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.

Inner Easter - Your Last Supper

 

Maundy Thursday is the day of the Last Supper. Below I've posted an audio  to share some thoughts on awakening within your own soul a feeling for the experience of the Last Supper.  As usual, the imagination of the last supper, like all the Inner Year imaginations, nurtures all souls on a spiritual path whether or not they are practicing Christians.

With Inner Lent we imagined a personal experience of the fasting of Christ and  the overcoming of the three great temptations.  When Jesus Christ returns from his solitude in the desert he seeks and finds his companions for his three years.  The Last Supper comes at the end of the three years and mirrors the fasting with a final feast and final gathering of the companions. 

Imagine your Inner Last Supper today. Imagine gathering your companions for a final feast. Work metaphorically and personally with the elements of the supper, your washing of their feet, the transubstantiation of your body and your blood and so on.   Feel the Christ mysteries awakening in your own self awareness.

As we look into our lives and into our souls to awaken an inner feeling for the Last Supper, I want to offer some suggestions. Rather than writing down my suggestions, I have recorded them in this 18 minute audio.

But before you listen, I want explain something.  In the audio I ask you to play with these suggestions. Play! I feel so much of our inner spiritual work is burdened and weakened by a mood of somberness and rigor.  As Christ says to his disciples, unless we become as little children we will have difficulty entering the kingdom of heaven.

There is a PBS documentary "Where Do Children Play?" www.wfum.org/childrenplay/
Here is a quote I found filled with wisdom and inspiration from the description on the website - italics are mine.

Play takes many forms. It may be best defined from within as a spontaneous human expression that relies on imagination and a sense of freedom. Players invent alternative contexts for conversation, visualization, movement, and interactions with real objects. They find release and involvement, stimulation and peace.

As you play in your contemplation of your last supper, find your freedom in your imagination. This is sacred play. There is nothing of idleness or thoughtlessness in a child's play.

Just press the yellow button and you can listen to the recording on your computer or download it to listen later. If you load it on to your ipod you can go for a walk and listen or take your journal to some quiet place so you can listen and write.  Don't forget to pause if a suggestion inspires your thoughts and feelings and you want to deepen both with playful attention or joyful writing.

Inner Easter - A Challenge, Not a Comfort

 As I work through and around the Inner Year of my soul, I find the Inner Solstices bring comfort and joy to the soul (Christmas and St John’s Tide) and the Inner Equinoxes (Easter and Michaelmas) bring challenge and suffering to the soul.

How is this so?

What comes to my heart is an imagination that light and dark by themselves are comforting and offer a joy in their enveloping presence.  White reflects all things and black absorbs all things.  No struggle there to confront and manage.  The Inner Solstices give us a clear gesture of attention and embrace. The soft darkness of Inner Christmas asks us to enter into a new sense of ourselves as spiritual beings of innocence and wisdom.  And the light energy of Inner St John’s Tide asks us to experience a new sense of ourselves as earthly creatures engaging in earthly relationships and earthly deeds.

But the Inner Equinoxes are another imagination all together.  Nature and spirit do not offer a simple experience. Light and dark are equal and the soul struggles in a tension between to the two inner poles.  The balance is precarious and confusing.  It is in the midst of this tense opposition that the soul is asked to meet death at Inner Easter and evil at Inner Michaelmas. Although the sense perceptible world is filled with beauty at both equinoxes, inwardly, we are challenged and we suffer. Appropriately so! Death and evil are not easy on the soul. It takes a maturity of self and courage of heart to do the inner work of the equinoxes and feel a sensitive conscious awareness to embrace our inner deaths and conquer our inner evil.

And our modern lives and modern culture so filled with superficial distractions and thoughtless anxieties make it all the more difficult to attend to our Inner Year with it’s comforts and joys and its challenges and suffering.

Inner Easter

In is just another week in our daily lives, but in our soul, in our inner life, it is Holy Week. As the temperate realm of the Northern Hemisphere of our amazing planet Earth, is bursting with new life, we find our souls needing to evolve our inner relationship to death.  Not death as a final ending, but death as a dramatic transformation that ends all attachment to the past and opens up to a mysterious and new future. And our souls must realize that this Inner Easter may seem an insignificant and timid, even foolish, reflection of the Easter Story of 2000 years ago

It is not that we must come to experience the Christ Mystery in all its fierce outer significance every Easter. Rather with the yearly experience of Inner Easter we find our intimate grasp of our personal and very real last suppers, agonies in the garden, cross-bearing journeys, crucifixions, descents in to hells and, ultimately, to our own inner resurrections. And every spring Equinox, as we bring our inner attention to our soul life, we take small steps in our moral development.

This inner work deserves and requires depth of thought and penetration, not easy in these days of superficiality.  We don’t want these experiences to melt quickly like a jelly bean or a milk chocolate Easter egg. We want an Inner Easter with profound and lasting meaning.

Inner Easter is less about time and more about attention.  So if you seek an Inner Easter, don’t feel you must devote the whole week to this work, (although wouldn’t the world be different if we could have a week of rest to attend to our inner development). Just a few minutes of devoted inner exploration and meditation will offer a deep experience.  Our soul’s need for attention and nourishment around the Easter mysteries is intense.  Give your Easter personal meaning beyond any religious meaning.

 

A Gift of Inner Year Guidance

I will be sending out to you a four-part series of written and spoken thoughts and suggestions for your inner experience of the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. The audios will each be about 10-20 minutes.  Like the Inner Christmas messages, Inner Easter is a gift from my soul to yours.  I hope you find spiritual resonance with these inspirations. (If you would like to make a donation expressing your gratitude, you can do that on the Inner Year blog). Thank you.

Please share your Inner Easter questions and experiences with others here on the blog.

Easter blessings,

Lynn

Permission to Forget

Wow, is this important for spiritual practice and inner development.

Give yourself permission to forget.
I repeat.
Give yourself permission to forget.

Forget what?

2 things...

your daily demands
and
your inner demands

When you focus on your inner development, give yourself permission to forget the demands of your daily life.

When you focus on your daily life, give yourself permission to forget the demands of your inner life.

If you do this you will find guilt, shame and anxiety fading out of your life. Without guilt, shame and anxiety, life happens joyfully.

***************

I am going to interrupt myself because I have a burning, just now crystalizing, insight to share.

There is a big difference between spiritual practice and spiritual development. Lots of people have a spiritual practice but don''t spiritually develop. A spiritual practice is something one does to maintain a relationship to spirit. Spirit can be an external being/god or an internal state. Prayer, contemplation, meditation, sacred movement, and sacred reading are all active forms of spiritual practice.

Spiritual development, on the other hand, is a dynamic commitment to the healing, liberating and empowering of your relationship to your selfhood, the divine being within. Being dynamic means you will dwell in paradox in order to develop. You will risk the familiar in order to find the true. You will die in order to become. You will release in order to grasp. You will stop seeking answers in order to find questions. No matter what you feel, you will feel compassion for yourself. You will play. You will change tracks and directions often. You will see silliness in all things serious and something profound in all things ridiculous.

My Inner Year work is not about spiritual practice. It is about the practice of spiritual development. So if you are someone who "can't" meditate, or someone who does meditate but wants more (as in spiritual hunger, not spiritual greed) then you will find support for your spiritual development in my work, the Inner Year.

************

Back to forgetting demands.

Most of us suffer with conflicting and nagging demands on our time, our energy and our attention.

I bet as you read this (and hopefully find yourself pausing to think about what you have read) you may be doubting the rightness of using your time, energy and attention this way. You have a list of to do's and a picture of a life of order, design and completions. You have piles of stuff to take care of and yet here you are staring at the computer screen! Right now forget the stuff. It's okay to forget the daily demands, when you are taking a few moments to nurture yourself.

Likewise, don't worry if you get so involved with your stuff, that you don't do your yoga, or sacred reading. This also goes for falling asleep without your evening spiritual practice of prayers or meditation because you are exhausted from doing so much. Give yourself permission to forget your inner life.

Just forget demands. Forgetting makes life less anxious and more manageable. Give joyful energy and joyful attention to what you are doing in the moment. Being responsible is joyful. Learn to feel joy and you will find order, design, and completion in your life, your daily life and your inner life. Joy comes first.

Now I will joyfully return to the work I was doing on developing facebook fan pages for the Six Christmases.

And please, joyfully comment or send me an email.

PS: Inner Advent is the work of spiritual development and the willingness to remember. It reveals how you spiritually and practically evolved as an individual and a member of humanity over the year. If you feel you would find benefit and clarity in working through a designed and orderly path of self-reflection over four weeks, do sign up for the Inner Advent teleseminar here.

The Second Question

The 2nd question to ask before having conversations with spiritual beings is a doozie.

What is a Spiritual Being?

This question generates many, many questions so it is not one that we ask very often. This may also be due to the fact that most of us grew up with “God.”

If the idea of “God” is satisfying to you, you don’t need to read further. And you probably shouldn’t consider my teleseminar, Having Conversations with Spiritual Beings. You probably believe prayer is the only form of interaction with “God” and think the idea of a conversation with a spiritual being is ridiculous or blasphemy.

However, if you feel there are spiritual beings in layers and hierarchies, actually, a whole panoply of gods, between us and “God,” then read on or think on. Play on with my questions below and add your own through the comment function of this blog.

Questions to ponder as a beginning...

Are you a spiritual being?

What is a being and what makes a being spiritual?

Are spiritual beings great dancers - always moving and flexible?

Do they ever tire and rest?

Or are spiritual beings fixed and immovable?

Do spiritual beings need something from us, their creations?

Do spiritual beings live in rocks or roses? swans or hyenas?

Can you see, hear or touch a spiritual being?

Do we have guardian angels?

When a human being dies, what happens to their spirit?

What is an elemental being?

Are there house spirits?

Do spiritual beings have clear roles and tasks?

Do spiritual beings have a voice and a language?

How do you get the attention of a spiritual being?

So many questions.

And here are a few questions of a different sort…

If we pray or meditate, why do we need to have a conversation with a spiritual being?

Are there different conversations for different spiritual beings?

Why would a spiritual being want to have a conversation with a human being?

Why would a human being want to have a conversation with a spiritual being?

Where and when do these conversations take place?

If spiritual beings have all the answers, why did they create the capacity to ask questions?

*****************

Add your questions and your thoughts about spiritual beings below.

These questions and more will be addressed and explored in my teleseminar, "Having Conversations with Spiritual Beings." If you want to engage in a conversation with other human beings on this rarely discussed or explored human capacity and challenge, join me. The conversation begins this Sunday, November 1 - All Saint's Day! Click here.

Two Things to Ask Before Having a Conversation With a Spiritual Being

The First Question:

What is a conversation?

How many conversations do you have in the course of a day, a week, a year, a lifetime?

Having been part of so many conversations, how do you define conversation? If you were to write your own definition of conversation would it change your response to the the question about how many conversations do you have?

Let me help you with your thinking about the meaning of conversation.

The key root to converse is a Latin word, vertare, which means to turn. Con, of course means with. Conversation as a word means “turning with.”

When I think of “turning with” two images appear: spirals and dancing.

Spirals: spinning inward to the details or outward to the expansions.

Dancing: leading and following, choreography, navigating the floor.

How do I “turn with” in the art of speaking and listening? I turn toward and in turning toward, I also turn away.

I am turning toward my conversation partner and away from myself when I listen. I am turning toward myself and away from my partner when I am speaking.

What speaking and listening is not a conversation? I think of empty phrases, reporting of data, untruths. What else?

Do I pay attention to this turning? Does it matter?

Are most of my conversations about thoughts and ideas, about feelings and emotions, or about deeds and possibilities? What does the content of the conversation tell me about my turning and what I turn with?

And the contexts of my conversations? What are they?

Do work with these questions. Any answers you come up with write them down and then turn them into questions. Wisdom lives in the next questions, so always find the next questions. Is there a conversation if there is no question? Is the question the turning?


I want to read your thoughts on conversation. Please leave a comment below.
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To learn the second question you must ask before having a conversation with a spiritual being, wait for my next post to the Inner Year blog in a few days.

November in the Inner Year is the time to pay attention to conversations with Spiritual Beings. The darkening of the Sun asks us to turn away from material existence and the surface of things. The soul is turning toward what exists beyond the surface seeking spiritual contexts and content and beings behind, beyond, below and above.

Now is the time to evolve your capacity to have conversations of all kinds and all purposes with spiritual beings. Learn the meaning, the design and the grace of these conversations.

I am offering a 4 session Inner Year teleseminar: Having Conversations With Spiritual Beings. In the teleseminar we will explore these questions and others about conversations. There are two options for this teleseminar series. The Basic is 4-40 minute presentations of content. It is essentially a lecture over the phone. You will find lots of insight and creative possibilities on having conversations with spiritual beings. However, it is not a conversation. If you want to engage in a conversation on having conversations with spiritual beings, you will want to take the Intensive Option which includes many conversations. (I didn’t make this distinction between the two learning options until I wrote this blog.) Visit here to learn more about the teleseminars.

Do invite your conversation partners in life to join you in the teleseminars. Forward this blog to all your friends.

Three Adversaries to a Good Life

The adversaries to a good life are many. They sneak into our personal thoughts, feelings and behaviors and oppose our healing, our liberation and our empowerment - the good life. They are internal and external forces that distract, disturb, delay or destroy our attention and intention. When we seek to learn or express truth, beauty or goodness, they confuse us and cause us to doubt. They work to get us stuck, when we need to move. They demand we resent, when we need to forgive. They seduce. They inflate. They arouse selfish desires. And so much more.

The adversaries know how to hide in the shadows of our consciousness and circumstances while they play with us. They are masters at “smoke and mirrors.” They create illusions and delusions as they convince us they are good, supportive, comfortable or essential. They will appear of little consequence in the long run of life and convince us to ignore them or they will appear so large, so dramatic, so powerful, so threatening, so beyond our little selves that we could never, ever grasp them, tame them, or vanquish them.

We need to meet the adversaries in the full light of consciousness, our own individual consciousness. We each need our own awareness of these opposers of the good life.

Three Adversaries

Procrastination - put it off. Cras is Latin for tomorrow. Crastinus is Latin for belonging to tomorrow. Life is a verb. You are a verb. Your actions express who you are. Your actions reveal your meaning and significance. Procrastination is a resistance and failure to act in the right time. Do you initiate action and fail to complete it? Or do you fail to initiate and begin the deed? I struggle with completion for the most, putting off the logical steps and trying to leap to a miracle. But when it comes to initiating, here are a few little demons: I put off asking for help. I put off celebrating my life. I put off cleaning up my messes. I put off telling my truth. I put off having fun. I put off managing my money.

Do you sleep better because you have so much to do tomorrow or because you got so much done today? Like me, you probably get more done in a day than you realize. There is a reason to review your day - but the adversaries of procrastination don't want you to do it.

What do I do with all the time I have today because I put off doing everything until the tomorrow that never comes? I think or, to use a better word, I perseverate. Perseverate is to repetitively think a thought long beyond the need to think it. I avoid doing by thinking and thinking and thinking. Others do and do and do to avoid thinking or feeling. Which leads to the next adversary I want to write about.

Habit - an addictive or automatic way of thinking, feeling or acting. Habits dull us, our minds, our hearts, our will. Sharp minds, sensitive hearts, and skilled will keep us strong against other adversaries and capable of many good deeds. We all proudly list our good habits but I will take the risk of asking what is good about any habit? What is good about any action that does not have thought living in it? Do I do a better job brushing my teeth if I think about what I am doing, how I am doing it and why I am doing it while I am doing it? In our crazy world of multi-tasking there is less and less attention and more and more reliance on habit. Does this make for a good life? Habit leads to conformity and the denial of our individuality. We become thoughtlessly obedient to convenience and automaticity. We risk becoming a machine. How great for the adversaries of freedom.

Minimalization - making something small, insignificant, meaningless and unreal.
We take a view of something and determine it is not worthy of attention. We take something in our lives that is significant in its impact and we pretend it is insignificant. We experience something that is bad and convince ourselves that it is okay, normal, even good. Or we look at something that is quite wonderful and dismiss it as ordinary.

How can we express or recognize truth, beauty or goodness in a minimized reality? How can we confront lies, distortion, and harm in a minimized reality?

A good life only exists in the reality of reality.

What are you minimizing in your life? Your loneliness, your anger, your talents, your joy? Look at pretense in your life. What do you pretend is okay, when it is not? Why do you do this? What is really cool and fabulous in your life that you pretend is flawed or insignificant? Why do you do this?


Procrastination, habit and minimalization are adversaries. They are forms of evil. Not doing something in a timely way, not doing something with full consciousness, not seeing the true reality of something will keep us from the good life.

As you look at procrastination, habit and minimalization in your life, observe, don't judge. Evil wants you to judge yourself. Through self-judgment, we identify with and strengthen the adversarial forces. Compassionate self-awareness is our empowerment and redemption.

As you pay attention to “the adversaries,” as you learn the subtle manipulations of evil, you will discover in yourself the following benefits, the elements of a good life:

• Courage
• Compassion
• Stable Balance
• Capacity to take a stand based on moral imagination
• Evolution - growing the wise heart.

Where do we engage with the questions of forces of opposition, of evil? When do we become aware of the role of evil in our personal lives? What are the benefits of meeting evil?

To sign up for my teleseminar on Evil (Sundays at 8:00PM - 9:00PM)
October 11,18, 25 please go to
www.lynnjericho.com/catalog.

Please comment and share your experiences with these three adversaries.