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 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. 

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.