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TRANSCRIPT:
Hello again my friends,
This week I have a lot of things to say, that may seem random and overly spiritual, but if you follow along, I think you’ll see the connections and see that I will attempt to share from my heart.
I hope that you are finding yourself enjoying the changing of the seasons, as spring approaches. I didn’t used to notice the subtle differences in Southern California, but since moving away, coming back and spending more time in nature, I have become ever more fond of the beauty that surrounds me in even the close-to-home bits of nature I encounter regularly, and the changes that are necessary for the health of the whole of our environment, of our planet, and frankly for each one of us as well.
The human experience is so very seasonal as well. We struggle, then we grow and then we can feel a plateau, a place of comfort… until we are stretched again and find struggle, and sometimes even suffering before we grow again. I read the works of and listen to the words of several people that talk about resisting; when we resist the struggle and the circumstances, we often end up suffering. When we are stuck resisting reality, making unhelpful meaning for ourselves, then we suffer. That doesn’t mean that all suffering is our fault, or that we are bad to resist change. It just to me paints a more perceivable picture of the cycles of our lives. How many times in my own experience have I resisted reality, resisted change, resisted anything that was uncertain, new or challenged me in an uncomfortable way. How many times I have learned, after much struggle and finally letting go, how much freer I feel when I have let go.
Whenever my perception of something changes, there has to be a surrender of what I once believed to be true. I have found myself changing so much over the past many years, and I used to laugh and say that current Holly wouldn’t like Past Holly if she met her today… but the more I think about this, the more I think of it in a totally different way. It is quite true that the beliefs and struggles and life I used to have would have made the Old Me meeting the New Me today very interesting indeed… the old me would have been intimidated by the new me. She would not have liked the New me, by this definition… however, the new me absolutely loves the old me. I thank her. I am grateful for believing different, because the process of feeling my beliefs challenged and then changed has humbled me in many ways where I have needed humbling. It is because of the old me continuing on, and doing her best, even when it was hard, that I made it to the life I have today. The new me would encourage the old me. Would listen to the old me and show acceptance and understanding of her, but I would also know that how she feels about the new me doesn’t reflect on my value. When I thought of this very interesting scenario, maybe for too long, I felt profoundly grateful for the mistakes I have made and for the fears I had to overcome, and those I am still working on facing. I became so grateful that I had the volume of challenges that I did have and had to overcome them, because of so much practice, there are things that I feel an understanding in that I never would have before. And maybe even beyond an understanding, I have a respect for and honor of the understanding I lack. I am so very human after all, and I want to be human. I don’t want to control it all, even though I think I do sometimes. I am still learning. All you hear me say, take with a grain of salt, because it is just a glimpse into my lens right now… and my prescription keeps changing 😊
Because of the nature of life, what I say is not an absolute truth. I share what I am learning and what I am learning is always changing. I am constantly searching for meaning, and that thirsty searching can be so good sometimes, and yet very difficult at others.
As we have gone through the pandemic, many of the things I have thought about God and about people and about life have been tested and tested and tested again. Relationships have been stripped down to the most vulnerable place, and for that I am very grateful now, and yet it took a lot of pushing through fear and realizing what I was thinking and resisting feeling, in order to even become aware of its value.
More recently, I was reading some of Richard Rhor’s teachings. He talks a lot about the love of God, but he talks about it from what he calls a non-dualistic perspective. What he means by this, as I understand it at such an elementary level, is that things aren’t black and white. That it’s not “us against them” and that religion often gets that all jumbled up and ends up spreading shame instead of the love which is intended. Whenever we have unhealed pain that we are both resisting feeling and or acknowledging and that we are unwilling or unable to work through; we inevitably spread, or perpetuate pain to others in the world and in our lives. But even when we are trying our hardest, there are always still wounds to heal, and thus we are always doing things imperfectly… spreading pain, being humbled or running from the shame we feel of this sometimes unbearable truth.
A lot of what he says, really meets me where I am at in my spiritual journey. I have wrestled for years and it’s been a very vulnerable place to accept myself to be in. And yet, being in this place of wrestling is now something I am okay not resisting, because it has provided me with more peace than I ever had before. I feel so much less lonely. I know that I am not alone to wrestle in my thoughts about God and religion and spirituality, and yet I am not here to tell you what the truth is or that I have found it. Only, that in this wrestling I have been learning to surrender and by that I mean, I am learning to just accept that I don’t know it all and that I will never know it all… AND that my journey will continue to change and to challenge me. I am allowing myself to ask questions that are outside of the acceptable box I had formed for my religious beliefs formerly, based on other people’s opinions and I am willing to be vulnerable with myself and my perception of God so that I can let go of the box altogether.
The more experiences I have that are both unique and connected with the universal human experience, the more I see the beauty in the diversity of all of our experiences and the more I see that I am on my own path to learn what I learn on a unique timeline, in a unique way and that it is not black and white.
I have been working on meditating and on digging into what this is in terms of spirituality, and I have learned about some concepts similar to meditation but related to God, called centering and contemplative prayer. In learning of these practices alongside my Meditation journey, I am learning to (as I keep saying) let go of the fact that I don’t control everything, and to stop trying and to very tangibly do this in moments of silence where I just am. If you know me, you know that talking is something I do a lot of. But I am learning just how peace-giving it is for me to take moments of silence where I don’t resist any of the thoughts that come into my head. Where I notice them and don’t make the thoughts mean anything, bad or good, about me or anybody else in the world. Where the thoughts and their accompanying emotions can then move through me because they are not being resisted or clung to. I sometimes get taken down rabbit holes of the thoughts in the process, and then when I notice, I just breathe again and my heart smiles. I have a mini celebration that I realized and had the ability to notice the thoughts and then resettle into this calm peaceful place within myself. It can sound so woowoo to some, I’m sure of that, and yet for others, you might feel a desire for something like this in your bones. I have been finding myself drawn more to awareness of when my talking is because my mind is too cluttered, and or when my emotions and thoughts feel too overwhelming… I am noticing these impulses to then just talk and finding space to choose instead to feel the discomfort and notice the clutter. To let the feelings be there and then my fear gets checked and I feel a little more clear.
It is so often that I find myself spinning my wheels constantly, checking things off of a list and reacting to life, taken along on a journey passively rather than with intention. I try and I try, and yet I will never be perfect… but when I am just sitting, without anything to do except not doing, it’s as though the train is passing me by and I am waving with a smile in my heart. I can see and hear what usually takes me along for the ride, and I am just able to observe. I continue to strengthen my ability to see things from a very unique perspective, the perspective of the observer… and one thing that I have found in all of this is that the more that I do this, the more I can see the variety of choices of perspectives. When I am in this place, I don’t feel my worth attached to my doing anything or my being good enough.., but I can feel the pull of thoughts tempting me to attach myself to them. I see how life continues on, moments move by, and the narrator that usually tells my life story becomes detached from who I am. It’s then that I can choose to simply peacefully smile at the story that she tells.
This again, might sound far out there, but with the world the way it is right now, this quite space that is always there, has come (for me) to represent the presence of a love that is completely unconditional. A love that makes all of our hearts beat; a love that makes plants grow; a love that is always there and doesn’t love more or less when I am doing more or less. I feel free. I feel peaceful. I feel enough.
As I dug into meditation more and centering prayer, I read a book about how to create groups where centering prayer can be the uniting purpose for the group and where people can come together to share in this beautiful experience. Though the entire book was incredibly useful, the key takeaway that I had from the book hit me so powerfully that I have thought about it repeatedly since.
This book talked about how the verbal communication and sharing among those in the group, during these meetings should be (at least attempted to be) kept in the form of one’s experience. Meaning, when sharing in the group, people are to attempt to share what they are thinking and feeling from a place of experiences. When we step away from our opinions and generic or blanket statements of knowledge that we see as truth, and remain in the vulnerable place of our story and how things are for us, we remain humble; we remain open; and we remain curious and able to learn from those around us. Also, when we remain in this stance, we are also able to be received by others as we are, without attachment to opinion as a part of our identity, and simply as another human having a human experience. In this way, we are reading the story of each-other’s lives, and crawling into each-other’s shoes.
This has been so profound for me because right now, more than ever, we are all struggling to listen. We hear but we don’t listen and knowing how to respond to others who handle things like a pandemic in a way so vastly different from our own is a challenge that none of us has faced before, among many other differences, and the challenges they present. When we can step into the other person’s shoes, because our guard is down and their hearts are open, then we are able to learn from the experience of others in a much more applicable way. In a way that keeps us humble and actually proves to make the world a better place because we can learn from each other and stop forgetting the person behind the words and actions.
How many times in my life can I look back and see how, at one time or another, I was my current selve’s potential foe. Me five years ago would have adamantly disagreed with many things that I say today with such conviction, just as I said before. But how many times I have read a facebook post years later or a journal entry, and felt deep connection and compassion for myself and where I was at and what I was experiencing. Likewise, I have read novels where you are immersed into the life of the main character, so much so that you are not grappling with their decisions with judgement, but rather knee-deep in empathy and your own emotions come into play as though you were that character. I have connected in random ways with total strangers and heard stories of their lives that made me feel a connecting pull to our shared human experience that was hard to come away from with anything other than admiration or appreciation for them being on this planet. We are not robots, we are human… and yet, it’s so easy to make things black and white and categorical. Accepting and rejecting based on our checklist of values.
So… then what if, instead of always focusing on what it is I can say to change someone else’s mind, I simply shared my journey OR EVEN BETTER… LISTEN TO THEIRS. Our My bumps and my bruises, without it producing a pedestal and a sermon.
I say all of this with the potential hypocrisy that it unfolds, because HELLO, this is a podcast where I share thoughts and opinions so often. But more than anything else I have come across in my life, I continue to come back to the fact that I don’t believe I am right or that I have the final say on any topic, but rather I am a totally human person, having a totally human experience, with all the stumbling and failure that such an experience entails and I only hope to share with you my experience.
Maybe in my experience, you can see my heart and you can maybe sometimes find grace for yourself in knowing that if I fail constantly, then your failure is not only “not the biggest of deals”, but that it’s expected. We do get to choose how we proceed, and we do get to choose what we make things mean, but not until we know we can choose… and not until we start to heal… and we can’t heal until we start to let go. And sometimes that doesn’t happen until we form a connection with another human being and then hear their failures and get to feel it with them… we can see things in a new way and we can see what we didn’t see there all along.
In this season, I am working on really listening to those around me. I am working on seeing others as humans with a road to forge on unforeseen future. I am hoping to try to see truth in others experiences and not try to change minds, but instead try to love hearts and share mine.
I want my interactions with people to be about connecting with those people. I want to honor the value of each person in the way I approach them and to respect that our experiences may be vastly different and the lessons we each are learning are not for me to judge. If I am to play a role in helping others, it will be through love and trying to be real about my experiences and stories so that they have a place to wrestle and dissect their thoughts and beliefs… or again, it will be through truly listening. It’s in this being listened to and the honest reflection that only happens when we feel safe to unfold and wrestle where I believe change can actually take place in someone’s heart, my own heart most of all.
It is possible that this might feel like I mean to allow injustice by not speaking out or by silencing myself and my power to promote change instead of being a voice of truth. That is not what I am saying. We can indeed speak truth and love, but we can also understand that where people change their minds and hearts is not when they feel shame… when we are feeling judged, shamed and unworthy, we only dig our heels in and lock ourselves into a defensive stance; shame begets pain; grace begets grace and a revolutionary mindset ripple effect.
I hope you have an incredible week my friends and I hope that this message meets you where you are and helps you to feel connected on your journey today. Until next time, this is Holly Ann Kasper, the Radical Imperfectionist.
And P.S. Although I am not affiliated, I wanted to share a couple of books I have read that have really helped regarding things I have talked about today. The first, about meditation, is called Bliss More by Light Watkins. The second is the Audio by Richard Rohr called The Art of Letting Go. And Lastly is You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy.
Have a wonderful day!