Wise Action

When you pray, move your feet.

Winter Solstice

Dear friends,

I believe that it will only be the world "as we know it" that ends today.  My soul says this is a good thing, and that we all have an opportunity to yield into the change we want to see in the world, and thus become a part of it.  Yielding into this change may feel threatening to many of us because we know that we are risking becoming more than we already are - a positive identity crisis is still an identity crisis.  Trusting our own potential and the potential of others will be an essential personal practice during this time.  Let there be Love and Light for all creatures great and small.  Winter solstice/'end of times': I welcome you!

Namaste,
Whitney

It Felt Love.

How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart

And give to this world
All it's
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise
We all remain

Too

Frightened.

-- Hafiz

Hopefulness

"Hope is a function of struggle.  Hope is not an emotion, but a is a cognitive, behavioral process that we learn when we experience adversity, when we have relationships that are trustworthy, when people have faith in our ability to get out of a jam".  

-- Brene Brown

The True Origin of Courage

"From Caring Comes Courage". - Lao Tzu.

I recently heard someone describe the incredible new quality of love they were capable of experiencing towards their newborn daughter.  They went on to explain the ways in which they could tell they had been initiated into a capacity for love that was entirely different from what they had been capable of feeling before: "Before this, I think I simply hoped that I would have the courage to jump in front of a bus or a bullet for someone else.  Now I know I would".  Their words reminded me of the Lao Tzu quote at the top of this post, and also reaffirmed to me what I've been remembering lately:  It takes courage to care about something because we know that any experience of caring will both beget and require more and more courage from us as we continue caring for it.

Getting married was one of the experiences that helped initiate me into a deeper understanding of the connection between caring and courage, as it required me to relate to my intuitive sense that I was signing up for a lifetime of learning how to become both more courageous and more caring towards this person I was marrying.  I did not know what "for better or for worse" could or would look like, and I had no interest in being naive about the vows I was making either.  My willingness to be that conscious about the phenomena of marriage required the kind of courage that could only come from a very deep caring for the man I was going to marry, the relationship I was agreeing to enter into, as well as my own set of personal need-strengths and limits.  I think this honest reflection has helped both of us navigate the circumstances in which we've needed to become more caring and more courageous towards one another.  I don't doubt that this will ever cease, and I'm powerfully grateful for that -- even though I still don't know what "for better or for worse" might look like for us.

Collectively, I believe we value both caring and courage in ourselves and others because it's the pro-social glue that holds the human species together.  Ironically, we have often learned that caring and courage can also be socially dangerous at times.  Maybe you were the child on the playground that cared deeply about the other child who was being actively bullied.  If you let your caring dictate a courageous gesture, you might soon find yourself on the receiving end of the bully's aggression. Perhaps you had the courage to tell someone that you liked, wanted, desired, or needed them, and were consequently rejected or humiliated.  So we become defended against both caring and courage in order to protect what's left of our delicate little egos.  To still appear socially attractive, we may learn how to pretend to care, or how to practice things that look like courage (but involve no real risk to our personal sense of safety).

For example, I notice that I'm willing to navigate intensely difficult interpersonal dynamics and admit my own shortcomings when I actually care deeply for the other person and the relationship itself.  I'm also willing to spend precious time, energy, and resources on the things I genuinely care about.  It should be noted that the word courage comes from latin roots that further illustrates this connection to caring.  In latin, the word means something like "to speak one's mind by telling one's whole heart". If courage is about telling one's whole heart, it also sounds like an invitation for lots of gut-wrenching honesty with oneself and others.  In light of this, I've started to examine the sincerity of my caring by the measure of real courage I experience in relation to it.  If I discover that I don't care as much as I want to care, then I have an opportunity to examine the psychological defenses that are holding me back.  As someone who is devoted to the ongoing process of wholeness, I'm often acutely aware that we have to be first willing to feel the experience of our heart in order to then speak about it.  That's a pretty courageous task in and of itself, which makes me think that even "caring about caring" involves some spark of real courage.

Echoing Lao Tzu's original sentiment, the social scientist, TedTalk celebrity, and author of the Ordinary Courage blog, Brene Brown, says it this way: "vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage".  My conclusion:  I believe the only real choices we have is this non-linear relationship between caring and courage is whether or not we will be open towards our own heart-felt response to things.

Book Evangelism!

The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren
A Little Book on The Human Shadow by Robert Bly
The Deepest Acceptance by Jeff Foster

The Intimate Life by Judith Blackstone

The Bond by Lynne McTaggart

Vibrational Medicine by Richard Gerber
The Polyvagal Theory by Stephen W. Porges
The Ever Present Origin by Jean Gebser

.... Ready, break!

Imperfection: the vehicle to all growth?

"Symmetry may have its appeal but it is inherently stale. Some kind of imbalance is behind every transformation."

-- astrophysicist, Marcelo Gleiser

Human Love

Today's Solar Eclipse!

I used to pay attention to horoscopes in the newspaper or magazines because I thought they were quirky and fun.  Maybe it also gave me a sense of cosmic connection when they were accurate as well.  Over the years, however, I've had more exposure to some very serious practitioners of the art, and any residual dismissive attitude has been consequently silenced.  According to the author of one particular astrology blog I read, these are the potential gifts of today's solar eclipse in Scorpio:

"Information lives in light.  This information comes from the heart of a Star–a star called the Sun. Our Sun holds information from its Creator (most likely the Black Hole at the Center of our Galaxy; the Galactic Center; Hunab Ku)… to Imagine what types of information is encoded within these primordial ancient galactic wave forms is mind bending. And light isn’t just information, it’s also energy. 

When the Moon aligns perfectly between Sun and Earth we experience Solar Eclipses.  Divinely infused New Moons meant to catapult us onto the right path.  It is up to us to be good tricksters in this opportune space.  Nobody is going to do this work for you.  It is up to you.  Be quick, be stealthy, and have an idea of what you are looking for.  Without the light of the Sun, we are “eclipsed” and free to roam in the Shadow of our being for a short time, rewriting aspects of our story we have been hungry to edit. 

What is the Shadow?  The Shadow in Jungian psychology is the unconscious dumping ground for undesirable characteristics of personality.  And so, during Eclipses we get to choose what gets released or incinerated in our unconscious dumping grounds.  Only with intent will you experience the stellar magic of these Dragon holes.  Intention and courage will bring you to the moments where you become weightless, carried by Love and nothing else…."

For more moon updates - check out this blog:  Holes To Heaven.

Our Oceanic Selves

No wave moves against the ocean.

When you remember that you are the whole ocean,
You're no longer afraid of the waves.

Be The Mystery.

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. And as you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, this intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world shall cease to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
And to the rushing water speak, I am.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Intelligence of Play.

"Who knows what makes us play?  The young of very many species, including our own, spontaneously chase, leap, twist, wrestle and cavort, promoting strength and endurance, instinct, social bonding and adaptation.  Complex play with objects and goals is associated with more complex brains.  But playing is also, apparently, just for the sheer pleasure of play.  An aquarium fish will repeatedly leap in and out of a tiny waterfall.  Ravens have been observed sledding on their backs down slopes of snow, and kea parrots toss rocks in the air.  Elephants kneel to equalize play with a smaller playmate.  Cats, dogs and primates, among others, incorporate objects and obstacles in their play and often have favorite toys.  Dolphins invite play with human swimmers.  Play, in fact, is a principal way in which acquaintance is made with another".  -- from The Book of Symbols

Intuitively, we know how important play is for our ongoing development.  We teach children games and give them time to play.  Hopscotch, for example, has it's origins in myths about the soul's journey from earth to heaven through a labyrinth.  I have no idea why we stop valuing this way of learning for our adult selves, but I think it's a grievous error to do so.  As Ramikrishna reminds us, "The divine mother is always sportive.  The universe is her play... her pleasure is in continuing the game".

The Book of Symbols further elaborates: "Psychologically, consciousness and unconscious interact and impact one another in all kinds of play.  The reverie of play unveils feelings, aspirations, impressions, locked up pieces of experience and potentialities.  Play can evoke the affinity and polarity between psychic opposites, and dynamics of exclusion and integration, separation and reunification.  Alchemy described a part of the opus as "child's play" despite the arduous nature of the work of self-understanding, suggesting that psychic process requires an attitude of play and that the imagination was a primary tool of the adept".

Carl Jung played "children's games" of drawing, sand-tray, making models out of clay, and dialoging with unseen figures, all of which are ways of engaging the unconscious energies of the psyche in order to coax them into consciousness.  Physicists, also, play speculative "god-games" with specialized toys that can only be handled safely because of the agreed upon rules of a specific game.  We could conclude, consequently, that play allows for "evolutionary change, self-awareness, scientific discovery, artistic composition, invention, pleasure, good friends of multiple species and the resolution of many questions" (The Book of Symbols).

Do you remember being a young child and enthusiastically ringing someone's doorbell in order to see if they could "come out and play"?  I believe that THIS is a good intention to have with ourselves and each other throughout the entire course of our lives.  Tremendous creativity and learning can come from play in a way that few other practices are able to facilitate so... playfully.  :-)

Abundance of Life

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst.
You love most of all those who need you
as they need a crowbar or a hoe.
You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

It's okay to feel things!

My own experiences with intense emotions (both personally and professionally) have convinced me that there is purpose and intelligence inside of all emotional material.  Over the past several years in particular, I've noticed a correlation between the feeling of sadness and the experience of grounding. Often times, when I attempt to slow down and connect to the immediate ground of my being, I also notice that I must allow an experience of genuine sadness to move through me as well.

I've also noticed a correlation between "not wanting to feel sadness", and an avoidance of grounding practices like meditation or deep relaxation.  Yet, I also know that every single time I've allowed this feeling of sadness into my conscious awareness, I wind up with a sense of incredible gratitude for having reconnected to my tender, immediate experience of being.  In fact, those moments of working with this emotion in particular have often taught me that sadness an appropriate expression of grief for having abandoned my immediate experience of myself in the first place.

Consequently, the sadness - or grief - turns out to be the emotional expression that allows me to authentically reconnect with my own wholeness.  My point?  Difficult emotions do not arise to haunt and persecute us, but rather to invite us back into relationship with our whole dynamic selves.

My other point?  The emotional experience is already here whether we acknowledge it consciously or unconsciously.  I once heard a brilliant man express the following sentiment about working with difficult emotions:  "Whatever arises arises.  As a result, we only have two real choices about how we might approach things:  face forwards or ass backwards".  I believe it's precisely this practice of 'facing' ourselves that ultimately reflects our original beauty back to us.

Honest Humanity

An honorable human relationship -- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" -- is a process of deepening the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

- Adrienne Rich

Restor(y)ing the Body!

"You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: they contact the body. Somewhere there is a place where the two ends meet and become interlocked. And that is the place where one cannot say whether it is matter, or what one calls psyche."  -- Carl Jung

My good friend and collaborative partner, Dana, and I have been working together to create a mind + body integrative healing practice, which we have affectionately named 'Restor(y)ing the Body'. Essentially, we work together to explore the unique ways in which our clients carry their own personal stories in their physical bodies.  Much of the work we do reflects the above idea from Carl Jung, as we aim to help people discover the precise places where their ideas about themselves and their physical expressions have become interlocked in symptomatic ways.   In our practice and our workshops, we use a variety of methods to help people explore and transform these constricting patterns that exist in both the body and the mind.  These methods include (but are not limited to!) body work, shamanic techniques, energy and vibrational medicine interventions, guided meditation, and authentic movement exercises.

We also passionately agree with psychologist and spiritual teacher, Judith Blackstone, when she suggests that "our fixed grasp on ourselves and the world is not just mental but also somatic. There are rigid holding patterns throughout the whole body, limiting our capacity for cognition, emotional responsiveness and physical sensation.  Even our sensory perception is limited by the psychologically based constrictions throughout our whole body".  The real thrill for us has been watching people rediscover the magic of who they are, by reconnecting with the wisdom that can be found when the mind and body begin to dialogue at the same point of reference.

We LOVE this work, and are so excited to start sharing it with more individuals and groups of people.  If you or someone you know would be interested in beginning to learn how to re-write their own "story", whether through a private session or a workshop experience with us, please feel free to message us on our Facebook page: Restor(y)ing the Body, or email us at restoryingthebody@gmail.com!

Namaste,
Whitney & Dana

True Self.

Lover.
Filled with wonder.
Playmate of the Universe.
More curious than afraid - a steadfast friend to Mystery.
Soft.
Tender.
So soft and tender.
Spacious enough to include all beings.
Different than trustworthy: Entrusted.
The way a river has a course, yet is absolutely Free.

Divine Formlessness

In this culture, most of us remember learning about the Judeo-Christian concept of God when we were very young.  Perhaps the background for this learning was deep, rich and mysterious.  Or maybe our exposure to religion often felt stuffy and bland.  The ideas we formed about this God may have been wonderful or menacing or terrifying or healing or comforting or even confusing.  I know that one of my early associations to "learning about God" involved a felt-board with felt cut-outs of animals that I could arrange on Noah's felt-ark according to my own whims.  With all this power to pick and choose who might survive the flood, I really questioned the necessity of alligators in my version of this brave new world.  A little later on in my religious education, I read about this same flood from a leather-bound bible that included a little sketch of a woman on a rock, gripping a small infant in her arms while these turbulent flood waters rose up around her.  If I had been familiar with swear words like this at the time, I'm pretty sure I would have shouted or cried out to the tune of "What the FUCK?"!!

Instead, I ran crying into my parents bedroom and demanded an explanation!  What was I supposed to make of this?!  Had I not been told that God was a powerfully safe, wise, moral, benevolent, grandfather type of God?  One that LOVED THE WORLD SO MUCH that he gave his only begotten son?  (I don't think I knew what the word 'begotten' meant, but I sure knew that phrase by heart). None of this made any sense and my whole spiritual-worldview was consequently hanging by a thread!  I imagine that was one of my mother's more unwelcome parenting moments in some ways.  She didn't have a satisfying answer for me, and likely didn't have a satisfying answer for herself either.  I've thought about that moment many times as I've moved along my particular spiritual path.  Because, as it turns out, this capacity to question and wrestle with the image (i.e. form) of God that's being presented to me has remained a consistent, and almost involuntary function for me.  And despite many moments of uncomfortable disillusionment, I consider this to be one of the great gifts of human consciousness.

The gift, as I understand it, is this: my questioning mind has not limited my receptivity to the many expressions of God in my life.  In fact, so far, the inverse has been true for me.  I have not had to exclude possible mediums through which Divine Mystery or Presence or Purpose might reveal Itself to me.  Nor have I needed to limit the ways I might be able to approach This Mystery.  God has been God in everything from Vacation Bible School and charismatic church gatherings, to gong baths, Sufi mysticism, poetry from Mary Oliver, the novels of Barbara Kingsolver, yoga practice, the Muslim call to prayer, quantum physics, microbiology, Hindu shrines, Jungian psychology, mountain ranges, weeping willow trees, my husband's heart beat, shamanic journeys, remembered dreams, top 40 music hits, conversations with friends, conversations with enemies, and even those dreadful alligators.  It's a thrilling way to orient to the world when you believe that around any corner or behind any set of eyes (human or animal), one might encounter Divine Mystery!  

Another curious consequence of this openness towards the Divine Personality has been that I tend to shame and neglect less and less parts of my own personality as well.  Maybe this is because I learned that mankind was made in God's own image around the same time I left those alligators to fend for themselves during the Great Felt-Board Flood!  If God is truly limitless, then perhaps being made in God's own image allows us to become wildly undefinable too.  I'm reminded of the way God described God's Self to Moses, saying only this:  "I AM WHO I AM, I AM BECOMING WHO I AM BECOMING, I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE" (Amplified Version).  I also take great comfort and inspiration from the first three sets of commandments that God gave to Moses during that same Mt. Sinai conversation.  First) there's no other God than Me.  Second) you better not try to form any image of Me.  Third) don't even name Me.  

Whew!  Now, see if you can orient yourself to that Divine paradox of nameless, formless specificity!? For me, it's become such a perfect set of instructions to keep me company on my own spiritual quest. From this vantage point, I can never assume I know this God completely, but I can always assume this God knows God's Self entirely.  Does that not sound like the most wild invitation into a simultaneously thrilling and humbling relationship with Mystery?  Both God and mankind can then be always on the move together!  And thank God -- because without movement we would all be disconnected and dead.  Final note:  I still don't have a satisfying answer for why this Great Flood is part of The Mystery, but with Great Doubt in fixed ideas and Great Faith in the limitless of possibilities, I'm really quite content to keep questioning.  After all, it seems that all the great heroes of this particular faith tradition (Job, Jacob, Abraham, Jesus, and maybe Eve?!) modeled a similar kind of attitude of open-hearted wrestling with These Mysteries.  

Born Again (from Within!).

“There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.” - Thomas Merton

Movement Theory!

In this culture, we are typically taught to understand the body as the ultimate biological machine in which the brain functions as a kind of "control" switch board.  Over the past decade of my life, I've been questioning this irreverent attitude towards the body in a really persistent and ongoing way.  My questions are largely intuitive and typically require more experiential learning than theoretical learning. However, once in a while I have the good fortune to stumble upon some fascinating theoretical information about the body that deepens the way in which I experience my own.

Apparently, there are five basic types of human movement that make up something called "The Satisfaction Cycle":  Yielding, Pushing, Reaching, Grasping, and Pulling.  All five of these movements are fundamentally important for human survival and interaction.  BUT - and here's the amazing teacher within this concept - yielding is the foundation for every other movement possibility in this sequence.  In other words: without being able to first yield into something, you cannot push off from it, reach out from there, grasp hold of anything, or pull things back towards yourself.

Why is this so fascinating to me?!  Because what's true in the body is also true in the mind and in the heart, of course!  See if you can make this analogous connection with me: we must first yield into our own authentic desires if we want to be able to move towards, reach out, grasp hold of, and pull them back into ourselves.  I don't know about the rest of you, but I certainly got the message from this culture that being soft and open about what I really wanted to experience in my life would make me an easy target for disappointment.  In recent years, however, I've been able to slowly (sometimes painfully!) unlearn this defensive habit, and experience many tender and beautiful things as a result. It now absolutely stuns and delights me to discover that the movements of my physical body were there all along, revealing this truer picture of things.

So what is yielding and how do we do it?  I imagine we each have to explore this question in our own personal hearts and minds to some degree.  Yet, it's equally interesting to note that Merriam-Webster defines yielding as "lacking rigidity or stiffness; flexible", "disposed to submit or comply", or "productive" (as in "high-yielding wheat").  That's right; yielding can mean "productive"!  As the cornerstone of all other movement possibilities, this makes perfect sense to me.  A seed must be willing to submit to the earth and the rain if it wants to be able to then push, reach, grasp, and pull in all the nourishment it requires to become the fullest (most productive!) expression of itself. We, ourselves, are no different.

Here's how Rumi might also say it: "Let yourself [yield and] be drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.  It will not lead you astray".  I wonder if your heart - or mine - is softening into it's own gravitational pull yet?

On the nature of Love.

"But to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things as he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own. Without sacrifice, such a transformation is utterly impossible. But unless we are capable of this kind of transformation ‘into the other’ while remaining ourselves, we are not yet capable of a fully human existence".  -- Thomas Merton

This is my wish for all persons who experience love in its many extraordinary forms.  Today, however, I wish this experience of love for my sister and her groom on their wedding day!  May they be transformed by one another while remaining themselves, and may we all benefit from their personal and shared radiance as a result.

Hearing the Whole.

"It's an incredibly interesting risk, and you've got to trust that when you have surrendered, you will hear clearly. The Tao says the truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing, and your longing to have it different than it is, is ultimately a trap, because it keeps you from hearing the whole gestalt, the whole way things are. And as you hear the totality of it, you trust that out of that will come an appropriate action, a dharmic action. That's the trust of dharma, that's the trust in the wisdom of the universe that is greater than your own personal egoism. So there is certainly an exquisite risk in it. We're so used to working out of "I ought to do it, I should do it" -- getting behind ourselves and pushing. The whole idea of trusting, that if we didn't push something would still happen, is very interesting to explore in people."  -- Ram Dass

The truth can hurt...

... and yet it's the truth which also offers us opportunities to experience profound relief and healing. And despite how much we avoid encounters with the truth for fear of hurt, we also know that it will indeed set us free.  In my life so far, I've discovered that becoming conscious of whatever is most honest is always ultimately beautiful.  Maybe this is what Spinoza means when he says that suffering ceases to be suffering as soon as you get a clear and precise picture of it.  Or perhaps it's as Jean Genets suggests: "acts must be carried through to their completion.  Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful.  It is because an action has not been completed that it is vile". However, Rumi remembers to say something important that the other two forgot: "There's [so much] courage involved if you want to become part of the Truth.  There's a broken open place in a Lover".

I think it's worth remembering that the word courage comes from latin and originally meant something like, "to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart".  Lately, I've been trying to live from within the very center of my own open heart.  Rumi is right about needing courage for this journey.  I can only hope that Jean Genets continues to be right as well.

Deep Calls Out to Deep.

I had something like an enlightenment experience the other day.  I'm choosing the words "enlightenment experience" simply because the light of my own consciousness touched something that was previously unknown to me.  The words I've written below are an attempt to describe the revelation within the experience:

A human heart beats to a contracting rhythm of in and out, honoring the pattern of union and separation and union again.  Cells do this same dance when they divide from one another, in order to only return to each other again.  We remember to let our lungs fill up again with our breath only because we first notice how it has gone out.  I marvel at these movements and wonder if this is the whole creative pattern of the Universe.

Love once told me that it disconnects from Itself in order to get an experience of Itself.  And of course it would!  Love wouldn't be Love if it didn't want to Love itself too.  Similarly, John O'Donohue once reminded me that one of the real excitements of being a human is that we are the place where the Universe can become conscious of Itself.  The alchemists seemed to understand this when they tried to channel this precise dynamic in order to turn base metals into gold.  Plato, too, suggested that a similar psychological movement pattern would increase our own awareness of ourselves.  And God told us it was Good when He parted Day from Night.  Perhaps Adam and Eve had to experience their own shame in order to encounter their True longings.  What then, really, is shame?  Perhaps shame is simply BELIEVING that our separateness is fixed instead of mutable.  

Maybe we have also been given the same set of initiation rites as our ancestors in Eden.  If so, it might be helpful to recall how their redemption arrived through a being that could remember his full Divinity and full humanity too.  Perhaps we too must be initiated into our own sense of separateness, experience our deep longing to return, in order to find our own authentic way back to this remembering.  

But, why all this trouble?  I have no idea.  Nonetheless, this experience of disconnection and reconnection appears to be the life-generating movement pattern of the cosmos.  Perhaps it's like this:  by the time we start remembering our connection, we've already been deeply initiated into the experience of our separateness, which enables us to become powerful messengers of the Truth of both realities.  I think John O'Donohue was right about one of the real excitements of being a human. We really can learn how to be the place where the Universe can become conscious of Itself.

From Kabir.

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,
and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.
And the music from the strings that no one touches,
and the source of all water.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:
friend, listen: the god whom I love is inside.
Why should we two ever want to part?

Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on the water,
we live as the great one and the little one.

As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,
we live as the great one and the little one.
This love between us goes back to the first humans:
it cannot he annihilated.

The intelligence of humility.

“I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”  -- Barbara Kingsolver

Remembering the Body.

“Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in. By being attuned to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place that your will and intellect, have constructed.”  - John O'Donohue

Much of my professional practice involves trying to teach people how to come home to the intelligence of their physical bodies.  In our culture, this can be an extraordinarily difficult task for most people.  It seems that at some point (perhaps around the Renaissance) we began to devalue the body and glorify the intellect.  You may notice this inheritance in many of our cultural, philosophical, and religious ideals such as "mind over matter", "I think therefore I am", "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak", etc.

There are many implications and consequences for this devaluation of the body's wisdom, which is easily noticeable in our modern society.  I imagine that we can all think of many times when we have mistreated or shamed our own bodies or the bodies of others.  However, I also believe that much of our personal and collective suffering is related to this pervasive sense of cultural disembodiment (mistreatment of the earth, improper allocation of resources, oppression, war, chronic pain, auto-immune diseases, addictions, eating disorders, diabetes, and other habitual self-destructive patterns).

This is a hard pattern to change because once we believe we are our minds, we become convinced that the stories we generate in our minds are absolute truths.  In order to avoid threat to our sense of self that any sort of cognitive dissonance would inevitably produce, we then feel compelled to act in ways that will reinforce the stories we're so busy telling ourselves.  Example: "no one will ever accept me for who I really am" becomes a devastating self-fullfilling prophecy when we let that belief convince us to keep secrets and tell lies.

But, what if we didn't have to believe all of our thoughts?  What kind of personal freedom would we experience if we weren't married to our own stories?  I think it's hard for us to imagine this in a cultural context that tells us we ARE our thoughts.  In fact, I think that the split between body and mind is so deeply rooted in our ideas about ourselves that we cannot address this chasm by simply "thinking" about it.  Einstein first famously suggested that we cannot solve problems on the level in which they were created.  Following that logic, I believe we must address this split by turning towards what has been split-off (i.e. the body) in an embodied way.

I've found that one of the most accessible ways for people to re-discover the body's wisdom involves practices that pair conscious physical movement with a simultaneous unknown goal.  This revelation is something that I've stumbled upon by accident after many blind leaps into body practices like yoga, thai massage, authentic movement, conscious breathing, rolfing, energy medicine, somatic experiencing therapies, etc. etc.  I'm not sure why I've never bothered to try to understand these things with my mind before I do them, but the gifts I've received as a result of "not needing to know" (i.e. figure out) what's happening have been immeasurable.  Chiefly, I have discovered this: embodied presence feels like Love.  ALL OF THE TIME.  Even when there's an experience of pain and discomfort, a larger field of loving awareness seems to permeate and contain it simultaneously.

Note:  I'm not suggesting that the mind is not engaged in this, but that it is simply free to stop trying to control and predict my experience, and can instead become open to some new possibilities.  In fact, it's precisely because the mind reflects the body and the body reflects the mind, that we can begin to understand how habitual physiological posturing is connected to habitual psychological posturing. Consequently, when we start to notice how changes in the body predict changes in the psyche, a really miraculous thing can happen:  reconnection!  (Fun side note: the word "religion" comes from the latin root re-ligamentus (i.e. ligament), and literally translated means "re-connection"). The reward for this kind of reconnection is a renewed access to one of our greatest sources of natural intelligence.  I have noticed that when we are able to reconnect to this embodied intelligence, we are then immediately drawn back into a deeper connection with our natural belonging.  As John O'Donohue reminds us, "our bodies know they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless".

Enlightenment

Today, I heard someone describe spiritual enlightenment like this:  finding just enough freedom from our habitual patterns of thinking, that we are able to simply explore other ways of relating to our human experience.

Chase your bliss, already!

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” - Steve Jobs

Have you ever noticed how the notion of "chasing your bliss" sometimes gets a bad rap from our stern fathers or worried mothers?  Of course, they're supposed to do that because they need to make sure we don't chase the kind of bliss one might stumble upon while participating in drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll.  However, I think we can also trust ourselves to know the difference between ephemeral feelings of ecstasy and genuine heart-soaring wonderment.  And there's many, many reasons to chase after that latter feeling.  One of the most compelling justifications for that kind of bliss-chasing might be this:  it's only through the genuine expression of our deepest longings that we can begin to find authentic belonging.

Hidden Singer

The gods are less for their love of praise. 
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing 
but its own wholeness, its health and ours. 
It has made all things by dividing itself. 
It will be whole again. 
To its joy we come together -- 
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten, 
the lover and the loved. 
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then, 
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire, 
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves 
who sings quietly and waits, and sings.

-- Wendell Berry

Choosing your stories.

"'The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words,'  said Terence McKenna in Alien Dreamtime, "and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish." Here's my version of that hypothesis: What world you end up living in depends at least in part on your relationship with language".  -- Rob Brezny

Breaking the shell.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses 
your understanding. 

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its 
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. 

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the 
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem 
less wondrous than your joy; 

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, 
even as you have always accepted the seasons that 
pass over your fields. 

And you would watch with serenity through the 
winters of your grief. 

Much of your pain is self-chosen. 

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within 
you heals your sick self. 

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy 
in silence and tranquillity: 

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by 
the tender hand of the Unseen, 

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has 
been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has 
moistened with His own sacred tears. 

- Kahlil Gibran

Internal Energy Medicine: An Imaginal New Approach?!

I believe rather enthusiastically that imagination is one of the more creative human intelligences.  I also agree completely with Brenda Ueland who suggests that "the imagination needs moodling -- long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering".  The following personal anecdote is written with the intention of illustrating one example of the genius of personal reveries.

Starting with a sensory awareness of chronic inflammation in my physical body, I wandered around aimlessly through dozens of personal reveries.  Somewhat spontaneously, this wandering helped me understand (or maybe to remember?) that the inflammation was an expression of personal "resistance".  Becoming curious about what exactly I might be resisting, my subsequent inefficient, happy, idle dawdling and puttering allowed me to discover how a viscerally felt sense of unconditional love dissolved the energy of resistance (manifesting as inflammation).  But, seriously.  The painful stagnant energy was released and moved out of my physical body via the antidotal influence of unconditional love.  It felt - and still feels - quite miraculous to my own sensibilities!

Here's the fun part:  the twists and turns in this happy, idle dawdling were all so seemingly disconnected when they first rose up in my own reveries.  It amuses me to know that the myth of Saturn, images from a Tim Burton movie, the psychological concept of Need Theory, and the principles of Einsteinian physics played a significant role in this happy, idle wandering towards the eventual cessation of physical discomfort in my body.  I'm not quite sure how to describe this process, but it felt like I was first learning the imaginal, energetic language of my own dis-ease, and then similarly the imaginal, energetic language of what might offer me relief.  When I then applied what I was learning to my immediate experience, something shifted in my physical body almost spontaneously.

It's so wildly non-linear and non-rational that it's almost incredible.  But it's true!  And it worked!  And I am so relieved!  Yet, here's the catch:  I needed to find the time to idle and dawdle and wander aimlessly.  This particular process had several small interruptions, but by and large it took an entire day.  I wouldn't have given myself that kind of time if I did not first believe in the potential wisdom in the aimless wandering reveries of my own imagination.

Task of Love.

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it".  - Rumi

What is 'IT'?

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. 
Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.
And there is getting down to the deepest self! 
It takes some diving.
Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. 
But of one thing we may be sure. 
If one wants to be free, 
one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.

-- D. H. Lawrence

The Art of Therapy

I believe in therapy.  In fact, I believe in it so much that I am both a practitioner and a client of the craft.  Consequently, I've had the tremendous fortune of being initiated into really beautiful processes of transformation from both positions.  My own journey through this somewhat mysterious phenomena has often let me to wonder exactly why therapy "works" when it does.

In light of that confession, I'd like to link you to this lovely little essay about the potential gifts of good psychotherapy:  The Folk Art of Therapy.  This piece gives one of my favorite explanations about why and how therapy can be so powerfully transformational.  If reading it stirs your curiosity at all, I'd like to also recommend another reading assignment:  The Gift of Therapy by Irvin Yalom.  This book does a beautiful job of exploring the subtleties of healing that the therapy relationship aims to facilitate.  If, however, you're a person who needs empirical evidence in order to believe in anything your five senses can't immediately recognize, you might want to look into this book:  The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy.  And if you have the supremely good fortune to live in the beautiful city of Chicago, and want to attend something that guarantees to facilitate a more provocative conversation than any of the above sources combined, then consider attending this lecture:  The Love Cure given through the CG Jung Institute of Chicago in early December of this year.

(Disclaimer: while I enjoy much of what each of these authors posits about the process of therapy, their beliefs about mental health and best practices do not necessarily reflect my own).

Not mad, just human.

"We are not mad, we are human. 
We want to love and someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love. 
For the paths are many and dark, 
and we are ardent and cruel in our journey."

-- Leonard Cohen

Self-Acceptance

Sometimes other people say things so well that it feels unfair to try to paraphrase it:

“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues.  But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?”  - CG Jung

“If you try to avoid or remove the awkward quality, it will pursue you. The only effective way to still its unease is to transfigure it, to let it become something creative and positive that contributes to who you are.  Nietzche said that one of the best days in his life was the day when he rebaptized all his negative qualities as his best qualities. Rather than banishing what is at first glimpse unwelcome, you bring it home to unity with your life.  In a sense, you are called to be a loving parent to your delinquent qualities”.  - John O'Donohue

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries" - Theodore Roethke

While I don't think I can articulate this sentiment any more clearly than the above minds have done so, I will add this:  learning how to practice genuine self-acceptance is not for the faint of heart.  It is a grievous error to assume that this concept belongs to some kind of cute, cuddly, warm and fuzzy experience.  It's equally grievous to dismiss the notion of self-acceptance as a means for justifying passive denial of personal responsibility.  Instead, real self-acceptance requires an honest and ongoing encounter with our own sources of shame.  That is an extraordinarily brave quest!  Yet the potential reward for this kind of inner courage is something like Wholeness.  In fact, Carl Jung believed that our darkest inner landscapes often hold our greatest creative potentials.

So, onward brave friends!  I think we owe it to ourselves and to each other.

Sleeping in the Forest

This poem feels like a beautiful metaphor about how a deep and viscerally felt sense of belonging can be so transformational:

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

-- Mary Oliver

Beyond metaphor, however, the earth does literally hold you.  It's safe to yield into her natural pull, and remember your belonging.

The mistake of envy.

“No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself; you are its custodian and entrance. No one else can see the world the way you see it. No one else can feel your life the way you feel it. Thus it is impossible to ever compare two people because each stands on such different ground. When you compare yourself to others, you are inviting envy into your consciousness; it can be a dangerous and destructive guest.”  -- John O'Donohue

I think this idea is one we should really try to hold onto while traveling through this ephemeral human experience.  In the above quote, John O'Donohue compassionately reminds us how the misperceptions of envy can be dangerous and destructive.  Following his lead, I'd like to remind us that this destructive quality often manifests in subtle, insidious, and/or nearly imperceivable ways.  I think we have to be conscious of the ways in which envy can simply distract us from pursuing our own authentic paths.  This feels important to me because it suggests that even in the most passive manifestations envy can have very personally tragic consequences.

Forgiveness

Listen.  
Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward.  
You are afraid you might forget, but you never will.  
You will forgive and remember.

-- Barbara Kingsolver

Human Hearts

I learned something miraculous recently while listening to an interview with Richard Bartlett about a healing technology he developed called Matrix Energetics.  There's a whole lot of remarkable content within this concept and you can listen to the whole interview by clicking the link I provided.  However, the single most impressive thing I learned from this conversation was about the nature of the human heart.

By describing this healing technology and how it works, Dr. Bartlett also explained a concept from quantum physics called a "torsion field".  To borrow his words exactly, a "torsion is just a spin or a twist. If you think of a tornado or a hurricane, that’s a torsion field. You’ve got this intense spinning energy, and then at its center, you’ve got a null point where there’s actually a change in the way the laws of physics behave".  Here's the exciting part -- Dr. Bartlett goes on to explain that the human heart is actually a torsion field.  Apparently, the first thing to form in an embryo is a 72-beats per minute pulse.  That pulse is driven by a whirling vortex - or spinning field with a null point - that eventually develops into the physical human heart.

His point?  Inside the field of the heart, there is this null or zero-point in which the laws of physics do not apply.  Consequently, Dr. Bartlett believes that there is this powerfully creative place in all of us where miracles can be conceived and then spun outward into this time-space reality.  He's not speaking metaphorically or philosophically here, however.  In fact, Matrix Energetics attempts to teach people how to get into the literal field of their hearts - which is apparently 5,000 times stronger electromagnetically than the field of the brain - and then tap into the infinite and lawless creative potential of their own torsion fields.

Dr. Bartlett makes two compelling claims:  One) getting into the field of your heart can be done.  Two) miracles, signs, and wonders do manifest as a result.  According to him, the source of this possibility is related to that neutral zero-point within the heart's torsion field.  Neutral, lawless, personality-less, empty, creative space:  that's where the miracles are sourced from!  He goes on to suggest that we can learn to return to a point in our hearts where there are no thoughts, no feelings, no emotions, no time, no space, and no rules.  He argues that when we get to that point, we have actually arrived at the point of our being that transcends all rule sets.  Dr. Bartlett calls this grace.  If this is true - I think it is - then we could conclude that the manifestation of Grace is the divine creative potential of the human heart.

Throughout this interview, Dr. Bartlett makes references to the person and miracles of Jesus Christ, as well as the transcendent experiences of monks, saints, and other mystics.  I can't remember if he then made this connection directly or only implied it, but I'm going to boldly suggest that these people knew how to get into that precise point of their being, and therein experience literal communion with that Grace.  There's a follow-up conversation I want to have about the body being the literal temple of the Holy Spirit, but I'll save that for another time.

Embodiment

"Forget about enlightenment.
Sit down wherever you are
And listen to the wind singing in your veins".

-John Welwood

The intelligence of opposites.

Fortunately for me, I have had the very good fortune of being psychologically reared within a Jungian framework of human development.  This has allowed me to become increasingly comfortable with what often feels like endless cycles of learning and unlearning and relearning all over again.  Carl Jung calls this "integrating the opposites", and considers this process to be the central principle of individuation.  From a theoretical perspective, he posits that everything we think we know is simply an initial "thesis", which must be psychically balanced out by an initially unknown opposite or "antithesis".  This antithesis is at first constellated in the unconscious, and we are therefore entirely unaware of its presence until we are somehow forced to acknowledge it.

Recognizing and allowing any antithesis into consciousness is rarely a comfortable process for us because it typically threatens our very fragile sense of security.  Since we are creatures who have learned to feel safe in the world by labeling, categorizing, understanding, predicting, and controlling our environment, we can start to feel powerfully threatened when what we've come to rely upon is being questioned in some way.  However, the real creative treasure in all of this can only be found when we are willing to hold both our thesis and its antithesis with a degree of consciousness.  IF we can find the courage to consider not knowing what we think we know, then the stunning miracle of "synthesis" has a chance of occurring!  For example: "I'm right and you're wrong" might have the chance of becoming "I wonder if I could learn something I don't already know from this person who disagrees with my idea".  A completely gorgeous possibility for growth, right?  Unconvinced?  Here's a classic scientific application of this idea: "Turns out, light is both a wave and a particle!".

While musing over this particular psychological process the other day, it occurred to me that this kind of thinking is actually the ironic antithesis of fundamentalist thinking.  That notion made me feel really curious about the psychological principles and patterns that govern fundamentalism.  I appreciate that the term fundamentalism is most often associated with theological and religious identifications, but I think I'd like to extrapolate the term and include rigid political identifications too.  This interests me so much right now because I think we can all appreciate our current political climate of divisive, ineffective chaos.  Yes?  Sure!

I haven't come to any definite conclusions because I'm trying to be a good student of my own philosophy, but I have begun to wonder what happens to someone (psychologically) when they decide that they know anything at all absolutely.  Maybe that's the point at which we risk becoming identified with our own sentiments, and consequently unwilling to look at them critically.  It seems to me that a person in that position would thereby have to expend a lot of energy protecting themselves from anything that contradicts their particular thesis.  Tragically, the above theoretical discussion seems to suggest that the possibility of growth would also come to a screeching halt at that exact point of psychological defense.

I'm not sure how to make this notion of "integrating the opposites" sound less threatening and more appealing for people.  Nonetheless, it seems increasingly insane to think that shouting at each other from our polarized positions will allow anything new to emerge.  Instead, I'd like to imagine a conversation about health care or taxes that didn't start with defensive posturing, but began with curiosity about the opposite of what we think we know.....

Looking for God.

I've been having a spiritual love affair with Rumi for years and years, and I still never grow tired of what he invites us to remember:

'Lo, I am with you always' means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you.
There's no need to go outside.   

-Rumi

The gift of pain.

I've been thinking a lot about hurt and pain, as I've experienced quite a bit of both (in many different manifestations) lately.  The most fascinating thing about all this recent physical and psychological suffering is that I'm genuinely grateful for it.  In fact, as I've been working towards finding out what messages this pain may have for me, I'm becoming able to let go of some old habits that are no longer serving me.  And within this new very hard-won freedom, I'm also discovering a creative new space in which I can become different in ways that serve me much better.

As I've been reflecting on this process, I'm reminded of two things from two different very wise spiritual teachers.  The first is something the Dalai Lama said at a conference I attended in Chicago this past spring.  He was talking about his time as a youth in school, and made a reference to this set of whips the monks would use to discipline their students.  He explained to the audience that the monks used both a brown whip and a yellow whip, and that the yellow whip was referred to as the 'holy whip'.  His point?  Holy pain does not hurt any less.

I think I often want the spiritual path to be a little less painful than the non-spiritual path.  And I suppose it is less painful in some ways because suffering can be worked with skillfully, and meaning can be made from it.  But to echo the Dalai Lama:  IT STILL HURTS LIKE HELL.  

Nonetheless, I'm aware today that I needed this recent round of painful blows in order to wake up to more of who I truly want to become.  The second spiritual teacher I alluded to above may have said it best:

There's courage involved if you want to become truth. 
There is a broken-open place in a lover. 
Where are those qualities of bravery and sharp compassion? 

What's the use of old and frozen thought? 

I want a howling hurt.
This is not a treasury where gold is stored; this is for copper.
We alchemists look for talent that can heat up and change.    

Lukewarm won't do. 
Halfhearted holding back, well-enough getting by? 

Not here.

-Rumi

Non-violence

Hafiz was once asked by a young woman, 
"How can you tell if someone knows God?" 
Hafiz was silent awhile. 
Looking into her eyes, he then said, 
"My dear, they have dropped the knife. 
They have dropped the cruel knife which is so often used on their own tender selves and others."

Approaching The Mystery

Rumi says there are three ways - and subsequent stages - of learning how to approach The Mystery:

The first - Prayer.
A step up from that - Meditation.
And the step beyond that - Conversation.

Self-love.

I think it's both an exquisite miracle and a profound difficulty to consciously relate to the predicament we're all in together:  eternal spirits dwelling within living bodies.  There are so many ongoing paradoxes inside of that experience, and it can get really uncomfortable sometimes.  Recently I have been forced to deal with the particularly uncomfortable paradox of recognizing my own body's limits.

I spent several days in a hospital bed hooked up to bags of IV fluids and other contraptions to monitor things like blood pressure, oxygen level, and heart rate.  Dozens of medical personnel drew my blood, took my temperature, gave me shots to keep my blood from clotting, told me what to eat, helped me use the bathroom, and reminded me that I couldn't change my circumstances by being angry about them.

So, I wound up with a stark set of choices (literally only two!) about how to respond:  be with what was happening or not.  At first, I tried the latter b/c it was both excruciating and so frustrating.  And then I remembered that I did actually want to find a way to be with my experience no matter how excruciating because I'm aware that I've got this ongoing moment-to-moment privilege in which I can CHOOSE not to abandon myself.

That moment of recognition and/or remembering felt like a whole mind+body+spirit sigh.  I stopped resisting my own immediate experience, and came home to it.  It felt humbling and healing at once. And I also gained a lot of information about what my body was trying to help me remember.  For example, I could see how my human limits were not a liability, but instead this perfect place in which my spirit could wake up to this this wildly healing and humbling human capacity we call 'love'.  In this case, self-love.

Self-love gets a lot of lip service in most of the circles I run in, but I'm not always convinced that any of us really want to surrender to it totally.  I think one of the reasons we struggle with this so much is that we can't really practice self-love without really getting intimate with our immediate experience of ourselves.  That's an intimidating prerequisite for self-love because being a human being means that we are going to encounter all kinds of suffering and shame and fear and pain and anxiety and loss and chaos.  It's no wonder we would want to avoid ourselves sometimes.

Yet my recent attempt at rejecting my own painful experience (this time it was physical pain, but I tend to try to reject pain in all of its forms!) reminded me again that the only real opportunity we've got to experience self-love is in the way we choose to be with the immediacy of whatever it is that we're experiencing right now.

Trusting the Divine Unction Within

"You must give birth to your images. 
They are the future waiting to be born. 
Fear not the strangeness you feel. 
The future must enter you long before it happens. 
Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity."

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Muir Woods

Recently I spent some time in Muir Woods, a national monument of ancient coastal redwood trees near the San Francisco Bay area.  For reasons I could not understand immediately, being with the trees made me feel overwhelmingly tender and reverent.  At some point, I wound up sitting with my back against an opening in the trunk of one of these giant trees.  Pressing myself into the base of this tree, I eventually had something like a conversation with it.  Over time, I've decided that this conversation is something I want to keep sharing with others:

It's more than beloved

The heartbeat of the earth is my own

This is the planet of contrast

Where love and beauty can pierce our ideas of separateness

And return us back to belonging 

Here, we get to both love and be this planet

In fact, it's possible that there are no mistakes

There's certainly no one to blame 

For the contrast in our own experience

We may choose to teach the ego to submit to this Unity

And even in times of great pain and discomfort 

There is a space of awareness that can care about this too,

Thus returning us to the kingdom of grace

By means of our own awakened hearts.

(- from my 'conversation' with the spirit of Muir Woods).

Make Love of Yourself Perfect

You are perfect, only you don’t know it.
Learn to know yourself and you will discover wonders. 
All you need is already within you, only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. 
Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors. 
Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of the love you bear for yourself; 
all I plead with you is this: make love of yourself perfect. 
Deny yourself nothing – give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that 
you do not need them; you are beyond. 

-- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Job

Once upon a time I was a Religion major at a Baptist university.  During that time I learned many, many wonderful things about the sacred texts from Jewish and Christian traditions.  I also learned how tragically watered-down and misunderstood some of those Bible stories have become in their modern Western mainstream translations.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from the book of Job.  Before learning the actual Hebrew translations of the words and the historical context of Job's interactions with God, I had assumed this was a tale about how we should all learn to take whatever God is dishing out with a stiff upper lip and a smile.  Turns out, I was POWERFULLY mistaken.

The real miracle of this story is that before Job went toe to toe with God (crying, cursing, screaming, blaming, doubting, and demanding justice), there was this really punitive theology that dominated that culture's beliefs at the time.  The technical term is called Deuteronomic Theology, and its basic premise is that you can tell who God loves most by a person's material wealth, overall health, and number of children.  Seriously.  It's different in application, but similar in philosophy to the belief systems that govern things like the caste system in India.  Belief systems like this allow us to get away with ignoring the suffering of others, and keep us in superficial relationship with the Divine.

Satan plays a role in this story too, which is curious on a lot of levels.  First of all, it reminds me to let you know that the Hebrew translation for the word that became "satan" in English literally means "the accuser".  Yep.  That's a good thing to remember b/c it alerts us that "the accuser" is an enemy of Love.  I have to work really hard to try to hold onto that truth because the energy of "the accuser" seems to rise up within us in such subtle, sneaky ways sometimes.

But, I digress.  Back to Job.  So, Satan accuses Job (behind his back, of course!) of only loving God b/c God has been so generous with him.  SO sneaky, right?  Ugh.  But God decides to take up this challenge, a deal is struck, and God hedges his bets that Job will prove that his love for God is real despite his outer circumstances.  I hate this part of the story because it's hard not to want to get in the ring and demand answers on Job's behalf too!  Which just might be the point.  Because Job reacted similarly - but on a grand scale.  Job's friends, however, basically begged him to stop crying out for justice from God and to admit that he had some secret unconfessed sin for which he was now being justly  punished.  A couple things here:  A) the word "sin" literally translated simply means "to miss the mark".  B)  THOSE ARE BAD FRIENDS.  And God agreed.

In fact, when God does answer Job with his presence, he is stunning and terrifying and all sorts of God-like, BUT he is not displeased with Job in anyway.  Guess who he's super angry with instead? Job's friends!  He's especially irritated b/c those guys were so busy talking about God, claiming to serve and know him from that place.  But Job (God's favorite) shouted at, pleaded with, talked directly to, and demanded a personal response from the Source of Life itself.  God decided that this kind of passion was the ultimate demonstration of faith and love in the Divine, and eventually rewarded Job's faith and love in many ways (note: the eventual reward did not diminish or erase his initial suffering).  Job's friends, on the other hand, were on God's shit-list in a major way.  God responded to them by deciding that they were not even fit to make penance to God on their own behalves, but would have to rely on Job's generosity and see if he would make sacrificial offerings for them.

So, why is this my favorite tale?!  Well, because it's so full of good news you can actually use.  First of all, I think it suggests (on an archetypal level) that real intimacy with the Divine requires real honesty... no matter how dark and despairing.  Another piece of brilliance in this story seems to demonstrate to us that even the darkest, most menacing accusatory energy can be responded to in a way that might transform a whole system of thought, way of being, or cultural attitude!  Lastly, I LOVE that part of Job's capacity to believe so fiercely in God's goodness was connected to Job's willingness to keep his heart open towards himself too.  He knew he was worthy Divine love and favor.

Basically this:  HE DID NOT BELIEVE THE VOICE OF THE ACCUSER, but instead pounded his fists furiously against the doors that open into Love.

Body Language

I've been reading and learning A LOT about the intelligence of the body lately, which has taken me on a fascinating journey into the writings of Wilhelm Reich (possibly the grandfather of body-based psychotherapy, which is often termed somatic psychology).  His experiential work allowed him to discover that "character" is a both a biological and psychological phenomenon.  In fact, he considered emotions to be manifest expressions of "plasmatic movements of tangible bio-energy" (Reich, 1935/1972, p. 356).  I'm not entirely sure I understand his language well enough to paraphrase it, but fortunately other people have done that for us.  Susan Aposhyan summarizes his findings in her book "Body-Mind Psychotherapy" in a way that helped me understand his conclusions in a profoundly empowering psychological context.  She suggests that Reich used clinical observations in conjunction with observations from natural science to find out how the mind and the body armor themselves in exactly the same way.  Reich was then able to develop a theory of "character armor", which attempts to expose the ways in which we inhibit our authentic emotional and/or energetic expressions by means of muscle control.  FASCINATING, right?!

So, naturally -- I started to get really curious about this relationship.  In fact, I've been working on myself and others in this way ever since.  And as it turns out, this is absolutely true:  the body reflects the mind, and the mind reflects the body precisely.  We hold our bodies in the same defensive or aggressive ways that we try to hold ourselves psychologically.

Don't believe it just yet?  Try these exercises out:  the next time you experience a tension headache, ask yourself about your relationship to self-criticism.  And the next time you have upper back, shoulder, or neck pain - try finding out which side of the body it's most concentrated.  If it's on the right side, ask yourself about your own feelings of "significance" in relation to self-esteem.  If it's on the left side, start exploring your beliefs about "belonging" in relation to self-esteem, as well.  Knee pain or inflammation?  Think about your attitudes concerning stubbornness and death energy.

After you've played around with those for awhile, start finding out what happens if you can relate to these issues by engaging the body and the mind simultaneously!  And if you need it, ask for help from people who know how to work these intelligences skillfully.

Human Friendship

Without a net, I catch a falcon
and release it to the sky, hunting

God.  This wine I drink today was
never held in a clay jar.  I love

this world, even as I hear the great
wind of leaving it rising, for there

is a grainy taste I prefer to every
idea of heaven:  human friendship.

-Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

"Welcome back to the Garden / You never left!"

One of my favorite teachers, Tara Brach, has a beautiful weekly podcast, which always feels like an invitation to remember our deep belonging to one another.  Her latest teaching is titled Back to the Garden, and it guarantees reconnection to yourselves and others in a tender, visceral way.

Personal note:  as soon as I realized that I had ever left the Garden at all, I became aware that I also wanted to find my way home to It.  The longing terrified me initially because I didn't know where the Garden was located, nor whether I would be welcomed home to It.  This particular teacher, Tara Brach, was one of the first voices that helped me believe it might be a good idea to go looking for the Garden within myself.

.... And now I can't imagine wanting to live a life where I had never risked stepping onto that path.

The truth about belonging.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~ Mary Oliver