It’s been a crazy year and a half. I came to Denver with absolute reluctance, with only what could fit into my car and not a single clue as to what would happen next. I had to leave Dallas because everything felt as though it was in shambles. I needed to simplify and stabilize. So when the job called in Denver, I answered. I knew I had to make some kind of move. Standing there stagnant wasn’t an option.
I had never been to Denver until I arrived two days before I was to start on Monday. I was hired as a denim designer for a western wear company and that’s all I lived, breathed and knew for the first six months. The first month and a half, I lived mostly like a squatter in a nice but tiny, overpriced apartment with no furniture and only an air mattress. I think it was a sign that I wanted to have one foot in and one foot out. I was never completely OK with being in Denver. It never fit me the way it does a lot of people who move here and instantly fall in love. The mountains and nature are beautiful, but cities each have a personality and they speak to you. Much in the way friendships are born, cities can be the same way.
I never really knew how long I’d stay here or what would become of my life in Denver. My job felt rocky (no pun really intended) from the very beginning. People were coming and going, mysteriously disappearing, walking out, getting fired, etc. So, I sensed the instability early in the game and knew that whatever I did, or for however long I was here, I had to make the best of my situation. I absolutely love what I do. I love to create, to make a difference and to contribute. I really feel as though my heart and soul were poured into the lines I was responsible for. There wasn’t a moment I didn’t give 100%, nor did I think of throwing in the towel before I had a chance to see it all through. I had a responsibility to my lines, and to myself. I wanted nothing more than to see them all succeed. I soldiered on, despite the volatility at work. Early on, I even had two possible job offers and one in LA for sure but I knew I needed to stick this one out. Something told me there was a reward for hanging in there.
So I did what I felt was right.
More months went by, I never took vacation time, I missed out on a lot of family holidays and events. Mostly because I took on an additional (huge) line at work when they failed to hire a tops designer to replace the old one who left. Of course, I was doing more work but not getting paid any more for it. Eventually, I found myself in the doctor’s office having myself checked out to make sure I was alright. I was having terrible neck, back, and nerve issues. I was going to the massage therapist twice a month just to feel OK. I made jokes about self-medicating with wine after work but honestly, it wasn’t a joke. I wasn’t drinking heavily, but the simple fact that I thought of that as a way out should have told me things were not OK. I was miserable inside and just dying to do something, anything else. I started doing more yoga, meditation and bought myself a bike that I had been wanting for so long. I loved riding my bike as much as I could. I found that doing things that were completely unrelated to work in my downtime was essential for my well being. Interestingly enough, the love of bike riding led to another weekend project of a bike bag and I began pursuing that as a possible business venture. I submitted my design specs to a factory and within weeks, my first prototypes arrived.
A few more months went by and as providence would have it, my job let me go. That was 2 weeks ago but it already feels like an eternity. I am now so far removed from that place and state of mind that I can barely relate to any of it anymore. At the time, it didn’t feel too good at all. I was scared and had a sore ego. But as I see it now, they really did me a huge favor. I was dragging my feet and afraid to take a chance, afraid to leave the comfort of a nest. None of us ever want to lose that steady paycheck but I have to tell you, your happiness is priceless. No matter how much they are paying, what you feel at the end of the day is really all that matters. I am happier now than I have been all year. I can’t tell you how great it feels to work on something I truly love and believe in. And even if I have to go and work some plain ol' job for a while, I am totally fine with it!
The good news is, I am no longer having any neck pains or back trouble; I can’t help but think it was all stress related due to my job.
Oh, and of course I met a wonderful man, too. :) He has been such a support and my rock through all of this. Oddly enough, I think I was just two weeks away from packing up my car and heading to LA when I met him. If I would have just quit everything and given up, I wouldn't have met him, nor would I have probably pursued my own line of bike bags the way I have now. After all, it was all the bike rides with him that made me realize what it was I needed to pursue. My life is better now, today, than it was April 17th 2011 when I arrived in Denver for “a job”. Maybe the job brought me here, but maybe it wasn't the whole reason I ended up here at all. At first glance, what we see in front of us, what appears as an obvious journey is just a stepping stone to something even bigger and greater than what we could ever plan.
And I guess my point in all of this is, if you’re unhappy where you are, start moving into the direction you want to go. And if you don’t know where you want to go exactly, just start moving and life will take it from there.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Departure
Tonight feels very heavy for me. Reality is setting in that I will be bracing myself soon for the upcoming departure of my boyfriend when he leaves for a four month deployment. I have never been in a place quite like this and I'm really scared. I already miss him. I wonder how I will cope, I wonder so many things. Going through something like this makes everything else in my life seem very small and insignificant. I will need my family and friends more now than ever before.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
L.A. reminds me that I'm OK
I’m still coming down from my 6-day trip to Los
Angeles. I arrived back in Denver early Thursday
morning and headed into work, still glowing with LA energy. For the first time in a long time, my visit
to the west coast wasn't so bittersweet. It felt good to
be there, like I was home again. The
city assured me that nothing had been moved since I’d last been there, and that
everything was just as I’d left it. I’m
amazed at the way each individual connects with a city. One man’s love affair with a city such as
Denver is another man’s disdain. Cities speak differently to each one of us,
depending on who we are. And I’m learning
the importance of loving where you live. Our lives are too short to just exist.
Love happens only when you surrender
BEYOND DEPENDENCY AND DOMINATION - Osho
"Breaking Out of the Shell of the Ego"
I have been always surprised by the number of people who come to me and say they are afraid of love. What is the fear of love? It is because when you really love somebody your ego starts slipping away and melting. You cannot love with the ego; the ego becomes a barrier, and when you want to drop the barrier between yourself and the other, the ego says, "This is going to be a death. Beware!"
The death of the ego is not your death; the death of the ego is really your possibility of life. The ego is just a dead crust around you, it has to be broken and thrown away. It comes into being naturally--just as a traveler collects dust on his clothes, on his body, and he has to take a bath to get rid of the dust. As we move through time, the dust of our experiences, our knowledge, of the life we have lived, of the past, collects. That dust becomes the ego. It accumulates and becomes a crust around you, which has to be broken and thrown away. One has to take a bath every day, in fact every moment, so that this crust never becomes a prison.
It will be helpful to understand where the ego comes from, to understand the roots.
A child is born and is absolutely helpless, particularly the human child. He cannot survive without others' help. Most children of the animals, the trees, the birds, can survive without the parents, can survive without a society, without a family. Even if sometimes help is needed, it is very little--a few days, at the most a few months. But a human child is so helpless that he has to depend on others for years. It is there that the root has to be sought.
Why does helplessness create the human ego? The child is helpless, he depends on others, but the ignorant mind of the child interprets this dependence as if he is the center of the whole world. The child thinks, "Whenever I cry, my mother runs immediately; whenever I am hungry, I just have to give an indication and the breast is given. Whenever I am wet, just a slight cry and somebody comes and changes my clothes." The child lives like an emperor. In fact he is absolutely helpless and dependent, and the mother and father, the family and his caretakers, are all helping him to survive. They are not dependent on the child, the child is dependent on them. But the mind of the child interprets this as if he is the center of the whole world, as if the whole world exists just for him.
And the world of the child is, of course, very small in the beginning. It consists of the mother, the caretaker, the father on the fringe--this is the child's whole world. These people love the child. And the child becomes more and more egoistic. He feels himself to be the very center of all existence, and in that way the ego is created. Through dependence and helplessness, the ego is created.
In fact the child's real situation is just the contrary from what he thinks; there is no real justification to create such an ego. But the child is absolutely ignorant, he is not capable of understanding the complexity of the thing. He cannot know that he is helpless, he thinks he is the dictator! And then for his whole life he will try to remain the dictator. He will become a Napoleon, an Alexander, an Adolf Hitler--your presidents, prime ministers, dictators, are all childish. They are trying to achieve the same thing they experienced as children; they want to be the center of the whole existence. With them the world should live and die; the whole world is their periphery and they are the center of it; the very meaning of life is hidden in them.
The child, of course, naturally finds this interpretation correct, because when the mother looks at him, in the eyes of the mother he sees that he is the significance of her life. When the father comes home, the child feels that he is the very meaning of the father's life. This lasts for three or four years--and the years at the beginning of life are the most important; never again will there be a time in a person's life with the same potential.
Psychologists say that after the first four years the child is almost complete. The whole pattern is fixed; throughout the rest of life you will repeat the same pattern in different situations. And by the seventh year the child has all his attitudes confirmed, his ego is settled. Now he moves out into the world--and then everywhere he encounters problems, millions of problems! Once you are out of the circle of the family, problems will arise--because nobody else bothers about you in the same way your mother bothered about you; nobody is as concerned about you as your father was. Instead, everywhere you find indifference, and the ego is hurt.
But now the pattern is set. Whether it hurts or not, the child cannot change the pattern--it has become the very blueprint of his being. He will play with other children and try to dominate them. He will go to school and try to dominate, to come first in his class, to become the most important student. He might believe he is superior but he finds that all the other children believe the same way. There is conflict, there are egos, there is fighting, struggle.
Then this becomes the whole story of life: there are millions of egos around you, just like yours, and everybody is trying to control, maneuver, dominate--through wealth, power, politics, knowledge, strength, lies, pretensions, hypocrisies. Even in religion and morality, everybody is trying to dominate, to show the rest of the world that "I am the center of the world."
This is the root of all problems between people. Because of this concept, you are always in conflict and struggle with somebody or other. Not that others are enemies to you--everybody else is just like you, in the same boat. The situation is the same for everybody else; they have been brought up in the same way.
There exists a certain school of psychoanalysts in the West who have proposed that unless children are brought up without their fathers and mothers, the world will never be at peace. I don't support them, because then children will never be brought up in any way! Those psychologists have something of truth in their proposal, but it is a very dangerous idea. Because if children are brought up in nurseries without fathers and mothers, without any love, with total indifference, they may not have the problems of the ego but they will have other, even more damaging and dangerous problems.
If a child is brought up in total indifference he will have no center. He will be a hotchpotch, clumsy, not knowing who he is. He will not have any identity. Afraid, scared, he will not be able to take even a single step without fear, because nobody has loved him. Of course, the ego will not be there, but without it he will have no center. He will not become a buddha; he will be just dull and crippled, always feeling afraid.
Love is needed to make you feel fearless, to make you feel that you are accepted, that you are not useless, that you cannot be discarded in the junkyard. If children are brought up in a situation where love is lacking, they will not have egos, that's true. Their life will not have so much struggle and fight. But they will not be able to stand up for themselves at all. They will be always in flight, escaping from everybody, hiding in caves in their own being. They will not be buddhas, they will not be radiant with vitality, they will not be centered, at ease, at home. They will simply be eccentric, off-center. That will not be a good situation either.
So I don't support these psychologists. Their approach would create robots, not human beings--and robots of course have no problems. Or, they may create human beings who are more like animals. There will be less anxiety, less ulcers, less cancer, but that is not worth achieving when it means that you cannot grow to a higher peak of consciousness. Instead you would be falling downward; it will be a regression. Of course, if you become an animal there will be less anguish, because there will be less consciousness. And if you become a stone, a rock, there will be no anxiety at all because there is nobody inside to feel anxious, to feel anguish. But this is not worth achieving. One has to be like a god, not like a rock. And by that I mean it to have absolute consciousness and still have no worries, no anxieties, no problems; to enjoy life like the birds, to celebrate life like birds, to sing like birds--not through regression but by growing to the optimum of consciousness.
The child gathers ego--it is natural, nothing can be done about it. One has to accept it. But later on, there is no need to keep carrying it. That ego is needed in the beginning for the child to feel that he is accepted, loved, welcomed--that he is an invited guest, not an accident. The father, the mother, the family, and the warmth around the child help him to grow strong, rooted, grounded. It is needed, the ego gives him protection--it is good, it is just like the shell of a seed. But the shell should not become the ultimate thing, otherwise the seed will die. The protection can go on too long, then it becomes a prison. The protection must remain a protection while it is needed, and when the moment comes for the hard shell of the seed to die into the earth, it should die naturally so that the seed can sprout and life can be born.
The ego is just a protective shell--the child needs it because he is helpless. The child needs it because he is weak; the child needs it because he is vulnerable and there are millions of forces all around. He needs protection, a home, a base. The whole world may be indifferent but he can always look toward home, and from there he can gather significance.
But, with significance comes the ego. The child becomes egoistic, and with this ego arise all the problems you face. This ego will not allow you to fall in love. This ego would like everybody to surrender to you; it will not allow you to surrender to anybody--and love happens only when you surrender.
Osho - "Being in Love: How to Love with Awareness and Relate Without Fear"
"Breaking Out of the Shell of the Ego"
I have been always surprised by the number of people who come to me and say they are afraid of love. What is the fear of love? It is because when you really love somebody your ego starts slipping away and melting. You cannot love with the ego; the ego becomes a barrier, and when you want to drop the barrier between yourself and the other, the ego says, "This is going to be a death. Beware!"
The death of the ego is not your death; the death of the ego is really your possibility of life. The ego is just a dead crust around you, it has to be broken and thrown away. It comes into being naturally--just as a traveler collects dust on his clothes, on his body, and he has to take a bath to get rid of the dust. As we move through time, the dust of our experiences, our knowledge, of the life we have lived, of the past, collects. That dust becomes the ego. It accumulates and becomes a crust around you, which has to be broken and thrown away. One has to take a bath every day, in fact every moment, so that this crust never becomes a prison.
It will be helpful to understand where the ego comes from, to understand the roots.
A child is born and is absolutely helpless, particularly the human child. He cannot survive without others' help. Most children of the animals, the trees, the birds, can survive without the parents, can survive without a society, without a family. Even if sometimes help is needed, it is very little--a few days, at the most a few months. But a human child is so helpless that he has to depend on others for years. It is there that the root has to be sought.
Why does helplessness create the human ego? The child is helpless, he depends on others, but the ignorant mind of the child interprets this dependence as if he is the center of the whole world. The child thinks, "Whenever I cry, my mother runs immediately; whenever I am hungry, I just have to give an indication and the breast is given. Whenever I am wet, just a slight cry and somebody comes and changes my clothes." The child lives like an emperor. In fact he is absolutely helpless and dependent, and the mother and father, the family and his caretakers, are all helping him to survive. They are not dependent on the child, the child is dependent on them. But the mind of the child interprets this as if he is the center of the whole world, as if the whole world exists just for him.
And the world of the child is, of course, very small in the beginning. It consists of the mother, the caretaker, the father on the fringe--this is the child's whole world. These people love the child. And the child becomes more and more egoistic. He feels himself to be the very center of all existence, and in that way the ego is created. Through dependence and helplessness, the ego is created.
In fact the child's real situation is just the contrary from what he thinks; there is no real justification to create such an ego. But the child is absolutely ignorant, he is not capable of understanding the complexity of the thing. He cannot know that he is helpless, he thinks he is the dictator! And then for his whole life he will try to remain the dictator. He will become a Napoleon, an Alexander, an Adolf Hitler--your presidents, prime ministers, dictators, are all childish. They are trying to achieve the same thing they experienced as children; they want to be the center of the whole existence. With them the world should live and die; the whole world is their periphery and they are the center of it; the very meaning of life is hidden in them.
The child, of course, naturally finds this interpretation correct, because when the mother looks at him, in the eyes of the mother he sees that he is the significance of her life. When the father comes home, the child feels that he is the very meaning of the father's life. This lasts for three or four years--and the years at the beginning of life are the most important; never again will there be a time in a person's life with the same potential.
Psychologists say that after the first four years the child is almost complete. The whole pattern is fixed; throughout the rest of life you will repeat the same pattern in different situations. And by the seventh year the child has all his attitudes confirmed, his ego is settled. Now he moves out into the world--and then everywhere he encounters problems, millions of problems! Once you are out of the circle of the family, problems will arise--because nobody else bothers about you in the same way your mother bothered about you; nobody is as concerned about you as your father was. Instead, everywhere you find indifference, and the ego is hurt.
But now the pattern is set. Whether it hurts or not, the child cannot change the pattern--it has become the very blueprint of his being. He will play with other children and try to dominate them. He will go to school and try to dominate, to come first in his class, to become the most important student. He might believe he is superior but he finds that all the other children believe the same way. There is conflict, there are egos, there is fighting, struggle.
Then this becomes the whole story of life: there are millions of egos around you, just like yours, and everybody is trying to control, maneuver, dominate--through wealth, power, politics, knowledge, strength, lies, pretensions, hypocrisies. Even in religion and morality, everybody is trying to dominate, to show the rest of the world that "I am the center of the world."
This is the root of all problems between people. Because of this concept, you are always in conflict and struggle with somebody or other. Not that others are enemies to you--everybody else is just like you, in the same boat. The situation is the same for everybody else; they have been brought up in the same way.
There exists a certain school of psychoanalysts in the West who have proposed that unless children are brought up without their fathers and mothers, the world will never be at peace. I don't support them, because then children will never be brought up in any way! Those psychologists have something of truth in their proposal, but it is a very dangerous idea. Because if children are brought up in nurseries without fathers and mothers, without any love, with total indifference, they may not have the problems of the ego but they will have other, even more damaging and dangerous problems.
If a child is brought up in total indifference he will have no center. He will be a hotchpotch, clumsy, not knowing who he is. He will not have any identity. Afraid, scared, he will not be able to take even a single step without fear, because nobody has loved him. Of course, the ego will not be there, but without it he will have no center. He will not become a buddha; he will be just dull and crippled, always feeling afraid.
Love is needed to make you feel fearless, to make you feel that you are accepted, that you are not useless, that you cannot be discarded in the junkyard. If children are brought up in a situation where love is lacking, they will not have egos, that's true. Their life will not have so much struggle and fight. But they will not be able to stand up for themselves at all. They will be always in flight, escaping from everybody, hiding in caves in their own being. They will not be buddhas, they will not be radiant with vitality, they will not be centered, at ease, at home. They will simply be eccentric, off-center. That will not be a good situation either.
So I don't support these psychologists. Their approach would create robots, not human beings--and robots of course have no problems. Or, they may create human beings who are more like animals. There will be less anxiety, less ulcers, less cancer, but that is not worth achieving when it means that you cannot grow to a higher peak of consciousness. Instead you would be falling downward; it will be a regression. Of course, if you become an animal there will be less anguish, because there will be less consciousness. And if you become a stone, a rock, there will be no anxiety at all because there is nobody inside to feel anxious, to feel anguish. But this is not worth achieving. One has to be like a god, not like a rock. And by that I mean it to have absolute consciousness and still have no worries, no anxieties, no problems; to enjoy life like the birds, to celebrate life like birds, to sing like birds--not through regression but by growing to the optimum of consciousness.
The child gathers ego--it is natural, nothing can be done about it. One has to accept it. But later on, there is no need to keep carrying it. That ego is needed in the beginning for the child to feel that he is accepted, loved, welcomed--that he is an invited guest, not an accident. The father, the mother, the family, and the warmth around the child help him to grow strong, rooted, grounded. It is needed, the ego gives him protection--it is good, it is just like the shell of a seed. But the shell should not become the ultimate thing, otherwise the seed will die. The protection can go on too long, then it becomes a prison. The protection must remain a protection while it is needed, and when the moment comes for the hard shell of the seed to die into the earth, it should die naturally so that the seed can sprout and life can be born.
The ego is just a protective shell--the child needs it because he is helpless. The child needs it because he is weak; the child needs it because he is vulnerable and there are millions of forces all around. He needs protection, a home, a base. The whole world may be indifferent but he can always look toward home, and from there he can gather significance.
But, with significance comes the ego. The child becomes egoistic, and with this ego arise all the problems you face. This ego will not allow you to fall in love. This ego would like everybody to surrender to you; it will not allow you to surrender to anybody--and love happens only when you surrender.
Osho - "Being in Love: How to Love with Awareness and Relate Without Fear"
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Sacred Ground
There is a road in the hearts of all of us, hidden and seldom traveled,
which leads to an unknown, secret place.
The old people came literally to love the soil,
and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of
being close to a mothering power.
Their tee-pees were built upon the earth
and their altars were made of earth.
The soul was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.
That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of
propping himself up and away from its life giving forces.
For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply
and to feel more keenly. He can see more clearly into the mysteries of
life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him.
-Chief Luther Standing Bear
When I was a child, I preferred to be barefoot. I loved feeling the earth beneath my feet and the grass between my toes; I would spend hours sitting on the ground, exploring the little world that exists down there. The blades of grass formed forests for the ants and tiny insects. I watched them work to gather food or find their way back home; or maybe they were little explorers. I wondered what their perspective of life was. Probably not much different from my world that was barely opening up to the vastness and complexity of the universe around me. I remember feeling so connected to nature and the earth. Mother Nature was my playground. I loved climbing trees, discovering plants and animals and I spent a lot of time laying in the cool grass, looking up at the sky. It was a comforting feeling to know I was cradled safely. There is something to be said about the ground and it's sacred energy.
I found myself lying on the cool lawn of a nearby park last Saturday night. I could hear myself think, and feel. For the first time in a very long time, I remembered how much I loved laying on the ground and feeling the depth and strength of the earth beneath me, to feel the cool blades of grass against my back like a soft blanket, to connect physically and on a soul-level with the world we belong to. It's amazing to me how much we forget that she's there. Always there, holding us up, providing for us, nurturing. We get so tangled up in a world of wires and disconnect that we forget the magnificence that exists right beneath our feet. If you are ever so inclined, take your shoes off, lay on the soft grass and you will feel the loving energy that exists there.
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