What is a Guide?
This page is home to my guides, in which I explore the various ideas, beliefs, experiences, practices, realizations etc. etc. etc. that have been meaningful in my self-inquiry and exploration. Simply put, I experience manifest reality (i.e. life) as one side of a cosmic coin wherein form and formless, expressed as duality, exist as one. The imperfect and impersonal expressions of life, which include us, are held by, comprised of, and sprouted from an aware presence. A sense of stability and peace in and as these manifest expressions (i.e. as people in the world) is in constant interrelationship with a capacity to cultivate balance and serenity within. An honest awareness and acceptance of the conditioned habits, patterns and behaviors we downloaded in childhood –through our family, school, cultural and/or societal systems – are prerequisites of our liberation and evolution. It is in these guides that I delineate how I personally work to align myself with practices that cultivate awareness, curiosity, acceptance, compassion and patience, re-membering myself to that innate awareness by and from which I sprout.
“It isn’t that the bull’s-eye, the destination, heaven, home, doesn’t exist. It is only that it doesn’t exist in linear time. It is like a crystal hanging above our entire timeline, refracting partial images of itself onto our world that we recognize as home. That is why the mystics tell us it is always there, closer than close. Nonetheless, our journeys away from home have their purpose. A will stronger than our own sends us on these journeys. If we do not someday leave home, then home will leave us.”
- Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home
Serenity Guide
This guide explicates several of my favorite* practices for regrounding myself in my own experience and re-membering into Self and taking responsibility for how I exist in the world.
*favorite is ~obviously~ relative and personal!! ;)
Intention & Expectation
I have been grappling with the distinctions between setting an intention and having an expectation, and how to operate from the former rather than the latter. Here is what I’ve managed to ascertain.
An intention is a deliberate choice to engage with a deeper level of your consciousness as a means to create a more mindful and present way of engaging with a situation. An expectation is an externalization, a story we smack onto a situation that is ultimately based in disengaging – from the present, from our capacity for consciousness, and from the myriad of possibilities therein.
An intention is about refining and evolving. It builds our capacity to trust ourselves. It is deliberate, internally-oriented, and is ultimately a practice in letting go. An expectation is fixed, domineering, and focuses our energy where it serves literally no one: on attempting to control the fundamentally uncontrollable external elements of our experience. Intention fosters our autonomy and minimizes our sense of things happening “to us,” which is a foundational characteristic of expectation.
An intention fosters our relationship with our truest selves, and encourages the meaningful use of our energy. Quantum science has proven that the physical world as it exists in the present moment is in flow with your focus and attention and energy - photons literally shift in response to where you put your energy. Use it wisely. In a bio-centric universe, the observer (us, we) are not some random mathematical anomaly. We are as integral to the structure and existence of the universe as the supposed objects we perceive to comprise it, be those our bodies, our pets or our rivers. Behold deliberately. Focus where it can serve you and others with curiosity and patience and compassion.
Truth is, there is so, so, soooooiii much more to be said here. I could make eight billion more categories tbh. But that is the nature of attempting to filter our experience through language – there will always be more ways to express, to dissect, and to articulate evermore carefully, thoughtfully, consciously… here is my attempt!
PS please pardon any repetition here – some of these sections and concepts overlap, but also need to be carefully explored in relation to other ideas!! 🙏
Divest
This is the beginning of a guide that I made as part of Earth Week 2020. It is a first step in helping guide folks towards divesting their funds from banks, companies and establishments that fund fossil fuel expansion and extraction.
