I watch the news, God. I observe it from a comfortable distance. I see people suffering, and I don't lift a finger to help them. I condemn injustice but I do nothing to fight against it. I am pained by the faces of starving children, but I am not moved enough to try to save them. I step over homeless people in the street, I walk past outstretched hands, I avert my eyes, I close my heart.
Forgive me, God, for remaining aloof while others are in need of my assistance.
Wake me up, God; ignite my passion, fill me with outrage. Remind me that I am responsible for Your world. Don't allow me to stand idly by. Inspire me to act. Teach me to believe that I can repair some corner of this world.
When I despair, fill me with hope. When I doubt my strength, fill me with faith. When I am weary, renew my spirit. When I lose direction, show me the way back to meaning, back to compassion, back to You. Amen.
?Rabbi Naomi Levy
Monday, November 30, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
Healing the Family - Part I
A storyteller, and we are all storytellers, honours their family history. This does not mean they have to like their family history but that you give your intention and attention to learning how to create from it. You create from that history something worth honouring, not only for yourself but also through the whole spectrum of the individual to the universal.
In my own family there is a history of a certain kind of disease. It is a disease of the eyes. It is called glaucoma. It is a disease of the eyes that in days of old, and even with today?s medical science ultimately leads to blindness. Genetically, I carry this potential because both my parents had glaucoma that, in the later stages of their lives required medical treatment. Their parents before them carried this genetic code that was created from a resistance to a way of seeing.
As many of you who listen and read the articles I write I am drawn to a certain kind of vision. This is a way of seeing that is the way of a real storyteller, the way of a true bard, the way of a true schanachie. I am interested in my family history for the reason of wholeness and healing. While the sins of the father might be visited upon the children this need not always be the case. If the light of consciousness is brought to that which lives as unease and disease in the psyche then healing happens or can be a happening.
In the best selling book entitled, ?You can heal your life,? by Louise L. Hay she writes about the eye disease called glaucoma in this way.
?Stony unforgiveness. Pressure from longstanding hurts. Overwhelmed by it all.?
Louise Hay tells us in her book that the antidote to this eye disease casual by pressure behind the eyes is to see with love and tenderness. Or as the mystic Hafiz invites to learn to live with a full moon in each eye and to speak from such vision. The antidote is to speak from a vision that will allow others who are longing to be a vision of Love in form to hear what can be a real vision.
Here is something that I as a storyteller, the teller of my personal life story, am directly connected to. I know this connection through the definition give by Louise Hay. I know this connection through the longing for Love and tenderness and the longing to be able to express in this way.
I can see the pressure from long standing hurts and stony unforgiveness mirrored in my father?s life. I can see the over whelmed by it all experience in the life of my mother. So what do you do with this encoded message within one?s personal DNA? Well, you can fight it or you can transform it. When you fight it you are in effect dishonouring it. When you transform it you are in effect honouring the way the story of Love has informed your immediate family. In this way you become a healer and what it means to be a real storyteller.
As a storyteller I start with intention. This is where creation begins to express in form. It is the connecting point between the world of form and the world beyond form. It is the connecting point between time and the timeless. It is where the invisible begins to manifest. It is the invitation to the formless, timeless, infinite possibility to come into being. It is the invitation to the One to become what the mystic Loa Tzu calls, ?the ten thousand things.?
At least for me this word intention invites inner tending and inner tenderness. It is not the get up and go of an often disturbed over accentuated masculine approach to living life. It is more the humble grounded approach of the mature feminine. It is out of this groundedness that healing begins and wholeness can be known and felt. Both the masculine and feminine are needed for wholeness but it is the masculine that serves the feminine.
Each of us stands on the shoulders of everyone who has ever lived in form. This is particularly true of all those family members who have lived in form before we arrived within this time space body. The freedoms we have now are often taken for granted. They have often been won at the expense of deep personal sacrifice. This should not be forgotten. All families have wounds. It is within this wondedness that you have the stuff of wonder. As the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung pointed out, ?The gold is in the shadow.?
The shadow of our family history manifests in disease and as Louise Hay says, and as most wisdom teachers say, disease arises out of the unwillingness to forgive. The disease of my family manifesting as glaucoma arises from the pressure of long standing hurts. Yet it is not the long-standing hurts in themselves that is the problem or is the real problem the unease deepening into disease. It is the pressure from the resistance to letting them go that causes the suffering.
There are so many wondrous stories in books and movies that are available around this issue that is called forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn?t redeem the other person. It redeems you. It sets you free. It takes you out of the prison of separateness that you have allowed yourself to become deeply attached to. There is no judgement here. You are not being blamed but you are being invited. You do not do forgiveness. It is more that you become willing to see the world in a new way and allow that seeing to envisage your life. It is the willingness for something new to be that allows forgiveness to heal you.
In my own family there is a history of a certain kind of disease. It is a disease of the eyes. It is called glaucoma. It is a disease of the eyes that in days of old, and even with today?s medical science ultimately leads to blindness. Genetically, I carry this potential because both my parents had glaucoma that, in the later stages of their lives required medical treatment. Their parents before them carried this genetic code that was created from a resistance to a way of seeing.
As many of you who listen and read the articles I write I am drawn to a certain kind of vision. This is a way of seeing that is the way of a real storyteller, the way of a true bard, the way of a true schanachie. I am interested in my family history for the reason of wholeness and healing. While the sins of the father might be visited upon the children this need not always be the case. If the light of consciousness is brought to that which lives as unease and disease in the psyche then healing happens or can be a happening.
In the best selling book entitled, ?You can heal your life,? by Louise L. Hay she writes about the eye disease called glaucoma in this way.
?Stony unforgiveness. Pressure from longstanding hurts. Overwhelmed by it all.?
Louise Hay tells us in her book that the antidote to this eye disease casual by pressure behind the eyes is to see with love and tenderness. Or as the mystic Hafiz invites to learn to live with a full moon in each eye and to speak from such vision. The antidote is to speak from a vision that will allow others who are longing to be a vision of Love in form to hear what can be a real vision.
Here is something that I as a storyteller, the teller of my personal life story, am directly connected to. I know this connection through the definition give by Louise Hay. I know this connection through the longing for Love and tenderness and the longing to be able to express in this way.
I can see the pressure from long standing hurts and stony unforgiveness mirrored in my father?s life. I can see the over whelmed by it all experience in the life of my mother. So what do you do with this encoded message within one?s personal DNA? Well, you can fight it or you can transform it. When you fight it you are in effect dishonouring it. When you transform it you are in effect honouring the way the story of Love has informed your immediate family. In this way you become a healer and what it means to be a real storyteller.
As a storyteller I start with intention. This is where creation begins to express in form. It is the connecting point between the world of form and the world beyond form. It is the connecting point between time and the timeless. It is where the invisible begins to manifest. It is the invitation to the formless, timeless, infinite possibility to come into being. It is the invitation to the One to become what the mystic Loa Tzu calls, ?the ten thousand things.?
At least for me this word intention invites inner tending and inner tenderness. It is not the get up and go of an often disturbed over accentuated masculine approach to living life. It is more the humble grounded approach of the mature feminine. It is out of this groundedness that healing begins and wholeness can be known and felt. Both the masculine and feminine are needed for wholeness but it is the masculine that serves the feminine.
Each of us stands on the shoulders of everyone who has ever lived in form. This is particularly true of all those family members who have lived in form before we arrived within this time space body. The freedoms we have now are often taken for granted. They have often been won at the expense of deep personal sacrifice. This should not be forgotten. All families have wounds. It is within this wondedness that you have the stuff of wonder. As the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung pointed out, ?The gold is in the shadow.?
The shadow of our family history manifests in disease and as Louise Hay says, and as most wisdom teachers say, disease arises out of the unwillingness to forgive. The disease of my family manifesting as glaucoma arises from the pressure of long standing hurts. Yet it is not the long-standing hurts in themselves that is the problem or is the real problem the unease deepening into disease. It is the pressure from the resistance to letting them go that causes the suffering.
There are so many wondrous stories in books and movies that are available around this issue that is called forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn?t redeem the other person. It redeems you. It sets you free. It takes you out of the prison of separateness that you have allowed yourself to become deeply attached to. There is no judgement here. You are not being blamed but you are being invited. You do not do forgiveness. It is more that you become willing to see the world in a new way and allow that seeing to envisage your life. It is the willingness for something new to be that allows forgiveness to heal you.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
The Key to Living Your Life's Desire
In Desiderata the inspiration poem by Max Ehrmann there is a word that holds the key to the whole of the poem. If you were to live this one word then you would be able to attain to the highest invitations in life.
It is the one word that the true invitation to Yoga tries to teach and invite you to know. It is the most practical of words but it is a much-misunderstood word. In the West we spend much of our time focused on this word but the way in which we focus on it keeps us from finding the key to a life of purpose, passion and prosperity.
For this Irish mystic storyteller this word is a riddle for most of us. It contains a practice that most everyone in the world worships and which keeps them enslaved. It is according to one modern wisdom teacher the cause of much of the world?s present problems.
If you live what this word invited then you would have stepped into a threshold place. If you lived the total invitation held within this word you would have the potential for what is called self-realisation and this is the experience of true happiness.
Max Ehrmann was a poet. Poets can take words and place them in a context where you are invited into the Deep Hearts Core. The beautiful invitation from Desiderata can be a poem that you simply read or a poem that you can use as a catalyst to becoming the beautiful radiance you are intended to become and to be revealed.
Poetry is not simply some sweet verse or some foreign language that only intellectuals can understand. If you have a hart and you are prepared to allow it to expand into the universal depth of its potential then poetry will, as it is intended bring you alive to your love nature.
So what is that word that if you live you will invoke the power of Desiderata - the list of desires that are at your deep hearts core and not simply something you are invited to acquire in a culture obsessed with the trinkets of never enough.
Lets make this more interesting. You tell me what that one word is from Desiderata and I will give you a full eCourse called Ready to Radiate for FREE. This course invites you to learn to live the invitation that you are here to be in all your glory. Simply email me what you think that one word solution is to
radiate@anamcaraexperience.org
If you went to a real wisdom school this is the word that would be written on the blackboard on the very first day. You would be called back to this word time and time again until you came to the revelation the poem invites. What is this word and why is it a foundational key to the true purpose of your life. More to come.
It is the one word that the true invitation to Yoga tries to teach and invite you to know. It is the most practical of words but it is a much-misunderstood word. In the West we spend much of our time focused on this word but the way in which we focus on it keeps us from finding the key to a life of purpose, passion and prosperity.
For this Irish mystic storyteller this word is a riddle for most of us. It contains a practice that most everyone in the world worships and which keeps them enslaved. It is according to one modern wisdom teacher the cause of much of the world?s present problems.
If you live what this word invited then you would have stepped into a threshold place. If you lived the total invitation held within this word you would have the potential for what is called self-realisation and this is the experience of true happiness.
Max Ehrmann was a poet. Poets can take words and place them in a context where you are invited into the Deep Hearts Core. The beautiful invitation from Desiderata can be a poem that you simply read or a poem that you can use as a catalyst to becoming the beautiful radiance you are intended to become and to be revealed.
Poetry is not simply some sweet verse or some foreign language that only intellectuals can understand. If you have a hart and you are prepared to allow it to expand into the universal depth of its potential then poetry will, as it is intended bring you alive to your love nature.
So what is that word that if you live you will invoke the power of Desiderata - the list of desires that are at your deep hearts core and not simply something you are invited to acquire in a culture obsessed with the trinkets of never enough.
Lets make this more interesting. You tell me what that one word is from Desiderata and I will give you a full eCourse called Ready to Radiate for FREE. This course invites you to learn to live the invitation that you are here to be in all your glory. Simply email me what you think that one word solution is to
radiate@anamcaraexperience.org
If you went to a real wisdom school this is the word that would be written on the blackboard on the very first day. You would be called back to this word time and time again until you came to the revelation the poem invites. What is this word and why is it a foundational key to the true purpose of your life. More to come.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Desiderata and the Law of Attraction
Jack Cranfield writing in "The Key to the Law of Attraction" writes,
In Desiderata Max Ehrmann invites the same approach.
In order to distress many of us, and I have done this myself begin to self medicate. I self medicated for years on alcohol until it became clear that I was anything but placid and someone heading for a mental breakdown of some kind.
The ways that work for those of us willing to commit to a regular practice are meditation and/or prayer. Jack Cranfield recommends these in his book "The Key to the Law of Attraction."
Out of this practice you have more get up and go but it is not a kind of get up and go that is driven by a go getting personality setting out to prove that they are a winner. It is a get up and go that is alive, focused and in the word used in Desiderata, placid.
Placid means stillness. It means unruffled. It does not mean passivity. You are not invited to go into the noise and haste with a mild mannered kind approach. You are invited to move from the centre. You are centred in your true sense of self while the whirlwind of noise and haste whirls around you.
When I worked in London I took advantage of sitting meditatively in the mediation room of the London Buddhist centre. Usually sometime around midday I would get a real sense of well-being and calmness that I didn?t ever get when I missed sitting. I can say that I went placidly amidst the noise and hats that were the underground tube stations on the way too and from work.
I managed during the day to do the work in a calm and efficient manner and I got to remember and feel what the poet W. B. Yeats calls the peace that comes dropping slow and the peace that is at the deep hearts core. This kind of peace is often listed amidst peoples personal list of desires - their personal Desiderata.
So if you would like to feel more of the peace that comes dropping slow then download my Deep Hearts Core podcast that invites you to feel the peace of the infinite peace and to allow you to feel the real Law of Attraction and the real attractiveness within you. Simple click on the words Deep Hearts core and you will arrive at the beginning of a journey of destiny and fulfil your personal Desiderata.
"Take time each day to step away from the clutter and the noise. A daily commitment to spend time in the still, quiet place is a commitment to clarify an inner peace. We need this time and space in our lives in order to remember who we really are, and what's important, and where our personal truth lies. It is time to calm the spirit and soothe the soul. It restores balance in our lives and it reconnects us to our source."
In Desiderata Max Ehrmann invites the same approach.
"Go placidly amidst the haste."You might spend your time amidst the noise and haste and if you are like most modern Westerners your response is to armour what the mystic poet Mary Oliver calls "the soft animal of your body." You lock yourself out of what the poet David Whyte refers to as "a body in full presence." Another way of saying this is that you feel stressed out.
In order to distress many of us, and I have done this myself begin to self medicate. I self medicated for years on alcohol until it became clear that I was anything but placid and someone heading for a mental breakdown of some kind.
The ways that work for those of us willing to commit to a regular practice are meditation and/or prayer. Jack Cranfield recommends these in his book "The Key to the Law of Attraction."
Out of this practice you have more get up and go but it is not a kind of get up and go that is driven by a go getting personality setting out to prove that they are a winner. It is a get up and go that is alive, focused and in the word used in Desiderata, placid.
Placid means stillness. It means unruffled. It does not mean passivity. You are not invited to go into the noise and haste with a mild mannered kind approach. You are invited to move from the centre. You are centred in your true sense of self while the whirlwind of noise and haste whirls around you.
When I worked in London I took advantage of sitting meditatively in the mediation room of the London Buddhist centre. Usually sometime around midday I would get a real sense of well-being and calmness that I didn?t ever get when I missed sitting. I can say that I went placidly amidst the noise and hats that were the underground tube stations on the way too and from work.
I managed during the day to do the work in a calm and efficient manner and I got to remember and feel what the poet W. B. Yeats calls the peace that comes dropping slow and the peace that is at the deep hearts core. This kind of peace is often listed amidst peoples personal list of desires - their personal Desiderata.
So if you would like to feel more of the peace that comes dropping slow then download my Deep Hearts Core podcast that invites you to feel the peace of the infinite peace and to allow you to feel the real Law of Attraction and the real attractiveness within you. Simple click on the words Deep Hearts core and you will arrive at the beginning of a journey of destiny and fulfil your personal Desiderata.
Spiritual Direction - Let the Force be With You
The writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell is famous for many things. One thing is that he coined the phrase "Follow your Bliss."
In order to follow your bliss there are a number of prerequisites you need to follow in order to allow you to do this. You have to make it your intention, you have to be attentive, you have to be committed and you have to take action.
The first step is to be clear about your intention - your inner tending to and your inner tenderness. To follow your bliss takes courage. Look around you. Do you see a world were people are following their bliss. They are mostly following the herd. To follow your bliss means you become an outsider and individual.
To follow your bliss is often anything but blissful. It is often very challenging. It means you will be called upon to make choices that in some ways make you feel very divided. This is why following your bliss is often called The Hero`s journey.
To follow your bliss requires that you trust your own unique guidance system and you build on trusting this guidance system. You have, like many people had this guidance system misused and you have been told that it is not to be trusted. This guidance system is your feelings. To put it simply. If you get a feeling of inspiration follow it. Take action.
When inspiration arises do not over analysis it. Do not spend your time working it out to the last detail. Trust it even if it doesn?t make any sense. Have faith in it even if it doesn?t work out the way you think it should. This is probably because you think it should work out in a particular way and not the way Love intended that it manifest in your life.
Do not judge the result. Be discriminating. The result is the result. The more important aspect of the process is that you practice faith in feeling inspired and feeling the inspiration. It will return and it will be more directed the next time. Faith builds on faith not simply results.
This is what it means when Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie is told by his wisdom teacher, "Let the force be with you." This isn't any mysterious force outside you. It is your connection to your felt sense of spirit - your spiritual direction - your inspired direction. Your intention, attention, commitment and practice is simply to trust this feeling force of inspiration and follow it.
You are living in a culture that demands instant results. It is a culture in many ways that offers you little of true worth other than some material trinkets. To follow your bliss you have to become an artist. You practice the art of following your bliss. This means that you commit to learning to feel from your Deep Hearts Core. For more on learning to follow your bliss download some inspirational direction from The Deep Hearts Core Podcast by clicking on any of the links in these last two sentences.
In order to follow your bliss there are a number of prerequisites you need to follow in order to allow you to do this. You have to make it your intention, you have to be attentive, you have to be committed and you have to take action.
The first step is to be clear about your intention - your inner tending to and your inner tenderness. To follow your bliss takes courage. Look around you. Do you see a world were people are following their bliss. They are mostly following the herd. To follow your bliss means you become an outsider and individual.
To follow your bliss is often anything but blissful. It is often very challenging. It means you will be called upon to make choices that in some ways make you feel very divided. This is why following your bliss is often called The Hero`s journey.
To follow your bliss requires that you trust your own unique guidance system and you build on trusting this guidance system. You have, like many people had this guidance system misused and you have been told that it is not to be trusted. This guidance system is your feelings. To put it simply. If you get a feeling of inspiration follow it. Take action.
When inspiration arises do not over analysis it. Do not spend your time working it out to the last detail. Trust it even if it doesn?t make any sense. Have faith in it even if it doesn?t work out the way you think it should. This is probably because you think it should work out in a particular way and not the way Love intended that it manifest in your life.
Do not judge the result. Be discriminating. The result is the result. The more important aspect of the process is that you practice faith in feeling inspired and feeling the inspiration. It will return and it will be more directed the next time. Faith builds on faith not simply results.
This is what it means when Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie is told by his wisdom teacher, "Let the force be with you." This isn't any mysterious force outside you. It is your connection to your felt sense of spirit - your spiritual direction - your inspired direction. Your intention, attention, commitment and practice is simply to trust this feeling force of inspiration and follow it.
You are living in a culture that demands instant results. It is a culture in many ways that offers you little of true worth other than some material trinkets. To follow your bliss you have to become an artist. You practice the art of following your bliss. This means that you commit to learning to feel from your Deep Hearts Core. For more on learning to follow your bliss download some inspirational direction from The Deep Hearts Core Podcast by clicking on any of the links in these last two sentences.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Celtic Spiritual Direction - The Radiance of Finding
The Ready to Radiate Course is finished. The most difficult and challenging aspect for this writer is the structuring of the course so that it flows. So that you know I haven?t forgotten you I am touching base with you in this article entitled "The Radiance of Finding."
This article is written to remind you of what you will find once you move through the various stages of soul growth. These stages are not necessarily linear. They are described in many different ways in many different times and in many different cultural contexts. These stages are Universal but they differ because we as individuals are unique. We are like the snowflake. Each snowflake has seven aspects that apply to all snowflakes but each snowflake is different.
In accepting the invitation to be an Anam Cara that is the invitation to soul friendship you undertake to become a bridge.
You bridge the connection between that which you are in time and form with that which you are beyond time and beyond form. In order to develop this bridge we have in the Ready to Radiate course been invited to delve into poetry at a mystical level. At the beginning of this Ready to Radiate experience we looked at the poem written by W. B Yeats entitled The Song of Wandering Aengus.
In this poem you may recall there is the experience of the call of the soul. This is represented in the following lines.
a glimmering girl with
apple blossom in her hair
who called me by my name
and ran and faded through the
brightening air.
When the call first comes it tends to be unsettling or glorious and is often a combination of both. One thing that happens is that you find you cannot hold unto the beauty that fades through the brightening air. This is why the Anam Cara Experience is written. It is in order that you learn how to engage with beauty so that beauty becomes you and that you become more and more available to that which is the beauty within you.
Beauty as all wisdom teachers affirm becomes YOU.
It is a perfume of who you are. It is part and not apart from the image of you as the image of the Beloved. You are simply ignorant of this grace. This is not intellectual ignorance but ignorance in the way that one sees the world as separate. Ignorance is at the heart of most suffering. You ignore the radiance of the creation that you are and you suffer. This beauty that is calling to flow through you fades through the brightening air of spiritual understanding because your agenda is other than Love.
Did W.B.Yeats, writing as Aengus, ever find the glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair?
This writer thinks he did. You to can learn to be with the representation of beauty that flows through your being. It doesn't have to be a symbol of a glimmering girl. It is more important that you connect to a symbol that resonates with you and that you learn to express as a radiance of who you are. This symbol will change and it will change you, as you are willing to allow it to enter deep into your heart.
Let W. B. Yeats speak about how one feels when you allow the beauty that soul friendship expresses through you.
Vacillation (IV)
My fiftieth year has come and gone.
I sat, a solitary man
In a crowded London shop
An open book and an empty cup
On marble table top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed so great my happiness
That I was blessed and could bless.
Each and every line of this reflection is pregnant with meaning.
Here there is no wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands. Here there is no searching to find where beauty has gone as Aengus does. The body is a sudden blazed. This is the radiance of connection to the soul. It doesn't come about through thinking about. It doesn't come about through emotional attachment to the mask of personality. It comes when the body is allowed to be in flow.
Mary Oliver expresses this beautifully when she says
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.
From Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver
W.B. Yeats writes
At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy.. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life.. everything fills me with affection..... It may be an hour before the mood passes, but lately I seem to understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate.
These moments of unforeseen connection are the radiance of soul friendship. They are the stuff of the Anam Cara experience. They come unannounced. They are grace moments of expanded awareness of who you are. They not only heal you in the sense that you feel blessed but you heal others simply by being available to such grace moments.
W.B Yeats writes
My fiftieth year has come and gone.
You don?t have to wait until you are fifty although this is an age when matters of spiritual direction tend to call more and more. The work of soul friendship is to learn to be available to these moments as they flow. This openness to being available is represented by the line
An open book and an empty cup.
This is an open mind and an open body available for those grace moment to flow. This is presence. This is the flow of Love through form. You are blessed. No more chasing rainbows. You and the one who calls you by your name are no longer separate. You have come full circle and returned home.
In those moment emptiness is power. The open book is the state of no mind available to the One Mind. The empty cup is the state described by the Master Jesus in the first beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are they who are poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Certainly these grace moments are not available if your heart is filled with hatred or any other emotional state linked to feelings of separateness. These emotional states are the lead that the Anam Cara learns to turn into gold. This is the real work of soul friendship. This is inner work. This is responsible work and is healing work. In the Islamic tradition it is called Jihad. It is the work of consciousness rising which paradoxically you do by simply getting grounded in trust and letting go.
You do not find these grace moments away from the body. This is why the poet says
My body of a sudden blazed out.
This is why Mary Oliver says
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves
This is trust in the body as a vehicle for the flow of the Divine. It is trust in the flow of feelings; trust in the flow of thought without attachment to thoughts as being who you are. This is trust and letting go and letting real happiness beyond conditionality arrive unforeseen.
Let me leave you with a poem that will remind you to allow the grace note that you are to play through you.
Birdsong brings relief
To my longing.
I am just as ecstatic as they are,
But with nothing to say!
Please, universal soul, practice
Some song, or something through me!
Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks.
Blessings until we resonate with each other again.
This article is written to remind you of what you will find once you move through the various stages of soul growth. These stages are not necessarily linear. They are described in many different ways in many different times and in many different cultural contexts. These stages are Universal but they differ because we as individuals are unique. We are like the snowflake. Each snowflake has seven aspects that apply to all snowflakes but each snowflake is different.
In accepting the invitation to be an Anam Cara that is the invitation to soul friendship you undertake to become a bridge.
You bridge the connection between that which you are in time and form with that which you are beyond time and beyond form. In order to develop this bridge we have in the Ready to Radiate course been invited to delve into poetry at a mystical level. At the beginning of this Ready to Radiate experience we looked at the poem written by W. B Yeats entitled The Song of Wandering Aengus.
In this poem you may recall there is the experience of the call of the soul. This is represented in the following lines.
a glimmering girl with
apple blossom in her hair
who called me by my name
and ran and faded through the
brightening air.
When the call first comes it tends to be unsettling or glorious and is often a combination of both. One thing that happens is that you find you cannot hold unto the beauty that fades through the brightening air. This is why the Anam Cara Experience is written. It is in order that you learn how to engage with beauty so that beauty becomes you and that you become more and more available to that which is the beauty within you.
Beauty as all wisdom teachers affirm becomes YOU.
It is a perfume of who you are. It is part and not apart from the image of you as the image of the Beloved. You are simply ignorant of this grace. This is not intellectual ignorance but ignorance in the way that one sees the world as separate. Ignorance is at the heart of most suffering. You ignore the radiance of the creation that you are and you suffer. This beauty that is calling to flow through you fades through the brightening air of spiritual understanding because your agenda is other than Love.
Did W.B.Yeats, writing as Aengus, ever find the glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair?
This writer thinks he did. You to can learn to be with the representation of beauty that flows through your being. It doesn't have to be a symbol of a glimmering girl. It is more important that you connect to a symbol that resonates with you and that you learn to express as a radiance of who you are. This symbol will change and it will change you, as you are willing to allow it to enter deep into your heart.
Let W. B. Yeats speak about how one feels when you allow the beauty that soul friendship expresses through you.
Vacillation (IV)
My fiftieth year has come and gone.
I sat, a solitary man
In a crowded London shop
An open book and an empty cup
On marble table top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed so great my happiness
That I was blessed and could bless.
Each and every line of this reflection is pregnant with meaning.
Here there is no wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands. Here there is no searching to find where beauty has gone as Aengus does. The body is a sudden blazed. This is the radiance of connection to the soul. It doesn't come about through thinking about. It doesn't come about through emotional attachment to the mask of personality. It comes when the body is allowed to be in flow.
Mary Oliver expresses this beautifully when she says
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.
From Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver
W.B. Yeats writes
At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy.. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life.. everything fills me with affection..... It may be an hour before the mood passes, but lately I seem to understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate.
These moments of unforeseen connection are the radiance of soul friendship. They are the stuff of the Anam Cara experience. They come unannounced. They are grace moments of expanded awareness of who you are. They not only heal you in the sense that you feel blessed but you heal others simply by being available to such grace moments.
W.B Yeats writes
My fiftieth year has come and gone.
You don?t have to wait until you are fifty although this is an age when matters of spiritual direction tend to call more and more. The work of soul friendship is to learn to be available to these moments as they flow. This openness to being available is represented by the line
An open book and an empty cup.
This is an open mind and an open body available for those grace moment to flow. This is presence. This is the flow of Love through form. You are blessed. No more chasing rainbows. You and the one who calls you by your name are no longer separate. You have come full circle and returned home.
In those moment emptiness is power. The open book is the state of no mind available to the One Mind. The empty cup is the state described by the Master Jesus in the first beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are they who are poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Certainly these grace moments are not available if your heart is filled with hatred or any other emotional state linked to feelings of separateness. These emotional states are the lead that the Anam Cara learns to turn into gold. This is the real work of soul friendship. This is inner work. This is responsible work and is healing work. In the Islamic tradition it is called Jihad. It is the work of consciousness rising which paradoxically you do by simply getting grounded in trust and letting go.
You do not find these grace moments away from the body. This is why the poet says
My body of a sudden blazed out.
This is why Mary Oliver says
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves
This is trust in the body as a vehicle for the flow of the Divine. It is trust in the flow of feelings; trust in the flow of thought without attachment to thoughts as being who you are. This is trust and letting go and letting real happiness beyond conditionality arrive unforeseen.
Let me leave you with a poem that will remind you to allow the grace note that you are to play through you.
Birdsong brings relief
To my longing.
I am just as ecstatic as they are,
But with nothing to say!
Please, universal soul, practice
Some song, or something through me!
Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks.
Blessings until we resonate with each other again.
Spiritual Direction from a Beatle
"I look at you all see the love there
that's sleeping while my guitar gently weeps.
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps."
George Harrison
In Corrogue I am on song.
This morning the mist hangs low in the far of fields. The landscape seems schroded in mystery. It is always new. It is always fresh to the eye that is accepting of it as it is. I want to go capture this mystery. It is how I imagine the threshold of Tir Na Nog would appear. I want to go and cross this threshold into the land of the ever young. This is the land of the ever-present moment.
All this week I have been singing.
This week I have been dancing as well. This dancing is a great technique for allowing one to get out of one`'s head and into the body. This is recreation. At this "place of the briars" (Corrogue) there is no one to be disturbed. Even the sheep dance and the cows look up from their feeding. I turn up the volume on the tape deck and play Annie Lennox singing "Why." This is a great song with a great question. It is a question about the failure of love.
This week I have had to walk into Dowra village one and one quarter miles from this cottage. When I am walking I have been accompanied by George Harrison's beautiful song "While my guitar gently weeps." I love this song. It is, for me, a song of deep compassion. It is the song of a seer. It is a song written and sung by one of great sensitivity. This is a real soul song. It is not a sentimental love song. It cuts to the heart of love and goes to what W B Yeats referred to as "The Deep Hearts Core."
In this song George Harrison tells us "I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping." This is beautiful. To be able to see and know that in each and everyone of us "love sleeps." This is a great knowing. For some this love is sleeping deeply. It sleeps because to often it has been wounded. It has not been welcomed.
To often love and the expression of love has become associated with pain. Better then to sleep without the need for this experience we call "love." Better not to venture into this place where the heart is vulnerable. So we choose not to risk all for love. We live outside our essence. Maybe we can settle for a little satisfaction. Let us not, however, venture into the vulnerability of grace and joy.
George Harrison sees "the love there that's sleeping." A soul friend sees the "love there that`'s sleeping." A soul friend laments this sleep. While love lies sleeping "a guitar gently weeps." This is the gentleness of compassion. The word "lament" comes from the words meaning, "to care."
This wonderful and wonder filled man plays a lament for the distance we are separate from love. What else to do? One has to lament. One has to enter a heart of vulnerability that says, "I care." More than this one has to enter the "will to care." One has to have courage to be this vulnerable.
When you are this vulnerable you discover you are the love that is always awake. It was only waiting for you to look through the eyes of the heart. You awake from the sleep of the ego. Until this time you are living in the dead of the past. You are never graced the entry into the only time you are alive. This is the here and now. This is the place of presence.
George Harrison gives you a great help to come awake to the love that sleeps within.
He sings, "I look at the floor and see it needs sweeping, still my guitar gently weeps." This is a great line. This is a Zen poem. It comes from a heart still weeping through his guitar. George Harrison and his guitar are not separate. They are one body. They have come to be at-one-ment. This guitar is a part of who he is. The voice of the Divine moves through him and his body. Then as he says "My guitar gently weeps." This is a holy instrument. This is a holy weeping. It is a lamenting for the unity of oneness with "all that is."
We are so often missing from life. We are too busy doing "our life."
We do not see what is needed in any moment. We do now know how to look. We look at the floor and we might judge. We would judge that the floor is dirty. We might think how little time we have to sweep the floor. We might think how our partner and our children are slobs. We might think how the colour of the floor has faded and maybe it is time to think about new kitchen tiles.
As for myself, when sweeping the floor, I might lament, "All those bloody dog hairs."
Then those, whose love never lies sleeping, go quiet. Our two dogs go and slink into a safe place. This is a place where the mad sweeping man might not find them. Sometimes the little dog will simply stand there and look. She becomes my little Zen master. I am her student. She reminds me that I am shouting. She reminds me that I should practice what I sometimes preach. She tells me, "Tony, the floor. That is all. Love in action. Just chill."
Sweeping the floor with judgement is our norm. This is our mind. This is my mind. This is who we think we are. We get so little experience of the real love that lies beyond sleeping. We go to various religious authorities. More than anywhere else the sleep there is often so deep they begin to have dreams that seem real. There you are encouraged to enter the sleep of belief. There you are told you are not even worthy to be standing on the floor.
Learn to look. Learn to just see.
The floor needs sweeping. That is all. This is love in action. Out of an awakened heart action moves. It is transformative. It is accepting. Energy flows feely. There is no attachment to results. Just sweep the floor. Just allow compassion to arise. We have lost faith in our passion and our experience of the flow of compassion. Let your heart lament the absence of presence.
Share your love and while you are at it drop the idea that it is "your love." Wake up for a moment and feel the love sleeping in your soul. You are this. You are the love that is sleeping. It is the flow of life moving through you. Love is not separate from you and will never be separate from you.
What needs sweeping is the dust of the mind.
It needs sweeping of all its attachments to all that it clings to. It clings to the past and is forever thinking about the future. All this "thinking about" crushes the heart. The heart is not felt. It is not trusted simply to be. You lose heart. You lose the ability to sweep the floor. You lose the ability to lament the loss of your birthright. You do not weep for the loss of soul. You do not weep for the loss of joy and the non-entry of grace. You forget how to lament.
When you hear a song running through your head stop and listen.
It is often speaking to what is termed "your condition." Allow this song space. Allow it some unconditional love. Then you might wake up to the love "there that's sleeping." You might wake up to see the floor just as it is.
This will be enough.
that's sleeping while my guitar gently weeps.
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps."
George Harrison
In Corrogue I am on song.
This morning the mist hangs low in the far of fields. The landscape seems schroded in mystery. It is always new. It is always fresh to the eye that is accepting of it as it is. I want to go capture this mystery. It is how I imagine the threshold of Tir Na Nog would appear. I want to go and cross this threshold into the land of the ever young. This is the land of the ever-present moment.
All this week I have been singing.
This week I have been dancing as well. This dancing is a great technique for allowing one to get out of one`'s head and into the body. This is recreation. At this "place of the briars" (Corrogue) there is no one to be disturbed. Even the sheep dance and the cows look up from their feeding. I turn up the volume on the tape deck and play Annie Lennox singing "Why." This is a great song with a great question. It is a question about the failure of love.
This week I have had to walk into Dowra village one and one quarter miles from this cottage. When I am walking I have been accompanied by George Harrison's beautiful song "While my guitar gently weeps." I love this song. It is, for me, a song of deep compassion. It is the song of a seer. It is a song written and sung by one of great sensitivity. This is a real soul song. It is not a sentimental love song. It cuts to the heart of love and goes to what W B Yeats referred to as "The Deep Hearts Core."
In this song George Harrison tells us "I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping." This is beautiful. To be able to see and know that in each and everyone of us "love sleeps." This is a great knowing. For some this love is sleeping deeply. It sleeps because to often it has been wounded. It has not been welcomed.
To often love and the expression of love has become associated with pain. Better then to sleep without the need for this experience we call "love." Better not to venture into this place where the heart is vulnerable. So we choose not to risk all for love. We live outside our essence. Maybe we can settle for a little satisfaction. Let us not, however, venture into the vulnerability of grace and joy.
George Harrison sees "the love there that's sleeping." A soul friend sees the "love there that`'s sleeping." A soul friend laments this sleep. While love lies sleeping "a guitar gently weeps." This is the gentleness of compassion. The word "lament" comes from the words meaning, "to care."
This wonderful and wonder filled man plays a lament for the distance we are separate from love. What else to do? One has to lament. One has to enter a heart of vulnerability that says, "I care." More than this one has to enter the "will to care." One has to have courage to be this vulnerable.
When you are this vulnerable you discover you are the love that is always awake. It was only waiting for you to look through the eyes of the heart. You awake from the sleep of the ego. Until this time you are living in the dead of the past. You are never graced the entry into the only time you are alive. This is the here and now. This is the place of presence.
George Harrison gives you a great help to come awake to the love that sleeps within.
He sings, "I look at the floor and see it needs sweeping, still my guitar gently weeps." This is a great line. This is a Zen poem. It comes from a heart still weeping through his guitar. George Harrison and his guitar are not separate. They are one body. They have come to be at-one-ment. This guitar is a part of who he is. The voice of the Divine moves through him and his body. Then as he says "My guitar gently weeps." This is a holy instrument. This is a holy weeping. It is a lamenting for the unity of oneness with "all that is."
We are so often missing from life. We are too busy doing "our life."
We do not see what is needed in any moment. We do now know how to look. We look at the floor and we might judge. We would judge that the floor is dirty. We might think how little time we have to sweep the floor. We might think how our partner and our children are slobs. We might think how the colour of the floor has faded and maybe it is time to think about new kitchen tiles.
As for myself, when sweeping the floor, I might lament, "All those bloody dog hairs."
Then those, whose love never lies sleeping, go quiet. Our two dogs go and slink into a safe place. This is a place where the mad sweeping man might not find them. Sometimes the little dog will simply stand there and look. She becomes my little Zen master. I am her student. She reminds me that I am shouting. She reminds me that I should practice what I sometimes preach. She tells me, "Tony, the floor. That is all. Love in action. Just chill."
Sweeping the floor with judgement is our norm. This is our mind. This is my mind. This is who we think we are. We get so little experience of the real love that lies beyond sleeping. We go to various religious authorities. More than anywhere else the sleep there is often so deep they begin to have dreams that seem real. There you are encouraged to enter the sleep of belief. There you are told you are not even worthy to be standing on the floor.
Learn to look. Learn to just see.
The floor needs sweeping. That is all. This is love in action. Out of an awakened heart action moves. It is transformative. It is accepting. Energy flows feely. There is no attachment to results. Just sweep the floor. Just allow compassion to arise. We have lost faith in our passion and our experience of the flow of compassion. Let your heart lament the absence of presence.
Share your love and while you are at it drop the idea that it is "your love." Wake up for a moment and feel the love sleeping in your soul. You are this. You are the love that is sleeping. It is the flow of life moving through you. Love is not separate from you and will never be separate from you.
What needs sweeping is the dust of the mind.
It needs sweeping of all its attachments to all that it clings to. It clings to the past and is forever thinking about the future. All this "thinking about" crushes the heart. The heart is not felt. It is not trusted simply to be. You lose heart. You lose the ability to sweep the floor. You lose the ability to lament the loss of your birthright. You do not weep for the loss of soul. You do not weep for the loss of joy and the non-entry of grace. You forget how to lament.
When you hear a song running through your head stop and listen.
It is often speaking to what is termed "your condition." Allow this song space. Allow it some unconditional love. Then you might wake up to the love "there that's sleeping." You might wake up to see the floor just as it is.
This will be enough.
Finding Real Confidence - Locating the Pool of Wisdom
Tom Cowan writing in ?Yearning for the Wind? writes
?When the beautiful people known as the Tuatha de Danaan learned that another race of humans was about to invade Ireland their seers decided to hide the pool of wisdom. They removed it from ordinary reality so that morals could not find the water and misuse its power.?
This story is not just part of an old Irish story. It is your story and my story. This pool of wisdom is available to each and everyone of us. It is, however, extremely powerful. Most everyone who comes to drink of this pool of grace is transformed by it. It is hidden but there is the promise that those who seek shall find.
Only as one off the world?s greatest drinkers of this pool of wisdom says, ?First you will be troubled, then you will be amazed.? You will be troubled because you will call this wisdom your own and you will, as most everyone does, use it to serve your self-interest. This is what this Irish mystic storyteller has done and in some little way is learning to undo.
When you drink of this wellspring of infinite knowing you will be given what you ask for. You will misuse it. It is a wishing well that you are intended to use for wishing well and not simply for getting everything that you wish for. In such focus of self-interest you will be setting yourself up for trouble. This isn?t a punishment but the universe does not give such power to those who would rush in where angels fear to tread.
You will through the self-serving of the ego lose contact with this wisdom pool that is at your deep harts core. This is the troubling stage. It can last a long time. The wisdom is really cultivated by the work of integrating the understanding that arose from within the depth of your deep hearts core. This is a humbling experience. You come back down to earth with a bump.
The wisdom pool is not a pool that is a bank of knowledge that you acquire. The wisdom poll isn?t like a skills bank. It is a pool of paradox, of riddle or parable and of story. It is a pool that dispels ignorance. It takes you out of the spell you are under when you identify experience with the separate sense of self you call me, myself, I.
The wisdom pool is not a pool of know how. It doesn?t tell you what you should do in this or that circumstance. It is a way of knowing that is free of concepts of time and end results. It isn?t within the realm of thinking about. Thought is not wisdom. Wisdom arises downstream of thought from the silence and majesty of no mind. No mind does not mean absence of a sense of being but the awareness of the vastness of being. Thought is conceptual. Wisdom is boundless.
?When the beautiful people known as the Tuatha de Danaan learned that another race of humans was about to invade Ireland their seers decided to hide the pool of wisdom. They removed it from ordinary reality so that morals could not find the water and misuse its power.?
This story is not just part of an old Irish story. It is your story and my story. This pool of wisdom is available to each and everyone of us. It is, however, extremely powerful. Most everyone who comes to drink of this pool of grace is transformed by it. It is hidden but there is the promise that those who seek shall find.
Only as one off the world?s greatest drinkers of this pool of wisdom says, ?First you will be troubled, then you will be amazed.? You will be troubled because you will call this wisdom your own and you will, as most everyone does, use it to serve your self-interest. This is what this Irish mystic storyteller has done and in some little way is learning to undo.
When you drink of this wellspring of infinite knowing you will be given what you ask for. You will misuse it. It is a wishing well that you are intended to use for wishing well and not simply for getting everything that you wish for. In such focus of self-interest you will be setting yourself up for trouble. This isn?t a punishment but the universe does not give such power to those who would rush in where angels fear to tread.
You will through the self-serving of the ego lose contact with this wisdom pool that is at your deep harts core. This is the troubling stage. It can last a long time. The wisdom is really cultivated by the work of integrating the understanding that arose from within the depth of your deep hearts core. This is a humbling experience. You come back down to earth with a bump.
The wisdom pool is not a pool that is a bank of knowledge that you acquire. The wisdom poll isn?t like a skills bank. It is a pool of paradox, of riddle or parable and of story. It is a pool that dispels ignorance. It takes you out of the spell you are under when you identify experience with the separate sense of self you call me, myself, I.
The wisdom pool is not a pool of know how. It doesn?t tell you what you should do in this or that circumstance. It is a way of knowing that is free of concepts of time and end results. It isn?t within the realm of thinking about. Thought is not wisdom. Wisdom arises downstream of thought from the silence and majesty of no mind. No mind does not mean absence of a sense of being but the awareness of the vastness of being. Thought is conceptual. Wisdom is boundless.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Spiritual Direction from a Beatle
"I look at you all see the love there
that's sleeping while my guitar gently weeps.
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps."
George Harrison
In Corrogue I am on song.
This morning the mist hangs low in the far of fields. The landscape seems schroded in mystery. It is always new. It is always fresh to the eye that is accepting of it as it is. I want to go capture this mystery. It is how I imagine the threshold of Tir Na Nog would appear. I want to go and cross this threshold into the land of the ever young. This is the land of the ever-present moment.
All this week I have been singing.
This week I have been dancing as well. This dancing is a great technique for allowing one to get out of one’s head and into the body. This is recreation. At this “place of the briars” there is no one to be disturbed. Even the sheep dance and the cows look up from their feeding. I turn up the volume on the tape deck and play Annie Lennox singing “Why.” This is a great song with a great question. It is a question about the failure of love.
This week I have had to walk into Dowra village one and one quarter miles from this cottage. When I am walking I have been accompanied by George Harrison’s beautiful song “While my guitar gently weeps.” I love this song. It is, for me, a song of deep compassion. It is the song of a seer. It is a song written and sung by one of great sensitivity. This is a real soul song. It is not a sentimental love song. It cuts to the heart of love.
In this song George Harrison tells us “I look at you all see the love there that’s sleeping.” This is beautiful. To be able to see and know that in each and everyone of us “love sleeps.” This is a great knowing. For some this love is sleeping deeply. It sleeps because to often it has been wounded. It has not been welcomed.
To often love and the expression of love has become associated with pain. Better then to sleep without the need for this experience we call "love." Better not to venture into this place where the heart is vulnerable. So we choose not to risk all for love. We live outside our essence. Maybe we can settle for a little satisfaction. Let us not, however, venture into the vulnerability of grace and joy.
George Harrison sees “the love there that’s sleeping.” A soul friend sees the “love there that’s sleeping.” A soul friend laments this sleep. While love lies sleeping “a guitar gently weeps.” This is the gentleness of compassion. The word "lament” comes from the words meaning, “to care.”
This wonderful and wonder filled man plays a lament for the distance we are separate from love. What else to do? One has to lament. One has to enter a heart of vulnerability that says, “I care.” More than this one has to enter the “will to care.” One has to have courage to be this vulnerable.
When you are this vulnerable you discover you are the love that is always awake. It was only waiting for you to look through the eyes of the heart. You awake from the sleep of the ego. Until this time you are living in the dead of the past. You are never graced the entry into the only time you are alive. This is the here and now. This is the place of presence.
George Harrison gives you a great help to come awake to the love that sleeps within.
He sings, “I look at the floor and see it needs sweeping, still my guitar gently weeps.” This is a great line. This is a Zen poem. It comes from a heart still weeping through his guitar. George Harrison and his guitar are not separate. They are one body. They have come to be at-one-ment. This guitar is a part of who he is. The voice of the Divine moves through him and his body. Then as he says “My guitar gently weeps.” This is a holy instrument. This is a holy weeping. It is a lamenting for the unity of oneness with “all that is.”
We are so often missing from life. We are too busy doing “our life.”
We do not see what is needed in any moment. We do now know how to look. We look at the floor and we might judge. We would judge that the floor is dirty. We might think how little time we have to sweep the floor. We might think how our partner and our children are slobs. We might think how the colour of the floor has faded and maybe it is time to think about new kitchen tiles.
As for myself, when sweeping the floor, I might lament, “All those bloody dog hairs.”
Then those, whose love never lies sleeping, go quiet. Our two dogs go and slink into a safe place. This is a place where the mad sweeping man might not find them. Sometimes the little dog will simply stand there and look. She becomes my little Zen master. I am her student. She reminds me that I am shouting. She reminds me that I should practice what I sometimes preach. She tells me, “Tony, the floor. That is all. Love in action. Just chill.”
Sweeping the floor with judgement is our norm. This is our mind. This is my mind. This is who we think we are. We get so little experience of the real love that lies beyond sleeping. We go to various religious authorities. More than anywhere else the sleep there is often so deep they begin to have dreams that seem real. There you are encouraged to enter the sleep of belief. There you are told you are not even worthy to be standing on the floor.
Learn to look. Learn to just see.
The floor needs sweeping. That is all. This is love in action. Out of an awakened heart action moves. It is transformative. It is accepting. Energy flows feely. There is no attachment to results. Just sweep the floor. Just allow compassion to arise. We have lost faith in our passion and our experience of the flow of compassion. Let your heart lament the absence of presence.
Share your love and while you are at it drop the idea that it is “your love.” Wake up for a moment and feel the love sleeping in your soul. You are this. You are the love that is sleeping. It is the flow of life moving through you. Love is not separate from you and will never be separate from you.
What needs sweeping is the dust of the mind.
It needs sweeping of all its attachments to all that it clings to. It clings to the past and is forever thinking about the future. All this “thinking about” crushes the heart. The heart is not felt. It is not trusted simply to be. You lose heart. You lose the ability to sweep the floor. You lose the ability to lament the loss of your birthright. You do not weep for the loss of soul. You do not weep for the loss of joy and the non-entry of grace. You forget how to lament.
When you hear a song running through your head stop and listen.
It is often speaking to what is termed “your condition. Allow this song space. Allow it some unconditional love. Then you might wake up to the love “there that’s sleeping.” You might wake up to see the floor just as it is.
This will be enough
that's sleeping while my guitar gently weeps.
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps."
George Harrison
In Corrogue I am on song.
This morning the mist hangs low in the far of fields. The landscape seems schroded in mystery. It is always new. It is always fresh to the eye that is accepting of it as it is. I want to go capture this mystery. It is how I imagine the threshold of Tir Na Nog would appear. I want to go and cross this threshold into the land of the ever young. This is the land of the ever-present moment.
All this week I have been singing.
This week I have been dancing as well. This dancing is a great technique for allowing one to get out of one’s head and into the body. This is recreation. At this “place of the briars” there is no one to be disturbed. Even the sheep dance and the cows look up from their feeding. I turn up the volume on the tape deck and play Annie Lennox singing “Why.” This is a great song with a great question. It is a question about the failure of love.
This week I have had to walk into Dowra village one and one quarter miles from this cottage. When I am walking I have been accompanied by George Harrison’s beautiful song “While my guitar gently weeps.” I love this song. It is, for me, a song of deep compassion. It is the song of a seer. It is a song written and sung by one of great sensitivity. This is a real soul song. It is not a sentimental love song. It cuts to the heart of love.
In this song George Harrison tells us “I look at you all see the love there that’s sleeping.” This is beautiful. To be able to see and know that in each and everyone of us “love sleeps.” This is a great knowing. For some this love is sleeping deeply. It sleeps because to often it has been wounded. It has not been welcomed.
To often love and the expression of love has become associated with pain. Better then to sleep without the need for this experience we call "love." Better not to venture into this place where the heart is vulnerable. So we choose not to risk all for love. We live outside our essence. Maybe we can settle for a little satisfaction. Let us not, however, venture into the vulnerability of grace and joy.
George Harrison sees “the love there that’s sleeping.” A soul friend sees the “love there that’s sleeping.” A soul friend laments this sleep. While love lies sleeping “a guitar gently weeps.” This is the gentleness of compassion. The word "lament” comes from the words meaning, “to care.”
This wonderful and wonder filled man plays a lament for the distance we are separate from love. What else to do? One has to lament. One has to enter a heart of vulnerability that says, “I care.” More than this one has to enter the “will to care.” One has to have courage to be this vulnerable.
When you are this vulnerable you discover you are the love that is always awake. It was only waiting for you to look through the eyes of the heart. You awake from the sleep of the ego. Until this time you are living in the dead of the past. You are never graced the entry into the only time you are alive. This is the here and now. This is the place of presence.
George Harrison gives you a great help to come awake to the love that sleeps within.
He sings, “I look at the floor and see it needs sweeping, still my guitar gently weeps.” This is a great line. This is a Zen poem. It comes from a heart still weeping through his guitar. George Harrison and his guitar are not separate. They are one body. They have come to be at-one-ment. This guitar is a part of who he is. The voice of the Divine moves through him and his body. Then as he says “My guitar gently weeps.” This is a holy instrument. This is a holy weeping. It is a lamenting for the unity of oneness with “all that is.”
We are so often missing from life. We are too busy doing “our life.”
We do not see what is needed in any moment. We do now know how to look. We look at the floor and we might judge. We would judge that the floor is dirty. We might think how little time we have to sweep the floor. We might think how our partner and our children are slobs. We might think how the colour of the floor has faded and maybe it is time to think about new kitchen tiles.
As for myself, when sweeping the floor, I might lament, “All those bloody dog hairs.”
Then those, whose love never lies sleeping, go quiet. Our two dogs go and slink into a safe place. This is a place where the mad sweeping man might not find them. Sometimes the little dog will simply stand there and look. She becomes my little Zen master. I am her student. She reminds me that I am shouting. She reminds me that I should practice what I sometimes preach. She tells me, “Tony, the floor. That is all. Love in action. Just chill.”
Sweeping the floor with judgement is our norm. This is our mind. This is my mind. This is who we think we are. We get so little experience of the real love that lies beyond sleeping. We go to various religious authorities. More than anywhere else the sleep there is often so deep they begin to have dreams that seem real. There you are encouraged to enter the sleep of belief. There you are told you are not even worthy to be standing on the floor.
Learn to look. Learn to just see.
The floor needs sweeping. That is all. This is love in action. Out of an awakened heart action moves. It is transformative. It is accepting. Energy flows feely. There is no attachment to results. Just sweep the floor. Just allow compassion to arise. We have lost faith in our passion and our experience of the flow of compassion. Let your heart lament the absence of presence.
Share your love and while you are at it drop the idea that it is “your love.” Wake up for a moment and feel the love sleeping in your soul. You are this. You are the love that is sleeping. It is the flow of life moving through you. Love is not separate from you and will never be separate from you.
What needs sweeping is the dust of the mind.
It needs sweeping of all its attachments to all that it clings to. It clings to the past and is forever thinking about the future. All this “thinking about” crushes the heart. The heart is not felt. It is not trusted simply to be. You lose heart. You lose the ability to sweep the floor. You lose the ability to lament the loss of your birthright. You do not weep for the loss of soul. You do not weep for the loss of joy and the non-entry of grace. You forget how to lament.
When you hear a song running through your head stop and listen.
It is often speaking to what is termed “your condition. Allow this song space. Allow it some unconditional love. Then you might wake up to the love “there that’s sleeping.” You might wake up to see the floor just as it is.
This will be enough
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Magic Swirling Ship of Irish Mythology
Take me for a trip upon
Your magic swirling ship
Bob Dylan ? Mr. Tambourine Man
Most of us are on a trip. The question is, ?Is this trip taking me anywhere?? There is a paradox to the answer. If you think it is then you are not on a trip that is magical and will make your head swirl.
We need to have our heads swirl. Heads can be so full of knowledge that there is no room for the new. In our heads that have bee taken over from the ?swirling ship? of the heart resides the inner critic, the doubter and various related members of the ?playing small? family devoid of magic or mystery.
Irish mythology, which is a language of magic and mystery, can become a magic swirling ship. This is not just a trip into some historical time and place but the invitation to real magic. This is the invitation to the Timeless ? the NOW.
The Mr. Tambourine Man can play a song for you but you will be in a whirl. This is because all Tambourine Men (which also includes women) will play you YOUR song. You will tell them that this song is just too beautiful for words. They will then ask you, ?Why aren?t you playing this song.?
The Tambourine Man will then disappear and this song will haunt you until you meet again. Only this time you will be attuned to your unique time. The one that you came here to sing. The one that will take you as a magic swirling ship going in the true direction.
Your magic swirling ship
Bob Dylan ? Mr. Tambourine Man
Most of us are on a trip. The question is, ?Is this trip taking me anywhere?? There is a paradox to the answer. If you think it is then you are not on a trip that is magical and will make your head swirl.
We need to have our heads swirl. Heads can be so full of knowledge that there is no room for the new. In our heads that have bee taken over from the ?swirling ship? of the heart resides the inner critic, the doubter and various related members of the ?playing small? family devoid of magic or mystery.
Irish mythology, which is a language of magic and mystery, can become a magic swirling ship. This is not just a trip into some historical time and place but the invitation to real magic. This is the invitation to the Timeless ? the NOW.
The Mr. Tambourine Man can play a song for you but you will be in a whirl. This is because all Tambourine Men (which also includes women) will play you YOUR song. You will tell them that this song is just too beautiful for words. They will then ask you, ?Why aren?t you playing this song.?
The Tambourine Man will then disappear and this song will haunt you until you meet again. Only this time you will be attuned to your unique time. The one that you came here to sing. The one that will take you as a magic swirling ship going in the true direction.
Return to Tir na nog ? Living the Time of Your Life
Tir na nog translates from the Irish as "The Land of the Forever Young." To modern intellects this story is a fairy story, meaning it is a fantasy. The intellect does not believe in a place where one lives forever and does not age.
The intellect is a wonderful tool but it keeps you bound to the prison of time and this is not the place where you can really enjoy the time of your life. To really enjoy your life you know who you are beyond time and form and space. Without this knowing (which is not an intellectual knowledge) you are living in a prison called time.
The Land of the Forever Young is not some mythical place but a state of being. It is the state of felt oneness with the source of Creation. Creation is created from that which itself was never born and never dies. In that sense it is outside what we call time. Forever does not mean an inexhaustible length of time. It is means no time at all.
An Anam cara invites you into the direct experience of living within time as a flow of the timeless. This is the direct experience of knowing yourself as the flow in form of that which is formless. This experience allows you to know the birthless, deathless state within. It allows you to know you truly are forever young.
The intellect is a wonderful tool but it keeps you bound to the prison of time and this is not the place where you can really enjoy the time of your life. To really enjoy your life you know who you are beyond time and form and space. Without this knowing (which is not an intellectual knowledge) you are living in a prison called time.
The Land of the Forever Young is not some mythical place but a state of being. It is the state of felt oneness with the source of Creation. Creation is created from that which itself was never born and never dies. In that sense it is outside what we call time. Forever does not mean an inexhaustible length of time. It is means no time at all.
An Anam cara invites you into the direct experience of living within time as a flow of the timeless. This is the direct experience of knowing yourself as the flow in form of that which is formless. This experience allows you to know the birthless, deathless state within. It allows you to know you truly are forever young.
The Fire that Takes no Wood
I went out to the hazel wood
Because a fire was in my head
W.B. Yeats ? The Song of Wandering Aengus
These lines open Yeats? great poem of the hero?s journey. This going to the hazel wood is undertaken by the outsider. This is the outsider who longs for the source of magic and miracle within.
The hazel wood is a place of sanctuary. It is a place of initiation. You are invited to be an initiate of the threshold places of the heart. This often takes you into a dark wood.
The fire in the head is a creative longing. It is the longing to be. To be is to be creative. You cannot not be creative, but you are given the choice in how you will express this creative fire that burns within you.
Many of us have lost the ability to feel the fire that burns within us to express love in action. We may lose it through grief or disappointment or listening to our internal critic rather than the voice of purpose and wisdom within.
Our fire has become the fire of ?doing? our life, where we get burnt out. It is a limited fire that consumes itself. We do not tend at the fire that needs no wood. We have forgotten what it is to sit and feel or creative, to be enveloped in its invisible embrace that warms the heart.
Through spiritual direction and soul friendship you can learn to tend the fire that needs no wood. The fire in your head is the natural call to creative expression as love in action. It never goes out. Except that most of us forget that this every creative potential is available to us if we enter the Deep Hearts Core.
This Irish Mystic Storyteller has a longing. It is the longing to share the invitation to the beauty at the deep hearts core. This is why I have recorded a weekly podcast that is given that name. The Deep Hearts core is the last line from W. B. Yeats? poem entitled The Lake Isle of Innisfree.
In the Deep Hearts Core Podcast this Irish Mystic Storyteller unfolds the invitation, not only from the poetry of W. B. Yeats, but from Irish mythology, Irish folk song and modern day song lyrics. This is an invitation for you to learn to allow your personal song of beauty to be sounded within the world and delight not only you but also others who see you living it.
So if you want a weekly input of inspired invitation to the beauty of who you are simply go to the following link and download the podcasts that interest you or sign up for a regular free subscription.
http://www.anamcaraexperience.org/podcast.html
Because a fire was in my head
W.B. Yeats ? The Song of Wandering Aengus
These lines open Yeats? great poem of the hero?s journey. This going to the hazel wood is undertaken by the outsider. This is the outsider who longs for the source of magic and miracle within.
The hazel wood is a place of sanctuary. It is a place of initiation. You are invited to be an initiate of the threshold places of the heart. This often takes you into a dark wood.
The fire in the head is a creative longing. It is the longing to be. To be is to be creative. You cannot not be creative, but you are given the choice in how you will express this creative fire that burns within you.
Many of us have lost the ability to feel the fire that burns within us to express love in action. We may lose it through grief or disappointment or listening to our internal critic rather than the voice of purpose and wisdom within.
Our fire has become the fire of ?doing? our life, where we get burnt out. It is a limited fire that consumes itself. We do not tend at the fire that needs no wood. We have forgotten what it is to sit and feel or creative, to be enveloped in its invisible embrace that warms the heart.
Through spiritual direction and soul friendship you can learn to tend the fire that needs no wood. The fire in your head is the natural call to creative expression as love in action. It never goes out. Except that most of us forget that this every creative potential is available to us if we enter the Deep Hearts Core.
This Irish Mystic Storyteller has a longing. It is the longing to share the invitation to the beauty at the deep hearts core. This is why I have recorded a weekly podcast that is given that name. The Deep Hearts core is the last line from W. B. Yeats? poem entitled The Lake Isle of Innisfree.
In the Deep Hearts Core Podcast this Irish Mystic Storyteller unfolds the invitation, not only from the poetry of W. B. Yeats, but from Irish mythology, Irish folk song and modern day song lyrics. This is an invitation for you to learn to allow your personal song of beauty to be sounded within the world and delight not only you but also others who see you living it.
So if you want a weekly input of inspired invitation to the beauty of who you are simply go to the following link and download the podcasts that interest you or sign up for a regular free subscription.
http://www.anamcaraexperience.org/podcast.html
Thursday, September 24, 2009
A Story of Global Land Grabbing
John Vidal the Environment Editor of the Guardian writes
?The acquisition of farmland from the worlds poor by rich countries and international corporations is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe?s farmland targeted in the last six months, reports from UN officials and agriculture experts say.?
In the Guardian article entitled ?Fears for the world?s poor countries as the rich grab land to grow food? we are told
?Outsourcing food production will ensure food security for investing countries but would leave behind a trail of hunger, starvation and food scarcities for local populations. The environmental tab of highly intensive farming ? devastated soils, dry aquifer, and ruined ecology from chemical infestation ? will be left for the host country to pick up.?
Here we see more of the same by the forces of global capitalism hell bent on ensuring that they maintain their highest levels of return on capital employed. They have used up most all the capital resources that exist in their own countries having devastated the soil and water and now they are moving to countries where they can charge for their chemical quick fix that creates deserts.
As an accountant one of the first principles of sound business management one learns is that you do not erode your capital base. It is out of this base that you earn revenue to sustain your business for the long term future. If you find that you are using capital this is indicative of mismanagement. Not so it appears if the capital base is the soil on which we are all dependant to sustain life.
Return on capital employed is the driving force of corporate life. The higher the better. Chief Executive Officers of large corporations will no longer be Chief Executive Officers if return on capital employed is not increasing and damn the consequences. This increased return is reflected in rising share prices that are the be all and end all of the God called market forces.
Who pays the consequences? In the short term the poor and in the long term every one of us. Why does this happen. In simplistic terms it is because we in the Western world are not prepared to pay the cost of producing food in a way that is sustainable. We have become so used to cheap price food that we no longer accept prices that would reflect the full cost of production.
The result is that food is produced as cheaply as possible and as intensively as possible. When the resources of the land have been burned away through intensive chemical use the corporations move on to buy up other land resources by which they can maintain their one measure of success ? return on capital employed. No one stops to ask what happens when the capital base is fully eroded.
As a storyteller and writer on Irish mythology this fixation on ever increased return on capital employed would be recognised as a poisonous story. In a fairy story this market force would be represented by a poison apple. We are now a global village and this poison is set to come back to us in the West. We have allowed undemocratic forces to use resources that belong to us all in a self interested way.
Due to self interest we have refused to be stewards of the land in the interest of future generations. Sustainable food costs. It costs energy in the form of money. If that energy is not expended in the form of money it costs in other ways. The present system of ever cheaper food production costs lives. The price paid is that of hunger and starvation but not for you or me ? or at least not yet. It costs the lives of the most vulnerable in our global village.
Still the good news is that the FTSE index will in the short term have risen in the knowledge that the God of the market place will be for a little while appeased. At least until the land runs out.
Tony Cuckson
Quotes taken from the Guardian Friday 3 July 2009
?The acquisition of farmland from the worlds poor by rich countries and international corporations is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe?s farmland targeted in the last six months, reports from UN officials and agriculture experts say.?
In the Guardian article entitled ?Fears for the world?s poor countries as the rich grab land to grow food? we are told
?Outsourcing food production will ensure food security for investing countries but would leave behind a trail of hunger, starvation and food scarcities for local populations. The environmental tab of highly intensive farming ? devastated soils, dry aquifer, and ruined ecology from chemical infestation ? will be left for the host country to pick up.?
Here we see more of the same by the forces of global capitalism hell bent on ensuring that they maintain their highest levels of return on capital employed. They have used up most all the capital resources that exist in their own countries having devastated the soil and water and now they are moving to countries where they can charge for their chemical quick fix that creates deserts.
As an accountant one of the first principles of sound business management one learns is that you do not erode your capital base. It is out of this base that you earn revenue to sustain your business for the long term future. If you find that you are using capital this is indicative of mismanagement. Not so it appears if the capital base is the soil on which we are all dependant to sustain life.
Return on capital employed is the driving force of corporate life. The higher the better. Chief Executive Officers of large corporations will no longer be Chief Executive Officers if return on capital employed is not increasing and damn the consequences. This increased return is reflected in rising share prices that are the be all and end all of the God called market forces.
Who pays the consequences? In the short term the poor and in the long term every one of us. Why does this happen. In simplistic terms it is because we in the Western world are not prepared to pay the cost of producing food in a way that is sustainable. We have become so used to cheap price food that we no longer accept prices that would reflect the full cost of production.
The result is that food is produced as cheaply as possible and as intensively as possible. When the resources of the land have been burned away through intensive chemical use the corporations move on to buy up other land resources by which they can maintain their one measure of success ? return on capital employed. No one stops to ask what happens when the capital base is fully eroded.
As a storyteller and writer on Irish mythology this fixation on ever increased return on capital employed would be recognised as a poisonous story. In a fairy story this market force would be represented by a poison apple. We are now a global village and this poison is set to come back to us in the West. We have allowed undemocratic forces to use resources that belong to us all in a self interested way.
Due to self interest we have refused to be stewards of the land in the interest of future generations. Sustainable food costs. It costs energy in the form of money. If that energy is not expended in the form of money it costs in other ways. The present system of ever cheaper food production costs lives. The price paid is that of hunger and starvation but not for you or me ? or at least not yet. It costs the lives of the most vulnerable in our global village.
Still the good news is that the FTSE index will in the short term have risen in the knowledge that the God of the market place will be for a little while appeased. At least until the land runs out.
Tony Cuckson
Quotes taken from the Guardian Friday 3 July 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Living the One Glorious Life
How does one as an Irish Mystic Storyteller begin to craft a story. One way is to pay attention to that which excites you and to be faithful to that feeling wherever it invites you to go. It also requires commitment and the ability to trust the process. It means learning to be comfortable with "not knowing."
Sometimes a story will simply happen and you have it down on the page very quickly. At other times the story is a kind of birthing. It will simply happen if you pay attention to simply getting out of the way and not being over anxious. In Zen such and attitude is summed up in the beautiful wisdom saying "Don`t push the river."
Pay attention when ideas keep coming back that you have resisted. Sometimes you will spend time with a story, even work very hard at a story, and it comes to nothing. Actually, what happens is that the story is flowering in a different way and will bloom through another story if you trust the intention.
When you feel excited, more than your head is involved. Excitement is the equivelant of the yellow brick road that takes you to the wonderland of Oz. Follow the yellow brick road. This is a metaphor for the wisdom road within you. It is the invitation to travel the beauty of the real story you are here to share.
Your real story is far more magnificent and more glorious than you might ever imagine. Trust this beauty to express as excitement within the body and live the one glorious life you have come here to be. You are the real wonder tale waiting to be told.
Sometimes a story will simply happen and you have it down on the page very quickly. At other times the story is a kind of birthing. It will simply happen if you pay attention to simply getting out of the way and not being over anxious. In Zen such and attitude is summed up in the beautiful wisdom saying "Don`t push the river."
Pay attention when ideas keep coming back that you have resisted. Sometimes you will spend time with a story, even work very hard at a story, and it comes to nothing. Actually, what happens is that the story is flowering in a different way and will bloom through another story if you trust the intention.
When you feel excited, more than your head is involved. Excitement is the equivelant of the yellow brick road that takes you to the wonderland of Oz. Follow the yellow brick road. This is a metaphor for the wisdom road within you. It is the invitation to travel the beauty of the real story you are here to share.
Your real story is far more magnificent and more glorious than you might ever imagine. Trust this beauty to express as excitement within the body and live the one glorious life you have come here to be. You are the real wonder tale waiting to be told.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Living as Love in Action
As an Irish Mystic Storyteller I invite you to live the unique story that you have come here to live and to be. You came into this world as the dance of Love in form.
What has happened to you since? You have been told stories that have blinded you to your true nature. If you are reading this article then you are interested in a story that helps you to become a seer and a visionary for your life?s Work (not necessarily your job or career). This is the great invitation from the short story that is contained in the poem by Max Ehrmann entitled Desiderata ? meaning, ?list of desires.?
The list of desires that you are invited to experience within your culture will eventually make you listless. Everyday you are bombarded by messages that tell you that you need this product in order to fit in, in order that you look beautiful, in order to be the right shape, in order to ad infinitum.
In this way you become addicted. You become addicted to a way of life based in a log list of desires that you become enslaved too. Much of what passes for work in our modern world is a form of slavery in which you mortgage your life force for some future promise of happiness.
This article and the invitation that is Desiderata is a different kind of story and the invitation to a very different way of living and being in the world. It is a way of freedom that allows you to go and become the beauty you are here to be.
A desideratum promotes Love in Action. This is the meaning of the opening invitation ?go placidly.? In those two words you have the full movement of creation. In those two words you have the possibility of the dance you can become. You have the masculine principle represented by the word ?go.? You have the feminine principle held in the word ?placidly.? These two are the creative dance of energy in form. You are that dance.
Most of us are on the go. Our days and our nights are filled with the doing of our lives. Many of us are addicted to our work. It is an addiction that is culturally approved. We invite our young people to become addicts to the work ethic without any awareness of what it is to do real work as the movement of Love in Action.
How do you begin to learn the dance of Creation? You begin with the first step of the dance. This is the focus of your intention. More on this to come. Remember that there is a full learning program centred on Desiderata becoming available at The Anam cara Experience website. This learning program teaches you to distinguish between Love in Action flowing from your deep hearts core rather than the addictive desire promoted by a culture that denies your birthright as a dance of Love in form.
Remember desire can become and is intended to become addictive. Learn the dance of Love in action. This is not just more information but a new and radical way of being the beauty in form creation invites you to become.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
What Brings you Alive
This Sunday morning I am planting bulbs that will add colour to the garden during the winter and the spring.
I am also planting seed in the form of inspiration. I have the seed of an idea that I am drawn to manifest. This is a work of appreciation.
I appreciate the work of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It is his poetry that speaks to my deep hearts core. It is he who called me to return to my native land. He still keeps calling me to be an invitation to the peace that comes dropping slow.
So I am intending to writ a book. It is a book about an Irish pilgrimage through the poetry of W. B. Yeats. I hope, therefore, to share this journey and invite others to journey to their own deep hearts core.
This journey through the poetry of W.B. Yeats is part of my essential story. It is the essence of who I am becoming. We are all telling a story. In every moment you are radiating the story of your life.
Have you ever asked the question, "What am I radiating?" Most of us radiate a belief that mystics of all traditions and all times tell us is false. This is the idea that we are living as a separate sense of self within time and space and body.
At the deep hearts cores this false identity of the separate sense of self is the core of suffering. Once it is seen, is realized as the illusion it is the life becomes more abundant.
There is less resistance and less grasping but the radiance of who you are is allowed to flow through a body and mind that knows the experience of real peace. This is more than peace that is an absence of conflict. This is the kind of peace that W. B. Yeats tells us comes dropping slow.
David Whyte the English poet and writer of "Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity" is known for the beautiful line that says, "Anyone who does not bring you alive is too small for you."
W. B. Yeats brings me alive. He invites real questions. He invites me to the Quest I am On. This is the call to adventure at the deep hearts core.
Who brings you alive? Do you spend time with them? Do you imbibe their presence? What kind of stories do they invite into your heart?
Most of the stories of our modern day culture are stories that are poisonous. They are imbibed because everyone takes it as normal to be a separate individual living in a body in time and space. Thus you as sleeping beauty have eaten of the poison apple whose core is rotten.
All the mystics of all times and traditions are the ones who know and have lived the life beyond the illusion of separateness from Love. They bring you truly alive.
Except that in the words of another poet Derek Walcott who writes in the poem Love after Love, you have to peel the image of the mirror and feast on your life.
Peeling the image of who you think you are of the mirror of your life situation and a sense of separateness from Love is painful. It involves a deep letting go so that the banquet that you are can be revealed.
This is the banquet that gives you real nourishment. It is a storehouse of revelation. It is not the store at the Mall that simply compensates you for what you are really missing which is the sense of being truly alive to the invitation at the deep hearts core.
Whatever it is that brings you alive then spend time with this. This is quality time. It can lead you to the timelessness of your true nature.
I am also planting seed in the form of inspiration. I have the seed of an idea that I am drawn to manifest. This is a work of appreciation.
I appreciate the work of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It is his poetry that speaks to my deep hearts core. It is he who called me to return to my native land. He still keeps calling me to be an invitation to the peace that comes dropping slow.
So I am intending to writ a book. It is a book about an Irish pilgrimage through the poetry of W. B. Yeats. I hope, therefore, to share this journey and invite others to journey to their own deep hearts core.
This journey through the poetry of W.B. Yeats is part of my essential story. It is the essence of who I am becoming. We are all telling a story. In every moment you are radiating the story of your life.
Have you ever asked the question, "What am I radiating?" Most of us radiate a belief that mystics of all traditions and all times tell us is false. This is the idea that we are living as a separate sense of self within time and space and body.
At the deep hearts cores this false identity of the separate sense of self is the core of suffering. Once it is seen, is realized as the illusion it is the life becomes more abundant.
There is less resistance and less grasping but the radiance of who you are is allowed to flow through a body and mind that knows the experience of real peace. This is more than peace that is an absence of conflict. This is the kind of peace that W. B. Yeats tells us comes dropping slow.
David Whyte the English poet and writer of "Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity" is known for the beautiful line that says, "Anyone who does not bring you alive is too small for you."
W. B. Yeats brings me alive. He invites real questions. He invites me to the Quest I am On. This is the call to adventure at the deep hearts core.
Who brings you alive? Do you spend time with them? Do you imbibe their presence? What kind of stories do they invite into your heart?
Most of the stories of our modern day culture are stories that are poisonous. They are imbibed because everyone takes it as normal to be a separate individual living in a body in time and space. Thus you as sleeping beauty have eaten of the poison apple whose core is rotten.
All the mystics of all times and traditions are the ones who know and have lived the life beyond the illusion of separateness from Love. They bring you truly alive.
Except that in the words of another poet Derek Walcott who writes in the poem Love after Love, you have to peel the image of the mirror and feast on your life.
Peeling the image of who you think you are of the mirror of your life situation and a sense of separateness from Love is painful. It involves a deep letting go so that the banquet that you are can be revealed.
This is the banquet that gives you real nourishment. It is a storehouse of revelation. It is not the store at the Mall that simply compensates you for what you are really missing which is the sense of being truly alive to the invitation at the deep hearts core.
Whatever it is that brings you alive then spend time with this. This is quality time. It can lead you to the timelessness of your true nature.
What Brings you Alive?
This Sunday morning I am planting bulbs that will add colour to the garden during the winter and the spring.
I am also planting seed in the form of inspiration. I have the seed of an idea that I am drawn to manifest. This is a work of appreciation.
I appreciate the work of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It is his poetry that speaks to my deep hearts core. It is he who called me to return to my native land. He still keeps calling me to be an invitation to the peace that comes dropping slow.
So I am intending to writ a book. It is a book about an Irish pilgrimage through the poetry of W. B. Yeats. I hope, therefore, to share this journey and invite others to journey to their own deep hearts core.
This journey through the poetry of W.B. Yeats is part of my essential story. It is the essence of who I am becoming. We are all telling a story. In every moment you are radiating the story of your life.
Have you ever asked the question, "What am I radiating?" Most of us radiate a belief that mystics of all traditions and all times tell us is false. This is the idea that we are living as a separate sense of self within time and space and body.
At the deep hearts cores this false identity of the separate sense of self is the core of suffering. Once it is seen, is realized as the illusion it is the life becomes more abundant.
There is less resistance and less grasping but the radiance of who you are is allowed to flow through a body and mind that knows the experience of real peace. This is more than peace that is an absence of conflict. This is the kind of peace that W. B. Yeats tells us comes dropping slow.
David Whyte the English poet and writer of "Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity" is known for the beautiful line that says, "Anyone who does not bring you alive is too small for you."
W. B. Yeats brings me alive. He invites real questions. He invites me to the Quest I am On. This is the call to adventure at the deep hearts core.
Who brings you alive? Do you spend time with them? Do you imbibe their presence? What kind of stories do they invite into your heart?
Most of the stories of our modern day culture are stories that are poisonous. They are imbibed because everyone takes it as normal to be a separate individual living in a body in time and space. Thus you as sleeping beauty have eaten of the poison apple whose core is rotten.
All the mystics of all times and traditions are the ones who know and have lived the life beyond the illusion of separateness from Love. They bring you truly alive.
Except that in the words of another poet Derek Walcott who writes in the poem Love after Love, you have to peel the image of the mirror and feast on your life.
Peeling the image of who you think you are of the mirror of your life situation and a sense of separateness from Love is painful. It involves a deep letting go so that the banquet that you are can be revealed.
This is the banquet that gives you real nourishment. It is a storehouse of revelation. It is not the store at the Mall that simply compensates you for what you are really missing which is the sense of being truly alive to the invitation at the deep hearts core.
Whatever it is that brings you alive then spend time with this. This is quality time. It can lead you to the timelessness of your true nature.
I am also planting seed in the form of inspiration. I have the seed of an idea that I am drawn to manifest. This is a work of appreciation.
I appreciate the work of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It is his poetry that speaks to my deep hearts core. It is he who called me to return to my native land. He still keeps calling me to be an invitation to the peace that comes dropping slow.
So I am intending to writ a book. It is a book about an Irish pilgrimage through the poetry of W. B. Yeats. I hope, therefore, to share this journey and invite others to journey to their own deep hearts core.
This journey through the poetry of W.B. Yeats is part of my essential story. It is the essence of who I am becoming. We are all telling a story. In every moment you are radiating the story of your life.
Have you ever asked the question, "What am I radiating?" Most of us radiate a belief that mystics of all traditions and all times tell us is false. This is the idea that we are living as a separate sense of self within time and space and body.
At the deep hearts cores this false identity of the separate sense of self is the core of suffering. Once it is seen, is realized as the illusion it is the life becomes more abundant.
There is less resistance and less grasping but the radiance of who you are is allowed to flow through a body and mind that knows the experience of real peace. This is more than peace that is an absence of conflict. This is the kind of peace that W. B. Yeats tells us comes dropping slow.
David Whyte the English poet and writer of "Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity" is known for the beautiful line that says, "Anyone who does not bring you alive is too small for you."
W. B. Yeats brings me alive. He invites real questions. He invites me to the Quest I am On. This is the call to adventure at the deep hearts core.
Who brings you alive? Do you spend time with them? Do you imbibe their presence? What kind of stories do they invite into your heart?
Most of the stories of our modern day culture are stories that are poisonous. They are imbibed because everyone takes it as normal to be a separate individual living in a body in time and space. Thus you as sleeping beauty have eaten of the poison apple whose core is rotten.
All the mystics of all times and traditions are the ones who know and have lived the life beyond the illusion of separateness from Love. They bring you truly alive.
Except that in the words of another poet Derek Walcott who writes in the poem Love after Love, you have to peel the image of the mirror and feast on your life.
Peeling the image of who you think you are of the mirror of your life situation and a sense of separateness from Love is painful. It involves a deep letting go so that the banquet that you are can be revealed.
This is the banquet that gives you real nourishment. It is a storehouse of revelation. It is not the store at the Mall that simply compensates you for what you are really missing which is the sense of being truly alive to the invitation at the deep hearts core.
Whatever it is that brings you alive then spend time with this. This is quality time. It can lead you to the timelessness of your true nature.
Friday, September 11, 2009
And Peace Comes Dropping Slow - Remembering 9/11
Today is 11th Sept. It is a day of remembrance for people all over the world. For most people it is a day of sorrow and for others a day of celebration.
On this day I like to share a vision of what could be. Sometimes I write this and sometimes I take the writings of others. One writer I love is an American woman called Ganngaji - born Toni Roberson who grew up in Mississippi. Here is an extract from "Choosing Peace" from "A Diamond in Your Pocket - Discovering your True Radiance."
"Unless all of us take the responsibility for our own inner peace, the wars will continue. We cannot wait any longer for someone else to change. We cannot wait for someone else to forgive us so that we can forgive them. We cannot wait for someone else to say they are sorry. Peace cannot be postponed.
Recognize that to whatever degree the war is going on in your own mind, it is based on one thing: the firm belief that you are a separate entity, separate from your parents, your children, your lover, your enemy.
All wars are based upon the ignorance of our true nature and the illusion of separation. When you firmly believe that you are separate from totality, separate from peace, separate from love, you protect yourself. That protection takes many forms involving personal and territorial identification. The horror is that if what you are protecting is the thought of who you are, it does not, in reality, even exist. It is only a thought, and whenever a thought is honestly investigated, it is found to have no inherent reality. Yet this thought of who you are has immeasurable power, because it becomes the filter of all experiences of reality.
As a consious human being, you have the opportunity to discover that never, not even for an instant, is it possible to be separate from Love, from the source of everything, from God. Once you discover this directly, you then brodcast it with every breath you take. Whether you speak of this discovery or you never speak again, you will broadcast it through the natural radiance of your being. In your willingness to take the chance, to accept that invitation, you will naturally share that peace everywhere."
Tell me that is not a most beautiful of invitations. Note that Ganaji says " Once you discover this directly------" This direct discovery is so essential. It is not a question of belief but an experience of radiance. You know it because you are it. Belief requires a believer separate from the experience. A believer is not one who is the experience of direct knowing.
Gangaji also invites each one of us to take responsibility for our own mind. Listen to your mind. On this day of remembrance sit still for 10 minutes and listen to the way your mind is forever on. This is not peace of mind. This is not attunement to the source. This is not stillness knowing that it is Love. If this is your mind then you have no peace to offer. You have no still point centre from which radiance happens.
This monkey mind is not your natural radiance of being. You on this day of remembrance can commit to this radiance of being. Then the tragedy of 9/11 can become the invitation to Heaven on Earth. It only happens when you are willing to become the invitation to the radiance at your deep hearts core.
Today share this invitation. Share this invitation tomorrow. Share it everyday in whatever way you are called to be the radiant pressence of Love in form. Then when you know directly that you are the living presence of eternal Love you need have no fear. Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death you will fear no evil. Then you become a beacon of hope in a fear filled world. Then you become the invitation in New York Harbour of a woman welcoming all that mass of separateness from Love. You liberate others from their sense of separateness from Love.
Peace of the Infinite Peace to You.
On this day I like to share a vision of what could be. Sometimes I write this and sometimes I take the writings of others. One writer I love is an American woman called Ganngaji - born Toni Roberson who grew up in Mississippi. Here is an extract from "Choosing Peace" from "A Diamond in Your Pocket - Discovering your True Radiance."
"Unless all of us take the responsibility for our own inner peace, the wars will continue. We cannot wait any longer for someone else to change. We cannot wait for someone else to forgive us so that we can forgive them. We cannot wait for someone else to say they are sorry. Peace cannot be postponed.
Recognize that to whatever degree the war is going on in your own mind, it is based on one thing: the firm belief that you are a separate entity, separate from your parents, your children, your lover, your enemy.
All wars are based upon the ignorance of our true nature and the illusion of separation. When you firmly believe that you are separate from totality, separate from peace, separate from love, you protect yourself. That protection takes many forms involving personal and territorial identification. The horror is that if what you are protecting is the thought of who you are, it does not, in reality, even exist. It is only a thought, and whenever a thought is honestly investigated, it is found to have no inherent reality. Yet this thought of who you are has immeasurable power, because it becomes the filter of all experiences of reality.
As a consious human being, you have the opportunity to discover that never, not even for an instant, is it possible to be separate from Love, from the source of everything, from God. Once you discover this directly, you then brodcast it with every breath you take. Whether you speak of this discovery or you never speak again, you will broadcast it through the natural radiance of your being. In your willingness to take the chance, to accept that invitation, you will naturally share that peace everywhere."
Tell me that is not a most beautiful of invitations. Note that Ganaji says " Once you discover this directly------" This direct discovery is so essential. It is not a question of belief but an experience of radiance. You know it because you are it. Belief requires a believer separate from the experience. A believer is not one who is the experience of direct knowing.
Gangaji also invites each one of us to take responsibility for our own mind. Listen to your mind. On this day of remembrance sit still for 10 minutes and listen to the way your mind is forever on. This is not peace of mind. This is not attunement to the source. This is not stillness knowing that it is Love. If this is your mind then you have no peace to offer. You have no still point centre from which radiance happens.
This monkey mind is not your natural radiance of being. You on this day of remembrance can commit to this radiance of being. Then the tragedy of 9/11 can become the invitation to Heaven on Earth. It only happens when you are willing to become the invitation to the radiance at your deep hearts core.
Today share this invitation. Share this invitation tomorrow. Share it everyday in whatever way you are called to be the radiant pressence of Love in form. Then when you know directly that you are the living presence of eternal Love you need have no fear. Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death you will fear no evil. Then you become a beacon of hope in a fear filled world. Then you become the invitation in New York Harbour of a woman welcoming all that mass of separateness from Love. You liberate others from their sense of separateness from Love.
Peace of the Infinite Peace to You.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Finding Your Unique Shape
In Anamcara - Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, John O'Donohue the great Irish poet and writer says: -
"I love, too, that image of Michelangelo?s: that in every stone no matter how dumb, awkward or blunt there is a secret shape waiting to emerge."
Such a secret shape often comes out of a spiritual emergence. The soul longs to be free from the shackles of a heart bounded by things. The deep hearts core longs to be unbounded by time and the heavy burden of the separate sense of self. That sense of self we call me, myself I.
We have been made to feel dumb, awkward or blunt. Our natural intelligence is a spiritual wisdom. The Celtic world is an invitation to know this spiritual wisdom as direct experience. This isn?t just more information. It isn?t just more communication. It is communion beyond the limitation of form. This is spiritual wisdom and you can know it because you are in essence not apart from such wisdom.
You are not required to be a Celt. You are required to have a heart. So take hart and allow it to break open to deep experience at the hearts core. This often feels like hammer blows. This is because your and I are like Michelangelo?s Prisoners in the Stone.
You have a unique shape. That shape is the way Love shaped you to dance in form. You are not a prisoner. The wisdom from the Celtic World is an invitation to the landscape of the deep hearts core. This is your hearts landscape and your escape from the idea that you can ever be separate from Love. You have to become your own stonemason and, metaphorically speaking, become a free mason.
Thus you engage with spiritual emergence rather than spiritual emergency. Rather than become stone like you become a blooming wisdom tale.
Such a secret shape often comes out of a spiritual emergence. The soul longs to be free from the shackles of a heart bounded by things. The deep hearts core longs to be unbounded by time and the heavy burden of the separate sense of self. That sense of self we call me, myself I.
We have been made to feel dumb, awkward or blunt. Our natural intelligence is a spiritual wisdom. The Celtic world is an invitation to know this spiritual wisdom as direct experience. This isn?t just more information. It isn?t just more communication. It is communion beyond the limitation of form. This is spiritual wisdom and you can know it because you are in essence not apart from such wisdom.
You are not required to be a Celt. You are required to have a heart. So take hart and allow it to break open to deep experience at the hearts core. This often feels like hammer blows. This is because your and I are like Michelangelo?s Prisoners in the Stone.
You have a unique shape. That shape is the way Love shaped you to dance in form. You are not a prisoner. The wisdom from the Celtic World is an invitation to the landscape of the deep hearts core. This is your hearts landscape and your escape from the idea that you can ever be separate from Love. You have to become your own stonemason and, metaphorically speaking, become a free mason.
Thus you engage with spiritual emergence rather than spiritual emergency. Rather than become stone like you become a blooming wisdom tale.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
The Radiance of Fitness - Are You Fit for Love
This article invites you to the place where you are the reflection of beauty and grace in form. It takes as part of its invitation the story of the ugly duckling whose nature is that of a swan. The swan metaphor in fairy stories represents the awakened soul full of beauty and grace. This article reminds you the Anam Cara who is a friend of the soul invites you to remember that you are naturally grace filled and beautiful. (The meaning of Anam Cara is Soul Friend ? Anam means Soul ? Cara means Friend. The writer defines soul in this way
Source
Of
Unlimited
Love
Many people subscribe to a fitness regime. They work out. They go to the gym. They do aerobics, yoga or some other body exercise in order to keep fit. For many people the primary focus of a fitness regime is the development of the body beautiful. Often this masks the unconscious judgement of themselves as somehow ugly.
This writer and storyteller works out in the garden. It is a natural way of working out. Doing physical work is healthy and its primary function is to ground you in the body. This allows you to feel the body beautiful not as something to simply be admired but as an instrument through which creation can freely flow and express as beauty in form.
You might be someone who follows a fitness program of some kind but have you ever asked the question, ?What am I fit for?? This is a powerful question for the Quest I On. It is the sort of question an Anam Cara will invite you into. They will ask, ?Are you fit for the purpose you are intended?? These are great spiritual direction questions.
There is no judgement of you intended here. Only the invitation to the grace and beauty of who you are. These questions are invitations to see the reflection that many of us avoid. Secretly there is often part of us still attached to the ugly duckling and refuse to even imagine that we are metaphorically swans full of grace and beauty.
An Anam Cara will tell you that while it is important to care for the body there are other bodies that if not cared for and tended with grace and tenderness adversely impact the physical dimension. These bodies are the mental and emotional bodies.
These bodies are more subtle than the physical body. They are more refined and careful attention to them allows you to feel fine.
Your body mind and soul are meant for a purpose. The Anam Cara will tell you that the primary purpose of your being in form is to be in service to the power of Love. They will ask you a rather intimate question. This is the question, ?Are you fit to be a Lover.? No one is ever asked this question and very few ever ask it of themselves.
Of course any question asked by an Anamcara has two answers. Like the storytellers of old they are spinners of magical tales and riddles. These riddles are for one purpose. They are like Zen Koans in that they are designed to take you out of the ivory tower of the intellect where you keep beauty asleep for one hundred years and more. The Anamcara is a paradox. They are of two worlds. The world of time and the world of the Timeless.
The answer to the question, ?Are you fit to be a Lover?? is ?Yes you are and no you are not.? Why is this answer as it is? You are always fit to be a Lover of the Beloved because you are created in the image of Love. Nothing you do or do not do changes this primacy. No you are not fit to be a Love because you have forgotten who you are. You have become not who you truly are but a begger.
What keeps you unfit for Love.
It is a mind that you allow to control you and use you for its purpose which is the purpose of your ego, you separate sense of self. It uses you for its purpose of limitation which is to say that it uses you for every purpose other than Love. You are unfit to be a Lover because you allow your emotional life to run away with the peace at the heart of who you are.
Again it is very important to be reminded that this is not a judgement of you. If it were a judgement then there would be no invitation to grace. The darkness of separateness is not made light through judging but through awareness. An Anam Cara is a Lover in the service of Love. They know there is no grater reward although one does not get to be a Lover of the Beloved as a reward. You do not get what you already are. You simply get to give up the illusion that you are something other than Love. You get to give up the ugly ducking illusion for the knowing of the beauty and grace that you are.
Fitness of mind for the purpose requires the practice of quieting the mind through meditation and/or comtemplative prayer. This is not the prayer that askes that you win the lottery. This is not prayer in the service of Love. Prayer arises out of the beauty of knowing how graced you are to be a swan. Prayer serves the highest good of all and offers itself up in service to the Beloved. It is not a public act but an action that takes place in the silence of the heart.
In becoming fit to be a Lover there are lots of things you have to lose. You have to lose the weight of doubt. You have to lose the weight of thinking about. You have to slim down living in the past or the future. When you become light weight you become empty. This is the paradox of spiritual development. You gain everything by becoming as nothing. In becoming nothing you become as no thing. In becoming no thing the everything that is Love pours into you in celebration.
As a lightweight Lover you get to fly to those placeless places beyond your imagination. There is no more begging in the world of form for something that you think is outside of who you are. You free the mind of its unfitness for the purpose of Love. You become as no mind which is the One Mind. This is the bridal chamber that the Master Jesus invites you into. There you become fir for the purpos of Love and are raptured by the Beloved. The two become One.
An Anam Cara invites you to become fit for the purpose you are intended. Keep the body fit, keep the mind fit, keep the emotions in free flow and you will become a willing offering to the radiance of Love. An Anam Cara will tell you that you have nothing to lose except the illusions of grandeur that are not real. You are invited to give up the ugly duckling image that is only part of the process toward reflecting the swan of grace and beauty within.
An Anam Cara will tell you that you as the duckling are yet unfit to know who you are but that this knowing is inherent in you. You will not, however, realise it living in the famyard where everyone elese tells you that grace and beauty are not who you are. You have to leave the farmyard and take the journey into Love. This is the invitation to beyond what you think you know and who you think you are.
The inviation for this week is the invitation to commit to fitness for purpose. You are here to reflect the image of Love that crated you. You need no thing more than to live from the heart of this knowing. People will never again see you as other than the natural invitation to grace that is inherent in your being. This is your real inheriatance. This is the inheritance that your soul friend knows and invites you to claim. Let this be your invitation.
Let the real purpose of your life be the invitation to be willing to serve the purpose of Love. Let Love use you for its own purps and your swan nature will be revealed to you.
THE ANAM CARA EXPERIENCE INVITATION
Why not learn more about the way of transformation into the beauty at the heart of who you are. Why not journey into the Anam Cara Experience. This is by what of learning designed to ensrue ath you do not improve yourself in any way. This is a way of learning that invites the ugly ducking into the swan grace of self acceptance.
This invitation comes by way of the following:-
How to leave behind the farm yard with its critic?s voices with all its judgements and tyranny and come to the place of the swan lake.
?
Discover the real power inherent in prayer and meditation that will take you nowhere but get you everywhere.
Relax into a real do it yourself course for those who are tired of doing all the time and missing the time of their lives.
Learn the only second language that you need to take you into the hearts journey where you will discover the way homeward.
Find out how unwanted circumstances in your life situation can become the path to the lake of true reflection.
Source
Of
Unlimited
Love
Many people subscribe to a fitness regime. They work out. They go to the gym. They do aerobics, yoga or some other body exercise in order to keep fit. For many people the primary focus of a fitness regime is the development of the body beautiful. Often this masks the unconscious judgement of themselves as somehow ugly.
This writer and storyteller works out in the garden. It is a natural way of working out. Doing physical work is healthy and its primary function is to ground you in the body. This allows you to feel the body beautiful not as something to simply be admired but as an instrument through which creation can freely flow and express as beauty in form.
You might be someone who follows a fitness program of some kind but have you ever asked the question, ?What am I fit for?? This is a powerful question for the Quest I On. It is the sort of question an Anam Cara will invite you into. They will ask, ?Are you fit for the purpose you are intended?? These are great spiritual direction questions.
There is no judgement of you intended here. Only the invitation to the grace and beauty of who you are. These questions are invitations to see the reflection that many of us avoid. Secretly there is often part of us still attached to the ugly duckling and refuse to even imagine that we are metaphorically swans full of grace and beauty.
An Anam Cara will tell you that while it is important to care for the body there are other bodies that if not cared for and tended with grace and tenderness adversely impact the physical dimension. These bodies are the mental and emotional bodies.
These bodies are more subtle than the physical body. They are more refined and careful attention to them allows you to feel fine.
Your body mind and soul are meant for a purpose. The Anam Cara will tell you that the primary purpose of your being in form is to be in service to the power of Love. They will ask you a rather intimate question. This is the question, ?Are you fit to be a Lover.? No one is ever asked this question and very few ever ask it of themselves.
Of course any question asked by an Anamcara has two answers. Like the storytellers of old they are spinners of magical tales and riddles. These riddles are for one purpose. They are like Zen Koans in that they are designed to take you out of the ivory tower of the intellect where you keep beauty asleep for one hundred years and more. The Anamcara is a paradox. They are of two worlds. The world of time and the world of the Timeless.
The answer to the question, ?Are you fit to be a Lover?? is ?Yes you are and no you are not.? Why is this answer as it is? You are always fit to be a Lover of the Beloved because you are created in the image of Love. Nothing you do or do not do changes this primacy. No you are not fit to be a Love because you have forgotten who you are. You have become not who you truly are but a begger.
What keeps you unfit for Love.
It is a mind that you allow to control you and use you for its purpose which is the purpose of your ego, you separate sense of self. It uses you for its purpose of limitation which is to say that it uses you for every purpose other than Love. You are unfit to be a Lover because you allow your emotional life to run away with the peace at the heart of who you are.
Again it is very important to be reminded that this is not a judgement of you. If it were a judgement then there would be no invitation to grace. The darkness of separateness is not made light through judging but through awareness. An Anam Cara is a Lover in the service of Love. They know there is no grater reward although one does not get to be a Lover of the Beloved as a reward. You do not get what you already are. You simply get to give up the illusion that you are something other than Love. You get to give up the ugly ducking illusion for the knowing of the beauty and grace that you are.
Fitness of mind for the purpose requires the practice of quieting the mind through meditation and/or comtemplative prayer. This is not the prayer that askes that you win the lottery. This is not prayer in the service of Love. Prayer arises out of the beauty of knowing how graced you are to be a swan. Prayer serves the highest good of all and offers itself up in service to the Beloved. It is not a public act but an action that takes place in the silence of the heart.
In becoming fit to be a Lover there are lots of things you have to lose. You have to lose the weight of doubt. You have to lose the weight of thinking about. You have to slim down living in the past or the future. When you become light weight you become empty. This is the paradox of spiritual development. You gain everything by becoming as nothing. In becoming nothing you become as no thing. In becoming no thing the everything that is Love pours into you in celebration.
As a lightweight Lover you get to fly to those placeless places beyond your imagination. There is no more begging in the world of form for something that you think is outside of who you are. You free the mind of its unfitness for the purpose of Love. You become as no mind which is the One Mind. This is the bridal chamber that the Master Jesus invites you into. There you become fir for the purpos of Love and are raptured by the Beloved. The two become One.
An Anam Cara invites you to become fit for the purpose you are intended. Keep the body fit, keep the mind fit, keep the emotions in free flow and you will become a willing offering to the radiance of Love. An Anam Cara will tell you that you have nothing to lose except the illusions of grandeur that are not real. You are invited to give up the ugly duckling image that is only part of the process toward reflecting the swan of grace and beauty within.
An Anam Cara will tell you that you as the duckling are yet unfit to know who you are but that this knowing is inherent in you. You will not, however, realise it living in the famyard where everyone elese tells you that grace and beauty are not who you are. You have to leave the farmyard and take the journey into Love. This is the invitation to beyond what you think you know and who you think you are.
The inviation for this week is the invitation to commit to fitness for purpose. You are here to reflect the image of Love that crated you. You need no thing more than to live from the heart of this knowing. People will never again see you as other than the natural invitation to grace that is inherent in your being. This is your real inheriatance. This is the inheritance that your soul friend knows and invites you to claim. Let this be your invitation.
Let the real purpose of your life be the invitation to be willing to serve the purpose of Love. Let Love use you for its own purps and your swan nature will be revealed to you.
THE ANAM CARA EXPERIENCE INVITATION
Why not learn more about the way of transformation into the beauty at the heart of who you are. Why not journey into the Anam Cara Experience. This is by what of learning designed to ensrue ath you do not improve yourself in any way. This is a way of learning that invites the ugly ducking into the swan grace of self acceptance.
This invitation comes by way of the following:-
How to leave behind the farm yard with its critic?s voices with all its judgements and tyranny and come to the place of the swan lake.
?
Discover the real power inherent in prayer and meditation that will take you nowhere but get you everywhere.
Relax into a real do it yourself course for those who are tired of doing all the time and missing the time of their lives.
Learn the only second language that you need to take you into the hearts journey where you will discover the way homeward.
Find out how unwanted circumstances in your life situation can become the path to the lake of true reflection.
A Town Called Paradise
?Let me take you
down to a town
called Paradise.?
Van Morrison
?No Guru, No Teacher, No Method.?
Many mornings during the week I take the highroad. This is the high road between the village of Glenfarne and the village of Rossinver in Co. Leitrim. This is a high road that winds and bends over the mountain. Early in the year I drive slowly. On this road I am going on what Van Morrison calls a long long drive.
I am going on a drive to a town called ?paradise.? This town is the central town in a place of eternity. In Ireland this place is called ?Tir Na Nog.? ?Tir Na Nog? is not a physical place but a state of being. It is a state of awareness. This is the mythological place where people are always beautiful and never age. This is a soul place. This is the place an Anam Cara will invite you to come to and belong.
Many of my readers know that Van Morrison the Irish singer/songwriter is an inspiration to me.
On the high road to Rossinver, while avoiding migrating frogs, I play his album, ?No Teacher, No Guru, No Method.? It is on this album that the song ?A town called Paradise? is heard. I love playing this song loud. There is no other traffic on this high road except for the odd tractor that travels slow and sure.
This song for me is about my relationship to the Beloved.
This is the central relationship that an Anam Cara commits to. It is the moment to moment awareness of ?what is.? It is the seeking to know the joy of paradise at deeper and deeper levels of awareness. This is the work of surrender to the ?timeless now."
Most of us driving our car are totally unaware.
We enter the vehicle, switch on the engine, and engage gears without very much awareness of what we are doing. We arrive at our destination without any awareness of the journey in between. This car journey is a mirror of the longer journey we call ?our life.?
When we are alone in our car we have a great opportunity.
We have the opportunity to be alone and aware. We can choose to be totally present to our minds, body and emotions. We can choose not to be distracted by music or talk radio. We can equally choose to play music that lifts the heart and that we consciously listen too. We can buy tapes and CD`s that life and inspire the soul.
Each time we enter the car we can make a commitment to be aware.
Feel yourself sitting on the seat. Feel your hands on the steering wheel. Listen to the sound of the engine. Say, Thank you,? to this vehicle that allows you to arrive at the place of your choosing. Remember to be aware of your breathing. Breathe deep into your belly and keep it soft. When you arrive you will feel focused and relaxed.
Stop ?thinking about? anywhere else other than this moment.
This moment is the town called ?paradise.? This moment is forever. In this moment, entered without judgment or compassion, there is beauty. You become as the people of ?Tir Na Nog.? You become eternal and filled with beauty.
To begin with you will look for this experience of beauty.
You will wish to grab at the experience of the eternal. In the beginning your ego wants this beauty and this experience for itself. It can only imagine the credos it will receive once it has such a prize. The problem (if it is a problem) is to know that you are this beauty and this eternity. Your ego wants it but cannot really accept the possibility of such wonder. It has to disappear in order that the wonder can be.
As Marianne Williamson has reminded us in her beautiful book ?Return to Love,? we are afraid of our magnificence. We are afraid of our light and not our darkness. We have lost our paradise. We have lost the paradise of being here now.
On the high road between Glenfarne and Rossinver I am practicing entry into paradise. This is a knack. It arrives. It does not arrive. When it is there I know. When it is not there I know. I focus and wait, knowing that infinite patience brings instant results.
Why not take a trip to this town called ?Paradise," where you can be free. You can learn to be free of care, of worry, of going anywhere or having to be anyone other than the delight you are.
When travelling on any journey make it a journey of focused awareness.
Become present to the moment. This is the real and only time of your life. Become the presence of the Beloved. Become the perfume of love in action. This perfume is timeless and beautiful beyond any measure your mind can ?think about.?
One glimpse of ?Tir Na Nog? and you will know that a real holiday is. It is beyond re-creation. It is you being aware of creation itself in the timeless beauty of forever loving now.
This is what an Anam Cara reminds you off.
They remind you that you are forever enough. They remind you that the Blessing is already here. They remind you that you are this blessing. Going nowhere, the river flows and the grass grows by itself. Come on down to ?paradise" where you are free to be all you ever imagined and more.
down to a town
called Paradise.?
Van Morrison
?No Guru, No Teacher, No Method.?
Many mornings during the week I take the highroad. This is the high road between the village of Glenfarne and the village of Rossinver in Co. Leitrim. This is a high road that winds and bends over the mountain. Early in the year I drive slowly. On this road I am going on what Van Morrison calls a long long drive.
I am going on a drive to a town called ?paradise.? This town is the central town in a place of eternity. In Ireland this place is called ?Tir Na Nog.? ?Tir Na Nog? is not a physical place but a state of being. It is a state of awareness. This is the mythological place where people are always beautiful and never age. This is a soul place. This is the place an Anam Cara will invite you to come to and belong.
Many of my readers know that Van Morrison the Irish singer/songwriter is an inspiration to me.
On the high road to Rossinver, while avoiding migrating frogs, I play his album, ?No Teacher, No Guru, No Method.? It is on this album that the song ?A town called Paradise? is heard. I love playing this song loud. There is no other traffic on this high road except for the odd tractor that travels slow and sure.
This song for me is about my relationship to the Beloved.
This is the central relationship that an Anam Cara commits to. It is the moment to moment awareness of ?what is.? It is the seeking to know the joy of paradise at deeper and deeper levels of awareness. This is the work of surrender to the ?timeless now."
Most of us driving our car are totally unaware.
We enter the vehicle, switch on the engine, and engage gears without very much awareness of what we are doing. We arrive at our destination without any awareness of the journey in between. This car journey is a mirror of the longer journey we call ?our life.?
When we are alone in our car we have a great opportunity.
We have the opportunity to be alone and aware. We can choose to be totally present to our minds, body and emotions. We can choose not to be distracted by music or talk radio. We can equally choose to play music that lifts the heart and that we consciously listen too. We can buy tapes and CD`s that life and inspire the soul.
Each time we enter the car we can make a commitment to be aware.
Feel yourself sitting on the seat. Feel your hands on the steering wheel. Listen to the sound of the engine. Say, Thank you,? to this vehicle that allows you to arrive at the place of your choosing. Remember to be aware of your breathing. Breathe deep into your belly and keep it soft. When you arrive you will feel focused and relaxed.
Stop ?thinking about? anywhere else other than this moment.
This moment is the town called ?paradise.? This moment is forever. In this moment, entered without judgment or compassion, there is beauty. You become as the people of ?Tir Na Nog.? You become eternal and filled with beauty.
To begin with you will look for this experience of beauty.
You will wish to grab at the experience of the eternal. In the beginning your ego wants this beauty and this experience for itself. It can only imagine the credos it will receive once it has such a prize. The problem (if it is a problem) is to know that you are this beauty and this eternity. Your ego wants it but cannot really accept the possibility of such wonder. It has to disappear in order that the wonder can be.
As Marianne Williamson has reminded us in her beautiful book ?Return to Love,? we are afraid of our magnificence. We are afraid of our light and not our darkness. We have lost our paradise. We have lost the paradise of being here now.
On the high road between Glenfarne and Rossinver I am practicing entry into paradise. This is a knack. It arrives. It does not arrive. When it is there I know. When it is not there I know. I focus and wait, knowing that infinite patience brings instant results.
Why not take a trip to this town called ?Paradise," where you can be free. You can learn to be free of care, of worry, of going anywhere or having to be anyone other than the delight you are.
When travelling on any journey make it a journey of focused awareness.
Become present to the moment. This is the real and only time of your life. Become the presence of the Beloved. Become the perfume of love in action. This perfume is timeless and beautiful beyond any measure your mind can ?think about.?
One glimpse of ?Tir Na Nog? and you will know that a real holiday is. It is beyond re-creation. It is you being aware of creation itself in the timeless beauty of forever loving now.
This is what an Anam Cara reminds you off.
They remind you that you are forever enough. They remind you that the Blessing is already here. They remind you that you are this blessing. Going nowhere, the river flows and the grass grows by itself. Come on down to ?paradise" where you are free to be all you ever imagined and more.
The Moonchild and the Sacred Contract
It?s a marvellous
Night for a moon dance.
Van Morrison ? Moondance
Before a fire that burns no wood sits an old hawkeyed seanachie. Around his feet lie hungry ghosts. They have come to hear a story. A story of shadow and light that might break their chains of memory and free them to be the dance they have come here to be. So when the deep silence of sanctuary fills this place at the edge of nowhere the storyteller begins to tell a tale of wonder.
In a soft voice of invitation to the powers beyond time he begins.
Once upon a time not so very long ago there lived a King and Queen of the Vale of Flowers. They each had a secret that was never said. This was the secret of the Sacred Contract. This contract was written in blood and renewed every seven days.
Every seven days the Sacred Contract was placed on the age-old table with its scars and scratches of longing and wounding. Each week the Queen was made to sign with her life?s blood. When the contract was signed the King left the room. It was then, and only then, in the secret place of her heart that the Queen of the Vale of Flowers sat down and wept.
Unknown to the King and Queen of the Vale of Flowers there was a witness to this seven-day renewal of the Sacred Contract. It was their daughter. It was the daughter to whom they gave the beautiful name Unity. This child was, as all children are, curious.
One day - it always happens on that one day - curiosity got the better of Unity. They say that curiosity killed the cat. Unity wasn?t killed though. However, reading the Sacred Contract made her blind. What was in the Sacred Contract was read only once and was never read again. Not only was she made blind all reference to the Sacred Contract was erased from her memory. All that was left within the heart of Unity was a hungry ghost without a name.
One day the Prince of Trumpeting, who was called Bottom, came and swept the blind girl off her feet. He and Unity were married only they did not quite live happily ever after. This might have been sad except for one thing. Unity gave birth to a golden child and they called her Moondancer.
She was the fairest of children and for a time Unity and the Prince of Trumpeting loved this beautiful Moondancer. This love might have been all the light that the moonchild needed except for one thing. The ghost without a name came to haunt the memory of Unity and her blindness deepened and darkened.
On nights when the moon was full the moonchild would dance. How she would dance. The dance and the moonchild were one. In this dance there were no steps in time. The moon and the child of the moon were taken on a magic swirling trip of delight. The delight was from the light of the moon that loved this child forever beyond ghosts and secrets unsaid.
The ritual of the Sacred Contract was enacted every seven days until the dying day of the King and Queen of the Vale of Flowers. Then it was fed into the heart of Unity who signed it with her own life?s blood and vowed to keep the secret that was never to be said. So the Sacred Contract bled into the life of Moondancer. It is said it still bleeds into her life. Such is the power of the Sacred Contract to live beyond time.
Is there any hope for this beautiful dance of the moon? Those who have met with the secret unsaid tell that there is a journey to be taken. This is a journey to a nowhere place. There, at this nowhere place, is the nowhere man. He is the one that tells of secrets unsaid. It is told that he is burned beyond recognition. He, they say, is a holy fool and laughs at nothing.
It is said that once he too was made blind by the Sacred Contract but has now become a Seer of Secrets. This seer of beyond will tell you that the dance is never lost. It is only forgotten.
This nowhere man tells all hungry ghosts they are moon dancers who have forgotten who they are. There are those who dance other ocean love songs. They live at threshold places of wonder guarded by the Eye of the Hawk. Theirs is a different way of seeing. Theirs is lifeblood no longer poisoned by secrets unsaid.
?Remember this,? this nowhere man will tell you. ?It?s always a marvellous night for a moondance. Do you remember? Will you remember? Will you come dancing the dance you have come here to be? This is the promise beyond those secrets unsaid. Will you come to the dance??
In that place where the fire burns no wood you can hear the chains of memory being loosened. You can watch within that sanctuary of silence as hungry ghosts feed from the light of the moon and go dancing. One sings an old Irish rock anthem.
It?s a marvellous night for a moon dance.
The old seanachie sits back on his stool while watching hungry ghosts feed from the light. He thinks about the moonchild born of Unity and the Prince of Trumpeting. His memory goes back to the Vale of Flowers. Strange to say, but he never found it to be a Vale of Flowers at all.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
Spiritual Warriorship - Real Irish Sovereignty
There are times when one opens one’s heart to the magnitude of the suffering in this world and one would weep. This is appropriate to the situation. What is not appropriate to the situation is despair.
One of the greatest workers for the invitation to Love in form was St. Francis of Assisi. The longer this Irish mystic storyteller lives the more he is drawn into this man’s resonance. In my homeland of Northern Ireland he would have been referred to as “a sound man.” This means a man of integrity and a man of Oneness.
He left a prayer. This is a great prayer. Even the politician Margaret Thatcher quoted from it on the steps of 10 Downing Street following her election victory. The sound of her voice when reading it, however, had little of the humility the prayer evokes when rendered from the heart.
Many of you know me as a storyteller. I adapt stories of old for modern times and modern minds. There are storytellers who will tell you stories of old but there is no heart connection to the story. I often resist the call of my heart to some stories. This is because of my conditioned upbringing in the past. I was brought up as a Protestant in Northern Ireland during the period known as the troubles.
Because of this fact I am sometimes reluctant to allow stories connected to what are called the Fianna to enter my heart. Yet I know that what I resist persists. The story of the Fianna is a story that my heart is being drawn to share and to tell in a very different way. It is the way of unity rather than the way of division. It is the way of true sovereignty rather than the way of allegiance to tribal identity.
In this Irish mythic story the Fianna are a band of warriors who it is said will arise from their underground cave when Ireland needs them and her sovereignty is threatened from forces without. Most political parties in the land of Ireland take their name in part from this story of myth and legend. There are the two major political parties, Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael.
Ireland, at this present time of writing, is on the edge of financial bankruptcy. The people have eaten the Celtic Tiger. I suspect this is in a little way a collective response to the trauma of the famine years some centuries earlier. Added to this is the greed promoted by the fear that one needs to get as much of the cake as one can while the going is good.
For this Irish storyteller, however, the Fianna is not simply a band of soldiers willing to protect the sovereignty of a land. They are, as all mythic stories invite you into the realisation of, the spiritual warrior within you. This is the dynamic of the protector of what is sovereign and not that which is separate. This is the true role of the masculine energy in the world of form. It is allegiance of the heart to the protection of that which is the timelessness of Love. This was, and is, the invitation from all warriors of spirit such as Jesus and the Buddha.
The Fianna, for this Irish mystic storyteller, are not nationalistic. They are not one tribe aligned against another. This, however, is not how political parties that bear in part, their name and thus their invitation, promote them.
In Northern Ireland when you say that someone is a Fenian (identified with the Fainna) you are using a term that is a term of hatred. You are, in effect, calling someone a Roman Catholic. Except that it is said in a tone that depersonalises the person and makes them an object. You are making them one of a tribe separate from your tribe that tends to be Protestant. This isn’t just a Northern Ireland issue. It happens all over the world and it happens within your world and my world.
The mythical story of the Fianna is not about Irish Nationalism. It is the story about a state of mind. It is your state of mind just as it is mine. Ireland is in trouble as we are all in trouble. She is not only financially bankrupt but also spiritually bankrupt. She, in part, calls herself a ‘free state’ but her people are enslaved. They are not enslaved by the landlordism of old. It is a new kind of landlordism. It is called the consumer society. It is an insane invitation to death through consuming ourselves to death because we feel spiritually empty.
In the story of the Fianna these warriors are hidden below ground waiting a time when the people of Ireland call to them to rise and free them from tyranny. This is not just a myth. This is not a fairy story of old. This is my story. It is your story whether you are Irish or not. You and I are the Fianna in waiting. That is unless we remain enslaved to a value system of separateness from Love – the consumer society.
The real problem is that you and I in each moment drive the power of the spiritual warrior within us underground. In the mythic story of the Fianna, Ireland isn’t just a symbol for a land that exists between the UK and the USA. Ireland in this story represents the universal sense of Self. That is what is meant by sovereignty. No spiritual warrior of any state serves national boundaries. They serve the Universal. They serve the timeless values of sacred unity and Love.
Irish politicians of all persuasions are tethered to what is called the nation state. This is true of most politicians. The nation state has sovereignty. Only the sovereignty of the nation state does not take, and can never take, precedence over that of the state of the timeless and the universal. Those who align themselves to the nation tend not to be visionaries. When the leaders have no vision the people die.
The Fianna represent that state of mind that is sovereign and whole and holy. It is not aligned to any political or religious affiliation. It has no hierarchy. It is the flow of the spirit of sacred unity through the heart of the individual who has had the courage to surrender to Love. This is spiritual warriorship. Those in power aren’t practicing it. But you and I can.
This sovereignty doesn’t belong to the Irish. It isn’t Roman Catholic. It isn’t nationalistic. It isn’t separate from one who is a Protestant. It isn’t absent from a Democrat or a Republican. Except it is when any one of identifies solely with a separate sense of self and thus absents themselves from such sacred sovereignty.
If you despair about the state of the world then become a spiritual warrior. This doesn’t mean you become a fundamentalist, which is no fun at all. If you are intent on being a spiritual warrior who honours the sovereignty beyond the limits of time and space and all attachment to ideas about who you are and who you think you are, then what will be revealed is true sovereignty. You become, not a revolutionary, but a revelation.
Such sovereignty is the true state of heart and mind. It brings true peace. If this is your intention then you will be called to be one of the Fianna. You do not have to give this invitation to such a call this name. You will be called through your hearts invitation to you own myth that you are intended to live and honour and share. In the USA this could be the symbol of Lady liberty. Each country has its own myths that invite universal consiousness to be the true state.
The Fianna are not interested in rising to save such a limited idea as Irish Nationalism or any nationalism for that matter. The Fianna are the heart energies that know their connection to the universe. They will arise in you (under whatever name) when you are intent in realising the sacred unity within your heart and within your brother and sisters heart.
When you feel this connection to that state of mind and heart then you will have no need of despair. You will be called to serve that which is timeless, that which is sovereign and that which is Love. Anything less means that the spiritual power in you will remain underground in the cave of the separate sense of self.
Choose well because your Life and our life on this beautiful planet depends on it.
© Tony Cuckson 2009Friday, August 21, 2009
Restless Traveller
Talk to me in a sailors tongue, I’ll wake you up in the morning.
Truth will run under different skies.
You and me restless travellers.
You and me restless travellers.
Restless Travellers by Raymond Frogget.
From the Album Tramps and Thieves
I have in my life been a restless traveller. I have travelled in different lands seeking the diamond in my pocket. I have travelled under different skies and sometimes, although very rarely, I would awake. Sometimes such awakening would only last a moments but it always felt as if it would last forever.
I have met with sailors who would talk to me in tongues of flame. Often I would become afraid that I would be burned away to nothing – like a moth drawn to a flame. Often these people who have sailed a different kind of ocean stand there with a light in their eyes and a fire in their head.
Sailors who talk to you don’t always appear as sailors. They often appear quite ordinary in many ways. If you meet with them and you are ready then they will set you alight. If you are not ready then they tend to simply pass by on the other side of the street. Maybe they will smile and sometimes they will stand on their heads. One cannot really predict what these voyagers to that other shore might do.
These sailors have sailed, have voyaged under many different skies. You could follow them and learn much from them. However, there is one sky under which they have sailed and it is not for the faint of heart.
There is a sun in this sky. It is brighter than the brightest star in our galaxy. It is a million times brighter than our own Sun. When you sit on this Sun and not want for water once then you can wake up in the morning. When you wake up on that morning you will never quite be such a restless traveller again.
Except that you will leave this tomorrows sky. Most everyone does who has ventured to that ocean beneath the sky where only a few ever go. And then you will come back to this shore. It is the shore we call time and you will be a restless traveller in a very different way. You will want to sit again on the Sun and never want for water once. And when you return from this ocean beneath that vast sky you will be one who sets others afire with the light of one million Suns.
There will come a time when you will ask a stranger, “Talk to me in a sailors tongue.” A certain kind of storyteller has asked that question. I have asked that question of a stranger. Let me tell you this. When you ask a stranger to talk to you in a tongue of a faraway land you will hear something very different. You will not like it because it reminds you of what you have forgotten.
This language of the sailors tongue has not been spoken to you for time out of mind. Be aware of two things. Firstly it will take you out of time and secondly it will take you out of your mind. It will take you into the place that those who have set on the Sun and not wanted water once call no mind. They have no mind at all.
Storytellers talk in funny ways. They talk to you in a sailors tongue. They are and have been and continue to be voyagers under very different skies. They go to lands that are full of magic and fully of mystery. They sail on different rivers. One such river is the mystic river where they travel to a different kind of ocean.
These storytellers who know that secret tongue do not sail in boats. No no that is for those who are afraid of real adventure. The storyteller becomes a wave on the ocean. Not only that but they and the ocean become one. These storytellers walk around with the ocean inside themselves and if you are willing they will pour it into you.
If you listen very quietly then they may talk to you in a sailors tongue. Then you might wake up. This isn’t waking up from sleep. This is where you take a giant leap and you wake up from a giant sleep. It is as if you have been under a spell. It is as if you had been listening to the words of a language that keeps you feeling deeply sleepy.
Then beyond the words of the sailors tongue there is the twixt and in between place. Now you have to get really quiet. I mean so quite that you might think that you have disappeared. An in a magical way you are getting ready to do exactly that. Listen and you will hear the ocean inside. It is singing.
All the songs of this ocean are love songs. They are heart songs. If you listen closely, very closely and you get still and quiet you can hear the ocean call you by your name. This is not the name you were given at birth. Your birth name may be beautiful name but the name that you are given by the Ocean of Love is more beautiful still.
The song you will hear is your song. This is a unique song. It is the song that only you can sing in this world. This does not mean that you must be a good singer. It doesn’t mean that you have to sing at all. It does mean that you have to allow the Ocean of Love to sing this song through your heart.
So remember. There will come a time when you will be aflame with a different kind of wish. You will be wishing that the Ocean of Love would sing a song through you. You will be wishing that any song will do. People will laugh at you. They will think that you might be a little bit crazy. You will think that you are a little bit crazy. But if you trust this well wishing then you will meet with a stranger.
This is the stranger who has been to that other shore and talks in a strange tongue that your heart knows. They will if you allow them to wake you up. You will walk beneath different skies. You will become a wave disappearing into an ocean Love song.
Until that happens to you, you and me are restless travellers, you and me restless travellers.
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