Inner Marriage

       Brian Roennow, a psychotherapist and spiritual teacher from Denmark, a wonderful friend and vibrant presence in the mentor group with Richard Moss, dashed off an email response to “Love-Ability” – a Weekly Wisdom I posted last month.  I was blown away by the depth of his insight and by its eloquence, especially since Brian responded so quickly and since English is not his native language.  I’m excited to share what he wrote.

       First, a couple quick notes:  In the chakra system, the solar plexus is an energy center that relates to personal identity (that which distinguishes us), and the heart is the energy center for love and compassion (that which unites us).  The word “chymical”, as Brian recently clarified for me, refers to a meeting of energies leading to mystical union and transformation.

        Here’s Brian:

In our hearts, feminine as well as masculine is present. But the feminine, encompassing empathic, nurturing and altruistic qualities etc., does not fight the masculine discerning, deciding and acting - and also altruistic - qualities. That fight goes on in the solar plexus/lunar plexus polarity at another level of consciousness.

No, in the heart, they marry, they say yes to each other and go forward into the chymical wedding. They are intimately forged together in a relationship where polarity is acknowledged and worshipped, in a deep playful manner.

And the fruit of this marriage is The Golden Child. 

This Child is our ability to connect with our deepest existence, with our deepest awareness of Self. Naive, playful, innocent, and yet full of wisdom and knowing. And it is our chance to ascend. Our ability to connect with the Divine, Nirvana, All, Non-dual. Whatever it is called. And to realize we have always been here - and we will never leave here - that is impossible and an illusion…

 Brian Roennow, personal correspondence, 10/21/13

       Joan Woolard, a dear friend and fellow sojourner in the Richard Moss mentor program, wrote this poem during a day of silence at the recent gathering of our group.  It touched something in me, as I suspect it may in you.

Porch Time

Breeze ever so gently beckoning to enter the pregnant pause

Take rest in the now; the land that time forgot

You know the place

It can be found between here and there

But don't look too hard or you'll miss it

Soften your gaze, loosen your grip and settle in

Let you mind wander and shift the focus of your awareness

Slip into the only place where you will find yourself, the now.

Nowhere to go

Nothing to do, fix or change

Just unending being with what is

Shadows lengthen

Leaves Rustle

Birds sing a call to action

Gather yourself and take flight on the wings of the now.

Joan Woolard

Big Heart Healing

       When I’m in distress – feeling anxious, ashamed, angry, etc. – the automatic tendency is to move into my head to process what I’m experiencing.  Truth be told, this is an attempt to defeat the distress, and it doesn’t work so well.  Usually, it just fuels the stories and interior dramas that create even more suffering. 

       Lately, I’ve experimented with acknowledging the distress, accepting its presence, and holding it gently in my heart – no analysis, no figuring, no words, no warfare.  I lean back, relax the body, breathe into my heart and witness heart’s natural expansion.  Small heart softens into Big Heart, the heart of compassion we all share.

       In this compassionate space, distress is invited to stay as long as it wants.  And yet, it dissolves – sometimes sooner, sometimes later.  Even when the discomfort is powerful and stubborn, I do my best to keep focused on the simple act of breathing into, and breathing out of, Big Heart. 

       The mind is a powerful instrument for processing many things.  Heart, however, is the better instrument for healing.

Love-Ability

       Classic romantic lore locates love “out there” in the lovability of what we love.  Love, from this perspective, is a positive judgment about someone or something – a judgment that tends to change as what’s out there alternates between more and less pleasing.  Implicit in this approach is the presumption that we can only love what we find lovable.  Our job, then, is to search the world for just the right love object – the one.

       In a recent lecture, “Love is Inside - Go Find It”, Michael Simpson asserts that love is an internal matter.  It has nothing to do with the desirability of an object and everything to do with the capacity to keep our hearts open and our energy flowing – a capacity we can all develop. 

       From this perspective, love is not a judgment.  It’s the simple act of opening our hearts as we engage with life.  Simpson claims that we can open our hearts at any moment, that we never have to shut down, that the only limits on our ability to love are self-imposed, and that there is nothing, inside us or outside us, that we cannot be present to with a soft heart.  There is nothing we cannot love.

       When caught up in the dominant paradigm of locating love “out there”, we tend to treat ourselves and others as objects.  We work hard to make ourselves lovable, so that love will come our way.  And we work hard to get our partners to become more lovable, so it will be easier for us to feel our love.  Frankly, all that hard work never produces lasting love.  The love we seek remains outside our grasp. 

       The shift to locating love internally is a movement toward taking sole responsibility for our love and our love-ability – not unlike the healthy way we take responsibility for our own happiness, self-esteem, serenity, sense of belonging and feeling of abundance.  It’s our job to keep our hearts open, no one else’s.  As social psychologists tell us, if two people are responsible for a job, it’s a lot less likely to get done than if one person is.

       Heart opening is hard work.   It takes wakeful awareness and persistent practice.  However, in contrast to the romantic approach, this hard work pays off.  We discover, inside ourselves, the vitality we’ve been seeking.  It’s always there – our love nature – our love-ability.

Focused Spaciousness

       Richard Moss, a mentor to me and many others, teaches Focused Spaciousness, an approach to meditation and centering that invites us to be keenly aware of our sensory experience – exquisitely focused – and, at the same time, to be fully present to the vast expanse of inner spaciousness. 

       Holding both simultaneously takes some practice – practice well-worth the effort, practice that draws us toward fullness of life at the center of being.

       On his website, Richard has posted two short video clips (The Art of Centering, Parts 1 & 2) demonstrating his approach.  I invite you to view them and, while you're at it, to browse his website:   www.richardmoss.com   

       Click on the link above and then on "Blog" to open the videos and other postings from Richard. 

       Enjoy!

Spiritual Nutrition

       Questions arrive – questions related to how I feed myself and my important relationships.  From a biological perspective, I know the foods we eat have a profound effect on health and vitality.

       Similarly, I wonder, how is my spirit affected by what I feed it?   The electronic and paper-based media I consume?  The thoughts I entertain and interior dramas I enact?  The places my mind habitually goes when there's a break in the action?  Does this diet nourish me?

       In my spiritual diet, is there a good balance of stimulation and quiet, connection and solitude, doing and not doing?

       How do I feed my important relationships?  Do I starve them through lack of attention and affection?  Is my relational economy booming or in recession? 

       Do I harm love – maybe even kill it – by the thoughts I harbor or the stories I tell myself about the other or about our relationship?  Is my relational diet contaminated by the toxins of criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stone-heartedness?

       How do I feed my heart so it stays soft, supple, spacious – and, therefore, vital?  How do I energize connections within me and with others?  How do I nurture fullness of life?

       Questions rumble.

       I observe.  I listen.  I know.

       I choose.

Keeping Heart Open

       In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer urges us to keep our hearts open – always.  Most of us, he notes, instinctively close our hearts to protect ourselves from experiences we don't like.

       "But closing your heart does not really protect you from anything; it just cuts you off from your source of energy…  Defining what you need in order to stay open actually ends up limiting you…  As long as you are defining what you like and what you don't like, you will open and close…  You are allowing your mind to create triggers that open and close you.  Let go of that.  Dare to be different.  Enjoy all of life."  (pp 46 – 47)

       "If enjoying a full life means experiencing high energy, love and enthusiasm all the time, then don't ever close…  You can learn to stay open no matter what happens in this world…  Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you are willing to close your heart over it…  Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over.  Nothing, ever, is worth closing your heart over."   (pp 44 – 47)

       Inspired by his passionate message, I've been experimenting lately with keeping my heart open, playing with various ways to do so and feeling amazed by the difference it's making in my life.  There is so much to say about how to stay open.  Right now I want to offer a couple thoughts about what's been working for me.

       Be mindful.  Notice when you close.  Notice physical tightness and emotional contraction.  Notice the stories of fear and shame and outrage that swirl in the mind.  Pay attention to the suffering brought on by closing down.  Whenever we close, we suffer.

       Breathe.  Soften the belly.  When something painful or difficult comes our way (from outside or inside), we can breathe, soften and hold ourselves in compassionate spaciousness.  We can interrupt old tendencies to tighten, close, protect and defend.  We can bring care to our suffering self.  In the spaciousness of self-compassion, suffering melts.  When we bring love to our discomfort, we naturally open – first to ourselves, then to all of life.

       Practice.  Practice.  Practice.  Just as closing down becomes automatic and habitual, so too we can develop habits of remaining soft and open.  It takes practice, lots of it – formal meditation practice and the moment-by-moment practices of staying present and embodied in everyday life.

       Staying alive – supple and free – is a conscious choice and a choice to be conscious.

       Enjoy!

Deep Listening

       I just picked up The Exquisite Risk:  Daring to Live an Authentic Life, by one of my favorite authors, Mark Nepo.  He talks about the connection between listening deeply and the authenticity of spirit that is so essential for our well being.  "We must meet the outer world with our inner world, or existence will crush us…  If we don't assume our space as living beings, the rest of life will fill us completely the way water fills a hole."  (p. 11)

       "When we can listen deeply, we are strengthened to feel that everything around us lives within us and that everything within us lives as part of the world.  When we experience both the circumference and center of the circle of life at once, we are then in the larger Self, the Universal Self, as Carl Jung describes it."   (p. 4)

       "But how do we listen?  It is so simple and so hard.  So obvious to begin and so elusive to maintain.  In this lies the vitality of deep listening.  To keep beginning.  Over and over.  To keep emptying and opening.  And simply to keep listening.  For to listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean.  In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear."  (p. 5) 

       "In truth, listening deeply and inwardly allows us to keep meeting the outer world with our inner being, and this mysteriously keeps us and the world vital.  Often, the nature of the dance cycles us from being self-centered to being other-centered to being balanced as an integral part in an integrated whole.  And when we're blessed to experience those balanced, integrated moments, it becomes clear that everything is relational.  Everything inside us and between us is circulatory – and ongoing exchange of what matters."  (p. 12)

       "In my life, I have known truth and beauty and peace to be ever-present companions that I often sit beside, bemoaning their absence."  (p. 15)

     Enjoy your listening Self.

Joining the Listener

        Last night, I bought a book, The Untethered Soul.  I'm considering it as a text for this fall's Connecting group.

       In his first chapter, Michael Singer discusses the incessant chatter of inner voices.  These voices take many viewpoints and assume many "personalities".  Which one, we wonder, is my true voice?  Which is the real me?

       Singer's answer is none of the above.  We are none of those talkers.  We are the one who listens. 

       In meditation this morning, I played with his idea.  My mind was filled with chatter – heavy drama happening.  I turned to the one who listens and asked:  "Are you enjoying all this?  Are you entertained by the drama going on inside me?"  I remembered how I was as a 7-year-old hunched over the radio on Sunday afternoons, raptly absorbed in episodes of "The Shadow".  I wondered if the listener were engaged in a similar way with my drama.

       The listener remained quiet – very quiet, gently quiet.  Yet, somehow, there was an answer – a felt sense.  No words.

       My translation of this felt sense was "duh-uh" – a bit like the expression teens use with parents who seem clueless in the face of the obvious, except there was no attitude in this "duh-uh".  I got the message.

       Shortly after, during an extended period of grace, I joined the listener.  We sat together, connected as one, in a delicious quiet.

       I'm amazed.  The listener is so patient, so unafraid.  What a wondrous companion – pure presence, loving and detached, with no judgment, no power in the traditional sense and no inclination to control or change anything.

       I think of God.

A Reminder

No matter where

you go

Or who

you know

Or what

you do

Or think

or feel

YOU CANNOT

NOT BELONG