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.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
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?
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?
Thursday, October 14, 2010
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
Monday, October 11, 2010
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!
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!
Sunday, October 3, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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