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The Quality of Your Touch – Lola Wright

By May 20, 2019February 10th, 2020Events, Home, Messages

In yesterday’s talk, “The Quality of Your Touch”, from our May Series, “GIVE IT AWAY NOW,” Lola guides us to resist patterns of resentment and awaken patterns of aliveness to create a collective shift into freedom.

Transcript
This “talk” is electronically transcribed. Please excuse any errors or omissions.

Lola: … because there’s a little bit of homework for this week for those who are willing to accept the challenge. Now go ahead and take all your clothes off. Not right here. Stand in front of your mirror in a place and space that’s sacred for you. Take off all your clothes, put on your favorite piece of music and move your body. You know that it’s called mirror work, to actually be with yourself. And likely what may happen is all of the judgements, all of the opinions … I do not invite you into that practice because it will necessarily be easy. You standing naked by yourself in front of a mirror moving your body may bring some stuff up. And that’s the point of this work.

Lola: I said to someone this week that … It was made popular by a journalist, but we often say it in this space, that we are here to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. So if you’re finding yourself real comfortable, create some healthy tension, create some healthy pressure. You’re here in this plane of existence to grow, to expand. When something is growing beneath the soil, it requires tension to bust through and become its most beautiful self. You’re just like that. You actually are served by some tension. No creation or innovation ever happened in your gluttonous self. It just doesn’t happen there. I’m not saying don’t enjoy the overflow. I’m just saying don’t be afraid of the discomfort. Discomfort is your friend. It’s here to rub up against you and make the rough edges a little smoother.

Lola: So one of the things that I was told many years ago is that no matter what comes up when we are in collective practice, you always have the choice to see it as perfect. You always have the choice to trust that that which is irritating you is actually divinely orchestrated for your highest and holiest expression. Everything that is occurring in this now moment, in this plane of existence, is rightly designed, because we either believe that the universe is orderly, or we don’t. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s orderly sometimes. That’s antithetical to the word order. Either it’s orderly or it’s not.

Lola: So bring to your mind’s eye throughout the service something that you’re in resistance to, something that you’re like a dog with a bone, you don’t want to let it go, and just be willing to try on any and all turnarounds; that the opposite of that experience that you’re perceiving as wrong could be wholly right and perfect, exactly the way it’s designed.

Lola: I am writing this book right now and the intro, apparently … Maybe you knew this, I didn’t know … The point of an intro is to say what inspired this book. And the thing that I recently said yes to that I’ve shared with you before, this conscious leadership program that people are in, that’s a two-year commitment, was so clear for me. It was like this creation is to bring together extraordinary human beings of differing experiences such that we could create a field that busts through old paradigms of existence. But guess what came up in the program? All the old paradigms of existence. And there was a moment or two or three where I really was like, “Why are we doing this? This is a massive pain in the neck. I don’t need this in my life.” And now it’s serving as a great intro to a book. So, you know what? You never know what irritating situation could be here for your good, right? The book wouldn’t have gotten in motion if that irritating situation hadn’t occurred.

Lola: So, I want to talk to you about this theme, this series, that’s titled, Give It Away Now. That’s what we’re talking about in the month of May. What does it mean to give? What does it mean to walk in circulation, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving? So I want to talk about what does the word give mean? To freely transfer something to someone or somewhere; to freely transfer. Now the key word there, what do you think it is? Freely, baby. My suspicion is that if you’re anything like me, you give, but it’s not freely. It comes with all kinds of conditions. And guess who will feel trapped at the end of that exchange? The giver.

Lola: So my invitation for us over the next week is to actually begin to explore this experience of generosity. What does it actually mean to give freely? You remember last week I talked about this notion of via negativa. I want to revisit that. Via negativa is the way of the no, to find the will of God. Now, when we use the word God here, we do not mean some man out in the sky. We mean the presence of all that is, that is nearer than your breath and vaster than your being. To find the will of God, the highest pursuit of monks and mystics, one had to say no to anything that could compete with the still, small voice of the infinite, of the universe, of the presence.

Lola: So in order for you to give freely, you’ll likely have to start saying no to some of your giving. Because if your giving is rooted in this pattern of obligation, it’s not free and you’re not free. And then when something comes along that you actually want to give to, it still feels taxing. That’s sort of confusing. So I’ve given, given, given, given, given, likely out of obligation on some level of my being, such that by the time and the opportunity comes along that I really do want to give to, I’m tired, depleted, and over it. Well, that’s what we want to interrupt, yeah?

Lola: So let’s look at this thing: obligation leads to resentment, leads to entitlement. I talked about it last week, but I really want you to get this. You are being called, by virtue of sitting in this room, listening to this conversation; that is not of me, right? This is just what’s coming through this dimension of reality. We’ve all said yes to some inquiry here, otherwise it wouldn’t be coming up in the collective consciousness. So you’re being invited to start being highly discerning around what you say yes to and what you say no to. I so want for myself ever more, and for anyone and everyone I’m in relationship with, to feel fully free and alive when you give a yes.

Lola: Have you ever said yes to something and then been like, “Oh, why did I do that?” It’s like moments later. Have you ever said yes to a commitment, and then all of a sudden you get sick right before? Funny how that happened. All of a sudden you got a flat tire right before you were supposed to get there. All of a sudden the kids have an emergency at school. Your subconscious mind is creating all the time. You are so much greater than this three dimensional realm of existence that you create a bunch of mess. And I create a bunch of mess when I say yes to things that I’m not fully alive to doing. We create messes.

Lola: So you might say no more frequently and you might say yes less frequently. But you know what? When you say yes, it will actually matter. Your yes will actually mean something. So this thing of obligation, resentment, entitlement: let’s start with the end in mind. Where are you entitled in relationship to your partner, in relationship to your job, in relationship to your parents? Anybody expecting an inheritance? It’s like an entitlement. I’m due that. But if it’s not created from a place of spaciousness, it’s usually rooted in a resentment.

Lola: So if I look and say, “Where do I feel entitled?” then I can get a lot of information around who and what I resent. We talked about this on Tuesday night in the Intro to Conscious Leadership class. When you begin to dissolve drama patterns in your life, you avail yourself to energy for creativity that you previously never knew was even possible. It could be said that you won’t even know what to do with yourself once you free yourself of drama, because you’ve never even had … the vast majority of us are living in drama-based patterns the vast majority of the time: irritated, agitated, because something out here is doing something to me. The big game of this conversation is that all of life is divinely orchestrated for your highest and holiest unfoldment, that the agitation you find yourself in is precisely the soil that irritates the growth.

Lola: If you stay in that cycle of irritation, you’re missing the point. If you’ve been having the same conversation with the same people for decades, we’re missing a word called growth. We’re here to grow, to change, to evolve, to expand, and then to be able to give that, whatever that is that we’re uniquely here to do, be, have, out into the universe.

Lola: So Spiritual Economics, this book by Eric Butterworth … I quoted his book last week, Living in the Flow. He says, “Giving is an attitude with which you touch things.” Giving is an attitude with which you touch things. I spent a lot of years in sales and I had this guy who I used to work with, you’ve probably heard this a million times before, but he would say, “Lola, your attitude determines your altitude.”

Lola: It was like, “Wow, profound.”

Lola: But there’s a lot of wisdom in that. Your attitude, the way in which you give your energy, has a vibration to it, it has a resonance to it. The word that came to me in my meditation this morning was timbre. There’s a quality to sound that’s beyond just the note, the pitch, the location. It has a resonance. Your giving of time, of energy, of money has a quality to it. It has an attitude to it and it amplifies. So is the attitude of your giving one that you would want returned to you? When you go and do something with someone that you don’t really want to do, when you show up at a job that you really don’t love, when you lay down to a person that you have an attitude about that perhaps is less than attractive, that’s what you’re giving out, and it will always come back.

Lola: So giving is the attitude of your touch. It’s the resonance. It’s the field. I would encourage you to do an audit of every bit of energy you move, your money, your time, your talent, and ask yourself, “Do I have a full body yes to giving?” If you don’t, pause, because it will get icky real fast. When you lead a volunteer community, you see this all the time. All the time. People don’t pay attention to their whole body yes, and then resentment develops, and then entitlement follows right behind it. I see it every day. It’s not unique to Bodhi. It’s what human beings do when we’re not taking a hundred percent responsibility for who we’re being on the planet.

Lola: So the opportunity is to pay attention to: where is my full body yes? Now, what’s a full body yes? It means your IQ, your intellect, your mind, your EQ, your emotional intelligence, and your BQ, your body intelligence, are in alignment. Your body is one of your greatest tools that is probably least realized. We are living amidst a culture and a society, the places, the vast majority of awareness, on the mind, on the intellect. We’re beginning to awaken to the fact that we have this thing called emotional intelligence. And perhaps if we’re really risque, we’ll suggest that the body knows something.

Lola: A whole body yes or a full body yes is discerning your aliveness in the realm of BQ, body intelligence, EQ, emotional intelligence, and IQ, intelligence or intellect: mind, body, spirit. When any one of those is left out, we don’t actually know the place from which we’re discerning or deciding. So moving forward, we could all choose to practice walking in an experience of whole body yes. One of the ways that we practice this in the classes that we teach here is a lot of times we’ll say, “Okay, we’re going to have partners over the next 10 weeks. So we’re about to do an exercise that might trigger your third grade dodge ball experience not getting picked. Take a breath. We’re going to walk around the room in complete and total silence. And you’re going to stand before someone and tune in to these three different energy centers and ask yourself, as I stand before this person, ‘Do I have a whole body yes to being their partner?’ Realizing it actually has very little to do with the other, and entirely to do with you, but the practice is to bring greater self-awareness in.”

Lola: So imagine you started walking on the planet and tuning in to anyone that you interacted with and just said, “Do I have a whole body yes to this intention right here, right now?” It would be a more peaceful place to exist. When you override your kinesthetic awareness, when you override your whole body yes, you create suffering. So remember that time you took a job that you knew wasn’t yours to do? Has anyone not had that happen? That would be an example of not honoring your whole body yes and your sacred no. Remember that one you slept with that you knew you didn’t need to do that? And then you had a hangover afterwards, a little heartbreak hangover. When we dishonor our awareness, that stuff happens. Something in you knows, and it’s not just your mind.

Lola: So if we were to look at this thing called whole body yes, what might the cycle look like distinct from the victim consciousness or the congestion consciousness that we talked about? See, if you’re not in victim consciousness, if we were to just put this in a binary, you would be in creator consciousness. You would know yourself as an empowered being, that you actually could create what you want in any given moment. I was giving my mom a hard time last night because we were doing a Boomerang on Insta Story and I was like, “just a slow repeated movement, like this.”

Lola: And she was like, “Okay, I got it.”

Lola: And then we looked at it, and she’s like, “I hate that angle.”

Lola: I go, “Then just ask for a new angle.”

Lola: She was like, “I would like a new angle.”

Lola: So we switched spots and we did it again.

Lola: You can create anything you want at any given moment, but it does require you to take a hundred percent responsibility and speak it. Folks can’t read your mind. I don’t know which angle you like. You understand what I’m saying? So let us look at this practice of whole body yes. What that then looks like is moving with openness and curiosity, and then having an experience of appreciation. It’s very different from resentment and entitlement. So if we were to just choose obligation, resentment, entitlement, or whole body yes, openness and curiosity and appreciation, which would you prefer?

Audience: [crosstalk 00:20:43] whole body yes.

Lola: Yeah, and yet most of us, most of the time, are creating from a place of obligation, and then sad that our lives look the way they look. Like some thing out there did some thing to us. No, you just didn’t honor your intrinsic knowing. There are all kinds of agreements that we have set up in our lives that would be worth revisiting. Look at your calendar, look at your money. How many subscriptions do you have that give you greater aliveness, and how many subscriptions have you forgotten about, that are like a leaky drain on your bank account? You understand what I’m saying?

Lola: When I did the TEDx Chicago talk, there was a man who spoke that day who is like the lead surgeon at Midwest Orthopedics at Rush Hospital. And his talk was on youth athletes that at one time used to be three-sport athletes but now play the same sport year-round, and that the surgery that he has a specialty in that he was trained to do on professional athletes, he’s now doing on 13-year-old athletes. And he said, “I’m really concerned about this, because what I’m seeing is parents that are keeping their kids in one sport around the year.” He said, “I’m concerned about that.” And he said, “If you actually look at the” …

Lola: I know it’s a surprise that we’re here.

Lola: “If you actually look at that, there are a couple of things going on. One is, parents have a delusional sense of the future of their child and their probability in being in collegiate athletics and professional athletics. So a delusional sense; statistically, very improbable. And number two, the industry of youth sports is a multiples of billion dollar industry. So it’s business.” Keep those kids working at baseball.

Lola: And as I sit in that … I mean, it’s just a real easy way for those of you who are parents to look at your calendar and go, “How many activities do I have my kids in, and from where does that get created?” What are we afraid of that we have to pack our kids with so many things? You could then look at your calendar and say, “If I were to look at the next four months, do I really have a whole body yes to this thing? Do I really have a whole body yes to the family picnic?”

Lola: If you were to transition out of obligation … See, obligation will say, well, that’s your family; that’s what we do, we’re family. But then if when you leave the family picnic, you’re pissed at the family, then it wasn’t actually an act of generosity. It actually created a bunch of upset. So how might I orient my life such that when I give my energy away, I’m made freer, I’m fully alive?

Lola: I had a conversation with a client yesterday and they said, “I want this, this, and this from you, at this price.”

Lola: And I literally was like, “If I say yes to you on that, I will resent this opportunity. And if I resent this opportunity, you will not get the best and highest version of me. And I’m most interested in giving you the best and highest version of me.” Most people are super grateful if you are that aware and that candid because it creates a lot less mess down the line.

Lola: So I want to revisit this idea of giving, to freely transfer something; to freely transfer something. I do not ever loan money. It’s not free. There’s always a cost, even if it’s just my psychic space. So if you ask me for money, if I can’t get with it being a gift, you won’t get it. When I give to this place, if there are a bunch of conditions, it’s not a gift. When I give to my children, if there are a bunch of conditions, it’s not a gift. If your sour puss face responds to this Easter basket like that one more time … What happened to the spirit of the season? Can I give from a place freedom? This is a practice, it is a life-long practice.

Lola: So I’m going to invite you to close your eyes, if you would, for just a moment. We’re going to a practice of meditation, and see if we can find the places and spaces that are sucking your energy. If we actually created a collective shift through this time and space together such that we began to resist the pattern of resentment and awaken the pattern of aliveness, what might we change?

Lola: So begin to bring your awareness to what you have calling your name tomorrow. Where do you need to be? Where are you choosing to spend your time tomorrow, on Monday, May 19th? Where will I be? You might begin to scan your day and tune in and see, does my energy go up as I think about that thing? Does my energy go down when I think about that thing, or does my energy stay the same?

Lola: When I think about the thing that I call my job, when I tune in to one of the places and spaces that I give most of my time, are there parts of it that I would like to release? Are there parts of it that I would like to do differently? Would I be willing to transcend survival states of consciousness that keep me in some kind of suffering agreement … And I begin to imagine a life of aliveness.

Lola: What do I see there?

Lola: What am I doing?

Lola: Who am I with?

Lola: When I begin to imagine myself as a portal, a channel for generosity, what am I amplifying?

Lola: As I begin to give from a place of openness and curiosity, such that I can experience massive waves of appreciation, what am I giving to? So I invite you to take a deep breath in, and do one last inquiry: if I were to be rigorously honest with myself, the thing I really don’t want to do anymore is, what?

Lola: See, what I know is that there is a divine orchestration to all of life. What I know is that this universe is a place and space of order. What I know is that harmony is always available. So if there’s any place or space within me that I’m in a loop of agitation, it’s an invitation for something new. Suffering is not the way of this universe. So resting in that, I just know absolutely here and now that as the universe is orderly, so is my existence. And as that is true for me, I know that that is true for all beings on the planet, that there is an order in back of all things, an abundance in back of all things, that is always accessible. So we can rest in that this day. We can take responsibility for getting clear on the life we want to create.

Lola: So I absolutely know and affirm that every being that is plugged into this conversation in this room and online, in this now moment and in the future, that there was a stirring in the soul for greater integration, greater harmony, greater order, a resting in the abundant nature of life, and an activation that is congruent with my full body awareness. So I’m very grateful for this. I’m very grateful for this time and space in human history, knowing that we are evolving out of suffering contexts into a higher idea of what’s possible. I trust that. I know that all is well, that the evolutionary impulse of humanity always moves forward. So for that, I am very, very grateful.

Lola: I invite you to take a deep breath in. And so it is.

Audience: And so it is.

 

Bodhi

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