Inner Easter - Your Resurrection

This Easter Sunday feel the sun rising in your heart of hearts flooding you with the light of freedom and the warmth of love.  Be new. 

 

This newness is not a new reflection of the old, familiar you.  It is new to the core. Everything in you that could suffer and die, everything in you that felt the fires of inner hell is gone.  You greet your companions and they do not recognize you.  You look in the mirror of your soul and see a self that is definitely you but so strange and different.You and I in our spiritually fragile development can only hold this experience for a moment. 

 

I am frustrated sharing my inadequate words.  I can only apologize for my lack of poetic elegance and assure you that my weak images do not reflect a weak conviction regarding the Inner Easter moments we each experience.  

 

 I want to share one contemporary poem that sings of the Easter mystery.  Derek Walcott wrote it.

Love After Love

The time will come 
when,

with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving


at your own door, in your own mirror


and each will smile at the other's welcome,

 



and say, sit here. Eat. 


You will love again the stranger who was your self.


Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart


to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

 



all your life, whom you ignored


for another, who knows you by heart.


Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

 



the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.


Sit. Feast on your life. 


 

If we let our old ways die and restore wholeness to our soul, we become new. Spiritually we remain ourselves, but without the limiting and often distorting context of our past to define our form we become different.  We become unrecognizable to ourselves and to all our companions.  We have risen to a new way of being.  This is the challenge and the reality of our inner resurrection experience.  We surprise ourselves for brief moments, we know joy.  Not a joy that is compared to a suffering.  No, resurrection joy is suffering turned inside out.

The Resurrection of 2000 years ago made it possible for each of us to have resurrection moments in our souls. Easter comes once a year to remind us to pay attention to our resurrection moments. Not just to pay attention, but to have faith in them.

I have suffered my heart being broken only to find it healed in a moment.  The healed heart is a new heart, not a mended heart.  It is a heart that has no memory of it's suffering and death.  It is resurrected and filled with new love and new freedom. 

In the audio I speak to the mystery of inner resurrection and the challenge of being new. 

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.

Living in the Southern Hemisphere

Dear Friends in the Southern Hemisphere,

With Inner Christmas and The Inner Year I am always thinking about you. I know your natural world meets the Sun in the reverse of my Northern Temperate experience. I wonder about your experience and how my thoughts meet your feelings.

The individuals who determined the dating of the Christian festivals lived in the Northern Hemisphere long before there was awareness that the Earth was a globe. They made their dating decisions based on the Gospels and the seasonal Pagan Festivals (which in so many ways reflected the unfolding of the events of the three years of Jesus).

Your intuition and the strength of your soul's connection to the seasons of Nature or to the Christian traditions will guide how you work with the thoughts on the Inner Year.

I encourage you to explore your inner experience. Develop your own way of following your Inner Year. Try reversing the festivals and see if it feels "right." Remember in the Spiritual World there are no calendars.

All things are relative in your imagination and in your heart. If you work with Inner Easter and the mood of the vernal equinox (when light overcomes darkness) when your days begin to darken, you may find that in six months your soul will awaken in some new and meaningful way. Perhaps it is your destiny to find spiritual growth in dealing with paradox and reversal.

Please post your experience as I know so many of my friends in the Southern Hemisphere wonder and even struggle with this question.

Inner Easter

Saying Goodbye to Winter

We have moved into another Spring. Winter has ended. You have lived 13 weeks or 91 days. Your soul has thought, felt and willed a season of life.

Spend a few moments reviewing your Winter. What thoughts stand out from the ordinary and the forgotten? What feelings colored your soul with shades of light and dark and warmth and cold? What deeds moved from thought to loving action? What did you learn about yourself? About those you love? work with? admire? resent? What happened in this season that you need to grieve or need to celebrate?

Easter, Nature and Your Soul

Easter is the time of Balance. We find the balance of life and death in the soul and the balance of light and dark in nature.

Wikipedia has a beautiful description and some great images of equinox. I urge you to spend a few minutes reading the article.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox

After reading this article on the Equinox, reflect on how much the experience of the Equinox is dependent on your place of observation.Where in the world are you? Which hemisphere do you live in? Between the equator and the pole - where is your latitude?

How you experience your life depends on where you are in your life. How you experience the light and dark of your inner life is so relative and so mysterious. Bringing your Inner Sun, the spiritual experience of "I am," to the equator of your soul and dwelling in the eternal moment of self-enlightenment is the goal of spiritual practice.

Nature's equinox occurs for a moment twice a year. Solstice occurs twice a year giving opposing experiences at the poles. Equinox is the perfect moment of "in between." Have you known the perfect between" in your soul? Or are you always seeking a polar moment? Where in your soul life do you find seemingly endless soul light? What do you find there? What about seemingly endless soul darkness?

In the seasonal mood of the Vernal Equinox, can you feel the natural fit of the Easter imagination? Out of the "dead" earth, new "life" sprouts in spring. With Easter we are drawn to the mysteries of death and of resurrection.

Death and Resurrection

How does your soul experience death? Is it the disappearance of a living thought of truth, a living feeling for beauty, a living intention for goodness? Is it the death of a loving and responsible relationship to the world, to the past, to the future, to another, to yourself? And is the death such a profound loss that you are willing to walk through hell, a deep personal hell, to find a greater inner sense of self that will resurrect or restore the dead to new life, meaning, purpose, significance?

One image illuminating Inner Easter is unselfishness. The Resurrection of the Christ is not selfish. It is a deed of cosmic devotion and cosmic destiny.

Resurrect only what lives in your soul to serve others and the future. Resurrect the thoughts, feelings, intentions, relationships that bear your "I am," not those that merely provide the pleasure of "me, my, and mine." Resurrection for selfish and egotistical reasons is cloning and not resurrection. Cloning of the soul stops inner evolution and personal growth.

Celebrating Inner Resurrection

In the course of every year, we make choices that crucify our higher self and true destiny. We crucify our higher self and our life's noble destiny with inner attachment to the superficial, the transient, the habitual, the easy, and the selfish.

Easter is a time to reflect on those choices, not to recrucify ourselves, but to resurrect ourselves. We can resurrect our devotion to the profound, the lasting, the creative, the challenging and the loving.


How long would it take to deepen your awareness of the superficial, the transient, the habitual, the easy and the selfish attachments in our daily lives? Perhaps we could make lists of the aspects of our lives that deaden our spirit. Consider how these attachments kill the True, the Beautiful and the Good in our souls? Write journal entries or poems about the crucifying and the resurrecting choices of your life.


As I work with the possibilities of the Inner Year, I am amazed at the graceful connectedness between the esoteric meanings of the Christian Festivals and the moods and questions supporting a rich and healthy unfolding soul life. What other time of year would nurture the soul's reflections on death and resurrection?

Bring the dawning of new life to your soul. Live into the mood of Easter.

One Woman's Death and Resurrection - An Easter Inspiration

Jill Bolte Taylor shares the story of her death and resurrection in an 18 minute video - http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229. Inspired by her brother's affliction with the brain disorder, schizophrenia, Jill devoted her career to neuroanatomy and ways to understand and heal the brain. She was highly respected brain researcher at Harvard when she suffered a major stroke at age 37.

In this inspiring video, Jill shares how she lived her "death" and her "resurrection." Whether you are more of a scientist or a spiritualist, you will find her talk amazing. It is truly an Inner Easter story.

Comments, please!

Inner Easter awakens many complex and personal thoughts and feelings. Please share your experience, your imaginations and your hopes. I will offer another posting in time for Whitsun or Pentecost, 50 days after Easter.