The Inner Rembrandt

One of the surprising welcoming notes around my move to the North Carolina Triangle area is the "Rembrandt in America" show at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.http://ncartmuseum.org/exhibitions/rembrandt/ opening in the most Rembrandt time of year - the end of October when light and dark embrace each other in nature and in the human soul celebrating the vital contrasts of life.

Rembrandt's art crystalizes in the compelling engagement, the romance, of light and dark in his portraits. He knew that his subject's humanity could only be revealed in the deep shadows of greys, browns, and almost blacks, and that their individuality shone through the luminous pearls and creams and  the mysterious beams of light he found in their countenances.  I can sense who these men and women were in the thresholds of personality found where these lights and darks meet in the brightening dawns and dimming dusks of these visual biographies. Rembrandt's portraits in light and dark powerfully awaken compassion in the viewer, the same compassion that made this artist so extraordinarily great.

As Rembrandt^'s romance with light and dark in the soul of his subjects matured into a true friendship, he moved beyond being a successful portraitist to being a portraitist of historical, moral and spiritual significance. His most important subject was himself. The more he worked on capturing the contrasts of his own soul, the more he could see what lived in others.

Whether or not you have ever held a paintbrush in your hand, Rembrandt can teach you a great lesson in compassionate self-portraiture - inwardly painting multiple pictures of your soul's biography. You must build a lasting friendship between the dark powerful defining shadows of your humanity with the bright light of your personal divinity.

In my conversations with my clients, I listen to their harsh judgments and anxious fears about their shadows.  They feel threatened by a sense of inner evil and the experience of being either the victim or the perpetrator. They hope I will say words that will rescue and redeem them.

Instead I teach them the compassion of the Inner Rembrandt and the transcendent healing, liberation and empowerment of the self-portrait. Like Rembrandt, you must have a mirror and a canvas, the brush and the palette of colors. Look into the mirror and paint what you see on the canvas.  When you finish one self-portrait, begin the next.

 

The Imagine Self programs are the studio of the Inner Rembrandt.

 

Painting Your Self-Portrait

 

The Inner Autumn Being Human Courses: Confronting Your Challengers and Engaging Your Companions teach the key elements for encountering the soul contrasts of dark and light. To paint your self-portrait you must find the darkest and the lightest points of your image.

 

The first course teaches the about the mysteries of the dark, the gestures of evil and the art of transformations.  You even learn how without the contrast of the shadows, light becomes formless and meaningless, and find the challenger that hides in that blinding of light.

(The second guides you into more conscious and active engagement with the spiritual beings that support your inner development.  I will share more about this program over the next few weeks. )

Confronting Your Challengers

In this rich course, you learn the significance of confronting or facing courageously the counter-forces and inclinations toward evil that live within your own soul.  This confrontation requires that you make friends with your shadows. We cannot dismiss or ignore evil. We cannot make light of the dark until we know it well.  We must  confront and confront and confront as spiritual practice and as a path of moral development.

Imagine the personal freedom that comes with understanding the opponents to that freedom.

Imagine the strength of your personal choices that comes with the ability to resist the forces that want to undermine or dominate those choices by twisting your truth, distorting your beauty, and crippling your will.

Imagine the confidence and the feeling of personal integrity that comes with having a strengthened moral immune system - a system that protects who you are from attack, sabotage, and invasion.

None of these imaginations can develop without taking the time to understand the relationships between the human soul, your human soul, and evil.

Devote one hour a week over the next four weeks (Thursday evening, Sunday afternoon or the download anytime) to confronting the forces that stand between you and your path of development.   Go here to learn more about the course and register for Confronting Your Challengers http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/CONFRONTING-YOUR-CHALLENGERS-IY-CC11.htm



The Inner Year Being Human Course are invaluable for knowing yourself and the rest of humanity.

Inner Changes at the Inner Equinox

How does your path of self-development change with the Equinox?

The Solstices and the Equinoxes are turning points for the work of self-knowledge. The Inner Year is a cosmic organizing and nurturing principle for your inner life just as Nature's Year organizes and nurtures life on Earth.

If you think of your Higher Self as your Inner Sun organizing the process and nurturing the progress of your inner development, you will want to follow its seasonal directions in your attention to finding yourself, knowing yourself, becoming yourself.

For your inner development, spiritual and moral, Autumn is the time of the cosmic inner year when your Inner Sun directs your focus to your relationship with what lives in the darkness of earthly existence.

In the shadows of your self-awareness, you find the challengers that distort your development. These challengers grow their strength in darkness. This is why, counter to the diminishing light of Autumn in Nature, your Inner Sun glows with more light following the Equinox, illuminating the darkness and your hidden challengers, allowing you to call their names, contain and limit their power, and develop your inner courage.

Your Inner Sun sits at the horizon of your consciousness. Only your inner work can move it above the horizon so it can enlighten and empower your sense of self and form the right relationship to spirit and matter.

As you contemplate on your Inner Equinox, take heart, and look into the shadows and encounter the challengers. You might want to post your thoughts to share with others by leaving a comment.

 

Encounters - Confronting Your Challengers

CONFRONTING YOUR CHALLENGERS

 Recognize and overcome the challenges to your spiritual and moral development.

This is the time of the Inner Year when we seek the wisdom to recognize and overcome the counter forces who seek to challenge us and undermine the truth, beauty and goodness of our human spirit.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Henry David Thoreau.

In this course we will seek the root understanding of evil.


The maturity of the soul is not its ability to avoid evil, but its ability to confront evil.

Archangel Michael's slaying of the dark beast of evil is recognized and attended to each year on September 29th. Michael carries the sword that points to, penetrates, and slays evil.

Encountering the Challengers intends to awaken in our souls the powerful force of Michael, the inner ability to recognize and overcome personal encounters with evil.

As the dark of night overtakes the light of day, it is time to look at the darker questons and realities of consciousness and self-development.  We need to look at our personal encounters with evil.  The dark topic of evil needs to come out of the swamps and shadows of our souls and into the light!  

What are your questions about evil?

How do we live with our own sins of commission and omission? How do we heal and resolve our experiences of victimhood? What is the karma of evil? What does it mean to “forgive us our debts and we forgive our debtors.”  How are we protected from the temptations of evil? How do we atone for our sins? Just what is atonement?

Esoterically, what are the beings of evil? How do they engage us? What do they want from us? Can we redeem them?

In our difficult times of greed, war, global warming, terror and trauma, we need to find meaningful and practical definitions, perspectives and practices that develop courage, integrity, forthrightness and understanding. Without a conscious and articulate sense of evil, the demons and dragons hold sway, while we hide in anxiety, depression, doubt and confusion.

Encountering the Challengers

offers you the following content:

Session One:
Definitions of evil, harm, violence.
How evil appears in thoughts, feelings, actions.
How we do evil to ourselves.

Session Two:
Inner immunity to evil
The victim/perpetrator relationship
The role of evil in personal biography

Session Three:
The three forms of evil in our souls.
The four basic relationships to evil.
The four inner declarations that redeem evil.

Session Four:
Evil and the four bodies of the Human Being.
The mysteries of justice
The karma of consequence
The lessons of reconcilliation

Your Benefits
(How will you profit from this course? What advantages will you receive?)

• You will be able to make choices and decisions with a more mature confidence.
• You will be able to reflect on your life, your relationships, and your work with a compassionate objectivity.
• You will have a deeper understanding and a greater capacity for forgiveness - forgiving yourself, others, circumstances, and conditions.
• Evil will no longer be a vague but powerful threat to your goodness.
• You will be able to recognize, name, locate, and assess evil in its myriad forms.
• You will be able to meet the challenges of evil and vanquish its temptations.
• You will release yourself from the demoralizing roles of victim and perpetrator.
• You will be able to understand your life dramas and patterns from new and liberating perspectives.     

Thursday Sessions: September 29, October 6, 13, 20
Time: 8 - 9 PM Eastern

Sunday Sessions: October 2, 9, 16, 23
Time:  4 - 5 PM Eastern

Cost: $47

Webinar format using your desktop and your phone (or Skype). All sessions are recorded and available as an MP3 download in case you can not attend the live presentation or want to relisten.

REGISTER HERE


http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/CONFRONTING-YOUR-CHALLENGERS-IY-CC11.htm

Supplemental Private Sessions:

Individually scheduled, will provide deep intimate attention to your personal questions and needs regarding your relationship to the challengers to your spiritual and moral development. These 30 minute sessions cost $40. Contact lynnjericho@gmail.com

Out of the Shadow Into the Light - Ten Years Later

 

OUT OF THE SHADOW

INTO THE LIGHT

ONLY YOU CAN DO IT!

 

Thoughts on  9/11 - Ten Years Later

On July 3, 2001 I moved into a brownstone in Jersey City. There was a deck off the living room where I could see the World Trade Towers across the Hudson River (about a mile away). Exactly ten weeks later, I stood on that deck and watched the towers fall and an hour later was down at the river standing in shock, wonder, and amazement at the looming emptiness filling with the smoke that would remain for weeks and weeks.  The world had changed. I had changed.

I had been working on a manuscript about the Twelve Senses. I put it aside and wrote an essay on trauma. I walked down to the waterfront often, especially at night when the lights at Ground Zero lit up the sky and illumined great changing shadows in the smoke.

The mood of Ground Zero lit up the souls of most with a deep caring for community and a sense of possibility. But it also cast dark shadows of fear, anger, powerlessness on the same souls.

A month later at a women writers conference in midtown, a woman introduced herself to me and asked to know about my experience of Ground Zero. We had been in a random gathering of woman at the lunch break who had been sharing their thoughts on the event that filled everyone's thoughts and feelings.  Inspired by years of working with Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of the evolution of consciousness, my perspectives were not reactionary, alarmist, nor retaliatory. I was certain there was the potential for a new world view, a new moral and creative responsibility, a new relationship to a shared future if only each individual became a world citizen, if each human soul reflected on the questions living in the light of 9/11, not the shadows.

This woman, Bethene LeMahieu, initiated a year long conversation that became a six-hour audiobook we called Ground Zero and the Human Soul: The Search for the New Ordinary Life. Well-reviewed, it spent a few months on the shelves of Barnes and Noble and Borders amongst all the other 9/11 literature and we were interviewed on a number of radio shows, but very few individuals ever heard the thoughts, the challenges, and the creative perspectives distilled from our hundreds of hours of conversations.

As we all know the "leaders of nations" had another perspective -- war, homeland security, destruction -- they prolonged the terror of 9/11 promising a return to the life of 9/10.  The conversations between Bethene and me imagine a different life for 9/12 and a dawning of a different consciousness in the individual.

Will you search for the new soul life that will shape the new ordinary life?

Below you can listen to and download the six conversations. Each is about one hour long.

Listen to them. Share them. Write comments. 


And please, have conversations about the future that is shaped by you and all the other world citizens, not governments, not corporations, not ideologies.

If you would like to purchase the transcripts, please contact me by email.

Conversation #1 

The Creative Challenge of Ground Zero and A New Picture of the Human Being

Conversation #2 

Feeling and the Search for Personal Harmony

Conversation #3 

Thinking and the Search for Personal Truth

Conversation #4 

Willing and the Search for Personal Goodness

Conversation #5 

Meeting Evil

Conversation #6 

The Search for the New Ordinary Life