Thoughts and Questions on Intimacy

In the course of the Inner Year, the annual cycle of soul development. Where Christmas, at the dark of the year, is the time we focus on our spiritual solitude - the deep interior of our lives, summer, when the sun shines brightest is the time of the Inner Year to focus on our life that reaches into the world and into relationships. We look at our earthly reality as bounded and formed by time and space, well-being and story. This is the time when we study and learn about our capacities for creative intimacy with others, creative contribution to the world and creative balance in our daily lives.

This post looks at intimacy and describes the teleseminar I am offering to help us become more intimate with how intimacy lives in our souls and our gestures in the world.

DEFINING INTIMACY

Intimacy comes from intimus - Latin for inmost.

Intimacy emerges from inmost closeness and knowledge. How willing and capable are you to be close to and to know another, physically, energetically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually? Intimacy is complex. You can be physically intimate, spiritually intimate. Spiritually intimate, but not emotionally intimate. You can be close and not know or be known. You can know or be known at a distance.

What is your ability for intimacy?

Like all things human, intimacy is a two way relationship - we are the object of intimacy and the subject of intimacy. We are born the object of intimacy - our mother is holds us close to her and knows us our every need and our every development. How our mother succeeds in providing us with feelings of intimacy, shapes are capacity for and our gracefulness in intimate relationships. As the subject of intimacy, we feel, think and act intimately in regard to a certain object of our intimacy.

We each make intimate choices. We recognize our needs and desires for intimacy. We resist and reject intimacy. We allow ourselves varying degrees of intimacy as object or subject - I can be close to you, but I will not reveal my inmost reality - so I will limit how much you will know me in spite of our closeness. Paradoxically, how intimate it is to speak the truth of your intimacy boundaries, to acknowledge to another that you need to limit the degree you will allow yourself to be known and close.

You can be closely related, but not intimate. You can hardly be acquainted with someone, yet find moments and brushes of profound intimacy. How have you experienced relationship without intimacy and intimacy without relationship? How have these intimacies caused joy or sorrow in your soul?

Intimacy is about the intersection of relationship with encounter. In encounter there is an adversarial component - a sensitivity to difference and otherness. Through encounter we find a closeness to the other and revelation of difference that is extraordinary in the context of the relationship. With each intimate encounter, the intimacy of the relationship grows. How open are you to intimate encounters? Do you feel unsafe or resistant when confront the difference and otherness in someone? Are you willing to look at your lover or your friend, your child or your colleague, as if they are a stranger and seek to encounter their inmost truth?

Intimacy asks us to gaze at each other. Not look, stare or glance at each other, but gaze! When we gaze we seek to know what is inmost in each other. When did you last gaze at another or experience someone gazing at you? Of course, we can gaze at another in our imaginations. How do you develop your capacity for gazing? How do you develop your ease at being gazed at?

There are measures of intimacy. How frequent are your intimate encounters? How intense are your intimate encounters? How enduring are your intimate encounters?


Like all things living, intimacy evolves and morphs.

Look at your biography of intimacy...
How close were you to…
Did they know you...
Parents?
Siblings?
Grandparents?
Aunts and Uncles and Cousins?
Step-relatives?


Best friends (What is best?)?
True loves (What is true?)?

Do you have an intimate relationship with God and the Spiritual World?
Do you have an intimate relationship with Nature?

How have you known ...
Intimacy welcomed?
Intimacy rejected?
Intimacy evolved?
Intimacy ended?

What are your...
Needs for intimacy?
Strategy for intimacy as subject and object?
Weaknesses as intimate object or intimate subject?

Spiritually, we can meditate on the karma and destiny of intimate encounters and relationships. Where is a relationship (or an aspect of a relationship) an encumberance or an obstacle? When are intimate difficulties and disappointments sources of opportunity and blessing?

Intimate knowledge never forms fixed judgment. It is so much about being truly sensitive, aware, attentive to the evolution of the object of intimacy. Like a mother’s womb to the fetus, or the walnut shell to the walnut, intimacy is a kind of evolving, responsive embrace to the subject.

Questions of Intimacy
a teleseminar

Tuesdays, 7:30PM - 9PM Eastern, 4:30PM - 6PM Pacific
June 23, June 30, July 7, July 14

Join this intimate group on intimacy. Limited to 12 participants.
We will reveal our stories and find our questions of intimacy. We will intimately listen to and be inspired by the stories and questions of 11 other people. We will be open, truthful, vulnerable. We will not try to fix, correct or heal. The group is a learning group, a liberating group, a questioning group. The reverence for each other will protect what is shared. The wonder at each other will nurture heart-confident disclosure and insight.

Do you seek to have more intimacy in your life?
Do you have too much intimacy in your life?
Do you desire more consciousness in your intimate relationships?
Do you desire more balance in your intimate relationships?
Can you express yourself intimately?
Can you contain yourself?
Does intimacy over stimulate you?
Do you withdraw and self-inhibit when faced with intimate encounter?

What inmost questions appear in your soul when you answer these questions?

The Questions of Intimacy teleseminar will not awaken all your questions and solve the intimate mysteries of your relationships, but it will help you articulate a few questions - enough questions to support your inner development over the Inner Year so that next summer you will be ready to become more intimate with your inmost questions of self and other.

You will need to plan on 30-60 minutes of "homework" and also be willing to have a phone conversation with another participant to work with your thoughts on "Questions of Intimacy."

Register here.

To pay by check, please mail it to Lynn Jericho, 132 Hillside Avenue, Chatham, NJ 07928 and send me an email immediately so I can include you in the seminar.

Questions? Or if you do not live in the US. please email me or call.

Pentecost, Community and The Future

There is so much living in the description of Pentecost.

• A gathering of people from all kinds of backgrounds, cultures, and status.
• A mighty wind that blows through the whole house.
• The Spirit appearing as a divided tongue of fire on everyone.
• Everyone speaking and hearing everyone’s native language.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your young men shall see visions, Your old men shall dream dreams. Acts 2.17

• The image of the future living in everyone as capacities to prophesy, envision and dream.

This year for Inner Pentecost, I want to share with you some thoughts on speaking, listening, and the future.

Three inner gestures live in this soul festival:

• a moving outward to meet and to know the other,
• a willingness to be met and to be known by the other and
• a capacity to perceive, even conceive, the future.

Inner Pentecost is barely inner. If all the other festivals of the Inner Year have been well-celebrated then Inner Pentecost will be a turning inside-out. This is the festival of the soul becoming social.

At Pentecost, we find a fully nourished self that can enter into the other. We find a self-knowledge so penetrating the self of the past and so aware of the unfolding self of the future that a genuine, truly confident and serene enthusiasm for the other emerges. Equally, this self is totally open to being deeply known and understood by the other. Finally, the future forms an inspired community of empowered and focused will. The inner life gives birth to the social life.

Writing these words, fills me with the joy of Inner Pentecost. It is the party of the Inner Year. Everyone is invited.

The story of Pentecost in the New Testament, gives the impression that the Holy Spirit comes and makes this all happen. That the invitation to this extraordinary "party" asks you to just show up.

Not so. Everyone present at the original Pentecost had prepared, had undergone an intense and complex initiation willingly. Their souls had willingly and dramatically evolved. There was nothing casual or miraculous about their path or their experiences. Every step had been willed. To experience the Holy Spirit we must actively develop our will forces.

Do you will yourself to know yourself?
Do you will yourself to know your fellow souls?

If you are thinking "I will do it!" You are speaking about doing something in the future. Will it now!

Our soul’s will forces make earthly manifestation possible. Through our will we bring the future into reality. When our own will merges with the will of others we form creative community, conceiving and giving birth to a higher community of unselfish and devoted and shared Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions. The work of the Inner Year gives birth to a new self and a community of "new selves" gives birth to the future.


The path of the Inner Year is an arduous journey. When you take the journey, you find the ending festival known as Pentecost is quite a celebration and the community of the future welcomes you with awesome wisdom and warmth. Through the experience of Pentecost, love evolves. There is no coercion, manipulation or deception in the Pentecost community. Truth, generosity and goodness prevail.

I hope my intense description hasn’t driven you into your intellect. When I write these Inner Year thoughts I go so deep into my consciousness that I sometimes get so serious, I am afraid I might be asking you to think too deeply for comfort and ease. Just remember that we must all learn to think with our hearts. It is only through heart thoughts that the deepest of ideas and the most meaningful ideals are met with inner grace.

Our soul loves to dance gracefully with both spirit and matter. Our heart is the dance floor. For Pentecost we dance a circle dance and hold hands with the souls of our fellow human beings. We move together like flames dancing in the wind to the music of the Holy Spirit.

For Inner Pentecost, think about the moments when you have joined hearts and hands with others to make something good, beautiful and true come into existence. Look around at the harvest of your community life. Celebrate the bounty of our shared future.

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

Today others are working on the imagination of this community of Pentecost. One individual has penetrated the Pentecost mystery and written about it with great clarity. Otto Scharmer’s book, Theory U, does not mention Pentecost, but those who practice the principles he shares, take up the challenges he articulates, will have a Pentecost experience. You can download very inspiring “tools” at his website: www.presencing.com

Scharmer describes the activity of listening with an open mind, an open heart, and an open will. He proposes that the future manifests through meeting each other through the generative listening of the open will. Generative listening is the listening of Pentecost. Out of generative listening comes the language everyone speaks together, the language of the future.


Theory U is chock full of brilliant guides to the listening and speaking that reflects the festival of Pentecost. The book is a gift from the future.

Love and The Inner Year

I base all my Inner Year writing, teaching and healing on the commitment that all spiritual realities must be made practical and functional in our material lives or they are simply “stories,” beautiful, powerful, frightening, soothing, but without daily practical impact. I want to spiritualize my material life and materialize my spiritual life. I want to become as fully human and fully divine as I can become and I want you to become as fully human and fully divine as you can become in each year. I want to surprise myself with my own evolving meaning and I want to delight in your evolving meaning. Each cycle of the year, I want to follow the inner processes that imbue me with more love. And I am willing to work at it.

Imagine instead of looking at each passing year as growing older, you could experience your heartsoul becoming a greater source of overflowing love year after year. Imagine the love that comes from greater self-knowledge and the love that comes from greater knowledge of other human souls.

Attending to the unfolding of the Inner Year each year will give you the nurturing support, the guiding imaginations and questions, and the creative perspectives to cultivate your love of self and other, your love for the earthly and the divine, and your love for the mystery and wonder of existence. Perhaps the greatest gift of the Inner Year is it’s compassionate cyclical return. You do not need to do it all at once, like the sun, your soul revisits each Inner Year festival with its particular expression and admonition every year. Like a growing oak, each year brings deeper roots, a stronger and taller trunk, more branches, more leaves and more acorns. As you move through each year you evolve into a new you, the same and different, less and more, something comes toward you and something moves away – all of this to deepen, enrich, heal, liberate and strengthen your ability and capacity to give and receive love.

A Lonely Place

There are times in our inner lives when we must dwell in a lonely place. A lonely place is unfrequented and remote. You dwell there without companions and without comforts. Inner Lent takes place in a lonely place. The reward of spending time in your lonely place is a clear inner strength of purpose and direction.

It's the middle of the Season of Lent and the time of the Inner Year when we can reflect on our personal need for or connection with the 40 days in the wilderness or desert. Immediately following the Baptism in the River Jordan, Christ is taken by the "Spirit" to this lonely place to fast for 40 days. Following the 40 days, the Devil comes and tempts Him three times.

The Baptism is the moment when the Christ enters Jesus of Nazareth. The Cosmic Christ incarnates within a human being. Following the Baptism, the incarnated Cosmic Christ must spend time in isolation contemplating the experience of human existence and the challenges of earthly limitations of space, weight, time, boundaries, hungers and desires.

The forty days of Lent is a time for you to contemplate the relationship of your divine purpose to the limitations of your personal existence. Inner Lent is not a simple gesture of denial, it is a profound and enriching time of self-exploration and self-awareness that occurs in a lonely place.

Lonely is the right word. When we reach a new inner level of development, meaning or purpose, we are different and "strange" even to ourselves. Our inner place of solitude is where we can adjust, adapt and engage with our new self.

What is your lonely place? The Gospels refer to either desert or wilderness. In the Inner Lent program, I have asked the participants to imagine their own experience of both inner landscapes.

The wilderness is untamed vegetation. There is a feeling of too much. Some find this environment overwhelming and others love the intensity and complexity of wild life. In the wilderness there is no distant horizon. Everything is close and demanding.

The desert is a place of vast emptiness. The horizon is faraway and endless. There is no shelter from the sun. The day is hot and long, the night cold and long. There is no distraction. Is this a safe environment for your soul?

How do you feel about these two environments? Neither the desert or the wilderness offers a path. Can you find your own inner direction? Do you have your own inner resources? How do you awaken to and strengthen your spiritual destiny in your inner isolation and your inner harsh environment?

Do you create a clearing in your wilderness? How do you do this?
Do you find an oasis in your desert? What does it provide for you?

When you reach a new stage of inner development, how can you give yourself time to meditate on how it changes your life? Each of us finds our Baptism when the Spirit comes into our lives and we are no longer our ordinary selves. It requires us to fast from our daily realities and overcome our temptations for external comfort, safety and personal power.

Inner Lent is the yearly season of attention to our renewed purpose. Whether you find yourself in a wilderness or a desert, hold fast to your Inner Divinity.

Please share your experience of dwelling in your lonely place? You will be inspiring others with your openness.

Working with the Inner Festivals

Working with the Inner Festivals

On February 25, Lent begins. Lent is the Christian festival that remembers the forty days, Jesus Christ spends in the wilderness following the Baptism in the River Jordan. During this time, Christ does not eat, is ministered to by angels, meets wild beasts and is tempted three times by Satan.

It is a Christian practice to “give up something tempting” for Lent. Usually we give up a favorite food or activity - chocolate, pasta, TV or video games. Even as a child, I wondered about this. It felt like a demanding law that had to be obeyed to be good, but didn’t make much sense spiritually or personally. Of course, I have never been any good at denying myself anything for a few hours and couldn’t imagine 40 days of living without anything I enjoyed, just to be “good” in the eyes of the Church. Yet, had I given a or found a reason, or an understanding in the heart of my heart, I felt I could have a true Lenten devotion and given up anything.

My childhood wonder and doubt has shaped my spiritual life into a practice of questioning. I don’t accept answers offered by exclusive dogmas and sectarian perspectives. I am fascinated by all religions - the dogmas and the rituals - and study them all with loving objectivity and respect.

In my childhood I attended a number of Christian denominations (from Catholic to Christian Science) as my father wanted me to have a liberal and inclusive religious experience. College opened me up to the Eastern paths and also to Judaism. I loved the whole gamut enough to minor in religion but did not find any one doctrine that called me to belong or practice.

With my marriage to a recovering alcoholic, I found both community and personal significance in AA and Al-Anon. I loved that it was a 24/7 relationship, that the “program” was devoted to healing, liberation and the acceptance and support of all others without judgment. The 12 Steps offered a one-size-fits-all path to self-mastery that was beautifully effective, challenging and compassionate. No dogmas and a open spirituality related to a self-defined Higher Power meant beliefs were personal.

Yet I still had a quiet longing for more. I felt there was something profound in the Christian Mystery and the story of Jesus Christ. Although I was not aware of my feelings at the time, there was something in the Christian festivals that called out to me even though the “church and cultural” festival practices felt empty of personal meaning. What did Christmas mean to me and all other souls? What was the personal and present significance of the Resurrection?

I wanted and needed festival practices that took me into myself, that made greater meaning of and in me. (I had no idea that I would need to create these inner festivals for myself or that I would be sharing them with others around the world.)

Then I put my kids in the new Waldorf School of Princeton and discovered Rudolf Steiner. Steiner brought this wonderful esoteric picture of Christianity and the Festivals. Esoteric signifies “within.” Everything I had been longing for in my heart and in my mind was present in Steiner’s cosmic worldview. I had found the essential ground and foundation on which to build a fulfilling spiritual life and my future work - Steiner’s anthroposophy (the wisdom of being human).

Inspired by Steiner’s loving and wise imagination of role of the Christ in human consciousness, a major piece of my personal work is a new psychospiritual understanding and practice of the Christian festivals - the design and guidance for a yearly cycle of practices for cultivating a rich and dynamic inner life.

Imagine what it means to your inner development to have a yearly rhythm of self-evolving practices that intimately connect your soul life to the cosmic cycle of the year and the esoteric meaning of the Christian festivals. The therapeutic process is often shaped by the immediate issues of the client, not any archetypal design or rhythm.

Through my attention to the Inner Year, I am now quite excited about a new two-part therapeutic design. Why not combine one-on-one counseling dealing with the immediate personal issues with the engagement in a group activity based on the festivals and the cycle of the year. This combination provides a highly effective process that acknowledges your reality as a unique individual with a unique biology, unique biography and unique destiny facing unique challenges, while also acknowledging the universal significance of the cosmic cycle of the sun through the course of the year and the esoteric impact and meaning of the Christian festivals to your thinking, feeling and willing?

The Inner Year is a program of self-knowledge, self-healing, self-development, self-restraint and self-liberation. It addresses all the archetypal issues of the soul in a yearly cycle. The Inner Year is a cosmic and universal guide for inner work and complements the intimate and unique process of one-on-one counseling and coaching.

Each of us has an inner sun shaping the life of our souls. This inner Sun is an image of our sense of “I am.” The inner Sun moves between solstices and equinoxes shaping our spiritual and material realities and attention. The twofold process of immediate and cosmic therapy engaging the unique and the universal aspects of our souls supports the development and maturing of our individuality and our humanity, the awareness of our Inner Sun.

The Christian festivals provides an extraordinary design for our lives. They reflect nature and both the story of the Christ Being and the longing and preparation of the human soul for the experience of Divinity dwelling and acting within in our heart of hearts.

Over the last few years I have given talks and written about all the major festivals - the quarterly festivals that reflect the esoteric meaning of the four seasons - Christmas/Winter Solstice, Easter/Spring Equinox, St John’s Tide/ Summer Solstice and Michaelmas/Fall Equinox. I have also spoken on Whitsun or Pentecost and on Advent. My focus on these talks is always the role the festivals play in the personal awakening of our inner life, the guidance to the fulfillment of the truth, beauty and goodness of our thoughts, feelings and deeds.

I have come to feel a real conviction that the renewal of the festivals, not as ritual and sentimental demonstrations of religious dogma, but as essential symbolic and guiding events during the year providing inspiration and illumination of our inner journeys, will free us to be free.

Christmas and the Holy Nights
December 25 - January 6
renews our innocence through Nativity and
increases the gifts of our wisdom through Epiphany.

Lent
40 days prior to Easter
cultivates self-mastery and builds the capacity to wisely and freely say “No!”

Easter
1st Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox
brings a conscious relationship to sacrifice, death and resurrection.

Whitsun or Pentecost
50 days after Easter
(re)awakens our sense of community and active empathy.

St John’s Tide
June 24
leads our souls to our moment of destiny and manifestation of our deeds in the world.

Michaelmas
September 29
asks us to face the presence of evil in our souls and in the world. We learn to redeem the perpetrator and resurrect the victim.

All Saints and All Soul’s
November 1
engages us with souls beyond the realm of life and death.

Advent
28 days before Christmas
offers a time to reflect on the meaning of the course of the year and the release of our attachment to our stories (dramas)allowing us to enter into the deep mystery of Christmas and the renewal of our inner (re)birth.

Over the course of 2009, beginning with Inner Lent, I will be offering some group opportunities for awakening and deepening your experience of The Inner Year. I will offer an indepth teleseminar of 2 or more 60 minute sessions of more direct guidance and interaction for each festival. These programs will be offered for a reasonable fee.

Click here to register for the Inner Lent Teleseminar.

Peace and Goodwill

Last year at Christmastime, I gave an interactive presentation on exploring the personal meaning of

Peace On Earth to Human Souls of Goodwill

I find this translation from Rudolf Steiner, the most empowering of the individual and the most meaningful in awakening the forces of community. Do you?

Let me give you two contrasting translations,

"Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men." King James version and the one I grew up with.

"...on Earth peace to men on whom his favor rests." New International version
(which I feels leads to war - one group feeling another group is in disfavor and therefore unworthy of the respect and safety of peace)

Whatever translation you feel most comfortable with or most engaged in, I encourage you to seek the deepest personal connection to the declaration. Is this wording the right wording for what lives in your heart?

I thought I would share with all of you the basic questions and thoughts I explored with my audience.

I took them through each word and asked them to meditate on the meaning.

How do you experience "Peace"? How do you experience "Goodwill"?
These are words of great mystery and live beyond personal definiton. What is the thought behind each word?

I led my audience through brief meditations on each word asking them to let the meaning of the word speak to them in their hearts rather than thinking a definition in their heads.

As everyone shared their imaginations of Peace and Goodwill, I captured them on the whiteboard. "Seeing" these heartfelt meanings brought a warming energy to the group.

Perhaps each individual expression of Peace and Goodwill was filled with the resounding voice of an angel. Certainly there was a sense of a host of meaning.

How does Peace live in your soul, your actions, your conversations? How do you practice goodwill. When in the last year have you been the beneficiary of the goodwill of another? I hope this stimulates deep thoughts. This is the time of year when our souls call out for these questions.

Ask your self, your friends, your family members to meditate on these words. What a Christmas gift. Remember these words were spoken to simple shepherds.

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I have spent some time considering our Christmas music and the relationship of Christmas carols and songs to each of the six Christmases. In looking at the Christmas of Nativity and the Shepherds and the Kings, I was surprised to see most Christmas music relates to the experience of the Shepherds.

Interestingly, most paintings of the Nativity focus on the Kings.

The shepherds hear the voices of the host of angels. The kings see the Star. Magi share the same root as image. The shepherds and the kings reflect on the two gestures of our brains. The left hemisphere is auditory and analytical and the right hemisphere is visual and intuitive. I see the shepherds as auditory and intuitive and the kings as visual and analytical. I find this fascinating. Do you?

With all my heart, I wish you peace and goodwill.

Connecting with The Dead

Halloween, All Saints Day and All Souls Day, October 31 - November 2, are Holy Days devoted to the dead. This time of the Inner Year we seek to understand and evolve our relationship with the dead. How do we show devotion to those who have crossed the threshold of death?

My Childhood Experiences

My cousin died of leukemia when I was five. I only heard about his death. I did not go to his funeral. Not even his sister was allowed to go to his funeral. We were “protected” from the death process by our parents. Death and grief were not appropriate or not seen as significant for young children.

Someone I knew shared a bedroom with her beloved grandmother and found her dead one night. She, too, was not allowed to attend the funeral. She never felt like she had said goodbye to her beloved granny.

Why did our parents want to keep us from death? Children, who are filled with life and love, have such a natural, fearless connection with the dead. Often children tenderly remain in active contact with the soul of the dead. Do you have a childhood experience with a dead soul?

Around 9, I learned about the festivals of All Saints Day and All Souls Day. At the same time, I first saw a dead body in an open casket.

I found these feast days, and the dead body, fascinating but not meaningful. I didn’t know how to make meaning of death and no one in my life seemed to have any ideas that spoke to my young heart. Was death an end or a beginning? Was death really a time when we faced judgment? I rarely thought about dead souls. Heaven was filled with angels, not the souls of the dead.

My Present Relationship to the Dead

Fast forward fifty years. Every, well almost every, night before falling asleep, I engage with the dead. I relate to them with a reverent and open heart. I call out their names to let them know I remain connected to their being.

I don’t mean I remain connected to the memory of their earthly existence. Even though they have physically disappeared, I still sense the ongoing reality of their spirit. I am aware that they live on beyond the threshold of death and that I need only reach out with the force of my unselfish heart to touch them.

With the festivals celebrating the dead falling almost six weeks after the Fall Equinox, does the growing darkness in our earthly world give us a clearer vision of the other world and all its inhabitants?

If we did not have electricity, we would be dependent on the soft glow of candlelight after nightfall. The flickering shadows at the edge of the light might give us a sense that the dead were living nearby. But the harshness of mechanical light does not create the mood of the threshold and leads us to feel only the physical is real.

During these festival days of the dead, do your best to resist the soul-killing energy of the mechanical and technical world. Find your way to the life of spiritual perception and sensitivity. Most of all keep your thoughts pulsing with newness. Spiritual beings, including “dead” souls, connect to living thoughts. They cannot experience mechanistic thoughts, thoughts that lack our own spiritual creativity.

Ways to Stay Connected

If you have wondered how to stay connected to your loved ones after death (beyond dwelling on your memories) reach out in three simple ways.

• Call out their names.
• Read aloud a passage from a sacred text. Read with your heart, not just your head.
• Speak a prayer or a verse aloud. Speak with your heart in your voice.
  

As you call out their names, feel their presence. This feeling of presence is the bridge of connection between the earthly here and and the heavenly there.

As you read aloud from a sacred text, feel the spiritual nourishment. Sacred texts feed both the living and the dead. You share a meaningful spiritual meal with your loved ones.

As you pray, feel the music of the heavens living in your heart. The resonating tones and meanings of love, harmonize the relationship between you and all the dead.


You can make this a daily, weekly or monthly practice. You can even invite your friends and family to join you in a monthly gathering of the living and the dead.

As I wrote earlier, I call out the names of the dead nightly. I know in my sleep, my soul and spirit are freed from the limitations of space and time. Calling out the names of the dead before I fall asleep, is a way of saying “Here I come for my nightly visit.”

These nightly visits bring many blessings. I wake up with clearer thoughts, designs for deeds of goodness, and a sense of emotional balance.

The more we connect with the dead in their continuing life in the spiritual world, the more alive our earthly lives become.


If you want to read more about our work with the dead, I strongly urge you to get a copy of Staying Connected, a wonderful book of Rudolf Steiner’s insights about death, dying and the dead. Christopher Bamford introduces Steiner’s work with warmth and intelligence. Here is a link to purchasing the book through Amazon.