Monday, February 28, 2011

MARCH RADICAL EXPRESSION




The ever-endearing story of The Wizard of Oz has been a life long friend and teacher for me. I learned years ago in my clinical training that if there is a fairy tale, story, book, or movie that has particularly captured and sustained your attention, it is because it points to an archetypal pattern that is important to the emergence of your Soul. I have at various times identified with the different individual characters, and the myth as a whole is as powerful a metaphysical lesson as anything termed a scripture.



At this time in my Soulful evolution, I am feeling into the comical yet empowering image of the so-called cowardly lion. Through all of his tears and fearful meanderings, the lion’s innate courage is integral to the unfolding of the story, and also to the saving of Dorothy in a dire and doom-filled situation. His love for her and for his fellow Oz-sojourners is what compelled him to move through his fear and take courageous action.



It reminds me that courage isn’t about not feeling fear. Courage is about feeling and embracing the fear and taking inspired actions anyway. When we have the spiritual musculature to be able to accept, love, and embrace ourselves in our fearfulness, that love propels us through the fear and into eventual transcendence. Fear is never an enemy. Fear is actually often a sign that we are moving out of the familiar and into the unknown of a broader possibility. If we always stay with what feels safe we never really grow. If we always cling to the status quo, we withhold ourselves from evolving and expanding. The fear may well be offering caution, but it also is urging us to proceed beyond the perceptual boundaries that are energetically and soulfully being pushed. Comfort is not a reliable barometer for sacred maturation. We can be so addicted to feeling good that we miss the wisdom that is hiding in the suppressed emotional discomfort.



The English word courage is actually derived from the Latin word for heart. The heart is the seat of courage, and it is in listening to the heart that courage is activated and utilized. It is when we embrace our fears that we courageously free our love. This indeed is the path of courage. We may like the lion pursue our path with fearful tears and quaking diminutive advances. But proceed we must. Our Soul is calling us out of the limited past. It is longing to show us that the power we are seeking has been within us all along. We have always had the wisdom, the heart, and the courage needed to move along our perfect path of unfoldment. Sure it can be scary. It is bound to be messy at times. There will be tears- that is a sign that our heart is activated and healing is occurring. We will at times inch forward nervously holding our tail within our trembling hands. That is the time to go deeply within to the home of the heart, and to allow the courage of our Sourced Self to lead the way. Step by step we move forward. We never know what truly lies ahead. There will be munchkin thoughts and wicked witch fears. The world can be a scary place indeed. But though we are in this world we are not of it. We have never left the Beloved embrace of our Source. Our fearfulness is contained within that embrace. And from that countenance our courage comes.



So take heart my friends. Literally be in your heart. Cry when you need to cry, and feel into the fearfulness so that you finally may be free. Be the lion-hearted journeyer you are in this wondrous dream of time and space. The wizard is always there inside. Allow your love of life to truly save the day. You have always had all of the courage you need. It is right within your sacred heart. Let your heart indeed be your home. And remember; there is no place like home.

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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

THE RETURN TO LOVE


The return to the heart is the return to the direct experience of Sourced unconditional Love. It is the return quite literally to the home we have never actually left. In order to live from the heart, you must live within and from the heart center. There is nothing ambiguous about that instruction. To live from the heart you must allow the attention to remain in the heart. Nothing could be simpler and yet so confounding. To a world mostly identified with the content of the surface mind, the return to heartfulness is scary at best and often terrifying beyond reason. To begin to live in the heart rather than in the mind requires a level of honest feeling and surrendered thinking that as of yet appeals to only a few. We are so fearful of feeling the depth of pain we intuitively know is defending our hearts that to remain at the dictates of the mind seems a worthwhile compromise. The mind is somewhat controllable while the unleashed passion of an open heart will take us places our woundedness is simply too fearful to go. And yet it is within that awakened heart that our true identity lies. It is passion and not passivity that is emblazoned in our Souls and encoded in our hearts. To deaden a being of Sourced aliveness is unworthy of who we are at depth. We so often misuse our Indwelling Power to withhold and to withdraw. It requires enormous energy to stave off the Universal. It weakens our bodies and splinters our person. We are dying because we refuse to truly live. To cut ourselves off from our feeling nature is to defend against the very forces of creation. When we become open, available, and willing to feel through the veiling that has shrouded our aching hearts, joyfulness beyond comprehension becomes available too. When we commit ourselves to deep intimacy and abiding authenticity, blissfulness of Being becomes our context and our companion. Connection to our hearts is connection to our Souls and to our world. We truly return home to the realm of the One.

When we are authentically connected to our hearts and to our Source, we experience the feeling of Love. Not a thinking concept, but a felt-sense embodied vibration. We are meant to live in an experience of vibrational harmony of In-Sourced Love. If we are not feeling love, we are asleep to who we are. When we move from an experience of contraction and disconnection to one of openness and lovingkindness, a miracle has occurred in our inner-world. Every moment of incarnation is an opportunity to choose the direct experience of unconditional Love. You cannot access that via the mind. Love is not an intellectual construct. It is a passion and a frequency that will overcome you with its intimacy, beauty, honestly, and exhilaration.

We are here to let into the Love. Release the grip of fear and relax into the embrace of Love. Let your heart feel. Let it feel relentlessly and unashamedly. Believe not the interpretations and subsequent stories. Simply stay open and Presence the feeling of Love as it shines into the fear and frees it’s self to be. The return to the heart is the return to the direct experience of unconditional love. Uncomfortable it may be. Yet to reopen the heart is to reignite the passion. And when you reignite the passion you restore your innate possibility.

So come home, my friend. Feel deeply the heart. Feel deeply the content of the moment. Feel deeply the Love. Feel deeply the Source.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

FEBRUARY 2011: HEART UNDEFENDED

There is a song lyric that includes the invitation “love like you’ve never been hurt.” I use the word invitation even though it feels more like a dare. To live and to love like we’ve never been hurt is at once daunting and exhilarating.

We know scientifically and psychologically that small children have a sense that there is something inherently wrong with them by the time they are three years old. Three years old! When our hearts are most tender and open we receive mostly inadvertent messages that who we are is somehow bad, wrong, defective, in need of fixing, shameful, sinful, and even evil. When we are most vulnerable and imprintable our openness becomes emotionally bruised in ways that frequently effect a life time. Our early woundedness has us subtly wincing through relationships, situations, and aspirations. Our then open hearts learn to close in defense, and it often takes a great deal of healing and integration to allow them to consistently stay open even in the face of conflict or rejection.

Though it rarely gets attributed to it, those who suffer defended hearts often surrender their dreams and sabotage their good. They remain in unhappy situations and circumstances long after the urge to leave has been activated. Those with unintegrated bruising often find themselves staying in inappropriate relationships and unfulfilling careers. They attract unjust and even abusive treatment, and they see the successful other as someone who is intrinsically superior to them. There is a tendency to fulfill a self- prophesy of the other shoe dropping, and Murphy’s Law is karmically intertwined in the story fabric of their experiences. They sadly get what they believe they deserve. They love like they have been deeply hurt, and the surface mind dominates a life experience of little intimacy and defensive connection.

And yet these bruised and sometimes aching hearts are the very instruments through which we must direct our love. The defensiveness must be softened if we are to ever experience the depth of love that is at our spiritual core. Vulnerability and intimacy are inseparable. The heart that cannot open to give can never widen to receive. At the level of the Soul we are unidirectional beings. Our volition flows out from center to circumference. We must choose to love. In fact, we live within the love that we are choosing to give. The love that we are experientially receiving is the returning dynamic of the love that is going out from us. The early wounding that appears to happen to us is an illogical balancing of the unintegrated material that we are incarnating to heal. In the face of the deepest hurt, we must choose to love anyway. In the throws of the most aching contraction, we are called to stay open. When we most want to hide, we are Soulfully urged to move forward. When the trigger is touched is when tenderness feels most dangerous. Emergence and evolution is about the heart choosing to remain open through places of past habitual closure. It is not so much loving like you’ve never been hurt as it is developing the capacity to love the self through the hurtful places. It takes an enormous amount of faith to embrace exposure and defenselessness when those have resulted in grief and woundedness. It takes a vigilant resiliency to breathe open the habitual contractions. It demands a new relationship to old wounds to allow the love to flow forward when the imprinting suggests that rejection is the result.

No one can take away my choice to keep my heart open. No one past or present can keep me from giving freely my love. The defensiveness and resistance that used to keep me locked in closure is just too painful. Today I do not love like I’ve never been hurt. I love like someone that has embraced the hurt enough to be able to choose to love anyway. Love is what I am. An open heart is where I dwell. A giving spirit is how I choose to be. When contraction and defense arise, I attend to my heart in a way that allows an opening and a release. And then love is what I choose to give, and love is what I choose to be. As my heart stays open so do my arms and my experience of life. My dreams are restored and my relationships renewed. I am one who has known great hurt and yet chooses to love anyway. And that is a testament to a heart undefended.

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