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.

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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...

Summer Questions

Do you have any summer questions? You know the ones about wishing life was different? They pop into your thoughts while you are walking along the beach or wishing you were.

What part of your life do you think about changing, making better, enjoying more?

Your relationship?
Your work?
Your finances?
Your body?
Your discipline?
Your parenting?
Your celebrating?
Your decision-making?


What feelings do you have that you want to understand, release, balance?
Your guilt?
Your grief?
Your doubt?
Your anxiety?
Your irritability?
Your confusion?
Your frustration?

What part of your spiritual life would you like to deepen, clarify, speak about?
Your meditative life?
Your faith?
Your practice?
Your tradition?

In the past, my work as a personal counselor has been limited to commitments to on-going conversations lasting months or even years. I still work this way.

But I realize that this long-term process is not always needed. Often you just have one question that you would like to explore through a creative conversation with someone skilled in listening and understanding. Maybe get a viewpoint that might move you to a new freedom around the topic.

I work with my clients over the phone or via skype. Skype is a way to have a conversation over the internet. We can do it with video and see each other. It free and lots of fun.

During July and August, I am offering Summer Conversations. You can schedule a Summer Conversation with me on Tuesday between Noon and 8PM or Saturday between 8AM and Noon. Conversations can be 20, 40, 60 or 80 minutes in length.
the cost is $40 for each 20 minutes.

To schedule a conversation go to
http://www.lynnjericho.genbook.com

Or call me directly at 646-797-9669.

Intimacy Teleseminar

Intimacy - Finding the Courage and the Compassion to Know and Being Known.

Life is a schooling for intimacy and most of us are flunking out and repeating the introductory courses over and over. Why?

Intimate relationships are a big risk. They ask us to be transparent and vulnerable. They ask us to tell the truth and hear the truth. They ask us to connect with others but from a place of not needing or depending. They ask us to be creative and not conform even to our own fantasies. They ask us to trust and to forgive.

But most of us surround ourselves with a shield of impenetrable defenses. Tell partial-truths and invite partial lies. We connect out of deep neediness seeking to fulfill personal fantasy and conforming to familial and cultural expectations. We are not confident enough in ourselves to truly trust another and unresolved ancient wounds make it impossible to truly forgive new ones.

Yes, it sounds harsh and makes us sad to compare the ideal with the shadowy reality. Focusing on intimacy for four weeks will not be a magic wand turning our capacities for intimacy into happily ever after but it will open a path and take us a step or two closer to something well-worth our struggles.

The Inner Year Intimacy Intensive gently evokes a new consciousness around relationships. Consciousness enlightens like an inner sun. In the light we can find our way. Intimacy is a difficult and challenging journey. It is much easier to stay on the path in the light of insight, confidence and compassion, than in the darkness of unconscious instincts, blind assumptions and selfish expectations.

Most of us find we have little understanding and consequently, little success, at establishing the kind of conscious intimacy that blesses us with real love.
The Inner Year Intimacy Intensive will give you the guidance to change your relationship to intimacy and deepen the intimacy of your relationships.


Intimacy begins with self knowledge. The Inner Year Intensive on Intimacy will offer a chance to question yourself about intimacy.

You will learn to distinguish the four levels of intimacy: physical, energetic, soul and spiritual.

You will begin to know your own particular
anxieties,
patterns and styles,
needs

You will recollect and clarify your history of intimacy. The course supports you in beginning a biographical review of your intimate relationships and their impact on your life. You will create a visual intimacy timeline.

You will learn the difference between attachment and intimacy and discover a rich independence.

You will find encouragement to seek truth through your intimate conversations.

You will learn how essential anger is to forgiveness. (Probably the most liberating and creative content of the course.)


To get the most from this INNER YEAR teleseminar you will need to be willing
to be a little uncomfortable,
to stretch a little beyond your usual limits
to not be afraid of the dark - what is hidden
or the light. - what is revealed
to form and commit to a spiritual practice of self-reflection

Self Reflective Spiritual Practice is spiritual investment of your time and your attention focusing on awakening and maturing your thinking about a particular aspect who you are. This almost always involves reflecting on your past - who you have been, and imagining your future - who you will become, while experiencing freedom in the present moment. Freedom in the present moment allows you to connect to the archetypes of being human and view your past and your future from multiple perspectives. The Inner Year courses help you to experience the archetypes. You develop a coherent picture of yourself that allows you to comprehend, manage and discover meaning in your existence.

Imagine relating to intimacy in freedom.

The Logistics

The Course is a TELESEMINAR. We meet over a conference call.

I am forming two groups for this work. There are only 10 spaces.

The SUNDAY AFTERNOON Group calls begin at 4PM EASTERN.
July 11, 18, 25 and August 1

The THURSDAY EVENING Group calls begin at 8PM EASTERN
July 15, 22, 29 and August 5

Calls are 90 minutes long. Yes that is a long time to be on the phone, but the time goes quickly, the material is rich and the listening profound.

You will be partnered with another participant. Each week you and your partner will schedule a 30-60 minute call when you will work together on the course material and share your struggles and your progress with your work.

You will also have a 20 minute private consultation with me during the last two weeks of the course.

You will receive a recording of each group session. This recording is confidential and is only for your listening. It is very helpful to relisten to the session. Knowing that you will receive the recording, allows you to relax during the actual session and not feel you must remember everything. Relaxation helps with learning.


The Cost is $120. Is your life of intimate relationship worth this investment? You bet! If you are really strapped financially and need a discount, call me at 646-797-9669. I am also willing to do a payment schedule.

You can register for the course by clicking this link.

www.store.lynnjericho.com

where you can pay via credit card or PayPal. You can also pay by check but will still need to register through the link.

Call with any questions: 646-797-9669