Living Through White-Colored Glasses

I am realizing how DEEPLY I deserve to fill my life with things that bring me joy and fun instead of darkness and despair.

I notice that throughout my whole life, I have given myself misery because I felt I deserved only darkness. But now, I've learned to love myself, and I am applying my lessons. I am being in self-worth and love. As a result, I see light all around me. I see my aura, and it is a beautiful white. Sometimes the lining does not project as far out as other days, and sometimes it does, but the outside band of it is grey instead of white. But it is no longer pure darkness.

I noticed today that this is happening because I am more joyful. The more joyful I feel, the wider the circumference of my aura stretches, until it fills up an entire room and extends past the ceiling, as I lie in bed.

As I've many times lain in bed filled with darkness, with a dank, black, gunky aura stretching to the ceiling and beyond, I was able to decide today what the difference between the black aura and the white aura is. As I mentioned before, it is my amount of joy. One way I've procured darkness in my life as been to fill my life with despair. To fill my life with things that make me unhappy, miserable, angry, self-hating, pain and many other dark-spirit emotions. I did this to keep me stuck, I recognize that now. The things I used to fill myself with darkness include: alcohol, judgment, hatred, lying to others, lying to myself, hiding my fears from myself, angry music, bitchiness, violence, irresponsibility, shame/guilt, spending money on things I "should" spend it on, doing things in life that I "should" do instead of what I purely want to do whether or not it seems appropriate or mature, paralysis via fear of failure.

As I remember how I lay in bed on Sunday filling the room with my whiteness and experiencing that feeling, I realized I have such an expansive aura because I am choosing to experience joy in life. I am procuring light in my life in order to be successful, to feel happy and to fill my life with things that make me happy, calm, joyous, honesty, self-love and love for everyone else. I used to look at people and judge them and build up SO much anger based simply on MY OWN judgment...as if they had perpetrated a spiritual crime against me just by existing. Now, I am teaching myself how much I absolutely LOVE to notice those same differences and quirks I used to judge and instead see them as SO beautiful. And I know this could sound like fake mumbo-jumbo rhetoric, and I know in the past I used to write about myself more whimsically and hype my spiritual progression...but this is honest and beautiful. I giggle so much now -- probably, like, 70% of my life now -- because I am absolutely tickled by how sweet everyone in the world truly is. It's a feeling to experience, not explain. :)

So, over the next year, I will be actively and purposely researching what experiences bring more joy into my life. Here is a preemptive list of things I will experience, as I believe they will bring joy into my life:
1. Sky diving
2. SCUBA diving
3. Learning ballet
4. Dating
5. Eating delicious food, and trying new delicious foods
6. Meditating
7. Yoga
8. Hiking
9. Spending lots of time with my friends!
10. Learning
11. Learning foreign languages (ASL and Italian to start with)
12. Writing music and lyrics
13. Drinking wine
14. Dancing
15. Smiling
16. Hugging others and expressing the depth of my love to them
17. Blogging
18. Serving
19. Going on random road trips with friends
20. Drinking coffee
21. Loving me

Seeing in RED: Eyes Wiped Clean

"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."
--Nelson Mandela

How many of us are afraid of HIV/AIDS? Are you? Did you just contemplate closing your browser after reading that question? If so, I would wager that you are. If you kept it open, still inventory yourself. You may be afraid of it, but willing to learn more. That is what we need to do to relinquish any fear we have from the hold it loves to keep on us. We learn about it. We experience it. We live a life that includes it in some aspect of our being. Now, (obviously) I am not saying "Hey, let's all go out and get HIV, so we can have some compassion..." But how many of us are too scared of it to even include it somewhere in our lives?

I'm beginning by calling out myself.
I have been SO scared of even approaching the topic of HIV/AIDS ANYwhere in my life. I have judged those who have contracted HIV as whores, sluts, irresponsible men who have no idea how to take care of themselves, or have any compassion for anyone else, so why should I have compassion for them??? HOWEVER, what I see now is that I chose to live in that judgment because it was too scary, as an uneducated gay man, for me to be able to approach a positive individual and say "I love you." What an atrocity, for that would mean that I might be labeled as positive! I could never endure such judgment -- the very same judgment I was casting and expecting others to endure.

I continue by calling you out.
How much do you know about HIV? How much have you educated yourself? How often do you reach out to those who have HIV? How many excuses have you already thrown up in defense of yourself? Too often, we believe it is not OUR burden to bear. Well, TRUST, it is not a burden. It is a gift -- in my opinion -- to be able to see someone with such beautiful compassion and see them through eyes wiped clean.
How often do you pity someone you've learned has HIV? How often do you ask if someone is "clean" (implying that if they have HIV or AIDS, they are "dirty")? How often do those with HIV/AIDS keep it a secret? How ashamed are they that they have it? On the other hand, let's be accountable: How many times do we judge those who live with HIV, fostering an environment in which they feel ashamed to be who they really are?

These are the words of a friend who is gay, lives with HIV, and has lived in Salt Lake City:

"The Community in Salt Lake are the prime example of hypocrites. They want equality from a church, yet they don't accept people with HIV...the community is SO uninformed. I hated being known as someone created by a community and not for who I really am. So I dealt with the humiliation and segregation from those who I called my friends."

This is ONE person. I've spoken with another friend about HIV/AIDS -- a public force in our community -- and he feels similarly.

Tyler Helms, who created IMPACT Red, now writes a bi-weekly column in The Advocate, called "Living the Questions" about what it is like to do just that. This decade is the time of education -- positive members of society truly are living the questions such that the rest of us may choose to educate ourselves with the answers. This is enough for which to honor these positive heroes. Tyler writes:

"I was finding that society expected full disclosure, would hold you
accountable for any risk, but was virtually unprepared for the openness. But demanding honesty and integrity is hard to do in a society that encourages truth but would prefer not to know it. In a city....where you will be heckled for speaking out about a truth that impacts us all. It even gets the most vocal of us down.
"But those willing to embark on a relationship with someone positive seem rare. The majority of people I meet are more willing to donate than go on a date. Perhaps this is why so many keep their secret from those they love. In the days following my December 1 public disclosure, I received an unsettling number of notes from people who are positive but have told no one. I sadly understand why they don’t. The fear of being alone, being judged, or not finding love often makes disclosure too great a risk — a risk that still is prevalent in 2010. To think they keep this secret from loved ones, hookups, and in some cases long-term partners is shocking. It’s also dangerous to our society."

What do WE do to educate? About the facts, and about the emotion? What do we do to encourage debate, to instigate learning, to honor those who teach? What are we doing to further this epidemic? How are OUR choices impacting US as a whole? What is our perspective around those who live their days with HIV/AIDS? Would we -- really -- reach out to someone who becomes positive?

Because whether we are gay or straight, or positive or negative, the answers -- and the questions themselves -- involve us aligning as one bloc: loving, powerful, clear and COMMITTED.

You and me, we're cut from the same cloth
It seems to some we famously get along
But you and me are strangers to each other
'Cause you and me: competitive to the bone.
Such tragedy to trample on each other with how much we've endured,
We are not all for one and one for all.
You and me have felt impotent in our skin,
You and me have taken it out on each other.
Such a pity to disavow each other with how far we've come --
With how strong we've been!
You and me are on this pendulum together,
You and me, with scarcity still fueling,
You and me have made it harder for the other;
We forget how hard separatism has been.
You and me, we can help change their minds together (with)
You and me in alignment until the end.
--Alanis Morissette, from the song "Sister Blister"

Are You Half An Ass?

I have experienced living half-assed for quite a while now. Without thinking very far back, I can ballpark it to about age 10 -- 13.5 years now. When my parents divorced -- and more aptly, when I internalized that my father rejected me -- I started to live life on autopilot. I was smart enough so I didn't even have to go to half my classes to get a decent grade. This continued on into college. I actually got approached by a professor who was bewildered and confused about what action to take; his syllabus indicated attendance as an integral piece of the successful grade-getting puzzle, but I was coming in just for the test and acing the class...he didn't know how he should grade me (what can I tell you, I am always pushing up against people's beliefs about what reality "should be" and what reality actually is lol).

For the longest time I blamed my inability to perform to my best on a number of things, including but not limited to: TIME (I mastered the ability to align my life with time and timeliness and then completely rejected it), ATTENTION (for MUCH too long I have "needed" attention and praise to "motivate" me -- by "motivate" I simply mean "keep me going until the next experience in which I was then starved for attention"), PERFECTION (I always needed to be beautiful, intelligent, right, inspiring, happy, real, successful, good enough...but not just that -- the MOST beautiful, intelligent, right, inspiring, happy, real, successful and good enough that was possible. No one could ever be better than me. If so, I was a failure and there was hell to pay within myself, and then I would manifest that without), CLARITY, OTHERS' OPINIONS/ACCEPTANCE (FYI: this, coupled with perfection, was my largest and most resilient downfall).

I'm typing this to make it even more real for myself. And I'm hoping that you will learn from it and that you will take it into your life and begin applying it if it rings true for you. But mostly, I'm writing it for me.

I've lived too long being half an ass. I'd rather just not be an ass at all (is that perfection coming in, though?) --> Oh, that points out a great aspect of my half-assed-ness that I forgot to mention. I would always worry myself to death, criticizing myself to death, and picturing the worst that could happen to keep myself from inaction. Also, I always focused my energy and my vitality even on the benefit and the "helping" of others and I never focused enough on me. Here is a tricky part for me to describe. There's the whole "live for yourself, 'cause it's not (the bad version of) selfish" conversation that I'm not quite sure really sinks in to anyone's brain...and I know it didn't for me...but that's not even quite what I mean when I say I never lived for myself...I THOUGHT I was living for me. That's where the shit was hitting the fan. I fooled myself into believing that I cared so much about a person or an organization that I would drop anything to help them or make ridiculous sacrifices to my personal integrity to make sure they felt okay. I actually believed THAT was my nature. The truth I see now is that everyone is capable of making their own choices and living in their own beliefs and realities and I hinder their growth and their future power by living half-assed and supporting them in THEIR half-assed-ness, if they were even that close...

When my dad left, I felt punished for not being good enough, though I had no real evidence that I WASN'T good enough. That, for some odd reason, was the first story that popped into my head in the very first moment I heard he left. I have been living that belief for over 13 years...more than half of my life...

I am finally discovering that I am good enough to be who I want to be, and I am teaching myself that, experience by experience. My life is changing dramatically as I connect with all this evidence. It really is beautiful right now, and the neophyte I am is afraid it will go away and I won't know how to regain it. But the truth is that I will know how to regain it, because I have just now learned how to gain it with no precedent. This time, if it slips, I will have a precedent to remember and to rely on for inspiration to find my way forward to where I want to live.

Good news.

Excavation

So, I wrote this blog at the end of last month or the beginning of this month, and I saved it in a Word document, so I could post it the next day, and then forgot to post it! I just found it yesterday, so here it is...

Blog Buddies,

I had one of the purest, most beautiful nights I’ve ever had Saturday after Service. I got to do a trust fall into the loving arms of 6 of my best friends (as if I can even qualify ANYONE as a “best” friend since I have so many amazing people in my life). I can honestly say I was fully caught by the group, AND it was also not how it was “supposed” to look. Lol. And I am 200% grateful for that, because I learned how much these people truly and purely love me. One friend was even willing to drop himself to the floor and shove his body underneath me, with specific focus to my head, just to protect me from harm, letting me squish and hurt him. Wow. What a gentle, loving, humble, caring, protective friend. I deserve relationships in my life like the one I have with him. The irony is I’ve known him for only a few weeks and he loves me that much, whereas I have friends who I’ve known for 5 years who have just gotten comfortable and lazy. This weekend I have gotten much clearer on the truth that lies within my relationships, and the potential for the relationships I already have. I too have been lazy (and selfish) in my relationships. I cannot say that any of my friends have been lazy without also acknowledging it in myself, because relationships are a two-way street. My loved ones respond to how I interact with them. If I was constantly “tipping the scales” for them in the relationship, they just naturally WOULDN’T settle for being a lazy friend. Period. So I have some work to take on in my relationships. At this point I am speechlessly grateful for the “Relationship Renewal” worksheet that The Great Life Foundation provides as part of its coursework. It gives me a great springboard off of which to launch.

A quick shout out to volunteer staffing at The Great Life! Within the past two months, I have staffed a Founders Training, two Part Twos, am coaching a Part Three and am about to take on a Part One this week. And it has been the most forward moving choice I have made in a long time! I have been awakened to new pieces of my character and personality and am doing a great job at piecing myself back together. Since I began my training two years ago, I’ve felt like I had amnesia regarding the real me…and even partly that I never even created a real me… From such a young age I was always trying to please everyone, to create a peace bubble in my life. I was abused, and after the age of 7, I always felt completely neglected. I was the youngest, the baby, and I always felt left behind, especially compared to my middle sister. I never felt like I could do anything good enough, that I would never be loved enough, that I would never be able to prove to everyone that I was okay, and that they should love me. I never realized I needed to prove to MYSELF that I was okay and that I am capable of love and being loved – even moreso, not to prove, but even just to simply trust that about myself.

I’m hungry…I’m gonna go cook some leftovers, and I’ll be back to blogging in about twenty…

I totally forgot I was blogging! Haha. It’s probably about 2 hours later now…lol.

Anyhow, I love myself now, and I am consciously taking actions toward self-fulfillment, and to continue to show myself how much I love myself, and it feels nice. And it is all due to having done the courses at Great Life. The reason I give a shout out to staffing there is because I have been doing it so much lately and loving myself so much lately and my life is just completely working. I am aligning with the Universe regarding things I need for Get Smashed! I am finding and keeping close, loving, generous, caring, passionate, honest relationships. I am feeling peace. I am creating the life I want. I am doing everything I want: I am starting a new job (finally!), going to Iceland to serve as a volunteer, really seeing progress with Get Smashed!, and serving very freely at Great Life, creating this beautiful human experience for myself. The joy and love is so abundant! Thank you, Universe. Thank you, loved ones who support me and fully care for me and my well-being. Thank you, Mom. THANK YOU, Great Life.

Oh, and a most heartfelt thank you to “The Academy.” ;)

Also, if you like musically interesting, stylistically challenging, poetic music sung by a man who has quite possibly the most talented vocal power in all of musical history, check out the band Incubus. I am constantly in awe of what this band can do artistically, not only with their musical arrangements, but also what the lead singer, Brandon Boyd, can do with his voice.

I will post again later tonight, and then again tomorrow morning, and that will probably be all from me this week, as I am staffing Awakenings at The Great Life Foundation this Wednesday-Saturday. NOTE: If you haven’t yet taken this training (or hell, even if you have), I encourage you to do so THIS WEEK, as it is priced at the lowest it will probably ever be: $99. Normal seminars charge that much for one-day events, and this is 4 days and is NOTHING like a “normal seminar” – it is much more powerful. It’s like going to a “Buy One, Get Six Free” sale. Of course you’re going to go and snatch up a deal like that.

Finally, I’d like to create a new agreement with you, my lovely Blog Buddies: to post at least once a week. That is something I can safely accomplish and keep my word around.

Until Tonight,

Ryan!

Peace out, Loves.