Moment to Moment - Etty Hillesum

...every moment gives birth to a new moment...

Life courses through one as a constant current in a great

series of moments, each having its own place in the day.

...whenever suffering thrusts itself upon us we must not
avoid it - but accept it.

Does that mean I am never sad, that I never rebel, always
acquiesce, and love life no matter what the circumstances?

No, far from it.  I believe that I know and share the many
sorrows and sad circumstances that a human being
experiences, but.....they pass through me, like life itself;
as a broad, eternal stream, they become part of that stream,
and life continues...

...ought we not, from time to time, open ourselves up to
cosmic sadness?

Your sorrow must become an integral part of yourself.
You mustn't run away from it, but bear it like an adult.
Do not relieve your feelings through hatred, do not seek
to be avenged on all German mothers, for they, too,
sorrow at this very moment for their slain and murdered
sons.  Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself
that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and
courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.
But if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and
instead reserve most of the space inside for your hatred and
thoughts of revenge - then sorrow will never cease in this
world and will multiply...

Etty Hillesum
From: Etty Hillesum - Essential Writings
by Annemarie S. Kidder

Etty was Dutch living in Nazi occupied Netherlands
during the Holocaust, and died in Auschwitz at the age
of 28 or 29. Her writings were taken from her journals.

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
"walking in Divine shoes"

~

May all those observing Hanukkah
find peace in their sorrow...

 

 

A Solemn Journey...

Photo by Martin Stranka

I feel deeply for a world in pain...
I know others of you do too...
A world bound by insanity and ignorance,
hatred and greed;
holding onto racist ideologies,
beliefs of empires of the past,
tattered by time and flamed by delusion.
Volatile violence erupting from darkened minds;
the new "prophets" of a civilization in denial
- uncivil -

burdening others with their detritus; like
robots blindly playing their part in the universal
tick-tock - already dead - lost to false beliefs -
blinded by their own nightmare,
wanting to inflict their pain on others...
Children killing children...
Survivors traumatized for life...

And we - the collective "we" - carry on-
business as usual...

Nothing changes...
And yet - Everything changes...

Life is a solemn journey for many...

Prayers for a broken world...

Mystic Meandering
May 15, 2022
revised May 24, 2022

~

Photo from No Mind's Land

 

 

Feel What You Feel - Fred LaMotte

I don't need you to change me.

Just help me Be
who I am.

It is good
and very good for me
to feel precisely what I feel,
this cloud of grief,
this downpour of despair,
without any names or notes
to self.

Only let me dissolve
in a healing rain
that penetrates all my shadows.
A liquid sliver of sun may arise
on the jagged edge of mourning.

Or not...

Now I can feel everything
because I have tasted
the night.

How a bud bursts, spilling
beauty from its wound.

How the chrysalis shatters,
frees the golden
moth from her season
of uncertainty.
How a single tear
becomes the sky.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

These are difficult times for the Earth and a lot of people 
on the Earth now are suffering. There's a density intensity
on the planet now.  I feel it.  It is difficult to be
"lighthearted" and celebratory when so many people are
suffering.  The Earth itself and the people on it are unsettled,
and many are in darkness within, affecting the whole Cosmos -
the whole order of life.

What brings you to your knees?
What causes you to suffer inside?

What happened to empathy for those who are suffering in our midst?

My neighbor hung himself in his garage over a month ago.  No one
knew he was suffering.  Now his wife suffers.

Those who suffer do not need "fixing."
They need our heart...

_/\_
Namaste

MM

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Turning of the Heart - Matt Licata

[You may be asking] Why, after years or even decades of working
on myself, meditating, praying, surrendering, and going to therapy
can it seem like nothing is changing! Why am I always feeling
disappointed?  When do I reach the end, become fully awakened,
enlightened, totally healed!  When will it change?  Will the
longing ever be fulfilled?

...true 'transformation'...does not always conform to the ways we
thought it would all turn out.  Many discover the 'great liberation'
in the realization that they are not who they thought they were..

...true 'transformation' isn't possible without tending to our
essential vulnerability and the entirety of unfelt feelings and
aspects of ourselves we have kept out of conscious awareness.

It is not possible for us to 'awaken' our live without befriending
all parts of ourselves, calling them all back home into the larger
field of what we are.  It is an attunement to the entirety of what
we are...

Many of us have quite a lot of insight into our embedded patterns
[samskaras and conditioning] and "know" what we need to do
to 'awaken'.  But - despite all the "knowing", fundamental change
can remain elusive.

At some point it might only be a turning of the heart that has the
power and beauty and poetic impact to soothe the cosmic exhaustion,
wounds and pain of an unlived life, where love is revealed to be
the ultimate medicine, which can penetrate the deepest layers of 
our conditioning and felt sense of separation.

We must tend to our turning of the heart through the fire of our 
own direct experience - opening to our pain, our grief, our longing,
honoring the psyche and the soul.  Mere [intellectual] insight
alone will not reveal the deepest layers... instead [they are revealed]
through awareness illumined from within by the heart, by warmth,
and by love.

Matt Licata
from: A Healing Space

~

Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all
the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Rumi

~

Photo - Mysitc Meandering

 

The body knows, the heart knows - Matt Licata

You don't have to fix anyone's problems.  You don't have to save
them, heal them, or get them to take on your favorite metaphysical
beliefs, theories, and techniques.

Just be there with them so that they feel felt and understood.
Bear witness to their own organic wisdom as it re-calibrates,
reorganizes, and emerges.

Listen.  Not only to their verbal narrative but to the somatic
story as well.  To the secret, sensitive language emerging from
their heart.

Bracket your beliefs and systems for a few moments.
Attune.  Enter into the miracle we-space with them, so that
they feel felt.

Extend to them a field of permission where they can go through
their experience without any pressure to heal or to meet some
hidden agenda in order for you to stay close.  Resist the
temptation to "teach" them.  But instead, "reach" them, finally,
by way of the circuitry of empathic immersion.

It's going to be difficult to do this if we are out of touch with 
our own unlived life - with the unmet grief, the unheld sadness,
the unmetabolized rage.  If we have disavowed these visitors -
including through our endless [spiritual] theories and beliefs...

Of course the mind has such a hard time with this.  It just can't
believe it.  What about my theories and techniques and spiritual
beliefs and all of it?  I must convey it all and show them.

But the body knows.  The heart knows. The holy nervous system
knows.

The "other" is not in need of new information, theories, or spiritual
beliefs, but needs and wants and longs for you...  your nakedness,
your tenderness, your raw unfiltered being, your love.

Matt Licata

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
November Rose

 

Hiding The Shadows - Toko-pa Turner

 What if [negative emotions] have something essential
to communicate to us and each other, and the real problem
is the misguided attitude that negative feelings make us less
evolved and need fixing?

In the same way that we hold others at arm's length when they
are too different from us, we avoid the inner encounter with
otherness, excluding anything that doesn't fit the image we've
been building of ourselves.

'Negative emotions' don't cease to exist because we ignore
them.  They just find other ways to express themselves.
Sometimes inappropriately, having confusing crying fits, or
feeling protractedly numb.  Most commonly we slip into 
depression and anxiety...

If not addressed in a person's life, these issues can harden into
ideologies which are then passed through the generations.
When you add to this equation a loud or charismatic leader,
movements like Nazism will be born from the corroborative
fear of otherness.

Most of us have been raised to be moral, good, and agreeable,
putting all of our 'unacceptable' qualities in what Robert Bly
calls "The Long Black Bag" we drag behind us, or what Jung
termed the personal "Shadow."  The Shadow is the place
where everything we have forgotten, denied, rejected, or not
yet discovered goes to live.

When we try to live up to the impossible image of a spiritually
enlightened, knowledgeable, selfless, forgiving, easy-going,
supportive, generous superhuman, the dark side of our nature
just gains in power...

You always have a choice to turn away or to look for redemption
in the shadows.  Sometimes turning away is exactly what you
need in the moment, especially if you're tired from toiling there.
Trust that whatever you decide is the right decision.  Also
know that if the issue being presented has roots, it will still
be there when you're ready to look at it...

We cannot simply remove the Shadow all at once.  It takes
wisdom, courage and forbearance for our shadows to reveal
themselves to us so they can be faced and dealt with gently,
compassionately, and firmly.

Toko-pa Turner
from: Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

This shadowy, sunglass-wearing figure revealed itself in
the grains of the cutting board I recently acquired - wearing
his silly little hat - as if hiding in the shadows behind a
curtain... :)

Invite the Guests In - Rumi & Ostaseski

 This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep through your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi
original title: "The Guest House"
translation by Coleman Barks

~

Suffering is about perception and interpretation.
Our stories about what is happening or did happen
shape our interpretation of it. Invite in what hurts;
sit down with it and get to know it really well.
The only way through suffering is to allow what is
happening.  Turn toward the difficulty to see what
it has to teach you.  You can't make a change until
you first accept the truth of what is.

Frank Ostaseski
from: The Five Invitations

~

Photo: Mystic Meandering

My "Guest" :)

Retrieving Joy - Matt Licata

 Many of us have lost the capacity to access and embody
"positive" experiences, such as contentment, pleasure,
creativity, empathy, and connectedness.

Some of us have even disconnected from the simple
experience of joy, a spontaneous sense of elation at
being alive.  I was once working with a man who was
suffering from depression.  What we discovered during
our time together was how unsafe it was for him to
express joy, how the experience of simple delight
became tangled in his nervous system with danger
and the likelihood of incredibly painful rupture with
critical figures in his life.

There were times we would become aware of his very
simple, childlike causeless joy coming to the surface...
We were able to explore it together.  Slowly and safely.
With no judgment or shame.  Repairing those broken
circuitries of love, empathy, presence and warmth.

Being together in this...he came to see how he had
equated feeling full of life and natural states of delight,
interest, play, and spontaneity with being judged and
rejected.  Over some time, he began to unwind this
organization and was able to slowly re-awaken and
touch the natural joy he had disconnected from at
an earlier time in his life.

To retrieve the lost joyous little boy and girl is an
act of love, really,not only for one's self but for all
of life.

Matt Licata, Ph.D.

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

Personal Note: It may seem strange to post about joy when
so many are still suffering from the ongoing pandemic and
the craziness still occurring in this country culturally, socially,
and politically...  It sometimes feels as if our "natural joy" has
been suffocated by a systemic entropy.  I'm still feeling a bit
unsettled from getting emotionally caught by the violent chaos
and rhetoric, and the realization that what has been, the
"scaffolding" of social order, is collapsing - right before our eyes...

And yet, internal "joy" comes - occasionally - and goes...
In the midst of it all - an unexpected causeless joy...

and with that
Gratitude for living
arises from within...

_/\_

MM

Feel It All - Gina Puorro

 Can you sit with this ocean of grief?
Can you feel the gravity of what is happening
without rushing towards silver linings
or happy endings?

Let the wound bleed a little longer
without running to cauterize it
with certainty and guarantees.
Let the lacerations cut a little deeper
carving lessons of the great mystery
into your flesh
and lean in close
to the pain.

Can you soothe without numbing?

Paint new landscapes with your frayed nerves
as your tongue searches for words
in a language that you have never had to speak before.
Feel the searing truth that nothing is certain
not today
or tomorrow
not the very next breath.
It never was.
But in this moment
we cannot ignore that.
Death sits close right now
we have a front row seat
to the cycles
of living and dying.

Feel the shakiness of your trust
the gnawing fear
the sting of loss
the burning anger
the confusion leaving you gasping
for why
and how
and when will this end?

Dissolve into the stillpoint
beyond thinking and doing
and feel the exquisite ache
of the heartbreaking
heart-opening act
of surrender.

Gina Puorro
April 5, 2020

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

A Delicate Dance - Gina Puorro

 I am feeling stretched, fingertips reaching wide towards the
sharp contrasts of joy and deep grief.  I feel weathered, open,
tired, curious, grateful, regretful, raw.  My body is going from
being an open channel for highly activated sensations to shut
down and hardened, sometimes within seconds of each other.
There have recently been blissful and ecstatic moments, and
moments that tear me apart.  Deep connections and penetrating
aloneness.  I've got a whole bunch of unanswered emails and
texts.  I feel a heightened awareness of the parts of me that feel
deeply wounded..., and all the stories that come along with them.
I'm trying to stay present to what is.  I feel like I am in a state of
unraveling, a grand coming undone that feels both wildly un-
comfortable and buoyant all at once, and I have been fighting
the urge to dig my heels in with defiance and resistance.

It feels as though we are deeply immersed in a season of death,
on the personal and collective levels.  So much dying - systems,
beliefs, ways of being, bodies, all being laid to rest in the cosmic
compost pile.  The phrase 'quality of life' has been coming up
a lot, and I wonder what that truly means - for the living and
the dying...  How does a society that is both grief-illiterate and
death phobic learn to die a good death?  Humans are such
curious creatures, and I fear we too often place ourselves at the
center, forgetting the much wider web we exist in.

I have been finding myself struggling to be open to views
starkly different than my own (sometimes I'm downright
judgmental and angry), which feels at odds with my idea of
who I am and my capacity to be compassionate and
understanding.   I feel like a fraud, like my membership card
 to the 'woke folk' club should be revoked.  I want answers,
 as we all do, and at times my mind spirals into a state of
desperate grasping for them when my body knows they don't
exist, at least not in some static and  definitive way.

I don't know what will happen and where we are all headed...
It feels like a delicate dance...

I feel far from my best right now. 

I pray for the softness required to take each step forward

with grace and humility, and for the bravery to 
dance this life...

Gina Puorro

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

We awoke to snow this morning and saw this leaf caught
in the snow on the front steps - blowing in the wind...

The Guest - Rumi

 This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes as an
unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

"Be There" - Jeff Foster

You cannot truly "be there" for another
until you learn to "be there" for yourself.

Be there.  Be a loving witness
to the extraordinary power that moves through you.
Be there for all your feelings, not just the pleasant ones.
Be there for the grief and anger, too.

The ease and frustration.

Be there for the sorrow, the emptiness and the fullness,
the wildness and the calm, the life and the dying.
Be there for all your thoughts.
The ones you love and the ones you hate.
The ones that scare you and the ones you seek.
Be there as they arise and dissolve.
Stay there as they stay and go.
Be there for the broken heart
and be there for the healed one too.
Be there for the answers,
but don't abandon the questions either.
Be there for the clarity,
but don't neglect the confusion.

Be there for all of yourself.
Like a mother, there for her children.
And you will be able
to be there for all of me...

Jeff Foster

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Feel Your Feelings - Fred LaMotte

[.....]

It is good, it is very good
to feel precisely
what I am feeling,
even grief, and despair.
For when I am completely
what I feel,
there is transformation
and healing.

No darkness left

to penetrate,
for I am all night.
This is how light is born.
This is how the bud
breaks open, spilling
beauty from a wound.
This is how the chrysalis
frees a golden moth
from its season
of uncertainty.
This is how your tear
becomes the sky.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

A Room - Jane Hirshfield

A room does not turn its back on grief.
Anger does not excite it.
Before desire, it neither responds
nor draws back in fear.

Without changing expression,
it takes
and gives back;
not a tuft in the mattress alters.

Windowsills evenly welcome
both heat and cold.
Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.

Doors are not equivocal,
floorboards do not hesitate or startle.
Impatience does not stir the curtains,
a bed is neither irritable or rapacious.

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood -

You are matter, as they are.
See how perfectly it can be done.
Hold, one day more, what is asked.

Jane Hirshfield
from The Lives of the Heart

via The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
digitally altered

Precipice - Fred LaMotte

The bold become themselves.  There is a point in meditation,
if it is true meditation, when you fall off the precipice of practice
into groundlessness...  You can no longer resist the subtle sorrow
in your flesh, that which the Buddha called Dukkha...

You've been carrying it for years, for centuries, the stuff made of
stories about a suffering 'me.'  It is buried deep in the rind of your
body, but neatly packaged in the sterile cellophane called 'spirituality.'

Now the time has come to let the wrapping go.  Be vulnerable to
yourself.  Allow your every distant ache, the brittle anguish of a
 trillion nerves, the  secrets of grief, the worms of rage, the clogging
 undigested waste of blame, this whole discomfort you are, to erupt
 in one magnificent purple blossom of pain, fragrant with the gift
 of tears. Let it flower from the subtle into the gross, gushing
 without name, and without distinction between good and bad,
beautiful or ugly.

It is just Dark Energy, percolating wordlessly out of your molecules,
yet pulsing with photons of fire and swirling suns.  It is holy
destruction and healing, cosmic in scale yet intimate with every
cell of your body.  It is the chaos of possibility.  It is the cleansing
smile of...No Secret Me Any More...
It is pure love, the stuff of your bones.

Be bold.  Let your edges dissolve.  There is no one else in all
the universe for you to become.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

Follow Your Genuine Self - Eric Baret

Fear, rage, love, sadness or any other emotion
with no apparent cause are bursting bubbles in a
boiling magma back to the heart of what is essential.

Lacking in clarity, we link the emotion to a situation,
and allow it to disturb our peace.  In reality, emotion
points to the heart.  When we refuse an emotion we are
simply postponing life.  Emotion is inherently free of
thought or knowledge.  If we remain present to our
emotions, the habit of attributing them to an external
cause will, sooner or later, fall away.

If you meet someone who is at peace, you can feel peace
in their presence.  The important thing is to realize that this
peace you feel is your own emotion as well.....experience
this openness that you experience in the so-called other.
Stay present to it...  What you feel in the other is also
your experience...

You might occasionally go to listen to [a spiritual teacher],
but you realize what you hear to be true on his lips is
your own truth.... 

You must follow yourself when you feel a true emotion.
You might be reading a text by Meister Eckhart and an
emotion arises in you.  Close the book; the text will fall away.
The important thing is the tear sliding down your cheek.  This
is your treasure, your direction, your teaching.  It is what
you must follow, must listen to....

Eric Baret

Via - No Mind's Land

~

There is something that waits and listens for the sound of
the genuine in yourself.  Can you find a way to hear the
sound of the genuine in yourself?  Do you know who you
genuinely are?

Howard Thurman

No Greater Temple - Matt Licata

At times the visitor of melancholy will appear,
arriving from the night world, from the moon,
[the feeling world], not to harm, but to reveal.
A tenderness, a disappointment, a raw achy
uncertainty.  The guide has appeared but wasn't
quite what we thought.  Such is the way of the
heart.  As we are made into dust, the fire is tended.

While it may be tempting to replace the burning
with bliss, the sadhana of disappointment demands
that we listen, to the stories and feelings and whispers,
and longings, and place the shattered pieces on the
altar in front of us.

Even if we cannot love, accept, or transform what has
come, we can always bow.  What this bowing looks
like for each of us will never conform to other's
fantasies and ways; for the map is weaved deep into
our soul alone.

We can fall to the ground and bear empathic witness to
the broken wholeness, to the wisdom shining out of
the human heart, for there is no greater temple.

Matt Licata

Who Are You Without Your Spiritual Story? - Jeff Foster

Please don't talk to me of "Pure Awareness" or
"Dwelling in the Absolute."  I want to see how you treat
your partner, your kids, your parents, your body.
Please don't lecture me about "the illusion of the separate
self" or how you achieved permanent bliss in just 7 days.
I want to feel a genuine warmth radiating from your heart.
I want to hear how well you listen, take information that
doesn't fit your personal philosophy [belief].  I want to see
how you deal with people who disagree with you.  Don't tell
me how awakened you are, how free you are from ego.  I want
to know you beneath the words.  I want to know what you're like
when troubles befall you. If you can fully allow your pain and
not pretend to be invulnerable.  If you can feel your anger yet not
step into violence.  If you can grant safe passage to your sorrow
yet not be its slave.  If you can feel your shame and not shame others.
If you can f**k up, and admit it. If you can say "sorry", and really
mean it.  If you can be fully human in your glorious divinity.
Don't talk to me about your spirituality, friend.  I only want to meet
you.  Know your precious heart.  Know your beautiful human
struggling for the light.  Before all clever words...

Jeff Foster

Rhythm of Sadness...

A deep rhythm of sadness
arises from within...
unexpectedly,
spontaneously,
inexplicably.

It rises even though
I "know"
that before thought and feeling
"I" am Eternal Beingness.

The rhythm of sadness
is not assuaged
with the knowledge
that "I am" That...

It will not be held back
by the sand bags of knowledge,
from the caverns of the mind...

It matters not to
"The Eternal"
that sadness and grief
arise in the mechanism called
"me",
like the tides of the ocean,
rising and falling
in a darkened harbor;
felt not seen...

It is all just held in Its Awareness...

Sadness
is of no consequence
to "The Eternal..."
It just is - sadness
rising and falling,
breathing
through

me

I follow the rhythm of sadness

as it rises through the gut
into the Heart
where it meets
The Rhythm
of

"The Eternal"
and
dissolves
~
~
~

into
rivulets
of energy;
just energy,
decreasing in
intensity.

Only to rise again
another day, or
on the next tide...

Mystic Meandering
Sept. 20, 2015

~

Sadness is not something you need to fix,
cure, or transform.  It need not be healed but held.
You need not shift sadness into some "higher" state or
apply teachings so that it will yield into something else.
For it is complete and pure on its own.

With the fire of awareness and the ally of your breath,
touch your heart...
Go on a journey into the core of the feeling, the sensation,
images and the raw, shaky life that is longing to be held.
And listen.

It is by way of this journey that sadness will be revealed to
be what it is, a bridge into the the universal heart, a messenger
of power, mercy, and fierce compassion...

Matt Licata

Open to the Dark - Fred LaMotte

We don't need to construct a higher self or a happy face that
denies our pain, our world-weary anger, the devastating loss
we may feel this very moment.  We just need to open.

Open to the dark without resistance, breathing every chaffing
grain of sand into the softness of your heart.  Embrace each
jagged edge and splinter of the world.  Open down deep
to the core...

Unconditional vulnerability is invincible strength.  When we
touch our core, the dark broken flower that seemed so
heavy with the toxins of human fragmentation suddenly
blossoms into fragrant wholeness.  Why?
Because we no longer identify with the content of our
awareness, but Awareness itself.

Beneath the fleeting sensations of the world - some pleasant,
some painful - is the continuum of awakening, the clear mirror
underlying its reflections.  Whether the image is terrible or
sublime (or both?), the nature of the mirror never changes:
bottomless clarity, immaculate stillness.

Awakening is not a miracle.  Wide-open awareness requires
no belief, no transformation, no journey.  Yet this mirror
drowns every fleeting shape in the ocean of transparency
and compassion.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance