As some of you who read my blog know, the practice of Wisdom Healing Qigong has been an important part of my life for seven years now (see Challenge, Choice, and Chi). I recently accepted an invitation to be part of an eleven month mentorship program with my teacher Master Mingtong Gu called The Living Tao. It began on April 1st. One of the primary things we were asked to create was a Life Project, which could encompass almost anything — a service, a business, a personal endeavor, an artistic pursuit, a relationship challenge, a community involvement…

For me, writing on this blog, which I resurrected in February, I knew would be my Life Project. (see A Resurrection Of Words – 2023)  But after our first mentorship gathering, I found I was being asked to consider how this project would fulfill certain requirements that Mingtong set forth. He asked us to meditate on several questions, including:

— How does the project serve self-realization?
— How does it generate the expression of Essence?
— What is the goal of your Life Project?
— How does your project encourage letting go of attachment, limited identification, outcome, judgement, resistance?
— Does your project have these qualities: awareness, wisdom, creativity, love, joy, self-initiation?

Alter Eco…the best!

As I contemplated this, I found myself having an inner dialogue with someone that sounded a lot like Spankie, my lower self.

“Write whatever you want,” she said.

“But complaining is something I’m really intending not to do these days,” I said.

“A little kvetching is good for the soul,” she said.

“It isn’t,” I said. “It’s getting myself agitated over unimportant stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Wordly things like seeing double-spacing between sentences in the self-published work of people and venues I care about. Or finding punctuation outside of quotation marks. Unacceptable…except in The Guardian. And Emojis!! Mingtong wants us to use emojis and other communicative icons to acknowledge each other’s weekly journal entries in the Living Tao that we post on Slack. I’m okay with a bird, a flower, musical notes, and hearts. I’ve learned to deal with hearts. But I’ve never been able to make myself use those yellow smiley, frowny faces from hell. For the most part, I can’t even make them out clearly and don’t understand what they mean. Seeing them makes me feel like someone scratching nails down a chalkboard.”

“My my,” she said. “Aren’t we getting fiesty?”

“This, from you?” I said. “You used to love a good rant.”

“Well, I certainly agree with you about emojis,” she said. “They portray a total lack of sophistication. As far as writing goes,” she went on, “I say you can write about anything that comes up for you. What about the whole letting-go-of-resistance? Don’t you have to let go of the resistance to writing from whatever you’re feeling? If you feel miffed, be miffed. If it helps to write about it, write about it. If it doesn’t, don’t. Be a little daring. Unleash your quirky side. Write about the ridiculous and the sublime. It’s all spiritual.”

And with that, she was gone.

As I traced the feelings inwards, I saw that errors in publications from people and venues whose work I admire and support and recommend, bother me because not using proper formatting looks unprofessional. I become concerned for their reputation. I want everyone to think well of those I care about. I don’t want them to be judged, as if I could know that would happen, or that it’s any of my business. This is what’s not “spiritual.” This idea of me wanting to “fix” something for someone else, something that most likely isn’t even an issue for them.

Painful scenarios of past times when I felt I’d totally embarrassed myself by my own ignorance or naivety and was judged, or felt judged, as incompetent and unprofessional drifted through my memory. Reliving these experiences wasn’t fun, but I was ultimately able to let them go. And as I did, I also felt the need to loosen the grip of this ridiculous obsession. Yay, another letting go.

For now, I’m going to listen to Spankie’s advice and write about whatever it moves me to write about, especially since I’ve discovered that even if I begin with an idea that might sound “unspiritual,” my Inner Self guides me to the deeper truth, and that’s worth sharing.