Inner Easter - Your Inner Crucifixion

Below is the audio on Inner Crucifixion (it is downloadable.).

The audio is just under 13 minutes. If you read this post, then listen to the audio, you will have spent 15-17 minutes of the 1440 minutes in the day on my thoughts on Inner Good Friday.  Now add to that the time you spend on your thoughts on both the originating Good Friday and your own Inner Crucifixion. How many minutes might that total?  And what do you get for spending that much time? Do you find more peace? More doubt? More self-compassion? More understanding?

Compare your sense of how much time you can attend to awakening your feeling of Inner Crucifixion to the amount of time Jesus Christ hung dying on the cross? 

I don't know about you but I haven't the meditative endurance to spend three hours on establishing a new relationship to Good Friday.  I could spend three hours reading the New Testament or the books of Rudolf Steiner or other spiritual thinkers and mystics. I could recite prayers and verses for three hours. But I don't know that I could sit or walk and engage my own heartfelt thoughts about my own inner life in right relationship to the Crucifixion.  I am not that developed.  

However, I am striving.  I will attend to this inner challenge.  I won't last three hours, but I will give my heart to the seeking a mere moment of meaning.  And I know moments of meaning, of grace, take us into timelessness, into the spiritual reality of eternity.  

I do hope this note and the audio help you find a moment of eternity on this Good Friday.

Now let go the imaginations of your Inner Last Supper. Let a blessed emptiness enter your soul. (If you don't know how to do this, just breathe, just blink. In each full breath and each quick blink, we experience a moment of blessed emptiness.)

It is time to bring your consciousness to Inner Crucifixion.  Not easy.  As you listen to the audio you can hear in my pauses and dropped thoughts, my own difficulty with the imagination of the Crucifixion.  But you can also hear after a few shaky minutes, the awakening - my voice and my breathing become smooth and my words start to flow.  Something living has entered my consciousness because I held myself fast with courage and devotion.

Trust your courage and your devotion as you follow your path of self-knowledge and inner development. Stay a few minutes with this attention to the Inner Crucifixion despite your doubts and hesitations - something will flow.  It might be a question, an image, a feeling - an Inner Easter germinating in your soul.

I thank you for experiencing Inner Easter with me.  Tomorrow we descend into Hell.

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.

Working with the Inner Festivals

Working with the Inner Festivals

On February 25, Lent begins. Lent is the Christian festival that remembers the forty days, Jesus Christ spends in the wilderness following the Baptism in the River Jordan. During this time, Christ does not eat, is ministered to by angels, meets wild beasts and is tempted three times by Satan.

It is a Christian practice to “give up something tempting” for Lent. Usually we give up a favorite food or activity - chocolate, pasta, TV or video games. Even as a child, I wondered about this. It felt like a demanding law that had to be obeyed to be good, but didn’t make much sense spiritually or personally. Of course, I have never been any good at denying myself anything for a few hours and couldn’t imagine 40 days of living without anything I enjoyed, just to be “good” in the eyes of the Church. Yet, had I given a or found a reason, or an understanding in the heart of my heart, I felt I could have a true Lenten devotion and given up anything.

My childhood wonder and doubt has shaped my spiritual life into a practice of questioning. I don’t accept answers offered by exclusive dogmas and sectarian perspectives. I am fascinated by all religions - the dogmas and the rituals - and study them all with loving objectivity and respect.

In my childhood I attended a number of Christian denominations (from Catholic to Christian Science) as my father wanted me to have a liberal and inclusive religious experience. College opened me up to the Eastern paths and also to Judaism. I loved the whole gamut enough to minor in religion but did not find any one doctrine that called me to belong or practice.

With my marriage to a recovering alcoholic, I found both community and personal significance in AA and Al-Anon. I loved that it was a 24/7 relationship, that the “program” was devoted to healing, liberation and the acceptance and support of all others without judgment. The 12 Steps offered a one-size-fits-all path to self-mastery that was beautifully effective, challenging and compassionate. No dogmas and a open spirituality related to a self-defined Higher Power meant beliefs were personal.

Yet I still had a quiet longing for more. I felt there was something profound in the Christian Mystery and the story of Jesus Christ. Although I was not aware of my feelings at the time, there was something in the Christian festivals that called out to me even though the “church and cultural” festival practices felt empty of personal meaning. What did Christmas mean to me and all other souls? What was the personal and present significance of the Resurrection?

I wanted and needed festival practices that took me into myself, that made greater meaning of and in me. (I had no idea that I would need to create these inner festivals for myself or that I would be sharing them with others around the world.)

Then I put my kids in the new Waldorf School of Princeton and discovered Rudolf Steiner. Steiner brought this wonderful esoteric picture of Christianity and the Festivals. Esoteric signifies “within.” Everything I had been longing for in my heart and in my mind was present in Steiner’s cosmic worldview. I had found the essential ground and foundation on which to build a fulfilling spiritual life and my future work - Steiner’s anthroposophy (the wisdom of being human).

Inspired by Steiner’s loving and wise imagination of role of the Christ in human consciousness, a major piece of my personal work is a new psychospiritual understanding and practice of the Christian festivals - the design and guidance for a yearly cycle of practices for cultivating a rich and dynamic inner life.

Imagine what it means to your inner development to have a yearly rhythm of self-evolving practices that intimately connect your soul life to the cosmic cycle of the year and the esoteric meaning of the Christian festivals. The therapeutic process is often shaped by the immediate issues of the client, not any archetypal design or rhythm.

Through my attention to the Inner Year, I am now quite excited about a new two-part therapeutic design. Why not combine one-on-one counseling dealing with the immediate personal issues with the engagement in a group activity based on the festivals and the cycle of the year. This combination provides a highly effective process that acknowledges your reality as a unique individual with a unique biology, unique biography and unique destiny facing unique challenges, while also acknowledging the universal significance of the cosmic cycle of the sun through the course of the year and the esoteric impact and meaning of the Christian festivals to your thinking, feeling and willing?

The Inner Year is a program of self-knowledge, self-healing, self-development, self-restraint and self-liberation. It addresses all the archetypal issues of the soul in a yearly cycle. The Inner Year is a cosmic and universal guide for inner work and complements the intimate and unique process of one-on-one counseling and coaching.

Each of us has an inner sun shaping the life of our souls. This inner Sun is an image of our sense of “I am.” The inner Sun moves between solstices and equinoxes shaping our spiritual and material realities and attention. The twofold process of immediate and cosmic therapy engaging the unique and the universal aspects of our souls supports the development and maturing of our individuality and our humanity, the awareness of our Inner Sun.

The Christian festivals provides an extraordinary design for our lives. They reflect nature and both the story of the Christ Being and the longing and preparation of the human soul for the experience of Divinity dwelling and acting within in our heart of hearts.

Over the last few years I have given talks and written about all the major festivals - the quarterly festivals that reflect the esoteric meaning of the four seasons - Christmas/Winter Solstice, Easter/Spring Equinox, St John’s Tide/ Summer Solstice and Michaelmas/Fall Equinox. I have also spoken on Whitsun or Pentecost and on Advent. My focus on these talks is always the role the festivals play in the personal awakening of our inner life, the guidance to the fulfillment of the truth, beauty and goodness of our thoughts, feelings and deeds.

I have come to feel a real conviction that the renewal of the festivals, not as ritual and sentimental demonstrations of religious dogma, but as essential symbolic and guiding events during the year providing inspiration and illumination of our inner journeys, will free us to be free.

Christmas and the Holy Nights
December 25 - January 6
renews our innocence through Nativity and
increases the gifts of our wisdom through Epiphany.

Lent
40 days prior to Easter
cultivates self-mastery and builds the capacity to wisely and freely say “No!”

Easter
1st Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox
brings a conscious relationship to sacrifice, death and resurrection.

Whitsun or Pentecost
50 days after Easter
(re)awakens our sense of community and active empathy.

St John’s Tide
June 24
leads our souls to our moment of destiny and manifestation of our deeds in the world.

Michaelmas
September 29
asks us to face the presence of evil in our souls and in the world. We learn to redeem the perpetrator and resurrect the victim.

All Saints and All Soul’s
November 1
engages us with souls beyond the realm of life and death.

Advent
28 days before Christmas
offers a time to reflect on the meaning of the course of the year and the release of our attachment to our stories (dramas)allowing us to enter into the deep mystery of Christmas and the renewal of our inner (re)birth.

Over the course of 2009, beginning with Inner Lent, I will be offering some group opportunities for awakening and deepening your experience of The Inner Year. I will offer an indepth teleseminar of 2 or more 60 minute sessions of more direct guidance and interaction for each festival. These programs will be offered for a reasonable fee.

Click here to register for the Inner Lent Teleseminar.

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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