I really grokked what she was talking about, and found many similarities to what we know to be happening through our understandings from Human Design (or at least what we collectively want to be happening), which is the shifting of our power from external to internal...knowing that to be of any benefit to others, we must BE ourselves. For those who want forward motion, there were certainly some hopeful statements in her article, but what caught my attention and quickly diverted to my internal dialog was in her statement "to remember we are here to serve our fellow human beings." 

What it brought up in me was this disconnect that I've always felt about  the connotations with 'being a good person/wife/mother/employee/(fill in the blank),' you have to sacrifice or to negate oneself...as is the old and distorted application of the energy, and certainly a pattern within my family of origin and it's showing itself in the form of breast cancer in my grandmother, aunts, mother, and sister.

So what I got in that moment was clarity around my/our misinterpretation that being of service was personal. What came to me was a replacement of the words 'fellow human beings' with the word 'humanity', which is impersonal. Additionally, I also had been conditioned to think that we needed to be overt about it all, yet the fact is, that by changing ourselves internally, we ultimately change the world externally. Our job is not to be running around trying to fix everyone and everything else (especially when our own house is a mess), but to honor, trust and take care of self and to be moved internally to take action appropriately. Only in this manner can we ultimately contribute positively to the state of the whole, as is the case with a single cell...in it's proper function, with everything else acting accordingly is the only way that the body thrives. So how do we change the world? One person at a time...and that person is me.

A minor detail, but a distinctly different understanding for me. Why it makes a difference to me, who knows...but for some reason when I got that it wasn't personal, my energy shifted. Having a completely open throat (no gate activations) I find myself playing around in the meaning of things, and that often the way we say things can be interpreted so many different ways...often looking for the meaning beneath the words. For whatever reason, today was the day that this one finally dropped in for me. Not that I hadn't understood this concept previously, but somehow it landed a bit deeper.

So, what this bit of rambling is ultimately about, is my internal shift and one more thing that got put into perspective...checking off one of those subtle disconnects that through living the question, I finally walked my way into the answer. At least in my version of reality. :)

So as I was (continually) attempting to clean up my inbox, an article in a recent newsletter caught my eye...The Gut Wisperer...

Baby Steps...Thanks Oprah.

Rainer Maria Rilke - Live the Questions Now


Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet

As I began the walk, paying attention to my breathing, there was no rhythm to it and I found myself trying to find the ease in my breathe and how interesting that a simple thing as breathing can feel so labored…what showed up over time was that it seemed to take a bit until my body organized the processes on it’s own. All I had to do was to allow it. Pretty fascinating and a wonderful feeling when it did…

Listening to the Radio (JAR), continues to be quite powerful part of study, the personal practice of my life and living my design. I listen to the stories, I feel the ‘aha’s as well as the charge when I get triggered, work with the energy, connect the dots and then seem to settle in to the acceptance and awareness that seems to wash over me. It’s an interesting process. From one level, I understand the teachings of Human Design much deeper…a shift from information and knowledge to real knowing. Whether there’s truth to my understanding, time will tell. The grand experiment that Design teaches. At a personal level, I’m understand more and more about the events of my life, my participation in them and the misunderstanding and misidentification with much of it. I continue to see the gifts in that and am much more gentle with myself as well as with others. The parts that piss me off, become my spiritual practice. To get to the root, energetically, as much as is possible in the moment, and to allow myself to move back to ground…the center from which is not rocked by external forces…that part of me that trusts impeccably and acts in a way that is mine to do.

More and more, I see that we are all living our own personal practice. The Church of One? The Zen Masters teach us to resist nothing. It’s been on my mind, friends have reminded me and listening to Genoa Bliven this morning talk about some of his experiences and how deeply we can go away from our nature, into the ‘Not-Self’ in Design terms. I now understand that conditioning, while we talk about it being such a bad thing, is part of the practice. It’s a place to learn from but not to live from. To know when to ‘let it pass by’ and when to work with it. But is it possible that to learn from it deeply, you have to lose yourself in it completely? Yet do we ever lose ourselves completely? Or are we just lost in it and then wake up to understanding?