Suffering, Love and Homegrown Tomatoes

I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering recently. Not the greatest topic to swill around in your brain but I have NEEDED to figure out this weird web of self-generated pain I’ve been indulging in for the last year.

It’s been a great learning journey that came to a conclusion with a baby, two dads, a magical homegrown tomato and a lost necklace. But more about that later…

Let’s start with the fun stuff first.

I’m experiencing love.

I’m experiencing love with a lot of things and a lot of people. I’m experiencing love with my kids, my family, my friends, my work, my brain, my life and, in spite of my resistance, the father of my youngest daughter.

My relationship with this man is a weird and very personal story. But since it is my birthday and kind of the beginning of a new era for me, I’d like to share it in the hopes that it might help you find love, too.

I started seeing this man about four years ago after I issued a personal moratorium on relationships in my life. I had just gotten out of a very painful relationship that ended the way all of my relationships in the last 10 years have ended and I didn’t want to get involved with anyone.

This relationship sort of started out without a whole lot of “relating”, if you catch my drift. Until I got pregnant, very (VERY) much against the odds…

Now, I have been diligently working on manifesting my life partner since my fortieth birthday, five years ago. I have a nice list of all the qualities I’d like my life partner to have. Some of you may have heard me read it out loud in Prosperity Boot Camp (which starts next Thursday, August 27, BTW).

I wanted a metaphysical man who would sit and meditate with me, a man who shared my passion for teaching and my life mission, a man who believed in fate and soulmates…

Instead I got this incredibly brilliant, well-educated, logical, intellectual Jewish man who is 15 years older than me and doesn’t really fit many of the criteria on my list.

I am very frightened of being in a relationship with this man. He is very attractive and many women want him. He has lived long enough to have a parade of “exes” of one sort or another and, given my history in relationship, and the statements he has made about the quality of our relationship, I can’t figure out what he wants with me, other than the fact that we share a daughter. (I know, you don’t have to send me emails about the “obvious”.)

But it’s more than just that.

For all the places where we lack common ground, we also have many places where we stand solidly together, side by side. We both believe in family, are committed to our children and doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. We laugh a lot. We do really well playing house together and we’re both very creative. We have an incredible energy together and, at the same time, a lot of simple peace between us and we really love our daughter, Ayelet.

And he likes my writing.

And he thinks I’m a good mother.

Oh, and did I mention that he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I live in Houston, Texas and we commute once a month to spend time together?

We live in separate cities because my fear drove me all the way across the country so that I could be “in control” of our relationship.

All that really happened is that my baby and I have logged an absurd amount of frequent flier miles and I spend my free time with a telephone glued to my ear.

So a big part of my suffering this year has been about being afraid to let go and love (and TRUST), feeling abandoned (even though I’m the one who left), feeling overwhelmed by parenting a baby by myself, missing my guy, feeling guilty when I leave my other children to spend time in Minneapolis (or wherever we end up traveling),feeling guilty for taking my baby away from her father, trying to explain this relationship to my friends and family who just look at me with one eyebrow raised and wondering just what DID my Higher Self have in mind with this pairing anyway????

(BTW, this is the LAST post about suffering for at least three months…new topics coming soon!)

Love scares me. I’ve had some really painful manifestations in relationships that have left me with a crook in my neck from looking back and a lot of fear that if I surrender to love, I’ll just get hurt again. So I enter into love always waiting for the “other shoe to drop”.

A few years ago, a very wise friend of mine told me that if you don’t want the “other shoe” to “drop”, stop looking for the other shoe. One of the things that I have learned recently is that if I want to stop suffering, I have to stop looking for it.

When you stop searching for evidence of something in your life and instead focus your attention on something else, “magically” we begin to see more of what we are looking for.

We are actually “hard-wired” in our bodies to only see what we condition ourselves to see. Think about this for a minute. At any given moment you are surrounded by thousands of bits of information. If you pay attention to all of it, you might go mad.

Your brain has a system call the Reticular Activating System (RAS) that programs your awareness to sort through about 250 bits of information per minute so that you are not overwhelmed by data. Did you ever notice how when you are thinking about buying a particular kind of car that you start to notice that car everywhere you go?

It’s not magic or even a “sign”. It’s simply that your RAS has programmed your awareness so that what you are thinking about is more evident in your outer world. Basically, you can program your thinking to see what you want to see and consequently even influence the kind of experience you want to have.

When I was living in Sedona a few years back, I got to spend a lot of time in my hammock under the stars. One night I got a very clear message in my head comprised of only one sentence:

It’s all Love.

And in that one moment I had this profound awareness that everything, every experience, every person, every situation, basically, all of life was an expression of love. I just had to learn to see it that way.

Marianne Williamson, author of “A Return to Love”, says, “There is no such thing as a neutral thought. Every thought takes us into love or into fear, and whichever one we choose casts out the vision of the other.”

We cannot be in love and fear simultaneously. One has to win. When we embark on an enlightened path and we begin to see the expansive, unlimited nature of the Universe, we also come to understand that love is the basic unchanging nature of life.

In the Human Design System, which I believe gives us the archetypical blueprint for the highest expression of humanity, love and life force are inextricably intertwined. Fear isn’t even a part of the map and is actually evolving out of the system as a place of awareness. (See the Solar Plexus Mutation mini-course.)

The only pain we experience in love is the pain of separation or the perception of separation. Are we really separate or do we just perceive ourselves to be, focus on it and then sit and suffer in the ever-growing gap we create in consciousness?

My friends, Paul and Layne Cutright, relationship coaches and authors of several relationship books, including “You’re Never Upset for the Reasons You Think You Are,” stated once in a teleclass I hosted, that the root cause of all conflict in a relationship is a couples desire to be closer and an inability to manifest that desire.

As with all contrast, our suffering in the perception of separation is simply our Higher Self helping us clarify that we want to be closer and in a loving space. To create more love, we simply have to shift our focus away from the places where we think we are apart from love and look at where we find closeness.

Creation is simply a matter of where you put your energy, attention and focus.

When we get stuck in fear or even panic (not-love) it’s usually because we don’t understand what is happening. Most of us, when we are caught in fear, struggle, resist or try to escape the circumstances that created the fear. We act like bugs caught in a spider web. The more we resist and struggle, the deeper we are ensnared in the web.

If we, instead, allow our response and work to see the experience from a different perspective, we can use the not-love experience as a powerful Point of Evolution that gives us the information necessary to move to a deeper experience of love.

There are many reasons why we get trapped in the web of fear. I’ll list a few but you may have your own:

1.It’s time to move on. You are done with the experience but you aren’t trusting that what is coming next is more in alignment with what you truly want to experience.

2.What you are wanting isn’t in the highest good for all, including yourself and your Higher Self is staging an “intervention”.

3.Your experiences are triggering past painful memories and you are afraid that the past will repeat itself.

4.You are focusing on what you don’t want instead of what you want.

5.You have an identity rooted in your “stuckness” and you don’t want to let it go. Maybe you don’t know who you are without pain, suffering, struggle, etc.

6.You are too tired to make the change. You’re burned out and need a break.

7.You have old beliefs that won’t allow you to believe that you can have/deserve to have/it is possible to have/feel guilty for having…

8.You forgot (temporarily) in the midst of the “earth dream” that you are a Source Being.


As I said, you may have other reasons but basically, they are all rooted in fear and not love. When we see the love, we can experience immediate healing.

Try this for a minute. Sit and breathe deeply and consciously. Let your breath fill your body and just hold the energy of the breath for a minute. As you exhale the breath, imagine that with your out-breath you are releasing all the tensions, fear, anxiety, concern, panic, or whatever may be bugging you.

Now breathe in again and as you breathe in this time, simply think about and feel love entering your body and breathing in pure love in all of its expressions and forms. Just be love.

Isn’t it interesting how such a simple experience of love can erase everything else?

I was recently at a wedding. One of the guests made a toast and compared love to the image of Adam and G-d in the Sistine Chapel, fingers reaching towards each other but not quite meeting. He stated that maybe love was the work we needed to do to actually connect and touch. I agree.

We can stand in the gap and connect and touch simply by shifting our focus. Do we spend our time noting the places where we don’t connect and lack common ground, or do we stand in the moment and savor all those places where we do connect and touch?

Your experience will depend on your answer to that question. (Hint: Life is precious and each moment can pass in heart beat. Do you really want to spend the time we have standing in “the gap”?)

Now, back to a tale of a baby, two dads, a magical homegrown tomato and a lost necklace…

When I was in New York a few days ago, I was traveling in the backseat of a rental car trying to keep my very active toddler happy at the end of a long road trip. I was wearing a necklace my father had given me when I was eight-years-old that was very dear to me. I took off the necklace and gave it to Ayelet to play with. She dropped it and it slid to the floor, or so I thought.

In the morning when I went to the car to look for the necklace, it was nowhere to be found. Her Dad and I tore the car and her car seat apart looking for it but it was gone.

When I was growing up, my Dad traveled a lot and I really, really missed him. He always brought me back a souvenir from his travels, usually a piece of jewelry. I have several pieces stored away to give to my daughters when they get older.

But this particular necklace is my favorite and when I wear it, I always remember how much I missed my Dad when I was little. When I lost it, I realized that maybe it was time to release the memory of always missing my Dad and I adjusted myself emotionally and let it go.

A few days later, after traveling with the car seat from Newark to Houston and putting it in two different cars, I was leaning over to put Ayelet in her seat when, seemingly out of nowhere, my necklace “dropped” into my hand. I was thrilled but kind of confounded at where the darn thing had been hiding itself.

In my meditation that evening, I got a clear message that instead of wearing it as a symbol of my missing my Dad, that I needed to see it as a token of my father’s love for me and I imagined him in the port city of Basra in Iraq picking out a special trinket for me. (BTW, he is still delighted when he sees me wear it.) It is time to release the old memories of separation and remember the love.

(One Dad down, one Dad to go.)

Now for the Magical Homegrown Tomato…Last week, Ayelet and I were outside enjoying our beautiful, tropical backyard in Houston. After roaming around the back of the garden, Ayelet brought me a warm, beautiful, sun-ripened, homegrown tomato.

Now, this isn’t such a big deal except that we have no tomato plants in our backyard and neither do our neighbors. I was, again, confounded about the appearance of something out of
“thin air”.

Later that evening, when I was talking to her Dad on the phone, he mentioned that he had picked the first ripe tomato of the season from his backyard in Minneapolis. We joked that maybe Ayelet had found a portal to her Dad’s backyard…

Now, I am certain that there is some kind of logical explanation for the reappearance of my necklace and the magical tomato. But I’ve decided to let go of my need to know…

Instead, I prefer to think that the power of remembering love vs. separation brought my necklace back to me and that the strength of a little girl’s love for her Dad (and his love for her) was powerful enough for her to blast through the time-space continuum and go tomato picking with her Daddy on a warm, beautiful summer afternoon.

Today is my birthday. Today I commit to a year of finding the love in everything.

I hope you’ll join me!

Love,
Karen


P.S. At the end of my time with Ayelet and her Dad, I made a little stack of stones, three stones representing each of us, and at the base I placed a perfect heart-shaped rock. I thought about taking a photo to mark the moment but I realized that the moment was, like all moments, temporary and profound because of its fleeting, impermanent nature.

My intention is that this “note” will remind you to see all the love that surrounds you, too! And That you won’t waste a minute getting after it! Hop to it! Love in all of its unique and amazing expressions is waaaaay more fun than suffering…