Sheila Winter Wallace BodyGateways

Letterman

I am not in agreement with some of the presuppositions that I read in the following piece written and expressed by comedian, David Letterman – especially, for me, the culturally conditioned and underlying notion that we, as human beings are separate from God as a force. I mean… what if each one of us were to grok, in our cores, that we are GodForce and so is everyone else; that we are right and so is everyone else; that the notion of God is internal, and, as such, not subject to external dogma – unless we choose to relinquish our personal power to external lies that are perceived as benefits for the common good?

Some of Letterman’s content, I agree with; there is some that holds no purchase with my view of my world. The content, however, is irrelevant. The context IS… and the context IS Letterman’s willingness to BE himself and to speak his truth, as it is for him, relative to his experience of his life. This is not truth as an absolute… I believe that it is his truth as he knows and experiences it.

In terms of my personal emancipation, I believe that, to the degree, that I am willing to express and to claim, if only to myself, everything that I love about my world, as well as everything that I experience as ugly and hateful, at one and the same time, then I can change my experience of my world. Denial/ avoidance will get me nowhere fast… and it is a choice. As I get older, I am growing in my ability to ‘cut the crap’ in my life as I know it. Sometimes that means witnessing people (family and friends) and ‘things’ in the process of removing themselves from my world, however they choose to do that, either awake or asleep. (Occasionally, they simply drop off, just like that! – Gone from my awareness.) It also means that I create new ways of engaging as I attract both new and ‘old’ ohana (Hawaiian for family of choice) to show up in my world.

Letterman is a celebrity and it might be easy to think that he can just get up and ‘perform’. For so many of us, this is, often, an unconscious strategy, by which we mindlessly go through our days, one day after another… and we wonder why we hate our lives. The strategy is driven by belief systems that are opinions at best, with which we declare that we are only good enough when we comply with cultural expectations. You know the ones that we, as a species, have modeled for eons: ‘Do this, don’t do that’… respective to the culture one finds her/himself in, in the moment. We seem to forget our unique essence of individual ‘Being’, our distinct and rare ‘Is’; how many of us have remained unconscious for life about whom and what we are? It takes courage to stay in the tough conversations… and the most important one is the one that I/we have with myself/ourselves, first.

So, I invite you to read Letterman’s words in the context of expressing authentically and telling yourself the truth of your experience. Forget about the content and any perceived judgements; DO read it in context and notice what you feel in your body. How do you feel as you read each one of the content elements? Stay with the feeling and stop holding your breath (literally) in order to ‘stay nice’ about what you are feeling. Honouring the movement of what you feel and notice in your body IS the first reclaiming by you of your own life and creating it the way you want it… if you actually know what you want. Often, I find the need to express what I DON’T want, first, to get clarity about what I DO want.

Performance. Performance, in my world, is about masking vulnerability. Performance to meet an external norm does carry, within itself, the power to kill us; it is so enervating to the body and to the mind. Vulnerability, on the other hand, can be blatantly scary, yet its very vibration carries the capacity for living, being fully alive. You can read more in Louise Lebrun’s stellar book, Fully Alive. David Shepherd, a magnificent master trainer of NLP in the U.K., once said of himself, within the context of a large group that I was connected to, that he was congruent with his willingness to stay vulnerable in telling his truth (not as an absolute) as it was for him; I understood, in that moment, that, for him, in my experience of him, vulnerability was his personal power as an internal reference. I have always remembered David in that moment because I experienced him as telling his truth in a context that undeniably, to my thinking, now, demanded unexpressed compliance (my own perspective and, perhaps, not his; I cannot speak for David) to a norm that no longer was a fit for him. Once he claimed his ‘vulnerability’ as his internal power, he left that context, by choice. I never saw him again. Yet I have continued to enjoy, for years now, the vibration of my experience of myself in the moment of his courageous decloaking.

I was reading the Ottawa Citizen Newspaper this morning. There is an article about Brian (‘Killer’) Kilrea, Coach of the 67′s Hockey Team. In it, Brian Kilrea states that he once read a quote that stated: ‘It’s not what everybody thinks of you, it’s what you think of yourself‘, to which Mr. Kilrea made the comment, ‘I think there’s something to that’. For me, there is undeniable truth to that, when I stay present to my experience in and of myself – not to be confused with self-judgments that are actually predicated upon external forces.

When I stay present to my experience of sensory cues in my body and breathe, any self-judgement (as a result) and its respective wiring (as a process) is effortlessly metabolized by the system I know as my body.

Please visit www.WEL-Systems.com for more information. We are not our bodies, plain and simple, yet our bodies are genius in their ability to express and to metabolize the very essence of whom we are as the divine.

And, finally, my mentor and colleague, Louise Lebrun, creator of the WEL-Systems® paradigm for the Quantum Biological Human™ and remembering whom and what we are (please visit www.WEL-Systems.com), has created some potent presuppositions by which to live, in her treatise, Evolution by Intention™. The assumption that has most powerfully served as my guide-post for more than a year now is this: ‘Whatever you think of me is none of my business‘. That, alone, has been my key to creating the exits that I have deemed important to my own growth and evolution… so that I become ‘more’.

So, finally, here is Letterman and… remember, as you read, that context is everything and that content means nothing, in and of itself. Letterman, I believe, has invited and allowed himself to show up in a way that I do not generally associate with him. I really only know him in the context of ‘comedian’. Whether I agree with his content of not is irrelevant; I am so happy to experience what is the ‘more’ of his unerring potential, because, I believe, that he is choosing to show up as ‘more’. I get that there is a powerful metaphor, here, for each and every human being. I leave it to you to determine what that is for you and for your uncommon, unrivaled and extraordinary self.

‘As most of you know I am not a President
Bush fan, nor have I ever been, but this is not
about Bush, it is about us, as Americans, and it
seems to hit the mark.

‘The other day I was reading Newsweek
magazine and came across some Poll data I found
rather hard to believe. It must be true given
the source, right?

The Newsweek poll alleges that 67
percent of Americans are unhappy with the
direction the country is headed and 69 percent of
the country is unhappy with the performance of
the President. In essence 2/3 of the citizenry
just ain’t happy and want a change. So being the
knuckle dragger I am, I started thinking, ‘What
are we so unhappy about?”

A.. Is it that we have electricity and
running water 24 hours a day, 7 Days a week?

B.. Is our unhappiness the result of
having air conditioning in the summer and heating
in the winter?

C.. Could it be that 95.4 percent of
these unhappy folks have a job?

D.. Maybe it is the ability to walk
into a grocery store at any time and see more
food in moments than Darfur has seen in the last
year?

E.. Maybe it is the ability to drive our
cars and trucks from the Pacific Ocean to the
Atlantic Ocean without having to present
identification papers as we move through each
state?

F.. Or possibly the hundreds of clean
and safe motels we would find along the way that
can provide temporary shelter?

G.. I guess having thousands of
restaurants with varying cuisine from around the
world is just not good enough either.

H. Or could it be that when we wreck
our car, emergency workers show up and provide
services to help all and even send a helicopter
to take you to the hospital.

I.. Perhaps you are one of the 70
percent of Americans who own a home.

J.. You may be upset with knowing that
in the unfortunate case of a fire, a group of
trained firefighters will appear in moments and
use top notch equipment to extinguish the flames,
thus saving you, your family, and your
belongings.

K.. Or if, while at home watching one
of your many flat screen TVs, a burglar or
prowler intrudes, an officer equipped with a gun
and a bullet-proof vest will come to defend you
and your family against attack or loss.

L.. This all in the backdrop of a
neighborhood free of bombs or militias raping and
pillaging the residents. Neighborhoods where
90% of teenagers own cell phones and computers.

M.. How about the complete religious,
social and political freedoms we enjoy that are
the envy of everyone in the world?

Maybe that is what has 67% of you folks
unhappy.

Fact is, we are the largest group of
ungrateful, spoiled brats the world has ever
seen. No wonder the world loves the U.S., yet
has a great disdain for its citizens. They see
us for what we are. The most blessed people in
the world who do nothing but complain about what
we don’t have, and what we hate about the country
instead of thanking the good Lord we live here.

I know, I know. What about the
president who took us into war and has no plan to
get us out? The president who has a measly 31
percent approval rating? Is this the same
president who guided the nation in the dark days
after 9/11? The president that cut taxes to
bring an economy out of recession? Could this
be the same guy who has been called every name in
the book for succeeding in keeping all the
spoiled ungrateful brats safe from terrorist
attacks? The commander in chief of an
all-volunteer army that is out there defending
you and me?

Did you hear how bad the President is
on the news or talk show? Did this news affect
you so much, make you so unhappy you couldn’t
take a look around for yourself and see all the
good things and be glad? Think about
it……are you upset at the President because he
actually caused you personal pain OR is it
because the ‘Media’ told you he was failing to
kiss your sorry, ungrateful behind every day.
Make no mistake about it.

The troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have
volunteered to serve, and in many cases may have
died for your freedom. There is currently no
draft in this country. They didn’t have to go.
They are able to refuse to go and end up with
either a ”general” discharge, an ‘other than
honorable” discharge or, worst case scenario, a
”dishonorable’ ‘ discharge after a few days in
the brig.

So, why, then, the flat-out discontentment
in the minds of 69 percent of Americans?

Say what you want but I blame it on the
media. If it bleeds, it leads and they
specialize in bad news. Everybody will watch a
car crash with blood and guts How many will
watch kids selling lemonade at the corner? The
media knows this and media outlets are for-profit
corporations. They offer what sells, and when
criticized, try to defend their actions by
‘justifying’ them in one way or another. Just ask
why they tried to allow a murderer like O.J.
Simpson to write a book about how he didn’t kill
his wife, but if he did he would have done it
this way……Insane!

Turn off the TV, burn Newsweek, and use the New
York Times for the bottom of your bird cage.
Then start being grateful for all we have as a
country. There is exponentially more good than
bad. We are among the most blessed people on
Earth and should thank God several times a day,
or at least be thankful and appreciative. With
hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud
slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up
the country from one end to another, and with the
threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, ‘Are we
sure this is a good time to take God out of the
Pledge of Allegiance?’

David Letterman

My final thought, respective to Letterman’s final words, ‘Are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the pledge of allegiance?’ is this: My allegiance IS to myself, first. It IS to remember, always, in all ways, that I am my own GodForce. My pledge to my allegiance IS to remember whom and what I am. And… that IS inalienable and irrevocable.