meet me where i am

Holding Two Worlds in Tension

The Online Meditation Crew has a Facebook group.  At first I was hesitant to join.

Sometimes I feel like I’m holding two different worlds in tension.  There is the one that I grew up with, where Christianity is the norm.  Then there is the one in which I can explore spirituality and religion without worrying about what society expects of me.

Facebook and Twitter mirror those worlds for me.  In Twitter, I have the shield of anonymity that I can hide behind if I need to, so it feels safe.  It is the place that I can explore and connect and get answers and try things on for size.

Facebook is more like “real life” for me.  All of my friends on Facebook (save two) are people that I know in real life – whether it’s friends from high school, former coworkers, or people from my current social circle, which centers around the Episcopal Church (in fact 18% of my friends are priests).

The Online Meditation Crew is Twitter.  It is a place where I can let my guard down, ask questions, explore.  I really like what I see, what I am doing, and what I am learning and experiencing. I don’t hold any illusions that I actually know the people I’m sitting with, but it really doesn’t matter.  We are all part of the same universe, and as such part of each other.  All the rest is details.

My fear was that my Twitter/OMC/Buddhist world would suddenly collide with my Facebook/Christian world and I would somehow end up chucked to the side from both.

And, lest you think this fear is unfounded, I must relate a story about two things that happened in church recently.

There was an opportunity for parishioners to join in “centering prayer“.  I thought it sounded great and joined the group on their first “sit”.  To me, everything about centering prayer was what I had learned about meditation.  There was one person in the group who was adamant (and I don’t think that’s a strong enough word) that this wasn’t meditation at all, and he tried to throw some theology in behind it to back up his opinion.  I still say that if you strip away all the trappings…it’s meditation.

The second story is about a person who was coming in to the parish to lead a workshop on yoga.  There wasn’t anything religious about her presentation from what I could tell – it was just about using yoga techniques to help center you in both mind and body.  The person who was organizing this workshop got up on two consecutive Sundays to try to get people to sign up.  She stressed both times that it was not some other religion that was being practiced so no one had to worry.

So, I see fear from the Christians, and I don’t know the Buddhists (or enough about Buddhism to be secure in it) yet, and I was afraid of what would happen when the two met.

During today’s OMC scheduled meditation session, it suddenly hit me.  It’s not about Christianity, or Buddhism, or Facebook, or Twitter, or “real life”, or “online life”.  It’s about ego.  My ego was getting in the way of me being who I am.  This is the way I am experiencing the universe, and the way the universe is experiencing me right now.  At this moment.

And this moment will be gone immediately to be replaced by another moment and another way of experiencing.  It’s time to let go and be.

I joined the OMC Facebook group.

Wait, what happened to the blog?

I’ve made a decision about this blog.  (If you want to skip the rest of this post, the decision is – I’m keeping it.)

This blog blinked into existence as a project for a class I was taking (I won a free Freshworkshops course in WordPress!).  For the class I had to install and configure WordPress.  To really work it, I had to add posts.  I hit on the domain name, but I really didn’t know where I was going with it.  I really was interested in learning WordPress as a concept.  I didn’t really want to make this an online journal of my day-to-day activities.  I already have that blog.  So, I added a couple of posts about things that were kind of on my mind – nothing earthshattering.

Recently, I’ve been wondering what to do with the blog, and I had decided to get rid of it.  I could use the hosting account for something else, and I wasn’t really going anywhere with the content, so I thought it would be better to just scrap it.

But now I’ve discovered the OMC, and I think I should use this forum to explore my meditation, and Buddhism, and see where I go with that.  If you think of spirituality as “many paths, one truth”, I think I have just stepped off the path I’ve grown up with and I’m looking around.  Not moving forward, not moving backward, but taking in the view.

I still don’t know where I’m going with this, but it should be an interesting journey.

That would explain why the posts that have been sitting here for almost a year are not here any longer.  (And I’ll be changing the theme, too, probably.)