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

Happiness or Wisdom?

It’s amazing and thrilling to me... over 4000 people opened the email I sent out on “Is This You???” I’ve received many, many responses - more than I can answer. This has given me the idea to include a “Is This You?” statement in each newsletter in the future.  Some of you even suggested other statements which felt wonderful. Please engage and continue to send me your statements of inner qualities, characteristics and perspectives - I will share them with all my readers.

Many of the responses were single words like “WOW” and “YES.” A lot of you took the time to right a comment about each of the twelve.  One reader said she was going to design a birthday card using the twelve statements and send it to her friends. Wow and  yes to that idea.

I do regret not posting the twelve statements here on the blog allowing the comments to be available to everyone. It was not wise and I am not happy, but I have learned. 

WISDOM OR HAPPINESS?

Number five on the list: “You would rather be wise than happy - although you find real joy in crossing the thresholds of inner experience.” received the most response.

Some people gave very thoughtful defenses of happiness as a primary and essential goal. 

I am so grateful for your challenges, deeply grateful.  All of you have pushed me to look at both happiness and wisdom in new and more objective and reflective ways.  What is the experience of happiness?? What is wisdom?  How do I relate to each and how do they relate, if at all, to each other?

Seeking the wisdom to answer these questions has caused me to sacrifice the happiness of at least two hours of early morning sleep for the last week!  Here are some of the thoughts that seemed to have some real inspiration living in them as they appeared in my consciousness.

 My Reflections on Wisdom and Happiness

Wisdom is as vast, and limitless as the cosmos. Happiness is small, brief, and contained within the personal. I lay no ownership on wisdom, but my happiness is mine and no other’s.

What is happiness?  Here’s my living (growing and evolving, becoming more complex with each reflection) and most “noble”list of my lasting happiness goals. (but do they answer the "what is" question?)



I feel health in my body, my earthly existence. There is a certain creative tension between arousal, confidence, and calm in just the right relative measures.  I feel a radiant and grounded presence of truth, beauty and goodness. I feel that whatever I need is available and generously provided. I am loved and loving. I am secure and stable, but also ready for surprise.  I feel a relaxed, contained enthusiasm for life. I am standing in the light and the light that shines from within me is seen by those I love. What I have to give is received. My relationships are harmonious and flexible.

Some of my happy moments...

I am ‘‘happy” when I enjoy a great ginger margarita or my hair sylist gives me a great cut and blow dry.  I am in bliss after a 90 minute massage. I feel joy waking up to a crystal clear sunny day after a good storm in the night. I can’t begin to speak of the happiness of loving my grandchildren (actually all children, puppies and kittens).  I love surrendering to my desires and sharing magical moments with the man I love.

but they are so fleeting...

The margarita gets drunk(well, that has two truths living in it.) My very fine hair can’t hold a style for more than 15 minutes before flattening and hair grows unevenly no matter how well cut. And so on.  Even my grandchildren are blessedly growing and becoming different with every breath - this is the closest experience I have to lasting happiness as long as I don’t get attached to the adorableness of a particular gesture. And the man I love is … sometimes a very challenging soap opera.

Happiness is found in the memories of our stories and in our sensations.  Wisdom is the penetration and ultimately the dissolving of opinions/stories and the transformation and purification of sensations. (That’s a whole other post I will write soon)

The challenge with wisdom is that it forms out of suffering. (We don't need to seek suffering as it arrives with the breath of life.) Wisdom awakes and gives meaning, purpose and significance to suffering.  Rudolf Steiner says it beautifully, “Wisdom is crystalized suffering.” The heart crystalizes, not the head, as the heart is capable of suffering and the head by itself is not. Heads do not feel but hearts can think.

Suffering is not the cause heartbreak as wise hearts do not break.  What can break is faith in the image that symbolizes truth, beauty, goodness and finally, the loss of faith in all forms of love ( agape, eros, philia and storge). Wise hearts do not harden as the heart is the organ of responsiveness and as long as blood/life flows the heart responds with powerful tenderness. What can harden is the vessels of blood when blood/life stops flowing because of attachment to the temporary things that offer happiness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love and freedom.

When we can observe/suffer the height, depth and breadth of our happiness we become wise.  This is equally true for observing our grief, our love, our sadness, our fear, our doubt, our resentment, our boredom. 

When we die it is not our happiness we take with us, it is our wisdom.

Wisdom requires compassion. The wise soul knows that it is one with the world.

Wisdom frees us from anxiety and awakens an emotional equanimity.  Wisdom observes and relates in an inner freedom. Wisdom does not react to its observation but learns from it. 

Because our hearts and bodies know happiness is fleeting there is that moment when we, the selfish mind realizes there will be an end to a particular source of happiness and it will be replaced by the nasty, obsessive longing for happiness. We feel anxiety begin its disturbing trickle. What would you do to stop the trickle from flooding your soul?

Or maybe it feels the opposite, that it is not a trickle in of anxiety but a leaking out of happiness and the encroaching sense of desolation.  What will you do to plug the leak and stop the encroaching pain?

These are the right questions for this time of the Inner Year. It is the soul season to do the work of Inner Lent and face what makes you susceptible to temptations.  Yes, it is wisdom that vanquishes the devil, not happiness.

Feeling Blessed and Full of Grace

 

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March 25, 2011

At the beginning of the week, my inbox was full of beautiful writings about the Vernal Equinox, Ostara, and Spring and I had thought about offering my own thoughts on the new season.

 

The Annunciation

 

But a few weeks ago, as the Cherry Plums began to bloom here in South Devon, I noticed on the calendar the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25. The inner question marks bloomed in my soul like the Cherry Plums -- What is the experience of Inner Annunciation?  I’ve surrendered to the questions and today on the Annunciation I want to share the results of my wonderings .

As with the other Christian Festivals, I look for meaning and relationships that are esoteric, hidden, personal, evolved, immediate, even practical, and outside the traditions of institutionalized Christianity. I connect with the Festivals as true and archetypal models of how each of us can incarnate the divine, fulfill our destiny and manifest goodness in the world.

You might want to go here to read the various versions of the Annunciation from the Bible and the beautiful version from the Koran.  You will also find a gallery of Annunciation art - so many painters have found inspiration in the story.  Plan on giving your soul at least 5-10 minutes of the healing beauty of these images.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation

 

The Results of My Wonderings

 

Archangels appear when a divine impulse will change the future of human existence or human consciousness. They announce, make whole, enlighten and protect the impulses living in our souls.  The impulse they attend to can be subtle and delicate or grand and powerful but the impulse is not personal and will impact more than an individual and more than the moment.

A virgin is pure, innocent and has yet to receive.  In each of us, in our consciousness, at any moment there is a place of virginity.  This is the place where we receive Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions. When we become aware of these divine impulses we often feel surprised and unworthy and wonder how this could be.

Immersed in the materialism of our modern times, it is difficult to realize in our humility that we are blessed and full of grace in these moments.

In your inner experience of the Annunciation, feel your way into an intimate connection to this festival.  Take a spring walk and quietly bend to your innocence.  Think back on your inner annunciations.  Consider how you let the divinely conceived grow in your inner womb until it is time to birth.

Blessings on the Blessed,

Lynn

Those constant temptations...

What is the meaning of Lent for your soul?

In the cycle of the Inner Year, the first quarter of the year is spent working with your relationship to yourself:

Inner Epiphany celebrates and deepens your sense of the purpose living in your existence.

Imagining Your Contribution addresses the evolving needs and expressions of that purpose. 

Then comes Inner Lent, the time of facing the possibility that you may be tempted to forego your purpose for more immediate and seductive powers and pleasures.


365 days a year, I succumb to little temptations. Don’t you?

There is always some voice urging me to turn a stone to bread, leap off some high perch trusting the angels to rescue me before I crash on the ground, and the great temptation to be right, to know it all.  And I succumb...dumb!

A stone is not bread and never satisfies my appetite.

Angels come to my side when I walk firmly on the ground, but laugh at my ridiculous attempts to magically fly through the day or the deed. The sound of angels laughing at my foolishness is an absolutely cringing sensation.

And being right, has nothing to do with being alive and in the moment. The sense of being right relates to a past and very dead moment.  Being right has no lasting power. If I arrogantly attach my life to a story of the past, time, the world and real joy pass me by.

Inner Lent is the time when my inner learning, my self-knowledge, focuses on my relationship to temptation.

Won’t you join me?

Inner Lent, like all of the Inner Year programs, offers archetypal imaginations and questions that guide and support you in your very unique and ,just right for you and only you” awakening and understanding of your soul’s unfolding.

I’ve made a recording of some thoughts on the first questions of Inner Lent. I look at the landscape of inner isolation and the experience of inner fasting. I describe why Inner Lent is connected, not to Inner Easter, but to the experience of Inner Baptism. 

As I write this, I keep struggling with the third temptation. I keep wanting to rerecord and make my thoughts perfect, so right that I would stand in glory above the world. Yuk, yuk, yuk!! 

Listen to my imperfect thoughts.  In spite of their imperfection you may find encouragement and inspiration for you own Inner Lent.
Click here to listen...

Then consider engaging in a deeper look at your relationship to each of the three temptations and their appearance in the modern soul (that’s our souls) as addiction, fantasy and prejudice. This is the Inner Lent program of three webinars and a bunch of great materials. 
You can click here to go to my “store” to register for the Inner Lent program. (I’ll be sending out at least one more email next week sharing more about the content of the webinar and how you might find real value in it.)

One reason to signup - to keep you focused on your Inner Lent, as our daily lives are so filled with temptations that distract us from the work of self-knowledge and our inner development.  It is so sad to let these rich inner seasonal possibilities slip by.  Yes, we can work on our addictions, fantasies and prejudices at any time of the year, but we do so without the support of the cosmos.  Now is the time when the cosmic design where the human soul finds alignment with divine intention and the course of the sun and the greatest amount of light shines down on these inner 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.

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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

The Sense of Thought

The Sense of Thought or Meaning

Like the word sense, the sense of thought is difficult to describe and imagine.  

I struggled to write this and suspect you will struggle to make sense of it all.  The three “highest” senses of word, thought and "I" are so beyond our ordinary thinking.

Last week we attempted to think of the perception of word, language and gesture isolated from the perception of thought or meaning.  Not easy and for many of us not possible. But perceiving is not thinking!! It lives more in the realm of intelligence, rather than intellect.

 

Let me offer a metaphor for the relationship of word to thought. If I dive into a pond, I can float or swim in the water.  The water carries me, just as words carry thoughts.  The water is not me and the word (or words) is not the thought or meaning.

Stop reading right now and think about the last few times you perceived the words “I love you.” Obviously, you perceived the same words but did you perceived the same meaning each time? Or consider the word “green” referring to the color of a pine tree, an olive, or a dollar bill. Different, different, different.

When I am working with my clients, five of them may say “I am angry with my spouse” or “I don’t know what my destiny is.” Same words, different meaning with each client. I must perceive the meaning being carried by the words or I must ask my client to find more distinct expresssion or words for carrying the truest meaning.

I see a smile or a tear on a clients face, what do they mean? Same gesture, different meaning.

In my teleseminars and my messages, I use words to convey meaning.  I work very hard to make sure  the words I use are the right words - that they point to the meaning I am intending to awaken in the perceiver.  Likewise, I work very hard in discerning the meaning in the words my client is speaking, in the gestures of their facial expressions and so on.

This sense is very challenging to pay attention to.  Often we rely on a previous perception. Get caught in biographical memory or the perspectives of certain identities - never risking going outside the box.  Ideally, we are always perceiving new meaning, meaning free of past perceptions or prejudices and seek the true meaning behind the words in the moment.

The practice of sacred attention is the full awareness of the hearing, word and meaning perceptions, subtle, profound, mysterious. And the pursuit of perception of true and momentary  meaning is a high and noble endeavor in the realm of the senses and the realm of the soul seeking spiritual significance through earthly and sensuous manifestation.


Bringing our attention to the development of this sense of thought can lead to hesitancy and confusion.  Without courage we conform, to cultural or family determined meanings. With courage we step outside the givens and the formals and risk awakening to something alive, challenging, even creatively uncertain.

This week look beyond the word, see beyond the gesture.  Ask yourself what is the deepest meaning I perceive in this phrase, this sentence, this paragraph of ideas?

Poetry often begins in thought and seeks elegant expression in words.  Instead of just speaking familiar words that have lost their meaning, write a poem today. You will feel more alive in your soul.

The Sense of Word

The Sense of Word


I was with my grandson for a month, a very vocal month.  For a couple of weeks, as he turned six months old, he was delighting in the sounds he could make. From grunts to squeals he was learning how to master the range of his voicebox.  On the last day he was sitting on his father’s lap and we let our friend’s dogs in.  They came up to the baby, sniffed, licked and walked away.  Edon wanted more.  He stretched out his arms and called out to the dogs.  He didn’t use a real word but it was a distinct sound with a distinct desire behind it.  Language as a conveyor of personal reality was being born.  Edon was not just making sounds and finding his voice, he was speaking and gesturing. And blessedly, I perceived this first attempt at language.

Words, language and gestures bear meanings but are not the meaning.  They are form but not substance.  In most cases, they carry merely parts of the meaning but not the whole. 

With the sense of word, language and gesture, we perceive the sounds of vowels and consonants. We notice syllables. And we notice intention. We actively shape our words. We choose our words and we perceive the choosing of words.

My mother tongue is English.  My words are American, a combination of Long Island and South Florida dialects.  I also use jargon words, esoteric words, slang, etc stemming from my studies and my interests. I am female. And it is important to know that most of my choice of words and my pleasure in perceiving certain words is loaded with the emotional and intellectual shadings of my biography - my joys and sorrows.

Because most of us confuse words with meaning and are not aware that the perception of words is distinct from the perception of meaning, we get into states of misunderstanding, confusion and distraction in our learning, our relationships and our communications.


Sometimes people don’t know what my words or gestures mean. They have either a different personal history with the word or a different language all together. An Italian or a Chinese perceives my words and could parrot them, but his sense of my meaning is lost in the simple perception of language. And then there is the struggle with spouses, lovers, parent, children and others so familiar and dear, that sometimes don’t hear the words, let alone care about the personal meaning they bear.


But what is really scary is sometimes I don’t know what my words mean to me or I use the wrong words for the meaning I want to convey. A word I was working with as I thought about this little essay was “money.” Money is a word I perceive and load with lots of emotional meanings and little thought.
I can define words in isolation but put them in a string of words, a sentence, and put the sentence in a context of even more complex meaning and I must work to perceive the meaning of the word in the context of many words.

Most words have several meanings.  One word with many subtle meanings is the word “love.”  I perceive the word and a million possible meanings appear.  How do I perceive the exact meaning in the moment?  Not by perceiving the word.  (Next week I will share about the thought sense which allows us to perceive meaning even when the meaning conflicts with the words being used!)

This week notice words.  And notice body words or gestures.  Notice how you use the word or react to the word and ignore or miss the meaning. And notice how your perception of the word is tied to your biography with the word.  (I could write pages about my biography with the money words!)

Here is a great article on language and thinking that was in the New York Times Sunday Magazine last week. It’s a great read.

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

Here is the website to create a word cloud out of any written document. http://www.wordle.net/ A word cloud works with the sense of word.  It is fun to play with.

Summer Questions

Do you have any summer questions? You know the ones about wishing life was different? They pop into your thoughts while you are walking along the beach or wishing you were.

What part of your life do you think about changing, making better, enjoying more?

Your relationship?
Your work?
Your finances?
Your body?
Your discipline?
Your parenting?
Your celebrating?
Your decision-making?


What feelings do you have that you want to understand, release, balance?
Your guilt?
Your grief?
Your doubt?
Your anxiety?
Your irritability?
Your confusion?
Your frustration?

What part of your spiritual life would you like to deepen, clarify, speak about?
Your meditative life?
Your faith?
Your practice?
Your tradition?

In the past, my work as a personal counselor has been limited to commitments to on-going conversations lasting months or even years. I still work this way.

But I realize that this long-term process is not always needed. Often you just have one question that you would like to explore through a creative conversation with someone skilled in listening and understanding. Maybe get a viewpoint that might move you to a new freedom around the topic.

I work with my clients over the phone or via skype. Skype is a way to have a conversation over the internet. We can do it with video and see each other. It free and lots of fun.

During July and August, I am offering Summer Conversations. You can schedule a Summer Conversation with me on Tuesday between Noon and 8PM or Saturday between 8AM and Noon. Conversations can be 20, 40, 60 or 80 minutes in length.
the cost is $40 for each 20 minutes.

To schedule a conversation go to
http://www.lynnjericho.genbook.com

Or call me directly at 646-797-9669.

Two Things to Ask Before Having a Conversation With a Spiritual Being

The First Question:

What is a conversation?

How many conversations do you have in the course of a day, a week, a year, a lifetime?

Having been part of so many conversations, how do you define conversation? If you were to write your own definition of conversation would it change your response to the the question about how many conversations do you have?

Let me help you with your thinking about the meaning of conversation.

The key root to converse is a Latin word, vertare, which means to turn. Con, of course means with. Conversation as a word means “turning with.”

When I think of “turning with” two images appear: spirals and dancing.

Spirals: spinning inward to the details or outward to the expansions.

Dancing: leading and following, choreography, navigating the floor.

How do I “turn with” in the art of speaking and listening? I turn toward and in turning toward, I also turn away.

I am turning toward my conversation partner and away from myself when I listen. I am turning toward myself and away from my partner when I am speaking.

What speaking and listening is not a conversation? I think of empty phrases, reporting of data, untruths. What else?

Do I pay attention to this turning? Does it matter?

Are most of my conversations about thoughts and ideas, about feelings and emotions, or about deeds and possibilities? What does the content of the conversation tell me about my turning and what I turn with?

And the contexts of my conversations? What are they?

Do work with these questions. Any answers you come up with write them down and then turn them into questions. Wisdom lives in the next questions, so always find the next questions. Is there a conversation if there is no question? Is the question the turning?


I want to read your thoughts on conversation. Please leave a comment below.
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To learn the second question you must ask before having a conversation with a spiritual being, wait for my next post to the Inner Year blog in a few days.

November in the Inner Year is the time to pay attention to conversations with Spiritual Beings. The darkening of the Sun asks us to turn away from material existence and the surface of things. The soul is turning toward what exists beyond the surface seeking spiritual contexts and content and beings behind, beyond, below and above.

Now is the time to evolve your capacity to have conversations of all kinds and all purposes with spiritual beings. Learn the meaning, the design and the grace of these conversations.

I am offering a 4 session Inner Year teleseminar: Having Conversations With Spiritual Beings. In the teleseminar we will explore these questions and others about conversations. There are two options for this teleseminar series. The Basic is 4-40 minute presentations of content. It is essentially a lecture over the phone. You will find lots of insight and creative possibilities on having conversations with spiritual beings. However, it is not a conversation. If you want to engage in a conversation on having conversations with spiritual beings, you will want to take the Intensive Option which includes many conversations. (I didn’t make this distinction between the two learning options until I wrote this blog.) Visit here to learn more about the teleseminars.

Do invite your conversation partners in life to join you in the teleseminars. Forward this blog to all your friends.

Three Adversaries to a Good Life

The adversaries to a good life are many. They sneak into our personal thoughts, feelings and behaviors and oppose our healing, our liberation and our empowerment - the good life. They are internal and external forces that distract, disturb, delay or destroy our attention and intention. When we seek to learn or express truth, beauty or goodness, they confuse us and cause us to doubt. They work to get us stuck, when we need to move. They demand we resent, when we need to forgive. They seduce. They inflate. They arouse selfish desires. And so much more.

The adversaries know how to hide in the shadows of our consciousness and circumstances while they play with us. They are masters at “smoke and mirrors.” They create illusions and delusions as they convince us they are good, supportive, comfortable or essential. They will appear of little consequence in the long run of life and convince us to ignore them or they will appear so large, so dramatic, so powerful, so threatening, so beyond our little selves that we could never, ever grasp them, tame them, or vanquish them.

We need to meet the adversaries in the full light of consciousness, our own individual consciousness. We each need our own awareness of these opposers of the good life.

Three Adversaries

Procrastination - put it off. Cras is Latin for tomorrow. Crastinus is Latin for belonging to tomorrow. Life is a verb. You are a verb. Your actions express who you are. Your actions reveal your meaning and significance. Procrastination is a resistance and failure to act in the right time. Do you initiate action and fail to complete it? Or do you fail to initiate and begin the deed? I struggle with completion for the most, putting off the logical steps and trying to leap to a miracle. But when it comes to initiating, here are a few little demons: I put off asking for help. I put off celebrating my life. I put off cleaning up my messes. I put off telling my truth. I put off having fun. I put off managing my money.

Do you sleep better because you have so much to do tomorrow or because you got so much done today? Like me, you probably get more done in a day than you realize. There is a reason to review your day - but the adversaries of procrastination don't want you to do it.

What do I do with all the time I have today because I put off doing everything until the tomorrow that never comes? I think or, to use a better word, I perseverate. Perseverate is to repetitively think a thought long beyond the need to think it. I avoid doing by thinking and thinking and thinking. Others do and do and do to avoid thinking or feeling. Which leads to the next adversary I want to write about.

Habit - an addictive or automatic way of thinking, feeling or acting. Habits dull us, our minds, our hearts, our will. Sharp minds, sensitive hearts, and skilled will keep us strong against other adversaries and capable of many good deeds. We all proudly list our good habits but I will take the risk of asking what is good about any habit? What is good about any action that does not have thought living in it? Do I do a better job brushing my teeth if I think about what I am doing, how I am doing it and why I am doing it while I am doing it? In our crazy world of multi-tasking there is less and less attention and more and more reliance on habit. Does this make for a good life? Habit leads to conformity and the denial of our individuality. We become thoughtlessly obedient to convenience and automaticity. We risk becoming a machine. How great for the adversaries of freedom.

Minimalization - making something small, insignificant, meaningless and unreal.
We take a view of something and determine it is not worthy of attention. We take something in our lives that is significant in its impact and we pretend it is insignificant. We experience something that is bad and convince ourselves that it is okay, normal, even good. Or we look at something that is quite wonderful and dismiss it as ordinary.

How can we express or recognize truth, beauty or goodness in a minimized reality? How can we confront lies, distortion, and harm in a minimized reality?

A good life only exists in the reality of reality.

What are you minimizing in your life? Your loneliness, your anger, your talents, your joy? Look at pretense in your life. What do you pretend is okay, when it is not? Why do you do this? What is really cool and fabulous in your life that you pretend is flawed or insignificant? Why do you do this?


Procrastination, habit and minimalization are adversaries. They are forms of evil. Not doing something in a timely way, not doing something with full consciousness, not seeing the true reality of something will keep us from the good life.

As you look at procrastination, habit and minimalization in your life, observe, don't judge. Evil wants you to judge yourself. Through self-judgment, we identify with and strengthen the adversarial forces. Compassionate self-awareness is our empowerment and redemption.

As you pay attention to “the adversaries,” as you learn the subtle manipulations of evil, you will discover in yourself the following benefits, the elements of a good life:

• Courage
• Compassion
• Stable Balance
• Capacity to take a stand based on moral imagination
• Evolution - growing the wise heart.

Where do we engage with the questions of forces of opposition, of evil? When do we become aware of the role of evil in our personal lives? What are the benefits of meeting evil?

To sign up for my teleseminar on Evil (Sundays at 8:00PM - 9:00PM)
October 11,18, 25 please go to
www.lynnjericho.com/catalog.

Please comment and share your experiences with these three adversaries.

Defining and Finding Balance

The Mysteries and Questions of Balance

Late summer, as the crispness of autumn air begins to energize us, we find the cosmic forces supporting our souls in the organization of our lives. This is the time of year to contemplate balance.

How balanced is your life? How balanced would you like it to be? What is a balanced life anyway?“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”
Thomas Merton

Balance is a mystery. Is it about feeling harmony (such a sweet word, but a word that has little reality beyond a wish in today’s crazy demanding times)? Is it about maintaining emotional equanimity - not getting too high or too low? Or is it about not falling off the tightrope of life? Is it about having a keystone that holds everything together and upright? Maybe it is about symmetry or equality. What is balance?

Balance and Babies

We might learn about balance if we look at how we develop physical balance in our first year of life.

Balance begins with our eyes. Both eyes need to work together for proper vision. We learn to focus. Balanced vision!

Our next miracle of balance is the ability to balance our heavy little heads on top of our spines. Here we gain the ability to look up to the heavens, down to the earth and straight ahead without having our skull waver and shake. We learn to move our head from side to side, look around and come back to center. A balanced head!

Then we learn to balance on our sitz bones and sit up. This balance makes it possible to use our arms and hands. We reach out to what we want. We can push away what we don’t want. Balanced desires and the ability to accept and reject!

Finally, we stand upright on our heels balancing our body so that we can move about the world, follow a path, reach our destination. A core sense of self and the ability to stand in the vertiginous world!

Balance is about focus, observation and midpoint. Balance is about being clear about what we want and don’t want. Balance is about walking our path.

Do you have trouble focusing? Can you observe your life with compassion and integrity? Do you have a strong sense of your own center?

How much stuff clutters your life because you can’t say no or let go? How much have you missed because you couldn’t grasp the truth of your desires?

What would make it easier to stay committed to your path? Your path of joy? of contribution? of health?

Establishing and maintaining balance is an endless exercise of grace. You need to have deep even breathing, a focal point, a center of gravity, and a straight spine that keeps you upright as you speed through the constantly changing and landscape of your life.

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Explore Your Life's Balance Teleseminar

Join the Mysteries and Questions of Balance Teleseminar - four 90 minute sessions that will bring new meaning and new capacity to balance in your life.

7:30 PM - 9:00PM Eastern
Mondays
August 31, September 14, 21, 28 (skips Labor Day!)
Only 12 spaces available.

$120

Register for the Balance Teleseminar here.

Inner Vacation

In the lazy, hazy days of summer, I hope you have a sweet restorative inner vacation - full of fun and full of meaning.

I just looked up the definition(s) of vacation and found some real inspiration for self-awareness and some yummy food for thought.

Vacation is

1. an extended period of recreation.
2. a fixed holiday between terms as in school or law courts
3. the action of leaving something once occupied.

In thinking about these definitions I came up with some thoughts on the meaning, purpose and significance of vacation.

As children we learn that vacation means play and fun. Many of us continue with that picture of vacation but a vacation can be so much more. Using the three definitions above (in reverse order), I share some deeper perspectives on what a vacation can mean to us as we live our lives.

Vacating an Occupation

A vacation occurs when you leave a state or occupation of existence, activity, familiarity, identity, sameness, competency, ordinariness, and experience something different or new. A sacred vacation provides a new way of knowing yourself, your world and your future. Some part or all that has occupied your inner or outer life is left behind either temporarily or permanently. Do you need to leave something behind? Do you vacate and take a break from the “givens” of your life? Do you need permission to let go?

Between Terms

A vacation is a fixed time between terms. Do you have a fixed time or times of between-ness? This is a regular and committed time of reflection and rest or a time of adventure and inspiration? Do you take these kinds of break once a year? once a season? once a month? once a week? once a day? Is the duration of the vacation also fixed - 5 minutes? 5 days? 5 weeks?

This kind of vacation consciousness also asks us to be aware of the terms of our lives. When does a natural “between” occur in your year? or your month? or your day? How do you design an inner or outer vacation between the terms of your life that restores you and returns you to your commitments with new energy or new perspectives?

Re-creation

A vacation is an extended period of recreation. Of re-creation! Do you ever take time to re-create yourself, your world or your future? It is the school year of our childhood that teaches us, imprints us with the notion of summer vacation. We leave our school work for play. School gives us an education when we are young. As adults we leave work for vacation but instead of play, vacation might be education - educare is the bringing out of the deeper self - of what lives within. Education can be the re-creation of ourselves.

Who We Are in the World

In the work of the Inner Year, late summer is a time of educating or awakening ourselves to a deeper sense of who we are in the world. Beginning on July 27, I will be offering an intensive teleseminar program of four 90 minute sessions devoted to

The Mysteries and Questions of Personal Contribution.

What do you contribute to the world?
What do you long to contribute to the world?
What is your special talent?
How do you find personal fulfillment through your work?
How do you break free from a life of dissatisfaction?
Can you vacate what has occupied your life, but not occupied your spirit?
How can you re-create your life?

If your heart does not sing in the world or if you would like your heart to sing with more strength, register for this teleseminar. You may or may not find answers during the four weeks, but you will find new and meaningful questions. Take a vacation with eleven other people and educate your soul’s intentions around your unique contribution.

Working with the insights from this teleseminar, Questions of Contribution, you will

• develop ways to make the right choices and changes for your career.
• find your true reasons for volunteering and for learning new skills.
• give yourself permission to end an activity or begin an activity.
• learn how to liberate yourself to the demands and limitations that inhibit your self-expression.

Registration is limited to 12 participants. Participants receive a private 20 minute consultation with me to discuss specific issues about their life of contribution. Sessions are recorded and materials are sent out via email.

Register here!



Please add any comments or questions.

Thoughts and Questions on Intimacy

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

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

DEFINING INTIMACY

Intimacy comes from intimus - Latin for inmost.

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

What is your ability for intimacy?

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

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

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

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

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

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


Like all things living, intimacy evolves and morphs.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions of Intimacy
a teleseminar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Register here.

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

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