spiritual practIce – Lisa Z. Lindahl

December 21, 2017December 17, 2017

Winter Solstice 2017

The celestial doings in our corner of the Cosmos often pique my own doings. The Winter Solstice, when the light begins to gain time in our days, is one of those significant “doings.” Light lifts me up, extroverts me, helps me.

“From out of the deepest, darkest night of the year comes a “new-born” sun, full of promise for days of greater light and warmth. It is this event that symbolically reminds us that light comes out of our darkness, the chaos of our lives, the heartbreak and the pain we sometimes endure. Yule is about promise.”
-From Wicca: A Year and a Day, by Timothy Roderick

As is traditional, at least for me, I use this time to reflect. Try to get up & out of the rut of my daily thinking and habits and take a look at this life I am living.

What am I liking these days?
What am I avoiding lately?
How’m I doing with that whole procrastination thing I’m prone to…
What are my actions saying that my words aren’t?
And the ever popular: that which no longer serves me: out!

I have a burn pit in my back yard. It’s not fancy, but oh so effective. It’s not for regular, uh, trash…but special refuse. (Now there is an interesting word, refuse. It can be both a verb and a noun, but basically meaning the same thing! I use it here as the noun).

Special refuse: things that once held a special place or meaning that must now be given up to disengage from any energetic hold they may have on/with me. To make space for anything new, a Solstice Burn is a cleansing, of sorts…

…Old drawings. Love letters from sundry exes. Recipes never successful in my kitchen. Years ago an acquaintance once burned 3 years worth of her old diaries at my Winter Solstice burn pit, the handwritten pages sparking, charring and flaring up into the night sky.
This year it will be just me at the burn pit. I will feed it some artwork, the crinoline from my wedding dress, and reams and reams and reams of papers with once meaningful words on them.

It will all be transformed in my heart, a fire feast to feed the returning light. To clear away the darkness that resides not on the physical plane, but in the energetic one…
…in our little corner of the Cosmos.

October 11, 2015

A Practice or a Habit?

So here I have been outlining how to engage in the Practice of True Beauty. And why. But have you ever wondered what the differences are between a “practice” and a “habit”?

A habit is a routine. While it may have begun with intention, it no longer needs thought behind it — it is part of one’s Automatic Pilot dashboard. It achieves some task: teeth get brushed.

A practice is just that – practice. It implies “rehearsal” for something more real?, permanent?, or better done that will occur at another time/place/space. A practice also implies it has been taken on with an intention attached to it. Part of that intention is to improve over time. I don’t think of my habits as necessarily having an element of improving.

A Caution about Practices

However, engaging in a practice may sometimes get in one’s way. In his book The Exquisite Risk, Daring to Live an Authentic Life, poet and philosopher Mark Nepo puts it well:

All the practice in the world can’t instigate enlightenment or revelation. It can only make us ready vessels for when these moments occur. … practice implies practice for something, usually a readying of the self…for the unexpected moment of life…

“vessels for…the unexpected moment of life…” Why do we practice meditation? Why do we introduce the practice of going to the gym each day? We must not forget the purpose behind the practice.

“Like Uncle Sam!” Lou says. “Remember all those times we had to eat cold Thanksgiving dinner because of waiting for him? He was always having to get his run in after he meditated for an hour, and meanwhile the whole family had to wait for him before sitting down — and Aunt Grace seemed always to time the turkey to be ready just as he went out the door, remember? When I was little it confused me like mad! When I got older I was really annoyed. Hungry! I mean really — one day outta the year you can’t change your schedule dude?”

I commiserated with Lou, having privately thought the same thing, and wondering why his sweet wife hadn’t thought to time her meal differently — or let us go ahead without him. Sam’s rigid meditation-cum-run devotion had not seemed to deepen his well of compassion or cooperation. Ah, well. Things change. We’ve moved away and now have our own hot Thanksgiving dinner, sans Sam and Grace. Still, I miss them, actually.

Lou is still thinking out loud about habits and practices…

“But habits — hey, we have to do something when we close down the screen, right? Before your Big Mr. Universe comes knocking at our door, beckoning us out into the cosmos! I can just see Mr. Universe! Big Hairy – oh, oh! Okay, MS. Universe. Hairy Ms. Uni — Oh! Oh! OKAY. The Universe has no gender? What?”

By this time I am hitting Lou over the head with a pillow from my chair. He squeals and runs out laughing and yelling something about pacificism and beauty and practicing what I preach.

But Lou, as usual, has a point. With the TV, computer, phone off and our automatic pilot off — that Captain of Habitual Activity — we might as well choose to intentionally practice something. So let’s practice True Beauty. It really does include a great deal of variety: Being funny, being quiet, walking or swimming or some such, any kind of art or production, looking at everything, hanging out with friends, giving and getting some loving – not too difficult, eminently satisfactory.

For once, Lou might agree with me.

Meanwhile though, make sure that in the name of your “practice”, you are not avoiding life. Life, with all its glory, it’s messiness, and oh yes — it’s unexpected sprouts and spouts.

June 28, 2015

Practicing True Beauty – Honoring Entropy

“Oh this is the joy of the rose:

That it blows,

And goes!” ~ Willa Cather

Rejoice, even in entropy…in darkness, in the entirety of the cyclical nature of birth, death and regeneration. It is easy to find Beauty in the part of the cycle that is about coming into existence, growth and discovery — less so on the other end: decay, dissolution and non-existence. But that does not mean the harmony and serenity of Beauty are not there.

When a truth rusts, a companion betrays or your sanctuary crumbles it is time to dig into your well of courage and recognize that the cycle is evolving. Call it Winter, transition, shadow or death — whatever resonates with you. It is a necessary part of the only constant: change; what I think of as the order>chaos>order cycle.

Our modern culture has tried to bury this inevitability in layers of illusion. In earlier centuries humans tried to tame change with things like “tradition” and “norms.” In our current techy times, change occurs so rapidly that our collective head spins, societal illusions fade and new ones form on our screens.

And, as chaos theory teaches, it is not chaos that falls from some mysteriously previous order, but order that spews forth from the primeval chaos. The Isness gloriously and unashamedly starts with a messy, unorganized clamor.

In our lives we cycle through various versions of this many times before the death of our physical bodies. Our spirit and personality grows and stretches, withers and shrinks at turns. We succeed, we fail. Sometimes we just coast. Martial arts teach us: to not be broken we must bend. There is cacophony that amazingly returns to harmony. Our bodies begin to decompose. Some believe this only happens to each individual human once, others believe it happens repeatedly.

Whether you believe in reincarnation or salvation, the real struggle is to do all of this messy part of living with grace, to honor the entropic nature of systems, and find the Wabi Sabi elements in the transitional tableau of degradation, impermanence, change, uncertainty and the eventual emergence of what will be.

If we honor the entropy that occurs in our lives rather than resist it, if we befriend it rather than demonize it we will take a long step away from fear towards serenity, toward harmony and the Way of Beauty, in the here and the now.

photo by Lisa Z Lindahl — November’s sunflowers

To Practice Honoring Entropy:

1) Expect it. Since the cycle of birth-death-rebirth is inherent in all living systems, don’t pretend ti will not be an integral part of your experiences. Plan for it even!

2) Think compost, not mere garbage. If it is your life circumstances that are decaying and beginning to stink, look for ways the situation might be fodder for the future. If everything is collapsing, is it time to build anew — or plant trees?

3) Allow for “liminal space.” The transitory time between then & now, before & after. It is that healing time, for scarring over. For the field to lie fallow. Don’t try to repair/rebuild/reconnect right away. The result will be weak and/or ill-conceived.

4) During the sweeter parts of the cycle, practice honing your abilities to be responsive and flexible in the face of change. Notice those circumstance requiring dissolution of some sort (even if it is simply a gardening cycle or refreshing something in your home) and be mindful (oh, that word!) of how you respond and handle it. (For instance: I hate tearing out plants to make way for a new gardening season; it doesn’t matter if they are weakly blooming, way dead, or what — I resist that part of the process. Hmmm…)

There is no doubt that entropy is also a gateway to true Ugliness (which we have not yet discussed in this blog yet). But we cannot allow our thinking and perceptions to fall into “auto pilot” on the nature of decay, death and ugliness any more than we can about birth, life and beauty. Learning to truly appreciate the full cycle is part of The Way of Beauty.

“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” ~ Pierre Auguste Renoir

December 30, 2014

The Way of Beauty Blog in Review

I started this blog just last September (2014). I hope I’ve made a few salient points, and entertained a bit along the way. I started off by making the distinction that The Way of Beauty — book, blog and actual practice — is about COSMOLOGY NOT COSMETOLOGY!

You all suffered through my Manifesto for True Beauty, where mere “glamour” was slammed and our modern obsession with it (think Kardashians) instead of true beauty was challenged. As the weeks rolled by we looked at shifting the paradigm in our culture, examined creating a “Way,” the importance of the natural world and its beauty, not to mention delved into mankind’s interactive magic with said natural world: Shamanism.

I also took a shot at clearing up the relationship between Art and True Beauty… though there is far more that might be said about that, I’m sure. I am wishing I might find someone to help elucidate the way in which Science and True Beauty are supportive. I tried as best I could in two blog bits, but know there are far more connections than I feel capable of making between the two at the moment.

Throughout it all, it is my hope that I’ve been able to begin to instill in others the nature and ready availability of True Beauty and its importance to us not just as individuals, but as a species. Going forward I am going to focus on the Beauty Practices through which we can infuse our everyday lives and activities with Beauty and grace.

Promote True, Deep Beauty in your self, your surroundings, and your understanding of our universe. Practice makes perfect, right?