The counter-intuitive nature of intuition

Sometimes it seems the more I try to navigate my own intuition, the more lost I get.

During our vacation in Barbados a couple of weeks ago I read a book entitled Discover Your Psychic Type: Developing and Using Your Natural Intuition by Sherrie Dillard. It was an excellent book for me to read, as it waved some of the fog away that surrounds the pinning down of my own intuition.

The true source of my complaint

I have a complaint. Along with everyone else.

Lately I have been noticing a lot of complaining. Complaining about what laws may or may not be passed. Complaints about the price of gas and the avarice of the oil companies. Complaints about sitting in traffic. Complaints about ones health. Complaints about the unending rain. Complaints about the attitudes and behaviors of other people.

Retiring the concept of should

I’ve decided to abandon use of the word should.

I’ve decided to throw it on the pyre along with words and terms such as hate and I can’t wait or that something is killing me.  Perhaps I’m perceiving words as having more power than they may actually hold, but I’m not willing to take any chances in case I’m wrong.

True intentions buried in good intentions

Sometimes I can spot the pollutant in my seemingly altruistic intentions.

Yesterday as I arrived at work and got out of my car I spotted a spent bag of popcorn lying in the parking lot, the type of popcorn that comes in a bag like potato chips. I picked up the bag, brought it into the building at work and threw it into the small trash can by the front door as I said good morning to my coworker. As the bag fell into the trash can, bits of popcorn remnants fell from the bag and scattered in front of the door.

Teaching guerilla style

For years I wanted to go into education.

Now I am in education. I am not a teacher, though. I work for the technology department of a school district. So I do work in the field of education.

I’m not sure if it’s ironic that I am working in education. When I said I had spent many years wanting to work in education, it was specifically to teach. I wanted to become a teacher. Now here I am working in education, but not as a teacher.

As much as I enjoy working for the district, I know the capacity in which I serve is a much better fit and more in alignment with my strengths, passions, and talents than teaching for a school would have been. But for a very long time I still felt that pull, that draw to teach in some capacity.  I feel like it is more of a resonance with my spirituality than with formal education. I’ve never been a very formal guy, in any event.

So I’ve been examining the many paths of spiritual teaching. As I send my spiritual scouts out through the electronic ether to see what there is to see, I find a plethora of forms of spiritual teaching. Coming from an environment of formal education where critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and measurable aptitude are the monarchs of the system, the residents of the landscape of spiritual awakening, learning, and self growth seem invisible in the daylight of the normal nine to five, only to show their bioluminescence in the depths of the internet, blanketing the virtual sky like stars in an alpine meadow.

I encounter the countless shingles of energy healers, spiritual teachers, psychics, life coaches with the click of each link. The sheer numbers available is staggering, nearly overwhelming. I respect and admire any and every one of them that have felt this life path unfold before them and have had the courage to walk among its brambles, stones, and cracks. I applaud the fact that they walk in the light among what sometimes seems to be the spiritual undead.

But is this my path? I love seeing people “heal” in their lives. I love seeing people experience true joy. It thrills me to see people embrace the beauty of life, of their own lives. But I don’t know if have the Moses in me to lead anyone across a parted sea of their own challenges. As much as I love my own life, I’m still working out all the details, making me wonder what qualifies me to coach anyone else. Yes, I am keenly aware of my recent post on my credentials, but those credentials qualify me to teach myself. For anyone to reach the place in life I have reached, wouldn’t they have to duplicate my every historical move, place their foot in each of my historical footprints? Hence the idea behind this entire blog.

I have had many teachers in my lifetime, but they have consisted of enlightening passages from several books, from profound quotes I have come across from a variety of people and sources, some familiar friends and other long dead historical icons. I have had teachers that have come in the form of experiences I have gone through. I have learned through the observations of those around me. All my learnings seem to comprise of fragments and shards of experiences and teachings that I have picked up along the way, on the way to where I am now.

So really it’s about the capacity in which to teach, the means of delivering the information I have available to share. I still feel the pull, but perhaps it’s not necessarily through the formats that seem apparent, that seem to be the obvious routes. Perhaps I have always been a teacher, perhaps I am being a teacher, and perhaps I will become a teacher. I may not ever have a classroom or stand in front of a podium. The knowledge I have to impart may not be tidily packed into a tome. But it appears I teach through being, through living, just as all my teachers have been a collage of people, places, and things, none of which I can identify as standing on its own and its entirety.

So with that I will embrace what I see in my life as teaching through living, the lessons I can offer broadcasted like seeds from a dandelion, landing where the wind may take them. I refer to it as guerilla teaching.

Lessons vs. experiences

There are many schools of thought on Life Lessons.

The idea exists that we are hear to learn a specific set of lessons throughout our lifetime, lessons that we chose between lifetimes. We choose the circumstances into which we’re born to create an arena, an environment, a set of opportunities for us to learn certain lessons.

There is a thought that we go through life and learn many lessons along the way, though not preordained such as in the previous idea. We come upon a set of circumstances through which we are presented with opportunities to learn about life and living. Challenges, obstacles, trials and tribulations, struggles, all can be seen as lessons.

Some people believe that our corporeal existence is a “school” of sorts. We are here on this earth in physical form as a sort of spiritual or metaphysical classroom.

I can see the merit in each of these ideas. Each of these perspectives gives meaning to life, that there is a reason we are faced with adversity and push through a myriad of challenges in between the sweet moments. It gives us a sense of purpose to believe that our lives are more than the result of a cosmic game of Yahtzee where at times one of the dice rolls under the 600 pound china cabinet.

However, here’s where I have trouble with the notion of lessons. Lessons are associated with a class, with school. Lessons are taught to us, then we are graded on how well we learned the lesson. We pass or we fail. The implication here is that if we do not learn a lesson in life, we fail. I suppose this is such a sensitive area for me because I was the type of student that excelled in subjects I had a passion for but bombed in subjects that held no interest for me. Nonetheless, I was still expected to pass these subjects, to learn these lessons in school, whether or not I cared for the subject matter. So for the portions of my life that contain implied lessons by these ideas that I would not care to experience, such as the passing of a loved one or an illness, I’m not sure I can stomach the idea of retaking the class until I pass.

The aforementioned scenarios are ones I will experience in a high likelihood. This is my preferred perspective, that these are not lessons, but experiences. These are events that transpired in my life. As it is my life, I have opportunities to learn from them and I will learn whatever I choose to learn. I could learn to become embittered or I could learn to go with the flow. Granted, one of those options seems “better” than the other, but these are value judgments based on some recipe of ethics and morality whose ingredients may include religious bias, social morays, and self esteem. At the end of the day, they all boil down to experiences. One is not more valuable than another, one does not warrant a passing grade more than another. They are experiences. And the beautiful thing about any experience is that we invariably learn from each and every one of them. What we learn is up to us, and whatever that is is perfectly valid, as we are our own architects for our own individual life experiences.

So at this point, if our planet is a school and life is comprised of a series of lessons, I will choose to audit all my classes.

Institutions in reflection

I’m beginning to wonder if we have become myopic to the extent to which personal responsibility needs to reach.

The other day I read a comment from someone on how our lawmakers are in the back pocket of lobbyists which serve big business. He raised a fist and shook it in the direction of the greed of Corporate America, how we are becoming powerless to the laws that are written and tailored to increase the gains of the shareholders of corporations.