Book Excerpt

[Group Manager]

Written by Group Owner
Posted via Group Manager

Frankly, I would admit to being a lot of things but, being the writer
of a book, definitely was not one of them. Although I didn't know
what 'the book' was going to be about, the idea to write it was
planted as a small seed about a year before the conditions were
sufficient for it to sprout.....then grow to a size where it called
for more time and attention so it might grow into it's fullness. I
choose to take some time away from my healing practice in Denver and
spend a week with my good friend John up in Carbondale. Below is a
rough draft of an excerpt from the introduction to:... “Is Spiritual
Practice Healing You”....I look forward to your comments.....

“..........Whether we are aware / conscious of it or not we are
creating our lives in each moment with the choices we are making....
like gardeners we choose what ideas will grow in us by which ones we
plant and water. We do this everyday....all day.
For most of my life I thought the world is what was creating my
reality but what I have seen is that nothing that I am experiencing is
being caused by anything outside of me. I am merely experiencing the
effects of my own choices, (really, more like judgments) about those
events, and I am doing this all the time. What I have come to realize
is that events in my life are neutral my thoughts about those events
are not. The Buddha said it like this over 2500 years ago:

“We are what
think.
All that we are arises with our
thoughts.
With our thoughts we create the
world.”
This is the good news and the bad news all wrapped up in a neat
package called Me.
The journey into this book is a journey into your ‘selves.’ The path
we will be walking is paved with stepping stones which are the
invitations that will be offered to explore perspectives that can
transform your life (garden). The messages will arrive in the form
stories, metaphors, and analogies.....so I think I'll just continue
with the one I've already started with a poem from David Whyte.

“A Garden Inside Me”
A garden inside
me.
Unknown.
Secret.
Neglected for
years.
The layers of its soil deep and
thick.
Trees in the corners with brandishing
arms,
and the tangled briars like broken nets.
Sunrise through the misted orchard morning sun...turned silver... on
the pointed
twigs.
I have woken from the sleep of
ages
but I am not sure if I am really seeing or dreaming or simply
astonished,
walking toward sunrise to have stumbled into the
garden
where the stone was rolled from the tomb of longing.

Okay, so let’s say, we are the 'gardener' and this lifetime is our
field of creation....what gets planted in that field (our
consciousness)...are the seeds that get watered... tended
to...nourished...and grow into the the garden that we call our lives.
Now, most of the seeds that have been planted in that garden were
planted there by others (parents, teachers, religion, society) so we
are unconsciously growing and watering seeds that we didn't choose to
plant. Their roots go very deep and sprout up out of the ground of our
being as our unconscious beliefs and behaviors, our conditioning, our
patterns...and it is our unconscious or conscious watering of them
that allows them to ripen into their fullness. Those seeds were handed
down....generation to generation...genetically grown so to
speak....from your particular 'family farm' and they got
'transplanted' into your garden by your earth parents....the gardeners
who planted them.
I don’t know about you, but it is safe to say that some of the seeds
that were planted in my garden, and i kept watering grew some plants
that seemed to grow uncontrollably.....like weeds...they just keep
coming back.....no matter how much I tried to kill them.
So now after years 30, 40, 50, years of hard work tending this garden
(that someone else planted) we start to become more aware of the
produce our gardening project has created (your life!) and you may not
like some of what's been growing...maybe even flourishing there....(“
the tangled briars like broken nets.”) like twisted vines with thorns
that chock the delicate and vulnerable 'baby's breathe' just beneath
them......still there....in the garden waiting for their beauty to be
allowed to burst forth.
Like most gardeners, we 'know' what to do when we see weeds...we pull
them out.... kill them.....try to get rid of them somehow. I know some
gardener's whose favorite strategy is to ignore them....kind of just
try to fence that part of the garden off....but they keep growing
back...and we keep trying hack them down...or fence them
off.....anything but to accept them or allow them...or even consider
seeing them from a different perspective...weeds are bad !...
Right !?..... So the gardeners (us ) wage war on the weeds. This war
is going on in our garden....in US. In the name of bringing peace to
the garden we wage war on the weeds.....practicing war in the name of
peace....how long have we humans been nourishing that seed in the
world (the garden) we all live in?? At some point there needs to be a
New Gardener one who can make different choices about how to tend your
garden. Remember, you learned how to 'take care' of the weeds in
your garden by the same gardeners that planted them....that is also
one of the seeds......”

[Ken]

Hello - I will attempt a comment on these two sentences: "I thought

the world is what was creating my reality but what I have seen is that
nothing that I am experiencing is being caused by anything outside of

me. I am merely experiencing the effects of my own choices...".
If I understand this correctly, I tend to think the opposite, that the
world has been creating my reality and that most everything I
experience is a product of what is outside of me. From my point of
view, that is the essential dilemma of civilized domesticated human
beings. The cultural story that I was brought up in taught me to look
outside myself to know 'truth'. If I seek to know who I am, the
natural of the world I live in, and my relationship to it, I must
consciously or unconsciously seek those who know the answers to these
fundamental questions, or any questions for that matter.

Even in the more recent realm of knowing (Spirituality), where I am
told that the answers lie within, I still must seek out a guru,
teacher, practitioner, workshop, therapy, and 'ones that know', in
order to find these answers. Given that spirituality has emerged from
a cultural story that says there are those that know and those that
don't, there are those that know a plenty in the spiritual realm.
Bookstores, DVD's, television programs abound with those that know
'truth'. And of course, the masses then put themselves in the position
of seeking those that know because the voice of the culture tells them
that they don't know. In my work with the primary selves, and now
specifically with the Inner Critic and the Judge, I am mostly certain
that what I experience, and especially what I choose, is mostly a
product of the drone of that which is outside of me. Everything the
critic and the judge act upon is what I have been taught about who I
am, what the world is, and my relationship to it. Only now, given the
Critic and Judge work, can I begin, in very small ways, to answer
those questions, any questions, for myself. Will I get the 'right'
answer? Without a dominant Critic or Judge, it doesn't really matter.
That's not the point.

Only now can I make a choice from something besides the anemic
possibilities that my culture has offered me. From my point of view,
it is difficult for most of us inside this ideology to truly claim to
have choice. What are we choosing from? If our choices are a
regurgitation from the primary 'self systems' of the ideology and
dogma of a sterile experimental cultural story, then I'm hard pressed
to call these real choices. Only when I begin to escape the dynamics
of this system can I claim to be making choices that reflect my own
remotely authentic experience. And how can I really know if I've
escaped, even for a few moments? No wonder the native folks had a
trickster god.