This the last installment from last Sunday’s writing workshop.

During this assignment, Bonnie asked us to make contact with a young part of us during a time that we felt a yearning to make a connection with someone that either was met or not met.

I immediately saw me at six years old. “What would you like for dinner,” My grandmother asked. I felt really confused because no one had ever asked me this question before. She said, “You get to make the menu. You can have anything you want while you’re visiting. “ I felt special. I had a sense of being important to someone for the first time.

Minute steak, fried chicken, wheel potatoes, pinto beans and cornbread and good old turnip greens were all part of the menu for the next several days. No English peace, no green beans. I loved it!

In my house the menu was rigidly planned at the beginning of the week with no substitutes allowed. I was never asked about what I wanted yet was made to eat the English peas and green beans that did not taste good to me at all. I hated it!

It was rough growing up in my house . Fear and shame were the feelings I remember the most.

I think my grandmother may have saved my life.

She gave me hope. She told me that I was a good boy and God loved me very much. I believed her. She would listen to my hurt and lovingly wipe the tears from my eyes and hers.

I recall us attending  church on my last day of this first visit with her. The preacher quoted a scripture from the bible, Romans 3:23, I believe, ”For all have sinned and come short him of the glory of god. This really confused me. I couldn’t  believe it what I was hearing.

Then I just figured God hadn’t met my grandmother yet.

Mikey

Bonnie, our workshop leader gave this assignment: Go outside into nature, look around a go to the first thing that notice with any degree of curiosity. Think about it. Examine it. Feel it. Drop deeper and sense its essence. Listen to what it wants to say and write about it with no editing. I picked up a pinecone. Here is what the pinecone said.

I pick you up to examine you more closely than I’ve thought of taking the time to do before. The first thing I notice is your one broken steam, barley hanging on and seeming so fragile. This opens my heart. I then notice your sharp pointy edges at the tip of each of your steams.

How am I like you?

I too am fragile. I too have sharp pointy strategies for protecting my fragileness. They can and have hurt others and cause them to bleed, just like you.

As a young boy I used you to win fierce pinecone battles in neighbor’s back yards. I wore gloves to protect my tender hands from picking you up and blocking your brother pinecones being herald at me with no mercy.

How am I like you?

I use my intelligence, sharp wit and humor to protect me from anyone getting to close to my fragileness, and like you may never know what it’s like to be held tightly.

Are you dead or alive? I really do not know. Do you have a purpose, other than ammunition for pinecone wars or are you just taking up space? Did you die and fall to the ground while reaching for the heavens to just take up space or to give birth to another mighty pine? I do not know.

How am I like you?

In my brief existence as a man, I have come to know that I am more able to add more value to flow of life here on the ground than reaching for the heavens.

What I’m touched by in this moment is the simple feeling of AWE that the act of being present to you has opened up for me. Somehow during our brief encounter, the whole of eternity and grand cycle of life and mystery of it all opens itself to me, through you.

Thank you precious pinecone-holder of the secrets and barer of a glimpse into eternity.

I so want to embrace you, to bring you to my chest , hold you and squeeze you so tightly. Yet, I’m afraid it will hurt too much.

In Wholeness,  Michael

The theme for today’s writing workshop was Oneness. Five of us sat in the cozy living room of workshop leader Bonnie Sparling’s quaint  home.  Away from the summer heat, on this longest day of the year, we were invited to follow Bennie’s simple formula for writing from the deep: (my words not hers)

1. Finding an actual thing
2. Looking at it and thinking about it
3. Examining it closely
4. Feeling into it with our heart while looking at it
5. Closing our eyes and dropping into an even deeper connection with it
6. Asking our heart (essence) to do the unedited writing. Listening and writing what we hear.

We wrote about what Oneness means to us, Oneness with the natural world, Oneness with Self and Others and Oneness with the ordinary in Everyday Life.

We opened our journey with this piece from Hafiz:

Voices ring within each of us.

Voices cry within each of us.

Voices sing within each of us.

Let us hear, but not too much!

Let us hear but not too much!

For I must bring myself to listening

I must bring myself to your words.

And Rejoice!

The glory of the moments when your story touches mine!

Today five people’s our Stories touched one another.

We Rejoiced!

I’ll be sharing one or two of my unedited pieces over the next few days.  So stay tuned , if you like,  for a peek into my soul. May not be pretty but my soul’s story.

In Wholeness,

Michael

Bonnie Sparling is the founder of Flowery Prose and offers writing classes for everyone. She can be reached at FloweryProse@gmail.com or 404. 660.7705.

The hotel marquee reads; “Welcome Spearman Family Reunion.”

We are attending Leslie’s family reunion on the beautiful wide beaches of Daytona Beach, Florida. Lots of sun and rain;  plenty of laughs during hours of red neck golf on the beach; good seafood; celebrating some people’s successes and offering others support during their time of struggle;  a fair amount of ego, mostly healthy -I presume and a good deal of essence, particularly from Leslie’s 93 year old and wise Grandmother.  Her warm smile is a reminder to me that all is well.

If you’ve ever been to Daytona Beach you will understand  this description of contrast.

I’m writing  this from the  beach.  About twenty feet in front of me is the vast, mysterious emptiness of the Atlantic ocean.  The rhythmic sound of the crashing waves are right here in front of me, while smells of exhaust fumes from the cars and trucks that are aloud to cruise the beach are just behind me.

Yes, another recognition of how close ego and Essence can be to one another.

Beautifully exhausting!

In hu-hu-hu- Wholeness, Michael

From the SOULutions monthly newsletter:

The first step in developing an Aware Ego is to understand how all of the parts of your ego work. At this month’s Essence Circle, we are going to discuss Dr. Stone’s work of Voice Dialog. With this technique, we break the ego apart into its primary selves and have a conversation with each part. By doing this, we better understand the motivations and patterns behind our behavior.

Your ego’s number one job is protection. To cope with fear and vulnerability, it created a system of personality segments called primary selves. The captain, also known as the Protector, is the first-born. The co-captain or Controller comes next. Your ego can best protect you from vulnerability by controlling yourself, others, your environment, others’ perception of you and anything else it thinks it can control.

Under the protection of your Protector and the Controller, your ego-self began to form an interconnected team of primary selves. Examples of these may be the Rule Follower, the Pleaser, the Perfectionist, the Pusher, the Friend Maker, the Funny Self, the Responsible Self and as many others as you need. Each primary self is a control strategy to help you to fit in and get what you want and to feel safe.

During your process of socializing, you disowned many ways of being. The most commonly disowned parts are basic instincts like being selfish, angry or afraid. At around the age of seven years, your ego had developed a pretty solid team of primary selves. Most of us adopt about a half dozen main or “first-string” primary selves, also called sub-personalities. It is the job of the ego-team co-captains, the Protector and Controller, to choose the self you use in any given situation. While all of this is happening inside you at lightning speed, you are mostly unaware of it. Meeting and having a dialog with these sub-personalities is the beginning of developing an Aware Ego.

By the time you were a young adult, you had a highly functional ego-team or false self that you have mistaken as being the real you. The problem is that this false self causes most people to suffer from feelings of alienation, shame and unworthiness. The real you is a unique soul, an embodied presence, a spiritual being or what I call Essence. Your Essence has been covered up by your false self because of its need to protect and become functional in the world.

You can learn about the origins of this work in the classic work of Dr. Hal Stone, Embracing Your Many Selves. In my private practice, I offer two options, a six-month Ego to Essence program or my six-session, Finding the Aware Ego.

For more information on my private practice programs, call me directly at 404-246-1036 for a free 20-minute consultation.

In Wholeness, Michael