 | Being Present | | | by KD Farris, Ph.D. |
This month marks the debut of a monthly column by KD Farris, Ph.D.. Each month, she'll offer her spiritual insights and techniques for "being present" in all aspects of life. We're very pleased to have her joining our Soulful Living Community!
The MESHE Concept - A Path to Soulful Living
The MESHE Concept teaches a simple practical plan for enhancing soulful living. Starting with something as basic as your kitchen, I’d like to show you how you can begin to make soulful choices which will, over time, add up to a more nurturing experience of life. MESHE (MEE-SHEE) is your "you." Everybody has one. If you are living in MESHE, you are living a soulful life. You are nurtured and centered. You are caring for the little moments, as easily as you care for the grand and important ones. 
Many of us try to live our best life, by trying to get it perfect. But "perfect" is not something that comes from our center. It is an idea, which comes from the mind. Being in MESHE, is living from the center of your "you." Trying to get everything right, is living from your mind. The mind can be useful - for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. It can help us think through a tough situation, but it can also cause us to think ourselves right into a rut. When the thinking starts to repeat itself, and no longer bring in new information--I call that ORBIT (OR-BIT). Our mind can be inspiring, or it can be repeating itself. When it is inspiring, it is glorious and we can feel a strong sense of MESHE. But when it is repeating itself, it is in ORBIT. Whenever I catch my mind in ORBIT, I realize that that is where my mind is and I stop it by naming it, ORBIT. ORBIT is like telling the mind to stop now. Thank you, but stop now.... There are many things that keep us out of MESHE. Thinking we need to be perfect is merely one of them. Worrying is another. My mind repeats a daily list of things that can go wrong, will go wrong, could go wrong, should go wrong. And when I realize I am tense or distracted because of my worries, I name it - ORBIT. And the litany stops. So, if we can name the mind, ORBIT, as it begins to take us into its world, we can stop it from happening. Then we can see the time we have--the day laid out before us, the evening ahead--as our time, our day, our evening. We can move from ORBIT into MESHE as we need to. And we can choose to live the moments of our lives in a richer more fulfilling manner. We can choose to live more and more of the moments of our life in MESHE. Being in MESHE means taking all of our moments and being present in them. Awakening within the moments. Not controlling them, or expecting things from them, but rather waking up in the middle and discovering ourselves in what we are doing. The next time you wash your dishes, for example, or rinse them to place them in the dishwasher--wake up in the moment--take in the warm running water on your hands, the silky finish of a wet porcelain plate, and be alive inside of the task. That is what it can mean to be in MESHE with something as simple as washing the dishes. Imagine what it could mean to wake up in the middle of dressing your daughter before daycare, greeting your husband when he comes home from a hard day, or sitting on a mountainside after a long well-earned hike. I don’t know about you, but I much prefer to stand over my sink in a surrealistic journey of what I am doing right now, than to stand over the same sink hashing out the negativity I picked up from my day. I name the negativity that goes on in my mind, ORBIT, and I let those kinds of thoughts slip away. I choose, rather, to drop my breath all the way down to the heels of my body, exhaling fully, and drawing my next breath deeply, so that I can watch the movements of my hands, as the bowl of the sink empties, and my dishwasher or dish drainer fills with my energy. My light, present, MESHE-filled energy. In my home, I strive to be in MESHE with everything in my kitchen. I’ve spent time putting things where I need them and getting the utensils that work for me. I have a cookie jar that makes me smile, a different spatula for flipping eggs than I have for flipping pancakes, and a garlic press that makes cleaning it easy. I am passionate about my dishes, my glasses, my tableware. These things are not expensive, they are simply appreciated by me, each time I use them, because they have expressed some centered part of me from the first day I brought them home. Some things I love because, though money was tight when I bought them, I choose carefully and made sure to buy from my budget something that I liked, something that I was in MESHE with. Many things came later, than when I first needed or wanted them, because I practiced early on, buying only when I was in MESHE with what I was about to purchase. The same is true for everything that I let into my life--relationships, activities, commitments. It feels better to be in MESHE with not having, than it does to have a lot that I am not in MESHE with. My kitchen is an easy place for me to be present, because everything in it has been placed there with awareness. Even the areas of my kitchen which are too cluttered, or in disarray, are areas that I am in MESHE with, because I have chosen to be in MESHE with them--I have put them consciously on a to-do list, which gets done from a special allotment of time that I choose on a regular basis. This special allotment of time is very important to building my MESHE. It is a time when I take myself seriously, and tend to the incomplete areas of my life. Being in MESHE with your kitchen is as easy as going through every nook and cranny and being open with yourself enough to find out what you need and don’t need, what you like and don’t like, what you want and don’t want, and then taking that list to heart. Today, walk through your kitchen and see if you are in MESHE with everything in it. Are there utensils in the drawer or utensil stand, which you never use? don’t like? or that are always breaking? Are the hot pads you have near the stove thick enough for you, so that you never get burned when you have to use them? Are the hot pads even near the stove? Do you wish you had new hot pads each time you use them, but forget to buy them before it is time to use them again? Maybe it is not your kitchen that needs transforming. Maybe it is your office, your bathroom, your relationships? If you were to go through your relationships with the same attention, would you also find a certain lack of proper tools which are causing you to get burned more often then you like? Think about it. Being in MESHE in the whole of your life can be a graceful way to wake up and create the necessary changes your soul is crying out for. Let us go through not just our kitchens, but our entire lives, transforming every task we must do this week, every thought that we think this week, every memory we hash out this week, month or year--until we are in MESHE with all of it. In an excerpt from my book, "MESHE, HESHE, MISON & ORBIT, What My Grandmother Taught Me About the Universe," young Kaydee describes the experience of getting into MESHE with everything in her life as, "giving every day a chance to be a day that could change some bad thought or memory into something I could easily forget--or forever fondly remember." What may start with a new set of hand towels, could just turn into a new outlook on life.... Take care of yourselves! © Copyright 2001 KD Farris, Ph.D.. KD Farris, Ph.D. is a successful counselor, healer, and bodyworker. For more than twenty years she has taught
extensive workshops based on MESHE, HESHE, MISON & ORBIT as well as many other self-discovery topics.
KD began developing her integrated bodywork and counseling techniques in 1983 under the tutelage of many prominent doctors and healers throughout the United States.
Her education into the spiritual and physical aspects of the human experience served as the foundation for her private practice and the development of a new philosophy. She combined her techniques into four guiding principles, which she shares in her book, MESHE, HESHE,
MISON & ORBIT: What My Grandmother Taught Me About the Universe. She teaches a companion workshop series, where she creates an interactive environment demonstrating the material from her book with tangible, life altering effects. In these workshops, individuals discover a
deepening of their relationship to self, others, and life itself.
Through individual counseling and group workshops, she has taught her results-oriented programs to many different types of people including those confined to mental institutions, substance and food abusers, and generally, people in life transitions, struggling with intimate
relationships, or who lack direction in their lives. Visit www.kdfarris.com. KD is currently touring a new body of work, Talking About People in Transition, Also Known As
Liminal Space. She will be writing about liminality and its relevance to day-to-day living in upcoming issues of Soulful Living. For more information on this new and exciting topic, or to learn about more her private practice, workshops and lectures, visit
www.kdfarris.com.
Contact KD at: info@MESHE.com
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