on public transportation for a month is enough to scare me into doing pretty much anything.

My month of no late night/early morning driving was April 29-May29. It passed relatively uneventfully, with the exception of plenty of jokes from friends. One night I went to a movie with some friends and then to the food carts. I had to make it clear that I had to be back to my car by 11:30 so that I could have enough time to get home by midnight. Add to this, the fact that I didn’t have any cash, and so Christina had to pay for my food. (I was able to scrape together just enough change to get into the $3 showing of The Fantastic Mr. Fox) She made the comment that it felt strangely like we were on a high school date. I had to be home by midnight and she had to pay for our food.

I probably didn’t help this image when I brought my parents to a birthday party a couple of weeks ago when they were in town visiting. Look how hip they are though at the party, texting on the couch. Thanks for the picture, Diana.

My 11th Favorite Thing

This article was too good to just put over in the sidebar. This one deserves to be called out in it's own post. My favorite new term in this article comes at the very end. Undergarment trickery.

Read all about Spanx for men.