Welcome to the Inner Year...

To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. Ecclesiastes 3.1.



The Inner Year relates personal soul development to the festivals of the Christian Year and to the cycle of Nature. I work with an esoteric spiritual understanding of the festivals. Esoteric perspectives reveal the deeper universal mysteries of things.

Whether or not you are Christian in your beliefs and your practices, you will find personal and spiritual relevance, insight and possibility in these posts.

Friday, April 2, 2010

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.



MP3 File



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

4 comments:

  1. Thank you Lynn. I must say i dont follow your posts regularly but it seems that i always stumble on the ones that are important to that something.
    I would like to share some of my thoughts.
    There is a time for death as only death can bring the new birth. Death is a friend, i feel it is not the taker of life but a giver of life. Letting ourselves die gives space for the new life in us. Some would say it is hard, i feel it is just necessary.
    Thank you Lynn.

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  2. Hi, I have just found your blog, so will have a good look soon, love and light from New Zealand Marie

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  3. Easter time is always difficult for me. On the one hand, it's hard to reconcile its significance with how it's popularly celebrated. But it goes beyond that. There's something bittersweet about it. Stark and hopeful at the same time. I have always felt the tension of opposing feelings and never considered the natural polarities of the equinox. Thank you for that reminder. Now, instead of trying to deny the darker feelings, I accept and even embrace the difficulties of this season - even the crucifixion. It's not easy and that's okay. Your contemplations are challenging and quite satisfying on a soul level. Thank you!

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  4. I took a breath and faced the nightmare I have been having for the last five years, this is the poem that emerged from my katabasis or descent into hell:

    Resurrection

    You move into the sleep of my child’s mind
    Gripping my throat against making audible my
    surprise, your heaviness
    the rage of your body as it wrenches
    My feet, my thighs, then pelvis
    shoulder and jaw
    the hollow hurt of my world of love
    now empty in the space of its own destruction
    rests in ignorance
    the body shutting down
    Now
    the words come unbidden
    travelling through time
    nightly, hourly
    “Daddy no!”

    Expansion in my chest as my heart breathes in righteousness
    I was not evil but a child, innocent, asleep
    And then broken inside
    But now full of knowing
    This is not my darkness
    Nor even yours
    Something handed down
    Between the generations
    palpates the wound through re-enactment

    This anger feels clean and like a gift
    I do not have to kill
    I do not have to die

    I can rejoice and grieve
    Finding myself
    Losing my trust

    Opening to the light, heart held in my hand, then flying free

    A bigger sadness that this is life
    So many hearts folded into loneliness

    Acts of betrayal, marching through lifetimes
    Leaving biting despair
    And a burning rage for justice

    Opening out into compassion
    The whole heart flowers
    Rising out of the peat of compressed endured suffering
    Out of the waters, out of the knowledge of death
    A song, an utterance, the cry of love and sorrow immersing in the life of the other

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