Courage and Sacred Conversations

 It is amazing how the gods support our intentions.  My intention was to write a second email about sacred conversations.  I want a lot of you to register for my teleseminar, The Elements of Sacred Conversations. Why? Because the two 90-minute sessions will give you a foundation for and an imagination of the real capacity for what you long to receive and long to give when you open your heart to another human being - a sacred conversation filled with wonder, reverence, honor, surprise.

So the evidence that the gods support this Inner Eastertide work (work being efforts of willed attention and activity toward a desired result and the development of new knowledge,  new skills and new organs of perception) was an email that led to a link that led to a link that referenced this poem.

This poem demonstrates a courageous vulnerability, a courageous self-declaration, and a real kiss between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between the universal I and the individual I.

 

A poem is a sacred conversation between the poet and the reader.

The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee


I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of the dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the Gods
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to everything that is beautiful...
You see, I am alive, I am alive

Navarre Scott Momaday

There are 22 declarations that begin with "I am" in this poem.  And they all go beyond the ordinary! The declarations demand you forget yourself, you listen openly to the poet and you empathize with his feelings. Through empathic and poetic listening, you find a new sense of life, of meaning, of the poet and of yourself.

Before reading further, I suggest you return to the poem and speak it out loud twice. Once to hear the poet and once to hear yourself. How does it feel to speak these words, to say "I am..." over and over again? How does it feel to say "I stand in good relation to..."?

 

Your Sacred Conversations

 

Who do you have sacred conversations with? Who embraces you while you strive and struggle to state your declarations - whatever they may be. "I am..." "I want to become..." "Help me know myself and take my stand." Who sees and hears the interweave between the spiritual being and the earthly being you are and you are becoming?  Who loves you enough to courageously silence their self conversations long enough to let you live, die and be reborn within their soul?

Whose declarations of "I am" do you embrace with your sacred listening?

Sacred conversations are filled with courage. Like other acts of courage, sometimes they just happen through grace.  I want them to happen through intention. If we intend to have sacred conversations, we will have more of them. Sacred conversations create a better world.

The content and consequence of a sacred conversation is filled with creative mystery, but there are attributes that can be known and skills that can be practiced. I offer my teleseminar on "The Elements of Sacred Conversation" to support you and your sacred conversations.



Sign up for my teleseminar on "The Elements of Sacred Conversation."  Here's the information:
Two 90 minute sessions.
Sunday, April 25 (TOMORROW!) at 8PM Eastern (5PM Pacific)
Sunday, May 2 at 4PM Eastern (1PM Pacific)
Cost: $27 (plus your long distance charges for the call)
Sessions are recorded and available for download (so you can sign up even if you can't be on the calls).

Sign up at http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/The-Elements-of-Sacred-Conversation-IYSC10.htm

Forward this email to those in your life who have the courageous love to share the blessings of sacred conversations with you.

 

With a listening heart,

Lynn

Soultides and Sacred Conversations

Soultides

(Yes, soultide is an anagram of solitude and an understanding of soultides makes our solitudes much richer.)

The Inner Year is a recognition of the tides of soul.

What is a tide?
A tide is an alternate rising and falling of seas.
A tide is a surge of feeling.

What is a soultide?
A soultide is a rising and falling of attention to particular aspects of inner and outer life, to spirit and matter, to self and other, to quiet and activity.
A soultide is a surge of a particular feeling at a particular time of the year, of the day, of a lifetime.

How lovely to think about soultides. To feel the pull of the soul's waxing and waning in our relationships to spirit and to matter. To be free of the unnatural demand of constancy in attention and enthusiasm to things that have moved onto the shore or out to sea of our consciousness. To realize we have inner rhythms of spiritual and earthly ebbs and flows.

These thoughts just brought up to memory the Righteous Brothers' song "Ebbtide" which came out the year I graduated from high school. As you read the lyrics, you might imagine this not a song of teenage passion but as a (albeit, corny) poem of the soul's desire for spirit and for matter.  Imagine being at peace in the web of the two arms of your consciousness, the spiritual and the practical.

First the tide rushes in
Plants a kiss on the shore
Then rolls out to sea
And the sea is very still once more
So I rush to your side
Like the oncoming tide
With one burning thought
Will your arms open wide
At last we're face to face
And as we kiss through an embrace
I can tell, I can feel
You are love, your are real
Really mine in the rain
In the dark, in the sun
Like the tide at its ebb
I'm at peace in the web of your arms

 

You can hear the Ebbtide in all it's melancholic sixties splendor here. It's embarrassing to reveal what a teenage romantic I was in my wishful solitude, but as participants in my Inner Life programs are realizing, the roots of our life direction and purpose are often found in some pretty weird events, meetings, and cultural connections.  So you might want to take a few minutes to reflect on the lyrics of your favorite songs when you were graduating from high school. Then we can laugh wisely together!

Inner Eastertide

Our souls are in the midst of Eastertide, the fifty days between Easter, the mystery of dying and resurrecting, and Pentecost, the mystery of universal understanding. Now is the time we move

• between the new awakening of our individuality and the new awakening to our humanity, 
• between the consciousness of being all alone and being all one.

How do you experience your inner tide between being all alone in yourself and being connected to all other human beings? How do you experience the struggle between knowing yourself and knowing another?

I had a real Inner Eastertide moment this last Sunday.  I was driving with a dear friend through the blossoming spring countryside.  We know each other very well, yet suddenly I felt this unfathomable loneliness of not knowing her at all.  Then in the blink of consciousness, I turned that feeling on myself and realized I hardly know myself.  Struggling with these two harsh feelings I found a third awareness surging in my soul.  Only if I feel love for myself and for my friend can I bear the suffering of not knowing.

For me this love becomes active in conversation.  Not in ordinary conversation but in sacred conversation.  Whether I have a sacred conversation with one of the unknown multitudes within my own soul or with one of the unknown multitudes within another's soul, I find peace in the web of true intercourse, of making love.

Of course, there are tides within a sacred conversation, flows of sympathy and antipathy where I approach and retreat.  All my counseling conversations, sacred by intention and agreement, live in tidal forces.  I bring my attention to my client and then ebb away to attend to my inner experience of what she is saying.  I move from the shores of her stories, questions and needs out to the seas of my understanding and then flow back to the conversation with a surge of insights.

Inner Eastertide is the time to contemplate the ebb and flow between self and other.  Following your Inner Easter experience of the death of the old and the birth of the new you, the first days of Inner Eastertide are given to the conversations you want to have with yourself.  Then as we feel the coming of Inner Pentecost the conversations move toward our relationship with others.  But the whole of the fifty days, our souls attend to increasing our willingness and ability to engage in sacred conversations.


As you attend to your inner life during this time of the Inner Year, work with your sense of sacred conversation.  What are the questions that live in a sacred conversation?  What is sacred listening?  Are there limits to sacred conversations?  What parts of yourself do you want to make love to?  Are there parts of yourself or parts of others that you are unwilling to have a sacred conversation with?

 

Recall the sacred conversations of your lives - some of these are conversations you have had with yourself! Were you the speaker or the listener?

The Elements of Sacred Conversations

 

If you would like creative guidance in working with the mysteries of sacred conversation, I am offering a two session teleseminar on the Elements of Sacred Conversations.  Through understanding the elements you will feel a greater depth of love and a greater capacity for knowing yourself and others.  You will become a sacred conversationalist. All relationships are enhanced through the sacred conversations. 

 

The Elements of Sacred Conversation teleseminar  takes place on Sunday, April 25 and Sunday, May 2 from 4 - 5:30PM Eastern (1PM Pacific). The cost is $27.

 

Click here to register and learn the details of this valuable teleseminar on sacred conversations.

Inner Easter - Your Resurrection

This Easter Sunday feel the sun rising in your heart of hearts flooding you with the light of freedom and the warmth of love.  Be new. 

 

This newness is not a new reflection of the old, familiar you.  It is new to the core. Everything in you that could suffer and die, everything in you that felt the fires of inner hell is gone.  You greet your companions and they do not recognize you.  You look in the mirror of your soul and see a self that is definitely you but so strange and different.You and I in our spiritually fragile development can only hold this experience for a moment. 

 

I am frustrated sharing my inadequate words.  I can only apologize for my lack of poetic elegance and assure you that my weak images do not reflect a weak conviction regarding the Inner Easter moments we each experience.  

 

 I want to share one contemporary poem that sings of the Easter mystery.  Derek Walcott wrote it.

Love After Love

The time will come 
when,

with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving


at your own door, in your own mirror


and each will smile at the other's welcome,

 



and say, sit here. Eat. 


You will love again the stranger who was your self.


Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart


to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

 



all your life, whom you ignored


for another, who knows you by heart.


Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

 



the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.


Sit. Feast on your life. 


 

If we let our old ways die and restore wholeness to our soul, we become new. Spiritually we remain ourselves, but without the limiting and often distorting context of our past to define our form we become different.  We become unrecognizable to ourselves and to all our companions.  We have risen to a new way of being.  This is the challenge and the reality of our inner resurrection experience.  We surprise ourselves for brief moments, we know joy.  Not a joy that is compared to a suffering.  No, resurrection joy is suffering turned inside out.

The Resurrection of 2000 years ago made it possible for each of us to have resurrection moments in our souls. Easter comes once a year to remind us to pay attention to our resurrection moments. Not just to pay attention, but to have faith in them.

I have suffered my heart being broken only to find it healed in a moment.  The healed heart is a new heart, not a mended heart.  It is a heart that has no memory of it's suffering and death.  It is resurrected and filled with new love and new freedom. 

In the audio I speak to the mystery of inner resurrection and the challenge of being new. 

Inner Easter - Holy Saturday

Most of our Easter education gives little attention to Holy Saturday and the Descent into Hell.  Probably the Church fathers chose to neglect the harrowing of hell because it indicated the Christ forgave all sins and released souls from the eternal fires of hell.  Where is the supremacy of the Church, of the priesthood, if the Christ forgives all sins, not the Church and it's priests in whatever hierarchical power?

Where is your relationship to your inner redemption if it is freed from the punishment of the eternal threat of brimstone?  What if freedom is not a magic wand, a fairy godmother's beneficent gesture , but dependent, actually exalted, by a conscious descent into the darkest, fiercest, most excruciating self-examination and compassionate self-judgment you are capable of?  Yes, it is frightening and truly, a personal threshold but the result is a possibility of Inner Resurrection.

 How do you descend into Hell? and for what inner purpose? 
Is there inner resurrection without inner redemption? 

How do you go into your own inner hell?
Why go into your own inner hell?

Each of us finds freedom and joy when we willingly enter into our own inner hell and find our way out.  We bring with us all that we have struggled to meet and forgive in our own individuality.

Listen to the audio with self-compassion. Be strong in meeting the parts of your soul that feel served by the fires of self- judgment.

Please share with me and the other companions descending into hell consciously, what you learn and what you forgive.  Each of us needs support for the deed of self-compassion.

Tomorrow we face the mystery of joy, the mystery of inner resurrection.
Warmly,
Lynn

Inner Easter - Your Inner Crucifixion

Below is the audio on Inner Crucifixion (it is downloadable.).

The audio is just under 13 minutes. If you read this post, then listen to the audio, you will have spent 15-17 minutes of the 1440 minutes in the day on my thoughts on Inner Good Friday.  Now add to that the time you spend on your thoughts on both the originating Good Friday and your own Inner Crucifixion. How many minutes might that total?  And what do you get for spending that much time? Do you find more peace? More doubt? More self-compassion? More understanding?

Compare your sense of how much time you can attend to awakening your feeling of Inner Crucifixion to the amount of time Jesus Christ hung dying on the cross? 

I don't know about you but I haven't the meditative endurance to spend three hours on establishing a new relationship to Good Friday.  I could spend three hours reading the New Testament or the books of Rudolf Steiner or other spiritual thinkers and mystics. I could recite prayers and verses for three hours. But I don't know that I could sit or walk and engage my own heartfelt thoughts about my own inner life in right relationship to the Crucifixion.  I am not that developed.  

However, I am striving.  I will attend to this inner challenge.  I won't last three hours, but I will give my heart to the seeking a mere moment of meaning.  And I know moments of meaning, of grace, take us into timelessness, into the spiritual reality of eternity.  

I do hope this note and the audio help you find a moment of eternity on this Good Friday.

Now let go the imaginations of your Inner Last Supper. Let a blessed emptiness enter your soul. (If you don't know how to do this, just breathe, just blink. In each full breath and each quick blink, we experience a moment of blessed emptiness.)

It is time to bring your consciousness to Inner Crucifixion.  Not easy.  As you listen to the audio you can hear in my pauses and dropped thoughts, my own difficulty with the imagination of the Crucifixion.  But you can also hear after a few shaky minutes, the awakening - my voice and my breathing become smooth and my words start to flow.  Something living has entered my consciousness because I held myself fast with courage and devotion.

Trust your courage and your devotion as you follow your path of self-knowledge and inner development. Stay a few minutes with this attention to the Inner Crucifixion despite your doubts and hesitations - something will flow.  It might be a question, an image, a feeling - an Inner Easter germinating in your soul.

I thank you for experiencing Inner Easter with me.  Tomorrow we descend into Hell.