Feeling Blessed and Full of Grace

 

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March 25, 2011

At the beginning of the week, my inbox was full of beautiful writings about the Vernal Equinox, Ostara, and Spring and I had thought about offering my own thoughts on the new season.

 

The Annunciation

 

But a few weeks ago, as the Cherry Plums began to bloom here in South Devon, I noticed on the calendar the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25. The inner question marks bloomed in my soul like the Cherry Plums -- What is the experience of Inner Annunciation?  I’ve surrendered to the questions and today on the Annunciation I want to share the results of my wonderings .

As with the other Christian Festivals, I look for meaning and relationships that are esoteric, hidden, personal, evolved, immediate, even practical, and outside the traditions of institutionalized Christianity. I connect with the Festivals as true and archetypal models of how each of us can incarnate the divine, fulfill our destiny and manifest goodness in the world.

You might want to go here to read the various versions of the Annunciation from the Bible and the beautiful version from the Koran.  You will also find a gallery of Annunciation art - so many painters have found inspiration in the story.  Plan on giving your soul at least 5-10 minutes of the healing beauty of these images.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation

 

The Results of My Wonderings

 

Archangels appear when a divine impulse will change the future of human existence or human consciousness. They announce, make whole, enlighten and protect the impulses living in our souls.  The impulse they attend to can be subtle and delicate or grand and powerful but the impulse is not personal and will impact more than an individual and more than the moment.

A virgin is pure, innocent and has yet to receive.  In each of us, in our consciousness, at any moment there is a place of virginity.  This is the place where we receive Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions. When we become aware of these divine impulses we often feel surprised and unworthy and wonder how this could be.

Immersed in the materialism of our modern times, it is difficult to realize in our humility that we are blessed and full of grace in these moments.

In your inner experience of the Annunciation, feel your way into an intimate connection to this festival.  Take a spring walk and quietly bend to your innocence.  Think back on your inner annunciations.  Consider how you let the divinely conceived grow in your inner womb until it is time to birth.

Blessings on the Blessed,

Lynn

Can you say YES, to saying NO?

What is Lent about for you in 2011? 

For me, Lent is about learning to say "No" to what tempts us.

Most of us aren’t very successful saying " No" when we are weak with our bottomless addictions, our powerful fantasies and our rigid prejudices.  And each of us, if we look at ourselves with objective compassion, can admit to many of these weaknesses.

With even a minimal mastery of "no!" we find greater freedom, integrity, fulfillment and growth.  Each year the practice of Inner Lent can evolve our command of our own impulses, habits, and anxieties and develop a greater confidence in our ability to liberate our consciousness, our feelings and our deeds.

When we enter and dwell in the wilderness of our soul we find the untamed instincts, obsessions and compulsions of our inner lives. There we feel our unfed hungers and unquenched thirsts. We face the ever more seductive temptations of egotism and meet the wild beasts living in our undisciplined and immature natures.
 
Inner Lent leads to deeply essential self-knowledge and self-mastery. During Inner Lent we learn to have a healthier, more responsible, more active, and more spiritual relationship to "NO!"

Inner Lent explores the three temptations in their modern soul reality: the temptations that live in our soul as addictions, fantasies and prejudices.  We look at how to understand these temptations, face and vanquish the inner tempters, and center ourselves in the embodiment of our destiny.

In this second week of Lent:
What addictions can you name and say no to without anxiety?
What fantasies can you ground with real action? 
What prejudices can you evolve into openness?

With what I cover and discuss with you in my three Inner Lent webinars, you will be able to apply your Inner Lent practice to the addictions, fantasies and prejudices in all areas of your life: health, diet, work, love, parenting, spiritual practice, emotional well-being.  Like Inner Christmas, Inner Lent will give you the wonder, the wisdom the wit and the will to shape a valued and valuable life.

The commitment to the three webinars keeps you focused and attending to your Lenten practice, working with your Lenten questions, and refining your Lenten insights.

Like all the Inner Year programs, Inner Lent is spiritually clarifying and inspiring and practically grounding and creative.

Each of the three Inner Lent webinars is recorded for listening and downloading. A number of helpful handouts will be emailed to all participants. If you cannot attend the live webinars you can listen to the replays and work with the handouts.

Say "YES!" to saying "NO!"

Deepen your Inner Lent:

The First Temptation:  To Turn Stones to Bread Through Your Addictions 
Sunday, March 20 at 1PM Eastern.

The Second Temptation: To Leap Off the Pinnacle Through Your Fantasies 
Sunday, April 3 at 1PM Eastern.

The Third Temptation: To Claim Dominion Over All You See Through Your Prejudices 
Sunday, April 17 at 1PM Eastern.

The cost for Inner Lent: access to the three webinars, the recordings, the inspiring handouts,  is $47. 

To register click here:  Inner Lent

If you have any questions, need to pay by check, or any difficulties registering please call me 973-457-4147 between 10AM Eastern and 4PM Eastern or email me anytime.

Those constant temptations...

What is the meaning of Lent for your soul?

In the cycle of the Inner Year, the first quarter of the year is spent working with your relationship to yourself:

Inner Epiphany celebrates and deepens your sense of the purpose living in your existence.

Imagining Your Contribution addresses the evolving needs and expressions of that purpose. 

Then comes Inner Lent, the time of facing the possibility that you may be tempted to forego your purpose for more immediate and seductive powers and pleasures.


365 days a year, I succumb to little temptations. Don’t you?

There is always some voice urging me to turn a stone to bread, leap off some high perch trusting the angels to rescue me before I crash on the ground, and the great temptation to be right, to know it all.  And I succumb...dumb!

A stone is not bread and never satisfies my appetite.

Angels come to my side when I walk firmly on the ground, but laugh at my ridiculous attempts to magically fly through the day or the deed. The sound of angels laughing at my foolishness is an absolutely cringing sensation.

And being right, has nothing to do with being alive and in the moment. The sense of being right relates to a past and very dead moment.  Being right has no lasting power. If I arrogantly attach my life to a story of the past, time, the world and real joy pass me by.

Inner Lent is the time when my inner learning, my self-knowledge, focuses on my relationship to temptation.

Won’t you join me?

Inner Lent, like all of the Inner Year programs, offers archetypal imaginations and questions that guide and support you in your very unique and ,just right for you and only you” awakening and understanding of your soul’s unfolding.

I’ve made a recording of some thoughts on the first questions of Inner Lent. I look at the landscape of inner isolation and the experience of inner fasting. I describe why Inner Lent is connected, not to Inner Easter, but to the experience of Inner Baptism. 

As I write this, I keep struggling with the third temptation. I keep wanting to rerecord and make my thoughts perfect, so right that I would stand in glory above the world. Yuk, yuk, yuk!! 

Listen to my imperfect thoughts.  In spite of their imperfection you may find encouragement and inspiration for you own Inner Lent.
Click here to listen...

Then consider engaging in a deeper look at your relationship to each of the three temptations and their appearance in the modern soul (that’s our souls) as addiction, fantasy and prejudice. This is the Inner Lent program of three webinars and a bunch of great materials. 
You can click here to go to my “store” to register for the Inner Lent program. (I’ll be sending out at least one more email next week sharing more about the content of the webinar and how you might find real value in it.)

One reason to signup - to keep you focused on your Inner Lent, as our daily lives are so filled with temptations that distract us from the work of self-knowledge and our inner development.  It is so sad to let these rich inner seasonal possibilities slip by.  Yes, we can work on our addictions, fantasies and prejudices at any time of the year, but we do so without the support of the cosmos.  Now is the time when the cosmic design where the human soul finds alignment with divine intention and the course of the sun and the greatest amount of light shines down on these inner questions.

Inner Epiphany - Your Initiative

YOUR INITIATIVE

Initiative is the power of the individual (or community) to begin to manifest a new reality.  In other words, it is the courage and power to show up as yourself, contribute what only you can contribute and make the difference only you can make.

Initiative lives in initiates.  In ancient times there was a process of initiation lead by hierophants or gurus. In the evolution of consciousness, we now initiate ourselves with guidance from wise friends. Through the challenges and struggles of self-initiation, we imagine and develop our capacities to contribute to humanity. At some point we experience an inner shift, a graduation. Then we actually do it - we make our difference!

In the Gospel of John, we read the brief description of the first “difference” made by Jesus Christ, the changing of water to wine at the wedding at Cana.

In this description we can find a number of archetypal elements of initiative.  Paying attention to these elements and to the personal insights they inspire can bring to your soul a self-awareness that will support your self-initiation. I explore these in the audio.

Just let me say here that our individual path to our unique initiatives in not for sissies or slugs.  It takes courage and perseverance.  Most of us need to change our thinking, our values and our habits - step way out of the familiar box.  But remember we have been given the three gifts and immersed ourselves in the living waters of personal baptism, so we have been moving toward taking initiative our whole life.

In the audio below, I share my thoughts on the first sign or miracle of Jesus Christ and how we might find a model for fulfilling our destiny deeds.  Please leave your comments.

Note: I made the audio yesterday. When I listened to it, I was disappointed in my hesitancy at the beginning, a lot of ah's and um's, as if my thoughts were stammering into speech.  When we take initiative we often trip over time as in "my time has not come" translated into "my thoughts or my words have not come."

Working with this inner mystery of the Wedding at Cana triggered a lot of resistance in me.The challenge to share my insights felt right, but not comfortable. Yet as I persevered, putting aside my hesitancy, the thoughts moved beyond my self-consciousness and I found the warmth of enthusiasm flowing into me as the thoughts became speech more gracefully. And the content and feeling of the thoughts became surprising to me, the speaker.  Do listen and forgive the stammering thoughts at the beginning and find the juicy flowing thoughts that come once I get out of the way.

Then last night, I saw "The King's Speech."

Click here to download the audio on Your Initiative…

or to listen immediately click the button.

IMAGINING YOUR CONTRIBUTION

 Following the process of relating to the three inner epiphany experiences of the manger, the river and the wedding, the soul’s cycle of the inner year takes us into an intensive exploration of how we imagine our personal contribution. Do you know what your contribution is? Do you want to learn a number of important insights and essential questions that will guide you on your path of self-initiation? Imagining Your Contribution begins in in two weeks. 

I will be sending out info on this program in a few days including the opportunity to register for a complementary teleseminar on Imagining Your Contribution next Sunday at 5PM GMT (that's Noon Eastern and 9AM Pacific).

Inner Epiphany - Your Baptism

Inner Baptism

The second Inner Epiphany is the baptism in the living waters and the entry and embodiment of the divine intention into human consciousness, your individual consciousness.

When the three gifts of the first epiphany are doing their work. Your thought life is now living and flowing with truth through the gesture of frankincense. Your feeling life is calm and form an evolvng, growing beauty through the gesture of myrrh. Your will life is glowing with the warmth of the sun ready “to go for the gold,” the incorruptible deed or deeds of unselfish goodness.

You wait for your inner time.  You wait for your inner recognition.  You wait for the inner heavens to open up and this core spark of love and freedom to come down and enter into your own sacred heart. And then it happens. You feel your significance.

Inner Baptism can occur many times in a lifetime.  In the course of our own inner development we can dive into the living waters of our souls and find new recognition, a new sense of deed and timing, a new warmth of courage and direction many times. Our inner heavens open up and new love enters our souls many times.

In the audio which is about 30 minutes long, I offer some soul pictures of the experience of inner baptism.  I give some new perspectives on the Baptism of Jesus Christ, but mostly I explore this inner baptism of self. I talk about the muddy banks of the river that we must walk through to get into the water.  I talk about how to celebrate your inner baptism.  And much more.

Click here to download the audio on Inner Baptism…

Or listen now by clicking the button:

Download the audio. Go for a walk and listen to it. If you want to go deeply into this imagination, use my words as inspiration to find your own relationship to inner baptism, I have a few suggestions.  After the first walking listening, sit down with your journal or a blank word document on your computer, and listen to segments of the audio - the segments that appeal to you.  Then write your thoughts and responses.  Let your thoughts be as living waters. Let them flow. 

Next Sunday, I will send thoughts on the Wedding and the Wine.

Inner Epiphany - Your Three Gifts

Inner Epiphany in the time in the cycle of the Inner Year when we notice the new light living in our souls from our Inner Christmas. We see the gifts of waking up, warming up, and wising up to ourselves and we realize our future begins now.

To understand the purpose of Inner Epiphany, we need to recall the Christian festival of Epiphany.  Three events in the life of Jesus Christ are celebrated on Epiphany: The arrival of the Three Wisemen offering their three gifts of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh; the Baptism in the River Jordan; and, the first miracle of turning water to wine at the Wedding at Cana. All three events have to do with fulfilling destiny.

Each of these events understood from an esoteric and intimate perspective, guides us to our own personal epiphanies and the awareness of our own destinies. We discover our own inner epiphanies and begin our futures now through asking our souls certain questions.

The Three Gifts - Frankincense, Myrrh & Gold

Two plant resins and a mineral, what could they possibly mean to your destiny? If destiny is the incarnation (sudden or incremental) of your spirit, your inner divinity, into your physical body so that your thoughts, your feelings and your deeds are sound, meaningful and purposeful, why would you need the gesture and support of these three gifts?

Listen to this recording and find insight and inspiration.  You might learn what you are missing in your soul and discover what you need to request, develop, embrace.  We all need these gifts to spiritually flourish and fulfill.  

You can download the recording to your mp3 player and listen to it as you go for a walk or take a drive. It's 23 minutes long.  

I made this audio last Epiphany with the intention to have it edited by my good friend Tony, but I never sent it to him - so I apologize for the first couple of minutes. 

Click here to download the audio…

Some thoughts you won't find on the audio:  These gifts are given to a newborn. Clearly, you are not a babe from a material perspective.  But - the mystery of the human soul is that it can be "newborn" at anytime.  The soul also has wise imaginations and inner gifts that nurture the inner newborn.  As we begin a new year and wake up to our resolve to live into our destines, we need to receive our self-given gifts. 

Remember the inspiration for the Inner Year are the Christian Festivals.  You can listen to the audio and find an esoteric understanding of events in the life of Jesus Christ, but,  please, discover how these events live in your own inner life.  

Click here to download the audio…

What a difference a year makes?

Your year made a difference - to you, to others, to the world and to the future. What was the difference? 

It was not just the same routine, the same gestures and activities, the same rhythms of sleep, meals, work, relationships. It was different and it was powerful. If you don't believe it, register for the Inner Advent teleseminar and do the work.  If you don't discover the powerful difference, I will give you your $47 back and include a one-hour private session with me to talk about why your year didn't make a difference.  

This is my third message and final message about Inner Advent and it is my strongest.  I really want you to participate in my Inner Advent teleseminar series.  It will make a difference in your life, both of your lives - the inner and the outer.


If you have decided you want to participate in Inner Advent, register now.
http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Inner-Advent-IYIA10.htm
The Sunday afternoon (4PM Eastern, 1PM Pacific) sessions begin tomorrow and the Thursday evening (8PM Eastern, 5PM Pacific) begin in five days.

Remember you do not need to be on the calls or be on every call. You will receive recordings of all the sessions and all the written materials within 24 hours.

Inner Advent

• shows the differences this year made
• makes sense of your year
• gives you a feeling of completion
• provides a surprisingly objective awareness of your truth.
• liberates you from limiting identities, stories and reactions
• reveals the lessons of the year
• increases your ability to creatively design your future
• celebrates who you’ve been, who  you are and who you are becoming

http://www.store.lynnjericho.com/Inner-Advent-IYIA10.htm

“My soul and the world are but one.”

There are seven billion people on this planet who have lived another year.  How many of them will do the inner work of recollecting, reviewing and releasing their inner past so their inner future can be met with real possibility and real responsibility? In our increasingly challenging world with the growing difficulties of our political, economic and environmental crises, self-knowledge is the first step to resolution. Self-knowledge leads to freedom and love - the freedom to make new choices and the love for others, the planet and the future.


Inner Advent is an embrace, a conscious embrace, of your unfolding life. It’s a responsibility to your self, maybe even a spiritual or moral duty to your self. 
We are different from animals in that we have the moral ability to be self-conscious and self-creative. We are not just about drives for survival or desires for being happy, we are about freedom and growth.

Freedom comes from knowing yourself. Self-knowledge is a spiritual practice.  Rudolf Steiner teachings guide me to a right relationship to my self.  He writes in his book, How To Know Higher Worlds, “You can only sacrifice that which you have fully possessed.” Self-knowledge is self-possession. Possess your year so you can let it go.

Know how you survived this year. Know how you emotionally experienced the year.  Know how you grew and evolved over the year.

Know your year to know your self!

Possess your year so you can let the stories go and find the meaning, the sacrifice of your 365 days, your 29000 breaths, your efforts and struggles, your dreams, your joys, your sorrows.

How do you begin to do this? How do you organize your recollection of the year? How do you analyze what happened? How do you intuit the meaning? What are the questions that will lead to the insights, the self-knowledge, to a new you, a wiser you, a freer you?

I want Inner Advent to be a relaxed and aware experience for you. I will guide the process, but you will do the work.  No one can do it but you. This is the gift you give your Self.