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.

Tony Cuckson is disappearing

When I begin to write, as I do most every morning, there is the experience before me of the empty page. Sometimes my hand is running down the lines before I know it is happening. This happens when I am infused with inspiration from the lines of a poem or a heartsong.

At other times I don’t know what to write or I am working with an idea, a dawning that I have not yet turned into full awareness. Such dawning is happening this morning. I have a strange unfolding developing within me. It is an awareness that I am disappearing and to be honest I want to disappear.

Before anyone thinks I am about to run away, be assured this is not the case. What seems to be happening is that what I call “little me” is being seen as a prison and I no longer want to be a prisoner.

Fundamental to our Western idea of who we are is the statement by Descartes, “I think therefore I am.” This heralded the Age of Reason out of what was called the Dark Ages. However, we have become what might be called the people of the head and not what the poet David Whyte refers to as people who live in a body in full presence

One of the keys to peace of mind that I am discovering is the absence of thought. Thought is a wonderful tool but it is for most of us a monkey on the chain that tends to pull us around through all our life’s drama. When I say, “I am disappearing,” I mean I no longer value the constant noise that goes on in my head like a badly tuned radio that cannot be turned off and often takes me into emotional white water.

I am noticing that there is movement toward more silent witnessing of thought. This silent witnessing makes me aware of how unsettled my mind really is. It is on despite my wish that I simply be still and know that the presence within me is Love.

I take more time now not to think. People may then ask, “Then who will you be?” I answer that I will be the experience of no mind. This is an experience that people fear. They think they will disappear and become some mindless creature. Except that no mind is a vast ocean of timeless creativity. There is still experience but I do not need to grasp it and claim it as mine. Such experience is more direct and more glorious. It is less fraught with anxiety about how “my life” should be. This is what I call presence.

Your ability to be present is more fulfilling because there is the experience of presence. You feel lighter, you are more in your body, and you are present to this moment. You are not projecting into the future with your desires to fill any sense of lack. You do not spend time with the past in regret or worry. You learn to enjoy the body in full presence.

The paradox is that you feel a deeper kind of experience because the thought process is still. This stills the emotions, which stills the body. You move closer to the experience of I AM. You move closer to the experience that you are Love beyond any need to be loved. You begin to realise that you are so much more than your thoughts.

This is the invitation of meditation. A practice par excellence that takes you deep into a stillness that is paradoxical. The more empty you become of ideas the fuller you are of inspiration. Reason cannot help you here. The silence of the heart can and does.

When you begin to disappear you become available to the Beloved. The sense of ‘I’ begins to melt into the vastness of I AM beyond the limitation of subject/object duality. Peace begins to descend in and about you and in a mind that only thinks when it chooses too. There is no loss of intelligence here. In fact real intelligence begins to dawn. This is an intelligence that solves problems holistically and not through rational thought alone – ration meaning “in part.”

You think that no thought is something that you should avoid. You might think it is mindlessness but it is the chatter of ones monkey mind that is mindless. Sit and still your mind for ten minutes and unless you are a practiced meditator you are unlikely to be able to do this. You will spend most of the time thinking about everything other than what you intended to practice.

Your mind is central to who you think you are. Would it not be beneficial to be in control of it? You would then find the experience of less thought brings more peace and power. This is because intelligence arises that is beyond thinking in words and concepts. Words and concepts, which are thoughts, are not direct experience but always about experience. In this way you are always one step removed from Life.

This stillness of thought allows I AM to arise from the realm of the invisible out of which all forms and all creation arises. It doesn’t need you to work it out. It created you so it knows exactly what needs to be done better and more completely than your rational mind can ever accomplish.

So I feel I am disappearing. This idea brings me such delight. I feel lighter. It is as if a great burden is being lifted of my shoulders. This burden is this sense of self called “me, mine and myself.” The disappearance of Tony Cuckson is not to be lamented because he is exchanging the nothingness of “his life” for Life but not as most of us know it.

The Land of the Forever Young

In one of my favorite books, "Ananam cara - Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World" John O'Donohue writes,

"The eternal is not elsewhere; it is not distant. There is nothing as near as the eternal. This is captured in the lovely Celtic phras: Ta tir na-og ar chul an ti - tir a lainn tnna che ile, i.e. the land of eternal youth is behine the house, a beautiful land fluent within itself."

The land of eternal youth is not the land or place where you live as a body that lives forever. It is a state of consiousness that gives access to direct knowing of ones eternal Self. It is the awareness that beyond the life of the body, that which animates the body - consiousness - is forever.

Forever doesn`t mean something that lasts a long time. It means that it is timeless, i.e. it is beyond the limitation of time and space but is known within the dimension of time and space.

The Land of the Forver Young, Tir na Nog is your birthright. Forever Young transforms the fear of death. One knows one lives in more than one dimension. One knows that there are many mansions to existance.

The Land of Forever young isn`t some quaint little Celtic myth. It isn`t a fairy story. It is the invitation to soul friendship which is the knowing of yourself beyond form but experiencing this direct knowing within a body living within time and space.

This is real hospitality. Why not accept the invitation to learn more and radiate your light so that others can radiate theirs and glorify Love that is the dimension of the Land of the Forever Young. This is your true homeplace and a real joyous homecoming

Welcome from Tony Cuckson of Anamcara Experience

Let me open with the wonderful Celtic Blessing

Deep peace of the running wave to you.

Deep peace of the shining stars to you.

Deep peace of the still earth to you.

Deep peace of the Infinite Peace to you.

This is more stable than wishing the invitation to happiness. The peace invited in this blessing will allow you to ride out the windstorms of your life situation. More to come.

Spiritual Partnership (1) - The Difficult Question

The need and interest of soul consciousness is not 'how' to
draw things to itself from the environment but how to draw out from itself the qualities and energies from which a greater environment can emerge.
- David Spangler

One of the questions that has arisen from being at Earthsong Camp 2009 is the question that I would call "spiritual partnership." One of the key aspects that I love about attending this festival in the heart of the Irish countryside are the individual moments shared around the campfire.
Many people are hungry and want to draw to them a relationship that is inspired and inspires them. They have a longing to love and be loved. They ask the question of Bee's and my relationship, "How do you stay together for so many years and still keep the flame of love tended so that it remains aflame and not just a spark or becomes an ember or an embarrassment of what is termed love?"

I will answer this question from my personal point of view and from the way in which I conduct my relationship with Bee. Let me say at the very outset that Barbara (Bee) is not my first love. My first love is my relationship with Self. Note here that I use the world Self with a capital S and not the word myself. This first love is no secret between us.

This love affair I have with the Self, the Beloved , is primary and out of that I am graced to love the blessing in form called Barbara Smith. Some people will find it difficult to imagine that one's partner takes second place but if you really want a spiritual partnership to evolve then, in my experience, you will have to learn to stand in Love with who you are and always are.

Read more

http://www.anamcaraexperience.org/articles/art_spiritual_partnership_1.html