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.

Beyond the Prayers of Childhood

How did you learn how to pray? What did you pray to? Pray for?

I learned to pray at night before I went to sleep.  I learned to be on my knees.  At four, with a naive sense of responsibility and devotion, I loved the litany of individuals in my “God bless...and...and...and...and…” list.  I was proud of my thoughtfulness in including my cat and my stuffed animals among my relatives and friends.

What I was praying for: safety, comfort, health, good weather, what I thought would make me happy, that mommy and daddy would stop fighting - was always clear. Who I was praying to was “God” or “Lord” or in the year I, raised Protestant, went to a Catholic boarding school (fourth grade) I thought it was pretty cool to pray to saints and martyrs and I loved saying the rosary and experiencing repetitive, impersonal prayer.

But building a real consciousness of a relationship with spiritual beings was never considered. I prayed to an anonymous power and authority.  The Virgin Mary seemed human - she might hold me with the same tenderness she held the Infant Jesus. But overall whatever being received my prayers, I believed in, but didin’t know and couldn’t describe.

In my late thirties, I met the vast and amazing insights of Rudolf Steiner.  Steiner’s mystical knowledge of spiritual beings provided rich meaning and profound distinctions. I found I could relate and relate and relate to spiritual beings of all sorts and purposes, angels, elementals, thrones, the Holy Spirit and so many others.   I could speak to them and listen to them.  I could feel them and learn from them.  Steiner spoke of the longing of these beings for real engagement with human souls, so I engaged as best I could. I found joy in my humble attempts to offer what I could out of my thoughts, feelings, deeds and perceptions to these beings. And I found new thoughts, feelings and deeds arising in my soul that were clearly not self-generated. These beings were engaging with me. I moved from prayer to contemplation to holy conversation. I was consciously connected.

Now once a year, in the deep spiritual mood of Inner Autumn, I give a teleseminar on “Connecting with Spiritual Beings.” I invite you to be part of this 4 part teleseminar. I share my perception of these beings and the ways we can relate to each of them.  I look at what they bring to our earthly lives and what they seek from each of us.

What would it mean to your inner life and spiritual practices to build creative, comforting and challenging relationships with the beings of the spiritual world?

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.

The Second Question

The 2nd question to ask before having conversations with spiritual beings is a doozie.

What is a Spiritual Being?

This question generates many, many questions so it is not one that we ask very often. This may also be due to the fact that most of us grew up with “God.”

If the idea of “God” is satisfying to you, you don’t need to read further. And you probably shouldn’t consider my teleseminar, Having Conversations with Spiritual Beings. You probably believe prayer is the only form of interaction with “God” and think the idea of a conversation with a spiritual being is ridiculous or blasphemy.

However, if you feel there are spiritual beings in layers and hierarchies, actually, a whole panoply of gods, between us and “God,” then read on or think on. Play on with my questions below and add your own through the comment function of this blog.

Questions to ponder as a beginning...

Are you a spiritual being?

What is a being and what makes a being spiritual?

Are spiritual beings great dancers - always moving and flexible?

Do they ever tire and rest?

Or are spiritual beings fixed and immovable?

Do spiritual beings need something from us, their creations?

Do spiritual beings live in rocks or roses? swans or hyenas?

Can you see, hear or touch a spiritual being?

Do we have guardian angels?

When a human being dies, what happens to their spirit?

What is an elemental being?

Are there house spirits?

Do spiritual beings have clear roles and tasks?

Do spiritual beings have a voice and a language?

How do you get the attention of a spiritual being?

So many questions.

And here are a few questions of a different sort…

If we pray or meditate, why do we need to have a conversation with a spiritual being?

Are there different conversations for different spiritual beings?

Why would a spiritual being want to have a conversation with a human being?

Why would a human being want to have a conversation with a spiritual being?

Where and when do these conversations take place?

If spiritual beings have all the answers, why did they create the capacity to ask questions?

*****************

Add your questions and your thoughts about spiritual beings below.

These questions and more will be addressed and explored in my teleseminar, "Having Conversations with Spiritual Beings." If you want to engage in a conversation with other human beings on this rarely discussed or explored human capacity and challenge, join me. The conversation begins this Sunday, November 1 - All Saint's Day! Click here.

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.

Anxiety and the Twelve Senses

We live in the age of anxiety and our challenge is the transformation of personal anxiety into personal confidence.

Anxiety arises out of a feeling of a gap. A gap is a break in continuity that asks for restoration. It is a hole or interval between you and what you desire that must be bridged. It is a lack of harmony or fit that requires alteration and adjustment.

Gaps occur in our relationship to our bodies, in our relationship to the world, and in our relationship to others. All these relationships are known through our perceptions. If our perceptions are distorted or our organs of perceptions are damaged restoration, bridging, alteration and adjustment appear difficult or impossible. Life becomes threatening. Anxiety increases.

Even confidence in our relationship to God or Spirit asks us to be "grounded" in our earthly perceptions first. Without this healthy and essential earthly life, our spiritual lives live over a gap in human experience.

Consequenttly, a very important way of managing, resolving or eliminating all forms of anxiety is to attend to our perceptions and our organs of perception.

From the perspective of inner development, we can look at twelve senses, twelve organs of perception:

4 senses give us our perception of our embodied self, the world within our skin:
the sense of touch or boundary,
the sense of well-being including our sense of hunger, thirst, exhaustion and pain,
the sense of self-movement and contraction and expansion, and
the sense of balance and uprightness.

4 senses give us our perception of the world beyond our skin:
smell,
taste,
vision and
warmth

and
4 senses give us our perception of what lives within the souls of others:
hearing,
the sense of word and gesture,
the sense of thought, idea and ideal, and
the sense of divine individuality in the other.

All twelve senses weave together to shape our soul and the sense of “I am.” Each one is a treasure of experience and information. But each sense is also fragile.

If any of these twelve senses is skewed with too much sensitivity or to little sensitivity, if any as been traumatized, if any has been inflated, depleted, overwhelmed or ignored, we experience distorted and unsafe perceptions of our meaning, our purpose and our significance. We do not find our perceptions harmonious. We become anxious.

THE TWELVE SENSES
an Inner Year program

Over four 60-minute teleseminars, I will offer a creative understanding of the twelve senses. This is not a boring course. It is filled with liberating “aha’s” and healing insights.

I love the senses - they make sense of every thing. When we have a conscious relationship - a real sense of our senses, we can gracefully master life. Anxiety becomes a “wake-up” feeling, instead of a threat. We do not get stuck in anxious feelings but find ourselves moving through a more dynamic process of growing confidence in all our relationships.

Through the Twelve Senses, we learn how to sustain and deepen the feelings:

I am calmly contained within myself.
I meet my needs for nourishment and restoration.
I move gracefully and purposefully in the right direction.
I am elegantly balanced in all matters.

I breathe in life.
I taste the richness of life.
I see life with clarity and focus
I feel the warmth of life

I hear the voices of other souls.
I recognize the words and gestures of other souls.
I discern the thoughts of other souls.
I love the divine essence within other souls.

These are statements free of anxiety. They are declarations of growing confidence. Knowledge of the twelve senses and understanding of the challenges living in our twelve senses give us ways to move from anxiety to confidence.

The Twelve Senses teleseminar will introduce you to each of the twelve senses and help you grasp the myriad ways the senses interact with each other.

In the fullness of summer, we will experience the fullness of our senses.

Join me for this sensuous and sensible study.

The Twelve Senses
an Inner Year program

*four 60 minute sessions
*sessions will be recorded and available to download for 30 days
*emailed handouts and notes

Sundays at 7:30PM Eastern, 4:30PM Pacific -
July 12,19,26, August 2

$47

Register here.

If you have any questions, email or call me.

Inner Lent

Lent is the Christian festival of fasting and denial in preparation for Holy Week and Easter. As a young child I was fascinated with the idea of giving up something for Jesus. But, as I grew up I found myself thinking of Lenten denial more as a religious diet, a Weight Watchers for the Soul. Dieting and other disciplines have always been difficult for me so Lent became a time of failure and meaninglessness. I didn’t quite understand how giving up chocolate, pasta or going to the movies for forty days connected me to the Spirit or my spirit. How did it serve my moral and spiritual development? How did it serve the world and the future?

Working with Inner Christmas over the last four years has opened me up to the personal and intimate possibilities living in the rest of the Christian Year. As a counselor/healer/educator, I find the calendar of the soul very important. If I contemplate the life of the soul in relation to the seasonal flow of Nature and the esoteric imaginations of the Christian festivals, what do I see?

Inner Christmas ends with Epiphany. Epiphany is the Baptism of the Christ - the incarnation of the Christ Being into Jesus of Nazareth. Following Epiphany, the mood of the soul is one of seeking knowledge. Winter supports a time of inner reflection on the questions “Who am I?”, “What do I want?” and “What am I doing?” These are destiny questions. We look at our life path of self-expression, of self-manifestation and of self-management. We consider our potential to contribute and to grow. And we attend to the big question of “What gets in my way.”

I believe Lent is the time to work with what gets in our way - the obstacles to our desire to fulfill our destiny. Lent finds its inspiration in the forty days in the wilderness that follow the Baptism. Christ Jesus goes off to be alone - to struggle with gravity, hunger, limitation - the challenges of being human before taking up His Deed for humanity. Each year the calendar of the soul gives us the mood of the wilderness, a yearly time to look at our personal deed and the temptations that seductively promise an existence free from pain, responsibility and discipline.

During the forty days, Christ is tempted three times by Evil. (You can do a google on “three temptations” and find much to read.) In the modern wilderness of soul, three temptations seduce us, individually and collectively. They are very powerful and we often succumb to them. The temptations are prejudice, fantasy and addiction.These are three ways in which we cripple and corrupt our thinking, our feeling and our willing and we distort the flow of time from past to present to future. Inner Lent is the time when we can face and overcome these 3 temptations of our soul.

Prejudice

Prejudice is thinking trapped in the past. Prejudice is pre-judgment. Most of us think of prejudice as being harmful, but prejudice can also be positive. The quality of prejudice is not the temptation. The temptation is the absence of living thinking. A thought that had validity in the past is carried forward, whether or not it has any relevance or meaning in the present. We don’t think - we remember an old lifeless thought. We assume a momentary perception, or concept, is forever.

The Lenten challenge is first to recognize your prejudices. Recognizing your prejudices is so difficult - it is like going into the cemetery of your soul and digging up dead bodies; Or ghost-busting in your soul; Or finding the thought vampires or living dead and driving a stake through their hearts; or shining the light of Spiritual Sun on them.

Make a list of five dead thoughts. These are thoughts that are very familiar in their comfort or discomfort. Consider,: a thought about yourself, a thought about someone you interact with, a thought about your work, a thought about your belief system and a thought about your future. Now explore the truth of each thought in the present moment. Is there any truth or relevancy?

Can you notice your prejudices during the forty days of Lent? Most of us have little awareness of how old our thinking is. Every prejudice is the absence of Spirit. Overcoming the temptation of prejudice means questioning the newness of your thoughts, attitudes and behaviors. What among these prejudices can you make new and imbue with freedom? What likes and dislikes can you examine? What dead thoughts can you give up for Lent?

You might find it less challenging to explore an impersonal thought. We all know the Sun rises in the East. This is a truth that we once thought with living interest. For most of us, it has become information and a dead thought. However, during Lent, wake up every morning and have a living experience of the newly rising Sun.

Addiction

Addiction is the avoidance of pain in the present. With an addiction we take in a substance to create an artificial and temporary harmony in the present. As a society, we tend to think of negative addictions, but there are many more positive addictions to consider. I used the addiction of reading spiritual and self-help books for years and years. I received great value out of my reading but I used it like a drug. I was in pain and, when I read, I was avoiding my pain.

Being in the wilderness is a time to face pain. What you resist, persists. The writer Joseph Conrad wrote “In the destructive element immerse.” Lent is the time to feel the pain of the present. Your Spirit will sustain you through this agony. Whether you suffer with the weight of the past, your hunger for the future or the limitations of the present, your forty days of Lenten suffering will strengthen you. You will spring forth at the end of Lent with a new understanding of your destiny.

Do not forego your biggest, most soothing addiction. Find your small, or medium-sized, addictions. In our age of comfort and anxiety, we need to modulate our inner lives. We go into the wilderness to find wisdom - not torture.
Do you have an addiction for information? Do you face fear when you don’t have all the answers? Can you give up reading the newspaper for forty days, or even five days? Do you avoid anxiety or sadness with addictive physical activity? Can you give up exercise for a week, or moderate your fitness program for forty days? And consider modifying spiritual practices or beauty routines? Spiritual practices can be about avoiding discomfort with material existence and beauty routines can mask the pain of aging or anxiety over feeling desirable. Your inner Spirit is filled with equanimity and compassion and will not abandon you in the wilderness of your pain.

Look at your life and determine which practices, activities, consumptions are motivated by avoidance of pain, of anxiety, of sadness, of self-disgust. This is the real challenge and gift of Lent - recognizing your motives of avoidance and finding the courage to immerse in the destructive elements of your soul.

Fantasy

Fantasy is will trapped in the future. Fantasies are so comforting because we do not need to do anything. We can fantasize the most amazing results and outcomes of our efforts and never take the first step. We don’t need to be in the reality of life. We create worlds and powers and benefits with fantasy. Fantasy is the future that will never come.

Thinking about doing good is not doing good. Good thoughts are not good deeds. Dreaming about possibilities is not fulfillment or contribution, it is just dreaming.

With so much powerlessness in childhood and so much emphasis on being freed from our enchanted castles and witch’s lairs, we learn to deal with the entrapment of our will forces by fantasizing all kinds of happy endings and wild adventures.

Our will needs to be active in the present. We need to free ourselves in the reality of the moment through responsibility and courage. If the work of the wilderness is to have any redemptive or creative power we must pull our will out of the future and act now.

What is the dream of the future that has no present action? What horizon do you see, yet fail to take any step toward? If you were to take just ten steps over forty days, what would those steps be? You cannot be in fantasy when your will is active in the present.


Closing thoughts

In facing the three temptations, do not be grandiose. Be successful in small ways. Just as God is in the details, find your radiant strength of spirit in the elegance and humility of the simple. Self-compassion is about being gentle and tender with your soul development.

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