Permission to Forget

Wow, is this important for spiritual practice and inner development.

Give yourself permission to forget.
I repeat.
Give yourself permission to forget.

Forget what?

2 things...

your daily demands
and
your inner demands

When you focus on your inner development, give yourself permission to forget the demands of your daily life.

When you focus on your daily life, give yourself permission to forget the demands of your inner life.

If you do this you will find guilt, shame and anxiety fading out of your life. Without guilt, shame and anxiety, life happens joyfully.

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I am going to interrupt myself because I have a burning, just now crystalizing, insight to share.

There is a big difference between spiritual practice and spiritual development. Lots of people have a spiritual practice but don''t spiritually develop. A spiritual practice is something one does to maintain a relationship to spirit. Spirit can be an external being/god or an internal state. Prayer, contemplation, meditation, sacred movement, and sacred reading are all active forms of spiritual practice.

Spiritual development, on the other hand, is a dynamic commitment to the healing, liberating and empowering of your relationship to your selfhood, the divine being within. Being dynamic means you will dwell in paradox in order to develop. You will risk the familiar in order to find the true. You will die in order to become. You will release in order to grasp. You will stop seeking answers in order to find questions. No matter what you feel, you will feel compassion for yourself. You will play. You will change tracks and directions often. You will see silliness in all things serious and something profound in all things ridiculous.

My Inner Year work is not about spiritual practice. It is about the practice of spiritual development. So if you are someone who "can't" meditate, or someone who does meditate but wants more (as in spiritual hunger, not spiritual greed) then you will find support for your spiritual development in my work, the Inner Year.

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Back to forgetting demands.

Most of us suffer with conflicting and nagging demands on our time, our energy and our attention.

I bet as you read this (and hopefully find yourself pausing to think about what you have read) you may be doubting the rightness of using your time, energy and attention this way. You have a list of to do's and a picture of a life of order, design and completions. You have piles of stuff to take care of and yet here you are staring at the computer screen! Right now forget the stuff. It's okay to forget the daily demands, when you are taking a few moments to nurture yourself.

Likewise, don't worry if you get so involved with your stuff, that you don't do your yoga, or sacred reading. This also goes for falling asleep without your evening spiritual practice of prayers or meditation because you are exhausted from doing so much. Give yourself permission to forget your inner life.

Just forget demands. Forgetting makes life less anxious and more manageable. Give joyful energy and joyful attention to what you are doing in the moment. Being responsible is joyful. Learn to feel joy and you will find order, design, and completion in your life, your daily life and your inner life. Joy comes first.

Now I will joyfully return to the work I was doing on developing facebook fan pages for the Six Christmases.

And please, joyfully comment or send me an email.

PS: Inner Advent is the work of spiritual development and the willingness to remember. It reveals how you spiritually and practically evolved as an individual and a member of humanity over the year. If you feel you would find benefit and clarity in working through a designed and orderly path of self-reflection over four weeks, do sign up for the Inner Advent teleseminar here.

The Second Question

The 2nd question to ask before having conversations with spiritual beings is a doozie.

What is a Spiritual Being?

This question generates many, many questions so it is not one that we ask very often. This may also be due to the fact that most of us grew up with “God.”

If the idea of “God” is satisfying to you, you don’t need to read further. And you probably shouldn’t consider my teleseminar, Having Conversations with Spiritual Beings. You probably believe prayer is the only form of interaction with “God” and think the idea of a conversation with a spiritual being is ridiculous or blasphemy.

However, if you feel there are spiritual beings in layers and hierarchies, actually, a whole panoply of gods, between us and “God,” then read on or think on. Play on with my questions below and add your own through the comment function of this blog.

Questions to ponder as a beginning...

Are you a spiritual being?

What is a being and what makes a being spiritual?

Are spiritual beings great dancers - always moving and flexible?

Do they ever tire and rest?

Or are spiritual beings fixed and immovable?

Do spiritual beings need something from us, their creations?

Do spiritual beings live in rocks or roses? swans or hyenas?

Can you see, hear or touch a spiritual being?

Do we have guardian angels?

When a human being dies, what happens to their spirit?

What is an elemental being?

Are there house spirits?

Do spiritual beings have clear roles and tasks?

Do spiritual beings have a voice and a language?

How do you get the attention of a spiritual being?

So many questions.

And here are a few questions of a different sort…

If we pray or meditate, why do we need to have a conversation with a spiritual being?

Are there different conversations for different spiritual beings?

Why would a spiritual being want to have a conversation with a human being?

Why would a human being want to have a conversation with a spiritual being?

Where and when do these conversations take place?

If spiritual beings have all the answers, why did they create the capacity to ask questions?

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Add your questions and your thoughts about spiritual beings below.

These questions and more will be addressed and explored in my teleseminar, "Having Conversations with Spiritual Beings." If you want to engage in a conversation with other human beings on this rarely discussed or explored human capacity and challenge, join me. The conversation begins this Sunday, November 1 - All Saint's Day! Click here.

Two Things to Ask Before Having a Conversation With a Spiritual Being

The First Question:

What is a conversation?

How many conversations do you have in the course of a day, a week, a year, a lifetime?

Having been part of so many conversations, how do you define conversation? If you were to write your own definition of conversation would it change your response to the the question about how many conversations do you have?

Let me help you with your thinking about the meaning of conversation.

The key root to converse is a Latin word, vertare, which means to turn. Con, of course means with. Conversation as a word means “turning with.”

When I think of “turning with” two images appear: spirals and dancing.

Spirals: spinning inward to the details or outward to the expansions.

Dancing: leading and following, choreography, navigating the floor.

How do I “turn with” in the art of speaking and listening? I turn toward and in turning toward, I also turn away.

I am turning toward my conversation partner and away from myself when I listen. I am turning toward myself and away from my partner when I am speaking.

What speaking and listening is not a conversation? I think of empty phrases, reporting of data, untruths. What else?

Do I pay attention to this turning? Does it matter?

Are most of my conversations about thoughts and ideas, about feelings and emotions, or about deeds and possibilities? What does the content of the conversation tell me about my turning and what I turn with?

And the contexts of my conversations? What are they?

Do work with these questions. Any answers you come up with write them down and then turn them into questions. Wisdom lives in the next questions, so always find the next questions. Is there a conversation if there is no question? Is the question the turning?


I want to read your thoughts on conversation. Please leave a comment below.
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To learn the second question you must ask before having a conversation with a spiritual being, wait for my next post to the Inner Year blog in a few days.

November in the Inner Year is the time to pay attention to conversations with Spiritual Beings. The darkening of the Sun asks us to turn away from material existence and the surface of things. The soul is turning toward what exists beyond the surface seeking spiritual contexts and content and beings behind, beyond, below and above.

Now is the time to evolve your capacity to have conversations of all kinds and all purposes with spiritual beings. Learn the meaning, the design and the grace of these conversations.

I am offering a 4 session Inner Year teleseminar: Having Conversations With Spiritual Beings. In the teleseminar we will explore these questions and others about conversations. There are two options for this teleseminar series. The Basic is 4-40 minute presentations of content. It is essentially a lecture over the phone. You will find lots of insight and creative possibilities on having conversations with spiritual beings. However, it is not a conversation. If you want to engage in a conversation on having conversations with spiritual beings, you will want to take the Intensive Option which includes many conversations. (I didn’t make this distinction between the two learning options until I wrote this blog.) Visit here to learn more about the teleseminars.

Do invite your conversation partners in life to join you in the teleseminars. Forward this blog to all your friends.

Three Adversaries to a Good Life

The adversaries to a good life are many. They sneak into our personal thoughts, feelings and behaviors and oppose our healing, our liberation and our empowerment - the good life. They are internal and external forces that distract, disturb, delay or destroy our attention and intention. When we seek to learn or express truth, beauty or goodness, they confuse us and cause us to doubt. They work to get us stuck, when we need to move. They demand we resent, when we need to forgive. They seduce. They inflate. They arouse selfish desires. And so much more.

The adversaries know how to hide in the shadows of our consciousness and circumstances while they play with us. They are masters at “smoke and mirrors.” They create illusions and delusions as they convince us they are good, supportive, comfortable or essential. They will appear of little consequence in the long run of life and convince us to ignore them or they will appear so large, so dramatic, so powerful, so threatening, so beyond our little selves that we could never, ever grasp them, tame them, or vanquish them.

We need to meet the adversaries in the full light of consciousness, our own individual consciousness. We each need our own awareness of these opposers of the good life.

Three Adversaries

Procrastination - put it off. Cras is Latin for tomorrow. Crastinus is Latin for belonging to tomorrow. Life is a verb. You are a verb. Your actions express who you are. Your actions reveal your meaning and significance. Procrastination is a resistance and failure to act in the right time. Do you initiate action and fail to complete it? Or do you fail to initiate and begin the deed? I struggle with completion for the most, putting off the logical steps and trying to leap to a miracle. But when it comes to initiating, here are a few little demons: I put off asking for help. I put off celebrating my life. I put off cleaning up my messes. I put off telling my truth. I put off having fun. I put off managing my money.

Do you sleep better because you have so much to do tomorrow or because you got so much done today? Like me, you probably get more done in a day than you realize. There is a reason to review your day - but the adversaries of procrastination don't want you to do it.

What do I do with all the time I have today because I put off doing everything until the tomorrow that never comes? I think or, to use a better word, I perseverate. Perseverate is to repetitively think a thought long beyond the need to think it. I avoid doing by thinking and thinking and thinking. Others do and do and do to avoid thinking or feeling. Which leads to the next adversary I want to write about.

Habit - an addictive or automatic way of thinking, feeling or acting. Habits dull us, our minds, our hearts, our will. Sharp minds, sensitive hearts, and skilled will keep us strong against other adversaries and capable of many good deeds. We all proudly list our good habits but I will take the risk of asking what is good about any habit? What is good about any action that does not have thought living in it? Do I do a better job brushing my teeth if I think about what I am doing, how I am doing it and why I am doing it while I am doing it? In our crazy world of multi-tasking there is less and less attention and more and more reliance on habit. Does this make for a good life? Habit leads to conformity and the denial of our individuality. We become thoughtlessly obedient to convenience and automaticity. We risk becoming a machine. How great for the adversaries of freedom.

Minimalization - making something small, insignificant, meaningless and unreal.
We take a view of something and determine it is not worthy of attention. We take something in our lives that is significant in its impact and we pretend it is insignificant. We experience something that is bad and convince ourselves that it is okay, normal, even good. Or we look at something that is quite wonderful and dismiss it as ordinary.

How can we express or recognize truth, beauty or goodness in a minimized reality? How can we confront lies, distortion, and harm in a minimized reality?

A good life only exists in the reality of reality.

What are you minimizing in your life? Your loneliness, your anger, your talents, your joy? Look at pretense in your life. What do you pretend is okay, when it is not? Why do you do this? What is really cool and fabulous in your life that you pretend is flawed or insignificant? Why do you do this?


Procrastination, habit and minimalization are adversaries. They are forms of evil. Not doing something in a timely way, not doing something with full consciousness, not seeing the true reality of something will keep us from the good life.

As you look at procrastination, habit and minimalization in your life, observe, don't judge. Evil wants you to judge yourself. Through self-judgment, we identify with and strengthen the adversarial forces. Compassionate self-awareness is our empowerment and redemption.

As you pay attention to “the adversaries,” as you learn the subtle manipulations of evil, you will discover in yourself the following benefits, the elements of a good life:

• Courage
• Compassion
• Stable Balance
• Capacity to take a stand based on moral imagination
• Evolution - growing the wise heart.

Where do we engage with the questions of forces of opposition, of evil? When do we become aware of the role of evil in our personal lives? What are the benefits of meeting evil?

To sign up for my teleseminar on Evil (Sundays at 8:00PM - 9:00PM)
October 11,18, 25 please go to
www.lynnjericho.com/catalog.

Please comment and share your experiences with these three adversaries.

Michaelmas and Continuous Improvement

Archangel Michael's gesture is recognized and attended to each year on September 29th. Michael carries the sword that points to, penetrates, and slays evil. The great works of art in sculpture and painting are always dramatic and active.

In the course of the Inner Year, now is the time to focus on evil. We want to find a clearer, more conscious relationship to evil. Most of us want to avoid this work. Many of us would rather enjoy the entertaining depictions of evil and trust the heroes of novels, movies, plays and TV shows to do the dragon slaying for us.

But, the Michaelic gesture does not demand dramatic deed. It is more often subtle, nuanced, small as a snowflake, raindrop, grain of sand or sunbeam.

And in the realm of time, it appears continuous and endless - think of how many continuous snowflakes it takes to make a blizzard, raindrops to make a monsoon, grains of sand to make a coastline, sunbeams to light the day.

Dragons, particularly the little ones living in our souls, have a way of only playing dead for a glorious moment, before rising up with new vigor.

So, what good is the sword of Michael? More important - how do we find the strength to wield the sword continuously?

To provide an answer I am going to send you to another blog. This post was in my inbox today and I read it before beginning my writing for the morning. The dragon of postponing my work caught me, seduced me, overcame my better self - or so I thought as I clicked on the email.

Presentation Zen is one of the most inspiring blogs I read on a regular basis. Garr Reynolds is a master of design, writes very well and knows what matters in many cases. He has lived and worked in Japan for most of his adult life and often shares the wisdom of Japanese culture as a source of good design. (Michael is constantly admonishing our souls to design a good life.)

Reading Garr's post today was not an avoidance of my task for the morning, but the inspiration for it. He writes about "kaizen" the art of continuous improvement - or, in my eyes, the subtle sword of Michael.

Read Garr's post here.

Garr offers 15 tips for continuous improvement in presentation design. Use your imagination to experience the tips as possibilities for continuous improvement in design your life as a Michaelic gesture, as ways to continuously find the dragons.

Please make comments below. Thanks.

I intend to write a few blog posts on evil over the month of October.

The Mysteries of Balance

A harmonious life is a life of balance. Harmony and balance are feelings, not things! All feelings are experiences belonging to an individual in momentary experiences. However, following our feelings and engaging in objective and compassionate perspective on our lives, our goals and our difficulties, we can design, establish and celebrate our own balanced lives.

Here a couple of insights to help you find greater, more creative balance in your life, practically, emotionally, and spiritually.

The Static Balance and the Dynamic Balance

I was friends with a man who wrote an engineering textbook on statics and dynamics. Statics are the things that are not active and never change and dynamics are the things that are always active and changing. It helps to think like an engineer when you are working on balancing your life. Categorizing the elements of your life into statics and dynamics is a first step to designing and building a balanced life.

I have an affinity for dynamics. I naturally bring change and activity into my life. (Writing this is giving me a whole new perspective on ADD/ADHD). I do not have a very conscious or comfortable relationship with most things static. Before I can create a balanced life I need to begin a new relationship to statics and dynamics. I need to learn to limit my indulgence and attention to the dynamic elements of my life and overcome my reluctance to be conscious of and appreciate the static elements. I then need to fit the static elements together with the dynamic ones in a way that works for me, for my goals for living a richly balanced life.

Equilibrium

Being balanced may require us to be out of balance or rather off center. Balance is not about equal parts, it is about equilibrium.

Balance comes from right relationship and right measure. As I write, Julia and Julie is a very popular new movie. It is a film about recipes and great food. Julia Child was a great cook because she worked and worked on balance - finding the right ingredients in the right measure in the right combination and cooked rightly. Julia felt wonderful when she sat down after cooking and surrendered to the joy of her meal. She was an engineer, a manager and an artist in the kitchen as she balanced her life as a cook.

Does your life have the right ingredients in the right measure? Do you combine them well? Do you know you know how the right temperature and the right cooking time to bring the flavors of your harmonious life to elegant expression? What is your recipe for a balanced life? My teleseminar will help the participants determine their own recipe - Mastering the Art of Balanced Living. ;-)

The Space Between

Another aspect of balance I want to share with you is the notion of “between.” Many of our questions of balance come from our experience of “between.” Between has a number of definitions. The definition I use here is the sense of conflict, of being pulled by two opposing realities. Living gracefully “between,” feeling a confidence of self while confronting the conflicts is something toward which you aspire and strive.

Harmony is an inner peace you feel in the space between.

between how you want to live and how you actually live.

between how you want your space to be and how your space actually is.

between what you want to accomplish and what you actually accomplish

between all you want to do and how much time you actually have to do it.

between all the attention you want to give to others and all the attention you want to give to yourself.

between all the things that you want and need and the money you have.

between your need law and order and your need for freedom and creative chaos.

In “the space between” you make most of your decisions and choices. In “the space between” you find the mood of your life. In this sacred space of balance you can tell your truth.

My Balanced Life

Do I have balance and harmony in my life? Yes! No! I have some balance and the feelings of harmony are growing as I examine my personal dynamics of balance. It’s an evolving process. Life is about increasing the simplicity of managing my increasing complexity - a balancing act, not a juggling act. I know that I am increasing my mastery of balance. Balance has become less of a high wire act and more of my feet moving gracefully along a winding path that sometimes takes me to cliffsides, battered with gale force winds. I haven’t fallen yet. In fact I don’t anxiously cling to soothing supports anymore. I feel my feet on the ground, my head upright, and my heart open.


If you were to create a dynamic design for a balanced life specific to your style, needs and quirks, where would you begin?




Join me and be one of twelve participants in an intense and intimate exploration into the mysteries of balance, please sign up here.

Defining and Finding Balance

The Mysteries and Questions of Balance

Late summer, as the crispness of autumn air begins to energize us, we find the cosmic forces supporting our souls in the organization of our lives. This is the time of year to contemplate balance.

How balanced is your life? How balanced would you like it to be? What is a balanced life anyway?“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”
Thomas Merton

Balance is a mystery. Is it about feeling harmony (such a sweet word, but a word that has little reality beyond a wish in today’s crazy demanding times)? Is it about maintaining emotional equanimity - not getting too high or too low? Or is it about not falling off the tightrope of life? Is it about having a keystone that holds everything together and upright? Maybe it is about symmetry or equality. What is balance?

Balance and Babies

We might learn about balance if we look at how we develop physical balance in our first year of life.

Balance begins with our eyes. Both eyes need to work together for proper vision. We learn to focus. Balanced vision!

Our next miracle of balance is the ability to balance our heavy little heads on top of our spines. Here we gain the ability to look up to the heavens, down to the earth and straight ahead without having our skull waver and shake. We learn to move our head from side to side, look around and come back to center. A balanced head!

Then we learn to balance on our sitz bones and sit up. This balance makes it possible to use our arms and hands. We reach out to what we want. We can push away what we don’t want. Balanced desires and the ability to accept and reject!

Finally, we stand upright on our heels balancing our body so that we can move about the world, follow a path, reach our destination. A core sense of self and the ability to stand in the vertiginous world!

Balance is about focus, observation and midpoint. Balance is about being clear about what we want and don’t want. Balance is about walking our path.

Do you have trouble focusing? Can you observe your life with compassion and integrity? Do you have a strong sense of your own center?

How much stuff clutters your life because you can’t say no or let go? How much have you missed because you couldn’t grasp the truth of your desires?

What would make it easier to stay committed to your path? Your path of joy? of contribution? of health?

Establishing and maintaining balance is an endless exercise of grace. You need to have deep even breathing, a focal point, a center of gravity, and a straight spine that keeps you upright as you speed through the constantly changing and landscape of your life.

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Explore Your Life's Balance Teleseminar

Join the Mysteries and Questions of Balance Teleseminar - four 90 minute sessions that will bring new meaning and new capacity to balance in your life.

7:30 PM - 9:00PM Eastern
Mondays
August 31, September 14, 21, 28 (skips Labor Day!)
Only 12 spaces available.

$120

Register for the Balance Teleseminar here.

Inner Vacation

In the lazy, hazy days of summer, I hope you have a sweet restorative inner vacation - full of fun and full of meaning.

I just looked up the definition(s) of vacation and found some real inspiration for self-awareness and some yummy food for thought.

Vacation is

1. an extended period of recreation.
2. a fixed holiday between terms as in school or law courts
3. the action of leaving something once occupied.

In thinking about these definitions I came up with some thoughts on the meaning, purpose and significance of vacation.

As children we learn that vacation means play and fun. Many of us continue with that picture of vacation but a vacation can be so much more. Using the three definitions above (in reverse order), I share some deeper perspectives on what a vacation can mean to us as we live our lives.

Vacating an Occupation

A vacation occurs when you leave a state or occupation of existence, activity, familiarity, identity, sameness, competency, ordinariness, and experience something different or new. A sacred vacation provides a new way of knowing yourself, your world and your future. Some part or all that has occupied your inner or outer life is left behind either temporarily or permanently. Do you need to leave something behind? Do you vacate and take a break from the “givens” of your life? Do you need permission to let go?

Between Terms

A vacation is a fixed time between terms. Do you have a fixed time or times of between-ness? This is a regular and committed time of reflection and rest or a time of adventure and inspiration? Do you take these kinds of break once a year? once a season? once a month? once a week? once a day? Is the duration of the vacation also fixed - 5 minutes? 5 days? 5 weeks?

This kind of vacation consciousness also asks us to be aware of the terms of our lives. When does a natural “between” occur in your year? or your month? or your day? How do you design an inner or outer vacation between the terms of your life that restores you and returns you to your commitments with new energy or new perspectives?

Re-creation

A vacation is an extended period of recreation. Of re-creation! Do you ever take time to re-create yourself, your world or your future? It is the school year of our childhood that teaches us, imprints us with the notion of summer vacation. We leave our school work for play. School gives us an education when we are young. As adults we leave work for vacation but instead of play, vacation might be education - educare is the bringing out of the deeper self - of what lives within. Education can be the re-creation of ourselves.

Who We Are in the World

In the work of the Inner Year, late summer is a time of educating or awakening ourselves to a deeper sense of who we are in the world. Beginning on July 27, I will be offering an intensive teleseminar program of four 90 minute sessions devoted to

The Mysteries and Questions of Personal Contribution.

What do you contribute to the world?
What do you long to contribute to the world?
What is your special talent?
How do you find personal fulfillment through your work?
How do you break free from a life of dissatisfaction?
Can you vacate what has occupied your life, but not occupied your spirit?
How can you re-create your life?

If your heart does not sing in the world or if you would like your heart to sing with more strength, register for this teleseminar. You may or may not find answers during the four weeks, but you will find new and meaningful questions. Take a vacation with eleven other people and educate your soul’s intentions around your unique contribution.

Working with the insights from this teleseminar, Questions of Contribution, you will

• develop ways to make the right choices and changes for your career.
• find your true reasons for volunteering and for learning new skills.
• give yourself permission to end an activity or begin an activity.
• learn how to liberate yourself to the demands and limitations that inhibit your self-expression.

Registration is limited to 12 participants. Participants receive a private 20 minute consultation with me to discuss specific issues about their life of contribution. Sessions are recorded and materials are sent out via email.

Register here!



Please add any comments or questions.

Anxiety and the Twelve Senses

We live in the age of anxiety and our challenge is the transformation of personal anxiety into personal confidence.

Anxiety arises out of a feeling of a gap. A gap is a break in continuity that asks for restoration. It is a hole or interval between you and what you desire that must be bridged. It is a lack of harmony or fit that requires alteration and adjustment.

Gaps occur in our relationship to our bodies, in our relationship to the world, and in our relationship to others. All these relationships are known through our perceptions. If our perceptions are distorted or our organs of perceptions are damaged restoration, bridging, alteration and adjustment appear difficult or impossible. Life becomes threatening. Anxiety increases.

Even confidence in our relationship to God or Spirit asks us to be "grounded" in our earthly perceptions first. Without this healthy and essential earthly life, our spiritual lives live over a gap in human experience.

Consequenttly, a very important way of managing, resolving or eliminating all forms of anxiety is to attend to our perceptions and our organs of perception.

From the perspective of inner development, we can look at twelve senses, twelve organs of perception:

4 senses give us our perception of our embodied self, the world within our skin:
the sense of touch or boundary,
the sense of well-being including our sense of hunger, thirst, exhaustion and pain,
the sense of self-movement and contraction and expansion, and
the sense of balance and uprightness.

4 senses give us our perception of the world beyond our skin:
smell,
taste,
vision and
warmth

and
4 senses give us our perception of what lives within the souls of others:
hearing,
the sense of word and gesture,
the sense of thought, idea and ideal, and
the sense of divine individuality in the other.

All twelve senses weave together to shape our soul and the sense of “I am.” Each one is a treasure of experience and information. But each sense is also fragile.

If any of these twelve senses is skewed with too much sensitivity or to little sensitivity, if any as been traumatized, if any has been inflated, depleted, overwhelmed or ignored, we experience distorted and unsafe perceptions of our meaning, our purpose and our significance. We do not find our perceptions harmonious. We become anxious.

THE TWELVE SENSES
an Inner Year program

Over four 60-minute teleseminars, I will offer a creative understanding of the twelve senses. This is not a boring course. It is filled with liberating “aha’s” and healing insights.

I love the senses - they make sense of every thing. When we have a conscious relationship - a real sense of our senses, we can gracefully master life. Anxiety becomes a “wake-up” feeling, instead of a threat. We do not get stuck in anxious feelings but find ourselves moving through a more dynamic process of growing confidence in all our relationships.

Through the Twelve Senses, we learn how to sustain and deepen the feelings:

I am calmly contained within myself.
I meet my needs for nourishment and restoration.
I move gracefully and purposefully in the right direction.
I am elegantly balanced in all matters.

I breathe in life.
I taste the richness of life.
I see life with clarity and focus
I feel the warmth of life

I hear the voices of other souls.
I recognize the words and gestures of other souls.
I discern the thoughts of other souls.
I love the divine essence within other souls.

These are statements free of anxiety. They are declarations of growing confidence. Knowledge of the twelve senses and understanding of the challenges living in our twelve senses give us ways to move from anxiety to confidence.

The Twelve Senses teleseminar will introduce you to each of the twelve senses and help you grasp the myriad ways the senses interact with each other.

In the fullness of summer, we will experience the fullness of our senses.

Join me for this sensuous and sensible study.

The Twelve Senses
an Inner Year program

*four 60 minute sessions
*sessions will be recorded and available to download for 30 days
*emailed handouts and notes

Sundays at 7:30PM Eastern, 4:30PM Pacific -
July 12,19,26, August 2

$47

Register here.

If you have any questions, email or call me.

Thoughts and Questions on Intimacy

In the course of the Inner Year, the annual cycle of soul development. Where Christmas, at the dark of the year, is the time we focus on our spiritual solitude - the deep interior of our lives, summer, when the sun shines brightest is the time of the Inner Year to focus on our life that reaches into the world and into relationships. We look at our earthly reality as bounded and formed by time and space, well-being and story. This is the time when we study and learn about our capacities for creative intimacy with others, creative contribution to the world and creative balance in our daily lives.

This post looks at intimacy and describes the teleseminar I am offering to help us become more intimate with how intimacy lives in our souls and our gestures in the world.

DEFINING INTIMACY

Intimacy comes from intimus - Latin for inmost.

Intimacy emerges from inmost closeness and knowledge. How willing and capable are you to be close to and to know another, physically, energetically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually? Intimacy is complex. You can be physically intimate, spiritually intimate. Spiritually intimate, but not emotionally intimate. You can be close and not know or be known. You can know or be known at a distance.

What is your ability for intimacy?

Like all things human, intimacy is a two way relationship - we are the object of intimacy and the subject of intimacy. We are born the object of intimacy - our mother is holds us close to her and knows us our every need and our every development. How our mother succeeds in providing us with feelings of intimacy, shapes are capacity for and our gracefulness in intimate relationships. As the subject of intimacy, we feel, think and act intimately in regard to a certain object of our intimacy.

We each make intimate choices. We recognize our needs and desires for intimacy. We resist and reject intimacy. We allow ourselves varying degrees of intimacy as object or subject - I can be close to you, but I will not reveal my inmost reality - so I will limit how much you will know me in spite of our closeness. Paradoxically, how intimate it is to speak the truth of your intimacy boundaries, to acknowledge to another that you need to limit the degree you will allow yourself to be known and close.

You can be closely related, but not intimate. You can hardly be acquainted with someone, yet find moments and brushes of profound intimacy. How have you experienced relationship without intimacy and intimacy without relationship? How have these intimacies caused joy or sorrow in your soul?

Intimacy is about the intersection of relationship with encounter. In encounter there is an adversarial component - a sensitivity to difference and otherness. Through encounter we find a closeness to the other and revelation of difference that is extraordinary in the context of the relationship. With each intimate encounter, the intimacy of the relationship grows. How open are you to intimate encounters? Do you feel unsafe or resistant when confront the difference and otherness in someone? Are you willing to look at your lover or your friend, your child or your colleague, as if they are a stranger and seek to encounter their inmost truth?

Intimacy asks us to gaze at each other. Not look, stare or glance at each other, but gaze! When we gaze we seek to know what is inmost in each other. When did you last gaze at another or experience someone gazing at you? Of course, we can gaze at another in our imaginations. How do you develop your capacity for gazing? How do you develop your ease at being gazed at?

There are measures of intimacy. How frequent are your intimate encounters? How intense are your intimate encounters? How enduring are your intimate encounters?


Like all things living, intimacy evolves and morphs.

Look at your biography of intimacy...
How close were you to…
Did they know you...
Parents?
Siblings?
Grandparents?
Aunts and Uncles and Cousins?
Step-relatives?


Best friends (What is best?)?
True loves (What is true?)?

Do you have an intimate relationship with God and the Spiritual World?
Do you have an intimate relationship with Nature?

How have you known ...
Intimacy welcomed?
Intimacy rejected?
Intimacy evolved?
Intimacy ended?

What are your...
Needs for intimacy?
Strategy for intimacy as subject and object?
Weaknesses as intimate object or intimate subject?

Spiritually, we can meditate on the karma and destiny of intimate encounters and relationships. Where is a relationship (or an aspect of a relationship) an encumberance or an obstacle? When are intimate difficulties and disappointments sources of opportunity and blessing?

Intimate knowledge never forms fixed judgment. It is so much about being truly sensitive, aware, attentive to the evolution of the object of intimacy. Like a mother’s womb to the fetus, or the walnut shell to the walnut, intimacy is a kind of evolving, responsive embrace to the subject.

Questions of Intimacy
a teleseminar

Tuesdays, 7:30PM - 9PM Eastern, 4:30PM - 6PM Pacific
June 23, June 30, July 7, July 14

Join this intimate group on intimacy. Limited to 12 participants.
We will reveal our stories and find our questions of intimacy. We will intimately listen to and be inspired by the stories and questions of 11 other people. We will be open, truthful, vulnerable. We will not try to fix, correct or heal. The group is a learning group, a liberating group, a questioning group. The reverence for each other will protect what is shared. The wonder at each other will nurture heart-confident disclosure and insight.

Do you seek to have more intimacy in your life?
Do you have too much intimacy in your life?
Do you desire more consciousness in your intimate relationships?
Do you desire more balance in your intimate relationships?
Can you express yourself intimately?
Can you contain yourself?
Does intimacy over stimulate you?
Do you withdraw and self-inhibit when faced with intimate encounter?

What inmost questions appear in your soul when you answer these questions?

The Questions of Intimacy teleseminar will not awaken all your questions and solve the intimate mysteries of your relationships, but it will help you articulate a few questions - enough questions to support your inner development over the Inner Year so that next summer you will be ready to become more intimate with your inmost questions of self and other.

You will need to plan on 30-60 minutes of "homework" and also be willing to have a phone conversation with another participant to work with your thoughts on "Questions of Intimacy."

Register here.

To pay by check, please mail it to Lynn Jericho, 132 Hillside Avenue, Chatham, NJ 07928 and send me an email immediately so I can include you in the seminar.

Questions? Or if you do not live in the US. please email me or call.

Pentecost, Community and The Future

There is so much living in the description of Pentecost.

• A gathering of people from all kinds of backgrounds, cultures, and status.
• A mighty wind that blows through the whole house.
• The Spirit appearing as a divided tongue of fire on everyone.
• Everyone speaking and hearing everyone’s native language.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your young men shall see visions, Your old men shall dream dreams. Acts 2.17

• The image of the future living in everyone as capacities to prophesy, envision and dream.

This year for Inner Pentecost, I want to share with you some thoughts on speaking, listening, and the future.

Three inner gestures live in this soul festival:

• a moving outward to meet and to know the other,
• a willingness to be met and to be known by the other and
• a capacity to perceive, even conceive, the future.

Inner Pentecost is barely inner. If all the other festivals of the Inner Year have been well-celebrated then Inner Pentecost will be a turning inside-out. This is the festival of the soul becoming social.

At Pentecost, we find a fully nourished self that can enter into the other. We find a self-knowledge so penetrating the self of the past and so aware of the unfolding self of the future that a genuine, truly confident and serene enthusiasm for the other emerges. Equally, this self is totally open to being deeply known and understood by the other. Finally, the future forms an inspired community of empowered and focused will. The inner life gives birth to the social life.

Writing these words, fills me with the joy of Inner Pentecost. It is the party of the Inner Year. Everyone is invited.

The story of Pentecost in the New Testament, gives the impression that the Holy Spirit comes and makes this all happen. That the invitation to this extraordinary "party" asks you to just show up.

Not so. Everyone present at the original Pentecost had prepared, had undergone an intense and complex initiation willingly. Their souls had willingly and dramatically evolved. There was nothing casual or miraculous about their path or their experiences. Every step had been willed. To experience the Holy Spirit we must actively develop our will forces.

Do you will yourself to know yourself?
Do you will yourself to know your fellow souls?

If you are thinking "I will do it!" You are speaking about doing something in the future. Will it now!

Our soul’s will forces make earthly manifestation possible. Through our will we bring the future into reality. When our own will merges with the will of others we form creative community, conceiving and giving birth to a higher community of unselfish and devoted and shared Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions. The work of the Inner Year gives birth to a new self and a community of "new selves" gives birth to the future.


The path of the Inner Year is an arduous journey. When you take the journey, you find the ending festival known as Pentecost is quite a celebration and the community of the future welcomes you with awesome wisdom and warmth. Through the experience of Pentecost, love evolves. There is no coercion, manipulation or deception in the Pentecost community. Truth, generosity and goodness prevail.

I hope my intense description hasn’t driven you into your intellect. When I write these Inner Year thoughts I go so deep into my consciousness that I sometimes get so serious, I am afraid I might be asking you to think too deeply for comfort and ease. Just remember that we must all learn to think with our hearts. It is only through heart thoughts that the deepest of ideas and the most meaningful ideals are met with inner grace.

Our soul loves to dance gracefully with both spirit and matter. Our heart is the dance floor. For Pentecost we dance a circle dance and hold hands with the souls of our fellow human beings. We move together like flames dancing in the wind to the music of the Holy Spirit.

For Inner Pentecost, think about the moments when you have joined hearts and hands with others to make something good, beautiful and true come into existence. Look around at the harvest of your community life. Celebrate the bounty of our shared future.

***********************************************

Today others are working on the imagination of this community of Pentecost. One individual has penetrated the Pentecost mystery and written about it with great clarity. Otto Scharmer’s book, Theory U, does not mention Pentecost, but those who practice the principles he shares, take up the challenges he articulates, will have a Pentecost experience. You can download very inspiring “tools” at his website: www.presencing.com

Scharmer describes the activity of listening with an open mind, an open heart, and an open will. He proposes that the future manifests through meeting each other through the generative listening of the open will. Generative listening is the listening of Pentecost. Out of generative listening comes the language everyone speaks together, the language of the future.


Theory U is chock full of brilliant guides to the listening and speaking that reflects the festival of Pentecost. The book is a gift from the future.

Love and The Inner Year

I base all my Inner Year writing, teaching and healing on the commitment that all spiritual realities must be made practical and functional in our material lives or they are simply “stories,” beautiful, powerful, frightening, soothing, but without daily practical impact. I want to spiritualize my material life and materialize my spiritual life. I want to become as fully human and fully divine as I can become and I want you to become as fully human and fully divine as you can become in each year. I want to surprise myself with my own evolving meaning and I want to delight in your evolving meaning. Each cycle of the year, I want to follow the inner processes that imbue me with more love. And I am willing to work at it.

Imagine instead of looking at each passing year as growing older, you could experience your heartsoul becoming a greater source of overflowing love year after year. Imagine the love that comes from greater self-knowledge and the love that comes from greater knowledge of other human souls.

Attending to the unfolding of the Inner Year each year will give you the nurturing support, the guiding imaginations and questions, and the creative perspectives to cultivate your love of self and other, your love for the earthly and the divine, and your love for the mystery and wonder of existence. Perhaps the greatest gift of the Inner Year is it’s compassionate cyclical return. You do not need to do it all at once, like the sun, your soul revisits each Inner Year festival with its particular expression and admonition every year. Like a growing oak, each year brings deeper roots, a stronger and taller trunk, more branches, more leaves and more acorns. As you move through each year you evolve into a new you, the same and different, less and more, something comes toward you and something moves away – all of this to deepen, enrich, heal, liberate and strengthen your ability and capacity to give and receive love.

A Lonely Place

There are times in our inner lives when we must dwell in a lonely place. A lonely place is unfrequented and remote. You dwell there without companions and without comforts. Inner Lent takes place in a lonely place. The reward of spending time in your lonely place is a clear inner strength of purpose and direction.

It's the middle of the Season of Lent and the time of the Inner Year when we can reflect on our personal need for or connection with the 40 days in the wilderness or desert. Immediately following the Baptism in the River Jordan, Christ is taken by the "Spirit" to this lonely place to fast for 40 days. Following the 40 days, the Devil comes and tempts Him three times.

The Baptism is the moment when the Christ enters Jesus of Nazareth. The Cosmic Christ incarnates within a human being. Following the Baptism, the incarnated Cosmic Christ must spend time in isolation contemplating the experience of human existence and the challenges of earthly limitations of space, weight, time, boundaries, hungers and desires.

The forty days of Lent is a time for you to contemplate the relationship of your divine purpose to the limitations of your personal existence. Inner Lent is not a simple gesture of denial, it is a profound and enriching time of self-exploration and self-awareness that occurs in a lonely place.

Lonely is the right word. When we reach a new inner level of development, meaning or purpose, we are different and "strange" even to ourselves. Our inner place of solitude is where we can adjust, adapt and engage with our new self.

What is your lonely place? The Gospels refer to either desert or wilderness. In the Inner Lent program, I have asked the participants to imagine their own experience of both inner landscapes.

The wilderness is untamed vegetation. There is a feeling of too much. Some find this environment overwhelming and others love the intensity and complexity of wild life. In the wilderness there is no distant horizon. Everything is close and demanding.

The desert is a place of vast emptiness. The horizon is faraway and endless. There is no shelter from the sun. The day is hot and long, the night cold and long. There is no distraction. Is this a safe environment for your soul?

How do you feel about these two environments? Neither the desert or the wilderness offers a path. Can you find your own inner direction? Do you have your own inner resources? How do you awaken to and strengthen your spiritual destiny in your inner isolation and your inner harsh environment?

Do you create a clearing in your wilderness? How do you do this?
Do you find an oasis in your desert? What does it provide for you?

When you reach a new stage of inner development, how can you give yourself time to meditate on how it changes your life? Each of us finds our Baptism when the Spirit comes into our lives and we are no longer our ordinary selves. It requires us to fast from our daily realities and overcome our temptations for external comfort, safety and personal power.

Inner Lent is the yearly season of attention to our renewed purpose. Whether you find yourself in a wilderness or a desert, hold fast to your Inner Divinity.

Please share your experience of dwelling in your lonely place? You will be inspiring others with your openness.

Working with the Inner Festivals

Working with the Inner Festivals

On February 25, Lent begins. Lent is the Christian festival that remembers the forty days, Jesus Christ spends in the wilderness following the Baptism in the River Jordan. During this time, Christ does not eat, is ministered to by angels, meets wild beasts and is tempted three times by Satan.

It is a Christian practice to “give up something tempting” for Lent. Usually we give up a favorite food or activity - chocolate, pasta, TV or video games. Even as a child, I wondered about this. It felt like a demanding law that had to be obeyed to be good, but didn’t make much sense spiritually or personally. Of course, I have never been any good at denying myself anything for a few hours and couldn’t imagine 40 days of living without anything I enjoyed, just to be “good” in the eyes of the Church. Yet, had I given a or found a reason, or an understanding in the heart of my heart, I felt I could have a true Lenten devotion and given up anything.

My childhood wonder and doubt has shaped my spiritual life into a practice of questioning. I don’t accept answers offered by exclusive dogmas and sectarian perspectives. I am fascinated by all religions - the dogmas and the rituals - and study them all with loving objectivity and respect.

In my childhood I attended a number of Christian denominations (from Catholic to Christian Science) as my father wanted me to have a liberal and inclusive religious experience. College opened me up to the Eastern paths and also to Judaism. I loved the whole gamut enough to minor in religion but did not find any one doctrine that called me to belong or practice.

With my marriage to a recovering alcoholic, I found both community and personal significance in AA and Al-Anon. I loved that it was a 24/7 relationship, that the “program” was devoted to healing, liberation and the acceptance and support of all others without judgment. The 12 Steps offered a one-size-fits-all path to self-mastery that was beautifully effective, challenging and compassionate. No dogmas and a open spirituality related to a self-defined Higher Power meant beliefs were personal.

Yet I still had a quiet longing for more. I felt there was something profound in the Christian Mystery and the story of Jesus Christ. Although I was not aware of my feelings at the time, there was something in the Christian festivals that called out to me even though the “church and cultural” festival practices felt empty of personal meaning. What did Christmas mean to me and all other souls? What was the personal and present significance of the Resurrection?

I wanted and needed festival practices that took me into myself, that made greater meaning of and in me. (I had no idea that I would need to create these inner festivals for myself or that I would be sharing them with others around the world.)

Then I put my kids in the new Waldorf School of Princeton and discovered Rudolf Steiner. Steiner brought this wonderful esoteric picture of Christianity and the Festivals. Esoteric signifies “within.” Everything I had been longing for in my heart and in my mind was present in Steiner’s cosmic worldview. I had found the essential ground and foundation on which to build a fulfilling spiritual life and my future work - Steiner’s anthroposophy (the wisdom of being human).

Inspired by Steiner’s loving and wise imagination of role of the Christ in human consciousness, a major piece of my personal work is a new psychospiritual understanding and practice of the Christian festivals - the design and guidance for a yearly cycle of practices for cultivating a rich and dynamic inner life.

Imagine what it means to your inner development to have a yearly rhythm of self-evolving practices that intimately connect your soul life to the cosmic cycle of the year and the esoteric meaning of the Christian festivals. The therapeutic process is often shaped by the immediate issues of the client, not any archetypal design or rhythm.

Through my attention to the Inner Year, I am now quite excited about a new two-part therapeutic design. Why not combine one-on-one counseling dealing with the immediate personal issues with the engagement in a group activity based on the festivals and the cycle of the year. This combination provides a highly effective process that acknowledges your reality as a unique individual with a unique biology, unique biography and unique destiny facing unique challenges, while also acknowledging the universal significance of the cosmic cycle of the sun through the course of the year and the esoteric impact and meaning of the Christian festivals to your thinking, feeling and willing?

The Inner Year is a program of self-knowledge, self-healing, self-development, self-restraint and self-liberation. It addresses all the archetypal issues of the soul in a yearly cycle. The Inner Year is a cosmic and universal guide for inner work and complements the intimate and unique process of one-on-one counseling and coaching.

Each of us has an inner sun shaping the life of our souls. This inner Sun is an image of our sense of “I am.” The inner Sun moves between solstices and equinoxes shaping our spiritual and material realities and attention. The twofold process of immediate and cosmic therapy engaging the unique and the universal aspects of our souls supports the development and maturing of our individuality and our humanity, the awareness of our Inner Sun.

The Christian festivals provides an extraordinary design for our lives. They reflect nature and both the story of the Christ Being and the longing and preparation of the human soul for the experience of Divinity dwelling and acting within in our heart of hearts.

Over the last few years I have given talks and written about all the major festivals - the quarterly festivals that reflect the esoteric meaning of the four seasons - Christmas/Winter Solstice, Easter/Spring Equinox, St John’s Tide/ Summer Solstice and Michaelmas/Fall Equinox. I have also spoken on Whitsun or Pentecost and on Advent. My focus on these talks is always the role the festivals play in the personal awakening of our inner life, the guidance to the fulfillment of the truth, beauty and goodness of our thoughts, feelings and deeds.

I have come to feel a real conviction that the renewal of the festivals, not as ritual and sentimental demonstrations of religious dogma, but as essential symbolic and guiding events during the year providing inspiration and illumination of our inner journeys, will free us to be free.

Christmas and the Holy Nights
December 25 - January 6
renews our innocence through Nativity and
increases the gifts of our wisdom through Epiphany.

Lent
40 days prior to Easter
cultivates self-mastery and builds the capacity to wisely and freely say “No!”

Easter
1st Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox
brings a conscious relationship to sacrifice, death and resurrection.

Whitsun or Pentecost
50 days after Easter
(re)awakens our sense of community and active empathy.

St John’s Tide
June 24
leads our souls to our moment of destiny and manifestation of our deeds in the world.

Michaelmas
September 29
asks us to face the presence of evil in our souls and in the world. We learn to redeem the perpetrator and resurrect the victim.

All Saints and All Soul’s
November 1
engages us with souls beyond the realm of life and death.

Advent
28 days before Christmas
offers a time to reflect on the meaning of the course of the year and the release of our attachment to our stories (dramas)allowing us to enter into the deep mystery of Christmas and the renewal of our inner (re)birth.

Over the course of 2009, beginning with Inner Lent, I will be offering some group opportunities for awakening and deepening your experience of The Inner Year. I will offer an indepth teleseminar of 2 or more 60 minute sessions of more direct guidance and interaction for each festival. These programs will be offered for a reasonable fee.

Click here to register for the Inner Lent Teleseminar.