Welcome to the newly renovated Through A Different Lens website!
I am excited about beginning to blog—an informal format where I can offer thoughts, photos and observations—and receive your comments and ideas in return. What a great frontier the Internet is for worldwide communication!
Re-writing and re-designing my website has provided me with an opportunity to stop and really take a look at where I am in my life, what I truly desire and what I want to contribute. The process has not all been easy. I wanted instant clarity, instant answers, instant changes. I wanted to DO it.
Instead, I’ve been sentenced to take my own advice. STOP, my insides said to me over the summer. Breathe. Wait. Not nice words for over-achievers trained in a masculine, “doing” culture. But I promised myself that I would not take one action or make one plan until it truly bubbled up from inside. Fortunately, finally, much has bubbled up. The results you see are not very different on an outer level than what I’ve been doing in the past. But the inner re-focusing has opened up new territory for me, and I know that will be visible before long.
My own process makes me think of the interview of Andre Agassi I heard on NPR about his new memoir, Open. He gave a lot of credit to his trainer, who turned out to give him advice that reached far beyond the physical plane. He said he needed someone to give him a new lens for seeing his own life, and that the book is one result of that process. The title, such a great pun, implies that Andre has opened, and that a new spaciousness has opened inside him. It was audible in his voice. I offer him this photo of an ancient temple, now open to the sky.
Tennis was my sport too, in a much tinier way than Andre’s, and for me it was also all about doing, proving, accomplishing. I gave it up because I finally realized I wasn’t having fun. When I let that go, new things opened for me.
I invite you to think about what people or practices or processes serve as lenses for seeing your own life anew. What or who invites you to stop, wait, look and open?
It is my fervent hope that in this website and in these blogs you will see and read and consider new ways to open, to be more awake, to stir the soul inside you who longs to come forth and be seen.
I will sign off with Namaste—the thought that the light within me sees the light within you, and when that happens, we are one. Even at a distance.
Namaste.
Pam
