OneLife Institute

Click HERE to download a full-color 6 page PDF of this issue of the newsletter.

Notes from the Director

We are called to assist the earth
to heal her wounds and in the process
to heal our own --
indeed to embrace the whole creation
in all its diversity, beauty and wonder.

~ Wangari Maathai

The work of healing speaks profoundly to the intersection of spirituality and justice. We are - each of us, all of us - part of a sacred interdependent whole, and the well-being of one is intimately tied to the well-being of all. Central to this is the restoration (or primary formation) of right relationships: with self, with family and community, between and among nations, with Nature, and with Ultimacy.

Our featured guest contributor for this issue is Ruth King, author of Healing Rage, and a leading authority on emotional wisdom. She notes, "healing is about remembering who we are and what we deeply know. It is about learning how to work with our mind in ways that relieve suffering" and cultivate wholeness. The goal is not to eliminate rage, Ruth explains, but to creatively and compassionately engage it as a teacher and ally in the journey of transformation. Through this, energy that was bound up in old patterns and modes of being is liberated for new and life-affirming possibilities.

NEW FACES AT ONELIFE

We are delighted to welcome two wonderful new members to the OneLife team! In January, Jeannine Etter was hired as our Community Outreach Coordinator, and has already proven herself to be a tremendous asset to our work. An Oakland native, Jeannine is a writer, editor, radio producer, promoter, and spiritual activist. She is the host of "Chocolate Octave," a monthly neo-soul radio program on KPFA. And in May, Haben Sebhatu became our new Volunteer Coordinator. Haben came to the Bay Area from Eritrea more than a dozen years ago, and since that time has been active in serving the community. She is a Human Resources professional for the City of Oakland, and brings an energetic and loving spirit to her work with OneLife. Please visit the Board & Staff Profiles page of our website to learn more about Jeannine and Haben and the many gifts they have to share!

ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

Save the date! On October 16th OneLife will celebrate our fifth anniversary with a Friday evening gala event at the new Linen Life Gallery. Join us for live music, food, and fabulous folks! We are planning a silent auction, so if you or someone you know would like to promote their product or service and support us at the same time through donation of an auction item, please contact us now for details. And if you would like to be part of the event committee, we’d love to hear from you. Most important, though, we hope all of you will come out on October 16th to celebrate with us!

THURMAN CLASS IN LOS ANGELES

On Saturday, July 11th, I will offer an introductory workshop, "With Head & Heart: The Life and Legacy of Howard Thurman" at the Center for Religion and Spirituality at Loyola Marymount University. Please let all your L.A. friends know about it and encourage them to register ASAP if interested. The class will be canceled if there is not sufficient enrollment. Information and registration on the LMU website at: https://www2.lmu.edu/extension/catalog.aspx?id=5725

TRANSFORMATIVE VISIONS 2010

We are delighted to announce that the FAITHS Program of the San Francisco Foundation has awarded us a mini-grant in support of Transformative Visions, our (now annual) art, jazz and spoken word event. Look for the call for submissions for visual and word artists in November. The event will once again be held in March, and will be hosted in partnership with our friends at Studio One Art Center. Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen the web-based version of Transformative Visions, please check out the linked pages for ART, WORD and MUSIC (from both 2007 and 2009) for photos, audio, and video, or visit the OneLife channel on YouTube.

SPIRIT, SOUND & SILENCE

On Saturday, August 1st we will be back at Holy Redeemer Center for our next 'Spirit, Sound & Silence' retreat. Come enjoy a day of healing and renewal. In addition to our sliding scale admission policy, we now have full scholarships available for those in need. Please click HERE for retreat details.

VOLUNTEER APPRECIATION

Our annual volunteer brunch was held on May 25th. This year we awarded certificates of appreciation to 55 people who generously shared their time and talent in support of OneLife and our work of healing and inspiration. Truly, we exist on volunteer power (and a lot of prayer!). If you are interested in serving with us, please visit the Volunteers Welcome page of our website or call 510.595.5598

With gratitude and in peace,

Liza
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Healing Rage

by Ruth King, MA

Rage is an oppressed child emotion housed deep in our bodies, minds and spirits. We react to our rage as if it were an emotional enemy to be annihilated, a fire to be feared. Yet rage is the descendent of our traumas, the twin of our shame, the burden of our denied histories, the foreign language of our emotional pain, and the wisdom that helps us heal. Rage is a natural resource of misused energy, and it exists - even rules our lives - whether we acknowledge it or not.

Rage and anger are often considered one and the same, but they are distinct experiences. Both rage and anger are emotions that we feel and may or may not express. Anger is more associated with a current injustice, disappointment, or dislike - someone says something ignorant and our first impulse is to set them straight, or a driver cuts in front of us without signaling and we shout out in the safety of our own car. These are forms of anger, they come and eventually we get over them and move on. Those finding themselves in a perpetual state of anger wear Defiance - one of the six disguises of rage.

Rage, on the other hand, is an accumulation of anger - an experience that is fundamentally rooted in something older and more personal, often a childhood experience that shamed us, or a child living in a chronic atmosphere of fear. With rage, we feel more shaken, confused, and often paralyzed in fear. Our experience feels foreign, frightening, and intolerable. In fact, an older memory wants to emerge but we can’t allow it, and this is often an unconscious process that haunts our lives. The primary job of rage is to keep us from re-experiencing intolerable shame.

Many of us go through our lives maintaining a good front. We may have all of the trappings - good job, higher education, and material gain, yet we have an inherent discontent with our lives that won’t go away. We manage to look okay from the outside, hiding those periods of despair when we feel everything caving in on us. We express confidence on the surface and feel fear or dread underneath. We may be on the edge, but we hide it, sometimes beautifully, even from ourselves. This is accomplished by wearing the Disguises of Rage.

Disguises are our rage child’s armor - the coats we wear year round to cope with the chill of life, even on a warm day. There are six Disguises of Rage that high functioning people wear:

* Dominance - You control to avoid being controlled. You distance from others and abuse power to manage your terror of tenderness.

* Defiance - You use anger to divert your need to be loved, often by your perceived enemy.

* Distraction - You avoid intolerable feelings of emptiness by filling yourself and your time with self-defeating diversions.

* Devotion - You take perfect care of others, sacrificing your own well being to avoid knowing and receiving what you deeply need.

* Dependence - You stay financially insecure and emotionally distressed. You deny your personal power out of your fear of losing love.

* Depression - You would rather disappear than disappoint others. You shut down to avoid overwhelming feelings of grief and rage.

Disguises attempt to hide what we fear, but they have a way of creating more fear in our day-to-day lives and in the lives of others. With Disguises, we convince ourselves that we are in control of a chronically frightening life, one we would prefer to accept as normal. Yet Disguises are symbolic of what is ungrieved – blocked energy that constricts the heart and all matters of the heart. Disguises are ambassadors of the past - old stories of rage that require our loving attention.

By the time we are 12 years old, we are well armed in our Disguises of Rage. They are the result of both childhood trauma and a rage inheritance - the unresolved rage of our parents and ancestors that we carry out of an unconscious loyalty to them. We relive what is unfinished through our Disguises, and these Disguises continue to rule our adult lives until we transform them. While Disguises have played a significant role in our survival, they interfere with our healing. We perceive these obscure expressions of rage as being safer and more acceptable than the truth they pretend to hide. Awareness of our Disguises of Rage is healing and often comes as a revelation and a challenge. Crucial is that we engage in a process that reacquaints us with our basic goodness, and cultivate our capacity to embrace the ignorance of the world, and ourselves, with tenderness.

Rage is indeed good news - a gift that allows us to investigate the universal nature of suffering and freedom through our own inner experiences. Each Disguise of Rage has a corresponding wisdom that is revealed when we relax the armor of our Disguises and rest in our basic goodness.

        * The Wisdom of Dominance →  Discernment

        * The Wisdom of Defiance →  Passionate Clarity

        * The Wisdom of Distraction →  Free Will

        * The Wisdom of Devotion →  Harmony

        * The Wisdom of Dependence →  Originality

        * The Wisdom of Depression →  Solitude

With an open heart, we are able to honor the basic goodness of all who suffer, especially ourselves. With practice, our interactions are more present, honest and compassionate, and our actions wise, intentional, and joyful.

Oscar Wilde shares: "Hearts are meant to be broken. This is how we heal." Rage is akin to matters of the heart, and healing requires that our hearts be broken again and again. To heal rage is to take that risk, come out of hiding, and recognize that what and who we fear - even hate - is our greatest teacher.

Transformation is our nature. It is our birthright to be kind, joyful and happy. When we are paying kind attention to rage, it ceases to be a problem. The antidote to our fear and discomfort with rage is to cultivate a compassionate mind and heart, intellectual understanding, moral consciousness, humility, and an ambition that leaves a good legacy. We need more than aspirations and inspiration - we need practices, as close to us as each breath, that support us in discovering who we are, who we have always been. 

~*~

Ruth King, MA, a respected voice on emotional wisdom, is president of Bridges, Branches & Braids - an organization working with negative emotions in positive ways. She is the author of Healing Rage: Women Making Inner Peace Possible (Penguin Publishing Group, 2007), and the audio CD Soothing the Inner Flames of Rage: Meditations that Educate the Heart & Transform the Mind. King weaves Eastern and Western psychology, leadership development, metaphysics, and teachings from wisdom traditions to lecture, coach, and facilitate retreats that transform the emotional body and mind. For details, please visit: www.ruthking.net

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One of the central activities in each of our quarterly Spirit, Sound and Silence retreats is the labyrinth walk. The labyrinth is an ancient symbolic pattern found in various forms in many cultures and religious traditions around the world. Some sources date them as far back as 2500 BCE. The labyrinth can be used as a way to quiet the mind, find balance, invite insight and healing. It is a powerful meditative practice rich with metaphor; an archetypal map describing the cycles of the spiritual journey.

Unlike a maze, the labyrinth is a single path without tricks or dead ends. The way in is the way out, and one must trust the process in order to complete it. Its looping pattern at times creates the illusion of doubling back or moving away from the goal, but every seemingly redundant or wrongly directed turn is an essential part of the distance between "here" and "there."

The first stage of the labyrinth journey is purgation or release – shedding the chatter of competing thoughts and emotions, letting go of outworn beliefs and habits that no longer serve. This is the path inward to the center of the labyrinth. Upon reaching the center comes illumination through a period of meditation, prayer, and receptivity. The journey out is union, integration with the Divine as one is empowered to find and accomplish the work of the soul’s calling. It is worth noticing that union comes not in the stillness at the center, but in the journey outward - in the walk of life itself.

Some people move through the labyrinth quickly, purposefully. They do not linger at the center. Others infuse each step with reverence and precision - at times stopping, listening; at  times walking  with eyes closed. Some even dance the labyrinth.

Each person is participating in a common experience - literally walking along the same markings on a piece of canvas - yet the perception of the experience is unique for each one. At times we may appear to be walking together with someone side-by-side, but then our paths unexpectedly separate. Or we may meet the same person many times as we cross and cross again, but we are traveling in opposite directions. Somebody who seems to be physically far away may actually be closer to us in time than the person in physical proximity. And whatever the distance in time or space, we remain connected by the pattern that holds us all together.

And this is Life. The path often leads in what looks like the wrong direction, but as my friend Sis. Destiny (the harpist for our retreats) observes, "Sometimes the longest way 'round is the shortest way home." For isn’t it always on the journey that the transformation occurs? That the pilgrims are tested and strengthened. That relationships are forged. That we become the people we are called to be. From Holy Scriptures to the Wizard of Oz, the gifts we seek are within us all the time, but it is the journey itself that brings them forth through our encounters with necessity.

Maya Angelou has written about the intense pressure needed to form a diamond. She notes that with less pressure one might have crystal, less than that coal, and still less, merely dirt.  It is all the same stuff, only the tempering process has differed.

In these days of change, many of us are experiencing intense pressures. Perhaps feeling like we are walking a maze from which we cannot escape. But I truly believe that rather than a maze, Life is like the labyrinth. Nothing is wasted - every twist and turn and loop is part of our initiation from dirt to diamonds. And though we are each on our own unique journey, there is a larger pattern of wholeness that guides our steps and connects us all. Our task is to engage with mindfulness and sacred intent, alert to what is revealed along the way. We can draw on the wisdom and courage of those who have come before, even as we help prepare the ground for those who will follow.

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