It’s November. The year is about to be over...done...finished...gone. How do you say goodbye to 2011? How do you discover the inner meaning of 2011? How do you prepare for 2012?
Each year you evolve. You become something you weren’t last year.
Some of your evolution is intentional and some is unintentional. But if you don’t take time to review your year as the unfolding of a new you, how do you know yourself? How do you know what you mean when you say I am?
How do you SEE yourself?
How do you CELEBRATE yourself?
How do you MAKE WISE CHOICES about the coming year?
Are you PREPARED TO BECOME new, different, more mature, more self-compassionate, more creative in the coming year?
INNER ADVENT is a program that guides you in saying goodbye to the old year. It provides an organized approach to looking at your inner evolvution and understanding the meaning of your year with creative compassion. It cleans up your soul and prepares your inner life for becoming new, for a another year of evolving. It creates a sweet emptiness, a manger in your soul.
It will take time to realize the meaning of your year. The webinar is 60-90 minutes each week. Your selfwork of journalling, creating your Inner Advent mandala (not a work of art but a self-illuminating artistic representation of your year - no critiquing, just wondrous and courageous self-expression) will take your attention and your effort - 2-10 hours over the four weeks. Optional partnering calls could be another 30-60 minutes each week.
Is your Inner Advent worth this much of your precious time? Will you be happier? More peaceful? More grounded? More alive? More awake to your self? Yes, yes, yes!
Will you find more true freedom to be and become yourself? Yes.
Will you find more love? For yourself? for others (even the difficult others)? for the world? for the future? for the past? for the moment? Yes.
Inner Advent, like all the Imagine Self, Inner Year and Inner Life programs, is a serious, profound and mysterious spiritual practice. It also offers moments of true joy when the experience of your evolving I AM sings in harmony with the evolving Cosmos.
Inner Advent is part of a spiritual curriculum for finding, knowing and becoming yourself.
How do you find yourself in all the events and circumstances of the year?
How do you recognize yourself with confidence and authority? What was authentically YOU in your thoughts, feelings and deeds?
How did you evolve, become new, more mature? What new truth lived in your thoughts? What new beauty formed in your feelings? How did goodness pour out from your actions? What happened to your soul over the year?
The cosmic rhythm of your inner year wakes up to these questions and finds their answers during the last few weeks before the Solstice and the Nativity - your soul's Inner Advent.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Lessons from an Old Stove
My landlord finally agreed to replace the old stove. We had been living for six weeks without a working oven. The delivery men had arrived with the new stove and were removing the old one. And I was about to have a spiritual lesson from a piece of junk.
This stove was over 20 years old and I had been living with it for less than two months. Now useless junk, I watched it being wheeled out through the backdoor.
Suddenly, I began to think/feel about all the people, all the human souls, that had been connected to the stove:
I did not know any of these individuals personally, but we had a connection through this metal object.
Rudolf Steiner said we must materialize spirit and spiritualize matter. I share this wisdom often in my writing and teaching. How often do I apply it in my life?
But these thoughts about the old stove, put this wisdom into practice and it felt very good to my soul. I wasn’t being sentimental: I was being morally awake. I was recollecting the human meaning, purpose and significance, and honoring the numerous human connections living in an old appliance. I was spiritualizing matter.
It took me less 20 seconds to think the thoughts and feel the feelings. but I have spent a number of minutes sharing the experience with others and now I am taking about 30 minutes to write this post. About 3000 people will read this post and some will be inspired to think spiritually and morally about the mundane things in their lives.
Yes, the stove is now on a waste pile somewhere along with thousands of other discarded, useless objects. It is part of the ecological challenge of waste. But energetically something spiritually dynamic is living in my consciousness and now in yours. The stove that was used to feed bodies, fed my soul with insight and my heart with awe for all the human initiative and connection that came together around this appliance over its “usetime.”
You might want to make it a spiritual practice whenever you throw something out to momentarily bring your attention to its relationship to the engagement of so many human souls, the thoughts, feelings, and initiatives, surrounding its existence.
What also happened in those few seconds of honoring the old stove and its role in the human community, was the preparation for the new stove.
We took a few minutes and some focused energy to clean the stove space (twenty years of other people’s spills and ant traps, etc.) The new stove was installed into a place that was clean and prepared.
Always have a thoughtful moment when you say goodbye. Always put some thought into preparing for the new.
Reminder: We are approaching Inner Advent when you bring your inner attention to saying goodbye to your old year and preparing for the new. To learn about Inner Advent click here.
This stove was over 20 years old and I had been living with it for less than two months. Now useless junk, I watched it being wheeled out through the backdoor.
Suddenly, I began to think/feel about all the people, all the human souls, that had been connected to the stove:
- All the people who worked for the manufacturer who made it, the appliance dealer who sold it to the building contractor and the guy that installed it. How many individuals had been involved in bringing the stove into the house it was now leaving?
- All the people whose bodies had been nourished by the food cooked on the stove. I have no idea how many people have lived in this house but over 20 years as many as 20,000 meals could have been prepared using the stove.
I did not know any of these individuals personally, but we had a connection through this metal object.
Rudolf Steiner said we must materialize spirit and spiritualize matter. I share this wisdom often in my writing and teaching. How often do I apply it in my life?
But these thoughts about the old stove, put this wisdom into practice and it felt very good to my soul. I wasn’t being sentimental: I was being morally awake. I was recollecting the human meaning, purpose and significance, and honoring the numerous human connections living in an old appliance. I was spiritualizing matter.
It took me less 20 seconds to think the thoughts and feel the feelings. but I have spent a number of minutes sharing the experience with others and now I am taking about 30 minutes to write this post. About 3000 people will read this post and some will be inspired to think spiritually and morally about the mundane things in their lives.
Yes, the stove is now on a waste pile somewhere along with thousands of other discarded, useless objects. It is part of the ecological challenge of waste. But energetically something spiritually dynamic is living in my consciousness and now in yours. The stove that was used to feed bodies, fed my soul with insight and my heart with awe for all the human initiative and connection that came together around this appliance over its “usetime.”
The Spiritual Practice of Saying Goodbye to Things
You might want to make it a spiritual practice whenever you throw something out to momentarily bring your attention to its relationship to the engagement of so many human souls, the thoughts, feelings, and initiatives, surrounding its existence.
What also happened in those few seconds of honoring the old stove and its role in the human community, was the preparation for the new stove.
We took a few minutes and some focused energy to clean the stove space (twenty years of other people’s spills and ant traps, etc.) The new stove was installed into a place that was clean and prepared.
Always have a thoughtful moment when you say goodbye. Always put some thought into preparing for the new.
Reminder: We are approaching Inner Advent when you bring your inner attention to saying goodbye to your old year and preparing for the new. To learn about Inner Advent click here.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Spritual Beings - Are They For Real? Do They Matter?
Halloween, All Saints. All Souls. It’s the time of year to focus on evolving our relationship to Spiritual Beings.
Are they for real? Do they matter?
Until I was in my early forties, spiritual beings didn’t really matter to me. I certainly had beliefs about their existence - Sunday-school-meets-New-Age beliefs, but I had no understanding and no active relationship to spiritual beings. I thought they were probably real, but I didn’t think they really mattered to me.
Actually, I hadn’t given it much thought because I had never been introduced to the reality and the significance of spiritual beings. I didn’t know what they did and how they related to my life. I had no concept for spiritual beings. No context for understanding why and how they mattered. My immature and vague beliefs were reassuring when I felt existential dread, but they were more a cloak I wrapped around myself to keep off the chill, then a ground for being.
And I did not feel any companionship with them, although I am a spiritual being. Human beings are spiritual beings. And there is what I called God, the all-encompassing name for the undefinable divine. In between, above, below, behind, what was there to connect with, to engage with? Were there other, more distinct forms of spiritual being, with purpose, task, even personality, that I could interact with?
And what does that interaction look like, feel like, develop into? How do I converse with spiritual beings? How do they converse with me?
Finally another question for serious consideration: If there are spiritual beings, am I real for them? Do I matter to spiritual beings?
Over twenty years of studying Rudolf Steiner’s cosmology gave me a conceptual framework for understanding spiritual beings, made them real and showed me how they mattered. But it wasn’t until I was called to teach and guide the Inner Year programs that I found a way to experience and encourage a warm intimacy, an engaged companionship between the human being, you and me, and the myriad beings of spirit.
I do love the benefits of the cyclical focus of the Inner Year. Each year at this time, when the cosmos resonates with the love of spiritual beings, I find more engagement, full of creativity, surprises, comfort, challenge, and real delight. There is a relaxed wakefulness in the engagement. Real companionship has grown.
Spiritual beings do not all look alike, sound alike or feel alike. I can make distinctions and discern subtleties now. My life is blessed with a conscious attention to the unique qualities of both the spiritual beings and my relationships with them.
I am not special in this capacity. Each of us is part of this spiritual company, this amazing fellowship. We just need to give it attention and slowly we can cultivate, nurture, and mature our awareness of our constant companionship with all our fellow spiritual beings from the grand Seraphim, to the nature spirits dwelling in the tree outside our windows, to our guardian angels, and to the beings that we knew as our grandfathers and grandmothers during their earthly lives.
In four webinars, beginning this Sunday, I will share with you what I have learned about Spiritual Beings and how to engage their companionship. You can participate during the live calls, or wait and download the audios to listen to as you take a long walk on a refreshing fall day. To learn more about the course, click here.
Are they for real? Do they matter?
Until I was in my early forties, spiritual beings didn’t really matter to me. I certainly had beliefs about their existence - Sunday-school-meets-New-Age beliefs, but I had no understanding and no active relationship to spiritual beings. I thought they were probably real, but I didn’t think they really mattered to me.
Actually, I hadn’t given it much thought because I had never been introduced to the reality and the significance of spiritual beings. I didn’t know what they did and how they related to my life. I had no concept for spiritual beings. No context for understanding why and how they mattered. My immature and vague beliefs were reassuring when I felt existential dread, but they were more a cloak I wrapped around myself to keep off the chill, then a ground for being.
And I did not feel any companionship with them, although I am a spiritual being. Human beings are spiritual beings. And there is what I called God, the all-encompassing name for the undefinable divine. In between, above, below, behind, what was there to connect with, to engage with? Were there other, more distinct forms of spiritual being, with purpose, task, even personality, that I could interact with?
And what does that interaction look like, feel like, develop into? How do I converse with spiritual beings? How do they converse with me?
Finally another question for serious consideration: If there are spiritual beings, am I real for them? Do I matter to spiritual beings?
Over twenty years of studying Rudolf Steiner’s cosmology gave me a conceptual framework for understanding spiritual beings, made them real and showed me how they mattered. But it wasn’t until I was called to teach and guide the Inner Year programs that I found a way to experience and encourage a warm intimacy, an engaged companionship between the human being, you and me, and the myriad beings of spirit.
I do love the benefits of the cyclical focus of the Inner Year. Each year at this time, when the cosmos resonates with the love of spiritual beings, I find more engagement, full of creativity, surprises, comfort, challenge, and real delight. There is a relaxed wakefulness in the engagement. Real companionship has grown.
Spiritual beings do not all look alike, sound alike or feel alike. I can make distinctions and discern subtleties now. My life is blessed with a conscious attention to the unique qualities of both the spiritual beings and my relationships with them.
I am not special in this capacity. Each of us is part of this spiritual company, this amazing fellowship. We just need to give it attention and slowly we can cultivate, nurture, and mature our awareness of our constant companionship with all our fellow spiritual beings from the grand Seraphim, to the nature spirits dwelling in the tree outside our windows, to our guardian angels, and to the beings that we knew as our grandfathers and grandmothers during their earthly lives.
In four webinars, beginning this Sunday, I will share with you what I have learned about Spiritual Beings and how to engage their companionship. You can participate during the live calls, or wait and download the audios to listen to as you take a long walk on a refreshing fall day. To learn more about the course, click here.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Let Them Live in Your Heart
It is good to recognize a blessing when it appears.
This morning I received two blessings both connected to the Lifting the Veils course. The first shows the importance of sharing your story to find yourself and help others and the second pointed out the painful vulnerability of doing this deeply intimate group work using technology.
The First Blessing - Inspiring
I receive the emails from Karma Tube. Today offered this very tender, achingly moving video of a gifted teacher guiding his 10 year old students into the fullness of life through the experience of empathy. More than anything I have written about the importance of biography work, this short video reveals how one person's story frees the secrets held in the silently suffering heart of another. I could write much more but nothing would match the beauty of this little video.
If this video, ignites a desire to do the work of Lifting the Veils, first read the second blessing and then register for the course.
Video from KarmaTube
The Second Blessing - Sobering
This morning a participant in the last Lifting the Veils course wrote me an email filled with disappointment and anger. In one session she had been sharing a story with deep feelings and her skype connection failed. The following session I did not begin with returning to her story as the focus was on another critical experience of early childhood. This person wrote that she felt painfully discounted.
Let me address her experience, because it points out two the the "dangers" of this work.
The Context Danger: The context of the Lifting the Veils program, as in all the programs I offer, is educational, not therapeutic. The outcome is self-knowledge and self-empowerment arising out of self-compassion and inner freedom. The basis of the education is the archetypes of being human and becoming I, the universal components and development of the human being, and the unique configurations and complexity of individual experience.
Through understanding the archetypal, the individual can be illuminated. Suddenly, personal experience and the challenging patterns, limiting defenses, and dysfunctional perspectives you formed in order to survive find their right relationship to your destiny and the redemptive and restorative purposes and lessons of your life fall into place. Self-knowledge, self-compassion and inner freedom increase.
This is group work greatly enriched by the sharing of personal story and personal questions. This sharing is intimate and sacred. Empathy and shared feelings leading to the wisdom of objective compassion is encourgaed. The distraction of sentimentalizing and dramatizing the often painful experiences of another is discouraged.
My job as facilitator and educator is a tough one. I must stay true to the course and the group, and that means in rare cases an individual can feel discounted, disregarded, neglected and not valued. In these cases, I am always willing to offer a private conversation at no cost to address these sensitive feelings with the attention and compassion they deserve.
No one should take a program I offer with the goal of getting fixed or fulfilling a fantasy of finding the ideal embrace of attention and love. I developed these programs as a curriculum for "finding yourself, knowing yourself, becoming yourself." Each program comforts and challenges, soothes and stimulates, answers questions and asks questions, and strives to guide you to the inner means of resolving karma and fulfilling destiny. All of the programs require courage and vulnerability and an ability to stand in your own fire. I am here to serve your I-consciousness, not your story, and I intend to serve with objective compassion and growing wisdom.
The Technology Danger: Skype can be iffy as signals can be weak, there can be a reverb/echo, your connection can be dropped and some participants have difficulty in following the steps to create a connection that allows for interactivity. It is possible to be on the "call" via your phone which may incur long distance charges.
All my Inner Year and Inner Life sessions are recorded and can be downloaded, a true benefit of technology. And I provide valuable handouts. Every participant receives a link to the recording. This means that even if you need to miss a session or you experience tech difficulties, you can still experience the content and the sharing of others. For all the intensive programs, I set up everyone with a partner for weekly calls where the course work is supported and enriched by thoughtful and warm conversations.
The technology is a risk, but it also makes the work possible on a global scale - forming intimate community in spite of physical distances. One participant in the upcoming Lifting the Veils is from Norway.
Here is the description of the course where you will find the link to register.
http://theinneryear.blogspot.com/2011/10/lifting-veils-veils-from-birth-to-seven.html
This morning I received two blessings both connected to the Lifting the Veils course. The first shows the importance of sharing your story to find yourself and help others and the second pointed out the painful vulnerability of doing this deeply intimate group work using technology.
The First Blessing - Inspiring
I receive the emails from Karma Tube. Today offered this very tender, achingly moving video of a gifted teacher guiding his 10 year old students into the fullness of life through the experience of empathy. More than anything I have written about the importance of biography work, this short video reveals how one person's story frees the secrets held in the silently suffering heart of another. I could write much more but nothing would match the beauty of this little video.
If this video, ignites a desire to do the work of Lifting the Veils, first read the second blessing and then register for the course.
Video from KarmaTube
The Second Blessing - Sobering
This morning a participant in the last Lifting the Veils course wrote me an email filled with disappointment and anger. In one session she had been sharing a story with deep feelings and her skype connection failed. The following session I did not begin with returning to her story as the focus was on another critical experience of early childhood. This person wrote that she felt painfully discounted.
Let me address her experience, because it points out two the the "dangers" of this work.
The Context Danger: The context of the Lifting the Veils program, as in all the programs I offer, is educational, not therapeutic. The outcome is self-knowledge and self-empowerment arising out of self-compassion and inner freedom. The basis of the education is the archetypes of being human and becoming I, the universal components and development of the human being, and the unique configurations and complexity of individual experience.
Through understanding the archetypal, the individual can be illuminated. Suddenly, personal experience and the challenging patterns, limiting defenses, and dysfunctional perspectives you formed in order to survive find their right relationship to your destiny and the redemptive and restorative purposes and lessons of your life fall into place. Self-knowledge, self-compassion and inner freedom increase.
This is group work greatly enriched by the sharing of personal story and personal questions. This sharing is intimate and sacred. Empathy and shared feelings leading to the wisdom of objective compassion is encourgaed. The distraction of sentimentalizing and dramatizing the often painful experiences of another is discouraged.
My job as facilitator and educator is a tough one. I must stay true to the course and the group, and that means in rare cases an individual can feel discounted, disregarded, neglected and not valued. In these cases, I am always willing to offer a private conversation at no cost to address these sensitive feelings with the attention and compassion they deserve.
No one should take a program I offer with the goal of getting fixed or fulfilling a fantasy of finding the ideal embrace of attention and love. I developed these programs as a curriculum for "finding yourself, knowing yourself, becoming yourself." Each program comforts and challenges, soothes and stimulates, answers questions and asks questions, and strives to guide you to the inner means of resolving karma and fulfilling destiny. All of the programs require courage and vulnerability and an ability to stand in your own fire. I am here to serve your I-consciousness, not your story, and I intend to serve with objective compassion and growing wisdom.
The Technology Danger: Skype can be iffy as signals can be weak, there can be a reverb/echo, your connection can be dropped and some participants have difficulty in following the steps to create a connection that allows for interactivity. It is possible to be on the "call" via your phone which may incur long distance charges.
All my Inner Year and Inner Life sessions are recorded and can be downloaded, a true benefit of technology. And I provide valuable handouts. Every participant receives a link to the recording. This means that even if you need to miss a session or you experience tech difficulties, you can still experience the content and the sharing of others. For all the intensive programs, I set up everyone with a partner for weekly calls where the course work is supported and enriched by thoughtful and warm conversations.
The technology is a risk, but it also makes the work possible on a global scale - forming intimate community in spite of physical distances. One participant in the upcoming Lifting the Veils is from Norway.
Here is the description of the course where you will find the link to register.
http://theinneryear.blogspot.com/2011/10/lifting-veils-veils-from-birth-to-seven.html
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Soul Shapers - The Story of Gladys & Me
Self development and its accompanying self-healing, self-liberation, and self-empowerment just never ends.
Three years ago I wrote a blog on the challenge of making requests. You can read it here.
http://liveinfullbloom.blogspot.com/2008/05/requesting-three-helpful-steps-and-true.html
It’s good. I nail some of the basics for making effective requests. I have always had a lot of difficulty in making requests and I explore the difficulties and resolve them for my benefit and my reader’s. Or so I thought.
Making requests is a significant and very complex gesture of selfhood. Each of us in our experience of self has a relationship to saying “I need and deserve help. All I need to do is ask.” I know this, but my reality around requests has always been painful, even traumatic.
I remained in trouble and troubled when I needed to ask for anything, particularly help.
THEN…
All my programs and products support self-development. I teach and guide with the confidence of being well-prepared and authentic and with the vulnerability of a participant. I am always seeking self-development - I don’t teach from the mountain top, I’m on the path. too. And sometimes I am wowed by what I learn about myself as I guide and encourage others.
This summer I had a powerful breakthrough at the end of an Inner Life course, LIFTING THE VEILS: BIRTH TO AGE 7.
Now very few of us have clear memories of our first seven years. I don’t. The program is not about sharing memories and creating a storybook, it is about lifting the veils to see clearly the root shaping of the challenges and obstacles appearing in our lives today.
Let me take a moment to define a clear memory. A clear memory is not a video in the mind of what happened, nor is it a story about an event. It is an understanding of what happened to your soul through an event - seeing the inner soul-shaping consequence of the experience.
My “requesting” dilemma was a major inner consequence of something.
I also had memories of two events involving the same person.
The memories and the consequence came together as I was preparing for the course, the veils lifted and I found healing, liberation and empowerment and it all made sense, beautiful sense.
The last two sessions of Lifting the Veils the focus is on the key encounters of our first seven years. I direct the particpants away from their immediate families to the soul-shapers that are more distant: perhaps the pediatrician, the postman, the neighbor, a dog, the little boy in your nursery class or his mother. These are the minor players and brief encounters providing major and lasting consequences.
Here’s the story of Gladys who took away my voice.
Gladys was a neighbor. I don’t remember her face or her voice. I just remember two key events and how she responded to me.
Memory #1
I am about 4 years old.
My mother had invited Gladys for lunch. She rings the bell and I run to open the door. I look up at her and with delight I say “Oh Gladys, you look gorgeous!” She responds, “Little girls don’t use words like that!” My heart feels crushed.
Lasting Consequence: Throughout my life, I block myself from expressing enthusiastic and genuine compliments. I feel terror and lose my voice.
Memory # 2
I am about 5 years old
I am going to kindergarten at the local elementary school and I take the bus. One afternoon I am walking home from the bus and my little bladder is about to burst. I am passing Gladys’ home and bravely decide to ask her if I can use her bathroom. I ring the doorbell. Gladys opens the door and I make my request with my knees held tightly together.
Gladys stands there and gives me what felt like a long lecture on how I should go to the bathroom before I get on the bus. I was so upset by this harsh response that I peed right there down my legs and on her porch. I was scared and incredibly embarrassed.
Lasting Consequence: When I need to make a request, a request which exposes any kind of vulnerability, I don’t make it.
For sixty years I have felt stupid and silly in both circumstances. How ridiculous to go speechless when I want to compliment. How pathetic to not ask for help when I need it. It seems I have an inner Gladys.
But I realized as I applied the insights and worked the exercises for those last two session of the Lifting the Veils program that I had kept secret from myself my feelings of humiliation and confusion, particularly, around peeing in my pants. When the veils lifted from my feelings, I shook and cried, a 5 yr old in a woman’s body. I comforted myself and I understood.
Gladys was a key encounter. It was karmic. The karma has resolved and now when I have the echoes of feeling that I’d rather die in silence then speak and risk harsh correction and devastating shame, I know they are truly echoes and that I can put the feelings back to the past where they belong, and in the present speak in the freedom of self-knowledge.
I encourage you to participate in the upcoming Lifting the Veils Birth to Age Seven. Here is the link to the description of the course. Lifting the Veils
My Gladys Poems
Participants are encouraged to lift the veils creatively: to sketch, paint, write poems, use expressive movement. I share the poems I wrote about Gladys and the veils here.
Three years ago I wrote a blog on the challenge of making requests. You can read it here.
http://liveinfullbloom.blogspot.com/2008/05/requesting-three-helpful-steps-and-true.html
It’s good. I nail some of the basics for making effective requests. I have always had a lot of difficulty in making requests and I explore the difficulties and resolve them for my benefit and my reader’s. Or so I thought.
Making requests is a significant and very complex gesture of selfhood. Each of us in our experience of self has a relationship to saying “I need and deserve help. All I need to do is ask.” I know this, but my reality around requests has always been painful, even traumatic.
I remained in trouble and troubled when I needed to ask for anything, particularly help.
THEN…
All my programs and products support self-development. I teach and guide with the confidence of being well-prepared and authentic and with the vulnerability of a participant. I am always seeking self-development - I don’t teach from the mountain top, I’m on the path. too. And sometimes I am wowed by what I learn about myself as I guide and encourage others.
This summer I had a powerful breakthrough at the end of an Inner Life course, LIFTING THE VEILS: BIRTH TO AGE 7.
Now very few of us have clear memories of our first seven years. I don’t. The program is not about sharing memories and creating a storybook, it is about lifting the veils to see clearly the root shaping of the challenges and obstacles appearing in our lives today.
Let me take a moment to define a clear memory. A clear memory is not a video in the mind of what happened, nor is it a story about an event. It is an understanding of what happened to your soul through an event - seeing the inner soul-shaping consequence of the experience.
My “requesting” dilemma was a major inner consequence of something.
I also had memories of two events involving the same person.
The memories and the consequence came together as I was preparing for the course, the veils lifted and I found healing, liberation and empowerment and it all made sense, beautiful sense.
The last two sessions of Lifting the Veils the focus is on the key encounters of our first seven years. I direct the particpants away from their immediate families to the soul-shapers that are more distant: perhaps the pediatrician, the postman, the neighbor, a dog, the little boy in your nursery class or his mother. These are the minor players and brief encounters providing major and lasting consequences.
Here’s the story of Gladys who took away my voice.
Gladys was a neighbor. I don’t remember her face or her voice. I just remember two key events and how she responded to me.
Memory #1
I am about 4 years old.
My mother had invited Gladys for lunch. She rings the bell and I run to open the door. I look up at her and with delight I say “Oh Gladys, you look gorgeous!” She responds, “Little girls don’t use words like that!” My heart feels crushed.
Lasting Consequence: Throughout my life, I block myself from expressing enthusiastic and genuine compliments. I feel terror and lose my voice.
Memory # 2
I am about 5 years old
I am going to kindergarten at the local elementary school and I take the bus. One afternoon I am walking home from the bus and my little bladder is about to burst. I am passing Gladys’ home and bravely decide to ask her if I can use her bathroom. I ring the doorbell. Gladys opens the door and I make my request with my knees held tightly together.
Gladys stands there and gives me what felt like a long lecture on how I should go to the bathroom before I get on the bus. I was so upset by this harsh response that I peed right there down my legs and on her porch. I was scared and incredibly embarrassed.
Lasting Consequence: When I need to make a request, a request which exposes any kind of vulnerability, I don’t make it.
For sixty years I have felt stupid and silly in both circumstances. How ridiculous to go speechless when I want to compliment. How pathetic to not ask for help when I need it. It seems I have an inner Gladys.
But I realized as I applied the insights and worked the exercises for those last two session of the Lifting the Veils program that I had kept secret from myself my feelings of humiliation and confusion, particularly, around peeing in my pants. When the veils lifted from my feelings, I shook and cried, a 5 yr old in a woman’s body. I comforted myself and I understood.
Gladys was a key encounter. It was karmic. The karma has resolved and now when I have the echoes of feeling that I’d rather die in silence then speak and risk harsh correction and devastating shame, I know they are truly echoes and that I can put the feelings back to the past where they belong, and in the present speak in the freedom of self-knowledge.
I encourage you to participate in the upcoming Lifting the Veils Birth to Age Seven. Here is the link to the description of the course. Lifting the Veils
My Gladys Poems
Participants are encouraged to lift the veils creatively: to sketch, paint, write poems, use expressive movement. I share the poems I wrote about Gladys and the veils here.
The Gladys Poems
Gor
Geous
Gor-geous
I can say it.
I know what it means.
Gorgeous
When I say it I am beautiful.
the doorbell rings
a gorgeous sound
I run to open the door
Gladys, you look gorgeous!
She turns cold, dry, ugly.
Little girls don’t use words like that, she tells me
No, little girls will never again use words like that…
words that sparkle and shine and are filled with love.
**********
oh, I need to tinkle
reallly bad
I just have to get home.
it hurts so bad.
I am going to wet my pants.
Oh, I can ask Gladys if I can use her toilet.
I ring the doorbell.
hurry please, i am bursting.
Gladys, I need to use your toilet.
she is standing in my way, telling me I am bad.
You should go to the bathroom before you get on the bus, she says
Oh no, I am tinkling down my legs.
There is a puddle on the porch.
A puddle on the porch.
It’s tinkle, my tinkle.
my wet everlasting shame.
The Veils
The First Veil
a doorbell rings
Gladys stands in the doorway
I stand in front of her
I have something to give
She shames me for giving
My heart is crushed
and a veil falls
The Second Veil
a doorbell rings
Gladys stands in the doorway
I stand in front of her
I need help
She shames me for needing help
My heart bursts
and a veil falls.
Lifting the Gladys Veils
Doorbells announce
Doorways either open
or close
Gladys closed my doorways
to parts of my soul
I open them now
sixty years later
I teach others
mysterious words
and their meanings
I give others a sacred place to release
the pain they can’t hold back for
one more minute
I ring bells at the doorways of souls.
Thank you, Gladys...you’re gorgeous
and so am I.
Geous
Gor-geous
I can say it.
I know what it means.
Gorgeous
When I say it I am beautiful.
the doorbell rings
a gorgeous sound
I run to open the door
Gladys, you look gorgeous!
She turns cold, dry, ugly.
Little girls don’t use words like that, she tells me
No, little girls will never again use words like that…
words that sparkle and shine and are filled with love.
**********
oh, I need to tinkle
reallly bad
I just have to get home.
it hurts so bad.
I am going to wet my pants.
Oh, I can ask Gladys if I can use her toilet.
I ring the doorbell.
hurry please, i am bursting.
Gladys, I need to use your toilet.
she is standing in my way, telling me I am bad.
You should go to the bathroom before you get on the bus, she says
Oh no, I am tinkling down my legs.
There is a puddle on the porch.
A puddle on the porch.
It’s tinkle, my tinkle.
my wet everlasting shame.
The Veils
The First Veil
a doorbell rings
Gladys stands in the doorway
I stand in front of her
I have something to give
She shames me for giving
My heart is crushed
and a veil falls
The Second Veil
a doorbell rings
Gladys stands in the doorway
I stand in front of her
I need help
She shames me for needing help
My heart bursts
and a veil falls.
Lifting the Gladys Veils
Doorbells announce
Doorways either open
or close
Gladys closed my doorways
to parts of my soul
I open them now
sixty years later
I teach others
mysterious words
and their meanings
I give others a sacred place to release
the pain they can’t hold back for
one more minute
I ring bells at the doorways of souls.
Thank you, Gladys...you’re gorgeous
and so am I.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Lifting the Veils - The Veils From Birth to Seven
Answering Life’s Questions...
Life’s questions begin as feelings: Why do I have this feeling now? Why do I always feel this way? What happened then, that keeps me from feeling the way I want to feel now? How do I let go of old feelings? and so on.
The answers to most, if not all, of life’s questions live in self-knowledge. And self knowledge develops through an understanding of human biographical development in general and one’s own biography in particular. All Inner Life Biography Programs guide you to the questions and answers that heal, liberate and empower all aspects of your life.
Inner Life Biography Programs guide and inspire you to see the details of your life story in the warm light of compassionate objectivity. In the details of your life stories, you find what you seek in your life’s mysterious unfolding.
LIFTING THE VEILS
The First Veils from Birth to Age 7
“ Lynn Jericho's seminars are so very worthwhile. They are engaging, revealing, insightful, and deeply satisfying. Lynn brings great wisdom, humor and kindness as well as a gift for being present with the group and to the needs of individuals.
Working with Lynn has brought clarity of thinking, awareness of feeling and certainty in action to my life. I am grateful to Lynn for offering these seminars and look forward to her future offerings. ”
Lisa Boisvert MacKensie. Editor of The Wonder of Childhood
Do you want to make sense of your life? Lifting the Veils provides a safe, yet challenging, creative way to discover the life and soul shaping energy of your memories. You will meet the stories that have shaped your feeling patterns, your relationship choices, your sense of worth, and your success in living your life.
You may feel you don’t remember much from your first seven years of life, but what you learned in those years is the source of your sense of yourself, your sense of others, your sense of the world and your sense of the future. Not lifting the veils to your early experiences leaves you unconscious and unfree. You remain on automatic, operating on judgements you made before you were capable of discerning any choice.
In order to move beyond instinct and unconsciousness, you must take up the work of re-membering your first seven years. You need solve the mysteries of your patterns and habits of thought, feeling and behavior. You lift each of the veils and begin to see clearly.
Lifting the Veils - The First Veils from Birth to 7. presents a wisdom of the archetypal relationships formed in the first seven years of life and offers a process for each participant to consider how their first seven years unfolded. The course is much more than recollecting the memories and retelling the stories, it is about becoming aware of the learning, the adaptations, the perspectives and the ways of relating formed before you lost a single baby tooth that shaped the rest of your life.
Lifting the Veils is filled with “ahha!” and “oh, my goodness!” and “Now I understand!” Most wonderful is the way this process frees you to experience a new, more loving relationship to your experience of self.
Is Lifting the Veils for You?
Yes, it is for you!
Whether you had a perfect childhood or one filled with unspeakable abuse, this course will give you freedom to be self-aware, self-nurturing, to find your place in the world, to have the confidence to change how you relate to life, to ideas, to choices, to intimacy, to your body, to your work, to growing older, to God, to having fun and all the other myriad aspects of living.
Is Lifting the Veils emotionally safe?
Lifting the Veils, like all the Imagine Self programs, is designed to be practically, emotionally and spiritually supportive of taking the risks necessary to heal, liberate and empower your soul, your inner sense of self.
Each one of us has fears and doubts about this work of finding, knowing and becoming ourselves. Imagine Self programs carry the mood of the Threshold. It is at the Threshold that we become conscious of ourselves. At the Threshold all our protections and defenses start to fade, even disintegrate. Very scary to the part of our souls that clings to the threats and comforts of the past, familiar, even though unfulfilling, but very exhilirating to the part of our souls that wants to live in the mysterious, surprising and fulfilling world of freedom and love, the future free of old scripts and adaptations.
Lifting the Veils provides a dual approach to heart and head. It presents materials that are intellectually sound and emotionally resonant. Both ways of questioning, learning, and maturing are satisfied.
Disclaimer: Lifting the Veils is not a magic wand, silver bullet or a quick fix. It is not designed to rescue, fix or transform. It is a process that requires commitment, patience, perseverance, and work. It is inspiring in its wisdom, guidance and possibilities. It is simply a soul journey on which a single step opens up a new vista on who you are. With each inner step you have arrived at a new inner destination of self to visit, explore, discover.
How does Lifting the Veils Work?
Each session focuses on an archetypal learning experience of early childhood. The clear, creative and compassionate presentations trigger insight, revealation, and understanding. Selfwork exercises to do in between the webinars deepen and empower the process. Then there are the partner conversations which bring a nurturing warmth to your process as you share questions based on the archetypes of the first seven years.
Each session is recorded and materials and suggestions for selfwork are provided. You can relisten to each session as often as you wish. The selfwork exercises can be practiced over and over. Many participants build lasting relationships with their partners — relationships that are based on supporting each others inner development.
Each group has between 4 and 12 particpants. It is intimate.
The course uses phone or skype and your computer (to see the slides). You experience is auditory and visual.
Here is a list of some of the benefits of the program
You will...
The Course Design
Partial descriptions of what is focused on in each session.
Session One - Conception, Gestation & Birth
How these primary experiences shape your life is astounding. We have felt memories and powerfully embedded “instincts” beginning with our conception such as the feeling that we are wanted or not wanted. We learn in those few months how life provides for our needs. We have a lasting impression of how easily we cross thresholds.
Session Two - Space
How do we experience the many relationships to space? Movement, boundaries and limitations, comfort, texture, hidden spaces, natural spaces, forbidden spaces, doorways, chairs, cribs & beds, shelves are all filled with experiences, emotions, demands, and energies.
Session Three - Time
Are you always in a hurry or are you always waiting? How does it feel? How do you feel about the sun, the seasons, birthdays, weekends and darkness. What is your relationship to time?
Session Four - Things & Activities
We fill space with things and we fill time with activities. How do you manage your possessions and your energies? How did your parents? Are you challenged by emptiness or stillness? Do you seek more or less?
Session Five - Your Body
What were you taught about your body and its functions? What were you taught about other people’s bodies? What don’t you know about bodies? What were the body taboos?
Session Six - Emotions & Becoming Social
The role of emotions and our parents reactions to them play a major role in our developing sense of self. How did your parents ability to fulfill their roles shape your relationships with others. How do you feel about being alone? Do you trust others? Do you trust yourself?
Session Seven and Eight - Beyond Your Parents
Many of the most important players in shaping our sense of self were not our parents. They may have been the pediatrician, your mother’s best friend, a neighbor, a friend. Who were the karmic relationships in your first seven years? Looking at the beliefs and traumas that came through your interactions with people who were not a big presence in your life, but a big impact?
8 Weekly Sessions
Tuesday Evenings 7:30 - 9PM Eastern.
October 25 through December 13, 2011
(This program will work for people living in Australia & New Zealand)
Wednesday Afternoons 12 Noon - 1:30PM Eastern
October 26 through December 14, 2011
(This program will work for people living in Europe and the Middle East)
Course fee: $200 (This is the last time this course will be offered at this price. I have been told by too many that this price is not reflective of the quality and value of the content and process. So I am raising the fee in 2012)
Process
We meet via the internet or phone for 90 minutes.
There is a slide presentation on your desktop and you hear Lynn and each other on the computer via Skype or on your phone. Directions for connecting are sent in an email - it is simple. These sessions are recorded and can be downloaded for relistening.
We have personal conversations with partners from the course…
Everyone has a partner for a 30-60+ minute conversation on the weekly topics. These are remarkable and deeply sacred conversations. When each partner is working with the same set of archetypal questions, rich dialogue emerges to nurture and clarify the biographical insights of each. This is awesome, thrilling and by far the most engaging, supportive aspect of the program.
We create personal binders...
Participants are encouraged to create their own binder to fill with the handouts and the selfwork exercises for each session. The handouts include descriptions of the key elements found in our biographies and sets of questions for each topic. Your binder contains all your biography work and your personal biographical reflections - in this case, the story of your first seven years. The binder gives you a place to continue your reflections beyond the frame of the program.
There is a personal conversation with Lynn...
During the course, you will schedule a 20 minute private conversation with Lynn on any personal question you have. More personal time with Lynn is available.
Life’s questions begin as feelings: Why do I have this feeling now? Why do I always feel this way? What happened then, that keeps me from feeling the way I want to feel now? How do I let go of old feelings? and so on.
The answers to most, if not all, of life’s questions live in self-knowledge. And self knowledge develops through an understanding of human biographical development in general and one’s own biography in particular. All Inner Life Biography Programs guide you to the questions and answers that heal, liberate and empower all aspects of your life.
Inner Life Biography Programs guide and inspire you to see the details of your life story in the warm light of compassionate objectivity. In the details of your life stories, you find what you seek in your life’s mysterious unfolding.
LIFTING THE VEILS
The First Veils from Birth to Age 7
“ Lynn Jericho's seminars are so very worthwhile. They are engaging, revealing, insightful, and deeply satisfying. Lynn brings great wisdom, humor and kindness as well as a gift for being present with the group and to the needs of individuals.
Working with Lynn has brought clarity of thinking, awareness of feeling and certainty in action to my life. I am grateful to Lynn for offering these seminars and look forward to her future offerings. ”
Lisa Boisvert MacKensie. Editor of The Wonder of Childhood
Do you want to make sense of your life? Lifting the Veils provides a safe, yet challenging, creative way to discover the life and soul shaping energy of your memories. You will meet the stories that have shaped your feeling patterns, your relationship choices, your sense of worth, and your success in living your life.
You may feel you don’t remember much from your first seven years of life, but what you learned in those years is the source of your sense of yourself, your sense of others, your sense of the world and your sense of the future. Not lifting the veils to your early experiences leaves you unconscious and unfree. You remain on automatic, operating on judgements you made before you were capable of discerning any choice.
In order to move beyond instinct and unconsciousness, you must take up the work of re-membering your first seven years. You need solve the mysteries of your patterns and habits of thought, feeling and behavior. You lift each of the veils and begin to see clearly.
Lifting the Veils - The First Veils from Birth to 7. presents a wisdom of the archetypal relationships formed in the first seven years of life and offers a process for each participant to consider how their first seven years unfolded. The course is much more than recollecting the memories and retelling the stories, it is about becoming aware of the learning, the adaptations, the perspectives and the ways of relating formed before you lost a single baby tooth that shaped the rest of your life.
Lifting the Veils is filled with “ahha!” and “oh, my goodness!” and “Now I understand!” Most wonderful is the way this process frees you to experience a new, more loving relationship to your experience of self.
Is Lifting the Veils for You?
Yes, it is for you!
Whether you had a perfect childhood or one filled with unspeakable abuse, this course will give you freedom to be self-aware, self-nurturing, to find your place in the world, to have the confidence to change how you relate to life, to ideas, to choices, to intimacy, to your body, to your work, to growing older, to God, to having fun and all the other myriad aspects of living.
Is Lifting the Veils emotionally safe?
Lifting the Veils, like all the Imagine Self programs, is designed to be practically, emotionally and spiritually supportive of taking the risks necessary to heal, liberate and empower your soul, your inner sense of self.
Each one of us has fears and doubts about this work of finding, knowing and becoming ourselves. Imagine Self programs carry the mood of the Threshold. It is at the Threshold that we become conscious of ourselves. At the Threshold all our protections and defenses start to fade, even disintegrate. Very scary to the part of our souls that clings to the threats and comforts of the past, familiar, even though unfulfilling, but very exhilirating to the part of our souls that wants to live in the mysterious, surprising and fulfilling world of freedom and love, the future free of old scripts and adaptations.
Lifting the Veils provides a dual approach to heart and head. It presents materials that are intellectually sound and emotionally resonant. Both ways of questioning, learning, and maturing are satisfied.
Disclaimer: Lifting the Veils is not a magic wand, silver bullet or a quick fix. It is not designed to rescue, fix or transform. It is a process that requires commitment, patience, perseverance, and work. It is inspiring in its wisdom, guidance and possibilities. It is simply a soul journey on which a single step opens up a new vista on who you are. With each inner step you have arrived at a new inner destination of self to visit, explore, discover.
How does Lifting the Veils Work?
Each session focuses on an archetypal learning experience of early childhood. The clear, creative and compassionate presentations trigger insight, revealation, and understanding. Selfwork exercises to do in between the webinars deepen and empower the process. Then there are the partner conversations which bring a nurturing warmth to your process as you share questions based on the archetypes of the first seven years.
Each session is recorded and materials and suggestions for selfwork are provided. You can relisten to each session as often as you wish. The selfwork exercises can be practiced over and over. Many participants build lasting relationships with their partners — relationships that are based on supporting each others inner development.
Each group has between 4 and 12 particpants. It is intimate.
The course uses phone or skype and your computer (to see the slides). You experience is auditory and visual.
Here is a list of some of the benefits of the program
You will...
- Know yourself with greater self-compassion
- Discover the fundamental karma of your life
- Find the gift of making the decisions that are right for who you are now and who you are becoming.
- Release family patterns.
- Break your future free from your past.
- Finally understand the root of your feelings.
- Experience finally being the designer of your life.
The Course Design
Partial descriptions of what is focused on in each session.
Session One - Conception, Gestation & Birth
How these primary experiences shape your life is astounding. We have felt memories and powerfully embedded “instincts” beginning with our conception such as the feeling that we are wanted or not wanted. We learn in those few months how life provides for our needs. We have a lasting impression of how easily we cross thresholds.
Session Two - Space
How do we experience the many relationships to space? Movement, boundaries and limitations, comfort, texture, hidden spaces, natural spaces, forbidden spaces, doorways, chairs, cribs & beds, shelves are all filled with experiences, emotions, demands, and energies.
Session Three - Time
Are you always in a hurry or are you always waiting? How does it feel? How do you feel about the sun, the seasons, birthdays, weekends and darkness. What is your relationship to time?
Session Four - Things & Activities
We fill space with things and we fill time with activities. How do you manage your possessions and your energies? How did your parents? Are you challenged by emptiness or stillness? Do you seek more or less?
Session Five - Your Body
What were you taught about your body and its functions? What were you taught about other people’s bodies? What don’t you know about bodies? What were the body taboos?
Session Six - Emotions & Becoming Social
The role of emotions and our parents reactions to them play a major role in our developing sense of self. How did your parents ability to fulfill their roles shape your relationships with others. How do you feel about being alone? Do you trust others? Do you trust yourself?
Session Seven and Eight - Beyond Your Parents
Many of the most important players in shaping our sense of self were not our parents. They may have been the pediatrician, your mother’s best friend, a neighbor, a friend. Who were the karmic relationships in your first seven years? Looking at the beliefs and traumas that came through your interactions with people who were not a big presence in your life, but a big impact?
8 Weekly Sessions
Tuesday Evenings 7:30 - 9PM Eastern.
October 25 through December 13, 2011
(This program will work for people living in Australia & New Zealand)
Wednesday Afternoons 12 Noon - 1:30PM Eastern
October 26 through December 14, 2011
(This program will work for people living in Europe and the Middle East)
Course fee: $200 (This is the last time this course will be offered at this price. I have been told by too many that this price is not reflective of the quality and value of the content and process. So I am raising the fee in 2012)
Process
We meet via the internet or phone for 90 minutes.
There is a slide presentation on your desktop and you hear Lynn and each other on the computer via Skype or on your phone. Directions for connecting are sent in an email - it is simple. These sessions are recorded and can be downloaded for relistening.
We have personal conversations with partners from the course…
Everyone has a partner for a 30-60+ minute conversation on the weekly topics. These are remarkable and deeply sacred conversations. When each partner is working with the same set of archetypal questions, rich dialogue emerges to nurture and clarify the biographical insights of each. This is awesome, thrilling and by far the most engaging, supportive aspect of the program.
We create personal binders...
Participants are encouraged to create their own binder to fill with the handouts and the selfwork exercises for each session. The handouts include descriptions of the key elements found in our biographies and sets of questions for each topic. Your binder contains all your biography work and your personal biographical reflections - in this case, the story of your first seven years. The binder gives you a place to continue your reflections beyond the frame of the program.
There is a personal conversation with Lynn...
During the course, you will schedule a 20 minute private conversation with Lynn on any personal question you have. More personal time with Lynn is available.
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