Aloha and Good Morning,

 

      “Okay,” Expedience said to herself as the current carried her away from the waterfall, “That shocked and dismayed me. I’m feeling sad and abandoned. Yet look what I’ve accomplished; look at the experiences that have come into my life. It’s time to keep my chin up.” Determined, she locked her eye upon the roof of her world, gulped a huge gulp and with a great heave, she tossed herself right out of the river and straight into the waiting claws of a seagull.

      “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” the seagull said. “You won’t believe what happened.”

“Ouch!” Expedience squeaked. “Not again, not after everything I’ve been through. You can’t possibly eat me now. It’s just not fair. I don’t care if you’re hungry or not, you put me down this instant!”

      “Put you down? Eat you? I’m not going to eat you, where would you get a silly idea like that?”

      “But you said you were hungry, you said it’s what seagulls do.”

      “Oh that was ages ago. I’m not hungry right now, and even if I were, I wouldn’t eat you. I’ve been waiting for you!”

     

“Waiting for me?” Expedience asked, blankly. “You don’t want to eat me?”

      “No silly,” the bird responded kindly. “I’ve been sent to tell you about heaven.”

      “You don’t want to eat me,” Expedience repeated weakly, grateful if a bit confused.

      “No. By-the-way, my name’s Jonathan.” The seagull smiled gently.

“Tell me about heaven?” Expedience said, suddenly remembering, “Did you fly there after all? Hey, you look different. I didn’t notice at first.” In truth, the seagull had changed. His feathers shown, gleaming brilliantly with their own inner light. “You’re beautiful. How could I not notice?”

“Have you noted people tend to relate to things as they were and not as they are and thus become less than fully present in the wonder of this current moment? Here, watch this!” They gained altitude steadily, easily climbing thousands of feet into the air. Expedience marveled, but with little chance to adjust to the wonder of this perspective before Jonathan suddenly tucked in his wings, pulled her up against his body and rocketed toward the river trailing light behind his feathers and laughing joyously.

I’ve been thinking about my tendency to automatically relegate my interactions into the realm of the unconscious mind. A good example of this is the act of reading – where we act like we’re reading. You are not reading these words right now.

 

 Studies have shown that adults no longer “read” words; rather they recognize patterns formed by the top half of each word. The unconscious mind sorts for meaning by checking the shape of a word against its internal catalog of learned vocabulary.

 

 The conscious mind doesn’t involve itself in the process unless an unfamiliar shape is encountered at which point the procedure slows while the conscious mind attempts to work out the sound of the word and sort for meaning based upon the context of the sentence. That is why we can merrily go along reading and thinking we understand certain words until someone asks us what they mean and suddenly, even though we feel like we know, we can’t really say for sure.

 

 This system of unconscious recognition and sorting works great for reading. Words tend to keep their meanings the same from one day to the next. People, on the other hand, do us the discourtesy of changing and thereby forcing us to either update our internal software or keep relating to them as they were instead of as they are, to keep relating to the unconscious catalog in which we categorized them instead of allowing this wondrous, present now-moment to present them in all their divinity and grace.

 

 This is one of the dangers of “roles” in society. Roles become the labels upon the boxes in which we put people. Then we begin relationships and build up expectations based upon what we believe a particular role means and how we believe a particular role should behave.

 

 

Expectation is relating to an idea instead of a person – an idea of what it means to have a boyfriend, a wife, a child, a boss, a friend. We look and we see an idea; we look and we see the labels upon the boxes and yet fail to look inside to verify its contents still belong there. Expectation is relating to an idea instead of a person, relating to a role, relating to a notion. Expectation is the inappropriate use of imagination.

 

 

Additionally, our internal sorting processes have been genetically trained to prioritize the chemically negative much higher in the unconscious catalog. After all, it was more important to recognize and react to the presence of a large, leaping tiger than the aesthetics of the tree from which it jumped. Alas, this means that in relationships events which felt stressful, threatening or hurtful are stored at the top of our memory stack while the pleasant, beautiful, divine gifts of love we receive daily are automatically shuffled to the bottom. This is what I meant when I said that stress (or negativity) makes us blind and stupid for it affects how we see the world around us and how we remember it after the fact.

 

 It’s time to reclaim conscious awareness in our relationships. It’s time to open all our internal boxes and let the light of insight shine inside. It’s time to reassess the labels and categorizations we have created unconsciously. It’s time to update our software!

 

 So, just for today, I’ll take a deep breath and remain present in my relationships and remember that, after all, the present is all that is.

 

Aloha, Peace & Wellness,

 

Holman

Contents © 2008 by  Holman R. Meyerhoffer, LMT—Project Transformation