Some Fears Around Sabbatical…
After almost two decades of teaching at Southern Maine Community College I finally decide to take advantage of their sabbatical program and apply for it…. not thinking I would actually get it… yet I did! Once again… be careful what you ask for in life… you may just get it.
Ok… now that it’s been a month after ALL final papers are approved and now I feel free and clear to purchase a thousand dollar airline ticket and arrange all that I need to plan my time away.
Sure, one of my sabbatical intentions is to be learning about international cooking, and the study and practice of spiritual truths right in the heart of Hindi and Buddhist land. Vipassana and mystical study will ensue. I plan on initially traveling to Varanasi, India where it is said is the spiritual capital of the world.
Only to find out that Varanasi is also home to Shiva and the Lord Shiva Temple. As well as the home of Annapurna Temple, the goddess of Food. Annapurna means… who gives complete food. As the name indicates the Annapurna temple is dedicated to the Goddess of Food. Food is a part of human survival and so the creation of a Goddess to worship is human attempt to be free from the fear of food scarcity. Annapurna Temple is said to keep Varanasi City free of Food Crisis.
OK then…. so what am I afraid of? Here’s the top 2 for now. I’m sure there will be more as time goes along…
- I spent the latter half of my life cultivating community and getting free from loneliness and isolation. There is a community I have at home that loves me, cares for me and looks out for me. Now I’m going by myself to a country where there is great poverty and I don’t speak the language. I fear the potential loneliness that will come with this trip.
- There are many children that are orphaned and there is very little money to help care for them. My heart isn’t sure how it’s going to be able to handle all of that. Especially when there are movies and documentaries out there that picture Hindi children getting maimed in order to pull at the heart strings of westerners with tender hearts such as myself.
As one of my teachers used to say…
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.
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.
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