Love is the real power. It's the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with--everyone blooms.
If we could allow the pace of our meetings to slow down to the pace of our hearts, we might find genuine understanding.
We all experience 'soul moments' in life-when we see a magnificent sunrise, hear the call of the loon, see the wrinkles in our mother's hands, or smell the sweetness of a baby. During these moments, our body, as well as our brain, resonates as we experience the glory of being a human being.
Storytelling is at the heart of life... In finding our own story, we assemble all the parts of ourselves. Whatever kind of mess we have made of it, we can somehow see the totality of who we are and recognize how our blunderings are related. We can own what we did and value who we are, not because of the outcome but because of the soul story that propelled us.
A life truly lived constantly burns away veils of illusion, burns away what is no longer relevant, gradually reveals our essence, until, at last, we are strong enough to stand in our naked truth.
Instead of transcending ourselves, we must move into ourselves.
* * * * *
Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction.
Metaphorically, the body becomes a machine to be driven or a garbage dump to be avoided. At the same time, the magnificent Mother in whose womb we live is mindlessly poisoned and raped. Surely, our insane denial has to be perceived and acted upon.
The
confusion of spirit and body is quite understandable in a culture where
spirit is concretized in magnificent skyscrapers, where cathedrals have
become museums for tourists, where woman-flesh-devil are associated,
and nature is raped for any deplorable excuse. Dieting with fierce
will-power is the masculine route; dieting with love of her own nature
is the feminine. Her only real hope is to care for her own body and
experience it as the vessel through which her Self may be born.
It is amazing that our souls — our eternal essences, with all their hopes and dreams and visions of an eternal world — are contained within these temporal bodies. No wonder suffering is part of the human condition.
If you are living for an ideal and driving yourself as hard as you can to be perfect — at your job or as a mother or as a perfect wife — you lose the natural, slow rhythm of life. There's a rushing, trying to attain the ideal; the slower pace of the beat of the earth, the state where you simply are, is forgotten.
The harder we look at our aches and ailments, the more we will be startled by the painful truths they are trying to convey about our dangerously disembodied way of life.
My soul is the bridge between spirit and body and, as such, is a uniter of opposites. Without soul at center, I would either transcend into spirit or become mired in matter.
It is our very fear of the future that distorts the now that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present.
* * * * *
This is your body, your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known.
Often the wisdom of the body Clarifies the despair of the spirit.
To strive for perfection is to kill love because perfection does not recognize humanity.
Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken.
An addiction is anything we do to avoid hearing the messages that body and soul are trying to send us.
If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning.... The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living.
Healing depends on listening with the inner ear — stopping the incessant blather, and listening. Fear keeps us chattering — fear that wells up from the past, fear of blurting out what we really fear, fear of future repercussions. It is our very fear of the future that distorts the now that could lead to a different future if we dared to be whole in the present.
But if you travel far enough, one day you will recognize yourself coming down to meet yourself. And you will say — yes.
* * * * *
The body has a wisdom of its own. However, slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative dammed up energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in.
Soul, to me, means “embodied essence,” when we experience ourselves and others in our full humanity — part animal, part divine. Healing comes through embodiment of the soul. The soul in matter is what I think the feminine side of God is all about... The feminine soul is what grounds us; it loves and accepts us in our totality.
At the very point of vulnerability is where the surrender takes place — that is where the god enters. The god comes through the wound.
Consciousness will not always solve the problem, but it may make the suffering meaningful.
Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.
There is no growth without real feeling. Children not loved for who they are do not learn how to love themselves. Their growth is an exercise in pleasing others, not in expanding through experience. As adults, they must learn to nurture their own lost child.
To me, real love, the move from power to love, involves immense suffering. Any creative work comes from that level, where we share our sufferings, just the sheer suffering of being human. And that's where the real love is.
The healing of ourselves as healers has to take place first. Bringing ourselves to wholeness, we become more sensitive to other people. In the change of consciousness that happens within us, we bring about change of consciousness in those around us and in the planet itself.
The mystery of God touches us — or does not — in the smallest details: giving a strawberry, with love; receiving a touch, with love; sharing the snapdragon red of an autumn sunset, with love.
No comments:
Post a Comment