On Suffering - Kathleen Knipp

 

Life is suffering...

This ubiquitous phrase, the first noble truth of Buddhism, is so
frequently repeated and disseminated throughout mainstream
media that even your uncle who disdains all things esoteric
has likely encountered a variation of it.  Life is suffering.
Many in my entourage are feeling the suffering.  They are
profoundly feeling it.  They keep company with others who
are feeling it.

Of all the teachings passed down through the ages, this message
has endured and become a widely recognized and popular catch-
phrase.

Why? 
 And, more importantly, how might we draw upon it as we face
these challenging times?

Many believe that the cause of their suffering is the destruction of
democracy and the destabilization of the world order.  Is this true?
Is it possible that the current catastrophes have only ripped the scab
off a subtler, root source of suffering?  Might it be that this round of
disasters serves as a compelling place to point a finger?  If that
lunatic were not running the US government (you can choose which
madman) then I'd feel OK.  Remember the early days of the pandemic
when we were all terrified to touch our groceries, no less our loved
ones?  Between then and today, maybe an illness or a death or a 
lost job or relationship took the helm of the suffering ship.

Why do we strive to rid ourselves of suffering?  Why not eradicate
joy?  Why, when, as we learn in Kashmir Shaivism:
 the Totality contains everything - everything, that Consciousness
manifests in an infinite variety of forms, not just the ones we like,
are we certain that "something needs to be done here!"  Why do I
believe life should be any different than it is?
[This is a tough question to ask oneself, especially when suffering.]

We are bound to suffering.  Might we ask ourselves, "What does
suffering actually feel like?"  How is it expressed in me?  Through
me?  Is it a nagging nebulous unsatisfactoriness or more of a
screaming painful certainty that I am in imminent danger?

[Or experiencing a chronic illness, or sudden decline in the body.]

Perhaps we can find a little time each day to sit on our cushion,
or lie down on our mat, or be wherever we are in whatever
position we happen to find ourselves, and we feel into the suffering.
Sense it deeply.  Every nuance of it.  Feel how we reject this
agony.  Sense the tension in our muscles, the knot in the belly,
the clenching of the teeth.  [Feel the anxiety and fear that arise.]
Feel how we protest and blame.  Recognize how we distract or
how we try to rearrange our lives to avoid feeling that which is
inevitable.  [Trying to rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic :]
Engage this practice with curiosity and with love.  
Give it all you have.

Maybe inquire, "Who is feeling this pain?"

For sure, there is fallout from the current political scene.  There is
no denying that the lives of many people have been adversely 
affected, and that, likely, they will continue to be...

.....this human gig is temporary...
this particular set of crises, well, they too will pass.....

Observe with gentleness our very human tendency
to identify with mind and its contents...

[to forget] that it's a never-ending play of Consciousness.

Kathleen Knipp
Pathless Yoga
Non-Dual Teacher
Excerpts from "On Suffering"

[brackets mine]

~

Photo - Art - Mystic Meandering
Light and Dark Vortex

2011

 

Portals to the Soul - Matt Licata

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go through the dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

Stanley Kunitz
The Testing Tree

~

As we move through the second half of life, a new voice will
often emerge, pouring out through our longing, our grief, our
anger, and our disappointment.  A figure from deep in the soul.

To hear and respond to the call, we have to slow down and 
listen through the veil, beyond the noise and density of the
collective...

It takes courage to listen to the soul and to take it seriously.
To cultivate a real devotion to the messages it is sending us.
We are called into this devotional place by way of our
dreams, our study and practices, and through prayer, ritual,
dance, art, creativity, and being a parent, a teacher, a lover,
and a friend (and Caregiver).

It can be a lonely journey at times, if there is no one who can
truly understand us.  We turn to look for the Friend though they
are not there.

But the Friend is near, even if unable to be seen.

Holding and tending this aloneness, and the grief that
accompanies it, lies at the very heart of the process of
 death and rebirth, and the truth that all healing is
relational in its essence.

There can be no unity or oneness without there first being
an experience of separation.  Otherwise, union would have no
meaning.  They co-arise together, where a subsequent union
lays the seeds for a more subtle separation, and then a more
subtle union, and on and on.

Separation and multiplicity are just as holy as oneness and
union; they are equally valid emanations of the Beloved.

There is no end to the depths of the human heart.  We don't
wiggle into some sustained transcendent state where we're
"permanently" awakened, gone beyond the reality that the
Beloved will pull the rug out from underneath us, in order
to draw us nearer, and to reveal more of its essence.

In the end, [The Beloved] seems quite uninterested in our
fantasies of permanent transcendence.

Even as we may yearn to rise above our embodied
sensitivities, emotional wounding, and relational trauma,
on the alchemical path they are the prima materia, the
required matter, and portals into the depths of the Soul.

Matt Licata

~

Vortex Art - Mystic Meandering
2011

 

Feel. Sense. Listen. - Matt Licata

The capacity to mourn and to grieve the death of an old
[perspective/view of life] is the portal to a new life, and one
that so many of us in our contemporary world have lost
contact with.  To go into the broken and to feel, to honor the
shards and shattered pieces of soul, to not pathologize them
and to not  urgently scramble to put it all back together.
For they are holy and complete in their brokenness...

Perhaps they need not to be "put back together," but held
in presence and in love.

In a more subtle way, we may discover a moment which is
"in between" the light and the dark, the known and the unknown,
lunar and solar - an opening into liminal space, where we come
into direct contact with something mysterious and vast...

[We can] train ourselves to recognize this inner space and its
qualities, to trust and listen to its non-ordinary, non-rational
wisdom and allow it to cleanse our perception...

...in this way, as the veil parts just a bit and we begin to lift
out of the collective matrix, we may start to see, in an
embodied, experiential way, that the soul is always speaking 
to us...

This communication will at times come by way of experiences
of beauty, joy, connection, and peace.  Through states of flow,
awe, wonder and pure Being.

But this dispatch from The Beloved from the Soul, will at times
emerge as an eruption of the dark, of the lunar, out of the
underworld and the somatic unconscious, and can be fierce
and untamed.  It doesn't conform to who and what we think we are,
what this world is, what "God", or the Divine is.

[It can express as] a surge of activation in one of our relationships,
out-of-the-blue experiences of depression or anxiety, an
unexplainable symptom in our body, the collapse of the known.

To perceive this also as grace is not easy and will ask everything
of us.  Stay in your body.  Feel. Sense. Listen.
Something important may be emerging, to be illuminated and held,
just underneath the threshold of consciousness.

Step into the unknown, and listen...

Matt Licata

~

Photo by my husband :)

 

Exploring Emotions - Kathleen Knipp

The goal is not to replace one's experience with another...
but accepting the entirety of life...  Be fully present for
what is here - instead of distracting ourselves...
Be intimately with yourself [using] somatic inquiry
into what's being felt and how it expresses itself as
sensation [in the body] getting a sense of what is
felt in the body.

You can also use inquiry to get a sense of what is
really Essential, what is really pulling you to what really
matters for you, using whatever we have as inner resource
or inner sanctuary...  What helps us to feel safe and feel what
is here.  Make the feeling sense as vivid as possible.

Our approach to meeting whatever is present is not aggressive,
but of receiving and welcoming.  What is seeking to be felt -
feel what presents itself.  What is the sensation you are drawn
to repeatedly?  Can you feel it without interpretation?

Let the emotion present itself and meet it.
What does it actually feel like?  Is there a part of the body
where this emotion expresses itself, or does it move around?
If there is no particular emotion present, be with what is here...

Slide behind the emotion, even dive inside, feel it from the
inside without conclusions, explanations, or stories.  Focus on
the sensation and be curious with wide open availability and
fully embodied...

Kathleen Knipp
Excerpts from a Yoga Nidra Meditation

 

The Wound - Maya Luna

Maybe you don't heal 

The wound

Maybe it becomes an

Opening

Where buried truths can finally

Speak

Maybe it's a portal into

An abandoned universe

Crying out to be

Known

Maybe the rip and tear is tilled

Ground

Where fresh creation

Blooms

Maybe it wasn't meant to be

Closed

Maybe its a secret

Well

A blackened vessel

Where power flows

Maybe the raw cut was meant to

Bleed

Vital Medicine into

Thirsty Hearts

Maya Luna

with thanks to No Mind's Land

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
2004

 

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

 

Homecoming - Mirabai Starr

I don't know about you, but I have grown weary of the 
self-improvement project.  The endless quest to uncover
and slay the host of inner demons who have been messing up
my plans for enlightenment, which I have imagined as some
pure land of perfect equanimity in which I hover over my
worldly concerns like a cartoon yogi, forever free from
narcissism and other embarrassing inclinations, reliably
dispensing compassion to the vulnerable, wisdom to the
ignorant, and a kind of sexy psychic luminescence to
anyone who comes into proximity with my purified and
 perfect (no)self.

Matt Licata's compassionate book, A Healing Space...affirms
that each of us has access to 'the outrageous intelligence and
bravery of the broken human heart' and the heart's ability to
return home.

This homecoming, as Matt shows us, is probably not what we
thought it would be when we signed up for the enlightenment
track.  We have been conditioned by our spiritual communities -
whether traditional religious institutions or alternative practice
spaces - to conquer certain feeling states in favor of some 
idealized realm where we are unmoved by these "lower
vibrations"...  Instead, he encourages us to share the truth of
our shattering so that we can become our own alchemists -
and learn to love reality however it is appearing in this
moment.

The ancient alchemists did not view the "base material" - as 
Matt calls our difficulties, our thoughts, our darker feelings
and emotions - to be transcended, but as 'the substance of the
gods' - Sacred, Beautiful and Loveable...  Matt's invitation is
to enter and inhabit those abandoned parts of ourselves and
our unlived lives as holy ground.

It's a revolutionary approach.  Rather than muscle our way
through spiritual disciplines, and therapeutic interventions,
we fall in love with our brokenness and welcome all the
orphaned parts of ourselves home.

Mirabai Starr
from the Forward to
A Healing Space:Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

Matt Licata, PhD

~

Photo from the Internet

 

Dancing In The Fire - Jennifer Welwood

There will always be voices that promise you greatness and glory;
They call out from the worldly marketplace;
They call out from the spiritual marketplace;
They call out from the bigger-better-more marketplace.

Do not buy their false promises, or purchase their ephemeral wares;
What fulfills for a moment is not worth the price of your soul.
There are heights that will lift you,
but not when you try to ascend them;
There are powers that will fill you,
but not when you make them your own.
There are treasures, and there are imitations of treasures.
If you have lost your true gold, at least turn away from the glitter.

Want only what is true.
This will lead you to the well of your deepest sorrows.
Follow the passageway, all the way down;
Become the dark emptiness of your core.
Be still.  Don't measure the waiting.
Be still.  Let the fire show you its secret heart;
A strand of clear light running through you.
Gather yourself there, and the luminous universe opens.

In the vast expanse, fathomless, infinite ocean of light,
lose yourself, and find yourself, and become what you already are.

Jennifer Welwood
Original title "Renunciation"

~

We can descend into the fire of direct experience of our feelings.
It is within the very core of this holy fire, in the alchemical crucible
of the body where the naked, groundless somatic territory of
illumination occurs, where healing emerges, and a new pathway
of love, care and compassion unfolds and illuminates within you.

Matt Licata

~

Art - Mystic Meandering
Woman Whirling in the Fire
(looking from overhead)

Craypas Oils
2012

 

Hey God - John Roedel

John: Hey God.

God: Hey John

John: Grief keeps sneaking up on me.

God: That's because grief is like a ninja.

John: When will it leave me alone?

God: Hopefully never.

John: Um. What?!

God: To grieve means that you have loved.
Grieving is one of the truest human experiences
that you will ever participate in.  It often arrives
without warning - like a late day summer storm -
obscuring the sun and drenching you in a downpour.
It is a gift, isn't it?

John: Uh, no.

God: Grab a pen and write the following four things down.

1) Grief can come and go as it pleases.
You gave it a key to your house at the exact moment you
gave your heart to somebody else.

2) Bereavement is the debt you must pay for having loved.
There is no getting over the loss of a beloved who is now
resting in the arms of endless love.  Grief has no expectation
date.  Despite the passing time, the phantom pain of mourning
is always one memory away from returning.

3) Of all the emotions you face, grief is the by-far stickiest.
It gets all over everything.  Like peanut butter, grief sticks
to the roof of your soul.

4) Grief is like an
afternoon thunderstorm
in late July.

It's the storm
that's always waiting
on the edges
of your most sunny
days to roll
across the horizon
and right over you.

The ghosts of your loved
ones who have died
are the clouds.

The webbed lighting

illuminating the
dark canvas sky is
their reminder to you
that life is just a
brilliant temporary flash
of time.

It's a reminder
to live now.
to be bold.
to be electric.

The pounding rain isn't your tears.
It's the hope of eternal life that
falls on you.

It's that downpour of hope that will
help you grow deep roots in love...

The gale winds
of these storms are
the messages from
those you have
lost to death that
are whispering
to you through the pines
the following psalm:

"It's okay, my love.  Eternity is holding  me.
Death isn't an end.  Death is a threshold.
I'm still here.  I never left.  Love doesn't die.
I remain.  There is no afterlife.  There is only life.
I'm here with you.  Love doesn't die."

It's all such an adventure!

John Roedel
from: Hey God, Hey John
a book about John's simple conversations with God...

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

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

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...

Never Not Broken - Gina Puorro

 These are strange times, sitting in this liminal space between
what was and what will be, a crossroads within both the micro -
and macrocosms.  I have been feeling a deep internal shakeup in
a way that I always do when met with something much greater than
me,  bringing lessons of my insignificance and an opportunity to
shapeshift.  There's  been less than glamorous insights into self;
meeting places of deep tension between my compassion and
intolerance, my flexibility and rigid worldview, my humility and
my desire to be right, my longing for and resistance to change,
where I remain open and where I shut down...  so much friction
between what feels like split personalities living in this body.
And, in the way that friction does, it's making many little fires
in me that need tending, so as not to be snuffed out, or burn me
right down to the ground.

I hear the call of many wise teachers and elders singing similar 
instructions; slow down, get quiet, be still, listen.

What if slowing down and finding stillness has nothing to do with
movement or speed and has everything to do with being completely
broken and not trying to pick up the pieces too quickly.  Rather
than striving for a greater capacity to hold more, aiming for total
incapacitation and surrender instead.  Perhaps it's a good time to
venerate Akhilandeshvari, Goddess of Never Not Broken; I hear
her asking us to sit with the wreckage and feel the sharp pangs of
loss and grief.  No expectations of the future, no instructions for
how to move forward.  A time to hospice ourselves through a good
death, and a long slow process of composting our former selves.

What if getting quiet has nothing to do with turning down the volume,
and more to do with a subtle attunement towards finding the sacred
amidst the noise and chaos.....

Invite the power of disruption that shakes us up and disorients us,
that opens portals, seducing us towards the in-between spaces and
to dance in the wild unknown.  To see creation and destruction as
necessary to each other's survival, and the inherent violence in
what we have named nature.  Let us be students of alchemy and
mischief, and to think and act in unorthodox ways as the wise fool.

Perhaps it is time for deep remembering and reclamation.  To sit
with the many troubles of being alive, to let go of reaching towards
any sort of arrival, victory, or stability, and meet each other in our
differences.  Let's stay shattered a while, and let ourselves spill up
and out of the many containers we have confined ourselves to; never
certain, never permanent, never alone, never not broken.

Gina Puorro

posted May 19, 2020

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

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

Grief as passageway of the Soul - Matt Licata

Grief is not something we "get over" by following pre-prescribed
stages, but a partner that we dance, play, honor, argue and weep
with as the cycles unfold.  It's appearance and the ways it longs
to be tended are unique for each psyche, heart, and nervous
system.

The timeline for this voyage is not knowable by the psychiatric
community, nor by insurance panels, or teachers of spirituality,
but is birthed in the heavens.  To rush, force, or pathologize
the experience of grief is to work against nature.

The grieving process [for all forms of loss] may not have an
endpoint or state of completion in which we come to some final
resolution, where we "finish" and land in some untouchable [more
spiritual] place, free from our embodied vulnerability, somatic
aliveness, and from falling apart and breaking open yet again.

While some may hold this fantasied end state as a goal which
comes about as we "master" [or "spiritualize"] life, the heart is
not interested in mastery.  But in entering the mystery in more
subtle and sensitive ways.

The heart itself is endless, and the visitors of grief may companion
us in their various forms for a lifetime.  Not come to harm, but
to reveal a portal into depth.  Shifting shapes, circulating, and
rotating, as they open and close passageways in the landscape of
the soul.

Grief is not so much a process that we "make it through", but a non-
linear unfolding, shepherd and emissary of the unknown.  It moves
not by way of straight line, but by that of circle and spiral.

Matt Licata

~

It is not an error
that you have been born
 a sensitive human being,
with a tender nervous system
and a heart that is sometimes
broken.

The tenderness there,
the shakiness, the grief...

not an error
to be remedied

or cured...

[or spiritually bypassed]

But a doorway to Essence,
a portal to Life.

Matt Licata

"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

Vulnerability - David Whyte

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or
something we can arrange to do without.  Vulnerability is not a
 choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding
undercurrent of our natural state.  To run from vulnerability is to
run from the essence of our nature.  The attempt to be invulnerable
is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most
especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others.
More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help
needed at every turn of our existence.

To have a temporary, or isolated sense of power over all events
and circumstances is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps
the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human
and especially of being a youthful human, but it is a privilege that
must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with
loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers;
powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we
approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our
vulnerability, how we become more courageous and  more
compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance.

Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of
loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers,
reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of Existence, but never
walking fully through the door...

David Whyte

Excerpt from
Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying
Meaning of Everyday Words

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Suffering is a Womb - Fred LaMotte

...whatever you suffer
is a womb.
Enter it more deeply
and be born.

Sink into groundlessness,
resist nothing,
cling to no self,
and you will know the secret.

The vacuum of space
is not empty.

Your atoms are wider than galaxies...

Each infinitesimal point is
ayin soph, a portal
and a whirling door
to the crystal path that
tangles ever inward.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

~

Photo from the internet