OWNING YOUR CHOICES

Several weeks ago I was hiking with my son in a canyon in southern Utah. Having descended a well maintained trail near a great stone bridge we hiked up the canyon floor on an "unmaintained trail" leading after several miles to another natural bridge and another well maintained trail leading back out of the canyon. We had chosen to do this hike in the evening. It was a wonderful scramble along mostly dry stream bed.
The canyon snaked back and forth, and was joined by far more side canyons than seemed to be on the map. While the hiking was easy and fun, with a bull frog chorus as the sun got lower, the sun was getting lower, and we needed to find the exit before the deep desert darkness set in.
In the end we found our way out, under a spectacularly back-lit stone bridge as the sun set and dusk came upon us. While we were never in real danger, the uncertainty and approaching darkness made them noticeably harder to make.
Last week I saw a movie called Angel-A about a young man living his life in constant haste, spurred by fear, and making choices that bring him to a literal dead end. An angel enters and forces him to slow down so he can notice his choices, to realize when he is making them and what they really are. At first he resists the idea that he actually has choices; he's just doing what is necessary, even if half of Paris is out to kill him.
Our life unfolds based on the choices we make, but living in fear, or haste, we may not realize we are making them. When we choose not to choose that is also a choice and slowing in freeze mode is at the other end of the same spectrum. Some choices are hard to even notice. It is said that our lives are formed by the things we don't see, or choose not to look at.
Like the young man we may believe we "don't have a choice". This stance robs us of our power. Even when we choose things that we don't like or really want, we are choosing (perhaps the best choice at the time) but if we don't own that choice as a choice how can we ever get to a place where we can choose differently? If you own your choices, even the unwilling ones, as choices, you begin to empower your ability to choose. Empowering choice in your life, you will discover better options. The young man in his power finds totally new choices which transform his life.
Most of our hike the rock walls told us where to go. Occasionally there were branches and possible alternate routes. If we had been too fearful, or hurried, we might have wound up in a side channel along way from a real exit. Slowing and trusting, we found the proper route and were led up and out, to a level with the choices of safety and warmth we sought.
You don't have to like all your choices, but owning them as your's, no matter how much they look like some form of external necessity, you claim your power to choose. You stop being a victim and wake up to a different world with power and choice and begin to co-create a life that works for you.

for my son, who is better at trusting than I am

(© 6/11)

RITUALS AND MASTERY

The natural world we live in is a mixture of order and chaos, the predictable, and the unpredictable. We know that the seasons will cycle, but every year they are also different. We know that the Spring brings rain and snow melt, but the level of flooding is unpredictable. In the midst of a variable world, we are wired by evolution to seek out the orderly, the predictable, the stable, that which is consistent so that we can have some certainty of surviving tomorrow as well as today.

Our need for regularity and predictability leads to rituals of all types. They both embody these qualities and serve to help create them. In this sense any regularly performed series of actions is a ritual. Some are small and personal; how we wake up in the morning and brush our teeth, have a cup of coffee or tea. Some are large and collective; the schedule for irrigation waters in the spring or the nine to five job which results in a paycheck on a regular basis. Some are spiritual or religious; the blessing of a new building, dances for rain, a collective service of worship, or a personal meditation.

All of these activities serve to create or embody stability, regularize our relationship with the world around us, natural and human; to promote survival and a sense of safety. Humans are nothing but inventive and we all have our rituals, large and small.

The interesting question about rituals is when do they serve our spiritual needs and are they sometimes a limitation, something done for their own sake, powered by the deep need for safety and survival but unconscious, habitual, perhaps even counter-productive? The 2 martini lunch was once seen as a normal social/business ritual, but now it is more often the sign of the dependancy of the alcoholic.

Do you work the job because it allows you to live the life you choose, or because you feel you have to have a job and can't live without one? Do you wash your hands because it centers you and prepares you to eat a healthy meal, or because some unconscious belief won't allow you not to? Do your rituals help you find an appropriate state of mind before performing artistically, or in sports, or are they compulsions that you can't choose to skip?

In short; are your rituals an expression of, and an aid to, your mastery of your life, or have they mastered you? This discernment can be as uncertain and variable as the spring weather. Some are socially sanctioned and some are not, but this is not the same as which ones are healthy and productive, and which ones are controlling and destructive.

Take some time this Spring to consider your rituals, especially that ones that you haven't thought of in those terms before. Give yourself permission to be conscious about them; to drop or alter old ones that limit or control you; to create or adopt new ones that empower, inspire or connect you. Notice which ones are based in fear and are mastering you and open to ones that are based in gratitude and love, supporting your mastery and joy.

(© 6/11)