Inner Easter's Tender Possibilities

 

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Find Yourself   Know Yourself   Become Yourself

April 20, 2011

Your inner life is designed by you for you.

How do you want to design your Inner Easter and Inner Spring?

 

By you, for you!

Read on below, if you want my suggestions of elements to include in your design.


What I write and teach through the Inner Year are suggestions for you to consider as you shape your active inner life.

Use my suggestions your way.

It's Spring and It's Easter.

It's the time to imagine new life and lasting love.

Spring seems fleeting in its newness. Easter seems eternal in its love. Together they wake us up to the celebration and the obligation of ever-renewing, limitless love in our relationships to others.

Inner Easter

Inner Easter is not an Easter shaped by religious tradition and ritual.  It is the Easter you discover in your own soul, living in your own life. 

 

Easter is the time each year when we renew and further deepen our relationship to love and death through contemplating

inwardly celebrating a final feast with our dearest companions,
inwardly surrendering our will to suffering and death as sacrifice to others,
inwardly forgiving,
inwardly descending into hell to redeem and release, and
inwardly resurrecting to a new life.

To inspire our feeling pictures as we seek new life and creative nuance in our relationship to Easter, we can turn to art.  Listen to some great Easter music, read or write great Easter poetry, or look at or make great Easter paintings or sculptures.  Let the art be yeast bubbling up in the sweet warmth of your heart. What feelings arise in you? Are they new feelings about the Christ Mystery? Do they give you a new illuminating sense of who you are and what you are capable of offering?

It seems strange to write this, but the blessings of the technology, means that I can turn my mechanical laptop into an inspiring altar.  I can download Mahler's Resurrection Symphony on itunes and play it while reading and speaking outloud Rilke's beautiful poem "The Last Supper" and then listen to Judy Collins singing "Morning Has Broken" while gazing at the Isenheim Altarpiece.  

 

And then, I can close my eyes and let my feelings open up to what lives in my heart as the art of my soul.

 

Tenderness

 

Just this morning in a conversation with a dear friend the word "tenderness" was spoken. Tenderness. I knew immediately that that word had been placed into the conversation so that I might realize and share that the mood of Easter is tenderness, calm, resilient tenderness.  As you meditate, listen, see, penetrate, imagine Inner Easter, do so with tenderness. 

 

Revisiting To Be Surprised

Last year on my blog, I shared some intimate ways to see the Easter mysteries and meanings reflected in your own life.  I included audios.  I've reread what I wrote and relistened to what I spoke. The perspectives and questions surprised me and challenged me in new ways.  So I have put the links here.  Revisit the blogs, download the audios and spend some time with them over these days of Easter. I hope you will share my surprise and uncover new layers of personal meaning.

Your Last Supper

http://theinneryear.blogspot.com/2010/03/inner-easter-your-last-supper.html

Your Crucifixion

http://theinneryear.blogspot.com/2010/04/inner-easter-your-inner-crucifixion.html

Your Descent into Hell

http://theinneryear.blogspot.com/2010/04/inner-easter-holy-saturday.html

Your Resurrection

http://theinneryear.blogspot.com/2010/04/inner-easter-your-resurrection.html

Please go to the blog and leave your Easter comments to inspire the rest of us.

 

Inner Spring Programs

 

Next week I will be sending out the information on the upcoming Inner Spring webinars which focus on mysteries of our relationships with others:

Imagining Intimacy
Sundays, May 1 - May 22

Learning the Language of the Four Temperaments.
Sundays, May 29 - June 19

 

 

Tender Blessings for Your Inner Easter,

Lynn

Inner Easter - Your Last Supper

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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