Trees for the forest

I'm forcing myself to write today, because I mean what I said in yesterday's post: I really don't want to be only negative.  But I also use the word "force" because it's hard.  Not just trying not to be negative when I'm feeling down, but just writing in general.  I want so much to cut through all my personal bullcrap and write words that are pure and honest, without trying to sound a certain way or be funnier or more clever than I really am.  I really, truly am on a journey to know myself and speak myself...and I know that sounds very corny and cliche, but I guess sometimes maybe truth is cliche?

So my point is, today's post might end up being like a meandering stroll through a forest with no clear destination.  But I tend to be a "trees for the forest" person anyway, so maybe it's good.  Let's spend some time looking at the trees.

I hope I don't worry my parents too much with this one (though it should come as no surprise to them, their girl who never really followed convention) but I struggle sometimes identifying as a textbook "Mormon".  Not near as much as I used to - I've come to terms with some things - but still just a little bit.  I feel calm and secure in my faith, like I don't have any thoughts that are too radical, and I'm not a boundary-pusher just for the scandal of it.  Ordain Women has no siren's call for me, for example.  But sometimes I worry that I appear just a bit sacrilegious to some people.  I love the church, I love the gospel.  I love everything it teaches.  But, my friend Brooke put it beautifully one time while she was teaching a Relief Society lesson - and I wish I could remember exactly what she said - but she said something along the lines of how sometimes our words or our wording, inside the church or inside Christian circles, gets in the way.  And sometimes it's easier to understand a concept or a principle when you hear it called something else, or described in a different way.  I feel that way so, so often.  Like I get so used to hearing the same phrases over and over again that I become deaf to their meaning, and it's refreshing to hear it described with different words so it can reach me again.  Not that the concept or principle or whatever  becomes bad or not true anymore, but sometimes I feel that our terminology within the church can feel a little exclusive to people on the outside.  There's nothing wrong with trying to find new ways to say the same thing.

So I really like Buddhism.  I had a little conversation with my dad a few days ago about how much we like Buddhism, and that many of the ideas and teachings we've found in it are really applicable to living a spiritual life, even one centered on Christ and the restored gospel.  I've recently discovered a woman called Pema Chodron, who I'm tempted to say is one of my favorite authors even though I've yet to fully read one of her books - and that's only cause I don't have a bunch of money to spend on books at the moment.  She's a Buddhist nun, and she has a way of speaking that opens me up to understanding.  

Here's an excerpt I love about meditation (I love meditation), from her book Start Where You Are:

"Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself.  It is healing to know all the ways that you're sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways.  You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness.  By knowing yourself, you're coming to know humanness altogether.  We are all up against these things.  We are all in this together.  So when you realize that you're talking to yourself, label it "thinking" and notice your tone of voice.  Let it be compassionate and gentle and humorous.  Then you'll be changing old stuck patterns that are shared by the whole human race.  Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves."

I'm sure someone at church has said basically this same thing at one point or another, but for some reason hearing about how knowing and being kind to yourself is important and is what allows us to be kind and compassionate to others from this meditative, Buddhist perspective helps me internalize it so much better.  

I also started reading this book called Restless: Because You Were Made For More, by Jennie Allen, who I guess is a non-LDS, Christian author.  And in most cases I seem to find myself relating even less to "christian" speak outside of the Mormon church than I do to non-christian spirituality, but so far I'm relating to this book.  This is a passage I particularly liked:

"Some of us have decorated our prison walls so beautifully that we have altogether forgotten we are sitting in a cell, wasting our lives.  We don't know there are chains that, though they no longer bind us, still seem to tangle us up.  We sit and listen to talks or read books about God, and we wonder why nothing changes when we so desperately want it to."

I love this, because it reinforces the principle of acting, of doing the work that's required instead of just thinking nice thoughts.

Anyway, those are just some of the trees in my forest. It took me like an hour to write that, which is probably really sad; but like I said, this is hard for me. It would be really nice if this were the kind of thing that gets easier the more you do it, but I guess we'll see.