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.

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.

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.