“Right now, and in every now-moment, you are either closing or opening. You are either stressfully waiting for something – more money, security, affection – or you are living from your deep heart, opening as the entire moment, and giving what you most deeply desire to give, without waiting,” writes (often outrageous and controversial) spiritual teacher David Deida in Naked Buddhism.

He goes on to advise taking the shape, the breath, the posture of whatever you are feeling, opening to all of it. Reading this today has made me aware of how much I DO NOT want to open to my anger (see http://www.comfortqueen.com/newsletters/Sep032005.htm). I want to savor it, feed it, habor it, display it, but not actually embody it. Dieda encourages us to feel the texture, relax into its shape, opening into the movement, the thoughts, the actions. Open outward, bit by bit, “like a soap bubble opening as wide as the sunlight, again and again and again.”

Open to anger? Instead, I grab one, then another, organic Paul Newman double chocolate sandwich cookies. (Yes, it does make me feel better that they are organic.) I do, however, as I am chewing, acknowledge that perhaps my anger is why I’ve gained 10 pounds in a short period of time.

I hate Dieda for declaring, “To the extent that you are closed, you give stress to the world. Your clench ripples outward, resonating others into closure.” I want to shout, “Opening seems so passive, so New Age airy fairy! I don’t want to “open,” I want to read Maureen Dowd and scream!”

“The administration’s foreign policy is entirely constructed around American self-love – the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have.

But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don’t see freedom. They see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths.” Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07dowd.html?incamp=article_popular

But even as I rant and rail, I wonder if I already know the answer. Opening to my anger might actually allow me to do what I wrote about in my last post – experience the interconnectedness of all beings – and move into being a Stage Four leader, move toward cultivating hope without the need to deny what is.

That all sounds rather lofty and hard for a Friday afternoon. I more interested in eating another cookie. I could start by opening to the experience of eating cookies. After all, we can only start where we are.