What is Normal?

What is normal?  We are in a unique time right now, and the invitation is to choose a new normal, rather than going back to the old one, as we move from sheltering in place to once again being out in the world.  Using the spiritual practices of introspection, self awareness and practicing the presence, and basing our lives in the principle of oneness, we get to choose what we want our new normal to look like.  We get to create our new normal.

Quote in this episode by Ernest Holmes, from Sermon By the Sea, available at http://somarchives.org

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Welcome, welcome to another episode of Fearlessly Feral Living. This is Karen broadcasting to you from the Woogie Ranch out here in the back 40 of northwestern Nevada, where I'm a half an hour away from the nearest gas station and the nearest grocery store. This is episode number four of Fearlessly Feral, and today we're going to be talking about normal. What is normal? Really? What is it? Some people like to joke about normal being a setting on the dryer. Except even that isn't normal. Think about it. What is normal for cottons is not normal for ships. We get to choose what normal is. And sometimes we get to re choose what normal is. This is where we find ourselves right now. In this time of pandemic where we've all been sheltering in place whether willingly or not, we get to re choose what our normal is as we begin to prepare to emerge out into the world again. And I'll be real honest with you here. All this talk about a return to normal scares the shit out of me. I do not want to return to what passed for normal before. I do want to create a new normal. And yes, normal isn't something we adopt or buy into or follow. It's something we create. So today's podcast, yes, it's about normal, but it's also about creativity in the context of normal. So the first thing to do in contemplating normalcy is to decide what is normal. For you, not anybody else. And then decide how you could show up in the world to create that normal. And don't even think of returning to what passed for normal before the pandemic. There has to be a reason for this thing we find ourselves in. There has to be a reason why we've been sheltering in place for two or three months. It's not just to shelter in place and then go back to what it was before. No, no, no, no, no, no. There's something new for us, something new. Don't think it's okay to go back to what passed for normal and have a mentality of us and them. It's not. That mentality has got to stop. That's what passed for normal before. And it just has to stop. In my world, we call that separation. And separation is the key to everything bad in life. So no, do not return to that, please. Don't return to harshly judging others because they vote differently or behave differently or believe differently or even dress differently. Don't think it's okay to attack others in our judgment, whether those be verbal attacks or physical ones. Here's some other things that used to be normal that I'm calling out and saying these are not normal. They should not be happening, and we have an opportunity here now to illuminate them. Busyness as a status symbol, not normal. It's just not normal. Sexism not normal. Misogyny not normal. Racism not normal. Bigotry not normal. All of that is ugly and it needs to stop. And yes, I'm realizing I have only said what I don't want normal to be. I've only saying what I'm against here. And I'll be honest with you, I need to work at that. I can be a negative Nelly and I can go there. That used to be my default setting was negativity. And I work hard at it. I it's easier now, but I work hard at not being a negative Nelly. How's that for a double negative? I work hard at being positive. A Pollyanna. So Ernest Holmes, who's the founder of Centers for Spiritual Living, a new thought organization, that I am very proud to be a part of. He once said in one of his last talks called Sermon by the Sea, that he longs for a world in which we are all for something and against nothing. He actually pleaded to find just one person who is for something and against nothing. And I listened to that talk or I read the transcript from that talk, and I like to think that I am that one person, or at least that I can be that one person, and I hold the vision for that. And I like to think that you are that one person too, and I hold the vision for you for that also. So what would it be like to be for something and against nothing? This is what we get to ask ourselves when we are contemplating a new normal. Instead of being against misogyny, how about we stand up proud, no matter what gender we claim, and claim our spot in the world? You know, as a woman, I get invitations to go to women-only functions all the time. I turn every last one of them down. You know why? Because men are a huge part of our world. And I don't want to support an event that's for women only. I also don't host women-only events. I've been uh harshly judged, let's say, for that. And my response has always been, you know what? If you're uncomfortable being around men, maybe that's something to work on. Maybe that's something to work on. If you're uncomfortable in a group that has all genders attending, maybe you need to look at who's facilitating the group to make it feel safe. So that's for me, you know, that's one example, you know, instead of being against misogyny and then supporting things that to my mind look misogynistic, they're either women only or men only or only this or only that, I don't want to do that. I'm not for separation. I'm for oneness. I'm for oneness. So instead of claiming busyness as a status symbol, we take a look at what's really important to us and we do that instead. I mean, really, how many times back in the in the day before the pandemic have you gone to someone and greeted them, maybe in the grocery store, and they say, How are you? And you say, Oh, I'm busy, I'm just so busy, I'm busy, busy, busy. And it's a status symbol, and they say, Oh yeah, I'm busy too. I'm busy, busy, busy. It's like busyness is a status symbol. Well, it's not. It's not. That kind of busyness will kill us if we allow it to. How about in a new normal we just create some time to sit every day and not brag about how busy we are, but instead carefully choose how we wish to spend our days? Instead of thinking and doing things the all way we've always done them when we emerge into this new normal, how about we come up with a new way of thinking and doing? Because you know, all our action is born in thought, so we have to think differently before we can do differently. I found this quote by Deeprak Chopra that I think is applicable here. He says, Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future. And that makes a lot of sense to me. We can emerge from this sheltering in place, doing things the same old way we've always done them. Or we we can be pioneers and we can emerge, creating a new future. We are in a wonderfully unique situation here. This has never happened before in our lifetimes. We've had a chance to retreat, whether we wanted it or not. We've had a chance to rest, whether we wanted to or not. We've done things we don't normally get to do. We've stopped doing things we normally do get to do. And even as if if we feel we were forced to do so, consider that perhaps within the tragedy and the lost income and the anger and even the lost lives, there might be some good in all of this. I have to believe that there's some good in all of this. I'm not denying the tragedies. I'm not denying the folks who are hurting financially right now. I'm not denying that over how many ever many millions of lives have been lost due to this virus called COVID-19. It's all happened, and yes, it is bad. What I'm saying is we need to mind the good that's coming out of this. We have to choose the good that's coming out of this, otherwise it will all be wasted. It'll all be for naught. So we've got this opportunity here. And there's a spiritual principle inherent in this opportunity. This is a spiritual principle that says that in order to create something new in your life, you have to first destroy the old. Lots has been destroyed. But there's a void there, and nature abhors a void, and so now we get to create anew. And again, I found a couple of quotes that really speak to this that I absolutely love. One of them is an oldie but a goodie from Picasso. He said, Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. Doesn't that make sense to you? It makes a lot of sense to me. And then another quote by somebody named Florida Scott Maxwell, who said, Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. Every seed destroys its container, or else there would be no fruition. So here we are, lots of stuff destroyed, lots of lives shattered, lots of jobs gone, maybe even yours. Lots of relationships altered, maybe even some of yours. You know, there were relationships getting altered long before we started sheltering in place. Just look at what's happening in our country with the political situation and how many people have severed ties with friends and f and family even because of political beliefs. We've got to find a new way to speak to one another because the old way is not working. It's just not working. All that stuff is being destroyed, and we have an opportunity to create something new. So we're faced with a choice here. We can either either continue to refuse or we can not. You know, some of us were encouraged to embrace video technology in order to participate in in life itself, in order to communicate with our fellow human beings, in order to feel not so isolated with the rest of the world while we were sheltering in place at home. And I actually had some people in my life who said, I refuse. I'm absolutely not going to embrace video technology. And they put their foot down. And I looked at that and I thought, you know, there's a choice here. We can either refuse to embrace the technology and live in isolation, or we can embrace it and learn a new way of participating in community. And so if you're listening to this podcast, I'm thinking you probably embrace the technology. And I'm very grateful for that. Now we get to embrace some more new stuff. So nature abhors a void, we've got a void, there's been destruction, and we are once again at choice, and we can choose how we get to fill that void. And I don't know about you, but I like the empowerment that I feel when I know that I am at choice. I love knowing that I get to choose. If we let someone else choose for us, we're subject to their desires, their whims, their moods, their beliefs, and their attitudes. I that doesn't appeal to me on any level. And that someone else doesn't have to be a person, it can be the news. You know, we can listen to the news and they can slant it in one way or another because these days the news is biased. And they're choosing for us because we sit there and we listen to it. And we go, oh yeah, that's right. And we jump on the bandwagon. It can be a book. You know, we can get a book, and the book has a certain point of view, and we can say, Oh, yeah, that's right. And we can let the book make our choices for us. Or we can have our choices be made for us by a set of societal societal mores that we just sort of automatically bought into because our family and our friends and our neighbors all did that when we were kids growing up. It's our default installation, and we never even stop to look at whether we really agreed with that stuff or not. We just blindly followed along. This is the time to take a look at that stuff and realize for ourselves whether or not it really applies to us. Sometimes we let God choose for us. Now, isn't that a kicker? It's God's will in my life. If God means for this to happen, then it's going to happen or not. We're letting God choose for us. Well, I'm probably gonna create some controversy here, and that's okay. I hope you stick with me. God doesn't choose for us. It doesn't. We choose. God's just a support system that supports us in our choices no matter what we make. That's what that free will thing is all about. God is a loving energy force that always says yes to our choices. And if you don't believe that, consider the last time you prayed for patience. What happened? I've learned not to pray for patience because when I ask for patience, God says, okay, here. And I get a situation that I need to exercise a lot of patience with. Now don't get me wrong, I love God, I really do. My life would be absolutely horrible without God in it. In fact, it might be gone. I might not be in existence on this plane if I did not have a God in my life. But God doesn't make my choices for me. I make my choices, but I make those choices from a place where God and I are inseparable, from a place where I get still long enough to listen to that still small voice within, where I get still long enough to feel that intuitive gut level feeling that goes on. That's the voice of God, and it comes from within us when we connect with it. My point here is that when we are looking at what is normal for us in our lives and we are deciding what is normal, we just need to make sure we're not buying into anybody else's normal. We get to decide if those opinions we hold belong to other people and not ours. We get to decide for ourselves. You know, I once had a lady who mentored me, and this woman gave me a lot. She taught me a lot. She had a way of interpreting things that allowed me to understand the wisdom in a way that I'd never been able to understand it before. She taught me a lot. But she had some opinions that she voiced very strongly and she held very strongly. And because I'm a bit of a codependent sort, I bought into those opinions. And after a little while of doing that, I realized it was harming me a lot. That I was I had stuffed or buried my own opinions in order to further hers. And it didn't feel good and it didn't look good, and the way it was coming out of me was not pleasant for me or for others. And I got to take a look at that and I got to re choose. I got to re-choose and figure out what my opinions were and what was true for me. So in deciding what is normal, we get to really sit down and take a good look at who and what we are. We get to look at things like how what are we feeling about a given situation? We get to look at things like what's the role of God in our life? What is that? We get to look at things like do those values and beliefs that I've had since I was a kid, are they really valid anymore in my life? Because if we buy into someone else's normal or someone else's value, we are out of integrity with our own. And again, that does not feel good. So the first thing about deciding to do what to what is normal for you is to discern whether or not your old normal was based on someone or something else's desires, whims, moods, beliefs, or attitudes, or whether it was based on your own. It's called self-awareness. And self-awareness is a spiritual practice. And it's a spiritual practice that means we get to take a look at what we are feeling. Now I'm over here smiling because uh there's quite frequently I'll have an opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with someone and I'll say, How are you feeling about that? And they will respond with, Well, I think, and I always stop them right there because a thought is not a feeling, it's an opinion. I've learned that a lot of people haven't a clue what they are feeling about things. It's okay. I once had a time in my life where I didn't have a clue what I was feeling about things. I had two emotions, rage and shutdown. That was it. That was all I was feeling. Rage or not anything at all, just totally shut down. So I had to learn what feelings were. Back then, before the internet, they had a list on paper of feelings. Now you can Google it. Go ahead, try and Google feelings list and see what comes up. If you don't know what you're feeling, if you think a feeling is a thought, if you're really kind of clueless there, it's okay, but figure it out. Go and Google feelings list. Once we get a sense of what we are feeling, then we can begin to know what is normal for us. Because honestly, if we're going along with someone else's normal, in a way we're creating victimhood for ourselves. Because we don't have a clue what's going on for with us and for us in our lives, and we're letting someone else decide for us. And to me, that's that's being a professional victim. You ever done that? You know, you meet somebody and you don't have a clue what's going on with yourself, but you meet someone and for some reason you're attracted to them. It could be anything. So you hit yourself up to someone else's wagon and you go along for the ride. And then all of a sudden they go left when you want to go right. And so you unhitch, you you have a choice. You can either unhitch yourself or you can stay for stick along for the right, even though you didn't want to go in that direction, which creates more victimhood. So then if you're still not aware, if you still haven't got this self awareness thing down, and you still don't know what your own normal is, and you still don't know what you're thinking and feeling, and you still don't know what your values and your beliefs are, you go along and you find someone else to hit your wagon up to, and you go along for the ride and Until they go in a direction that you know somehow is not the direction you want to go in. And then you get to choose again. You know, we can do this over and over and over again. Or we can stop and choose differently right here and right now. We can choose our new normal now. So here we are sheltering in place. So take some time. Take some time to go ahead and sit. Take some time to figure out what's going on inside of you. Google the feelings list, check it out. Consider your opinion of God and your thoughts of God and your beliefs about God. And give yourself permission to change any of those beliefs if they don't work for you because I've got news for you, God is big enough to handle it all. Consider the things that took up your time on a daily basis before you sheltered in place and ask yourself, do you really want those things to take up your time again? Consider how many times you reacted to someone else's words about a given situation out in the world? Do you really want to do that anymore? Or do you want to sit back and give a well-thought-out response instead of a quick unthought reaction? Do you maybe want instead to attempt to find a common goal that everybody can strive towards, even if they have different opinions about things? That's my goal. This is how I got to this place where I know I get to choose. I'm not under any circumstances suggesting on any level that you guys adopt these beliefs. I'm sharing them because it's the only way I know how to illustrate to you how this thing works, how to just how to do this process of creativity, how to choose and create a new normal in our life. So here's the deal: I do believe in God. I believe in a God that is everywhere present and all good all the time. I believe that this God lives and moves and has its being in and as and through me. Which means I get to ask myself on a daily basis, what would God do? And if God is everywhere present and all good all the time, then what about this situation is not good? And if I can't find the good, I get to seek the good, and I get to find it. That's part of my job. And in finding the good, I get to focus on that good because here's another belief. What we focus on expands. So I focus on that good and I turn my thoughts from negativity to positivity because here's another belief. My thoughts, or more accurately, the pattern of my thoughts, create my life. Those patterns manifest as situations and conditions. So it behooves me to consider that what I'm thinking, I need to look at it very carefully. And I need to change my thinking if necessary. And here's another belief. We can change our thinking as often as we wish. Just like we can change our beliefs. They may have worked at one time, those thoughts and beliefs, but they don't work anymore. That age-old Shakespeare quote that says, To thine own self be true, it's quoted and repeated over and over again for a reason. We must know ourselves in order to be true ourselves. So go forth and do some introspection or some meditation. Or if you're a 12-stepper, some inventory, Google that feelings list. Figure out what you're feeling. Figure out who you are and what you are about. Check out some of your beliefs and your values. If they're not fitting anymore, change them. And then follow that up with actions. Thank you so much for listening. Fairlessly Feral Living is supported and sponsored by the Center for Spiritual Living, Carson City. And you can support this podcast by going to www.cslc.org. That's the initials for Center for Spiritual Living, Carson City. Cslc.org. And click on the donate button. You can also join the Fearlessly Feral community on Patreon. That's at Patreon slash Fearlessly Feral. If you're on Facebook, please come and join us at the Fearlessly Feral group. We've got lots of good discussions there. I'll have some information for you in the show notes. And once again, I thank you very much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this episode.