The Lord Jesus, when he had eaten with his disciples, poured water into a basin and began to wash their feet, saying: This example I leave you. (John 13: 4,5,15)

Our needs are always greater than our awareness of them. Renewal, transformation and healing can come to us in many ways and from many different sources. 

The path to wholeness and healing has one very distinct characteristic: it s not pre-fabricated. It doesn’t already exist. The path we’re taking about is the moment-by-moment evolution of our experience, our thoughts and our emotions. The path is unchartered. It comes into existence moment-by-moment and at the same time drops away behind us. We can’t see where we’re headed, only where we’ve been.

Transformation holds within its wide embrace the personal renewals that come with a spiritual awakening, a conversion, a mystical epiphany or enlightenment. It covers the deepening that takes place when we get in touch with our higher self or spirit.

Intentional transformation involves the shedding of old ways, especially those that have become burdens. No matter who you are or what has already happened to you, no matter what you have done, it is still possible to be and to do something new.

Intentional transformation implies a marked change in your life. Start where you are making simple changes – begin a spiritual practice, break a habit, take a different route to work, embrace someone or something new – signal your spirit that you are willing to accept change in your life and to be an agent of change in the world.

Intentional transformation brings healing and wholeness – if you make room for it. Refusal or resistance to change can be a major obstacle to transformation. Be open to a kaleidoscope of witness that is all around you.

Opening the Hand of Thought: Reflections on Wonder

I invite you to sit with me under the wide umbrella of the old fig tree that was planted behind this house before we were born. All around us life is breaking open: the orange trees are covered in white buds, which, softened by yesterday’s rain, will release the rapturous scent that always reminds me of new beginnings and weddings. It is a perfect time to visit.

I want to remind you of a way of thinking and offer you the gift of a practice. Both have helped me travel across the tumultuous terrain of learning to live the life I love and love the life I am living.

I am asking you to reclaim what may have become a dusty and numb habit and transform it into a practice of breaking open into a new aliveness. There’s no time for small talk or even medium talk. Instead, let’s have an experience of what is involved in opening our minds in wonder. I invite you to read the next paragraph, then pause for a moment and try this practice for yourself.

Step 1

Fold your hands in your lap the way you’ve been doing since you were a child ―the way you did when you were taught to “pay attention.”

Step 2

Bring your attention to your hands and notice how you folded them. Is the right thumb folded over the left, or vice versa?

Step 3

Unfold your hands.

Step 4

Refold your hands in the opposite, nonhabitual way (if right was over left, then place left over right, etc.).

Step 5

Go back and forth between the habitual way and the nonhabitual way while asking:  Which way feels the most awkward? Which way feels the most secure? Which way feels the most alive?

The first time I did this, I was amazed to discover that the habitual way felt so secure that I barely noticed my hands were there. They were numb to me. The nonhabitual way was much more awkward but also more alive. In and of itself, that has been a major lesson: in order to feel more alive, I need to allow myself to feel a little awkward. Even more important was what I noticed in step three ―the uncertainty that exists after unfolding my hands and letting go of the comfort of habit and before refolding them into the new possibility. Step three is the place where wonder can grow.

Wonder is how we open “the hand of thought.” It can lift our minds out of the mud of rational resignation and open them into wild relational cartwheels of insight. Wonder is the place where prejudices fall away and our capacity to notice life increases. You have known how to do it since you were a child. 

A warning though: As your mind opens and your thinking begins to diverge into possibilities, you may experience what is commonly called “confusion.” When you were young, you didn’t mind confusion any more than you cared if your tummy stuck out a little after eating too much. But many of us were shamed when we were confused.

Do you remember a moment long ago, perhaps before you went to school, when you were trying to figure something out, but your mind got stuck and you gave up? Perhaps you began to hum or whistle, trace patterns in the dirt, or doodle “mindlessly” on a piece of paper, forgetting about everything, or so it seemed, until pop! ― understanding came. That pop was a flash of insight ― a breaking through after breaking down ― that occurs when a tiny portion of your brain lights up like a shooting star across a dark sky.

You and I are hard-wired to enter the unknown and transform chaos into ingenious possibilities. It is our birthright. And it is as simple as flying a kite. You don’t have to know anything or be anything. Here are a few questions to help you throw the kite of your mind up into the wind. Choose one and let it string out into a daydream:

What if everyone who came before you, everyone who ever prayed for you, everyone who ever loved you, everyone who hoped that someday there would be one such as you ― what if they were all behind you now? What if they could feel and hear and see the world through you in this moment?

If life made a promise to the world the moment you were born, what would it be?

What happens when you imagine you are sitting still, holding a challenge you are currently facing in one of your hands, and all of your life’s wisdom in the other, as they learn to open and dance together?

I invite you to remember that you’ve drifted into this way of imagining possibilities your whole life. Wonder is a pilgrimage toward what is most original and shining in you.

By: Dawna Markova

Think about practicing this exercise to help you accept the grace that is being offered to you:

Imagery Exercise

Breathe out three times.

See yourself as a swimmer floating face up in the water.

Sense how the water holds you without your effort. 

Breathe out one time.

See yourself as a hawk soaring above the earth.

Sense how the air holds you without your effort.

Breathe out one time.

See and sense yourself in freefall, floating into the Divine’s deep embrace.

Know that the light of grace is surrounding you.

Then open your eyes.

Grace bewilders our natural human tendencies. We want to believe we are in control. We assume there are specific steps we can take to ensure we are rewarded. We expect the Divine’s gifts to be given out according to some recognizable plan. 

Grace does not work this way. Grace teaches us to let go. We don’t have to be in charge. We just need to stay open to receiving the sacred.

Receptivity requires that we give up shame – those persistent feelings that are unworthy, that we don’t deserve all that we have, that we’re not as good as people assume, that we’ve messed up, that our whole life is a mistake.

Grace doesn’t listen to that litany. Grace is not based on a scorecard. Grace happens.

Prayer Mantra:

There’s nothing you have to do.

There’s nothing you have to do.

There’s nothing you have to do.