At the end of my message on celebrating nature, I said today's message would be about celebrating divinity but after much thought I am calling it nativity. When I wrote my book, "Six Ways to Celebrate Christmas & Celebrate You!," I did not "think" about calling the second celebration Nativity as Christmas is Nativity - it was obvious, a no brainer. But this week I did think and think and it is the miracle of nativity that I want us to celebrate.
Divinity, God, Spirit what ever name we give IT is ever present and we celebrate IT in many ways with many beliefs. I am asking you to bring celebration to the birth of the consciousness of divinity in your ordinary life. The birth of the Jesus takes place in humble space and in ordinary time. No bells, no whistles accept to those who out of their simplicity (the Shepherds) or their wisdom (the three Kings) are paying attention.
I ask you with simple wisdom to wake up and pay attention to the sacred birth moments when you perceive the divine source found mysteriously before, behind, beyond and within all things. Each moment is celebrated as a birth, a nativity.
Nature is always perceptible. So is Nativity but in such a different way. Nature is perceptible to your senses. Nativity is found in your thoughts when something is born within your consciousness and lifts a veil or brings a dawning or fills you with first breath. It is not something you have ever thought before, no memory of the earthly or the personal. Yet, through being conceived in you in the moment, this thought takes you back before your birth and sends you out beyond the threshold of your death to a knowing that always is, or takes you behind your senses and their perceptions to something purely spiritual or moves you within to the holy center of things.
How did you experience, feel, know, understand the presence or the nativity of the Divine today?
If you are feeling uncertain, doubtful or confused perhaps it is because we can only point to this experience and can never describe it. There are many, many great spiritual texts that point the reader to this experience far more clearly and beautifully than I am doing. In writing this, it is the courage to experience the birth of the new meaning that keeps me going in face of my own uncertainty, doubt and confusion. Stay with me in this feeling - it is the mood of the threshold. The nativity of the Divine is on the other side of these feelings.
You celebrate nativity by recalling something you thought or said or did during the day that was new and filled with love. Something that surprised you. Or celebrate your openness to the new, your readiness to conceive the sacred.
When your mind, heart or intention is truly open, what is that open space like?
What is the invitation living in that space?
What could fill that space completely?
A birth!
Showing posts with label Soul. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Soul. Show all posts
Monday, October 11, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Celebrate Nature in Your Soul
As I am getting ready to post this, I am sitting by an open window on the first cool morning of the fall. My skin was just touched by a slightly chilling breeze. I notice it with a smile. Will I recall it tonight when I review my day?
Every moment of our lives we are beings of nature living in relationship to nature. We can celebrate ourselves by celebrating nature. We can come to know ourselves, the natural part of ourselves, by coming to know nature.
Too many of us overlook nature, take her for granted, fail to wonder at her beauty, her complexity, her intensity, her tenderness, her changeability. If we pay attention to nature everyday for a week, just by recalling at the end of the day what we perceived of the natural world, our lives will be so much more joyful.
As children we delight in nature and have rich interactions with trees, the breeze, snowflakes, dandelions, mud, puddles, kittens, soaring birds, cloud shapes, so much. When we let ourselves, our adult selves, play with nature, that childhood delight returns and with it comes wisdom.
So let me suggest that you devote a few moments each evening to reflect on what you have experienced during the day in the natural world - minerals, earth, plants at all stages, animals. What have you seen or heard or smelled or touched or tasted of the natural world.
Too many of us overlook nature, take her for granted, fail to wonder at her beauty, her complexity, her intensity, her tenderness, her changeability. If we pay attention to nature everyday for a week, just by recalling at the end of the day what we perceived of the natural world, our lives will be so much more joyful.
As children we delight in nature and have rich interactions with trees, the breeze, snowflakes, dandelions, mud, puddles, kittens, soaring birds, cloud shapes, so much. When we let ourselves, our adult selves, play with nature, that childhood delight returns and with it comes wisdom.
So let me suggest that you devote a few moments each evening to reflect on what you have experienced during the day in the natural world - minerals, earth, plants at all stages, animals. What have you seen or heard or smelled or touched or tasted of the natural world.
In these autumn weeks in North America, we find apples turning rosy and the changing colors of leaves. We see birds flying south. We feel the seasonal change in the air and see it in the sky. Pay attention to nature. Every night this week, before you go to bed, think about how you met nature, any aspect of nature's many gifts, during your waking hours.
Celebrate the rich wisdom of the natural world this week. Connect your soul to nature often.
Suggestions for deeper/higher work with nature
To go deeper/higher with your celebration of nature, move beyond your likes and dislikes, beyond your feelings of pleasure and displeasure, to the reverence that can only come with objectivity. Recollect gray skies with as much reverence as you give to blue skies. Recollect the scent of a skunk with as much reverence as the scent of fresh mowed grass. I watch my grandson (now 7+ months old) celebrating and learning about everything with utter wonder and interest. He hasn't been told not to like certain things (yet) so his world remains large and enriching. Without objectivity and reverence, wonder and interest your relationship to nature becomes bland and small with little to celebrate.
To know yourself through your celebration of nature, you can work with two questions:
How is what I am celebrating, reflected in the human being, in me?
For example: How is the branch being moved by the wind found in my body or my soul? How is the eye of my cat reflected in my thinking - does my thinking see in the dark?
Where in my biography, my life memories, have I experienced this aspect of nature before? What did it feel like? How did I interact with it?
And, of course, you can celebrate with an artistic gesture: a sketch, a painting, a poem.
Next Sunday: The Celebration of the Divine.
This post was inspired by my book on the six celebrations of Christmas. To buy a copy of the book, Six Ways To Celebrate Christmas & Celebrate You!, go to my store. There are no shipping charges for books ordered between now and Christmas. The book is a great gift.
Friday, August 28, 2009
The Mysteries of Balance
A harmonious life is a life of balance. Harmony and balance are feelings, not things! All feelings are experiences belonging to an individual in momentary experiences. However, following our feelings and engaging in objective and compassionate perspective on our lives, our goals and our difficulties, we can design, establish and celebrate our own balanced lives.
Here a couple of insights to help you find greater, more creative balance in your life, practically, emotionally, and spiritually.
I was friends with a man who wrote an engineering textbook on statics and dynamics. Statics are the things that are not active and never change and dynamics are the things that are always active and changing. It helps to think like an engineer when you are working on balancing your life. Categorizing the elements of your life into statics and dynamics is a first step to designing and building a balanced life.
I have an affinity for dynamics. I naturally bring change and activity into my life. (Writing this is giving me a whole new perspective on ADD/ADHD). I do not have a very conscious or comfortable relationship with most things static. Before I can create a balanced life I need to begin a new relationship to statics and dynamics. I need to learn to limit my indulgence and attention to the dynamic elements of my life and overcome my reluctance to be conscious of and appreciate the static elements. I then need to fit the static elements together with the dynamic ones in a way that works for me, for my goals for living a richly balanced life.
Being balanced may require us to be out of balance or rather off center. Balance is not about equal parts, it is about equilibrium.
Balance comes from right relationship and right measure. As I write, Julia and Julie is a very popular new movie. It is a film about recipes and great food. Julia Child was a great cook because she worked and worked on balance - finding the right ingredients in the right measure in the right combination and cooked rightly. Julia felt wonderful when she sat down after cooking and surrendered to the joy of her meal. She was an engineer, a manager and an artist in the kitchen as she balanced her life as a cook.
Does your life have the right ingredients in the right measure? Do you combine them well? Do you know you know how the right temperature and the right cooking time to bring the flavors of your harmonious life to elegant expression? What is your recipe for a balanced life? My teleseminar will help the participants determine their own recipe - Mastering the Art of Balanced Living. ;-)
Another aspect of balance I want to share with you is the notion of “between.” Many of our questions of balance come from our experience of “between.” Between has a number of definitions. The definition I use here is the sense of conflict, of being pulled by two opposing realities. Living gracefully “between,” feeling a confidence of self while confronting the conflicts is something toward which you aspire and strive.
Harmony is an inner peace you feel in the space between.
between how you want to live and how you actually live.
between how you want your space to be and how your space actually is.
between what you want to accomplish and what you actually accomplish
between all you want to do and how much time you actually have to do it.
between all the attention you want to give to others and all the attention you want to give to yourself.
between all the things that you want and need and the money you have.
between your need law and order and your need for freedom and creative chaos.
In “the space between” you make most of your decisions and choices. In “the space between” you find the mood of your life. In this sacred space of balance you can tell your truth.
Do I have balance and harmony in my life? Yes! No! I have some balance and the feelings of harmony are growing as I examine my personal dynamics of balance. It’s an evolving process. Life is about increasing the simplicity of managing my increasing complexity - a balancing act, not a juggling act. I know that I am increasing my mastery of balance. Balance has become less of a high wire act and more of my feet moving gracefully along a winding path that sometimes takes me to cliffsides, battered with gale force winds. I haven’t fallen yet. In fact I don’t anxiously cling to soothing supports anymore. I feel my feet on the ground, my head upright, and my heart open.
If you were to create a dynamic design for a balanced life specific to your style, needs and quirks, where would you begin?
Join me and be one of twelve participants in an intense and intimate exploration into the mysteries of balance, please sign up here.
Here a couple of insights to help you find greater, more creative balance in your life, practically, emotionally, and spiritually.
The Static Balance and the Dynamic Balance
I was friends with a man who wrote an engineering textbook on statics and dynamics. Statics are the things that are not active and never change and dynamics are the things that are always active and changing. It helps to think like an engineer when you are working on balancing your life. Categorizing the elements of your life into statics and dynamics is a first step to designing and building a balanced life.
I have an affinity for dynamics. I naturally bring change and activity into my life. (Writing this is giving me a whole new perspective on ADD/ADHD). I do not have a very conscious or comfortable relationship with most things static. Before I can create a balanced life I need to begin a new relationship to statics and dynamics. I need to learn to limit my indulgence and attention to the dynamic elements of my life and overcome my reluctance to be conscious of and appreciate the static elements. I then need to fit the static elements together with the dynamic ones in a way that works for me, for my goals for living a richly balanced life.
Equilibrium
Being balanced may require us to be out of balance or rather off center. Balance is not about equal parts, it is about equilibrium.
Balance comes from right relationship and right measure. As I write, Julia and Julie is a very popular new movie. It is a film about recipes and great food. Julia Child was a great cook because she worked and worked on balance - finding the right ingredients in the right measure in the right combination and cooked rightly. Julia felt wonderful when she sat down after cooking and surrendered to the joy of her meal. She was an engineer, a manager and an artist in the kitchen as she balanced her life as a cook.
Does your life have the right ingredients in the right measure? Do you combine them well? Do you know you know how the right temperature and the right cooking time to bring the flavors of your harmonious life to elegant expression? What is your recipe for a balanced life? My teleseminar will help the participants determine their own recipe - Mastering the Art of Balanced Living. ;-)
The Space Between
Another aspect of balance I want to share with you is the notion of “between.” Many of our questions of balance come from our experience of “between.” Between has a number of definitions. The definition I use here is the sense of conflict, of being pulled by two opposing realities. Living gracefully “between,” feeling a confidence of self while confronting the conflicts is something toward which you aspire and strive.
Harmony is an inner peace you feel in the space between.
between how you want to live and how you actually live.
between how you want your space to be and how your space actually is.
between what you want to accomplish and what you actually accomplish
between all you want to do and how much time you actually have to do it.
between all the attention you want to give to others and all the attention you want to give to yourself.
between all the things that you want and need and the money you have.
between your need law and order and your need for freedom and creative chaos.
In “the space between” you make most of your decisions and choices. In “the space between” you find the mood of your life. In this sacred space of balance you can tell your truth.
My Balanced Life
Do I have balance and harmony in my life? Yes! No! I have some balance and the feelings of harmony are growing as I examine my personal dynamics of balance. It’s an evolving process. Life is about increasing the simplicity of managing my increasing complexity - a balancing act, not a juggling act. I know that I am increasing my mastery of balance. Balance has become less of a high wire act and more of my feet moving gracefully along a winding path that sometimes takes me to cliffsides, battered with gale force winds. I haven’t fallen yet. In fact I don’t anxiously cling to soothing supports anymore. I feel my feet on the ground, my head upright, and my heart open.
If you were to create a dynamic design for a balanced life specific to your style, needs and quirks, where would you begin?
Join me and be one of twelve participants in an intense and intimate exploration into the mysteries of balance, please sign up here.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
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.
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.
If you have any questions, email or call me.
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
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.
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.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
More thoughts on the Southern Hemisphere
Festivals are spiritual celebrations that live in our Imaginations.
I live in an urban environment and there are no flowers around me, just cement, steel and glass. For Whitsun, I must imagine blooming flowers, just as I must imagine the circle of apostles, the Virgin Sophia and the Holy Spirit.
So it doesn't matter if you are in the Southern Hemisphere or the Northern, what matters is how alive your spiritual Imagination is. Your environment, your relationship to the sun may align with the imagination or not. You can pay attention to the sense perceptible seasonal realities or not.
We must realize that each of the festivals lives within the human spirit and can be celebrated and experienced any day of the year and on any place on the planet.
I live in an urban environment and there are no flowers around me, just cement, steel and glass. For Whitsun, I must imagine blooming flowers, just as I must imagine the circle of apostles, the Virgin Sophia and the Holy Spirit.
So it doesn't matter if you are in the Southern Hemisphere or the Northern, what matters is how alive your spiritual Imagination is. Your environment, your relationship to the sun may align with the imagination or not. You can pay attention to the sense perceptible seasonal realities or not.
We must realize that each of the festivals lives within the human spirit and can be celebrated and experienced any day of the year and on any place on the planet.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Inner Whitsun
Hello dear Friend,
49 days after Easter and the Resurrection is a day known as either Pentecost or Whitsun. This day celebrates or acknowledges a mysterious event: the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Here is what happened about two thousand years ago. All those who had been with the resurrected Christ in the 40 days before the Ascension had gathered together. These included the Twelve Apostles and maybe 144 others. The Holy Mother or Virgin Sophia enters the gathering and everyone forms a circle around her. A mighty wind rises and a dove appears bringing a new force of spiritual energy. This dove is the way we experience the Holy Spirit and have come to recognize as a symbol of peace and new beginnings. This sacred energy radiates into the Virgin Sophia and out to the Apostles causing tongues of fire to appear on their foreheads at the place known as the Third Eye. Following this event those present found the Apostles could speak to and hear each one of them in the language of their birth.
What is the meaning of this event for the human soul and the evolution of consciousness and self-awareness? Why does it occur at this time of year? Why should anyone, not Christian, be interested in this celebration? And how can we celebrate Whitsun in a modern and meaningful way that cultivates a desirable experience in our souls?
I have such a feeling for this holy day. I love it like I love the flowers of late Spring. The joyful love of and for all souls blooms irrepressibly within our being.
If Easter is about redemption and resurrection, Whitsun is about universal and intimate love. When you know through loving another soul intimately enough to speak the language of their being or are the object of such a love, you know the gift of the Holy Spirit. This speaking of the native language has nothing to do with the geographical place of birth. It is the language of the self, of the native essence, of the truth of the individuality.
Whitsun reminds us to know one another intimately. I mean deeply, compassionately, unconditionally, completely, unselfishly. The flame of Whitsun is the energy of the Third Eye chakra, the two petalled lotus seeing wisely and without prejudice all that lives in another’s soul.
Pentecost in the Hebrew tradition was a feast of the first harvest. What can you harvest from your Inner Year practices? We began with the new seeds of selfhood of Inner Nativity and Inner Epiphany. We cultivated the soil of our soul through Inner Lent finding new freedom. We brought new life to our soul through Inner Easter. Now with Inner Whitsun we begin to harvest the fruit of Inner Living, new love.
What are the practices of Inner Whitsun? How do we grow wise in knowing/loving the other?
Read a great biography or autobiography. Study another’s life. Do a google search on an individual, read a number of posts, look at the images - not out of curiosity, but out of willed love or devotion. Invite a friend or several to do the same. Get together and share your perceptions, perceptions arising out of reverence for the individual.
Write a poem about a friend. Could you describe the true nature of your friend in 13 lines or 13 stanzas? Twelve lines or stanzas each presenting a perspective of your friend and the thirteenth being a metaphor for the place where all twelve perspectives meet. Don’t write this poem from your intellect, write it from your heart — your heart’s wisdom. Like the Virgin Sophia, the heart is both wise and innocent at the same time.
Have a love feast. I do this at the end of the biography workshops I lead. I have a love seat that each participant sits in silence, with arms and legs uncrossed. All the other participants take turns speaking of their admiration, respect, and love for the person in the love seat. So invite a few of your friends over and give them each and yourself a chance to sit in the Love Seat and receive the language of love that arises out of their friends wise heart.
Pick a place on the planet and love it. Yes, choose a different culture/language and bring love to it. Pick your place and do a search online or at the library. I suggest you just work with images as text tends to drive us from our heart into our head. God bless Google and Wikipedia for giving us quick access to the strange, the different, the other. Another possibility, much more difficult, is to lovingly speak and lovingly hear the language of an opposing political perspective. Somehow I feel that both Hillary and Barack would love to be actively loving each other rather than competing and attacking. What would at Whitsun election look like in the USA or any other country?
Practice ho’oponopono. Have you heard about ho’oponopono? This is very much a “Whitsun deed.” that works with the language of the shadow. Here is a link to a brief description of the work http://www.reuniting.info/wisdom_hooponopono_buddy_system. Just doing this practice for five minutes feels good (good as in goodness, not good as merely a pleasant feeling).
The next festival I will be writing about is St Johnstide which falls on June 24th and is connected to the Summer Solstice.
If you just read these thoughts on Whitsun you will be opening up to a very sacred part of your being. Having a sense of the cycle of the Natural Year and its impact on the Inner Year is a great step in self-awareness and personal development. Do what you feel capable of doing and love yourself.
Feel the power of the Third Eye, not just to see, but to love.
49 days after Easter and the Resurrection is a day known as either Pentecost or Whitsun. This day celebrates or acknowledges a mysterious event: the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Here is what happened about two thousand years ago. All those who had been with the resurrected Christ in the 40 days before the Ascension had gathered together. These included the Twelve Apostles and maybe 144 others. The Holy Mother or Virgin Sophia enters the gathering and everyone forms a circle around her. A mighty wind rises and a dove appears bringing a new force of spiritual energy. This dove is the way we experience the Holy Spirit and have come to recognize as a symbol of peace and new beginnings. This sacred energy radiates into the Virgin Sophia and out to the Apostles causing tongues of fire to appear on their foreheads at the place known as the Third Eye. Following this event those present found the Apostles could speak to and hear each one of them in the language of their birth.
What is the meaning of this event for the human soul and the evolution of consciousness and self-awareness? Why does it occur at this time of year? Why should anyone, not Christian, be interested in this celebration? And how can we celebrate Whitsun in a modern and meaningful way that cultivates a desirable experience in our souls?
I have such a feeling for this holy day. I love it like I love the flowers of late Spring. The joyful love of and for all souls blooms irrepressibly within our being.
If Easter is about redemption and resurrection, Whitsun is about universal and intimate love. When you know through loving another soul intimately enough to speak the language of their being or are the object of such a love, you know the gift of the Holy Spirit. This speaking of the native language has nothing to do with the geographical place of birth. It is the language of the self, of the native essence, of the truth of the individuality.
Whitsun reminds us to know one another intimately. I mean deeply, compassionately, unconditionally, completely, unselfishly. The flame of Whitsun is the energy of the Third Eye chakra, the two petalled lotus seeing wisely and without prejudice all that lives in another’s soul.
Pentecost in the Hebrew tradition was a feast of the first harvest. What can you harvest from your Inner Year practices? We began with the new seeds of selfhood of Inner Nativity and Inner Epiphany. We cultivated the soil of our soul through Inner Lent finding new freedom. We brought new life to our soul through Inner Easter. Now with Inner Whitsun we begin to harvest the fruit of Inner Living, new love.
What are the practices of Inner Whitsun? How do we grow wise in knowing/loving the other?
Read a great biography or autobiography. Study another’s life. Do a google search on an individual, read a number of posts, look at the images - not out of curiosity, but out of willed love or devotion. Invite a friend or several to do the same. Get together and share your perceptions, perceptions arising out of reverence for the individual.
Write a poem about a friend. Could you describe the true nature of your friend in 13 lines or 13 stanzas? Twelve lines or stanzas each presenting a perspective of your friend and the thirteenth being a metaphor for the place where all twelve perspectives meet. Don’t write this poem from your intellect, write it from your heart — your heart’s wisdom. Like the Virgin Sophia, the heart is both wise and innocent at the same time.
Have a love feast. I do this at the end of the biography workshops I lead. I have a love seat that each participant sits in silence, with arms and legs uncrossed. All the other participants take turns speaking of their admiration, respect, and love for the person in the love seat. So invite a few of your friends over and give them each and yourself a chance to sit in the Love Seat and receive the language of love that arises out of their friends wise heart.
Pick a place on the planet and love it. Yes, choose a different culture/language and bring love to it. Pick your place and do a search online or at the library. I suggest you just work with images as text tends to drive us from our heart into our head. God bless Google and Wikipedia for giving us quick access to the strange, the different, the other. Another possibility, much more difficult, is to lovingly speak and lovingly hear the language of an opposing political perspective. Somehow I feel that both Hillary and Barack would love to be actively loving each other rather than competing and attacking. What would at Whitsun election look like in the USA or any other country?
Practice ho’oponopono. Have you heard about ho’oponopono? This is very much a “Whitsun deed.” that works with the language of the shadow. Here is a link to a brief description of the work http://www.reuniting.info/wisdom_hooponopono_buddy_system. Just doing this practice for five minutes feels good (good as in goodness, not good as merely a pleasant feeling).
The next festival I will be writing about is St Johnstide which falls on June 24th and is connected to the Summer Solstice.
If you just read these thoughts on Whitsun you will be opening up to a very sacred part of your being. Having a sense of the cycle of the Natural Year and its impact on the Inner Year is a great step in self-awareness and personal development. Do what you feel capable of doing and love yourself.
Feel the power of the Third Eye, not just to see, but to love.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Inner Easter
Saying Goodbye to Winter
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.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 SoulSpend 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?
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
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.
Monday, February 4, 2008
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.
Please think about commenting. To leave a comment click on the word "comments" below.
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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