A Sabbatical to Explore Life !?!?
In attempt to journal and document the next year in my life I need to do some back story to talk about how I got here and what I’m going through to make plans for my sabbatical. I’ve always wanted to spend some time in India and south western Asian countries like Thailand, Nepal, Bali and who knows where else and for the many reasons. Learning the culture of cooking in these regions and following the Hindi and Buddhist practices for many years has been my driving forces.
November 2017 – The week before Thanksgiving I thought it would be a good idea to write up the sabbatical application that I wanted to take for the last several years. Discouraged in the past by feedback from colleagues whose applications had been denied, thinking I didn’t have enough funds to back the kind of trip I wanted to take, after a system office investigation where no disciplinary action was found needed who would actually grant me a sabbatical… as well as a myriad of other thoughts that kept me from asking… ENOUGH ALREADY! Get that application in.
January 2018 – Meeting with my boss… was told that everyone is supportive of my application and will get it written up to be presented to the president.Was asked to give it a few weeks to get it written.
February – March 2018 – After a series of emails from me inquiring about the process, knowing the union contract says that by April 1st the paperwork needed to be completed my application gets written up and sent to the college president
April 2018 – Application signed by the college president and sent to the system office to be approved by the system president.
May 17, 2018 – Verbal approval by the system. I was frustrated by the timing of all this as I did not get to say my farewells to my students that I was not going to see to their graduation next year.
June 6, 2018 – Paperwork finally signed by all.
What seemed a really long time (7 months) to get papers signed I finally feel like I am ready to invest more time and energy and money into planning my sabbatical. The shit just got real…
Be careful what you ask for… you just might get it.
Time to get things going….
After we have an experience to an opening through God’s love in our human experience it is natural to contract into a protective way of being. In our individual private world we bring figures from our past, and it is because of this that our worlds of past/present/future differ. Our minds create these illusions and make up a private world that we make a choice of not sharing. Yet the figures that we have created and choose to see were never real, for they are made up only of our reactions to our past, and do not include others’ reactions to us. We get scared and make up stores that we are vulnerable and are going to be hurt… so we contract.
Love cannot live in a world apart, for when it shows up it is not recognized. If you blame others and don’t see it as your own fear, you miss out in seeing others and are not living into your own true self nature. Everyone wants to keep close what we love, and recoil from what we fear and react with fear to love, and push love away from us. Yet fear attracts us, and believing it is love, we take comfort in it. Our private worlds are filled with figures of past fear that we keep close to our awareness so we don’t ever get hurt like that again and then we miss all the love others offer us. Is this (This is) the world in which we have withdrawn into our own insanity?!
One of the first things we need to understand about form and content is that they are both part of dualistic thinking of the human brain and do not exist in the oneness of spirit/love/god mindedness. While we are born into our small self, we appear to have a separate mind from everyone else and it is validated through the myriad of different ways in which the body sees itself as separate from each other. Even the westernized culture we live in which is full of competition, industrialization and capitalism supports the separation viewpoint.
It is within the dualistic mindset where we have a choice between two possible “contents” or thoughts: the thought of separation, or our surrender into the memory of oneness/sameness. Our brain then has only one activity: the power to choose between these two thoughts. Once the mind chooses one of these two thoughts, the thought takes form. The form may be a specific behavior, a “thought”, or a judgment that expresses the original thought. All thinking produces a form at one level or another. When the choice of content is for oneness/peace/joy/happiness it represents the reminder of love in the mind… our surrender into love, whatever is done or not done in form will be a reflection of that love. The content through love’s expression is communicated in some form because it has been chosen by our mind.
Your heart is the most important aspect of your being…that may sound controversial…in this world of doing…of personal “