Worship

For so long I believed if I was looking in just the right place,
at just the right angle,

then perhaps I too could claim to have secret knowledge of the Mystery.

The Christians would say, "Oh, of course, God has these three aspects of Himself",
while Jews might wonder if Christians are working with some bad information.

Muslims pay respect to the person of Jesus as a prophet of God,
and yet claim another Prophet with a more relevant message entered the Divine narrative afterwards.

Indigenous Americans are able to see the face of the Divine in animals, plants, and sky spirits,
while Buddhists and Hindus instruct people to search for God within themselves.

Tantric yoginis and Amazonian shamans both sing songs of praise to the Great Mother,
and sometimes participate in ritualized ecstasy.

Yet a Sufi mystic believes to have a Lover's intimate knowledge of God.

But, alas, and thank God, Whomever God may be,

the possibility of my own unique arrogance continues to be revealed to me.

No matter how many spiritual paths I travel down,
I now am starting to believe
I will never find Absolute knowledge on much of anything.

Like the light rising at dawn upon a crew of lost and frightened travelers,
I am learning to let go of other peoples' ideas about things.

Embracing instead the unknowingness of each new and changing moment,

Absolute only in it's Mystery.

-- Whitney Logan

What We Could See....

If I could meet myself again
as a tiny little girl,
with a wide-open and unobstructed consciousness,

I would tell her to close her eyes,
and go ahead,
and try to see what she could find deep within herself.

I would tell her to expect that it would be beautiful and wonderful ---
and only sometimes a little bit terrible,

and I would tell her about how even those terrible parts need to be honored and included in a careful way.

I know now that she would then be able to see
how the whole Universe was there -
with her
and
within her.

Always.


--Whitney Logan, 11.1.13

Remembering what we already know.

I want to learn how to let Love move through me unobstructed.

Believing that particular Resource is Eternally and Infinitely available.

The Alpha, the Omega, the Beginning, and the End.

Dwelling right inside of me.

Perhaps then I could freely give That which I knew could never be exhausted.

Love.
Love.
Love.

Love.

My soul says, "It's True already, you know?"

And I can only respond, "I'm working on Remembering".


-- Whitney Logan

Welcoming Rejection.

"The gift in rejection is that it can become the new face of liberation".

I've been silently repeating this to myself for several days now, hoping it will stick.  Turns out, I'm weeks away from being 30 years old, and the possibility of rejection is still a big, scary thing for me.

Perhaps too early in my life I suffered from an incomplete initiation into this particularly devastating kind of pain, and have subsequently been trying to avoid it by learning to be "likable enough" in most situations, most of the time.  Today, I'm hoping that these nearly 30 years of life experience have finally allowed me to decided that the price one pays for that comfortable "likable" status is way too high.  Every effort to avoid this experience on the outside, the searing pain of rejection becomes internalized instead.

All too recently - despite years of therapy and other healing interventions - I have discovered that this inner ridicule is still wreaking havoc on select parts of my psyche and bodily systems.  Fortunately, I also know -- largely as a result of all those same years of therapy (etc.) - that many of my initiations into the bitterness of rejection have also carried with them an elixir of healing far beyond any kind of suffering I had feared before.

So, to expand on my original mantra: I'm thinking that the gift in a conscious approach to any experience of rejection is that it may become a powerful teacher on the path of liberation.  Exactly what that teaching will be teaching 'you' is unknown until it's endured, I suppose.

May we have the courage when we need it.

Namaste.

Things I Learned From Trees

Things I learned from trees yesterday
Include nothing not already known

And yet everything transformed

Into a kind of radiance of the Old
New way of being with Mystery

The children of Mother and Father;
These trees

Reaching out in all directions -
Never fearing Love's dark reciprocities

And so Growing up from tenderness
To create this bridge Between

And suddenly I too could remember
Giving birth to those majestic beings.

-- Whitney Logan, 6.9.13

Writer's Block

It can feel base
And meaningless
To try to make words
Form themselves
In such a way
As to deliver
Their Message

When we must too
Remember
How it is
That even the most
Carefully formed
Sounds

Simply return
Back
Into the form from
Which they emerged:

Formless.

Receptivity

Oh Lady of The Great Waiting!
In your stillness you receive All Things.

Revealing your secrets for Enduring

The moment where two types of Trembling -
Ecstasy and Terror - occur simultaneously.

And then show us that the only Thing
Capable of surviving One is the Other -

The hero bows before the throne.

Love has already conquered Eternity.

How Love Looks

Each new day
I’m learning
How Love looks
Like the leaves
Stirring on an Elm
Tree touched by wind
Withstanding
Not splitting
Revealing itself
Within shifting
Patterns of light
Where only moments
Before
Nothing at all
Had been there.

-- Whitney Logan, 4.9.13

Everything Is Beautiful

Once in awhile I realize that everything is truly This beautiful.
The pain, the pleasure, the mystery of what will happen next --

My breath catches between heart and throat,
And each moment that touches me leaves me

Changed.
Forever.

Welcome the difficulty when it Insists
On it's own teaching.

Remembering how

To wring out the heaviness
That holds down
The buoyancy of a Heart

Returning

Into Nothingness
Where everything Beautiful
Is True at once.

This is the Way-
In which all that's Becoming
Is allowed to happen

To us now

In order that it might begin
To happen through us too.

Nothing is easy about surrender,
But still --
I will give myself to it when I can.

The Mystery

Looking out, we find ourselves in everything; looking in, we find everything within ourselves.

Don't you think?

Creation Stories

"In the Beginning, Nothingness longed for Love.  And so it was made possible: this planet of contrast, where the play of opposites could Become the dance of Love that was longed for at the start".  -- mine

Fruit of the Spirit

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a shamanic retreat at a beautiful retreat center near St. Louis.  For those who are unfamiliar with the concept of shamanism, here's a few rough talking points: a shaman is an indigenous (i.e. in some way native to the "place" they practice) healer.  They often facilitate "journeys" to transpersonal realms so that people might have experiences of healing and transformation they may not otherwise have access to in their ordinary waking state of consciousness.  In shamanism, there is also a deep belief in reciprocal exchange between all potential and manifest energies.  In other words, it's possible for us to have a mutually influential relationship (and an ongoing conversation!) with all things - visible and invisible.

During this recent retreat, for example, I was able to receive some information about the psychological origins of a current experience of dis-ease in my physical body.  From this previously mentioned belief in the possibility of reciprocal relationship with all energies, I was encouraged to ask the dis-ease itself about it's origins.  I asked this specific energy why it had manifested at this time in my life.  It answered back immediately: "because of your belief in scarcity".  I also asked the dis-ease where the physical origins of this energy block - or holding pattern - were located in my body, and it responded by showing me the back of my heart.  I was working with a woman who is both a shaman and a neurologist during this particular exercise, and she reminded me that the back side of the body often holds the unconscious beliefs associated with each organ or energy center in the body.  Subsequently, I then decided to then ask that energy center if it would allow whatever was unconscious to become conscious (i.e. unblocked).  After a moment or two, I received this answer:  "THE LOVE IS REAL".

I didn't understand that message in it's entirety immediately, but my body responded by softening in such a way that convinced me that this answer must be exactly right.  Later that evening - in the middle of a Despacho Ceremony - I kept noticing feelings of the deepest kind of tenderness in my body.  This feeling of tenderness was connected to my own experience of love towards the many energies and persons that were being honored by this ceremony.  Spontaneously, I understood that what Spirt meant by "THE LOVE IS REAL" was that my own experience of love in my physical body is a real experience of Love.  At that moment, I could literally feel my heart pouring itself into every other cell in body, and I wept many tears for many hours out of this experience of profoundly loving overflow.

That night, I had a dream.  In the dream, I became aware of a feeling of deeply satisfying joy in my body.  As I went searching for the source of this joy, some kind of disembodied dream voice explained to me that "joy is also experienced on the inside".  Fortuitously, I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down all that I could remember from the dream before falling back to sleep. During our lunch break the next day, I went outside to find a place to make "Sand Art" (another shamanic ritual involving reciprocal exchange with nature).  While gathering up some sticks I intended to use to enclose my sand art with, I happened to stumble upon this literal sign in nature that read "JOY":

As you may be able to see, I placed my sticks in a circle at the foot of this altar to JOY, and then began to clear away the leaves with the boundaries of the sticks.  Underneath the leaves, I found a small stump.  Upon uncovering this stump, I noticed that it was literally shaped like an anatomically accurate human heart!  See image:

When I turned the stump over, I discovered that the entire back side of this heart-shaped stump was covered in ICE!  The "back of the heart" was literally frozen over.  Immediately, I allowed myself to feel into that real experience of love I now believed to be available in my own body, placed my hand over the icy stump, and proceeded to send love and warmth to that frozen heart until I felt nothing but warm wetness underneath my palm.  At the exact moment I realized the thawing process was complete, the noon-ish sun shifted in the sky just slightly, spilling all of it's radiance onto my face, and casting a perfect shadow from the "JOY" sign right through the center of that heart-shaped stump.  I understood the tender message that the natural world seemed to be speaking to me in that moment, and allowed myself to become conscious of the real experience of joy in my physical body too.

Some moments later, I got up in order to walk away from this sacred space and ran into another literal sign in nature that read "PEACE":

I stood there gazing for at it for a moment, trying to honor the message that might be trying to reveal itself to me.  I felt peaceful, certainly, and could appreciate that this feeling of peace could also become an internal refuge.  But when I tried to walk away from this spot, I felt something pull me back toward it.  I looked all around the little meadow of trees, and only found one other sign:

In a single moment, I remembered (thank you Christian youth camp!) that there's a passage in the Bible lists the "Fruit of the Holy Spirit" in precisely this order:  LOVE, JOY, PEACE... Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-Control.  I laughed out loud, feeling myself filled with gratitude for this newly enlivened teaching, as I suddenly understood in a new, deep way that they are ordered in this way for a reason.  I wondered how much of my life I had spent trying to master self-control in order to gain an experience of love (something that probably got reinforced by this same youth camp, unfortunately).  At this particular moment, however, I could see very clearly the grievous error in this way of thinking, and felt the grace that comes with an embodied understanding of how things could be different.  It seemed that Spirit had given me a living, breathing experience that would continue to help me understand that we must start with a belief in the immediate, experiential, available reality of Love, and everything else we value would flow forth from there.  

Mary Oliver says it this way: "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". The rest will follow.

Divine Mother

Perhaps poetry goes unwritten 

In Your name

Because wordless are your workings

Deeply held in the mysteries of the body

I feel Your whispers

When the Wind raises hair on my neck

Or the moon reaches into

The back of my heart

The dark Earth causes 

Me to weep with wonder

All sensation begins to feel like Your caress,

And all inner movement as searching for You! 

How is it possible to Love this much?

You weave everything into Love, Mother

By never turning your gaze away 

From me.

Unnameable, unknowable

Yet the source of all that is known

You are an Encounter!

The Whole experience of being belongs to You.

In the soft animal of my body, I find

You are Becoming as I become

Transformed into what has always

Been joined as One

There was never irreconcilable loss -

No true leaving;

Only forgetting

Your face is in everything.

The Serpent in the Garden

The Fruit of finding out -

We were never truly separated,

Nor banished from You

Only asked to look for you in darkness too.

I can see and hear and touch and taste and smell again!

Knowing there was never any reason 
to hide
And now, nowhere to run -

But Home.
Where I can find you Eternally
Deep inside the belly 
Of my own beating heart. 

-- Whitney Logan, 2.1.13

Tree of Life

On a warm night in January of 2009, while taking a very necessary year-long hiatus from independent adult life, I sat down by a tree in my parents' backyard and wept bitterly about my own feelings of alienation from myself.  Sometime during that powerful release of grief and fear and shame and longing, I began to press my whole body and face into that old, familiar tree in their yard.  I suppose I must have called out to the spirit in that tree in some way that evoked its presence, because very soon I began to feel a visceral kind of sweetness reaching out to me from deep within the tree.  I let my exhausted body and mind yield into that small miracle of connection to nature, and from a place of gentle surrender, I began to feel as if that generous spirit in the tree was also within me.  My mind was suddenly able to see how I had been trying to live my life out on the furthest, most outward-facing branch of my experience, and that this was in fact the cause of my suffering.  I realized then that by choosing to live out on this fragile limb, I had become completely identified with the weather patterns - or vicissitudes - of my immediate subjective experience. 

From a sense of deep kinship with this tree, however, I began to feel curious about my own sturdier branches, trunk, and roots -- my deepest, most essential self.  I believe that this connection with the tree afforded me both the courage and the grace to discover how I might symbolically turn around from my outward-facing position on that limb where I had been living, and look deeply into my own origins instead.  I reference the need for courage because I remember exactly how terrified I was to look that deeply into myself; I was almost paralyzed with fear about what I might find there!  I also understand that grace played a part in this experience, precisely because I did not know how to bring my own conscious awareness into what had remained so willfully unconscious until then.  

But I learned how to do it that night!  And with my back pressed into the trunk of that ordinary tree, I swallowed hard, and surrendered my ego's firmly held position on that far-reaching limb, in order to actually see my-Self (consciously) for the very first time.  To my utter amazement, I saw something so neutral, timeless, cohesive, eternal, spacious, and incorruptible that I began to laugh out loud!  I could not believe that I had been so afraid of this profoundly empty, receptive, flowing, spacious, awareness.

I wrote a poem of sorts that night, which I later understood to be a kind of reflective love letter to my most Essential Self.  And the poem goes like this:

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.

I've kept those words and that embodied understanding with me ever since -- and my experience of mySelf has never been the same.  The profound feeling of alienation ended in an instant.  I also understood in an instant that I would continue living a life full of plenty of mistakes.  The lasting transformation for me, however, has been that I've never doubted for a single moment since this one that I could find my way Home to this place within myself whenever I notice that I've lost my way.  

A few days ago, I painted a picture of a naked, yet luminous tree at a friend's arts-y birthday party (see image below).  I had never painted anything before, and was amazed that this image was willing to manifest itself through me that night.  It felt like another gift from that same spirit I first connected with inside that old tree.  The next day, I showed a picture of this painting to one of my colleagues at work.  He took one look at it and said, "It sort of looks like you - I mean, it has a feeling to it that reminds me of how I experience you".

I don't know this man very well, but he gave me a tremendous gift inside of that simple statement. It made me feel like my Essential Self was indeed infusing my outer branches with it's innermost Truth more and more consistently.  I went home that evening after work and looked for the poem I had written back in 2009.  To my astonishment, I discovered that I made this tree painting exactly 4 years TO THE DAY that I had this experience I've described above.

Looking at this painting now, I feel grateful for my own human journey - and simultaneously less and less afraid of being down here on the earth; where pain and beauty seem to always exist in the same place at the same time, and nothing worth having ever comes easy.

May the grace and courage that was given to me four years ago continue to assist in the liberation of all sentient beings.  Namaste. 

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

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.  :-)

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.