What a difference a year makes?

Your year made a difference - to you, to others, to the world and to the future. What was the difference? 

It was not just the same routine, the same gestures and activities, the same rhythms of sleep, meals, work, relationships. It was different and it was powerful. If you don't believe it, register for the Inner Advent teleseminar and do the work.  If you don't discover the powerful difference, I will give you your $47 back and include a one-hour private session with me to talk about why your year didn't make a difference.  

This is my third message and final message about Inner Advent and it is my strongest.  I really want you to participate in my Inner Advent teleseminar series.  It will make a difference in your life, both of your lives - the inner and the outer.


If you have decided you want to participate in Inner Advent, register now.
http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Inner-Advent-IYIA10.htm
The Sunday afternoon (4PM Eastern, 1PM Pacific) sessions begin tomorrow and the Thursday evening (8PM Eastern, 5PM Pacific) begin in five days.

Remember you do not need to be on the calls or be on every call. You will receive recordings of all the sessions and all the written materials within 24 hours.

Inner Advent

• shows the differences this year made
• makes sense of your year
• gives you a feeling of completion
• provides a surprisingly objective awareness of your truth.
• liberates you from limiting identities, stories and reactions
• reveals the lessons of the year
• increases your ability to creatively design your future
• celebrates who you’ve been, who  you are and who you are becoming

http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Inner-Advent-IYIA10.htm

“My soul and the world are but one.”

There are seven billion people on this planet who have lived another year.  How many of them will do the inner work of recollecting, reviewing and releasing their inner past so their inner future can be met with real possibility and real responsibility? In our increasingly challenging world with the growing difficulties of our political, economic and environmental crises, self-knowledge is the first step to resolution. Self-knowledge leads to freedom and love - the freedom to make new choices and the love for others, the planet and the future.


Inner Advent is an embrace, a conscious embrace, of your unfolding life. It’s a responsibility to your self, maybe even a spiritual or moral duty to your self. 
We are different from animals in that we have the moral ability to be self-conscious and self-creative. We are not just about drives for survival or desires for being happy, we are about freedom and growth.

Freedom comes from knowing yourself. Self-knowledge is a spiritual practice.  Rudolf Steiner teachings guide me to a right relationship to my self.  He writes in his book, How To Know Higher Worlds, “You can only sacrifice that which you have fully possessed.” Self-knowledge is self-possession. Possess your year so you can let it go.

Know how you survived this year. Know how you emotionally experienced the year.  Know how you grew and evolved over the year.

Know your year to know your self!

Possess your year so you can let the stories go and find the meaning, the sacrifice of your 365 days, your 29000 breaths, your efforts and struggles, your dreams, your joys, your sorrows.

How do you begin to do this? How do you organize your recollection of the year? How do you analyze what happened? How do you intuit the meaning? What are the questions that will lead to the insights, the self-knowledge, to a new you, a wiser you, a freer you?

I want Inner Advent to be a relaxed and aware experience for you. I will guide the process, but you will do the work.  No one can do it but you. This is the gift you give your Self.

Celebrate the Past and the Future

Celebrate the Past, Celebrate the Future

I am writing about the fifth and sixth celebrations of the soul together, because they go together as sweetly as they stand alone. These two celebrations are one in the intimate flow of your lifetime - your past and your future. I was, I am, I will be is the hymn of this combined celebration. 

Can you celebrate in the stream of time? This is a real question for your soul to ponder for to do it you must slip beyond time to the moment.

Below is the celebration of the past and the future expressed by one of my favorite poets, Lucille Clifton, who I once kissed on her cocoa cheek.

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me.

What did you say to yourself ten years ago? ten months ago? ten days ago?  Did you make promises? Did you keep them?

What do you say to yourself today about tomorrow? next month? next year? ten years from now?

Do you have the compassionate courage to forgive yourself?  Now that is something to celebrate!

If you resonate with these questions and take them to heart, to attention and to action -
can’t believe what I just wrote here as it makes me realize:
I make many promises from my wishful and loving heart, some from my genuinely caring attention, but what are the promises from my will to act, which are the promises I’ve kept and will keep? Should these be called deep promises?
Look at these questions with wonder, not judgment. 

Back to what I want to urge you to do if these thoughts resonate with you.  Register for my Inner Advent teleseminar.  Let’s gather together (on the telephone) once a week for four weeks to discover the meaning of 2010.

I will guide you through a creative and powerful process for recollecting your year.  You will learn ways to review your year and discover what it was all about.  You will then release the perceptions and energies of 2010 like a sweet celebratory exhale and a kind forgiving sigh.

Celebrating Inner Advent prepares the soul, cleanses self-doubt, cultivates self-awareness, nurtures self-discovery in a way that allows us to enter into the mystery of the twelve Holy Nights with real openness. Working with your past year is working on your future year.

Inner Advent will need your heart, your attention and your action for 2-3 hours a week.  The call is 60 minutes and your personal process will ask for another hour or two or more. 

If you live outside the US you can join the calls using skype.
Sign up here for Inner Advent.

Celebrate Relationships in Your Soul

Celebrate relationships.

Just a reminder that I am asking all of us to experience inner celebration as an honoring of being human, of the daily success at incarnating self into the unfolding of your life. Celebration done consciously becomes a consecration, a making sacred. Our lives are filled with little, simple, sweet, yet profound acts of consecration. We need to pay attention to them. We need to more consciously engage in self-celebration.

The first three of the six celebrations of being human - the celebrations of nature, nativity and riches - are celebrations that feel safe.  What do I mean by “safe?” I mean they are relatively free of personal shadows and dilemmas.  Yes, we can be scared of spiders or lightning, be a little clueless about sensing the divinity in all things, and we can be a bit out of balance when it comes to sensory delights, but overall these celebrations do not confront us with the messiness of our karma and the pain of our desires. 

The next three celebrations focus on our connections to others, our own early biography, and our own inner development. These celebrations ask us to attend to our inner experiences with interest, compassion and objectivity.  To fully celebrate we need to notice and attempt to release any sentimentality or shame, pride or regret, resentment or resignation as these feelings will cloud and distort our celebration. We can honor and revere without conditions and judgments. Maybe we can begin to feel a little inner freedom through conscious celebration in these challenging intimacies .

I do realize that the last paragraph is a doozy and feels like it needs at least several pages of development and explanation and a lot of inner contemplation to really “get.”  Basically, if reading and contemplating the Celebration of Relationships, the Celebration of Childhood and the Celebration of Selfhood cause squirminess of soul come back to the third sentence in the above paragraph and notice! and do your best to release!

Relationships are the joys and agonies of our lives. Relationships are the great teachers  of our lives. Life is all relationship, even avoiding relationships is relationship.

One simple dictionary definition for relationship is “the way in which two or more people or organizations regard and behave toward each other.”

What are the ways we relate with regard and behavior? Here are some possibilites:

We relate in a whole range of closeness, from fusion to utter separation. 
We relate in a whole range of duration, from a brief passing to our entire lifetime. 
We relate in a whole range of impact, from superficial to deep and life/soul-altering. 
We relate in a whole range of feeling, from indifference to love/hate. 
We relate in a whole range of responsibility from being cared for to taking care of. 
We relate in a whole range of reality from fantasy to the manifest, from the spiritual to the practical.


Celebrate Relationships in all the different ranges, consider regard and behavior, and discover the sweet and bitter and always meaningful lessons of the heart.
 

Celebrate Riches in Your Soul

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. 

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?

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.  

 

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.

 

Register for the Connecting With Spiritual Beings here.
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

 

Home might be a location, a dwelling, a friendship, a community, a type of work or artistic activity, a spiritual path. I repeat, home is a feeling. Journal about your feeling at home in all these different aspects of your waking life.

 

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

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. 

Register for CYCLES, THEMES, PATTERNS, THREADS here.

 

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