Soultides and Sacred Conversations

Soultides

(Yes, soultide is an anagram of solitude and an understanding of soultides makes our solitudes much richer.)

The Inner Year is a recognition of the tides of soul.

What is a tide?
A tide is an alternate rising and falling of seas.
A tide is a surge of feeling.

What is a soultide?
A soultide is a rising and falling of attention to particular aspects of inner and outer life, to spirit and matter, to self and other, to quiet and activity.
A soultide is a surge of a particular feeling at a particular time of the year, of the day, of a lifetime.

How lovely to think about soultides. To feel the pull of the soul's waxing and waning in our relationships to spirit and to matter. To be free of the unnatural demand of constancy in attention and enthusiasm to things that have moved onto the shore or out to sea of our consciousness. To realize we have inner rhythms of spiritual and earthly ebbs and flows.

These thoughts just brought up to memory the Righteous Brothers' song "Ebbtide" which came out the year I graduated from high school. As you read the lyrics, you might imagine this not a song of teenage passion but as a (albeit, corny) poem of the soul's desire for spirit and for matter.  Imagine being at peace in the web of the two arms of your consciousness, the spiritual and the practical.

First the tide rushes in
Plants a kiss on the shore
Then rolls out to sea
And the sea is very still once more
So I rush to your side
Like the oncoming tide
With one burning thought
Will your arms open wide
At last we're face to face
And as we kiss through an embrace
I can tell, I can feel
You are love, your are real
Really mine in the rain
In the dark, in the sun
Like the tide at its ebb
I'm at peace in the web of your arms

 

You can hear the Ebbtide in all it's melancholic sixties splendor here. It's embarrassing to reveal what a teenage romantic I was in my wishful solitude, but as participants in my Inner Life programs are realizing, the roots of our life direction and purpose are often found in some pretty weird events, meetings, and cultural connections.  So you might want to take a few minutes to reflect on the lyrics of your favorite songs when you were graduating from high school. Then we can laugh wisely together!

Inner Eastertide

Our souls are in the midst of Eastertide, the fifty days between Easter, the mystery of dying and resurrecting, and Pentecost, the mystery of universal understanding. Now is the time we move

• between the new awakening of our individuality and the new awakening to our humanity, 
• between the consciousness of being all alone and being all one.

How do you experience your inner tide between being all alone in yourself and being connected to all other human beings? How do you experience the struggle between knowing yourself and knowing another?

I had a real Inner Eastertide moment this last Sunday.  I was driving with a dear friend through the blossoming spring countryside.  We know each other very well, yet suddenly I felt this unfathomable loneliness of not knowing her at all.  Then in the blink of consciousness, I turned that feeling on myself and realized I hardly know myself.  Struggling with these two harsh feelings I found a third awareness surging in my soul.  Only if I feel love for myself and for my friend can I bear the suffering of not knowing.

For me this love becomes active in conversation.  Not in ordinary conversation but in sacred conversation.  Whether I have a sacred conversation with one of the unknown multitudes within my own soul or with one of the unknown multitudes within another's soul, I find peace in the web of true intercourse, of making love.

Of course, there are tides within a sacred conversation, flows of sympathy and antipathy where I approach and retreat.  All my counseling conversations, sacred by intention and agreement, live in tidal forces.  I bring my attention to my client and then ebb away to attend to my inner experience of what she is saying.  I move from the shores of her stories, questions and needs out to the seas of my understanding and then flow back to the conversation with a surge of insights.

Inner Eastertide is the time to contemplate the ebb and flow between self and other.  Following your Inner Easter experience of the death of the old and the birth of the new you, the first days of Inner Eastertide are given to the conversations you want to have with yourself.  Then as we feel the coming of Inner Pentecost the conversations move toward our relationship with others.  But the whole of the fifty days, our souls attend to increasing our willingness and ability to engage in sacred conversations.


As you attend to your inner life during this time of the Inner Year, work with your sense of sacred conversation.  What are the questions that live in a sacred conversation?  What is sacred listening?  Are there limits to sacred conversations?  What parts of yourself do you want to make love to?  Are there parts of yourself or parts of others that you are unwilling to have a sacred conversation with?

 

Recall the sacred conversations of your lives - some of these are conversations you have had with yourself! Were you the speaker or the listener?

The Elements of Sacred Conversations

 

If you would like creative guidance in working with the mysteries of sacred conversation, I am offering a two session teleseminar on the Elements of Sacred Conversations.  Through understanding the elements you will feel a greater depth of love and a greater capacity for knowing yourself and others.  You will become a sacred conversationalist. All relationships are enhanced through the sacred conversations. 

 

The Elements of Sacred Conversation teleseminar  takes place on Sunday, April 25 and Sunday, May 2 from 4 - 5:30PM Eastern (1PM Pacific). The cost is $27.

 

Click here to register and learn the details of this valuable teleseminar on sacred conversations.

Inner Easter - Your Resurrection

This Easter Sunday feel the sun rising in your heart of hearts flooding you with the light of freedom and the warmth of love.  Be new. 

 

This newness is not a new reflection of the old, familiar you.  It is new to the core. Everything in you that could suffer and die, everything in you that felt the fires of inner hell is gone.  You greet your companions and they do not recognize you.  You look in the mirror of your soul and see a self that is definitely you but so strange and different.You and I in our spiritually fragile development can only hold this experience for a moment. 

 

I am frustrated sharing my inadequate words.  I can only apologize for my lack of poetic elegance and assure you that my weak images do not reflect a weak conviction regarding the Inner Easter moments we each experience.  

 

 I want to share one contemporary poem that sings of the Easter mystery.  Derek Walcott wrote it.

Love After Love

The time will come 
when,

with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving


at your own door, in your own mirror


and each will smile at the other's welcome,

 



and say, sit here. Eat. 


You will love again the stranger who was your self.


Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart


to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

 



all your life, whom you ignored


for another, who knows you by heart.


Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

 



the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.


Sit. Feast on your life. 


 

If we let our old ways die and restore wholeness to our soul, we become new. Spiritually we remain ourselves, but without the limiting and often distorting context of our past to define our form we become different.  We become unrecognizable to ourselves and to all our companions.  We have risen to a new way of being.  This is the challenge and the reality of our inner resurrection experience.  We surprise ourselves for brief moments, we know joy.  Not a joy that is compared to a suffering.  No, resurrection joy is suffering turned inside out.

The Resurrection of 2000 years ago made it possible for each of us to have resurrection moments in our souls. Easter comes once a year to remind us to pay attention to our resurrection moments. Not just to pay attention, but to have faith in them.

I have suffered my heart being broken only to find it healed in a moment.  The healed heart is a new heart, not a mended heart.  It is a heart that has no memory of it's suffering and death.  It is resurrected and filled with new love and new freedom. 

In the audio I speak to the mystery of inner resurrection and the challenge of being new. 

Inner Easter - Holy Saturday

Most of our Easter education gives little attention to Holy Saturday and the Descent into Hell.  Probably the Church fathers chose to neglect the harrowing of hell because it indicated the Christ forgave all sins and released souls from the eternal fires of hell.  Where is the supremacy of the Church, of the priesthood, if the Christ forgives all sins, not the Church and it's priests in whatever hierarchical power?

Where is your relationship to your inner redemption if it is freed from the punishment of the eternal threat of brimstone?  What if freedom is not a magic wand, a fairy godmother's beneficent gesture , but dependent, actually exalted, by a conscious descent into the darkest, fiercest, most excruciating self-examination and compassionate self-judgment you are capable of?  Yes, it is frightening and truly, a personal threshold but the result is a possibility of Inner Resurrection.

 How do you descend into Hell? and for what inner purpose? 
Is there inner resurrection without inner redemption? 

How do you go into your own inner hell?
Why go into your own inner hell?

Each of us finds freedom and joy when we willingly enter into our own inner hell and find our way out.  We bring with us all that we have struggled to meet and forgive in our own individuality.

Listen to the audio with self-compassion. Be strong in meeting the parts of your soul that feel served by the fires of self- judgment.

Please share with me and the other companions descending into hell consciously, what you learn and what you forgive.  Each of us needs support for the deed of self-compassion.

Tomorrow we face the mystery of joy, the mystery of inner resurrection.
Warmly,
Lynn

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.

Inner Easter - Your Last Supper

 

Maundy Thursday is the day of the Last Supper. Below I've posted an audio  to share some thoughts on awakening within your own soul a feeling for the experience of the Last Supper.  As usual, the imagination of the last supper, like all the Inner Year imaginations, nurtures all souls on a spiritual path whether or not they are practicing Christians.

With Inner Lent we imagined a personal experience of the fasting of Christ and  the overcoming of the three great temptations.  When Jesus Christ returns from his solitude in the desert he seeks and finds his companions for his three years.  The Last Supper comes at the end of the three years and mirrors the fasting with a final feast and final gathering of the companions. 

Imagine your Inner Last Supper today. Imagine gathering your companions for a final feast. Work metaphorically and personally with the elements of the supper, your washing of their feet, the transubstantiation of your body and your blood and so on.   Feel the Christ mysteries awakening in your own self awareness.

As we look into our lives and into our souls to awaken an inner feeling for the Last Supper, I want to offer some suggestions. Rather than writing down my suggestions, I have recorded them in this 18 minute audio.

But before you listen, I want explain something.  In the audio I ask you to play with these suggestions. Play! I feel so much of our inner spiritual work is burdened and weakened by a mood of somberness and rigor.  As Christ says to his disciples, unless we become as little children we will have difficulty entering the kingdom of heaven.

There is a PBS documentary "Where Do Children Play?" www.wfum.org/childrenplay/
Here is a quote I found filled with wisdom and inspiration from the description on the website - italics are mine.

Play takes many forms. It may be best defined from within as a spontaneous human expression that relies on imagination and a sense of freedom. Players invent alternative contexts for conversation, visualization, movement, and interactions with real objects. They find release and involvement, stimulation and peace.

As you play in your contemplation of your last supper, find your freedom in your imagination. This is sacred play. There is nothing of idleness or thoughtlessness in a child's play.

Just press the yellow button and you can listen to the recording on your computer or download it to listen later. If you load it on to your ipod you can go for a walk and listen or take your journal to some quiet place so you can listen and write.  Don't forget to pause if a suggestion inspires your thoughts and feelings and you want to deepen both with playful attention or joyful writing.

Inner Easter - A Challenge, Not a Comfort

 As I work through and around the Inner Year of my soul, I find the Inner Solstices bring comfort and joy to the soul (Christmas and St John’s Tide) and the Inner Equinoxes (Easter and Michaelmas) bring challenge and suffering to the soul.

How is this so?

What comes to my heart is an imagination that light and dark by themselves are comforting and offer a joy in their enveloping presence.  White reflects all things and black absorbs all things.  No struggle there to confront and manage.  The Inner Solstices give us a clear gesture of attention and embrace. The soft darkness of Inner Christmas asks us to enter into a new sense of ourselves as spiritual beings of innocence and wisdom.  And the light energy of Inner St John’s Tide asks us to experience a new sense of ourselves as earthly creatures engaging in earthly relationships and earthly deeds.

But the Inner Equinoxes are another imagination all together.  Nature and spirit do not offer a simple experience. Light and dark are equal and the soul struggles in a tension between to the two inner poles.  The balance is precarious and confusing.  It is in the midst of this tense opposition that the soul is asked to meet death at Inner Easter and evil at Inner Michaelmas. Although the sense perceptible world is filled with beauty at both equinoxes, inwardly, we are challenged and we suffer. Appropriately so! Death and evil are not easy on the soul. It takes a maturity of self and courage of heart to do the inner work of the equinoxes and feel a sensitive conscious awareness to embrace our inner deaths and conquer our inner evil.

And our modern lives and modern culture so filled with superficial distractions and thoughtless anxieties make it all the more difficult to attend to our Inner Year with it’s comforts and joys and its challenges and suffering.

Inner Easter

In is just another week in our daily lives, but in our soul, in our inner life, it is Holy Week. As the temperate realm of the Northern Hemisphere of our amazing planet Earth, is bursting with new life, we find our souls needing to evolve our inner relationship to death.  Not death as a final ending, but death as a dramatic transformation that ends all attachment to the past and opens up to a mysterious and new future. And our souls must realize that this Inner Easter may seem an insignificant and timid, even foolish, reflection of the Easter Story of 2000 years ago

It is not that we must come to experience the Christ Mystery in all its fierce outer significance every Easter. Rather with the yearly experience of Inner Easter we find our intimate grasp of our personal and very real last suppers, agonies in the garden, cross-bearing journeys, crucifixions, descents in to hells and, ultimately, to our own inner resurrections. And every spring Equinox, as we bring our inner attention to our soul life, we take small steps in our moral development.

This inner work deserves and requires depth of thought and penetration, not easy in these days of superficiality.  We don’t want these experiences to melt quickly like a jelly bean or a milk chocolate Easter egg. We want an Inner Easter with profound and lasting meaning.

Inner Easter is less about time and more about attention.  So if you seek an Inner Easter, don’t feel you must devote the whole week to this work, (although wouldn’t the world be different if we could have a week of rest to attend to our inner development). Just a few minutes of devoted inner exploration and meditation will offer a deep experience.  Our soul’s need for attention and nourishment around the Easter mysteries is intense.  Give your Easter personal meaning beyond any religious meaning.

 

A Gift of Inner Year Guidance

I will be sending out to you a four-part series of written and spoken thoughts and suggestions for your inner experience of the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. The audios will each be about 10-20 minutes.  Like the Inner Christmas messages, Inner Easter is a gift from my soul to yours.  I hope you find spiritual resonance with these inspirations. (If you would like to make a donation expressing your gratitude, you can do that on the Inner Year blog). Thank you.

Please share your Inner Easter questions and experiences with others here on the blog.

Easter blessings,

Lynn

Permission to Forget

Wow, is this important for spiritual practice and inner development.

Give yourself permission to forget.
I repeat.
Give yourself permission to forget.

Forget what?

2 things...

your daily demands
and
your inner demands

When you focus on your inner development, give yourself permission to forget the demands of your daily life.

When you focus on your daily life, give yourself permission to forget the demands of your inner life.

If you do this you will find guilt, shame and anxiety fading out of your life. Without guilt, shame and anxiety, life happens joyfully.

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

I am going to interrupt myself because I have a burning, just now crystalizing, insight to share.

There is a big difference between spiritual practice and spiritual development. Lots of people have a spiritual practice but don''t spiritually develop. A spiritual practice is something one does to maintain a relationship to spirit. Spirit can be an external being/god or an internal state. Prayer, contemplation, meditation, sacred movement, and sacred reading are all active forms of spiritual practice.

Spiritual development, on the other hand, is a dynamic commitment to the healing, liberating and empowering of your relationship to your selfhood, the divine being within. Being dynamic means you will dwell in paradox in order to develop. You will risk the familiar in order to find the true. You will die in order to become. You will release in order to grasp. You will stop seeking answers in order to find questions. No matter what you feel, you will feel compassion for yourself. You will play. You will change tracks and directions often. You will see silliness in all things serious and something profound in all things ridiculous.

My Inner Year work is not about spiritual practice. It is about the practice of spiritual development. So if you are someone who "can't" meditate, or someone who does meditate but wants more (as in spiritual hunger, not spiritual greed) then you will find support for your spiritual development in my work, the Inner Year.

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

Back to forgetting demands.

Most of us suffer with conflicting and nagging demands on our time, our energy and our attention.

I bet as you read this (and hopefully find yourself pausing to think about what you have read) you may be doubting the rightness of using your time, energy and attention this way. You have a list of to do's and a picture of a life of order, design and completions. You have piles of stuff to take care of and yet here you are staring at the computer screen! Right now forget the stuff. It's okay to forget the daily demands, when you are taking a few moments to nurture yourself.

Likewise, don't worry if you get so involved with your stuff, that you don't do your yoga, or sacred reading. This also goes for falling asleep without your evening spiritual practice of prayers or meditation because you are exhausted from doing so much. Give yourself permission to forget your inner life.

Just forget demands. Forgetting makes life less anxious and more manageable. Give joyful energy and joyful attention to what you are doing in the moment. Being responsible is joyful. Learn to feel joy and you will find order, design, and completion in your life, your daily life and your inner life. Joy comes first.

Now I will joyfully return to the work I was doing on developing facebook fan pages for the Six Christmases.

And please, joyfully comment or send me an email.

PS: Inner Advent is the work of spiritual development and the willingness to remember. It reveals how you spiritually and practically evolved as an individual and a member of humanity over the year. If you feel you would find benefit and clarity in working through a designed and orderly path of self-reflection over four weeks, do sign up for the Inner Advent teleseminar here.