The Inner Life

More Soundings

2009-02-12T20:26:00.004-07:00

Life and time are crushed under ever-increasing piles of paper.

Slivers of reality get trapped in the vice-grip of words.

When you have sex with your body on Earth and your mind in Heaven, all your sins are forgiven.

The reward for an obligation fulfilled is simple relief.

Creativity is conceived from the violent coupling of desire and frustration.

The mystery is how to fit actions into that infinitesimal space between now and then.

Soul Sounding

2009-02-11T08:36:00.003-07:00

Lying in bed, feeling spiritually "dry", I wondered how to keep that inner soul connection fresh each day. The title 'Soul Sounding" came to me. Sounding means: "the action of determining the depth of water" -- "resonant, sonorous, reverberant." The image is of reaching down deep inside to find reverberation of the days experiences arising from the soul.

Here is a suggestion:

Settle down and get very quiet inside just before you go to sleep. You need a pen and notebook.
From a place of inner quiet, allow your attention to wander gently over the main events, images and feelings of the day. This attention needs to come from an attitude of curiosity, detachment and no judgement. It simply allows whatever is insistent, vivid and important to rise to the surface.
Holding each experience in mind, use the fewest words possible to express, sum up and describe the absolute essence of that experience.
Write down anything as it comes with no editing, and then return to the quiet to find what is still waiting. Later, edit the descriptions until they capture as fully as possible what your inner self is telling you and add a little note of the external event that seemed to give rise to the inner experience.

Here are some of my soundings. Many are responses to clients in therapy.

Lord help me be alive; let me feel life. (A prayer during spiritual dryness).

To write a memory is to crystallize forever the intangible flow of life.
A dream told is a story woven from billowing clouds. (After reading Annie Dillard's essay on memoirs).

Fear is the material world holding our hearts in a rock-like grip.
Freedom is the falcon's wing held up by emptiness. ( A response to J's dream of snakes and hawks).

Is Life really the soft soothings of a bubble bath? (Response to S's use of baths to avoid).
Behind the girlish smile is an tight fist clutching a screaming child. (Response to S's seductive smile)

Love is the antidote to a raging heart. (Response to A's anger).

Envisioning our Life Purpose

2008-10-22T15:09:00.004-06:00

Our lives are a pattern, a complex set of interlocking processes that have a particular and individual shape. We cannot know this pattern fully because we are within it, caught in the flowing turmoil of our ongoing experience. We are limited by our experience of time and our inability to harness our attention and awareness. As we age, we can begin to sense more the wholeness and shape of this pattern. Our task is to complete this pattern as fully as possible before we die.

This pattern is also our purpose. We come to the world with and for a purpose – our life task or individual path. This purpose has inner and outer aspects – to develop wholeness within ourselves and our relationships and to manifest that wholeness as a difference in the world. We have to work to change ourselves and to change our world; we are responsible for the evolution of humanity and for the creation of a better world. Our purpose fits with some vast overall unfolding of the universe of which we are a tiny but essential part.

To further our purpose, we come into the world with particular talents (abilities in potential form) and we have particular experiences and learnings that bring forth these talents. We grow into the our purpose over time. Everything we are or experience is potentially useful – suffering and challenges often help our talents come to light. Our purpose is a seed that quietly demands that we help it flourish and grow. God supports us only beyond the limits of our abilities and talents. Like a good parent, He/She/It does for us only what we cannot do for ourselves.

Our responsibility is to do what we must to develop ourselves, our understanding, awareness and intention so that we can shoulder more of the creation, have a greater capacity to make a difference. The more we are able to do, the less Gad has to do directly. We have to become adults in our spirituality and ability to take responsibility for ourselves and the world.

We need to work with our talents and nature – connect to and understand our abilities and disabilities. These exist at many levels, the most important is the work to actualize ourselves and our purpose/destiny/life tasks. To do this, we must do the creative work of envisioning, intending and taking action. We must look at ourselves squarely – no place for illusions of either inflation or inadequacy.

Envisioning
Out of the greater purpose of our life we have to create a vision of how this can become manifest in the world. For this we mus invite imagination to form the images, feelings and sensations that exist beyond our consciousness, beneath our awareness in the deeper realms of our being. We go to the wellsprings of creative inspiration, our dreams and formless feelings. We begin by groping in the dark to find those images just beyond our reach. We are inviting purpose to take form, to show us a corner of its pattern so that we can bring it into our lives fully.

True vision cannot be controlled or created through our thinking and conscious mind. It has to arise, through attention and respect from somewhere deep within us. We listen, invite and create a space for something unexpected and new to arise; we do not force or cajole or become impatient. Vision approaches first as a sense of something missing, an unsettling lack of something that we cannot put our finger on.

To invite vision, we:

Pay attention to what is incomplete – the missing aspects of our lives and selves
Listen attentively to what we do not want to do, what we never thought would be relevant and important
Notice the shape of our dreams and imaginings, the direction of our discomfort
Feel for the patterns that are unfinished, rough around the edges, in need of refinement. We have a deeply engrained need for pattern, closure, completion. We need to develop this sense in relation to our lives and self.

Intention
From envisioning, we begin to feel what needs to happen, what is required to be brought forth so the vision can become manifest. Intention is the energetic holding of the vision with an inner conviction that invites/cajoles/moves the vision from the realms of possibility into the realms of actuality. Intention is the bridge over which vision must travel to become real in the world.

Intention is not will power or willfulness; it does not try to force vision into a preset goal or outcome. It allows it unfold and flow over time into the shape that is needs to take. There must be a give and take, a dialectic with the requirements of the physical universe so that vision can have a life of its own, existing separate from the envisioner.

Without intention that is consistent and firm, nothing can happen. Intention creates a space in the world for something to come about. It focuses our awareness and attention so that we notice and make use of possibilities.

Action
Intention requires action to actualize. Action is the work of our heart and mind to bring something into being. Our heart holds the passion, the wishes and the feeling that makes us keep working, while our minds do the planning, the organizing and the procedures that allow something to be constructed and completed. Action is the effective means to bring the vision through intention to fruition.

Taking action requires a sense of energy and timeliness. Things can only manifest in time and space when they are ready and all requirements are complete. As we complete the action, when our vision becomes manifest we experience a sense of “rightness” that tells us that we are on the right path to fulfilling our purpose.

Each level other than pure purposes has its shadow side that diverts, distracts and confuses:

The shadow of vision is prejudice -- expecting a particular pre-judged personally wished-for outcome.
The shadow of intention is confused aimlessness -- the inability to be clear and whole in where we are going.
The shadow of action is passivity -- the expectation that we will be looked after, that life happens without effort.

Inner Nature

2008-10-09T14:33:00.004-06:00

Each person has his or her own inner nature. It is a like a fingerprint that distinguishes that person from every other. This nature is a blueprint for the tasks and challenges we experiences in our life. It is not simply the soul, but how our soul relates to the world and its unfolding. Our nature is a reflection of the soul in the mirror of the world.

The soul’s capacity for impacting the world is determined by its level of development. We are burdened by our person karma, our ancestral inheritance and our own limited awareness. These determine how much the material world influences our experience and actions. They hinder our ability to move ourselves and the world toward greater conscious evolution.

Development depends on our level of awareness, our understanding and wisdom, our intention and surrender. In our being, these are blocked or limited by the influence of material forces on our consciousness. These act through distraction and clinging causing fear of losing our ego identity. As we unburden ourselves of needy attachment, so we become free and alive.

Levels of Soul Engagement

2008-10-09T14:07:00.005-06:00

There are four levels of engagement with the world:

Ignorance
Knowledge
Understanding
Wisdom.

Ignorance is the blindness that comes from our inability/unwillingness to be aware of the consequences of our being in the world. This is the influence of the blind material world.

Knowledge is seeing the world as if it were a picture, two dimensional as something that is distant and separate from us. It is the way of science and education. It allows manipulation and some semblance of control and so helps us contain our anxiety. Knowledge is better than ignorance but has the danger of superficiality and exploitation. It is disengaged.

Understanding is three-dimensional; it is the world of participation and engagement, or experience. To understand is to be involved with the object, to feel its nature, its function and limitations. It is the world of empathy and creativity that accepts the suffering and loss of control that comes from involvement. When we understand, we know something with more than just our perceptions and mental constructs – we know its nature.

Wisdom is experiencing the whole -- knowing fully the expanding consequences of our actions, the part something plays in the web of connectivity and in our life experience. It recognizes that nothing is separate, that complexity and chaos are essential for all life and growth, that we are small and inconsequential in the face of a vast universe, that our awareness is limited and constrained.

Death

2008-09-22T05:45:00.010-06:00

It comes to us all -- yet we do not fully believe in death. It is our inevitable future, one of the few constants of an inconstant universe -- yet death is a mystery. Maybe all living beings, including humans are not designed to fully comprehend death. Certainly, our minds tend to slip over the reality of our own deaths, as if the idea were teflon coated.

Recently, I have been surrounded by death, immersed in the experience of inevitable loss. Friends are dead or dying, clients are losing loved ones, even animals are expiring. Something in me is drawn to and fascinated by the strangeness of it all. Since I was very young, I have looked on death as the final frontier, the ultimate challenge, a place beyond which understanding ceases. I have always wanted to know and experience death.

Interest in death is taboo in US society. We are taught to avoid death, pump it full of embalming fluid, not be "morbid." I am reminded of when my mother was laid out in her coffin in the village mortuary in Ireland. There was little attempt to prettify the body. She looked very dead. Yet children as young as 7 years old came in off the street, looked her full in the face, crossed themselves and offered condolences. They were obviously curious and unafraid.

Death brings up such profound questions:

Where does the profound richness of life go when someone dies? Does it dissipate out into the darkness, snuffed out like a flickering flame? Does it leave the body and go we know not where?

I have had too many experiences of the dead and dying to believe that aliveness simply dissipates.

Tasks of Being Human

2008-09-22T05:27:00.004-06:00

The four tasks of being human:

1. Maintain an inner sense of clarity, patience and quiet. Avoid and manage fear, anger and agitation.

2. Develop the ability to listen deeply to the promptings of our inner guidance

3. Embrace relationship and express love, compassion and clarity

4. Engage fully with the life tasks and life purpose given to us

From inner tranquility and patience arises the ability to listen to inner guidance.

That guidance helps us become more loving and truly dedicated to following what we need to do in life.