What a difference a year makes?

Your year made a difference - to you, to others, to the world and to the future. What was the difference? 

It was not just the same routine, the same gestures and activities, the same rhythms of sleep, meals, work, relationships. It was different and it was powerful. If you don't believe it, register for the Inner Advent teleseminar and do the work.  If you don't discover the powerful difference, I will give you your $47 back and include a one-hour private session with me to talk about why your year didn't make a difference.  

This is my third message and final message about Inner Advent and it is my strongest.  I really want you to participate in my Inner Advent teleseminar series.  It will make a difference in your life, both of your lives - the inner and the outer.


If you have decided you want to participate in Inner Advent, register now.
http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Inner-Advent-IYIA10.htm
The Sunday afternoon (4PM Eastern, 1PM Pacific) sessions begin tomorrow and the Thursday evening (8PM Eastern, 5PM Pacific) begin in five days.

Remember you do not need to be on the calls or be on every call. You will receive recordings of all the sessions and all the written materials within 24 hours.

Inner Advent

• shows the differences this year made
• makes sense of your year
• gives you a feeling of completion
• provides a surprisingly objective awareness of your truth.
• liberates you from limiting identities, stories and reactions
• reveals the lessons of the year
• increases your ability to creatively design your future
• celebrates who you’ve been, who  you are and who you are becoming

http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Inner-Advent-IYIA10.htm

“My soul and the world are but one.”

There are seven billion people on this planet who have lived another year.  How many of them will do the inner work of recollecting, reviewing and releasing their inner past so their inner future can be met with real possibility and real responsibility? In our increasingly challenging world with the growing difficulties of our political, economic and environmental crises, self-knowledge is the first step to resolution. Self-knowledge leads to freedom and love - the freedom to make new choices and the love for others, the planet and the future.


Inner Advent is an embrace, a conscious embrace, of your unfolding life. It’s a responsibility to your self, maybe even a spiritual or moral duty to your self. 
We are different from animals in that we have the moral ability to be self-conscious and self-creative. We are not just about drives for survival or desires for being happy, we are about freedom and growth.

Freedom comes from knowing yourself. Self-knowledge is a spiritual practice.  Rudolf Steiner teachings guide me to a right relationship to my self.  He writes in his book, How To Know Higher Worlds, “You can only sacrifice that which you have fully possessed.” Self-knowledge is self-possession. Possess your year so you can let it go.

Know how you survived this year. Know how you emotionally experienced the year.  Know how you grew and evolved over the year.

Know your year to know your self!

Possess your year so you can let the stories go and find the meaning, the sacrifice of your 365 days, your 29000 breaths, your efforts and struggles, your dreams, your joys, your sorrows.

How do you begin to do this? How do you organize your recollection of the year? How do you analyze what happened? How do you intuit the meaning? What are the questions that will lead to the insights, the self-knowledge, to a new you, a wiser you, a freer you?

I want Inner Advent to be a relaxed and aware experience for you. I will guide the process, but you will do the work.  No one can do it but you. This is the gift you give your Self.

Celebrate the Past and the Future

Celebrate the Past, Celebrate the Future

I am writing about the fifth and sixth celebrations of the soul together, because they go together as sweetly as they stand alone. These two celebrations are one in the intimate flow of your lifetime - your past and your future. I was, I am, I will be is the hymn of this combined celebration. 

Can you celebrate in the stream of time? This is a real question for your soul to ponder for to do it you must slip beyond time to the moment.

Below is the celebration of the past and the future expressed by one of my favorite poets, Lucille Clifton, who I once kissed on her cocoa cheek.

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me.

What did you say to yourself ten years ago? ten months ago? ten days ago?  Did you make promises? Did you keep them?

What do you say to yourself today about tomorrow? next month? next year? ten years from now?

Do you have the compassionate courage to forgive yourself?  Now that is something to celebrate!

If you resonate with these questions and take them to heart, to attention and to action -
can’t believe what I just wrote here as it makes me realize:
I make many promises from my wishful and loving heart, some from my genuinely caring attention, but what are the promises from my will to act, which are the promises I’ve kept and will keep? Should these be called deep promises?
Look at these questions with wonder, not judgment. 

Back to what I want to urge you to do if these thoughts resonate with you.  Register for my Inner Advent teleseminar.  Let’s gather together (on the telephone) once a week for four weeks to discover the meaning of 2010.

I will guide you through a creative and powerful process for recollecting your year.  You will learn ways to review your year and discover what it was all about.  You will then release the perceptions and energies of 2010 like a sweet celebratory exhale and a kind forgiving sigh.

Celebrating Inner Advent prepares the soul, cleanses self-doubt, cultivates self-awareness, nurtures self-discovery in a way that allows us to enter into the mystery of the twelve Holy Nights with real openness. Working with your past year is working on your future year.

Inner Advent will need your heart, your attention and your action for 2-3 hours a week.  The call is 60 minutes and your personal process will ask for another hour or two or more. 

If you live outside the US you can join the calls using skype.
Sign up here for Inner Advent.

Celebrate Relationships in Your Soul

Celebrate relationships.

Just a reminder that I am asking all of us to experience inner celebration as an honoring of being human, of the daily success at incarnating self into the unfolding of your life. Celebration done consciously becomes a consecration, a making sacred. Our lives are filled with little, simple, sweet, yet profound acts of consecration. We need to pay attention to them. We need to more consciously engage in self-celebration.

The first three of the six celebrations of being human - the celebrations of nature, nativity and riches - are celebrations that feel safe.  What do I mean by “safe?” I mean they are relatively free of personal shadows and dilemmas.  Yes, we can be scared of spiders or lightning, be a little clueless about sensing the divinity in all things, and we can be a bit out of balance when it comes to sensory delights, but overall these celebrations do not confront us with the messiness of our karma and the pain of our desires. 

The next three celebrations focus on our connections to others, our own early biography, and our own inner development. These celebrations ask us to attend to our inner experiences with interest, compassion and objectivity.  To fully celebrate we need to notice and attempt to release any sentimentality or shame, pride or regret, resentment or resignation as these feelings will cloud and distort our celebration. We can honor and revere without conditions and judgments. Maybe we can begin to feel a little inner freedom through conscious celebration in these challenging intimacies .

I do realize that the last paragraph is a doozy and feels like it needs at least several pages of development and explanation and a lot of inner contemplation to really “get.”  Basically, if reading and contemplating the Celebration of Relationships, the Celebration of Childhood and the Celebration of Selfhood cause squirminess of soul come back to the third sentence in the above paragraph and notice! and do your best to release!

Relationships are the joys and agonies of our lives. Relationships are the great teachers  of our lives. Life is all relationship, even avoiding relationships is relationship.

One simple dictionary definition for relationship is “the way in which two or more people or organizations regard and behave toward each other.”

What are the ways we relate with regard and behavior? Here are some possibilites:

We relate in a whole range of closeness, from fusion to utter separation. 
We relate in a whole range of duration, from a brief passing to our entire lifetime. 
We relate in a whole range of impact, from superficial to deep and life/soul-altering. 
We relate in a whole range of feeling, from indifference to love/hate. 
We relate in a whole range of responsibility from being cared for to taking care of. 
We relate in a whole range of reality from fantasy to the manifest, from the spiritual to the practical.


Celebrate Relationships in all the different ranges, consider regard and behavior, and discover the sweet and bitter and always meaningful lessons of the heart.
 

Celebrate Riches in Your Soul

Celebrate Riches

This is the celebration of all the creations of humankind - our material riches.  We need to honor our creative efforts. There is joy in being grateful for all things useful and all things beautiful that exist as a result of human imagination and human productivity,

As I write I am listening to great music on my ipod.  I am wearing really comfortable shoes.  Today I had a Reuben sandwich made with house-cured Pastrami that was unbelievably tasty. I am knitting a sweater for my grandson from directions in a knitting magazine written by a woman I will never know - does she have a grandson?  Every morning I brush my teeth with a toothbrush that fits my hand and my mouth.  And those silk teabags shaped like a pyramid delight me.  Oh, the Pyramids!

In a little over a minute, I just celebrated and felt sweet gratitude for a number of things in my daily life and suddenly I was filled with the image of the sacred pyramids that I have never seen (not yet, anyway).  Oh, the mystery of the human soul that can think of comfortable shoes and the great pyramids and have lovely feelings about them both.

And neither would exist without the efforts of many, many human beings over centuries of civilization.  Who thought of the pyramids, who carved the stones, made the ropes, fed the workers and so forth?  Who fabricated the machine that made the rubber soles of my shoes, who packed them into the shoebox, who drove the truck that delivered them to the store?  I celebrate them all.

This week spend a couple of minutes everyday celebrating the riches of your daily life.  You will feel good doing it. 

Beyond the Prayers of Childhood

How did you learn how to pray? What did you pray to? Pray for?

I learned to pray at night before I went to sleep.  I learned to be on my knees.  At four, with a naive sense of responsibility and devotion, I loved the litany of individuals in my “God bless...and...and...and...and…” list.  I was proud of my thoughtfulness in including my cat and my stuffed animals among my relatives and friends.

What I was praying for: safety, comfort, health, good weather, what I thought would make me happy, that mommy and daddy would stop fighting - was always clear. Who I was praying to was “God” or “Lord” or in the year I, raised Protestant, went to a Catholic boarding school (fourth grade) I thought it was pretty cool to pray to saints and martyrs and I loved saying the rosary and experiencing repetitive, impersonal prayer.

But building a real consciousness of a relationship with spiritual beings was never considered. I prayed to an anonymous power and authority.  The Virgin Mary seemed human - she might hold me with the same tenderness she held the Infant Jesus. But overall whatever being received my prayers, I believed in, but didin’t know and couldn’t describe.

In my late thirties, I met the vast and amazing insights of Rudolf Steiner.  Steiner’s mystical knowledge of spiritual beings provided rich meaning and profound distinctions. I found I could relate and relate and relate to spiritual beings of all sorts and purposes, angels, elementals, thrones, the Holy Spirit and so many others.   I could speak to them and listen to them.  I could feel them and learn from them.  Steiner spoke of the longing of these beings for real engagement with human souls, so I engaged as best I could. I found joy in my humble attempts to offer what I could out of my thoughts, feelings, deeds and perceptions to these beings. And I found new thoughts, feelings and deeds arising in my soul that were clearly not self-generated. These beings were engaging with me. I moved from prayer to contemplation to holy conversation. I was consciously connected.

Now once a year, in the deep spiritual mood of Inner Autumn, I give a teleseminar on “Connecting with Spiritual Beings.” I invite you to be part of this 4 part teleseminar. I share my perception of these beings and the ways we can relate to each of them.  I look at what they bring to our earthly lives and what they seek from each of us.

What would it mean to your inner life and spiritual practices to build creative, comforting and challenging relationships with the beings of the spiritual world?

Connecting With the Dead and other Spiritual Beings

Do you ever want to connect with a loved one who has died?

There is a thread in your heart that ties you to many souls who are no longer living.  How do you work with this thread?  Do you know how to connect actively with the dead? The true core of each human being is spirit and spirit does not die but it does end a lifetime.  Our connections are deeper and more lasting than the end of a lifetime. We can stay connected beyond time and space.

Staying connected is not about avoiding mourning. We grieve the loss of the daily sense impressions of our loved one and there seems to be no more story to live.  But going forward we can stay connected spiritually and spiritually the relationship can continue and be profoundly fulfilling.

Before death, we connect with our waking consciousness of our senses.  We see with our eyes, Hear with our ears. Touch with our fingers.  And our stories are told by our likes and dislikes, our drives and  desires, our agreements and our disagreements.

After death, inspired by our mourning, we can stay connected through our heart and through sleep.  Our hearts do not need the senses to love and be loved and the stories found in deep sleep will not be told by the drama and ideals of responses and reactions.

Call out to the dead before you go to sleep.  Ask them questions or simply wonder about them. Offer them your open heart. Fall asleep and enter the spiritual conversation.  When you wake up, you will feel the connection and the spiritual conversations will glimmer in your consciousness.

I have found two activities very helpful.  I will read from a spiritual text before falling asleep.  These words take me beyond the drama and the wishes of ordinary connection and open my heart.  Upon waking, I will journal and capture the mystery of the feelings and discover the spiritual warmth and sometimes quite practical wisdom that could only come from one free of the fetters of the senses and the stories but still connected in love.

This is one way to stay connected.  

 

In this season of the dead, I encourage you to reach out with love.

 

With love,

Lynn

---

Connecting To Spiritual Beings

an Inner Autumn program

The more one is oneself, the more one feels alone. But the pain of feeling "alone" is very different from the anguish of feeling "abandoned." Marcelle Spira, Swiss psychoanalyst
                  

Each of us feels the need to awaken fully to the self, to the meaning and significance of what we refer to when we say "I," during our lifetime.  As we discover our selfhood, we  separate from our identities in the world and our connections to other human beings.  This can be psychologically very scary and  threatening.  We discover that knowing our individuality necessarily separates us from others.  We become a solo subject, with strange and subtle relationships to all other things.  We may feel the grief of being alone or the nightmare of being abandoned. We experience ourselves abandoning all limiting attachments in order to hold on to this sacred sense of oneself. This is our earthly dilemma.

If we explore this spiritually, we come to another experience.  We experience being all one.  If the core of the experience of "I" is spiritual, recognizing ourselves as spiritual beings living an earthly existence of separateness, then another reality comes into our consciousness.  There is no separation in spiritual reality and selfhood coexists in our consciousness with being all one.  We find eternal connection.

To overcome the pain of aloneness and the horror of abandonment, we need to know the presence of spiritual beings.  Who are the beings that never abandon us? That always honor and support our selfhood? How do we relate to these beings? What do they want from us, the human beings, if anything?

The first step in having an active and conscious relationship to spiritual beings, is to know their names and their deeds.

In this teleseminar series, we will build a creative understanding and imagine a meaningful relationship with spiritual beings.  We will look at our connections to...

...our own guardian angel - this connection will surprise you as it is not the sweet relationship,

...the spiritual hierarchies - these beings bring a wonderful creative order to our existence

• angels, archangels, archai - these beings support the human life and activities and interact with us all the time
• exusiai, dynanmis, kyriotetes - these beings support creation (and have these unpronouncable Greek names)
• thrones, cherubim, seraphim - these beings offer divine substances to our thoughts, feelings and deeds

...elementals and nature spirits - these beings are all around the earthly world and can be very helpful and they thrive on our attention.

...the dead and the unborn - those on either side of the threshold of earthly life - if the core of the self is spirit - there is a part of each us that needs no birth and never dies.  These loved ones are always with us even if we cannot see them.

 

...the spiritual core living in our own hearts and the hearts of other human beings

 

We will also look at the challenges to these connections and the path to overcome these threats.

 

The course will help you develop spiritual connections that will take away the fear of isolation and of the future. 

 

 

Inner Autumn Teleseminars

The Inner Autumn teleseminars are part of The Inner Year curriculum for personal development.  The Inner Year provides creative perspectives on the great psychospiritual needs of human consciousness and the questions living in the seeking soul. The Inner Year is based on the wisdom of the cycle of the seasons of the soul.

Connecting with Spiritual Beings is a teleseminar offered via the telephone and the internet.  It is live and interactive with presentation and sharing. There are four sessions.  Each session is 60 minutes. Handouts are sent via email.

The course is offered:
Sundays 4:00 - 5:00 PM Eastern Oct 24 - Nov 14
Thursdays 8:00 - 9:0 PM Eastern Oct 28 - Nov 18

The fee is $47.

 

Register for the Connecting With Spiritual Beings here.
http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Connecting-With-Spiritual-Beings-IYCSB10.htm

Email me if you need to register by phone or have any questions.

Feeling at Home

Here is a question to guide you into an Inner Life reflection.  Take the time and discover something about yourself.  It will clarify and strengthen the choices you make.  And if you like what you find, consider joining my upcoming Inner Life program: Cycles, Themes, Patterns, Threads: An Introduction to Biographical Review.

 

In a couple of days, you will also receive the announcement of my upcoming Inner Year program: Connecting with Spiritual Beings.  I share some thoughts on remaining connected to loved ones who have crossed the Threshold of Death.  We all have lost the physical presence of someone we dearly loved and long to reach out to them with love. I hope my thoughts in my next message will help you fulfill your desire.

 

Much warmth and inner light in these darkening days,

Lynn

 

 

The Question...

 

Where have you felt at home?

The keyword in this Inner Life theme question is "felt."  Home is a feeling, not an address. Here are two exercises one is about the feeling of home, the other is about the address.

The Feeling

 

Home might be a location, a dwelling, a friendship, a community, a type of work or artistic activity, a spiritual path. I repeat, home is a feeling. Journal about your feeling at home in all these different aspects of your waking life.

 

The Address

 

Now that you have explored the feeling of being at home, look at the places where you have slept. When and where has it truly been home? Home should reflect you and provide for you. What about you does your home need to reflect for you to feel at home? What does a dwelling need to provide for you for you to feel at home? Journal about all the places you have slept and felt at home or not felt at home.

If you spend some serious time wondering about these questions, you will discover something important about your life.  You will see into your past in a way that liberates you in the present and empowers your future. What is your unconscious pattern around feeling at home?  Do you see a thread that is pulling you toward a sense of home that is a fulfillment of destiny?

Imagine how working with this Inner Life question in a group of other individuals seeking, like you, to know themselves could deepen your imaginations around feeling at home.  Imagine the mutual sharing of home images, feelings and experiences waking up a memory or a new insight in another person and healing or enriching their sense of home. 

If these Inner Life questions inspire you, please consider joining the next Inner Life teleseminar (even if you don't feel at home on the telephone) . Inner Life teleseminars are a place where you will feel at home discovering yourself.

---

Inner Life Programs

discovering the wisdom in your biography!

with Lynn Jericho

Cycles, Themes, Patterns, and Threads
An Introduction to Biographical Review

All lives unfold in unique expressions of archetypal cycles, themes, patterns and threads. This course reveals both the archetypes and your own individual expression of them.  Knowing the archetypes and discovering your unique, even original, relationship to them, is profoundly liberating as you begin to know your "I."

Without biographical review, our lives are recollected in disjointed, often chaotic and distorted, snapshots and movie clips and filled with confused emotions. Often there are whole aspects of our life experience that we don't remember leaving holes in our sense of self. Working with cycles and themes, you find a new relationship to your memories and even recall forgotten ones.  You discover the patterns and threads of your life.

The effect of doing this work in the social realm of a group of strangers is the truly wonderful awakening of compassion for other. You develop a sensitive reading of the memory book of life-impacting environments, relationships, and events, that lives over and over again in the thoughts, deeds, emotions and desires of yourself and others. You carry this experience into the rest of your life and meet life with a new confidence and a new interest.

Through this introductory biographical review, your memories become a guide book to fulfilling your destiny. Your memories stop being dreams and dramas as they take on real meaning.  You find the freedom to bring new perspectives on old stories.  You recognize wounds as lessons.  You sense the mysterious wisdom living in your past.

In this introductory course, you will learn

• the meaning of each year in the seven year cycle
• the process of embodiment over the first 21 years
• the the archetypal soul wounds
• the meaning of karma

Most importantly, you will learn about yourself.  The Inner Life programs are about self-knowledge, self-healing, self-expression and self-compassion. You begin to have a right relationship to your life.

This is a teleseminar offered via the telephone and the internet.  It is live and interactive with presentation and sharing. There are nine sessions.  Each session is 90 minutes. There are extensive handouts sent via email.

In addition to the sessions, there is homework and weekly calls with another member of the group (beginning after the 4th session).

The fee is $180. 

Register for CYCLES, THEMES, PATTERNS, THREADS here.

 

The course is offered:
Saturdays 4:00 - 5:30 PM Eastern Oct 23 - Dec 18
Tuesdays 1:00 - 2:30 PM Eastern Oct 26 - Dec 21


Payment Plans and Discounts are available.  Email me

Celebrate Nativity in Your Soul

At the end of my message on celebrating nature, I said today's message would be about celebrating divinity but after much thought I am calling it nativity. When I wrote my book, "Six Ways to Celebrate Christmas & Celebrate You!," I did not "think" about calling the second celebration Nativity as Christmas is Nativity - it was obvious, a no brainer.  But this week I did think and think and it is the miracle of nativity that I want us to celebrate.

Divinity, God, Spirit what ever name we give IT is ever present and we celebrate IT in many ways with many beliefs.  I am asking you to bring celebration to the birth of the consciousness of divinity in your ordinary life. The birth of the Jesus takes place in humble space and in ordinary time.  No bells, no whistles accept to those who out of their simplicity (the Shepherds) or their wisdom (the three Kings) are paying attention.

I ask you with simple wisdom to wake up and pay attention to the sacred birth moments when you perceive the divine source found mysteriously before, behind, beyond and within all things.  Each moment is celebrated as a birth, a nativity.

Nature is always perceptible. So is Nativity but in such a different way.  Nature is perceptible to your senses.  Nativity is found in your thoughts when something  is born within your consciousness and lifts a veil or brings a dawning or fills you with first breath. It is not something you have ever thought before, no memory of the earthly or the personal. Yet, through being conceived in you in the moment, this thought takes you back before your birth and sends you out beyond the threshold of your death to a knowing that always is, or takes you behind your senses and their perceptions to something purely spiritual or moves you within to the holy center of things.

How did you experience, feel, know, understand the presence or the nativity of the Divine today?

If you are feeling uncertain, doubtful or confused perhaps it is because we can only point to this experience and can never describe it.  There are many, many great spiritual texts that point the reader to this experience far more clearly and beautifully than I am doing. In writing this, it is the courage to experience the birth of the new meaning that keeps me going in face of my own uncertainty, doubt and confusion.  Stay with me in this feeling - it is the mood of the threshold.  The nativity of the Divine is on the other side of these feelings.


You celebrate nativity by recalling something you thought or said or did during the day that was new and filled with love. Something that surprised you. Or celebrate your openness to the new, your readiness to conceive the sacred.

When your mind, heart or intention is truly open, what is that open space like?

What is the invitation living in that space?

What could fill that space completely?

A birth!

Celebrate Nature in Your Soul

As I am getting ready to post this, I am sitting by an open window on the first cool morning of the fall.  My skin was just touched by a slightly chilling breeze. I notice it with a smile. Will I recall it tonight when I review my day?

 

Every moment of our lives we are beings of nature living in relationship to nature.  We can celebrate ourselves by celebrating nature. We can come to know ourselves, the natural part of ourselves, by coming to know nature.

Too many of us overlook nature, take her for granted, fail to wonder at her beauty, her complexity, her intensity, her tenderness, her changeability.  If we pay attention to nature everyday for a week, just by recalling at the end of the day what we perceived of the natural world, our lives will be so much more joyful.

As children we delight in  nature and have rich interactions with trees, the breeze, snowflakes, dandelions, mud, puddles, kittens, soaring birds, cloud shapes, so much. When we let ourselves, our adult selves, play with nature, that childhood delight returns and with it comes wisdom.

So let me suggest that you devote a few moments each evening to reflect on what you have experienced during the day in the natural world - minerals, earth, plants at all stages, animals. What have you seen or heard or smelled or touched or tasted of the natural world.

In these autumn weeks in North America, we find apples turning rosy and the changing colors of leaves.  We see birds flying south.  We feel the seasonal change in the air and see it in the sky. Pay attention to nature. Every night this week, before you go to bed, think about how you met nature, any aspect of nature's many gifts, during your waking hours.

Celebrate the rich wisdom of the natural world this week.  Connect your soul to nature often.

 

Suggestions for deeper/higher work with nature

To go deeper/higher with your celebration of nature, move beyond your likes and dislikes, beyond your feelings of pleasure and displeasure, to the reverence that can only come with objectivity.  Recollect gray skies with as much reverence as you give to blue skies. Recollect the scent of a skunk with as much reverence as the scent of fresh mowed grass.  I watch my grandson (now 7+ months old) celebrating and learning about everything with utter wonder and interest. He hasn't been told not to like certain things (yet) so his world remains large and enriching. Without objectivity and reverence, wonder and interest your relationship to nature becomes bland and small with little to celebrate. 

 

To know yourself through your celebration of nature, you can work with two questions:

 

How is what I am celebrating, reflected in the human being, in me? 

For example: How is the branch being moved by the wind found in my body or my soul? How is the eye of my cat reflected in my thinking - does my thinking see in the dark?

 

Where in my biography, my life memories, have I experienced this aspect of nature before? What did it feel like?  How did I interact with it?

 And, of course, you can celebrate with an artistic gesture: a sketch, a painting, a poem.

 

Email me.

 

Next Sunday: The Celebration of the Divine.

 

---

 

This post was inspired by my book on the six celebrations of Christmas.  To buy a copy of the book, Six Ways To Celebrate Christmas & Celebrate You!, go to my store. There are no shipping charges for books ordered between now and Christmas. The book is a great gift.

A Sword to Protect Your Soul...forged in the heavens

Archangel Michael, is the spirit of our times.  The mood of our times is anxiety and Michael is the spiritual model and teacher of the courage, calmness and clarity that overcomes the mood of anxiety. If you are challenged by demons of confusion, overwhelm, uncertainty, fear, Michael’s spiritual sword can pierce your soul, filling it with light and strength.  This is a sword that brings grace, transformation and balance to your thoughts and actions.

Michael’s sword can appear in life in many forms.  I think Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring’s Trilogy is filled with the inspiration of Michael which is why I find myself rereading it every few years.  Certain music enters my soul bringing the sounds of courage to my soul such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Ode to Joy.   I feel the sword in the willingness of my clients to face and heal the traumas of a painful childhood. I find it in the compassion and encouragement coming from my friends when I stand on the edge of an inner threshold needing to make a choice that will change my life. 

Where do you feel the force of Michael entering your soul? 

Here is a powerful meditation verse to work with on Michaelmas 

and anytime you feel the mood of anxiety overtaking your soul.  

For the Michael Age
by Rudolf Steiner



We must eradicate from the Soul

All fear and terror of what comes towards us

From out of the future,



And we must acquire serenity

In all feelings and sensations about the future.



We must look forward

With complete equanimity to everything that may come,



And we must think only that whatever comes

Is given to us by a world directive full of wisdom.



It is part of what we must learn in this age:

Namely to live out of pure trust

Without any security in existence,



Trust in the ever-present help of the Spiritual World.



Truly, nothing else will do

If our courage is not to fail us.



And we must seek this awakening within ourselves



Every morning and every evening.

~~~~~~~~~~***********~~~~~~~~~~

A few weeks ago I was researching gem elixirs on the web and I found an unusual one made from a meteorite.  At the time of Michaelmas, September 29, there are many iron meteorites falling to earth.  As I read the description of this essence and the story of the keris, I felt the image of Michael.  I have copied it below and included a photo of a keris and its scabbard. 

Meteorite Gem Elixir

A journalist friend made us aware of Kosta Danaos’ book The Magus of Java – a personal account of the Greek Martial Artist’s journey of finding and studying under a Chinese Taoist master on the island of Java. A chapter of this book is dedicated to telling the story of the authentic Javanese Keris, a particular bladed weapon that many Javanese consider to be magical. Kosta delights the reader with his first-person narrative of a demonstration of spinning and moving kerises he witnesses. In Kosta’s sequel to The Magus of Java, his teacher explains: “a real keris must be forged from a meteorite!” In response to Kosta’s question why this is so, the Sifu explains: “Because only a meteorite can contain the yin energy of the talisman. Any keris that truly has power has been forged from a stone that has fallen from the sky.” We were, of course, intrigued. If this explanation holds true, we should get some highly unique performance from an elixir made of such an iron-nickel meteorite as is used for forging a keris! And so we set out to acquire a meteorite from a private collection, only to dissolve the beauty in sulfuric acid…and to produce one of the most remarkable elixirs we’ve ever made.

For Personal Transformation: Meteorite energizes and warms the third eye and upper tan tien. It enables the recognition and change of unwanted thought patterns and strengthens one's willpower.

For Medicinal Purposes: Meteorite affects particularly the brain and the hypothalamus, assisting in overcoming mental fatigue. Meteorite has a relaxing effect on tension or cramps of the digestive system and to a lesser degree of muscle tissue while at the same time it is highly energizing. Meteorite is a choice preparation for those athletes who want simultaneously alertness, relaxedness and a toned and primed-for-action mind and body.

Imagine self/SELF

As I reflect back over my work over the last 21 years, I recognize the thread that weaves all the counseling, writing, speaking and teaching into a meaningful fabric - supporting each of us in imagining our own individuality. I've been discovering and sharing tools, insights, inspirations and encouragement for forming a sense of self/SELF that heals, liberates and strenghtens from many directions both within and without. 

Yes, we are two in one.  The small self and the immense SELF.  I use lower case when I am referring to the small self that wants a linear life without complexity, with simple answers, clear choices and no confusion or ambivalence, yet finds instead endless dilemmas, wounds that resist healing, longings that never seem to be fulfilled and dreams that never die. I use all caps when I am referring to the immense SELF that contains endless paradoxes, contradictions, and riddles while remaining whole and integral and always has room for more.

My clients, readers and audiences are brave, creative and evolving.  They embrace light and dark, the internal and external, (self)love and (self)hate, the constant and the ephemeral, matter and spirit, growing young and growing old, exuberance and restraint, stillness and movement, humanity and individuality and ultimately, dying and resurrecting.  And they want to make sense of everything and find the right relationship to everything. They want to mature and ripen their thinking, feeling, and willing in finding deeper and often painful truths, forming more beauty and harmony and manifesting goodness unselfishly.

They are willing to devote time to imagining self/SELF - creating the image of the human being and the image of the constant and ever-changing "I." Being willing to devote time requires a discipline, particularly in our demanding and distracting times. Ideally, everyday you have a time to reflect, to engage, to ponder and wonder, to write, to study, and to converse on this imagining.

The benefits are worth the efforts of time and attention. Imagining self/SELF is the only way to know self/SELF. Little steps will get you there and sometimes the little steps , on reflection, will be giant leaps. It's fun and scary - like an outrageous rollercoaster ride where gravity intensifies and then disappears, where up becomes down and left becomes right and suddenly returns to a new normal.

Please send me your thoughts on self/SELF and let me know how you set aside time for   nurturing and cultivating your imagination - for celebrating you. Email me.

 

Six Ways To Celebrate All of You!

 

Almost seven years ago, I began writing the Inner Christmas messages - a guide for a path of twelve small steps to take between Christmas and Epiphany during the Twelve Holy Nights.  Two years ago I wrote my book, Six Ways to Celebrate Christmas & Celebrate You! describing how we can consciously and creatively experience the holiday and ourselves.   I knew I was decribing the six ways we can celebrate every day. Six ways we can find and honor new personal meaning in our lives within every twenty-four hours. Each way of celebrating is a dialogue between self and SELF.

Beginning next Sunday, I will bring your attention to each of the six celebrations and offer some creative guidance on making every day meaningful. Here's a list of the six celebrations for you:

Nature - celebrate your new awareness of the natural world.
Divinity - celebrate your new experience of the spirit
Riches - celebrate new material and sensory delights
Relationships - celebrate new feelings about your many relationships to other human beings
Childhood - celebrate new insights into your personal history
Selfhood - celebrate your growing self-knowledge

This will take us through the first Sunday in November.



(I really want to encourage you to order the Six Ways to Celebrate Christmas & Celebrate You! now as it gives real examples/questions for each celebration - it is a wonderful book to use in a book club or study group. Between now and Christmas there are no shipping charges! Order here. http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Six-Ways-To-Celebrate-Christmas-Celebrate-You-111CCCY.htm)

 

Michaelmas - September 29

 

I will be sending out a special message on Wednesday about this very meaningful festival - the celebration of the courageous human heart.

 

Much Autumnal Warmth...

Lynn

  

 

The Sense of Ego

The Sense of Ego

Of the four mysterious senses of Love, hearing, word, thought and Ego, the Ego sense is the most subtly exquisite (ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense [carefully ascertained, precise] ): from Latin exquisit- ‘sought out,’ from the verb exquirere, from ex- ‘out’ + quaerere ‘seek.)

With this sense we perceive the eternal essence, the I AM, of other individuals.  Imagine all the other perceptions falling away - the ones that tell us all about the earthly appearance, the personality, the intelligence, the energies, the feelings, all the “things” and attributes of another - and all we are left with to know is the pure spirit of the other.  Can you bear that imagination?

It is an imagination of a flame searing your soul leaving behind embers of profound truth, indescribable beauty, fierce goodness and the warm glow of evolving freedom and emerging  love.

We are always perceiving the Ego of others, but oh, so rarely are we conscious of this perception.  We remain dull to this sense most of our waking lives as the other senses draw our attention.  When we do bring consciousness to this perception it is usually felt as a glance, a glimmer, a whiff,  a moment of buoyancy, a whisper of the name of God.

I thought I would ask you to recall this fleeting experience of the I of another, but as I think about it,  I realize that ordinary memory does not come from these most sacred perceptions. We cannot remember what lives beyond thought.  We cannot memorialize the “I” the way we can memorialize what perceive in our bodies or in the world.  We memorialize through our emotional responses and reactions, we like and dislike, we judge and evaluate, we desire or resist the perceptions of the other eleven senses.

This is what we can gradually grasp through attention to the four senses of love, that all the senses are only alive in the moment, that our memories of perceptions are just memories and are diminished and intensified , even distorted, over time. We must strive for a wise innocence in all our perceptions, we must perceive in the living moment free from all memory. 

Instead of the kind of earthly security that comes from perceptual familiarity, leap into the fires of the present and experience the person beside you free from the veils of space and time and memory.  Simply love, in freedom. Then your soul will be blessed by the perception of the Ego of the other, shining forth.

What we can remember is within each human being, in their holy of holies, dwells the Ego, the “I Am” and that within our own souls lives the sense to perceive it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is the closing post for this 2010 Inner Summer journey through the realm of the senses.  Thank you for sharing it with me. 

Thanks also to those who have shown their appreciation through the donation button on the blog. 

I have found it a rich experience to commit to the responsibility of writing once a week about the Inner Year mysteries of the soul.  I work to articulate the thoughts that create an imagination of Self.  I plan on continuing this rhythm.   The next six Sundays I will be writing about the many ways we find meaning in our daily lives.

Lynn

Some thoughts on Evil...

Some thoughts on evil... (This is a long one.)

It is Yom Kippur, the Day of Attonement. A good day to think about evil.


We need to begin to think maturely about evil, to form a conscious and active relationship to evil.

Given that as small children we were not allowed to touch, hear, taste, see or smell “dirty” or “disgusting” things, we have grown up thinking that we are good and safe only if we avoid all the things that might be untouchable, distasteful, hard to hear or reek with foulness. We close our eyes/minds to thinking about evil.

Evil feels to our immature consciousness as if it is about blame, shame and guilt. It feels mysterious and unknowable. We feel we must keep evil at a distance or we will be punished.


As adults we scapegoat others. We attach evil to others and drive them out of the community of humankind or execute them. We believe if we kill an evil person for doing evil things, we rid our world and our future of evil.

Hollywood has entertained us with our desires to kill or avoid evil. Occasionally, we see on a screen a suggestion of our relationship to evil as when Luke Skywalker learns Darth Vader is his father, but even then Luke kills his father.

It is not who is evil but what is evil and what is our relationship to evil?

We believe if we avoid perceiving evil, it will cease to exist when actually evil thrives on our lack of attention.

If we can’t face evil in ourselves and in others and in the world, if we can’t imagine taking responsibility for our relationships to evil what hope is there for the future? We remain manipulated by evil. We remain stuck in our naivete and evil runs our life.

If in our moral space we keep evil at a distance, we can’t connect with it consciously or define it or see when and how it penetrates our thoughts, feelings and actions.

I have found over the years I have been reflecting on my many relationships to evil in all it’s shapeshifting forms that the reflections give me more moral stability and moral freedom in my choices. I feel more real having a clearer sense of my shadows. It nurtures me more than false feeling found in maintaining my appearance of being good.

The work of personal and moral development is not about walking in the light of goodness, it’s about slogging through the swamp to find the demons and dragons of our inner life.

Here are three manifestations of evil that show up in our social interactions.

Any attempt to influence, coerce or control another person or group of persons where there is potential to

• cause harm
• violate the integrity of the other
• disrespect the other’s differences

Now I am a parent of two grown children. Reflecting on my parenting (long before I began to look at evil from a mature consciousness) I see many times when I thought I was being a good parent raising a good child, but I was not thinking of the lasting harm I was doing, how I was violating their emerging integrity or my insensitivity to how different they were from me.

My intentions were never evil. Of course, not. Yet I had so little consciousness that all my parental goodness was often a foil for evil, because I had never explored evil in a thoughtful way.

As adults we cannot develop morally, without attending thoughtfully to our manifold relationships to evil.

A Teleseminar on Evil

Over four 60 minute teleseminars, I am going to present some observations I have made about evil and our inner life. I will share what I sense to be difficult, humbling and liberating questions about the demons and dragons we find dwelling in our soul and in the soul of the world. If you register for the teleseminar you can be on the call and ask questions or you can simply download the recording of the call and listen to it when you find the time and the quiet.

Two different sessions:
Beginning tomorrow, Sunday, September 19 at 4PM Eastern.
Beginning Thursday, September 23 at 8 PMEastern.
The fee is $47
Register here. http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Slaying-Inner-Demons-Dragons-IY-DD10.htm

This is not “Evil for Dummies.” It is a course on thinking about ” What is Evil? and What is My Relationship to Evil?” for those who strive to be fully and powerfully human, to courageously build their personal bridge between spirit and matter, good and evil, life and death. It is not a course for those who find comfort in a belief system or dogma. I want offer you some perspectives that will encourage you to find your own evolving thoughts on evil.

In writing the previous paragraph I had two closing thoughts:

When we strive, really strive for moral development we will engage with evil with every step we take but we will serve evil less and less.
And then the bridge metaphor made me think of the nursery rhyme/song, London Bridge is Falling Down. The full verson is stanza after stanza of how we build London Bridge up again! The nursery rhyme teaches children all about how our soul overcomes the evil it falls into over and over again.

Register here. http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Slaying-Inner-Demons-Dragons-IY-DD10.htm

Where did I come from?? Where did I begin??

Where did I come from???? Where did I begin???

There are two answers to these two questions: Sex and Spirit!

As a physical being, I come from and began in a sexual act between my mother and my father.

So do you!

As a conscious, evolving being, I come from and began in realms of spirit.

So do you!

Both sexuality and spirituality are expressions of love. I can also say I come from and began in love.

So do you!

I am innately woven into myself through my evolving relationship to sexuality and spirituality as ideas and ideals and my sexuality and my spirituality as personal identity and personal drama.  How do I see this great tapestry of myself?  How do you?


My relationship to sexuality and spirituality involve my thoughts and feelings about being alone.  I have my own mysteries about being alone, being lonely and being all one.  How do I penetrate these mysteries?  How do you?

I wonder how I act out my spirituality and my sexuality in my daily life.  How consciously spiritual am I? How consciously sexual?  How conscious are you?

By grasping a picture of the archetypal development of human sexual consciousness and spiritual consciousness beginning with birth and moving to adulthood, I create an objective and universal imagination of sexuality and spirituality.

Then I can begin exploring my own version of the archetype in my sexual and spiritual dreams, stories, adventures, absences, abuses, experiments and longings and discover healing, liberation, possibilities.

I can see what imprints, interruptions and illuminations have happened as I unfolded my fierce and fragile sexuality and spirituality.

I can forgive and celebrate myself for being myself.

I can integrate what was split off from my soul.

I can find a new, deeper, freer relationship to and confidence in my aloneness.

I can know myself.

Join me in an Inner Life Biographical Review of Sexuality and Spirituality beginning this Saturday, September 18 at 1PM Eastern or this Tuesday Evening, September 21 at 8PM Eastern.

 Learn more here.

Inner Life Biography Reviews are safe, respectful, warm and confidential.

Meanwhile here is this sweet video on How To Be Alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs

The Sense of Thought

The Sense of Thought or Meaning

Like the word sense, the sense of thought is difficult to describe and imagine.  

I struggled to write this and suspect you will struggle to make sense of it all.  The three “highest” senses of word, thought and "I" are so beyond our ordinary thinking.

Last week we attempted to think of the perception of word, language and gesture isolated from the perception of thought or meaning.  Not easy and for many of us not possible. But perceiving is not thinking!! It lives more in the realm of intelligence, rather than intellect.

 

Let me offer a metaphor for the relationship of word to thought. If I dive into a pond, I can float or swim in the water.  The water carries me, just as words carry thoughts.  The water is not me and the word (or words) is not the thought or meaning.

Stop reading right now and think about the last few times you perceived the words “I love you.” Obviously, you perceived the same words but did you perceived the same meaning each time? Or consider the word “green” referring to the color of a pine tree, an olive, or a dollar bill. Different, different, different.

When I am working with my clients, five of them may say “I am angry with my spouse” or “I don’t know what my destiny is.” Same words, different meaning with each client. I must perceive the meaning being carried by the words or I must ask my client to find more distinct expresssion or words for carrying the truest meaning.

I see a smile or a tear on a clients face, what do they mean? Same gesture, different meaning.

In my teleseminars and my messages, I use words to convey meaning.  I work very hard to make sure  the words I use are the right words - that they point to the meaning I am intending to awaken in the perceiver.  Likewise, I work very hard in discerning the meaning in the words my client is speaking, in the gestures of their facial expressions and so on.

This sense is very challenging to pay attention to.  Often we rely on a previous perception. Get caught in biographical memory or the perspectives of certain identities - never risking going outside the box.  Ideally, we are always perceiving new meaning, meaning free of past perceptions or prejudices and seek the true meaning behind the words in the moment.

The practice of sacred attention is the full awareness of the hearing, word and meaning perceptions, subtle, profound, mysterious. And the pursuit of perception of true and momentary  meaning is a high and noble endeavor in the realm of the senses and the realm of the soul seeking spiritual significance through earthly and sensuous manifestation.


Bringing our attention to the development of this sense of thought can lead to hesitancy and confusion.  Without courage we conform, to cultural or family determined meanings. With courage we step outside the givens and the formals and risk awakening to something alive, challenging, even creatively uncertain.

This week look beyond the word, see beyond the gesture.  Ask yourself what is the deepest meaning I perceive in this phrase, this sentence, this paragraph of ideas?

Poetry often begins in thought and seeks elegant expression in words.  Instead of just speaking familiar words that have lost their meaning, write a poem today. You will feel more alive in your soul.

The Sense of Smell

We perceive over 10000 different odors and an seemingly infinite number of combinations.  And with each breath we smell the  scent combinations of whatever is around us.  Though we don’t notice all the smells, we are making decisions about them all the time.  Decisions beyond like and dislike.  We assess the health and safety of all that is near to us with our sense of smell.

Before we taste, we smell. If something smells bad, we won’t taste it.

Our smell sense links directly to memory.  We love familiar smells.  We immediately know our blood relatives through smell and feel at home with the smells of our culture.

Smell takes us on adventures.  If we smell something we love, we will follow the smell to its source.  If we don’t like a smell, we will move away from it as far as necessary. Because smell comes with breath, it tells us good smells are about life and bad smells are about death.  We seek life and avoid death and smell is our guide.

Likewise, smells soothe us and stimulate us and offer a healing action for our bodies and souls.  Those who have lost their sense of smell feel life has been taken away from them.



The soul’s sense of smell tells us about the health of an idea, the complexity of a mood, and the safety of an intention.

When you reflect on your inner life build your awareness with metaphors of odor and smell. I suggest you spend a few minutes everyday recording perceptions, thoughts, feelings, intentions and actions and then put a scent metaphor next to each one.

As I write this I am thinking about the childhood associations with Ivory Soap.  Something about the scent of Ivory awakens a sense of clean - of being about 3 years old in the bathtub and getting scrubbed, feeling/smelling new and fresh.  Why would that memory/metaphor appear as I write this post?

Well, I want you to be inspired to seek in your inner life a fresh, clean, newness through this exercise.  Does that smell good to you?

But look at the soul experiences that don’t smell good to you, too.  Look at the ones that feel like perfume covering up stink. What about the one’s that have no smell - did they ever have life?

Sometimes as I am doing research on an aspect of the Inner Year, or working with a painful memory from my childhood, or working with a client on a critical questions, I smell a faint odor that gives me a sense that something is almost near enough to taste or see or touch.  These “soul smells” pull me forward.  I become like a bloodhound following a scent of thoughts, of feelings or of intentions.

If you practice this “smell” attention, you will find you have a nose for what’s right for you!

The Sense of Word

The Sense of Word


I was with my grandson for a month, a very vocal month.  For a couple of weeks, as he turned six months old, he was delighting in the sounds he could make. From grunts to squeals he was learning how to master the range of his voicebox.  On the last day he was sitting on his father’s lap and we let our friend’s dogs in.  They came up to the baby, sniffed, licked and walked away.  Edon wanted more.  He stretched out his arms and called out to the dogs.  He didn’t use a real word but it was a distinct sound with a distinct desire behind it.  Language as a conveyor of personal reality was being born.  Edon was not just making sounds and finding his voice, he was speaking and gesturing. And blessedly, I perceived this first attempt at language.

Words, language and gestures bear meanings but are not the meaning.  They are form but not substance.  In most cases, they carry merely parts of the meaning but not the whole. 

With the sense of word, language and gesture, we perceive the sounds of vowels and consonants. We notice syllables. And we notice intention. We actively shape our words. We choose our words and we perceive the choosing of words.

My mother tongue is English.  My words are American, a combination of Long Island and South Florida dialects.  I also use jargon words, esoteric words, slang, etc stemming from my studies and my interests. I am female. And it is important to know that most of my choice of words and my pleasure in perceiving certain words is loaded with the emotional and intellectual shadings of my biography - my joys and sorrows.

Because most of us confuse words with meaning and are not aware that the perception of words is distinct from the perception of meaning, we get into states of misunderstanding, confusion and distraction in our learning, our relationships and our communications.


Sometimes people don’t know what my words or gestures mean. They have either a different personal history with the word or a different language all together. An Italian or a Chinese perceives my words and could parrot them, but his sense of my meaning is lost in the simple perception of language. And then there is the struggle with spouses, lovers, parent, children and others so familiar and dear, that sometimes don’t hear the words, let alone care about the personal meaning they bear.


But what is really scary is sometimes I don’t know what my words mean to me or I use the wrong words for the meaning I want to convey. A word I was working with as I thought about this little essay was “money.” Money is a word I perceive and load with lots of emotional meanings and little thought.
I can define words in isolation but put them in a string of words, a sentence, and put the sentence in a context of even more complex meaning and I must work to perceive the meaning of the word in the context of many words.

Most words have several meanings.  One word with many subtle meanings is the word “love.”  I perceive the word and a million possible meanings appear.  How do I perceive the exact meaning in the moment?  Not by perceiving the word.  (Next week I will share about the thought sense which allows us to perceive meaning even when the meaning conflicts with the words being used!)

This week notice words.  And notice body words or gestures.  Notice how you use the word or react to the word and ignore or miss the meaning. And notice how your perception of the word is tied to your biography with the word.  (I could write pages about my biography with the money words!)

Here is a great article on language and thinking that was in the New York Times Sunday Magazine last week. It’s a great read.

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

Here is the website to create a word cloud out of any written document. http://www.wordle.net/ A word cloud works with the sense of word.  It is fun to play with.

The Sense of Hearing

 

I want to begin with saying what the sense of hearing is not! It is not the perception of words or ideas.  Hearing is just the perception of sound waves, acoustic events.  In this message I want to share with you four distinctions I find through my hearing sense. If I confused hearing with the perception of words or the perception of thoughts, I would miss the great wisdom that lives in hearing.

 

Right now I am hearing a clock ticktock and water play with water in a stream outside my window, neither of which are words or ideas. The first I experience as a mildly unpleasant mechanical noise and the second is a sweet sound of nature. A noise is something I don't want to hear and wish I could shut off or shut out. A sound is something that is natural and not distorted. I react to hearing a noise or a sound with pleasure or displeasure and that tells me about me.

From the reality of my soul, what does my hearing hear?

My soul's hearing can awaken listening.  I want to listen to something that offers a communication or a message.  I listen for a voice. If my soul experiences a voice, my listening tells me something about the source of the voice, not about me.  Voices offer all kinds of information. Some evenings I hear the voice of an owl.  I recognize the sound. Voice also tells me the mood of its source.  The dog's bark tells me if it is excited, alarmed, attacking, or just wants to come in or go out.  A friend's voice tells  about their energy and their emotion. A violin's voice tells me about the music, it's sound tells me about the instrument.

In a voice I listen for a tone and this asks my soul to hear and vibrate from it's deepest core.  With the tone of a voice I begin to resonate with the truth or falsity, the beauty or distortion, and goodness or illness of the source of the voice. When I hear tone, I find imagination, inspiration and intuition about the source.

In my counseling practice, much of which is over the phone, I listen to my client's voice and listen for his/her tone. Through my hearing of voice and tone, I learn how to percieve their words and ideas, their questions and their longings, I hear the vibrations of the wounds of the past and the possibilities of the future  I am resonating to something far deeper in their souls, to their living nature.

In the reality of my soul, my hearing moves from mere perception of an acoustic event to a vibrational knowing of deep intimacy.   And all this is before the experience of words or ideas.

With the sense of warmth, you begin to experience what lives in another.  With hearing your whole soul vibrates with what is living in another, the noise, the sound, the voice and the tone living in the world around you.  Listen well everyday to everything.

At the end of the day, reflect on what you have heard. With practice you will be able to know when you are hearing the harmonies of the cosmos.

Back to a mundane and practical sense, reading includes a sense of hearing living in a different part of consciousness than the words and ideas. In reading email or a novel and particularly in a poem,  your soul hears through the silence all the noise, sound, voice or tone present in the soul of the writer.

The Sense of Warmth

When you touch something you are thrown back into yourself, but you are accompanied by something of the other - the warmth (or coolness) of the other. I experience myself through touch whether I am touching a rock, the bath water, a book, the keys on my computer, or my grandson’s sweet cheeks.  But I am finding a special knowledge of the object I am touching by its temperature.  I feel something of the object within me by perceiving its degree of warmth.   It seems to permeate me.

This within-ness of the warmth, of the other, is quite a revealing and intimate experience.  Much more intimate than seeing it, because seeing requires separation. The sense of warmth requires the relative absence of separation. 

When your heart and soul experience the warmth of another’s existence, of their thoughts and feelings and intentions, what could be more intimate? You find yourself perceiving their meaning, their purpose, their love, their suffering, even their becoming.  The sensitivity of the soul’s temperature sense is measured by the presence of sympathy, of antipathy and of empathy. How empathic are you? Do you prefer the warmth of sympathy in your perceptions of others? Or do you like the coolness of antipathy.  Do you want to control your inner temperature and avoid intimacy or do you want to risk the rising and lowering of your soul’s interest through the permeation of the other’s truth into your truth? Can you maintain your sense of self when someone else gets under your skin?

The soul’s sense of warm is the threshold between our superficial perception of another human being as an object outside us and the intimate conscious perceptions of what lives within them.  The next four senses are the senses of love. These four ask more of us than the four senses of participation.

I really love this sense of warmth. It’s like the invitation to the surprises and delights of really knowing another.  But it also challenges me with two polar threats.  I can lose myself by melting into the other.  I can meet the chilling shadow of disinterest.  I then must be able to regulate or stabilize my perception of warmth with a soul thermostat.

As you read my thoughts on warmth, do you feel their warmth or do they leave you cool? After I send out any message I will always get a few responses.  Some coolly unsubscribe. It is always nice when the unsubsciber takes the time to warm up the “rejection” with a reason.  And then there are the incredibly warming notes that express how grateful for or inspired the writer is by my thoughts.

Every message I write brings me a whole range of temperatures.  When I begin it’s like diving into chilly waters as I feel somewhat distant from the topic.  Then I start swimming around in the mystery of the topic and start warming up to it.  By the time I hit the “publish” button, I am warm as toast and wish I could write pages more. Sense the warm of everyone you touch.

The Sense of Vison

Dear Friend,

 

The richness and complexity of the vision of vision in our souls is astounding and wonderful. I am writing this during the lunch break at a conference on The Search for Humanity in Contemporary Art, so I have a list of visual thoughts in my notebook from listening to the presentations.

The phrase that stands out and grabs my eye (I) is "onlooking."  LOOKING ON!  In your soul what do you rest your I on?  Or do you bring your visual consciousness only to what your eyes see in the material world?

Let's add a few more prepositions. Not only looks on, but also looks out, looks in and looks away. From our inner life, we look out, in and on seeking the light of truth, beauty, and goodness.  At the same time we may look away from the shadows cast by falsehood, distortion and ill will. 

Are these looks out, in and on a mere glance or a penetrating gaze? A glance is quick and provides no deep value, but it can capture your momentary attention and invite you to return later for a lasting gaze with more attention and intention.

Gazing lets the I penetrate, see through and beyond.  Gazing lets the object be reflected in the heart of the subject. Gazing often changes the one gazing.


Do you choose to gaze so you can see through and beyond the surface?  This is a serious question as it indicates a real responsibility and a certain fearlessness.

This act of soul seeing requires practice and discipline.  It also requires a willingness to be surprised, shocked, even frightened.

You can see how it is very, very helpful to have worked with and developed your sensitivity to the soul's touch, well-being, self-movement, balance, smell and taste, to maintain a strong sense of self before you start looking on what lies inside our skin, out in the world and deep in the realities of another human being.

This week choose an image to gaze on.  Spend a few minutes each morning and each evening, in dawn's early light and in the growing shadows of dusk, seeing what you can see. This object can be an idea, a work of art, your own hand, a tree, the sky outside a particular window in your home or someone you love.  The question in your heart is "What am I seeing? What is the shape? how many colors? what shines brightest?  what am I not seeing? could I take another perspective? How does this object reflect me? reflect God? What does this image ask of me?


Gaze on, my friend.  See what you can see.

Of course, if you look away, you might never see what needs to be seen. You may overlook the essential?  Are you afraid? Of what?

 

Here's looking at you,

 

Lynn

The Sense of Taste

How does your soul savour life? Or what in your life does your soul savour?

I love food.  It so delights my senses with smells, textures, flavors, colors, and shapes.  But now I am feeling seduced by my senses because inner maturity wakes me up to the reality that what I eat needs to delight my body, not my senses. My senses get my attention and they give me a sensation that becomes a perception but then I must seek the substance living behind the perception.  I must engage my selfhood and seek the meaning the perception offers. And that goes for every morsel I put in my mouth and every perception I put into my soul.

With the sense of taste, we suddenly have a new, more active relationship to the perception then those five senses that have come before.  We can spit out anything that does not please our sense of taste. We can decide to swallow only what tastes good. 

There is a more developed relationship to flavors beyond easy choices of like and dislike.  We can acquire taste - learn to find pleasure in what we formally found nothing pleasing and rejected.  My acquired food tastes are olives, blue cheese, liver, sushi, etc.  I love them all even though I found them utterly disgusting when I was younger.

Now take the notion of acquired tastes into your soul functions.  What thoughts have you acquired a feeling for?  What feelings do you express, even celebrate now that in the past you found unbearable?  And your will, your energy, your disciplined practices...what strength of attention and force of engagement has developed in your life?

What soul tastes would you be willing to acquire if you knew you would find truth, beauty, harmony, goodness in digesting a new soul diet?  Would you let go of your familiar identities? Your convenient prejudices? Your habitual behaviors? What exotic and nutritious tastes have you been unwilling to try? Now is the time to be adventurous in your tasting. Seek out flavors that heal, that liberate, that empower. 

This week chew on a new food for your soul - read a challenging book, practice a different meditation, listen to different music, write in your journal from a new perspective or focus on feelings you find difficult to swallow. Notice all the subtle new tastes.  Just imagine acquiring a new taste every week of your life...how wise you would be.

The Sense of Balance

Balance lets us sway in many directions and never fall.   Through balance we maintain our uprightness.  No matter how much we sway in any direction we can return to our standpoint, head held high, ready to focus on what is important, find our center between two opposing forces or infinite possibilities. We are not dizzy or light-headed because of this perception.  We know our inner balance of power and our infinite flexibility.  Balance dots our i and crosses our t. 

Balance crowns us with inner sovereignty and gives us dominion over our pulling, pushing, chaotic impulses.  Balance also frees us from dependency on the rules of earthly gravity by giving us a center of gravity within our own being.

This week look at balance in your soul life.  Your souls move to and fro in your thoughts and your actions.  In your soul you find your balancing point in your feeling life which allows you to judge the (up)right relationship between many thoughts and many actions.

Over this week connect with your sense of soul balance.  Look at all the “things” you want to think, all the “things” you want to do, all the “things” you want to be, all the “things” (spiritual and material) that you want to have. Human existence asks you to choose, to say “yes,”  “no” and “maybe” - to say “now,” “later” and “never.” A balanced soul chooses well, manages the swaying from choice to choice elegantly.  How balanced do you feel?

If you are having a hard time balancing your life, balancing your emotions, balancing your thoughts, imagine a thin crystalline thread of pure light attached to the end of a fiery sword coming from the heavens and piercing through your head straight through your body and down to the center of the earth. This thread gives your selfhood a constant balancing energy.  No matter what forces cause you to sway, you easily sustain your balance as through you the heavens reach into the earth.

Blessings on your growing sense of inner balance.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We are getting close to the time of year that begs the soul to focus on the mysteries of balance in our individual lives.  As light fades and darkness increases, as we start to feel death in nature, the soul must strengthen it’s consciousness of balance.  In the Inner Year curriculum, the 4 part teleseminar, The Mysteries of Personal Balance, begins on August 15 for the Sunday sessions and August 19 for the Thursday sessions. You will receive a description of the teleseminar next week.

Sense of Self-Movement

It seems intelligent to give you the brief dictionary definition of the sense of self-movement. There are two words that relate to self-movement:

Proprioception from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body.
Kinesthesia from Greek, kinesis, motion, aisthesis, feeling
1. The sense that detects bodily position, weight, or movement of the muscles, tendons, and joints.
2. The sensation of moving in space.

As I watch my grandson develop - today he is five months old - I witness his growing awareness of his own movements, the achievement of willful coordination and the awakening of the ability to move toward and grasp (touch) what he desires. Of course, everything he wants and gets, then is brought to his mouth because all hunger (the sense of well-being) is satisfied through his mouth at this age.

Slowly he is moving from awkward to graceful. His body is becoming his own. And he will be developing this sense for the rest of his life at least in his soul.

As my grandson learns to master the movement of his body, he is also learning how to master and coordinate his increasingly complex soul life of thinking, feeling and willing. That is why it is so necessary to play, to move your body in all kinds of ways that develop and challenge movement coordination. The more you move your body as a child, and as an adult, the more graceful and coordinated your thinking becomes.

 Movement in Your Soul

How conscious of your soul movements are you??? Do you always move the same way or do you explore new movements?

Is there grace in your soul? Is there weight in your soul? How well do you coordinate your desires? How do you move toward truth?

How aware are you of the relative positions of your perceptions, your opinions, your feelings, your intentions?

I want to encourage you to stretch. Compare the perception of stretching in your body with the perception of stretching your ability to think or focus or relax. What are you stretching toward?

I want to encourage you to leap. When was the last time you risked leaping? A child leaps and feels such a delighted sense of self. If you take a leap in your soul will you feel delight?

In our times we are perhaps moving too much from activity to activity, from feeling to feeling. This week as you work with the sense of self-movement, don’t forget to experience the grace of stillness.

Movement In My Life

I have always been a good dancer and a good swimmer and, of course, loved water ballet and wanted to be Esther Williams. So there is something about choreographed coordination that resonates with my ideal of self-movement. Yet I also enjoy spontaneous, surprising, yet mindful, movement. My body feels at home in the discipline of ballet and the freedom of jazz dancing.

Now, after years of practice, I am most delighted with the way my thinking moves from imagination to imagination sometimes stretching and sometimes leaping and almost, always coordinated. When I reflect on my thinking, I discover the choreography of it all. I realize just as I choreograph my body’s movements, there is a divine choreographer guiding the movements of my soul.

The Inner Year curriculum is choreographed movement for the soul, yet it empowers inner freedom and inner grace for each soul seeking self-expressive movement.

Move!!! and Other Metaphors

No matter what your age, move! Move your body and move your soul.

P.S. What other soul metaphors for self-movement can you imagine?

The Sense of Well-Being

Once we incarnate into our sense of touch, through which we experience the resistance of something else and the reality of our own boundary, and we find ourselves thrown back into our own center, we move to the perception of “the existence within” our skin. What exists within our skin is our life, our biological organization and the functions that keep us alive. This new sense is called our life sense or our sense of well-being. We don’t pay too much attention to this sense until something is not well within. With touch we perceive “is,” our being is because I experience my limits and boundaries. With well-being we perceive “is not,” I am alert to an absence in my “isness.”

When something is not right, lacking, or overwhelming, our sense of well-being alerts us with feelings of hunger, thirst, exhaustion or dis-ease. As infants and children we depend on others to fill our bellies, quench our thirst, put us to bed, and calm and comfort our dis-ease. Curiously this sense tells us that what resists our touch can also care and provide for us.

Before I go into the soul perceptions of well-being, I want to quickly point out that touch wakes us up to space and well-being wakes us up to time. When our sense of well-being grabs our attention we begin to endure. Duration is the body’s perception of time - how long can I bear this suffering, the absence of my well-being.

Now to the sense that let’s the soul know it is suffering...

Begin with questioning your ability to endure suffering. Your own suffering and the suffering of others? Are you struggling right now with the suffering of the planet, with the Gulf oil spill?

Is it easy for you to repress your suffering? Repressed suffering lives below consciousness and never finds relief. (I know for myself, I learned to endure and put on a happy face at an early age. Eventually, I lost all sense of what was unendurable, found myself seeking relationships that demanded I hunger, thirst, and exhaust myself, etc. It’s a whole story of a very unhealthy sense of well-being. I’ve been in soul recovery for years. I know now it is up to me to notice when my cup is empty and fill it with kindness myself. When it overflows, I can share my kindness with others. There are so many great lessons living in the awareness of well-being.

When your soul is hungry, what is it hungry for? How do you feed your soul? Who else feeds your soul? Think of comfort foods for the soul - a poem, a painting, a string quartet, a long walk, a good movie, telling your truth. Make a list. You might want to make a bunch of little cards with suggestions for soul snacks or soul feasts and keep them in a bowl. When your soul feels hunger rumblings, go to the bowl and pull a card. Enjoy the nourishment.

When your soul is thirsty, dry, parched - do you know this feeling? Where do you go? Where are the sweet waters your soul drinks from? Does the smile of a loved one or a stranger quench your loneliness?

Souls need rest. Do you overwhelm your soul with too much self-help, too much seriousness, too much demand to develop? How do you imagine taking a soul nap? What lullaby would sing your soul into a gentle sleep? If you just close your eyes.

And if your soul knows dis-ease, pain, illness where do you seek healing? When your soul gets inflamed what cools you down? Or if your soul gets chilled, what blankets your thoughts and feelings with warmth?

In your sense journal, make lists of how your soul experiences a lack of well being, when it feels it is losing its liveliness and life. Then make lists of all the wonderful things that restore your soul’s health and wealth. These lists will be an endless source of personal care and wisdom, recipes for delicious soul feasts, juices for a juicy sense of self, soft pillows on which to lay your soul down and all kinds of therapeutic relief and restoration.

If you need a summer conversation for soothing or stimulating, I might have what you are seeking. Read more...