Imagine… times three hundred and sixty five

Let John Lennon’s “Imagine” waft into your mind.  It’s easy if you try… 

…above us only sky.

It is a song about being happy and conscious in the here and now, in the service of the oneness that we already are a part of.  So whether you follow yoga, or Jesus, or Torah, or Tao, or Buddha, or Krishna, or cut your own bold trail of no-God through the chaotic tangle of tangible “reality,” all these paths may prove as bridges to a common island of what just IS.  

And we will find parents on every path, and in every corner of the existential situation.  When John Lennon sings, “Imagine no religion,” I think about time he spent in India, and how the Hindus may seem to pray to many gods, but their ultimate goal is to see past them all into the infinite truth of no “gods” only the unfathomable God of what is.  Likewise, when Moses asks the Divine presence in the burning bush, “Who are you?” the voice answers enigmatically:  “I am that I am.”  When Jesus says that we should love God with all our hearts and souls, this is consistent with loving every neighbor (including those who see it all differently than we do).  Arguably, loving God could mean that we are well served to love the world, right now, as it is.  I suspect that Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha and John Lennon would all have much less argument with each other than would the subsequent “followers” of these different voices of human consciousness.

And for this reason I suggest that parenting itself is a path to “God”—to the living God that pulses all around us, and contains us and all our diverse opinions, feelings and arguments—the God of what just is, the Truth that sets us free to live, love and be completely alive today.  

Now it seems to me that the human condition, by design or by random flux, is a challenging one.  And it also seems that when you do an MRI on a monk who has spent years meditating, the parts of their brain that we associate with connection, happiness and joy glow like Christmas lights.  This underscores how if we change our minds, we change our brains.

Very often our egos think they know what we want, and we suffer because we don’t have it, or we suffer because we get it and, like Gatsby, find that it did not bring the feelings we thought it would.  A radical approach to happiness and better parenting is to embrace, love and find gratitude for what simply is—our kids and our world as it stands, today.  Trust the universe.  In this way painful lessons are mastered and we are released from stuckness and suffering through accepting, loving and learning from the very things we thought we did not want.  The gold is in the poop (and so is God).

It’s easy if you try… but mindfulness practices, whether prayer, yoga or gardening, benefit from consistency.  That’s why it’s called “practice.”  In this spirit I offer the following palliative.  

Let’s set an intention:  To love God (i.e. what already is) in the service of our individual children (i.e. our kids, students, animals) in the service of all our collective children.

My offering is to post something in the spirit of this intention, every day that I am physically able, for a year of parenting mindfully, summer solstice to summer solstice.  I will try to evoke the spirit of the “good” (by which I mean good and not so good, right-on and dead wrong, but with all good and sincere intention).  Working together, we will attempt a blog that is as much ear as it is mouth, in the hopes that together in our sangha we may be loving, consistent, steady, listening… Our sangha will be here whether you, as an individual, come or you don’t come on any given day or week or month.  No guilt, no control, no agenda beyond helping us be our best Selves as parents.

Namaste, Bruce