Tiny Stories

• His shoulders sagged. He was tired. He knew he messed up—and big. Nothing he said to himself made him feel better. Cheating on his girlfriend made him sick. He didn’t even love the other woman. In fact, if he never saw her again, he’d be happy. His girlfriend possessed everything he ever wanted from a woman. Her sweet nature and grace captivated him the first time he met her. And she was the goofiest, funniest person he knew. They laughed often and hard. So why? Why did he do it? He felt he deserved nothing. He felt worthless.

• She curled into a ball, the quilt that her mama made her twisting into her. If she could follow her mama, she would. Life without her seemed impossible. She prayed for the oblivion of sleep to take her far far away.

• Bombs shook the ground. The little girl clung to her older brother. He was the only one left. Her brother held her, but she could feel the quiver of his muscles. The children just wanted to smell their mama’s cooking and hear their papa laugh again. War is hell.

Never-Ending Suffering

Suffering… It comes to each of us, in micro and macro doses. As I’ve promised from the beginning of launching The Creator’s Compass, I will not sugarcoat things. There is too much of that in modern spiritual dialogue. But I do understand and empathize with the sugarcoating. After all, we tend to gravitate towards words that soothe us. It comes from a good place of craving to relieve our pains and the pains of others, from the seemingly insignificant crying of a newborn baby, to the fear of a terminally ill person. In the end, we all want peace and joy.

I believe, down into the marrow of my bones, that true relief from suffering comes to us by both letting go of control, in all senses of that phrase, and intellectual study. These two practices are not easy, to put it lightly. But both raise our awareness of Source. In Buddhist understanding, when our awareness unfurls into its unbounded expanse, suffering transforms into wisdom and compassion.

Green Tara

In Tibet, there is a figure called Green Tara, a fully enlightened female buddha, born from the tear of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of immeasurable compassion. Tara embodies pure active compassion, ready to step into anyone’s suffering and help them find their worth, and immense innate beauty that no mistake or hideous situation can sully or even touch.

In the stories of Green Tara, she is youthful, beautiful, cloaked in green and adorned in jewels. Typically, you will see her sitting crossed-legged, with one foot extended out symbolizing her active compassion to all sentient beings who are afraid and suffering.

Prayers to Green Tara are very common in the Tibetan Buddhist community, and, in this way, she serves as a means of letting go of control. She isn’t a “real” being in the normal way we think as real. She is a representation of an aspect of ultimate reality. The practice of Green Tara so beautifully and gently brings us back home to our eternal never-sullied-by-any-action-or-circumstance nature.

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The Painting

Some of us are curled into the suffering of a loss right now. Some of us are trapped in war, huddled with loved ones in absolute terror. Some of us have face-planted in the mud of unsavory behavior. There is so much suffering. When I am able not to weep for all that non-stop suffering and remember our untouchable nature, there is a softening in my awareness, an opening, an exhale of faith that life is good.

As a way to sink my feet deeper into the ground of loving-kindness for others and for myself, I painted Green Tara in watercolor. What emerged was strictly my interpretation, deviating from original Tibetan depictions. I enjoyed breaking free from the expected norm, finding my own artistic voice.

I hope, if you have suffering, that your pain softens with the comfort of Source’s unbounded love for you. OM TARE TUTTARE TURE SOHA

I send you light and love,

Renee

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PURITY :

“freedom from adulteration or contamination”

A few weeks back, I sat under the Redbud tree in front of my home. This gorgeous tree announcing spring embraced its full glory.

My soul paused. Something was nearing.

Then it struck.

A collision of mind slamming into mind.

It was not a horrible collision, but it wasn’t pleasant, either. I’m always grateful when a rod in my eye is removed, however painful the procedure.

What struck me was that I’ve walked through life in an unconscious sort of quiet desperation, trying to remain good—trying to be pure.

I gulped, clearly seeing I’ve tiptoed in the confusing mud of life timidly so as not to splash the filth of muddy impurity on me by impure speech, impure action, and impure intentions (these being Buddhist ideals). Think I succeeded? Laughable. I have limited understandings. I am still puppeteered by confusions, fears, and hopes.

And so, my tiptoeing toes couldn’t prevent me from missteps. It didn’t matter anyways. I’d misstep if I walked in life’s mud flatfooted, or crawled, or swam.

But WHY does the ideal of purity feel so yucky to me?

As I sat under that tree of lavender glory and wrestled with this ideal of purity that has me in a choke hold, I kept returning to my theory that the concept of purity is MISUSED to perpetuate shame and guilt for simply living and running through life’s muddy swamps.

Shame on us for daring to live before we’ve got it all figured out!

After all, shame and guilt are tried and true ways in which to mentally enslave oneself to one’s deepest fears of inadequacies, enhancing the prevalent feelings many hold of not being of worth. We unconsciously use purity hooked to shame and guilt to validate our fears and to manipulate others. Religions do a splendid job of this, too.

So, if we trip in the mud and hurt ourselves or someone else, are we now impure? Contaminated? Adulterated?

Are we impure just being human?

If we cease to buy into not being contaminated, I suppose we’re free to do anything our animal brains dictate? Throw our feces at each other like chimps? That’s the fear, yes? The fear that if we don’t adhere to the ideal of purity, we release ourselves from personal responsibility. But that’s an ignorant conclusion, stemming from a small heart and a contracted view of reality (said the Redbud petals that fell into my lap).

I used to teach yoga to children with Downs Syndrome, and, I have to admit, if purity in a human exists, it exists in those children. Their palpable love reaching towards anyone aware snatches you by the heart and pulls you in. Yet, those children weren’t free from complexity. They had meltdowns, anger, and made mistakes, too. Are we to say they are impure?

Many express that babies are pure. Pure how? Yes, they have yet to activate free will, and consequently, can’t fumble while learning how to live with purpose and meaning. They don’t yet bear the marks of falling into mud.

On the positive side, aiming for the nebulous ideal of purity can be an attempt to encourage more mindful, compassionate behavior.

But do not muddy swamps feed the sweet sunshine on warmed grasses and wildflowers found at its banks? And isn’t true that if we stand on the other side of the bank and wish to get to the wildflowers it’s inevitable we must splash through the mud, making mistakes small and big while confronting life challenges (heartaches, fears, and anxieties)? Is not the mud the teaching grounds?

Who wants to feel impure?

No one likes the idea of feeling dirty, impure, tainted. That’s why this ideal can wield us into submission to our deep fears and into group mentalities of all different flavors.

Christians believe Jesus relieved humanity of the burden of purity by taking on human sin. I find that teaching helpful for untangling from thinking purity is an attainable external, though it does sink a believer deep into the shame of viewing their essence as sinful or impure. Though in my heart/mind, Jesus is something much more. He rose magnificently on the tides of love and compassion.

Buddhists tend to the ideal of purity, also. It is taught our nature is compassion and wisdom, with no beginning and no end. This is often referred to as pure. I know, I’ve chanted, visualized, and meditated on this concept thousands of times. Am I brainwashing myself? Interestingly, it seems to me, Jesus embodies this Buddhist concept.

In these Buddhist pointing out truths on the nature of ourselves, which means not to attach to concepts, our challenge lies in recognizing that ignorance shrouds our ability to behold our true nature—ignorance being the mud, which, to make this more confusing, is in the end, neither good nor bad.

The Buddhist approach frees us from identifying ourselves with a sinful nature, while not denying the real-world effects of harmful behavior and the need to take personal responsibility.

Taken this way, the yucky feelings of the profaned idea of purity loses it’s power over me. I can then see this concept as an idea, in a myriad of ideas, attempting to answer big and bold questions. In essence, I can relate to purity as another color of human minds and hearts, wrestling with how to live a meaningful and joyful life.

Soul-trekking

If we are alive, we will find ourselves in muddy waters and swamps. Figuring out this soul-stuff isn’t a dance-in-the-meadow-with-flowers-in-your-hair-wearing a-white-cotton-dress. Taking on an honest soul-trek forces us to embrace personal responsibility and remove the rods out of our eyes. It’s painful, breaking free of the rods of assumptions and beliefs we inherited from family, friends, and community. Maybe we find some of those assumptions were wise and sound, but if we don’t question them we are more robotic than free agents, and engage our free wills quite infrequently.

Engaging soul-stuff is fraught with suffering, but if the Buddhists are correct, while we soul-trek, we may discover the play of it all—the mud and wildflowers, the guilt and self-love, the sun and moon. And we may finally remove the cataracts from our eyes, those rods, to see a reality that is grander than the commonly used and simplistic, provincial understanding of purity.

Choosing to soul-trek is simply us doing our best to figure out what this LIFE is all about. How we are a part of it all. What Source really is. What we really are. What it all MEANS. Soul-trekking is sifting through the sands of our consciousness to find Truth for ourselves. If you’ve ever trekked you know the challenges; the desire to quit, the fortitude not to, the sweat, the glory, the misery, and the satisfaction. And that kind of life kicks us in the pants sometimes because we aren’t safeguarded by society telling us what to think and believe. Damn courageous, I say.

After much time chewing on these ideas of purity, I gazed up at the Redbud flowers, washed white by the sun and felt a clarity of heart more than mind, and concluded that as squishy mud spurts between our toes, we need not berate ourselves when we make errors, lose balance, face plant in the muckiest mud, or slip up in a thousand different ways. The mud is our classroom.

All that rang so right to me under the lavender shadows of the tree, but a gnawing hole still needed attending to, and it took me another two minutes or so to realize what the hole was: Just because the mud and missteps are our classroom doesn’t give us an excuse to not take personal responsibility and declare when we misstep, “I won’t make that mistake again.”

But what if we do make the same mistake twice, thrice, or more? When I do, I repeat my declaration while determining ways to break past habits by understanding personal motivations and past traumas. Good times? Umm… define good. What I can say is that this willingness to free ourselves from rods in our eyes brings with it a deepening relaxation of self; a melting of an ice cube in warm waters (to be poetic).

Sending light and love,

Renee

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“You’re a fool,” she said, “to think you can succeed. Look at the statistics. Be reasonable.”

I swallowed my hurt down into my big toe so I didn’t appear weak. But the thing was, I felt weak. What if she was right? What if I was doomed to fail?

“Besides,” she continued, her diamond bracelet glistening in the hot sun, “no one makes real money with art.”

She sure didn’t. She married into wealth to a guy that after he proposed, she came to me and sobbed into my arms because he had cheated on her.

“Some people make it as an artist,” I stammered lamely, my martini that she had bought wobbling in my hand.

“Those people, dear, get a foot in the door with their looks.”

Her gaze traveled me up and down, from my yellow Walmart tank top to my scuffed TJ Max shoes, all with a smile of pity in her eyes.

Was this what hatred feels like?

Learning to navigate our matrix

Have you ever experienced that kind of a ‘dressing down’ from someone posturing confidence? If you have, I’m sorry you experienced that. It’s awful to be cut into pieces with words, looks and innuendos. Sometimes it’s so subtle you think you’re going mad, convinced you are imagining such cruelty.

Gaslighting, or out-right obvious unkindness, can be discombobulating and actually is experienced as shock, for our core nature is loving-kindness and unkindness confuses our emotional bodies.

Yet, in the world we find ourselves in, or to borrow the over-borrowed idea—the matrix we believe we are stuck in—dealing with unkind behavior from

• ourselves to ourselves,

• or ourselves to others,

• or others to us,

is the reality we need to learn how to navigate.

Anchor emotion with reason

In Tibetan Buddhism, it is held as a practice not to condemn the ugliness we perceive, but to use the ugliness as the path to enlightenment by putting compassion into real- world action. It’s action in the middle of human dysfunction (think politics). It’s action when we feel horrible, sick, or plain tired. It’s action in the face of the endless, cruel competition that drives modern society at the expense of others’ well-being.

Through engaging compassion mindfully beyond its mere concept, the Tibetan Buddhists found the ultimate compass. Imagine taking up compassion with intent as our compass. In my experience thus far, that compass always leads us back home to ourselves, allowing us to pop out of the matrix and see reality just as it is.

Buddhist scholars came to this understanding through observation and reason, not religious dogma, although Buddhism as a religion has formed around it. Observation and reason are vital components in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, where questions of anything and everything are welcomed and embraced, for truth doesn’t shudder at questions but delights in the opportunity to pierce through ignorance and bring peace. Just a few honest moments can teach us that we need reason to pop out of the matrix so as not to chain ourselves inside of it with untethered emotionalism. We need the anchor of reason to right the plane straight so we don’t plummet to the ground and explode in a million pieces of confusion.

This is not to say feelings are insignificant. Emotions and all that comes with them make us human. If it weren’t for emotions, we’d be robotic, lifeless, and without inspiration.

Imagine a life void of all love, anger, joy, giggles, and passionate embraces. Horrible.

Likewise, imagine a life void of reason. Picture the absurd state you’d be in not knowing how to do anything, your body simply in a constant state of emoting. Total chaos.

Obviously we need both emotion and reason to fly straight, to live in equanimity.

I think many of us feel that reason is cold and heartless. We may have come to believe compassion is at odds with reason. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Compassion is a state of equanimity, containing the feelings of empathy and love and the wisdom of knowing how and when to help yourself and others.

It isn’t reason that’s cold, it’s the quitting too soon within a progression of reasoning that falls short. And so many of us quit when the bitter winds pelt our faces, not seeing the warm valleys ahead.

Facing unkindness by covering our own feet

So, we find ourselves in the matrix, and our tools to break free from spinning endlessly into the vortex of mental oblivion are reason and emotion. But how the heck can these tools help us when dealing with someone being mean? How do we engage compassion in the real world?

When a careless, maybe equally confused person as ourselves, throws daggers at us with downright nasty words, it stings. We are hurt. Then our bodies buzz as the nervous system goes into overdrive protection mode. This makes our thoughts fire off like hot licks of flames.

We find ourselves in a total inward meltdown.

However, we have our tools, one of which is useless in the immediate moment of being hurt, our emotions. But reason waits in the wings, ready to come to our defense. All we need to do, for reason to draw its sword, is to pause in the face of the unkind person, despite maybe wanting to knock their head off.

In the pause, reason has room to take over. Having the space to breathe, our minds can hold at bay our emotions, and remind ourselves that the person in front of us, despite our visceral reaction to them in that moment, is confused and hurt themselves (otherwise they would not be acting like that). Like I mentioned in Part 1 of Hurt People Hurt People, this reminding is compassion in action, and compassion is the sharpened edge of Reason’s sword. And once the sword is employed, our emotions can dance freely without the nefarious side effects of creating unnecessary damage to ourselves or others by reacting in kind instead of thoughtfully responding with wisdom.

Logical people might read this and puff with pride. But they should quell the dragon of arrogance, for emotions sustain life. They are the vehicle for manifested love on earth. And when coupled with reason, emotions become a mirror of self (self-reflection), the reflection able to seek out ultimate truth.

Practicing real-life compassion can taste awful when forced to confront meanness, like our body is being forced to eat putrid meat. But, the thing is, that reaction is our emotional body gasping in hurt and when we nurture our emotions with the balm of reason, facing hurt people acting mean-spiritedly, gets easier.

We can summarize compassion in action as not covering the entire world with leather to cushion our feet, instead it is covering our individual feet, thus ceasing to spread our hurt and putting an end to spinning into our own matrix of misery.

The beauty of being human

To be poetic—emotions are the flower drinking in the sun, and reason is the soil anchoring the flower. Or, emotions are the breath inside the notes and reason is the logic of scales and harmony.

I may be overly-poetic to some of you, but really, isn’t the dance between emotion and reason actually magic? There is no beauty when one outshines the other. Implicit in gratitude of the human being is beholding both. We lose nothing and gain immeasurable fulfillment when we learn how to use the tools available to us.

We aren’t robots, and we aren’t doomed to spin endlessly in chaotic whirlpools of emotion. We can harness reason and emotion in equal measure, and when done well, peace is present.

It’s a peace that is rooted and eternal.

It’s a peace that gives others around us comfort.

Within those times hurt people hurt us, we are given the opportunity to rise into the understanding of our higher selves, that aspect of us which is the ground of all that is good, loving, and true.

When our triggers are harnessed with reason, when compassion holds the sword of reason and glistens with emotion, we become a point of peace in this world. How beautiful.

Sometimes I practice well, sometimes I don’t and I lose my way only to nurture resentment towards people that have been ugly to me. But I’ve found in myself, over time, with concerted focus and pure intention to honor this life, so much growth and a deepening real-life, not just hopeful words in my head, compassion, that state beyond embracing, but inclusive of, emotion. In other words, compassion is seeping from my head and into my heart.

I foresee that being able to view even the most hurt among us with the eyes of unadulterated compassion could only be total freedom. I pray that I’ve only tasted a drop of compassion and that the entire ocean of loving-kindness is readying itself to enfold into the awareness of which I am.

And, at that point, I’ll pop fully out of the matrix and realize that I never was in it to begin with.

Sending light and love,

Renée

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How to keep cool in the face of someone being unkind, or a straight up jerk, often takes an unearthly strength, let alone keeping the flame of compassion alive for the unkind person.

Just last month, someone poked fun of my looks. This has been happening since grade school and am quite accustomed to it, but I am stunned that people are still awful as older adults. I did my best not to get swallowed by hurt and lifted my chin, pretending all was fine. But was it? No.

The evening of this individual’s remark I grew angry, imagining dressing him down, shaming him. I can have a wickedly witty tongue when I want. Yet, what good would that do? I suppose the only real thing to have done was to point out he was being hurtful. My instinct to not begin a confrontation stopped me. I wish it hadn’t, because when I don’t, I’m left with anger for not standing up for myself. This person being a jerk is an example of when my compass of compassion gets rusty and it takes a lot of discipline to not succumb to anger, one of the five poisons according to Vajrayana Buddhism.

Hurt people hurt people.

My story is not unique. We all get hurt. And we all hurt others on occasion, often unconsciously so. I can honestly say I have never intentionally hurt anyone, and I venture to guess, the readers here, have in large part, never intentionally hurt anyone either.

Given the nature of life, and the confusions and pains that we carry deeply embedded in our very bones, it’s inevitable that we hurt others simply by our sheer ignorance, arising from being blind to our true nature of compassion and wisdom. We go through our days the best we know how, bumping into each other and tossed around by our confusions like leaves in a storm. It would all be humorous, except for the fact that sufferings are great, and real consequences occur from our confused actions.

The more hurt we fling around, the more confusion that is whipped up, smacking sharp sands of dust into our blinded eyes. When hurt is hurled at us from a fellow confused soul, our hands tremble to hit back. Yet we have the free will to pause, and instead, pick up our sword of compassion.

In those moments our swords are heavy, maybe quite unwanted. After all, in these moments, our base instincts may be to scream and hurl hurt back. It’s like a dang tennis match, the ball being the hurt, and whoever “wins” has the strongest backhand. In reality, the winner is the one who breaks their racquet. And that is the beginning of a life filled with peace and joy, even if that beginning is hard as hell.

I’ve found it helpful to activate compassion for those that hurt us by reminding myself they wouldn’t be such a jerk if they were not hurting also. If you are prone to defend yourself in the moment, it may help to quell reactionary instincts to repeat the words, “hurt people hurt people” until you relax and can think clearly in order to respond wisely, if a response is even necessary. Many times patiently ignoring someone being unkind is the way to respond. Not easy, but peace is difficult to come by at times.

Meeting unkindness with compassion isn’t excusing deplorable behavior, its a skillful way to not sink deeper into our own suffering by keeping the tennis ball of hurt in play. If we continue to play, the ball will inevitably be smacked back to our side of the court. And possibly, if we stop the game and meet an offender’s unkindness with compassion, they may realize they also can rise above their hurts.

From my understanding at this point in life, stopping the game begins with a path towards discovering our true nature, a path of awakened mind. As we lift the curtain of ignorance, inch by inch, we gain greater awareness and clarity of the nature of reality and are able to behold not only our own awesome nature, but also the awesome nature of others. With an ability to maintain this profound view, hurting others by our actions stops. The tennis match of hurt naturally ends. In fact, the desire to hurt the offending party vanishes. The game stops. It does because our nature is compassionate, and compassion isn’t bound to the ego, ready to defend itself.

When we end the karmic cycle of exchanging pain for pain, active compassion is natural, like heat to a flame. There is no more ‘trying’ to be compassionate. It feels akin to stepping inside your home after being gone for an extended period of time, because we are coming home to our nature of loving-kindness.

And our suffering melts away like dew on a flower in the early morning sun.

Of course our presence very well may continue to hurt others, but not because of our actions, but because they are caught in the winds of suffering stemming from confusion, and project their suffering onto us.

Yet, if we are holding our compass of compassion, keeping the energy of compassion continually fresh and alive, it touches others, consciously or unconsciously, and our lives gain great purpose.

When I hear stories of people who have gone through horrid nearly unthinkable atrocities and are still able to shine as angels on this earth, I’m more than humbled. They help keep my compass polished. They are my heroes. If they can hold steady in faith, confidence, and compassion, I am surely capable of quelling my ego when confronted with an ugly side of a human being. Until every curtain is lifted and the light of understanding hits each of our minds, I will not stop believing in all of us beholding the wonder and sheer beauty of ourselves, even in the face of unkindness, or cruelty.

It’s challenging to look past unkindness. It hurts when others are mean-spirited. The only way out of the pain that I’ve found is to polish my compass and hold steady against the storm by remembering my own past ignorance, and acknowledging my ignorance yet not lifted. Then I repeat until my body feels it, “hurt people hurt people.” If I stay steady within this view, I soften. Sometimes I soften instantly and in the moment of a confrontation, other times the softening takes time, maybe days or months. I must say, when soft I am at peace, and the stains of pain I experience dissolve in direct correlation to how quickly I’m able to soften.

I hope my thoughts and explorations on confronting unkind behavior helps us bind together as a force of ever clearer, calmer, and more loving individuals. We all need support to help our ripple effects from our actions cause beautiful songs to reach into the infinite expanse.

Sending you light, love, and the confidence to hold compassion steady amidst unkindness. I stand with you.

Renee

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Dear Readers,

Have you ever heard of the song, “Shut de door, keep out de devil?” This song’s title so often encapsulates what it feels like to be around people anymore.

If we look at humanity from a bird's-eye view, we are one giant split heart. We are not just shutting the door to the devil, but to each other. We’re sick, and what we need is a genuine connection with one another, and with ourselves.

We are severing from each other as we sever our heads from our hearts. Politics, religion, sensations of scarcity, and financial systems crumbling under obscene power, act as the swords to our throats.

I get it—I flinch around people anymore, afraid of being hurt. My fearful self wants to deadbolt the door shut.

Yet we aren’t built to shut the door to each other. It makes us sick. How could it not? Doors separate us, and, after time, we grow fragile. But there is an important distinction between being alone and isolating oneself out of fear. The former can contain connection, the latter grows weak without connection.

When we sever ourselves from one other out of fear, we sever from a wealth of beautiful opportunities to embrace our inheritance of compassion, and a rich life is one lived in compassion. In Tibetan Buddhism, compassion is considered a masculine principle and wisdom a feminine principle. In this way, compassion is viewed as active and not just as something we feel. To put it simply, compassion is wisdom and loving-kindness in action.

Sharing sunsets

In uncertain times, it would be the wise and noble thing to do to courageously open the door and invite others into our inner world.

Scary? Hell yes.

Exhausting? Yes…well at first.

Will we get hurt again? Probably sometimes.

Choosing to live shut off may feel safer in the short term, but long term our suffering magnifies. Sharing and connecting is the human experience. And isolation is a thief, robbing the world of our gifts we have to offer, as well as robbing us of receiving from others.

My dad has the sweetest definition of marriage. He says, “Marriage is sharing the sunset together.” Simple. This need not be applied just to marriage. It can be applied to any meaningful relationship. Yet, how many of us aren’t looking at the sunset together? How many times do we refuse to share the bounty of life? When I bake a fresh loaf of sourdough bread, my joy for the bread triples when I see my husband go back for more and more slices. Isn’t that expansion of joy true of anything we have, whether it’s a gift we share or a dinner we create?

In America, the country was united for a brief time during the beginning of COVID. People’s hearts were connected. Then the severing began. The mighty hands of politics, fear, and belief shoved people. We put on team jerseys for whatever team we convinced ourselves was the right one. How miserable we grew, even if what we stood for was true, for it all resulted in thousands of unshared sunsets.

Share sunsets, and be like water

Imagine a healthy ocean and its horizon touching a magnificent sunset and sharing that awe with a loved one.

Yet how do we do that when all we want to do is slam the door hard shut? How do we share sunsets when we are scared? My answer is to mirror water. Healthy waters require boundaries and an open softness. Healthy waters nourish the earth and are the veins that course through all life. Being nourished water as a human is in the discovery of boundaries born out of realized compassion for self and others while recovering the sweet gentleness we are born with that may be sheltering because of past trauma.

Softening is a crumbling of our fears over and over again until what’s left is a heart full of compassion, so much so that whatever fears may linger, they are mere shadows.

At that point, hurts we experience are bubbles on the ocean of our souls.

Our hearts are the portals to compassion. Connecting to our hearts over and over again is how we soften. Do this enough and your presence to yourself and others is naturally soft, kind, warm, and strong. In essence, we become like water, soft and powerful, able to sculpt a canyon.

When we experience pain, our tendency is to retract, to shrink, to protect. Retraction is important, but only for short periods of time to give honor to whatever hurt us. After listening to the message of hurt, we heal by connecting to our hearts, those portals to our innate compassion. If we continue to practice this, we may see that we emerge stronger and with a deeper strength of loving-kindness and a wiser understanding of healthy boundaries.

Shut de door is rooted in the idea of the devil snatching your soul in the night. If we give ourselves permission to derive a meaning that wasn’t intended, we can view the song as maintaining healthy boundaries (keeping the devil out) while keeping our light of compassion lit (the light of Jesus).

I open my door

What if I had kept my door shut? For starters, I would never have connected with any of you. That thought is a sad one, as this newsletter has privileged me to connect, learn and gain wisdom from some of the most wonderful and insightful readers and writers around. What a gift you all have given. Because of such, we can carry forth a brighter and bigger torch of healing compassion to more people longing for their inheritance of connection.

There are many suffering souls experiencing disconnection. Like me, they, too, long for the power of real, non-sugary-sweet and non-overly-sentimental medicine of compassion. There is something magical in us that recognizes the medicine even if we are unsure of how to take it. We sense compassion really can ignite true healing, and we hold it in the palm of our hand.

Let’s continue to help each other learn how and when to prop our doors open, even if only a sliver, while recovering our softness that has sheltered under our fears for possibly a little too long.

Thank you, dear readers, for being here.

With love,

Renee

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Ghosts, witches, pumpkins, scary stories, candy, costumes, spiders, and bats. These are a few of the things that pop into my mind when I consider Halloween.

Yet the most pressing consideration for me is: why do people get so excited about death and spooky things, when dying is the root fear for the vast majority of us?

If we look deeply into the human heart, fear of death, and the loss of loved ones to death, touches all other fears, for death contains the unknown, and imagined possible annihilation of self and others.

So, why a day to honor our greatest fear?

In order to understand why we honor the spooky scary things of life on Halloween, we need to look backwards

A brief side note here on looking at interesting history: I want to highlight a beautifully-written substack publication called BERKANA, which uncovers forgotten histories with an unusual depth of spirit.

We often celebrate Halloween without consideration of its roots. Instead, we are carried by the winds of current tradition and cultural habits with little thought. Over time, Halloween’s traditions shifted and morphed until our collective memory for the roots of this interesting holiday became a dim light upon on a distant hill. There is nothing innately wrong with this. However, we can go towards that distant light on the hill to rediscover how and why Halloween exists at all.

Samhain: the hallowed time of an ancient world

Halloween’s earliest known roots are in the ancient Gaelic, or Celtic, pagan festival of Samhain. This festival marked the end of harvest and the beginning of winter. It was an important time of transition, and was seen as a thin veil between this world and the next, allowing communication with the dead.

Samhain was an acknowledgment of nature and of the unknown, marked by spiritual traditions with wide sweeps of folklore and sprinkles of political intimidation. Like so many human creations, it was a mixed bag of the awesome and the profane. On the side of the awesome, Samhain was a way to face with collective courage and curiosity those things which are bigger than our individual selves, like nature and death.

Today, the holiday of Halloween (predominately celebrated in America and Canada) carries influences of Samhain. Halloween enthusiasts clad themselves in an endless array of customs, echoing the practice of disguise against unwanted ghosts during the Samhain festivities. And when people carve our jack-o’-lanterns, they are carrying forth the tradition of hollowed guards used as lanterns from the long ago Celtic world.

Yet Halloween is a distant cousin of Samhain. It is a morphed version, helped in large part by Christianity’s attempt centuries ago to override the pagan holiday with their own version. In the 9th century Pope Gregory created All Saints’ Day, on November 1, with All Souls’ Day, following on November 2, containing prayer and fasting. In fact, Halloween (the contracted All Hallows Eve) is most commonly celebrated on October 31, the eve of All Saint’s Day, also known All Hallows Eve.

After all the mishmash of traditions vying for spiritual authority, Halloween has strangely become not so much a celebration of transition and folklore, or prayer and fasting, but one of play and fun. It’s a day in which children dress in cute costumes of little skunks or princesses, adults dress as sexy versions of almost any form (witches, nurses, pirates ect…), and gore and fright parade as caricatures of folklore or nightmare—all of it topped with loads of candy! (I’m not complaining.)

Maybe I’ve missed something and Halloween is still collectively celebrated with spiritual intent, but I don’t recall bigger than life folklore, or spiritual significance of nature’s transition embedded in my childhood experience of Halloween. Although, perhaps we like to assume those imagined Celtic people of the past moved with more meaning than we do to give us a hope we can recover our sense of mystery and awe of life as we embed ourselves ever deeper into the cyber matrix, bending over for the master of the Screen.

Even if many participants of Samhain and All Saints Day didn’t celebrate with intention of the spiritual, do not the beginnings of the ancient Celtic tradition, and even Christianity’s attempt to override Samhain, hold a depth and meaning that the modern American Halloween lacks? Our Halloween is far more a hedonistic play than a meaningful time of transition.

Loss of meaning

Culture is losing depth and the willingness to grapple with subtlety in order to uncover our thirst for a meaningful life. Maybe it’s the commercialization of nearly everything that swipes away the color of our days, or perhaps it is a collective fear of the unknown turned into laziness. Whatever the reason, in order to create, discover and share meaning with others, we need to be willing to face the unknown and ask questions in uncomfortable waters until we find Ultimate Truth.

Stepping off the comfortable path, we risk pain, but oh, we discover treasures! Nothing in my life that is the most meaningful has come to me because I stayed on a path, afraid to venture into the woods. Only when I brazenly step off old paths do my treasures come rushing to me, like long-lost friends.

New, or fresh, paths are scary, causing us to tremble. Questions about death, dying, living, the universe and our place in it are no different. These inquisitive explorations are all fresh paths that create internal tension. Unfortunately, tension hurts. That is, until we realize a diamond is being created, and the tension becomes a play of the old dissolving into the new. And in my opinion, finding Ultimate Truth is the most exquisite diamond in the human experience.

I admire the willingness of the ancient Celtic culture who allowed nature to usher them into grappling with the unknown, the first step of finding Truth.

Magical Soul

Whether or not you enjoy witches, pumpkins, candy, or spooky things, there is something magical about fall. It is a season when the air grows crisper, and the energy of nature quiets down. Fall is a time to ponder that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but is ever transformed. I find this idea of transformation bittersweet. The beauty and terror of death in one sense, but eternity in another, squeezes my heart. These two ideas of death and eternity holding each other in an unwavering embrace is something I don’t pretend to truly understand, and maybe never will.

Yet, even with the absence of fully understanding nature, if we are able to reflect the embrace of death and eternity reflected in nature’s transformation within our awareness, a calm courage blossoms and we feel ready to grapple with those big, often uncomfortable questions pertaining to death and our very existence in this unfathomable universe.

As our awareness guides us, both intellectual and experiential, into discovering Ultimate Truth, we become a magical soul, our very breath a mirror onto our awareness, and maybe the unfathomable quality of reality loses those sharp, gripping edges of fear. And maybe our loss of loved ones becomes awe to replace overpowering sorrow.

For those of us who celebrate Halloween, as we step into our costumes and/or carve our pumpkins, our Celtic ancestors who celebrated Samhain sing for us to remember the veil between what is familiar, and the unfathomable ultimate nature of reality.

Now THAT is magic!

Until next time, my friends, remember your magic. I send you light and love. Happy Halloween!

Renee

Hello everyone. I am so happy that you are a part of The Creator’s Compass, a place where we explore how to live our lives with meaning and purpose by diving more deeply into what it actually takes to do so in real life. When we apply reason without denying the heart, our thoughts, ethics, and dreams begin to unify and we find peace and joy.

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Where have I been?

I went to visit my family who live far away from me. Being physically present to the ones we love is precious and, if taken for granted, we hurt ourselves. I suppose that is the single silver lining living a part from family—realizing the importance and preciousness of moments with loved ones. Although love is eternal, time doesn’t stop for our desire to forever touch and hold those we cherish.

Between morning talks with my Dad over coffee, lunch on the back porch with Mom as the mountains loom shadows over the lake in the distance, sister time, embracing the delights of being an aunt with all the fun and none of the mommy responsibility (shout out to my sister!), and dipping toes in a mountain lake, I stole tidbits of time to edit portions of my third novel. I found it odd to read my work away from home, as if the story was both familiar and new. I’d say, changing locations when editing is my newest lesson in the writing process. Below are a couple photos of my time visiting family.

(I never include photos of family and friends unless I get their permission, and I keep forgetting to ask! I hope in the near future I’ll obtain such permissions. And a lot of photos of me feels horribly close to narcissism!)

As I continue to edit my novel at home, I vacillate between pride and despair. Oh, the tender human heart! Seemingly endless details interweave throughout a novel, boggling the writer’s mind (well, my mind) and I’m filled with a sense of awe that I accomplished such a feat. That is until, halfway through the second edit of the novel, I catch one of my character’s eyes shift from blue to green with a golden speck in the left eye. Okay, when did I decide such an important detail needed a complete change? I spin into fictional conversations when one of my characters decides to turn a corner I didn’t know existed, such as eye an color change. A conversation may go like this:

Me: “Hey, why didn’t you tell me you up and changed your eye color?”

Character: “I told you when you wrote it.”

Me: “But you gave me no warning. That’s crazy-making.”

Character: “Um, you’re the writer, so you must be the crazy-maker.”

Me: “You’re being mean. I created you, for goodness’ sake! Without me, you’d not be.”

Character: “You prove my point. I think you’re a bit out of your tree. Maybe take some Ginkgo biloba? I’ve been told it’s great for brain health. You obviously need something.”

Yes, writing fiction is a play with multiple personalities. The thing that separates a writer from a person called “crazy” is the degree to which one loses oneself in the play of personalities.

Anyway, I like to assume that, subconsciously, when I changed my character’s eye color, it was a plea for more fantastical elements in my story. That would not surprise me. My first two novels are mystical, brimming with the ethereal magic that quietly exists in the mundane. Both of these fantastical novels wait patiently in the wings for their time to shine as I polish this third ‘baby’ with apparent eye-changing magic. Though, I’m beginning to consider the first two aren’t waiting so patiently?

Is editing a novel terrible?

Editing is a task many authors abhor, but it’s a creative journey I enjoy. In the nuances of the sentences, I can wave my wand and turn or float or fly an idea closer to the feeling and image I hold in my mind’s eye of the character or scene. These images, only I will ever behold, are ideals of the story, and if I hit the mark, my written words merge closer and closer to my story’s ideals. To fly near an ideal, I must not allow too much tight thinking when I edit, for I’ll destroy the character and/or scene. Of course, if I’m too lax, there is no structure or coherence.

Life is always a balancing act, isn’t it?

Penning a story is much like drawing a bow across violin strings. The strings need to be taut — not too loose, not too tight. When my writing and editing strings are strung just right, the warm light of my story’s ideal hit the words and my heart blooms in satisfaction. There is always a hum in the soul when this happens. And, when the strings are loose, they produce no sound, and when they are rigid, my ears are assaulted with screechy, string-fraying noise.

Importantly, when the writing strings don’t have that perfect tautness, there is a tension around my solar plexus accompanied by a slight sour stomach, even if I work hard to deny it, which I often do, for laziness is an alluring siren.

Portals to self-compassion

In shining light on my writing process, I am in no way insinuating I’m an elite writer, but I am the only one who can create my stories and offer them to the world. No one else has the blueprint I was born with or the experiences I’ve accumulated throughout my life to hold my stories in their minds. But that’s the same for each of us. We all are unique with miraculous creative potential, primed and ready to present our gifts to the world. And I believe this embracing of our unique gifts, manifested by creative acts, can be a portal to self-compassion.

From my experience, when I create, I find an endless well of peace and joy. It soothes my parched throat with the elixir from the well of those sublime waters, and I find it infinitely easier to hold myself with compassion.

It seems immersing myself into waters of the sublime to create naturally awakens self-compassion, for I’m in a state of non-resistance, or relaxed clarity. Here, my mind is clear, more able to perceive truth without the fog of unsettling emotions, and within this bliss of relaxed clarity, I am able to reconnect to compassion for myself.

I’ve come to believe that when we create in a state of non-resistance, we connect to truth, which is from, and is of, Ultimate Truth—that singular all-pervading nature of reality. If you’ve followed me long enough, you know that from a Vajrayana Buddhist understanding, this singular truth I’m speaking of IS compassion and wisdom. And all, no matter age, gender, or circumstance, are equally a part of, and not separate from this truth.

I’d like to remind us that creativity calls to each of us differently. I write and illustrate. Your creativity could be a call to motherhood or fatherhood. Maybe your unique call is to farming, teaching, or entrepreneurship. The list is as endless as there are sentient beings. Whatever your call, it could be a magical portal, ushering you into a soothing and liberating blanket of self-compassion. The blanket of compassion heals wrecked nerves, those times you feel weary and unsure of your innate worth and in need of remembering how miraculous and wondrous you are.

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May all of us experience self-compassion so to allow us to taste the sweetness of our innate and sublime worth, healing our hearts of suffering. May all of us continue to deepen our realization of this, and hold our compass of compassion, not just for self, but for all beings.

Sending light and love,

Renee

To the readers of The Creator’s Compass,

I spent some time in nature yesterday and wrote in my journal. I took what I wrote and did my best to make it coherent for all of you.

Always feel free to offer your ideas on what I write by hitting the comment button. I love hearing from readers! And warm welcome to all new subscribers. I’m so glad you are here.

Should we share our gifts?

I’m on the edge of the forest where our yard touches the wild. The trees surround me like sentinels protecting Ultimate Truth, holding the whispers of God. I can sense it no less than sensing my husband’s loving gaze when he thinks I’m not aware. Just as I’m always compelled to lift my eyes to my husband in those timeless moments, I lift my awareness to the trees and listen. Today they are reminding me about wholeness. Here, I feel there is no need to seek anything new, or accomplish anything at all. Everything is perfect as it is, right here, right now.

Yet, minds run around like puppies, and my mind is quickly disrobing this moment of non-striving. My hand crawls over the page to etch words on paper, words that bubble up from mind’s creative, endless well.

I ponder why I even share my ideas in writing. Why do I spend hours creating articles for The Creator’s Compass? Why do I edit my novels until my eyes hurt from staring at a screen? Why do I about kill myself gathering illustration skills, like a chipmunk stuffing acorns into her mouth, to bring to life my children's stories? I can choose to keep all my little creations to myself, thus assuring I protect my relatively solitary life.

I like my contained existence, living barefoot to the earth and surrounded by these trees, the birds overhead, and the critters chattering on all sides. Privacy, away from what I call the interweb and fame, is precious. So then why do I share my ideas and stories and meditations on the interweb, threatening this sweet box of containment, cradling my little nook in the world? In essence, I suppose I’m asking, is it important to share?

I ask myself this question most every day. The question always arises along side whispers inside to offer whatever meager gifts with which I find myself. But whispers? Are those important? I’m certain my teacher from years ago would say, “Yes, listen to those whispers.”

The teacher to whom I refer was my piano teacher during my high school years. She was a concert pianist with a heavy French accent and always a wealth of insight and wisdom. In her efforts to convince me to play piano and sing in recitals, she would say that if we don’t share our gifts, we waste them. She insisted it was our responsibility to God to offer what we have, whether that is food, shelter, or artistic creations. Often through the years, her words come back to me, and I find myself exploring if her wisdom holds up with my personal studies of philosophy, a word that literally translates as the love of wisdom.

“Become as a hollow flute, so Brahma can create beautiful music through you.”

I came across a book a few years ago, exploring some of the sacred texts of India. One concept struck me, probably because of the imagery it evoked. The idea presented was that only when one empties oneself of false views and actions not aligned with Brahma (the Creator) can Brahma move through one unhindered. From my memory, the translation of the sacred text was: Become as a hollow flute, so Brahma can create beautiful music through you.

It seems one interpretation of this beautiful sentence may be that we when we are fully awakened to Ultimate Reality, our thoughts, words, and actions are in complete unity with the Creator, our lives now instruments of the Creator, and we live in joy.

My piano teacher was communicating a similar idea to the one of a relationship with Brahma. As she is Catholic, I assume she might view becoming as a hollow flute so Brahma can create beautiful music through you as nurturing our gifts bestowed to us by God so we can share with others God’s glory and simultaneously give purpose, joy and peace to our lives.

(As a side note, within the varied philosophies we collectively label for convenience as Hinduism, there are complex and deeply philosophical ideas, which at times differentiate between the Creator called Brahma and the Ground of All, often referred to as Brahman.)

Sharing our gifts is compassion in action

Maybe it is our responsibility to offer what we have. But, perhaps not sharing what we have is less of a waste and is more akin to something that is not fully bloomed, like picking a fruit before it’s ripe.

Offering our gifts just might be the full bloom of our gifts, or the full ripening of them. So, it seems my piano teacher’s lesson on sharing hold up to my current philosophical understandings, and I see sharing our gifts as compassion in action. But the sharing doesn’t always need to be with other humans.

If I were to sing a song in the forest alone right now, would not the trees and birds and hidden animals receive my offering? What about singing solely to myself? Can not I receive my offering? Of course anyone, or anything can receive, but the ego plays tricks on us, and I need to be mindful that I share from the ground of compassion and not the aggrandizement of the self. If I, or you, remain rooted in compassionate action, sharing to self, others, or to nature, Brahma plays beautiful music through me, through you.

Keepers of Gifts

I am pulled to view that we each are keepers of God’s, or Brahma’s or Source’s gifts. Because of this, it moves me to declare that sharing is a natural progression of our gifts. If we find that the teachings of the Buddha hold true, (the teachings that the ground of reality is compassion and wisdom) sharing our gifts is natural, healthy, and joyful. Offering what we have inside is our way of living from and within compassion. And sharing from the ground of compassion is a manifestation of self-compassion.

If we view that each of us are none other than Source, then through our sharing with each other, Source hears itself and we become aware of the true nature of reality, and this is where we find a boundless ocean of compassion for self and others.

Dreams

No matter how uncomfortable it is for me to share, I will as long as whispers from Source move through me. If you find that you, too, see the ground of Source as wisdom and compassion, you may experience that whispers from Source will gift dreams into your heart that are birthed from the ideal of compassion—dreams you are excited to manifest and share with others.

Consider sharing your gifts if have yet to do so. Or begin to discover what your gifts may be if you are unsure. Perhaps listen to whispers in your heart, they just may be glorious dreams from Source meant for you to share. The trees surrounding me will hear the song of your dreams from afar, if you dare to sing, for Truth pulses beyond time and space. And I believe a single sharing that profoundly touches a single life makes for a life well lived.

Thank you for sitting with me and the trees and the whispers.

Sending light and love,

Renée

Welcome to The Creator’s Compass. Here we strive to live our lives with a compass pointed towards compassion, a compassion deeply integrated into our minds, so we not only live in peace and joy, but in also in our ultimate strength. And with this strength we are able to navigate our precious and brief time on this earth with purpose and excitement.

Thank you for your interest in The Creator’s Compass. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I would walk through fire to help anyone suffering panic. I would because I know, beyond some clinical definition, what that hell feels like. If you have never experienced such hell, I’m grateful that you have not. Panic is heavy anxiety so rooted in the marrow of your being that you swear there is no escape. Just an eternity of torment. I am not exaggerating. It truly is that horrible, and that overwhelming.

When I was a girl in seventh grade, nutrients that later fed into future anxiety troubles seared into my young heart. I decidedly was not cool, not even a little. I was awkward and shy, and with bangs that defied normalcy by forming horns like a bull on either side of my head. Yes, it was pointed out to me. Yet those were not the richest nutrients to my future anxiety struggles. No, the richest soil came from my best friend since second grade. A friend who was cool, whose blonde hair and social prowess elevated her from an unknown to an accepted cream-of-the-crop fancy-pants popular girl as soon as we graduated 6th grade from our small Montessori School (only three in our class) and entered public school after my last blissfully innocent summer of childhood.

I was not welcomed to sit at her lunch table. I had no friends… for two years. I learned to cope. I learned to keep my eyes downcast. When we had a class together, we did not speak. It was humiliating.

Scars created at any age change a person, especially scars from other people. And it has taken until recently for me to finally raise my eyes and meet my place at the dining table of life, but not after years battling undercurrents of anxiety rooted in not seeing my worth, roots that became stronger in seventh grade.

What traumatizes us often keeps us in a lifetime pattern of coping and spiraling and hiding from others, from ourselves, from life.

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But I learned two major lessons from those painfully lonely years. The first lesson is invaluable, so priceless I can’t regret the pain my younger self suffered. My empathy deepened. I was taught pain in junior high school, so ever since that time, I recognize pain in others and wish I could release them from their suffering. The second lesson took many decades fully to blossom into understanding: I learned that when you are in pain, let the undercurrent of anxiety pull you out into the depths of the foreboding sea: Don’t fight it. Fighting only drowns us. Fighting, as most of us know, grows the fear, or provokes the enemy. Fighting guarantees exhaustion and misery. But allowing whatever is to be as it is, in the end, frees us. And the metaphorical sea becomes a great realm of exciting possibilities to manifest our dreams and to grow wealthy in those things which matter most—wisdom and compassion for self and all others.

The idea of allowing is a hot topic in the mindfulness world, so much so I almost couldn’t bear to write this post. Yet, I concluded that the readers of The Creator’s Compass may appreciate my personal take on what is ‘allowing’. So I offer, from my experience, what it means to ‘allow’ in trust that my words, however imprecise they may be, helps at least one person.

The key to ‘allowing’ is to not resist whatever emotion or thought is present. While we find an equanimity to not resist, the second key is to not hold on to, or grasp, thoughts and feelings of the present. Being pulled out by the undercurrent, my metaphor for allowing, means staying relaxed with an awareness of what’s happening while not analysing the situation. This non-analysing is how to not grasp thoughts and emotions. If we grasp thoughts, following them down endless rabbit holes, we add more thoughts and feelings. This is compounding thoughts and feelings, for thoughts beget thoughts, which beget emotional reactions to thoughts.

Panic is thought and feeling-based. Allowing is awareness-based. Allowing is letting go of the reins of control, which is about the scariest thing to do in times of panic.

Sometimes, there is nothing I can do for a person who is in the grips of a mental undercurrent but impart that I am there, that I am not leaving, and that, despite the fact they can not believe me in the moment, they will cycle out of the mental torment. In fact, when I slip into old patterns of anxiety, there is nothing I can do for myself other than the same I do for another; remind myself I am here, I will cycle out of anxiety, that the undercurrent will subside because it only lasts so long. And with those reminders I practice allowing, practice releasing control.

And in those times, when I’m aware enough within anxiety, there are revelations. As soon as I allow myself to be pulled out to sea to swim the edges of my fear, courage and faith and trust develop that becomes so deeply integrated in awareness. Here, my fear relaxes, then my body gets the message and relaxes, followed by my brain releasing chemicals to further promote the relaxation, and my mind finds a peace and I’m able to swim parallel to shore and make my way back home to warm sands.

Not all peace is rediscovered with incense, a meditation cushion, and a hot mug of tea beside us. Some peace is revealed through fire.

If we pay closer attention to the phenomena of panic transforming into peace, we see our minds are greater than our fears, our brains, and our bodies. Which is why in Tibetan art certain deities have eyes painted on the soles of feet and on the palms of hands to symbolize that awareness rests EVERYWHERE, that awareness is not bounded inside our bodies, but is boundless. Our mind is awareness.

So, if some of your anxiety roots began in seventh grade like mine, or earlier, or last week, or you inherited anxiety from your family genetics and/or roots (yes, that’s a real thing) and your anxiety disrupts your days, I want you to know I see you. I understand. I know those undercurrents. They are strong; they grip us, cementing us to our darkest fears. But I also want to remind you and myself, for it takes reminding, that:

• YOU ARE MORE THAN YOUR FEARS.

• YOU ARE GREATER THAN YOUR ANXIETY.

• YOU ARE MORE POWERFUL THAN YOUR PANIC.

• YOU ARE AWARENESS SO BOUNDLESS THAT ONCE YOU TASTE IT, YOUR ANXIETY WILL BEGIN TO DISSOLVE.

Those undercurrents, if we allow them, will pull us out to the edges of our fears, and there we have an opportunity to discover our unimaginable strength, resting in wisdom and compassion. And in the end, maybe our anxieties will be the ultimate pathway to becoming fully awake…. if we don’t fight them.

Allowing anxiety to pull us out so we can find our peace inside—easy words to write and one of the most difficult things in life to practice. Though I swim by your side, it is ultimately you who must discover how to allow, and that realization is the first step to finding freedom from, or dare I say, through, anxiety and/or panic.

I am not a counselor, or psychologist, or anything with fancy letters after my name. I write about anxiety from personal experience and witnessing my loved ones, friends, and students wrestle with this hell on earth experience. This article is not giving us the HOW in allowing, but simply focuses on the idea of allowing. The HOWs that work for me to allow will come in subsequent publications. I will share these personal HOWs because we are all the same in a million different ways, and if certain methods work for me, they are bound to work for at least one other. And helping just one will make these publications on anxiety worth every hour it takes to write and edit.

Sending light and love and strength and support, especially to those who find themselves in undercurrents. Your heart matters. Your life matters. Your gifts only you possess, even if you’ve yet to discover them, matter. (And yes, everyone carries gifts inside. Of that I am certain.)

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With love,

Renee

Welcome to the Creator’s Compass. Here, we strive to live our lives with a compass pointed towards compassion, a compassion deeply integrated into our minds so that we not only live in peace and joy, but in our ultimate strength. And with this strength, we are able to navigate our precious and brief time on this earth with purpose and excitement.

Our community is growing, and I appreciate each one of you for joining on this lofty mission of igniting our spirits into remembering our innate wisdom and compassion. If you are new here, warm welcome. Every publication and guided meditation is on our homepage, under the headers, Explorations and Meditations. Please visit as often as you wish, or need.

I ducked behind lush mountains to hide away from technology for a few weeks, immersing myself both in my annual Buddhist retreat and the lullaby of oceanic waters.

Each summer my husband and I trek a long 20 hour drive to our Tibetan Buddhist temple where our teacher resides. And each summer we are greeted by friends making a similar trek from all over the US and abroad. There is something wondrous about being surrounded by people on a similar journey with the intention of bringing awakening to our minds with the aspiration of being of benefit to all sentient beings. It is especially comforting for me, given I can feel isolated living in the South where fundamentalism runs deep, much like the river cutting through the limestone cliffs in my county; strong, pulsing, and never to be underestimated. (I stole the last part of that sentence from my novel I’m currently editing.)

I’ve been pondering what to share with you about the energetic river of my retreat. There are endless side streams I could flow down with you, both personal and philosophical, and I was quite turned around as to where to bring us. After a few days of ruminating, I settled on the idea to keep this letter simple. The retreat is always a profound one, full of study and practice, but right now I fear not only would my words fall irritatingly short of the experience, but they would somehow profane the personal essence of my time there.

Like many of you, I’ve had eye-opening visions beyond common life throughout my years in this life. I call this beyondness, “that which sees beyond earth-bound familiarity”. I’ve shared these visions with my teacher. His response is to not grasp such experiences. By grasping them, I could easily create grand stories about their meanings, further veiling my mind’s awareness of Absolute reality. This veil would sink me more heavily into only perceiving Relative reality (the reality we all are comfortable with, the reality, that without the awareness of the Absolute, brings suffering by grasping.) He also warned me to be careful with whom I share my spiritual experiences. I surmised he said this to 1. not mislead others, and 2. not get caught in the whirlpool of ego-grasping.

This whirlpool of spiritual ego-grasping sneaks up on us, much like weight gain: You don’t notice it at first, and when you become aware, you are a plump spiritual seeker spouting how spiritual your life has become. It happens, and it’s something to be vigilant against.

With that said, I’ve shared a few photos found below of my time at the temple, and in future publications, I’ll expand upon Tibetan Buddhist philosophy to the best of my capabilities with both story and contemplative explorations. Buddhist philosophy gives me refuge, as well as guides my heart/mind and my creative endeavors, both here on Substack and within my fiction writings. And so I share my refuge with all of you, dear readers, who are on similar paths leading you to ultimate awareness. I understand and honor Buddhism is not everyone’s path, but maybe by sharing my burgeoning understandings of this life we share will be of benefit to you, or highlight something beautiful on the journey you are walking.

I believe our community here supports each of us to lift the veil to our pure, unadulterated awareness, able to behold the Absolute. As I lift my veil, I ask of you to bear with me as I stumble and soar, make mistakes big and small, reach goals and learn to love better, all of which will be reflected in my writings. In the meantime, let’s deepen our gentleness and understanding towards ourselves and others as we learn to fly with our one wing of wisdom and the other wing of compassion. Just imagine all of us across the world soaring in peace and joy, singing songs of love and compassion to one another. Oh, what the world would be… what a heaven we can create.

As a brief side note, my intention for The Creator’s Compass was to publish twice per month, but with an endless amount of topics I wish to cover I was unable to hold myself back from a weekly offering these past five wonderful months. As I edit my novel, I can only guarantee twice per month for a short bit. However, I predict I will feel the undeniable inspiration to send to you bonus recordings. If you are wanting me to touch upon anything specific to explore, or a meditation that may help your journey, please leave a comment below, or hit the reply button and email me.

Sending light and love always,

Renee

In this moment, as I write, I’m sitting in an 88 degree house, surrounded by a heavy summer rainstorm, thundering the sky and saturating the soil. When the AC unit quit working, I bemoaned the next few days, or more, being forced to live in the staggering heat and humidity of summer in the South. I’m prone to overheat, and I became anxious last night, imagining the near future and how I was to keep my body temperature in a safe zone.

Despite discomfort from the unexpected vacation our AC took, I am fine. It’s quite interesting to be thrown into the embrace of unmitigated summer, no longer able to hide in my human-made environment. How easy it is to forget the rawness of life, while sequestered away within bubbles of temperature-modified homes enjoyed by the fortunate—how easy and how unfortunate. But I digress. That’s a topic for another day.

Anyway, I type this while glancing out the window every few minutes to saturate my vision with the beauty of the forest surrounding our house. The multi-version of greens birthed within the leaves brighten like dormant dry watercolor pigment coming alive with brush and water. Every leaf trembles with each rain drop, grateful the dry spell has broken. The tree’s thirst is being quenched, and I can almost hear their rapture.

I know their joy. Nothing in this world rejuvenates me, unveiling my natural joy to pulse on the surface of my skin, more than swimming. Wrap me in a river, lake, or sea and the result is always the same; I emerge refreshed, happy, and peacefully calm. And never is my water dance complete until the harsh sounds of the dry world hush as I fully disappear under the skin of the water’s surface, that mysterious liquid, which mirrors the ever-changing reality of life, of our human existence.

From the sea, the sky siphons water upward, only to release it back down again. While ice holds history in her belly, mist, snow, and rain transform into one another at a much more rapid pace. Isn’t this a mirror to our lives? We are born, and each moment, we change. We never stay the same, though we may believe we do. Nothing in our perceived reality is solid, including us. Like all phenomena, we are as water, transforming and playing into different forms, even if these transformations aren’t detectable by human perception. Look at a photo of yourself at age three, then at age twenty. Now compare how you are today to those photos. Remember how different the world seemed at these different ages? What about you is the same? What holds all those different versions of you together?

I find it frightening, recognizing the impermanence of all things. I also find it liberating. If things were not impermanent, we could never grow and experience life. In fact, there would not be life at all, for life depends on change.

But there IS something that connects this web of constant transformation. I’m not here to preach to you what my answer may be to what is this stable, ever-present reality. I simply want to share with you the wonder of this interplay between our impermanence and the permanent nature of the spiritual. This interplay strikes me as beautifully frightening, much like the wild South Pacific ocean I experienced in Samoa many years ago.

It was our honeymoon. My husband and I hiked to a cove of black sand and huge swells that never broke. I refused to go in, as it seemed so unfamiliar and scary. I didn’t trust swells that never turned over into waves. My husband eventually coaxed me in with a promise to never let me go. As our intertwined bodies lifted and dropped with the swell’s powerful, yet gentle ease, peace found me effortlessly within the arms of my husband. The moment was one of those times that washes your soul into a bright aliveness, an awareness void of a dull mind anchored by disorderly habits of thought and emotion. It was a type of yoking between nature, spirit, and love. To this day, that paradisal cove is one of our most treasured moments together, given to us by the sea.

From the hot southern rains to the ice packed lands of the north to the swells of the South Pacific ocean, water is the reflection of the soul. Both wonder-filled and frightening, this mysterious element electrifies my soul (I imagine much like it does for the trees outside my window who have now stilled, peacefully refreshed by the sky’s transformative dance).

Below is a poem I wrote while being embraced by the sky’s water dance.

As always, please consider hitting the like button, and/or comment if you appreciated this publication, so I can better connect to all of you wonder-filled readers and fellow water dancers.

I send you light and love,

Renee

Given it is the 4th of July weekend, a time of celebrating freedom in America, I would like to offer some thoughts on the power and pull of freedom, something I believe that each individual deserves equally, for it’s a spiritual call and we are spirit in spirit-flesh.

FREEDOM—the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint

This beautiful word carries with it so much of which our spirits thirst. Though imperfect in our dance with it, we reach for a life lived in unbounded freedom. But are we reaching, or simply wanting to reach? I’m confident we all want some form freedom, but do we want unbounded freedom? A life lived with no external restraint, completely untethered from any outside influence? I venture to say many of us do not.

I think of all the major religions and political systems of the world and their varying degree of strict rules and codes of conduct that purposefully bind actions, thereby limiting freedoms, and sometimes profoundly snuffing out all personal freedom.

Rules, Laws, and Codes of Conduct

Rules, laws, and codes of conduct can make us safe and feel secure in a world of unknowns. We are, after-all, funny shaped creatures on a spinning blue ball in a universe that many scientists are now saying is infinitely expanding. Not to mention there are countless other universes. If that doesn’t make one take significant pause on the deepest questions of all things, I don’t know what will.

The more fearful we are of the unknowns, the more we are prone to shy away from unbounded freedom.

Not having rules, laws, and codes of conduct allows for unbridled action, both good and bad. But a life without boundaries leaves one completely vulnerable psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Anarchy is free falling and often binds a person to their unrefined animal natures if not guided by profound and realized wisdom. That doesn’t sound too good.

The less we examine our inner worlds and how they relate to the outer worlds, the more we spiral into confusion.

I’ve witnessed people so bound up by rules you can picture their spirit wrapped like a stiff mummy, a sheet of illusory safety blinding their eyes to the wonder of life. I’ve also witnessed people so rebelliously unencumbered by religious or political rules that they have bound themselves into a mess of confusion and unhappiness. They are blinded to the interconnectivity of all life, uncaring of how their actions affect others. And then there is the majority of us, bumping around with vague ideas of what freedom means and all that this ideal implies.

The Binds Of Hope And Fear

Can human beings regulate themselves without religious or political rules? Can we act ethically without reward and punishment? History, past and present, tells us most can not.

We are so fearful as a species, pulled by hope and fear in equal measure, we act outside our center of inner balance or equanimity. If we hope, we are afraid what we hope for won’t come to fruition. If we are fearful, we are hopeful our fears will disappear. They are a package deal. We are puppets of hope and fear, and because of that we create rules to mitigate this hope and fear dance, not just to control ourselves, but others. In essence, we don’t trust our nature or the nature of others underneath the hope and fear, thus the need to wield the sword of control.

The founders of the U.S. constitution wisely observed this distrust, saying humans are flawed. While I agree we act in flawed ways, I don’t agree we are fundamentally flawed. I would say we human beings are ignorant of our perfect nature, and our ignorance dictates our actions with hope and fear, many of which are destructive to ourselves and others, hence the need to curb our actions with political systems if we want greater cohesiveness and peace with one another.

In Buddhism, you may come across the idea that our nature is like a beautiful diamond caked in mud and as soon as you see this as true, you reveal the diamond by doing the work of removing the mud. In Buddhism, that is accomplished so often by entire systems of study and practice, or we could say codes of conduct. Yet, if viewed correctly, the conduct is a path on which we learn to quiet the despot of our bloated egos that clings to the illusion of a permanent self in order to reveal our innate nature.

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Unbounded Freedom And The Revelation Of Our True Nature

It seems a reasonable conclusion that if we want unbounded freedom while maintaining a civil world, we need to cultivate ethical behavior that naturally occurs from a wise and compassionate mind, with no need for reward or punishment. From my perspective, that would require each individual to discover their true nature, and for that discovery to happen collectively and at the same time.

If you have followed me these past four months, you are aware that I see our true nature as compassion and wisdom. However, the discovery process of unveiling our nature isn’t always pleasant and necessitates an inner resolve and the courage of a monarch butterfly crossing the sea. Sometimes the process of unveiling is wretched, in that we have to scrap away layers of ignorance. And sometimes those layers are like thick tar and painful to remove.

Yet, if we peel the layers away, there is a beholding of our innate nature, the cycle of hope and fear severed, and we recognize we are awakened mind. This awakening bears a fruit of an effortless inner unbounded freedom—a freedom not dependent on rules and laws. With a nature of wisdom and compassion, why would a person awakened to her nature need a decree of how to act? She would not. Ethical behavior would be as natural as heat from a fire.

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Do we truly want unbounded freedom? Can there be collective unbounded freedom? Can the lion lay down next to the lamb?

This brings me back to the original question of do we truly want unbounded freedom? It’s one thing to intellectually understand, another to live as an unbounded freedom-dancer. If we decide we do indeed want ultimate freedom, we must take total responsibility for ourselves, both our inner and outer worlds. We must be brave and face the question of who we are under all those pesky layers. We must bravely wrestle with the idea we may not be a solid and fixed entity, but a more fluid, ever-changing creative energy of love and wisdom.

How willing are we to face ourselves and bravely unveil our true nature? I am uncertain if I am ready for unbounded freedom. I still stress out if I can’t decide what to order in a restaurant, let alone take utter and complete responsibility. The fact is, I am still strung by the strings of hope and fear.

Yet, I continue to thirst for freedom, and I guess most of you feel the promise of freedom, too. This promise we all sense is an inner call, beckoning us back home, back to our true nature. I believe we can direct our ships within life’s stormy seas towards inner unbounded freedom. We can make our journey a spiritual journey and free ourselves from the strings of hope and fear to taste the infinite nature of our minds.

I am certain individuals can find such inner unbounded freedom. But I’m doubtful humanity as a collective can have the lion laying down next to the lamb—the perfect peace of no conflict. Imagine, that would require each individual discovering their true nature at the same time.

If each human being is not ready at the exact same time for such questions, if we are not ready collectively to see our true nature, then as a society we cannot act consistently civil without rules, or to act out of a steady compassion for ourselves and others. How could we? If you accept the idea we are so often being played by hope and fear, which as we have already touched upon, cause us to act in an endless kaleidoscopic play of uncouth behavior, then civility without boundaries is shaky at best.

So, as most of us are not anarchists, understanding the wisdom for civil society, we bind ourselves with religious and political rules, relinquishing personal freedoms. We also fight about how much binding we need. And we create massive death and destruction with these fights.

This balancing game between religion, government, and personal freedom is a tricky one, indeed. It is alluring to imagine a civil society without the binds of externally enforced rules and laws. If collectively we aren’t all awakened to our true nature, then we must keep our feet planted firmly in human constructs of agreed upon laws to create civility, while not losing sight of the vast sky of the inner unbounded freedom available to each of us equally.

I think we all crave a heaven on earth where there is no hostility or evil-doings. Yet, duality is the game we are in, and it is impossible nirvana exists without its opposite of samsara. Of course, I could be utterly wrong, and that collective utopia on this molten rock spinning in space is not just possible, but is our destiny.

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My prayer for us all

I pray that each of us as individuals finds ultimate freedom, beyond nirvana and samsara, by discovering our true nature.

I pray our diamond-nature, shining brilliantly of wise compassion, is unveiled, always on the ready to love ourselves and others and to be of service to any sentient being in need.

I offer my prayer on this glorious U.S. holiday of the 4th of July—a day in which there is an opportunity to look more closely at what freedom means, from the inner sanctum of the spiritual mind to collective society.

Let freedom ring, let it sound its crystal call into each heart so not one being suffers with loneliness or fear, but knows a love so deep there is no need for hope.

Roads, especially the beautiful, empty ones that wind through canopies of trees, hollow me out in a loneliness. I don’t know why. I just always confront that hollow feeling while traveling, which often presses its way past lovely dappled light, falling onto roads paved or not paved.

Yet, I yearn to travel, and have for most of my life. There is a hunger to gulp in everything the world offers, lest I miss something, lest I never set my eyes on that next wonder with the potential to guide me closer to ultimate truth.

I realize after years of Buddhist study and practice that one must look within to taste Truth. I get it. Maybe that’s why roads are beacons of lonely. Maybe they are telling me, “This is not the road, my dear. Your road lies elsewhere. What you are traveling towards is not reached by a road you can see, smell, touch, hear, or taste.”

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Loneliness = Disconnection

I’m not the only one who faces loneliness. And if you struggle with loneliness, you are not alone. We can suffer loneliness because we live in a physical isolation. Yet, we can also suffer loneliness surrounded by throngs of people. You and I could walk down a Chicago, Bombay, or Paris street, and unknowingly pass hundreds of desperately lonely individuals. Their countenances would belie their suffering, and we’d assume they were confidently happy. So many of us wear similar game faces, which belie our cry to connect, to be seen, and to be heard. Posturing happiness and success hides the fact we are afraid we will be found out to not ‘have it all together’. But this only further exacerbates feelings of disconnect. How can we connect if we pretend? Connection require authenticity.

I fiercely believe loneliness to be a spiritual problem. As our collective human knowledge expands at lightning speed, we split apart at the same speed. Modern society pushes us into becoming specialists of a specialty until we forget we are part of a whole. We find ourselves focused on our works like a fine surgeon who only practices one specialized surgery for her entire career. This makes it too easy to lose our connection to our innate wisdom, intuition, and wholeness when we are only aware of a fragment of reality. Because much of our focus in the modern world has little to do with nature, we forget to look up to the sky and drink in the stars, remembering the wholeness and connection of all of life as our ancestors did.

Our ancestors were star gazers. All humans were. For most of human history, the eternity of the sky was the world wide web, and what blanketed us all in the same cloak of shared humanity, if only for a moment of remembrance.

Now we stare at screens, specialize in a specialty, learn one small sliver of a sliver of something, and thus, fraction apart from each other, not realizing we are all still connected, not by screens, but by the ethereal untouchable essence of life itself.

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“The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with oneself.” Mark Twain

Disconnection from others begins with a disconnection from oneself. And if, as Twain alluded to, we can find peace within, we rid ourselves of the worst form of loneliness. I’ve found that if I sit with the hollow empty feeling of loneliness with the same equanimity as watching a stream gentle flow past my bare toes, I cease to be a victim to the feelings, and the misery dissipates like mist lifting off a still lake. It’s as if, by releasing my victimhood, I’m gifted with the ache of wanting connection to others being transformed into an unshakable connection to myself.

By connecting to oneself, we awaken to the realization that all phenomena are impermanent, including our emotions and our bodily reactions to those emotions. Nothing stays the same. Not even those things which seem solid. The Grand Canyon seems solid, but it is changing each moment of every day. If you could rocket forward in time many thousands of years from now, the canyon would be vastly different. Observing this reality of impermanence is the first step for me in disrupting being stuck in an emotional whirlpool because I loosen the solid, heavy attachment to a particular feeling, knowing it, too, shall pass. As soon as I realize things change, it’s as if I pop out of the whirlpool’s hold on me. From there, it is easier to shift my relationship to loneliness, or any disruptive emotion, and find a peace.

I invite us all to examine if what I write to be true or not. Individually, we may choose to question and experiment with the idea that loneliness is the absence of connection. We may choose to experiment with different ways we can nurture connection to ourselves and to Source. And we may find the loneliness we are experiencing will transform into a passing breeze as we unveil how each of us as individuals can reconnect with our inner nature of wisdom and compassion.

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What does this re-connection to self look like in real life?

When the rain of loneliness just won’t stop pounding down, soaking you to your bones, making you shiver until the will to nurture connection fogs over into a heavy darkness of not caring to try anymore, you have a choice. It is this choice that trips us all up, because to choose it means we can’t assume victimhood anymore. I understand this. I’ve never been an accepted person in any group: not the cool people tribe, or the nerd tribe, or the outdoorsy tribe, or the spiritual tribe. No tribe am I, so before you get angry with me talking about not staying a victim, let me assure you I understand the struggle of loneliness and disconnection.

The brave choice of not being a victim:

The choice is practicing non-resistance by allowing the hard as stone raindrops of disconnected loneliness pummel you. Turn your face upward and let the drops hit your eyes and mouth and throat. Let the water darken your clothes until you are facing it head on. Set your eyes upon the dragon’s face until it’s as familiar to you as a beloved’s face. Hold your warrior’s sword of self-compassion strong and keep observing your loneliness until the fear begins to lesson. As the fear softens, listen with a keen ear to your feelings every time a drop strikes your skin. Listen as if a frightened child is speaking to you and you hold the power to relieve their fear. Your fear is talking and you are listening with a tenderness that may spring tears to your eyes. These tears are connection to self. They are beautiful.

This is courage.

This is warrior hood.

This is an awakening mind.

Invite your lonely feelings to come and gently let those feelings go. They have a cycle, just like the ocean tides. They will rise and fall. If you can allow the rise and fall, you notice the impermanence of them and lose the fear of the discomfort they bring. At that point, they become more ethereal and transparent. In this way, we can use our loneliness as the portal to deep meditation, and in time we transcend our loneliness to enter a realm that includes, but is much grander than, our individual thoughts and sufferings.

If, for whatever reason, you are unable to connect to yourself, seek help from another. We are social creatures and we need each other, and sometimes we need to find help when we are struggling and can’t catch our breath. Asking for help often is a first step to creating emotional well-being.

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Nature is medicine to loneliness.

Nothing helps me more than placing myself in nature. Connecting to the pulse of life beyond human interaction by tuning into the song of the tides, the talking of the trees, the dancing of the winds, reminds me of my true nature. When I merge into the natural world, the masks I wear on the stage of life as I attempt to make my way through and in society are stripped away.

In removing the demands of society for a spell by placing ourselves in the natural world, we become naked, our masks no longer fitting our faces. AND IT IS A RELIEF. I experience nature to be the best place to practice the brave choice of practicing meditation through watching pain. Nothing seems to come close to the healing properties of nature.

“Compassion that does not include yourself is incomplete.” The Buddha

To sit with our loneliness pain in order shift our dance with it may be one of the most difficult things we can do. It requires vulnerability because we can’t lie to ourselves any longer. When we need to sit with our pain, we should try doing so tenderly, and tend to it as a mother soothes her baby. In this way, we aren’t resisting the pain, we are allowing it to be as it is and hearing its message without slapping it down with a fearful hand. Listen tenderly, gently, calmly, and compassionately. This is transforming our dance with loneliness, and in return, loneliness becomes a great guru, showing us the road only our spirit can travel.

Once we are able to listen to ourselves and find our inner peace, we become a safe harbor for another because now our wisdom supports our compassion and we can listen with sincerity. We can listen to others with the same tender compassion that helped our connection to ourselves. How beautiful that a connection to our innate wisdom not only alleviates our own suffering, but also sets us on a path to better help ease the sufferings of others.

In Conclusion

As I prepared this article, I meditated on the seasons in my life where loneliness gripped me and what I discovered on the other side of that pain. I believe I learned empathy for others and connection to self through my lonely years.

In an attempt to sum up the essence of what I am attempting to communicate I will end with this: Connection to self gives room for loneliness to be met with as much calm and acceptance as a stream flowing past our bare toes, and that the pain of loneliness can transform into a clear and compassionate call, able to enfold us back into our true nature of loving-kindness.

As always, thank you for being here and sharing your time with The Creator’s Compass. You are so very appreciated.

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Calm-voiced and Fiery

I had an article I was going to publish for this Sunday, but I decided to take a detour. This decision was made after I talked to my friend Adrian. (I encourage all to read her informative and heart-felt explorations on PTSD.) During our call, we touched on the idea of truthfulness in our writing and how important that is to both of us.

As for me, I am hyper-aware when listening to my audio meditations and essays on the topics I explore that it’s easy to assume I’m always gentle and soft-spirited. Though that is a true side of who I am, I’m also quite fiery. Ask my family.

What is important to impart is that I had a long journey to guide the fire in me to support the calm I now am able to call upon. The voice you hear took many years to unveil. I don’t believe I created the calm and serenity that is a part of me—I cultivated it by shedding layers of unsettled mind, or unhealthy habitual patterns of the mind. I have come far, and I have far to go.

I view the fire-spirit that is a part of me to be both nature and conditioning. I’m the middle child of three girls. And I took on that role, almost to a laughable degree, which means I’m the peace-maker, and the one who can’t decide if she wants to be the boss or the one who wants to be taken care of. According to a book on birth order, a middle child is a vexing conundrum. Well, that’s both hilarious and not so nice! Maybe that is why, in part, my intense energy was easily encouraged as it bounced from one extreme to another.

The extremes often lead me to consider myself to be as a cheetah—I can sprint at warp speed, but only for short periods. I embrace my cheetah spirit with all its intense blasts of energy, but if I don’t keep my eye on its run, its blessings flip over to a curse. This intense side must be anchored, so it doesn’t run beyond my sight, and I do so with study and meditation practice. If I don’t, my anxiety surfaces as a tsunami and I lose my seat in the eye of the tornado. When I’m grounded, my intensity is a blessing because it allows me to dive deep into those things which pull on my consciousness, it allows me to focus on my work, and it allows me to love so deeply the ones that are dear to me.

I also gravitate to a poetic and gentle nature. I used to spend hours as a young child in my treehouse writing poetry and stories. And as a lonely teenager, I poured my sensitivity into piano and art, neither to a high degree of mastery. The lack of excellence didn’t matter however, as those creative outlets were my first experiences into exploring the inner world, which became the ground for unveiling the calm inside my heart.

The point is, I’m both fire and gentleness. Both aspects dance inside, taking turns who leads. Guiding, or grounding, the fire inside by the teachings of my Buddhist practice in order to benefit my life’s intention has allowed the dance to be graceful and no longer so jagged and disrupting. The fire complements the gentle and vice versa… well most of the time.

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Why share this?

I don’t want to not mislead anyone, giving the impression that only calm-voiced people are destined for peace. Calm-voice me is real, as well as intense-voice me. In fact the intense side gave me the focus to be able to stabilize my calm side, which has always called with her gentle song.

Intense-voice is not the best vehicle for sharing, as it easily shuts down the willingness to listen with the heart to oneself, and I believe the ability to listen to one’s heart is vital for awakening peace inside. This is why I allow gentleness to guide the offerings while I share what I’ve found to be extraordinarily helpful for many of my students and me to better know peace. It would break my heart if someone came across a meditation and thought, “I’m not calm. This is not for me”.

When I first began meditation, I lasted twenty seconds before I felt I wanted to jump out of my skin. Now, I can sit with ease for long stretches of time. I never imagined that would be me, the woman who can meditate.

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If I can settle my mind while not losing my nature, you can, too.

If you are a more easy-going spirit where nothing rattles you much, then your challenge is not jumping out of your skin at the beginning of cultivating a meditation practice, but drooping into a meditative lethargy. On the other side of that coin, if you are more fiery-spirited, then your challenge is closer to what mine was—a mind that jumps from one thing to another, like a drunk monkey, or several monkeys in a brawl! Yet, both challenges are just that, challenges. And they do not, and can not, deter your journey to your calm state if you have decided to unveil your inherent peace.

The beautiful thing is, our calm already exists. You do not have to create it. If it didn’t already exist, how could we discover it? How could we cultivate it? Inside a flower seed is a flower, and inside the seed of our awareness is wisdom and compassion, which bears fruits of peace and joy.

It is our noble work to unveil the calm, so we live in more peace and joy, both for ourselves and for all others. This is compassion in action.

I have included a recent watercolor I did of a gorilla because I’ve been in love with these beautiful beings since I can remember, and they so often display a serenity that can belie their immense fortitude. Quite possibly, they were amongst my first teachers.

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Thank you for joining me on this detour. I hope it was helpful, either with your relationship to what I present, or simply gaining a bit more clarity on who is behind the voice you hear.

May the dance of serenity and fire for us all stabilize in a perfect, unshakable balance, both at the ready to lead without hesitation when their time is called.

I send you light and love,

Renee

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I remember his smile, his joy, and the sand dunes. I don’t recall the others. Even the boys my age, which I was hyper-aware of at all times, have no weight in this memory. The lack of the boys speaks to the power that morning had on me. Geological formations were not something that easily pulled my nineteen-year-old self’s attention away from the wild recklessness of young men so alluring and frightening in equal measure.

His face did not allure or frighten me. His face invited in joy.

What did he look like? I can not tell you. He is only a vague, ghost-like image of a middle-aged man in my mind’s eye. I simply remember his joy, and mine.

He always waited at the bottom of the bus stairs, more awake than the lot of us college students on an early Saturday morning. We would pile in, choosing seats at random, some of us peering through grimy windows that told of many outdoor labs with different lots of college kids led by other professors. I never got used to the university bus idling with the acrid burn of diesel. It felt foreign and exciting, for I had never ridden the bus after school when I lived with my family.

The old bus promised learning outside the walls of lectures, chalkboards, tests and the metal seats that either made you sweat or burned your backside with a sting of cold. I always got good marks in school and usually caught on quickly, minus the horrors of statistics and the other nightmare of math.

Despite performing well in learning institutions, I loathed the classroom. It was torture being forced to sit still, paying attention to the endless drone of a bored professor, or subjected to the terror of a masochistic professor who delighted in calling names of students at random. Anxiety flourished inside a classroom for me, and I often became like a dried up, rigid sea sponge, unable to soak in lessons to my full capacity.

But whisked away to be made aware of the hidden beauties of earth by the clunky old bus with him, his pen tucked into the pocket of his outdoor shirt, softened the sharp edges of anxiety. Outside and free, my sea sponge-self became pliable, and I could soak in knowledge with considerably more ease.

Each Saturday we bumped along in the bus, rolling over winding, mostly empty roads for our lab hours to see the wonders of the natural world, specifically the crust of the earth, aka dirt and rock.

That day of the sand dunes, we (me and the others I can’t recall) were bundled up in layers, as the Pacific North Coast is rarely warm even with the sun out, which it was that day. And it was beautiful.

The redwood trees barreled up to the sky, drinking in the mists of the sea, right up to the edges of the cliffs shooting down to the untamed waters ornamented by the sun with water diamonds twinkling like the brightest stars you’ve ever seen.

The old bus delivered us beyond the steep cliffs and to a magical land of sand dunes, seagrass, and the sound of breaking waves whispering secrets of distant lands that they had lapped against.

My eyes cast out, following the water diamonds to the horizon, as my bare feet sunk into the impossibly high sand dune we all stood upon. Our shoes congregated in the grasses behind us, our delight in front.

“Come on, let’s play!” he said, beckoning his flock. He was our professor, and we adored him. So flock we did.

We flew down the immense dune, the cascading sand carrying us along. There was no pretense of sexual appeal or intellectual prowess as we skied sand. We were bursting into our joy.

He smiled, his happiness beaming, watching us live as we all should live no matter the age.

“Again!” he shouted.

We willingly obeyed and scrambled up the slippery dune, clawing and panting until we reached the peak. Invigorated, we looked over the roaring sea that muted all of our voices singing out without care. Bursts of cool winds brought wildness to our hair, pinched our cheeks pink, and dried our lips. I licked my lips, wanting to devour everything about that moment, the salt’s delightful snap staining my tongue.

How many times we flew down and scrambled up that dune, I don’t remember. But I remember his smile and his joy. I remember him. I remember. And I am grateful.

The sand dunes are such a wonderful memory. There are so many wonderful memories of which I am comprised, like the strata of the Pacific North Coast. I make efforts religiously to recall these types of memory. I have to because I rather enjoy feeling good, and feeling good is often a choice.

Experiencing good feelings is a choice because our brains evolved to sort and make sense of the world to keep us alive. And the ugly side of that truth is that we tend to remember the bad things with more aliveness than the good times to make sure we stay away from things that hurt us. In my observation of myself and others, this negative dwelling can be a tragedy of our human experience because it causes such intense and vast suffering. Yet, our good memories, our good stains on our consciousness exist, and we just need to make it a habit to unearth them so that they bubble up more naturally. If we keep choosing good memories and focus on thoughts that encourage balance in our bodies and minds, in time, our thought habits are drawn with much more effortlessness to those ideas, or thoughts, which makes us feel better and more at peace.

But what can we do with the terrible memories? Denying bad memories only strengthens them and makes them prone to cause us even more suffering. Fortunately we can train our minds not to dwell on the bad. I don’t say this flippantly. Doing this requires courage and lots of it. I know people who’ve been through hell and back, who struggle with severe PTSD. For help with understanding the complexities of PTSD, head over to my dear friend Adrian Purchas’s Substack publication.

The best methods I’ve discovered that help to train our minds not to dwell on bad thoughts and memories is to bring the body’s nervous system into a baseline of calm and peace with meditative practices and movement.

When we find the practices that best nurture us as individuals towards greater calm, the gardens of our minds are prepped, our soils rich and ready to be able to intentionally choose good memories and focus on healthy ideas.

This memory of my geology professor is a gift, a gift that he gave. His love for his subject he professed, and his love for his students were a rarity in my experience of education. His joy and love embedded into my soul, and I imagine into hundreds of other souls. The ripple effect of his compassion continues forth, as his light helped ignite my own joy that I share with friends and family.

Joy and compassion married together have a great, miraculous ripple effect. It has a power that flows and moves through us like wind through an aspen tree, causing the leaves to flutter and dance. Your compassion and joy has this great and powerful ripple effect. We all are so powerful, able to bring immense love into this world if we so choose.

I’d like to end with a thank you to my professor, to his compassion, and to his joy that continues to bless my heart and mind to this day. He is forever a part of the fluttering dance of my very imperfect, but ripening, waltz with compassionate action.

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THE LAST GOODBYE

Do you ever think about the last words, that final utterance you will offer to someone? I consider them a lot, too much really. We’ve all heard the phrase, never go to bed angry. But what about those times when loved ones are yanked away unexpectedly from accidents, human evil-doings, or natural disasters? Those awful goodbyes are happening as we connect through word and voice right now, in this very moment, the world over.

And what about those yanking-aways that are well planned and expected? Those goodbyes sear the soul with their own special flavor of torture, containing their own sauce of should-haves and could-haves. These, too, are happening right now in this very moment, the world over.

I imagine in those awful expected goodbyes, silence speaks the most clearly, communicating the essence of truth that swim in our hearts. For it is in silence we can most easily hear those whispers of compassion’s call.

It is not just misery to be separated from those we love, it can be extremely frightening, putting into question our sense of safety and belonging. Yet in these experiences, if we discover how to not resist what I call, temporary separation, we can siphon out our greatest capacity to engage compassion. I write this because it is often in times of searing pain that we are forced to discover who we truly are beneath our hopes and fears. And discoveries born in these soils have the power to point our compasses to our true north, guiding us to unveil our true nature.

The story I’m about to read was inspired by my husband’s great-grandmother. As a young woman, she boarded a ship from Germany to America and waved goodbye to her parents. She was to never see them again.

As I am going to end this publication with the story, I offer you my gratitude now for being here. May your mind and heart hear the whispers of compassion between every breath.

The Last Goodbye

Her shoes click-clacked on the cobblestones, and with each click, I hated those shoes more because they conspired to usher her away. I cast my eyes down to watch her tender, determined gait, worrying about her ankle turning. Soon I wouldn’t be able to assist her any longer if she hurt herself. Those tiny ankles, so delicate and strong, used to carry her in explosive bounds, full of excitement, down the wooden stairs, desperate to show us her new drawing. With those sparkling amber-brown eyes, she was always insistent that we were to exclaim her as the best artist in the village, which we did. We always meant it. My wife and I never lied to our daughter.

Now, she would draw on the leather-bound notebook I crafted for her with an etching of the giant oak tree in front of our home. She used to climb the old oak as a child and later daydreamed of love under its canopy when she realized herself as a young woman. It was those daydreams that led her to him, and because of that, I nearly didn’t etch the tree. But she loved that tree and him, so I did because she had my heart. I denied her nothing. She had a loving spirit as boundless as a blue sky and never asked for much more than our love and paper to draw on, so because of her nature she was not spoiled.

My wife clung to me in horrified silence as all four of us trod in unison our last steps together. My boots still bore the sawdust from the wooden chairs the burgermeister commissioned for his sister and her family. I was known for my craft, and men with title always came to me, desiring fine furniture for their homes. I wondered if his sister was here, too, and if those chairs brought happiness or misery for what they represented—a goodbye.

Through the slats of morning sun, I saw the burgermeister walking up the plank with a courage only the wealthy own. I kept the sighting to myself, for if I told my wife, a scene would arise, and I didn’t believe I could withstand that storm.

White feathery streaks swooped over head with a call forever tied to that day. Their shrieks echoed my soul, though they screeched for remnants of fish guts cast aside by ship hands and not broken hearts. Their calls and the wafts of rotting fish burned me from the roots of my feet to the center of my chest so never could I walk close to the docks for the rest of my days unless circumstances beyond my control forced themselves upon me.

“It’s time,” he said.

I held out my hand to him in reluctant acceptance.

He didn’t take it, instead pulling me into his young, capable arms in a hug that I well knew was remorse for taking her. His acrid sweat told of stress, not unlike my own in that moment. We both carried the weight of loving and protecting such a one as my only daughter. I didn’t say a word, didn’t want her to be made aware of my fear, or his. At least I could do that small amount.

“I will take care of her. She is my entire life,” he choked out.

Try as I might, there was no air to bring forth words. My heart was shattering, and it was closing off my throat.

My dear wife gasped, her shattering rising to the surface, too. I prayed like I’d never prayed before that God would stand her up in stoicism until they were gone. If she waited until then to break, I could accept that.

My daughter’s feet stilled, and with the etched notebook still tucked under her gentle arm, she put down her suitcase and fell into my arms, burying herself into my chest. I clung on to her with a ferocity of primal agony, memorizing her scent of lavender and moonlight and the way her voice lilted with every third word. I memorized the exact color of her blonde hair that glinted silver when the sun struck it. I drank her heartbeat into my own, telling myself time and distance existed only in the human realm. And in the end, when we leave our flesh behind, she would be in my embrace once again.

My wife and I waved until our arms lost all sensation. We were surrounded by hundreds of others left behind as they, too, died a death where the body still breathes and moves. The seekers and the ones they left behind waved frantically to each other, like branches in a gale, us all about to snap under the force of emotion. My child’s slim arm waving was the most beautiful of all, but her age did not yet grasp time and what this moment held. I was glad about that. She was spared the agony as she stood on the top deck in the middle of the ship, which loomed above like a monolith straight from hell. It cast a giant shadow to cover us—the ones standing on solid ground, bound to die where we breathed our first breath.

With ungodly moans and creaks, the ship began to slip away. It glided the surface, slowly extricating my soul from my body, neither having a home to each other any longer. My wife’s soul was drifting away, too. I felt it happen as we stood shoulder to shoulder, our silence carrying a singular thought better not uttered. But I kept on waving for my beloved girl, as did my wife, who balanced precariously on the balls of her shoes, stretching her arm up as high as possible to make certain her dear daughter saw the eternal love of a mother. I kept sturdy for both of them, yet I was terrified this loss would leave me a monster.

As my arm trembled in its reach and the uncut strands of my hair whipped in the sea’s breeze, I fell into unbearable remorse that this day never would have been if she hadn’t had met him. If only the burgermeister’s son had never delivered the order two years ago. If only America wasn’t calling his name. If only she didn’t belong to him. But they did belong to each other. And we were as poor as one can get without being city rats living on the streets, eating remnants of food flung out of restaurant back doors. We were never going to the promised land of freedom, and they were never returning to the homeland. These were truths as certain as the dance between the sun and the moon.

The last image I saw of my Lina was the silver glint of her hair caught in the strengthening morning light of a sunbeam. It was then my chest gripped with a fresh fear I hadn’t predicted. Did I say the perfect words to her, so she would know the depth of my love? And would she remember?

With love,

Renee

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There was a request by one of our compass-holders to hear the bubbling brook on the property again. Before I walk down to the brook, I’d like to invite you share a place that is meaningful to you, a place that invites your soul to awaken to the fragile strength and tenderness of this earth. Because we have compass-holders in different countries, it would be lovely to share beauties of our various nooks in the world to expand our view so our compasses burn even brighter.

If you are happy to share, leave a comment below.

Let’s go to the brook now. I’ll take my camera, along with my journal, and see what the winged-spirits of spring will offer today.

Here I am surrounded by the forest, my toes aching to touch the frigid spring waters. Little pops of purple and white flowers dot the ground, and under the canopy of the trees are magic patches of bright green moss. If you slow your breath and pause, you can see that the moss is clusters of thousands of tiny star shapes, and brushing your hand along the top, you are met with a plushness that invites a softening of your spirit.

After months of barren beauty, the forest is awakening. Tender grasses wiggle up from the rain drenched soil and tiny, fresh leaves of nearly fluorescent greens and yellows smile as they burst from every branch and twig on every tree.

I’m not alone. Oh no. The land is buzzing with creatures. The little three-toed turkey prints show their march up the steep canyon, marking a path that veers around boulders, a path I used to make my way down to the brook. And because it rained, the deer hooves that sank in the mud near the water’s edge tell me they were here not long ago. I wonder if they watch me now. Whistles of eager songbirds guide my eyes upward. I peer through the smiles and quivers of those newly born leaves to see a cobalt blue sky with three great vultures circling and riding the currents with so much grace and contained power.

Though my childhood is decades past, I can feel the tug of my mother’s fear, a protective fear of the copperhead and cottonmouth snakes that take life with one bite. Are they emerging with the warming of the land? Do they feel my heat near and stay away, or are they curled up half-asleep not ready to slither into the world of moment- to-moment survival? Their lives bring to me an awareness of the fragility of life, of my life, of the lives of everyone I know and love. Such a realization that even the most poisonous creatures are vulnerable, ushers an awareness of the impermanence of all life to merge with the tender fresh burst of spring. It squeezes my heart and I fall in love more with the forest, knowing it and I and all the creatures will someday no more be.

Yet, deep in the heart-knowing there is the sense all is eternal. This moment will never die. It cannot, as it is not graspable. It has no solid place. In a space beyond conceptions, I and the forest will never not be. You will never not be. For as both the Buddha and Einstein said, time, as we experience it, is an illusion.

How to hold the passing of human time in our hands and be brave enough to open our awareness to taste the eternal—this is the noble work of a human being. This is what births compassion in our minds that goes beyond time and space—a compassion that is vast and unbounded, much like the wide open cobalt blue sky of spring.

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A question was posed to me by one of our fellow compass-holders. The essence of the question was, “How do we create within chaos?” I will attempt to offer my thoughts to her question. I am certain this is just the beginning of my answer, and I will start by painting a bird's-eye view, offering more practical applications in future writings. This is a publication to stir the wheels of deep questioning, so take your time with it.

Creating, whatever form that takes for you, is the portal to understanding what is this life we all share. At times, we create with the tools of grief. Other times we mold with the hands of joy.

But what do we do when we are overwhelmed by chaos? How do we pierce through the absence of inspiration chaos often brings? How do we wrangle the intense emotions and anxieties that often accompany chaos in order to create? Should we even attempt to create within chaos? Perhaps we are best to allow the rapids of chaotic rivers to take us where they wish.

When you find yourself being swept away by a chaotic river remind yourself that silence between notes creates music. Similarly, we would not exist without the space of silence. Creation depends upon silence, and the spaciousness that silence holds is the ground of everything that has been, and will be, created. Spaciousness breathes life between the notes, between our thoughts, between inhales and exhales, and between the rise and fall of endless waves of emotion. What is the best way to block creative flow? Resist the natural flow of spaciousness by grasping with emotions and expectations for things we want to control.

For example, a skilled martial artist knows to keep relaxed in battle, to allow mind and limbs to move in a seamless grace of intense focus by staying spacious and receptive. She or he does not grasp to control herself or the other. This approach gives the martial artist the flexibility to respond and not react. And that makes all the difference.

The warrior knows that spaciousness allows the pouring in of creativity from the Creator to activate our hearts and minds into creation. It’s not just the excellent skills of a warrior, every skilled act of excellence requires spaciousness yolked to a steady mind.

If we could behold this spaciousness with a steady mind and place our ear to the chest of silence, we would hear the heartbeat of compassion calling to us without pause. Compassion never abandons us with a patience only wisdom can bring. Compassion won’t tire, and in time, we all return home to it.

But where is this compassion when the tornadoes of chaos bust up our homes, pick us up only to thrash us around until we can’t distinguish what is up or what is down? Where is compassion within the tornado when we lose sight of where the moon beams her light, or where the ground stretches out? Where is compassion when we lose that which anchors us into a steady and healthy mind?

In a tornado, we lose our anchors that we lean on, that we rely on to give us safe boundaries. Yet in the very center of a tornado, there is a still point. It’s a space of no movement, a place where the boundaries of safety aren’t dependent upon our familiar walk on the earth when chaos lies dormant—those blissful times tornadoes do not siphon life upward into the sky.

This center of a still point inside the winds of chaos is a portal to the silence of compassion—a portal to allow ourselves to fall into her call of loving-kindness. It is a portal ushering us into a calm state where we can create despite it all.

My account of compassion may irritate some, because the reality of finding a silent spaciousness of compassion is often elusive, especially during chaos. Because of this, finding that center-point is a real and difficult challenge even in the best of times, and is even more difficult when chaos muffles our voice, binds our arms and legs, and steals our joy.

So, what can we DO to recover our creative walk when we find ourselves living in chaos?

Let us consider compassion as light, and chaos as clouds. The clouds may be dark and oppressive, creating mayhem with torrents of rain. The clouds may also be mere wisps of obscuration. Even so, the light exists in either case, and eventually, all storms part, and the light is felt once again, and soaks into our skin.

From my experience, keeping this truth of the eternal light of compassion in our awareness reminds us we are irrevocably yolked to the light, making it easier to cultivate faith, which guides us to our seat within the tornado's eye.

This faith rests on the observation that in our personal lives, compassion makes us more joyful and happy. We come to see this as truth, a truth not reliant on doctrine. With this type of faith, we can navigate life in confidence, knowing a compass of compassion is a direct way to peace. Faith in compassion guides us to the eye of the tornado, which is the ultimate safe-space—a space not reliant on doctrine, but born from direct observation of what is true. The eye of the tornado is ultimate freedom. This freedom is a silent, spacious, and compassionate freedom full of calm and peace and joy. It is a steadfast freedom, forever our guardian no matter what we, or others, or unfortunate circumstances are thrown our way.

The further question then arises: “How to find that center?” Or, as the great yogis of India may state it, “how to yolk to the center?”

In line with the stated mission of The Creator’s Compass, I refuse to sugar-coat what I view the answer to be. I refuse to placate us only to make us feel better on the surface and never touch the roots of the honest answer. I care too much for you to lie by omission just to bring a momentary lick of ice cream when what we need is a lush salad grown within the rich soil of loving-kindness.

In my view, there are two major ingredients that set the ground of compassion, or build the launchpad so we can rocket into the center of the tornado and create with freedom no matter what chaos we find ourselves in:

1. A dedicated practice of training the mind into an unwavering stillness, formally referred to as meditation.

2. Philosophical study and contemplation.

These ingredients intertwine and support one another like roots of a tree, and are often strengthened by the rich soil of a healthy community.

Our skills navigating the trials of life mature with meditation and contemplative studies, allowing us to confidently keep our ship afloat during rough seas. With a strong spiritual practice, we learn through experience all dark clouds are bound to part, and we steer our ship through storms with faith, navigating by the light of compassion. I, again, won’t lie. This path is not the easy path, but we if are enough of a bad-ass warrior to take it, we can create even within the chaos of wind and torrential downpours—our warrior’s sword cutting a path for both our personal fulfillment and to be of service to others.

In other words, once our creative rocket blasts off from a launchpad of compassionate ground nurtured by study, contemplation, and meditation, we create with inspiration to serve both ourselves and others. As a result, we behold a state of effortless joy and peace.

When I create only for my happiness (which I do sometimes), inspiration is short-lived, and I peter out, leaving me morose and frustrated. When I create for myself and others, inspiration may rise and fall, but it never leaves, and its flame burns with boundless oxygen.

Finding what inspires us as individuals to embody compassion for self and others recovers our inspiration to create.

When we discover which compassionate path calls us, we begin to steady ourselves in the tornado's eye. And here, the power of compassion takes over, flooding us with endless inspiration. If we continue to feed only our desires, we remain outside the tornado’s eye and are whipped around into a confused state, and our creative inspirations become diseased. I know, because I’ve been there, and still I find I lose my ground from time to time.

I believe we can recover our energies and inspirations in order to create amid chaos. I know it’s difficult. I recognize in myself how sometimes my launchpad is broken and my ground barren. I witness in myself and others how inspiration is sometimes here and sometimes gone. But we can continue to make the ground of compassion richer, to make our launchpads more steady and powerful. And we can only do so by merging to the sound of compassion’s silent call that echos in our bones. To allow compassion to breathe us into her center-less center of her heart. To have faith and confidence that compassion never waivers in her wise patience born out of unbounded loving-kindness.

Let us not forget we need each other. We need to hold each other with compassion and without judgment, and even more so when tornadoes of chaos whip into our lives. Never be shy or afraid to reach out for help. Help can be in the form of a therapist, a community, or a spiritual friend. Sometimes severe depression sinks its teeth into us as an aftermath of chaos and/or trauma and we need to seek extra help from highly qualified teachers or therapists.

Thank you for being here, for engaging with your mind and heart. If you would like to help spread The Creator’s Compass to insure its longevity, the best way to do so is to talk about it with friends and family and share this link. And if you haven’t already, subscribe below for free, and you will never miss a publication.

May all of us rest in the stillness of compassion’s love.

With all my love,

Renee

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Hello everyone. Today I’d like to share with you one of my adventures I took many years ago. And like most adventures that take you away from your comfort zone, it shifted my perspective. This one was taken with my beautiful friend Anne, and this podcast is dedicated to her and all our grand adventures we shared. I wouldn’t have survived without you, Anne.

EMERALD WATERS and MONSOONS

-Koh Phi Phi, Thailand

Flying fish leapt out of the inky, undulating sea, and my heart leapt with them. This was exactly the sort of thing I had yearned to see. I was on my way to heaven where clear sapphire-blue waters were promised by photos nailed outside the tourist expeditions’ office. And now off Thailand’s mainland, my friend Anne and I headed to Koh Phi Phi, an Island living in a nest of those clear waters.

On the boat, I peered into the ominous darkness below the bow and my stomach tugged with a sting of primal fear. We had to skate those waters to reach nirvana. That’s the thing with youth, you willingly skim dangerous territory. In fact, that’s part of the thrill, a thrill Anne and I grabbed onto during our months of travel.

We sat at the bow of the boat, forgoing the more serene stern because we wanted to be at the forefront of the small sea craft, cutting into the dense, movable earth, breaking into splashes of white to sting your eyes with its salt. Other adventure-seekers around us also knew the pull of devouring every ounce of their adventures.

Anne and I allowed our feet to dangle over the lip of the deck. I smiled at her, her blonde hair a crazy mess dancing above her head. I’m not sure she saw me smile, but her eyes shone with joy as she gazed at the sea before us.

I followed her gaze and saw, off in the distance, a solitary dark cloud. It seemed incongruous to the bright warmth saturating into all of our skins and the metal railing our arms flopped over. But innocence, or plain stupidity, glossed over what I assumed was a singular dark cloud and my attention was instead taken in by the sea whipping past us. Plopped here and there within the sea were dots of bright green lands poking their heads up from the surface like turtles as flying fish punctuated the collective excitement on board.

I don’t recall how long Anne and I sat on the bow, our legs draped over the ledge of the deck and our arms over the railing that warmed our tender skin. But somewhere in that space of timelessness, everyone silently disappeared. That should have been a clue. I was in a dreamy state, lulled by the boat and my dreams, so I didn’t even hear the others leave. When I noticed their absence, I assumed they became tired of fighting the elements of wind and salty spray and took refuge inside.

Not but a few moments later, and without warning, my toes touched the waters. I jolted, stung by the unexpected. Before I could comprehend why my toes touched the sea, rain pelted down.

“Grab on!” Anne shouted, her voice being swallowed by the aggression of wind coming from Greek gods who were visiting their southeastern cousins in Thailand. Anne’s hands gripped a thick white rope. Smart girl. I reached for it, too. With rope in hand and desperate for assurance all was okay, I craned my neck to look back to the captain in his safe plexiglass bubble. He signaled to stay put, don’t move.

That little black cloud, miffed at me for underestimating her, was proving her power and strength and was releasing her full wrath upon us. I considered praying to her. But praying to your captor seemed a bad idea, like it would anger her more.

How did Anne and I miss the cues to move inside? Why didn’t anyone warn us?

It felt ridiculous and stupid holding onto the rope. I looked back again at the plexiglass bubble. It was a relief to see a crew hand stepping outside and moving towards us. He slipped and leaned towards the willing, open mouth of the sea. I met his gaze. His good intent was obvious. But the Captain thwarted his desire to help the two stupid Americans, gripping for their lives with a rope, and demanded he abandon the mission.

My biceps tensed, working hard to support my weight. Large swells rose us up and dipped us back down repeatedly, my right foot tasting the salty grip of the sea over and over again.

A peculiar sensation arose. A feeling unfamiliar to most young people. “This may not end right,” I thought.

Anne and I hung on as our young bodies slid ungracefully to the left, only to slide quickly to the right, at complete mercy of the monsoon goddess. Our arms and legs fought in full battle mode, bracing and stabilizing us the best they could.

Then it stopped. And as quickly as the monsoon goddess had come, she left. My biceps relaxed, and the rope slid through my hands as a comforting height emerged between my feet and the waters, which were not inky darkness any longer, but a happy shade of emerald green. Anne and I sat there, mute, looking at the approaching refuge of Phi Phi Island. I glanced back at the Captain once again. He and a handful of crew mates smiled and laughed. I took it a bit personally. Laughing? We almost fell into the ocean, in a monsoon! There is no way that is funny.

I turned to Anne for much needed validation. “Scary,” I said.

“Oh my god!” she responded. Her pupils remained dilated and her usual carefree spirit had been submitted.

We skirted into the dock. Soft rain blanketed Koh Phi Phi as if we had sailed into a living Monet painting. The island buzzed with small village life meeting tourist demand, as if no storm had happened. I wondered if it had happened on this little piece of a mountain sticking up through the crust of the sea. The clarity of the waters we bobbed upon simultaneously joyed and disappointed me. The color did not speak sapphire-blue. I stuffed down my spoiled attitude and faulty expectations. After all, the emerald waters were spectacular, and more than that, Anne and I were alive.

A baht broke the surface of the water. A young boy immediately dove for the coin. A slew of bahts followed. Five other boys appeared, jumping off the dock for the easy money. Their wide smiles brightened up the mood of the passengers. But it took me aback and made me queasy, watching the children fetch the coins thrown in by tourists. I hoped for the boys’ sake it was not different for them from when I delighted in the challenge of diving for shiny pennies in my grandpa’s pool.

Anne and I had become accustomed to new and unsavory things like this, things like tourists and locals interacting in peculiar ways. We had grown accustomed to the unfamiliar and traveled by the seat of our pants without reservations. But that small monsoon shook us up more than we wanted to admit. Looking back, our tender pride of being fearless adventure-seekers had been bruised. However, because we knew how to rally under challenging circumstances, in less than a half an hour, we sat on firm beds inside a private island cabin. It always worked out that way for us. And that day gratitude did not escape us. The quietness, however, made the adrenaline still coursing through our blood something we couldn’t hide from.

The usually chill Anne retrieved a bottle of Nyquil, took a huge slug before offering it to me, and said, “Have some. It will help.”

I’m not one for masking anxiety, but that day I let the thick, noxious liquid pour down my throat.

As the syrup ushered us into the blank feeling of no-feeling, loud, tremendous thumps of significant weight beat on our cabin’s roof. Bang, bang…… bang bang bang. Canon bombs plummeted atop our heads.

With a bit of adrenaline still on the ready, we jumped up and opened the door. We burst into tired laughter. Coconuts. Our little scared selves had nestled in a coconut grove, and the storm had given the trees a haircut of sorts, the coconuts no longer able to hang onto their weakened branches. We closed the door and retreated.

The next day we awoke fresh and wide-eyed adventure-seekers again. We explored Koh Phi Phi, and the day that followed, we kayaked and snorkeled under the towering cliffs of the nearby uninhabited island. And this became the moment when I laid my eyes on sapphire-blue waters. They held a blue that speaks of the soul. A blue that drinks in your heart and mind.

But drifting from death defying waters of the open sea to paradisal waters of a pristine lagoon forced me to give up any pretense of control. And here, the first tentacles of adult trepidation, which accumulate as we age, took root in my psyche. I call these kinds of trepidations, half-blind wisdoms because we are no longer innocent and not quite fully wise. For the fully wise, there is no trepidation. But there is a gift from half-blind wisdoms. They teach us to embody whatever moment presents itself because you never know what’s around the corner.

Leaving behind the kayak for a snorkel, the stains from the fright on the boat vibrated in my bones as I looked through my mask, my lifeline a plastic tube pointing upward. The kaleidoscopic color of undersea life swarmed in the open water lagoon. I forced myself to turn my head away from bliss and peer into the depths pressing against the lagoon; it was a clear representation of eternity by the wall of water stretching on and on, getting darker and darker.

Out in the sea, thousands of miles away from home, I swam in my long sought after bliss of sapphire soul-blue waters, but with a visual reminder of the uncomfortable truth that bliss and misery are two sides of the same coin. They can’t exist without the other. Right? How can we know one without the other? I don’t think we can.

So, there I swam in bliss, surrounded by fright. How to hold both in the same moment? I tried, but I am sad to say I believe the fright overtook the bliss one too many times, especially when a current pushed and pulled me like an undersea frond. I was young. I was naïve. I was brave. And I had tasted my first real-life taste of discovering wisdom. And wisdom is gained by looking past bliss and into its other-half; misery. Eventually, as the Buddha taught, we look past both, and it is there that ultimate, not half-blind, wisdom rests.

I am still swimming in life, still pushing into misery and pulled by bliss, still learning how to capture the moment with no expectations, to snorkel without allowing fear to overshadow.

When bliss finds me, I always remember the monsoon. I’m reminded that bliss can shift without warning into misery. Yet, when misery visits, the truth of the inevitable shifting escapes me. If I only could remember. To be human is peculiar.

Maybe the lesson is to be like the boat; able to skate the turbulence and peace in equal measure, prepared for both and neither upset nor excitable when one leaves and the other shifts in.

I invite you to conjure up a time in your life where bliss and misery shifted into each other unexpectedly. Did bliss shift into misery or the other way around? Did it frighten you, or, pardon my language, piss you off?

I promised that within The Creator’s Compass we wouldn’t gloss over the difficulties of embodying compassion. And looking at difficult things is vital in order to understand the depth of compassion through the lens of wisdom. Therefore, being a spiritual seeker of truth requires us to be a bad-ass. Truly, we have got to be courageous and look at these difficult dragons of reality in the eye, to turn our heads to the dark waters pressing into our bliss, otherwise we are forever their subject and forced to bow down to the fear they create inside.

I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments (just hit the comment button below). About this subject of bliss and misery and their connection, do you agree? Are you at peace with this dance? I’d love to learn from you and not be an echo chamber of my making. We all need your wisdom because we hold compasses of compassion not only for ourselves but for each other, and this is our place to keep each other motivated and strengthened, so we keep digging deeper, unveiling our awesome and innate power waiting to burst forth. We might burst forth just like the monsoon goddess of the Thai seas, not with destruction, but with life-changing compassion.

Yes, that’s me, kayaking towards my soul-blue sapphire waters. An old photo taken by a real camera!

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In a world in which being strong means being a “bad-ass”, we choke out what makes us actually strong. Embedded in fear and anxiety, bad-ass is fueled with that all too familiar experience of being disconnected, of seeing ourselves totally separate from others. Bad-ass is bravado. It is that feeling of being ‘juiced up’ inside, ready to prove ourselves to be in the right, to submit the other side to our righteousness. It is a never-ending battle of the “I” or “me” asserting itself against the backdrop of a hostile world.

From the first tumbles with our tiny feet learning to walk to the seemingly constant barrage of people challenging us, hurting us, threatening our well-being, we need to be strong to thrive. And to survive, we need to be a bad-ass, but not the kind with poison dripping from our fangs, coiled up and ready to strike anything or anyone we deem a threat. That path is too obvious, too easy, and it sinks our fangs into an endless well of suffering. The other path is more subtle, less obvious at first, hallowed with soft light and looked upon as naive and weak by those who have never walked its terrain. It’s a road where the trees speak wisdom and the heart folds into its innate compassion. One path is fraught with never-ending battles and the other path reveals an ever-deepening joy and peace.

Let us not pretend that the path to joy and peace is easy and passive. The path to peace takes us through dark valleys where our inner world struggles to make sense of itself with the outer world. But these valleys are where we begin to see that we carry with us a sword of such greater strength than any sword we may find along the path of bravado and poisoned fangs because it’s the sword of awakening mind and when the mind is awake, there is nothing more powerful.

It takes immense courage to choose the path leading to peace, for that road requires vulnerability, a vulnerability speaking to the idea of staying open and fully alive. There is a sharp edge at first to staying spacious and open to others, and to ourselves, because it requires us to accept the very real possibility of getting hurt, sometimes profoundly so. But if we stay open long enough, nurturing wisdom and compassion, the sharp edges blunt and our fears dissolve.

Courageous vulnerability allows us to be open to the world, to soak in the rays of sunshine instead of fighting them. Instead of a war cry, we sigh in peace. Instead of resisting what is, we learn to accept. And instead of weakening our spirits by kicking and screaming at what we think of as bad, we throw our arms up in complete surrender to life with unbridled curiosity and appreciation.

Leading to our expansion, the courageous path makes our hearts burst with aliveness and purpose. On the opposite side, the path of bravado constricts us, essentially shutting us off from the world in an emotional self-defense protectiveness. Our inner beings crouch down like a tiger ready to pounce. In this protective stance, we experience feelings of disconnect and depression because it’s us against them… always.

It’s understandable why we shut off, why we shield ourselves from the inevitable pain others will hurl at us like cannon balls. The question is, how do we remain vulnerable yet not a pushover? How to be open and a powerful force?

During the first summer of the great shutdown of COVID, my family and I thought we were losing my dad because of a complex web of medical issues. I live about as far away from my family as one can in the USA and couldn’t help. Even if I wanted to, at that point, COVID was still a huge unknown and flying seemed out of the question. Fear was gripping my chest every day as I did my best to support my parents over the phone while juggling the every-day living duties. Amid my dad and Covid, I had to set some boundaries with the longest friendship of my life. It broke the friendship. I sincerely needed those boundaries, but I disrupted decades of a long dance and I should have predicted the outcome. I naively thought love would outshine the initial discomfort.

The sear of that broken friendship was startling, and the oddest thing was that the effects compounded over the next two years without me quite recognizing what was happening. I was becoming closed off to others. My trust was disintegrating. It was as if I was digging a deep moat to protect myself each day, one shovel worth at a time.

I refused to initiate meet-ups with friends. And with COVID still raging, I had the perfect excuse. My bubble was safe. I was safe. Or so I thought.

Then, I had to set boundaries with another person in the middle of all that chaos. This person also didn’t take kindly to my boundaries. I was finding out that disrupting the familiar rarely goes smoothly.

I polished my shovel, and I started deepening the moat. One dig with anger, another with sadness.

My Dad was recovering while I was losing what makes me be able to breathe life, to fold into its sunlight and honor the softness in me. I needed a savior, a lighthouse, to grab my shovel and lower the bridge for others to cross into my castle again.

With patient quiet whispers, the Buddha’s words wrapped around the handle of my shovel. His teachings on suffering reminded me that all sufferings inflicted on others by others arises from suffering. And when we behave with words or deeds that stem from our pain, we believe somehow our suffering lessons. But it never works this way. We are not dancing with our true selves when we act out of pain; we are dancing with our shadows. The more we move from our pain, the denser and denser our shadows become until we forget we are not our shadows. It is digging a moat without knowing it and one day finding we have dug so deep we can’t remember what the sunlight feels like anymore.

For me, the Buddha’s teachings on suffering were like a golden dagger of remembrance: We all suffer. We all share the same emotions. We all crave love and safety. And at times we reach for these blankets of peace with trembling fearful hands, hurting ourselves and others along the way. This golden reminder is the very seed for blossoming our compassion into full bloom. But…..

Oh, yeah, compassion. Dang it. Annoying. Stupid compassion won’t let me keep digging my moat. My instinct to strike with poisoned fangs was fighting for its chance, but my heart knew better, and now my head was finally catching up.

The ones who hurt me are hurting.

I softened.

I felt the tentacles of anger relax with the embrace of compassion. The power of compassion always dissolves the pain underneath the anger and hurt. It allows us to accept both the glory and struggle of life with a peaceful walk. With compassion as a guide, I came back to the scary and liberating realization that I’m completely responsible for my inner landscape of thoughts and emotions. It’s my choice to fight the sunshine or bask in its warmth. My choice alone. Contract and harden, or expand and soften? I choose to soften.

As soon as we soften, we might ask, if walking with compassion can soften us, what can protect us? What can make us not weak or a pushover? Boundaries. Is this not what I did? Yes, and the results were not what I would have chosen, but I gained strength and self-respect. I was determined to live fully embodied and confident, and to do so I needed to, and must still, set boundaries, but do so without fangs of poison. We all need boundaries and we can build them so that they shine our worth like a cloak of light so brightly that our boundaries are an expression of authentic loving-kindness, both for ourselves and others.

There is a saying I learned from the teachings of Tai Chi: Be like steel wrapped in cotton.

Being ‘as steel’ is knowing our worth and setting boundaries to honor that worth. Sometimes that results in hurt feelings, and in more extreme cases, it may mean physical self-defense. But this defense is born out of compassion for self and others and not an attitude stemming from fear and a disconnected sense of ‘me’ from ‘you’.

But we can’t be all iron. We need softness. And the softness of cotton wraps around us like clouds circling our iron strength. Our softness is our compassionate nature in action and how we interact with ourselves and the world around us. The root of compassion is seeing others as valuable as ourselves and when we do, we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness as naturally as a brook bubbling and dancing after a spring rain. There are many blessings with acting out of loving-kindness. One of these blessings is that we are free from the need to seek validation from others because we act not for external approval, but from our inner compass of unshakable compassion. The freedom from being needy shows we have cultivated an inner strength by discovering our true worth.

We are now steel wrapped in the softness of compassion.

And as such, we become the most bad-ass warrior a human can become. We are not a pushover, or weak, or one who cannot defend ourselves or others who need us, yet we are able to remain vulnerable so we can yolk ourselves to the unimaginable strength of compassion. Our sword is now sharp, our minds and hearts linked.

Next you or I experience pain inflicted on us from another, let us close our eyes with our compass of compassion firmly in our hands and hearts, remembering three things:

1. Compassion is impartial, and with that understanding we can see that those who hurt us falsely believe their actions will relieve them of their suffering. Because we know suffering ourselves, deep down we don’t want them to suffer. This reminder will soften us so that we can experience our true worth born out of wisdom and compassion. And this allows us to:

2. Be like steel wrapped in cotton. We know our worth, and with that we can set strong boundaries, allowing our compassion be how we greet the world. And this makes us:

3. True warriors with no need to carry the suffering others inflict upon us. We all are meant to expand into love and wisdom, not contract away from these very waters that soothe our parched throats.

Creativity Prompt

Write a story, a song, paint a picture, take a photograph, or create anything that inspires you with this prompt:

Imagine yourself as a warrior with a polished sword. You are steel wrapped in cotton, completely at ease with yourself and others, but never one to be pushed around. Now picture yourself coming upon your scared-self. What would you say to ease your scared-self? How would you help that self see his or her value and worth? How would you comfort your scared-self?

Write or create from your heart, for the scared-self is stuck in the head and all it wants to do is melt with the warrior-you into the heart-center.

Until next time, may we all remember each other holding the compass of compassion so we know we walk not alone.