These quotations are but a glimpse into the many gems found in Jeff Brown's book, Ascending with Both Feet On the Ground: Words to Awaken your Heart. Wonderful medicine for our hearts and needed transformative wisdom for our world. ― Molly
It is important to grant yourself permission to wander as part of your spiritual journey. So often mischaracterized as lostness, there is a kind of immersion in the not knowing that is actually quite necessary if we are going to find our way home. So much information can come up when we are looking in no particular direction. By surrendering to the unknown, we create space for a deeper knowing to emerge. In the heart of not knowing, the paths that we are here to walk reveal themselves.
Real presence comes through the open heart. You cannot heal and resolve your emotional material with your mind. Your emotional material does not evaporate because you watch it. You can only heal your heart with your heart.
I am not interested in enlightenment if it means detachment from the emotional body, the earth plane, the challenges of being human. I am interested in enrealment, because it means that my most spiritual moments are inclusive, arising right in the heart of all that is human: joy and sorrow, shopping list and unity consciousness, fresh mangos and stale bread. Enrealment is about living in all the aspects of reality simultaneously rather than only those realms that feel the most comfortable We are not just the light, or the mind, or the emptiness, or perpetual positivity. We are the everything. It's ALL God, even the dust that falls off my awakening heart.
All too often, the positive thinking movement becomes a bypass of reality, a skimming of the surface of our inner lives. Too many have followed this approach to transformation and lost their way, making major life changes without the ground to support them. Don't be intoxicated by the allure of wish-full thinking. Instead, focus your energy on genuine foundation building, doing the painstaking work to clear the inner channel and learn essential lessons so that your quest for true-path is solid and true. Divine Perspiration begets Divine Inspiration. The universe responds to authentic change ― nothing feigned will do.
Excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis.
If we don't embrace our confusion, we remain trapped between worlds ― on the one hand, old ways of being ready to die; on the other, new ways of being eager to be born. By holding the space for all possibilities at once, clarity emerges on its own terms. The bridge from one side to the other is confusion. We must learn how to cross it on our way home.
Befriend your confusion. Don't be fooled by its chaotic appearance ― confusion is a sign that your soul is in transition. Welcome it as a friend that has come from far away to bring you home. Be open to it. Keep it close.
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It's important to recognize that to live in a continuous state of detachment is to do the spiritual bypass and miss the moment altogether. It is to trip out of the body that carries the karmic seeds for our transformation. It is to leave earth before our time. To be sure, there are times when detachment is necessary: when we need to be reminded of something beyond our localized perceptions, when we need a peek into a vaster reality, when we need to distinguish between that which serves us and that which derails us. Indeed, we are far more than our monkey mind, our neurotic patterns, our unimaginative lens. But perpetual detachment is self-avoidance masquerading as enlightenment. At some point we have to come back down into our body and work with what lives inside us.
Quick fix, Looooooong suffering.
The more emotionally unresolved we are, the denser the message we transmit. The trick is to clear ourselves out from the inside-out so that we are emanating from a clear and unified channel.
It doesn't matter how much two people love one another if they are developmentally incompatible, or if there is not a shared willingness to become conscious. This is why they call it a relationship instead of a loveship. Love alone is not enough. If you want it to last, you have to relate to each other in ways that keep the ship afloat.
There is a fine line between relational passion and avoidant intensities. There were moments when my passionate nature was a direct reflection of my aliveness, but there were others when I was just using intensity and drama as a coping strategy, a way to actually hide from a deeper experience of the moment, some kind of addictive anti-mellow drama that procrastinated my relationship with reality. Somewhere below the drama was my real life, waiting in the wings to be lived. It was scary, but it called to me, reminding me that there is more to this life than sidestepping of the inner world. There is the avoidant life, and then there is the one that is vulnerably true.
We often talk about living in the moment but it is my experience that we cannot live fully in the moment if we are not living our truth. Without truth, our breaths are somehow incomplete, our presence shrouded, our intimacy half-hearted because we are not fully there for it. The moment we own our truths, we get truth-chills ― little signs of relief from our body temple ― as the veils to clarity fall away and our divine presence enters. Here we are. Here now.
It all comes down to truth ― truth or consequences.
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I am in-countering terrorism of a shaming form. Ah, the inner terrorist. There he is, standing before me with his usual weaponry (disdain, despair, dogma), blocking the path home. I am quite habituated to succumbing to his shaming style, but this afternoon, I am looking the bastard in the inner eye, daring him to come a little closer. When he gets within reach, I am going to give him the hug he has been longing for since time immemorial. Maybe, just maybe, i can melt him with kindness.
Shame is rooted in the shame pit of generations before, perpetuating the self-hatred of the collective unconscious, still lodged in dark energies and imaginings. Your shame has nothing to say about who you really are, never did, never will. In truth, you don't need anyone else's permission to be here. God gave you all the permission you need. And who are you really? A divinely intended wave of magnificence, an ocean of gifts just waiting to be opened, a soulnami of epic proportions. First we clear the path of inner debris, then we walk our way home...
I am cozying up to my pain-body this morning and thanking it for its presence. It doesn't want me to trip out of it. It wants me to nourish it and honor its wisdom. I mean, where would we be without our shadow? What would grow us? Not to glorify the challenges of life, but I expanded in my spirituality through a deepening interface with my shadowy material. Shadow as karmic fodder, Shadow as grist for the soul mill.
Sensitivity is a sign of life. Better hurt than hardened. I bow to those who keep their hearts open when it is most difficult, those who refuse to keep their armor on any longer than the have to, those who recognize the courage at the heart of vulnerability. After all the malevolent warriors end each other, the open-hearted will inherit the earth.
If you can be in heartbreak, and keep your heart totally open, you are living very close to God.
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The body is far more than just a vessel for the soul. It is the field where the soul's lessons are harvested. It is the breeding ground for the soul's emergence. Repressed emotions are unactualized spiritual lessons. In order to grow in our spirituality, we must bring our joy and our suffering through our emotional body until our lessons are birthed. We must 'cell our soul.'
There is a time to adventure heartily into new possibilities, but there is also a need for quiet integration time on the self-creation journey. We can have all the peak experiences we want but the real work happens between peaks, while laying down and integrating on the valley floor. Growers are inch worms. Lasting transformation is an incremental process one soul-step at a time. This may frustrate us, but it's the only way to craft an awareness that is authentic and sustainable.
Let's not throw the entire ego out with the bath water. I'm not talking about the unbridled ego, the narcissistic ego, the imbalanced ego. I'm talking about the strong self-concept, the boundaried sense of self, the healthy ego that helps us to manage reality and honor our purpose. Without a strong sense of self, we don't have the solidity to sustain the journey. Without a solid core, our forays into unity come crashing back to earth. Solid me, solid we...
We may not be only our stories, but we also are our stories. If we stay connected to the fact that our story has both a localized and a universal dimension, we are on the right path. Not identifying ourselves as our story, but identifying the juice at the heart of our story as fundamental to our expansion. In the heart of our stories are the personal identifications and unresolved issues that are the grist for our spiritual expansion. Never throw the story out with the bath water. Without karmic clay to work with, our expansion is stalled.
The only real homeland security is the knowledge that whatever the world brings your way, your soul is safe in your own two hands. A certain faith develops, not simply that the universe will provide for you, but that you will provide for you. They can shame you, they can obstruct you, but they can no longer alienate you from your own essence.
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We have to continue to close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. This is the work of all spiritual warriors ― to clear the path of debris, to infuse the path with so much truth that others can find their way home. Truth workers untied under the banner of authentic self-revealing!
Grace is not something that pours down from the heavens. It is something that rises up from within us.
Bringing our soul lessons through takes more than awareness. It is an active process that demands a courageous willingness to live our experiences right through to completion. This means staying with our feelings until they are truly done with us, no matter how uncomfortable they are. It will be difficult at times, but the feelings will only hurt until they convert into the lessons at their heart. Although we may not see it at first, there is a method to our sadness.
Caught between a rock and a heart place, I am trusting the universe to bring me through the openings... the just right karmic crevice, the crack in the heart where the rivers of truth flow through. Ah, to continue to be a conoeist of the heart, riding the rapids of a growthful consciousness, coming to rest on the tender shores of my own essence. I mean, isn't that the harbour we seek?
The very fact that we are trying to heal our hearts in a world where so many have had to bury their hurt is already extraordinary. It may not seem like such a big deal, but when the energy has been moving in another direction for so many generations, it is quite a challenge to turn the tide. We are breaking new inner ground, after all. Recognizing this should translate into giving ourselves a break when we can't quite get it perfect. It's a long path back to the receptive heart, one opening at a time...
Honor your inner champion, the one that chooses to confront and work through your obstacles to wholeness, the one that slays the inner dragons with tenderness and persistence. Isn't it time that we soulebrated the courage it takes to confront our patterns time and again? Isn't it time for an up-framing of our often negative view of our challenges? Instead of "oh no, not that pattern again", how about recognizing that we are CHAMPIONS for simply taking them on? How about seeing ourselves as some of the first humans with the blessed opportunity to shift the negative patterning intrinsic to the collective unconscious? We are PIONEERS, for God's sake! What a fantastic thing to be pioneers in the inner world! Every little step is a radical paradigm shift for humanity.
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