Faith Makes Sense (It’s “sensical”)

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a pretty logical kind of guy.  Much of the time this serves me very well, but at times it can be a great hindrance.  I began to recognize that aspect of my logical self a long time ago, but recently understood it in a new way.  My desire for logic was sometimes causing self-doubt and something else that tormented me; second guessing.
 
This came to the fore once again over the last couple of days as Kate and I went tipi shopping.  Back in November a very generous donor had graciously gifted us the money to purchase one for The Mesa, but it was the end of January and we still hadn’t bought it yet.  We knew that we wouldn’t put it up on the runway before winter turned to spring, but also that it would soon be tipi makers’ busy season.  If we waited too long we could end up sitting on a waiting list instead of in a tipi.  Why didn’t we act?
 
On several occasions we had looked at various tipi manufacturers’ websites, and felt overwhelmed by all of the choices.  Mentioning in the “News from The Mesa” section of our emails that we were shopping for one brought a recommendation from Mesa friends Larry and Neta in Israel who had just recently received shipment of the tenth tipi they have purchased for their own spiritual center or to help others.  We valued our friends’ advice, which basically reinforced our own leanings.
 
Tuesday, we called and spoke with a representative at Nomadics Tipis who graciously answered all of our questions and promised to call us back with a quote for what we wanted.  The money was in the bank and we had secured permission from our landlord to put a tipi on the runway.  All we needed to do was to check on our charge card balance to make sure we didn’t bump into our credit limit.  Still, we could feel some part of us begin to second guess, me more so than my wife.  Were we making the right choice?
 
Kate’s Aries (“Do it now!”) nature was ready to jump in and order it on the spot when Nicole called back with a quote that included shipping of the 27 foot long poles, but I was more hesitant.  I knew it was prudent to check on our finances, but I was feeling something else; that one foot on the gas, one foot on the brakes kind of hesitancy that sometimes stopped me from doing things in life that I knew were right until I checked and triple checked.  I told myself I was being cautious.  Besides, I reminded myself, we had to rush off to meet a healing client up at The Mesa and stop at the bank on the way, so there wouldn’t be time to do the transaction right then.  That served to justify something I was feeling inside me that I did not fully understand—not until the next day.
 
I had crazy dreams that night about being detained in a foreign country and trying to bargain or deceive my way out.  My efforts were unsuccessful but I wasn’t imprisoned, just not allowed to leave some kind of government agency.  I stayed willingly, not attempting to force my way out and risk reprisal.  Later scenes were of me and Kate in a car, trying to decide what town in that foreign land to drive to now that we were free to travel.  We had to choose which way to turn and debated going left or right.  On top of things, the car was nearly out of gas.  I turned off the engine.
 
As I woke up and began my morning check-in with myself, and then with Kate, the issue of second guessing came to the fore.  I often watched myself doing it with certain things in life but not with others, and categorized it as some kind of protective behavior.  I wanted to understand what was driving it so I could move past second guessing to a new level of trusting myself, my intuition, and my heart.  I started asking myself and my Guides questions along with some Kinesiology (muscle testing) and what emerged didn’t seem like that big a deal at first glance.
 
I asked if second guessing myself was about fear and got NO’s all around.  Stating the obvious, I asked if there was some kind of payoff for me and got a YES.  If I’m not doing it out of fear, then what’s driving it?, I wondered.  Then another word came into my awareness; faith.  I knew I had trouble with faith, not as a concept, but as a felt sense.  I easily believed in the unseen world that I had been touched by many times in my life without any outside “proof” other than my own senses.  What I had trouble with was the sense of comfort, certainty, and assurance that I figured would go along with a feeling of faith in what I believed.
 
Just a couple of days before, I had spoken with an insistent telemarketer who had called The Mesa, wanting to sell us health insurance.  I laughed out loud when she stated her case, telling her that we are holistic healing practitioners and don’t foresee a need to go to doctors.  “OK,” she said, “but what if you have an accident or a heart attack?  We can set you up with catastrophic insurance.”  I told her that I didn’t need to have an accident because I was facing the things inside of myself that would cause me to manifest one.  “But what if you were in an accident?” she continued, “You wouldn’t want to end up in the hospital with a $50,000 medical bill, would you?”  I told her that I wasn’t going to end up in the hospital.  “You wouldn’t go to the hospital if you were hurt?” she asked incredulously, missing the point.  She then wished me luck and promptly hung up.
 
Even while I was talking with the relentless, obviously well trained and accomplished telemarketer about my beliefs and outlook on health and life outcomes, I could feel that second guessing going on deep inside of me, down there in the subconscious “parking garages” of what we call the Binary Level.  “But what if I’m wrong?” it whispered.  “That would be awful…”  I recognized the feeling from other occasions, like explaining energy healing to skeptical strangers.  I also knew that this was exactly what the telemarketer was counting on me thinking.  I somehow objectively observed it all happening in real time; this inner struggle to stand my ground and have faith in what I knew.  There was still an uneasy feeling, and that voice.  Was it just whimpering, or the “voice of reason”?
 
Sitting there with Kate, I made a verbal list of what I knew of myself and my faith:  I knew I had it, that it was very big, and of great strength to have gotten me this far.  I also knew that I struggled with consciously experiencing it.  I seldom felt something reassuring kick in when I felt I needed it.  There was clear evidence of some kind of internal reckoning about faith.  Was it simply a conflict between belief and doubt, or was it more of a disconnect—my turning faith off, like flipping the switch on some inner kitchen appliance.  I could visualize that having happened for any number of traumatic reasons in my life, but the nature of an underlying conflict was more obscure.  I felt unsure how to get directly to the issue, but my instincts told me that if we started a Guided Head Movement healing for me about feeling faith, the conflict would likely show itself.
 
I decided to ask Kate to use the statement, “Brad, I want you to feel your faith,” as the healing request for the process.  As she said it and started to roll my head for the NO portion of the no/yes sequence, I gauged the level of resistance within me.  I recognized it from other healings, not only for me or Kate, but with clients in our Healing Center as well.  It was like that of a child afraid of water being asked to jump into the pool.  I knew there would be resistance and eventual relenting.  I knew the water of Faith wouldn’t be so bad once I was in it, but I had to somehow get past whatever was stopping me from diving in.
 
Then I heard words form from deep inside of me, first the word, “sense”, rapidly followed by “nonsensical”, and finally a whole sentence, “Faith isn’t sensical.”  That was it.  Faith, a spiritual standpoint, didn’t make sense.  Suddenly I recognized the problem I was having and how widespread it was in my personal world.  Little of what I focused on doing or what I believed in made much “sense” in a logical, provable, rational way.  I was experiencing conflict over whether all of Creation was purely logical, (reason-able) as science would have us believe, or spiritual, as um… religion would have us believe.  (Hmm…)  And there was the rub: vast discrepancies between scientific, religious, and spiritual points of view, with “me” in the middle.
 
To my thoughtful conscious mind, the paradigm of a spiritual Universe made a kind of sense, but my under-the-radar, childlike, inner self wasn’t sure.  It had the fear-based religious story I knew wasn’t true, and the nay-saying of others to deal with.  (Throw in the Tooth Fairy and any “imaginary” beings I was told I was seeing to add to my confusion.)  At some early point in my life this caused a disconnection of faith at the control center down on the Binary Level because I couldn’t agree with myself on what to believe in.  (“Oh, shoot…  Just unplug it, Charley!”)
 
We switched the healing request to; “I want you to know, faith makes sense.”  As soon as Kate said that to me I felt things activating, even before she started to turn my head.  What happened next as she started to roll my head from side to side took me and my logical mind totally off guard.  There was this commotion somewhere deep inside of my psyche that I felt more than saw.  I described it to Kate as someone tearing things up, the way a boozed-up rock star would gleefully trash a room; tearing up books and magazines, busting furniture, pulling down the curtains.  There was no anger involved, just a frenzied ripping apart of something—an old system of belief and being perhaps.  The issue’s energy shifted immediately, confirmed by a muscle test, but with it also came new ideas about the concept of “making sense” and who was choosing what it was for me.  Personally, faith made perfect sense.
 
Kate had also been second guessing herself over what “made sense” and I helped her shift it with a similar Guided Head Movement healing.  As we talked about the healing we recognized that the issue of things needing to make a particular brand of sense (be sensical) was also holding us up in other areas of our life.  It was pretty obvious that concepts like art, love, energy healing, intuition, meditation, helping strangers, necessary play, prayer, and faith made little if any logical, practical “sense” in the rude, fiscally oriented, technologically driven world around us.
 
The dilemma with the tipi wasn’t really where to buy it, getting the best deal, what configuration to select, or the possible headaches of dealing with another rather bulky, unusual possession, but whether or not having a tipi made any sense at all in the first place.  The real question was; …made senseto whom?  To Kate and me, it made perfect sense, but not to our inner policemen (Cue the sirens…) who wanted to keep us in line with societal systems of right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, wise and foolish.
 
For that matter, by business standards the whole idea of The Mesa made little sense.  Our “business plan” was non-existent because it came from Spirit and our souls.  Our first goal is to help people and make the world a better place, not just make money.  From a CEO’s point of view we are too generous with our time, and don’t concern ourselves enough with profit margins, shop lifting prevention, liability “exposure”, meticulous record keeping, inflated appearances, or “monetizing” healing.  We just know that what we are doing is our spiritual mission, (There is no “Plan B”.) but have spent far too much time and energy wrestling with the societal “sense” of it and second guessing ourselves.  Now we could stop.
 
Curiously, when we looked at some of the other things our inner selves regarded as non-sensical and second guessed about, we found that for the two of us it was art, not love (what we often see as foundational in our healing work) that appeared as the key to breaking down our old system of what made sense and what didn’t.  Clearly art’s not what we have been taught it is, but the mystery of Creation itself.  Somewhere in our Beings, we already knew that.  We remembered its metaphysical, shamanic, and necessary  nature, but few others seemed to register it on the level we did.  To an empath, those kind of energy numbers feel overwhelming and defeating.  We have to develop ways to cope with conformity, like dimming faith, dimming love, and dimming art.  This gets worse and worse with time and experience.
 
I still vividly remember being 18 yrs old and carving a large wooden sculpture in my mother’s basement, talking out loud to myself about what I was engaging in to the rhythm of mallet and chisel:  I love doing this; standing here and making chips, I said.  It feels good.  But what good is it?  People need refrigerators, they don’t need art, I lamented, but kept on chipping.  I was dealing with society’s and my parents’ view of the impracticality of art.  They didn’t see the same kind of sense I saw it make.  This probably started for me in kindergarten when I heard my teacher say, “It’s time to put your crayons away now…”
 
For my wife, it was in college that the sensicalness of art was called vividly into question.  She had already chosen Communications Graphics as her major to hopefully attain a practical way of earning a living with her art talent.  A well meaning guidance counselor encouraged her to add Art Education as a “fall back” double major, which of course, made sense.  When she graduated it was much easier for Kate to become a teacher than studio artist or commercial designer.  She followed the path of least (or was it greater?) resistance for many years until “retiring” from her teaching job to be full time at The Mesa.  Many times I have seen her stymied by the “artist’s block” caused by that silent questioning, “Does this make any sense?”  Fortunately for me and Kate, we did not forget that art is the most sensical thing we both know, and our Spirits encouraged us to go on.  Second guessing ourselves was the vestigial holdover of values externally exacted on us by the adults in our world.  When we did healings for each other about the sense that art makes, many other intangibles made sense, too.
 
We encourage you: Call up your faith, your love, your art; no matter what others think in terms of sense or non-sense.  Take back your inner knowing of what’s sensical for you.  We’ll be here to pass out crayons, and help you let go of the second guessing.