Simply Living...

 I've been revisiting the view that life is a story being lived
by Life ItSelf; That "I" am being lived; that we are the living
story of Life.

Life lives the story of "me" that I've identified with all these
years, and believed, for a while at least, that "I" needed to be
"enlightened" - and have once again returned to the sense
that "I" am simply living.  Just Being.

In this there is an internal "letting go" - or "giving up" - or
some would say "surrender"...  And as a wise friend explained:
"In that, an ancient tension and stress is released.  And in the
deepest instance of 'giving up', even the somatic aspect of our
being feels a tremendous relief, and a Serene Emptiness where
a contraction had formerly been felt; as much in our physical
body as in our subtle energetic nature.  Struggle ceases, no longer
driven by the engine of dissatisfaction with 'what is', with 'how
we are.'  No longer driven by the engine of self-judgment and 
self-qualification, by the desire to be better or worthy, or
finally 'understanding', or the desire for
'enlightenment.'"

~

There is only the immediacy of the current experience -

just living that experience, whatever that experience is,
whether it is one of joy, or sorrow and grief, however it
unfolds, without the sense of a "self" striving for something
"better", or to do anything to improve it, or to create
strategies to become "enlightened;"  the struggle of the "self."

Everything is allowed...

"Enlightenment" is just untangling what you believe to be
true - your belief constructs.  Just live life intuitively,

with no strategies for "awakening."  Don't get trapped in
the mind, or try to figure out how to play the game.

"We", the "Beingness" that we are, just experiences 
whatever is occurring without a framework of time,
or reference point, or concept...

It's just Life being - life!

It is Existence experiencing ItSelf as "me", or "you" -
as an occurrence within ItSelf...

Simply Living...

We, as waves of the Ocean of Existence, are continually
occurring - unfolding fluidly, seamlessly, reverberating
through the concept of time, and is what the wrinkle of
time happens in - the Timeless Ocean of Existence.

And so the realization seems to be that we simply
recognize Life living ItSelf as us...

...Simply Living

As we are...

Our Natural selves...

Now if I could only remember this...  :)

_/\_

Mystic Meandering

~

photo taken by my brother
Sunset over the Parker River in
Newbury, MA

Unfolding Spirals of Grief - Matt Licata

 Art by Joe Maccer at Deviant Art

Tending to grief is the essence of....providing a sanctuary and
safe passage for its unfolding - in the body, the psyche, and the
nervous system - which requires that we fall to the ground,
at times, and weep.

Weep for our shattering [collective and personal], for the dying
of a dream, for the  entirety of the unlived life.  For it is these tears
 that form the substance of the portal of joy. [Rebirth].

Grief is not something we "get over", but a partner we spin
with, honor at times, argue with at others, and lament with as
the cycles of our lives unfold.

We live in a world that has lost contact with the holy waters of
reorganization.  But to marginalize the experience of grief is
to work against nature.  Out in the natural world, the earth grieves
by way of her seasons.  We can feel that grief in a rain drop, if
we allow ourselves to be taken apart and put back together.

There is no endpoint to this restructuring, no final state of
resolution where we land in some untouchable place, free from
our embodied vulnerability, our somatic aliveness, and from
more burning.

Rather, we find ourselves in what the alchemists call the rotatio,
the holy rotation of vast cycles of rupture and repair that touch
and open the human soul.

The soul is endless and the visitors of grief may companion us
for a lifetime.  But the grieving, orphaned ones of the psyche
and soma come not to harm, but to reveal.  And to open a
doorway into wholeness, mercy, and light.

Grief is not so much a process that we "make it through" and 
come out the other side fully intact, but a non-linear transforming
midwife of the unknown.  It moves not by way of straight line,
but by that of circle and spiral.

Matt Licata, PhD

A Time of "Dying"...

 Photo - David Peters

A time of "dying",

dying to the entanglements of this world;
to the demands of this world;
dis-mantling the attachments;
untangling the knots...

A time of "dying".
to self-image;
the loss of the structure of identity;
of expectations of how I hoped life would be,
how I would be -
Yet grateful for the way it is...

A metaphorical "death",
an internal "death";
the death of perceptions,
perspectives, beliefs and preoccupations -
only shadowy characters in the play.

Feeling the loss of my own "death" already,
my self-made identity - loosening its grip;
the decline in faculties of mind and body -
losing their functions...

Something in us knows
when we hear the haunting echo of birds
singing at dawn - "waking" you up -
that something inside is "dying"...

Yet, I welcome this "death",
this "release";
the release of physical tension,
the mind's mentations,
and the ache of the heart.

And possibly an opening
into a Great Transition;
a Rebirth into
the Rhythm of
the Grand Mystery
of the Universe...

Mystic Meandering
April 23, 2021

Simple Life - J.Krishnamurti

 Simple life does not consist in the mere possession of a few
things but in the freedom from possession and non-possession,
in the indifference to things that comes with deep understanding.
Merely to renounce things in order to reach greater happiness,
greater joy that is promised, is to seek reward which limits it
and prevents it from flowering...

To control thought-feeling for a greater reward, for a greater
result, is to make it petty, ignorant and sorrowful.  Simplicity
of life comes with inner richness, with inward freedom from
craving, with freedom from acquisitiveness, from addiction,
from distraction.  From this simple life there comes that
necessary one-pointedness which is not the outcome of
self-enclosing concentration, but of extensional awareness
and meditative understanding.

Simple life is not the result of outward circumstances;
contentment with little comes with the riches of inward
understanding.  If you depend on circumstances to make
you satisfied with life then you will create misery and
chaos [for yourself and for others], for then you are a
plaything of environment, and it is only when
circumstances  are transcended through understanding
 that there is order and clarity. To be constantly aware of
the process of acquisitiveness, of addiction,
of distraction, brings freedom from them

and so there is a true and simple life.

J. Krishnamurti
from The Collected Works Volume III Ojai
8th Public Talk 2nd July, 1944

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Essence of who you are simply exists - Rosacker

The body is a bio-organic sensing vehicle that *you*
are experiencing. It's designed to feel feelings and
have thoughts and experience emotions and have
experiences; all of which are temporary.

Everything in the physical dimension has a 
beginning, a duration, and a completion.

It is temporary...

The Essence of Being is not temporary...

There is This that you are,
that is non-physical, that remains as it is
unaltered and unharmed;
will always be eternal existing Presence.

The Essence of who you are simply exists...

You have always been This -
the continuum of existence is you,
not limited to a body.

Excerpts from "Living Practice"
a guided meditation
by Mitch Rosacker
of Self Discovery Studio

~

Photo Mystic Meandering

 

At the Core of Being...

At the very Core of Being
there is complete stillness,
a dynamic Stillness of Being

~

Just Being

There is utter awareness
of all life, all existence,
not as form,
but
the felt sense of the
ISness of Being ~

of Life

~

Living

~

In the Silence of
this dynamic Stillness
one is aware of
to cocooning hush
of The Mystery,
of Primordial Existence
that holds the unmanifest
in the comfort of
Its Womb

before its birth
into form

~

In this Stillness
the rhythmic Breath

of the Cosmos
pulses like
waves

~

The originating Cosmic energies
of an Alive Cosmos
generate themselves
into existence
spiraling outward
from the
Core ~

giving birth to itself
through spiraling open its petals,
blossoming into time and space

~

All Existence is at
the Core of our Being ~

In every atom, every cell...

We are the living Cosmos...

~

Existence lives ItSelf,
in a perpetual unfolding of Life ~

The Core of Being birthing ItSelf

in and as us ~

The unmanifest manifesting
the formless into form ~

~

At the Core of Being

there is only

Aliveness
Stillness
Silence
Peace
Love
Life

It is who we are...

~*~

Namaste
_/\_

Mystic Meandering
Meditative Writings

Feb. 12, 2015

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Dissolve - Fred LaMotte

Rosette Nebula - From: The Invisible Universe
by David Malin

 Stars dissolve into a rose. A rose dissolves into stars. Ask Dante.

The solution is dissolution.  What dissolves?  Separateness.

I am not my skin color.  I am not my tribe.  I am not even my
gender.  I wear these veils and garments, just as I have a red
shirt or a Yankees cap on: but they are not my Self.

Nor am I my political party, my nation, or my religion.  And I
am not my ancestors.  These are marvelous incidents, but not
my Essence.  The core of my existence is prior to labels,
identifications, masks.  Yes, I enjoy wearing them, dancing in
them, playing in their forms.  I need not renounce them,
because they were never really "mine" to begin with.  In deep
meditation, these forms dissolve like the dreams they are.
Then I Am.

In deep meditation, the core of existence reveals itself as the
One who cannot be divided into races, tribes, religions, parties,
yet who plays in them all as light playing in a kaleidoscope.
The revelation transcends thought and imagination.  It is the
Self-image of the Imageless.  Groundless, brilliant, empty, it
is nowhere and everywhere.  It is the Holy of Holies.

Emerging from meditation, I need no longer look for that place.
I look from that place.  Then it is impossible to identify any
color or creed, any political or spiritual movement, as "me."
I am simply who Am.

The verb "Am" is solid as a diamond, boundless as the sky.
Who needs to say, "I Am a man, I Am a liberal, I Am a Buddhist,
I Am a white or a black?  Not I.  Just Am.  Those labels of
identity make the mind small.  No noun, no-thing, ever really
follows the verb To Be.

Fred LaMottte
Uradiance

Heaven's Wrinkle - Susan Tweit

 Looking at the heavens places me in time and space - and beyond
them.  Gazing at the stars, I look through heaven's wrinkle; the
light I see now represents their past, having traveled many years
across space to reach my eyes here on earth; the light they are
emitting now will be visible only in some future, years away.

I and all the other lives on Earth are connected to the stars, held
together by gravity, the invisible glue that defines our universe,
and bound elementally by a common material: stardust.  This
atomic grit of interstellar space paints dark clouds on the Milky
Way, condenses itself into swirls of gravity-bound suns and 
planets, and provides the minerals bounded by the push and pull
of electrical charges into the molecules that form our cells.  Like
stardust and other materials of life itself, we are in constant
motion, changing shape as we pass through our lives, and after
the makings of our bodies break down and are recycled,
rearranged into other forms of life.  The stars remind me of
where I come from and who I am.

Susan J. Tweit
from -Walking Nature Home

with thanks to Beyond the Fields We Know
for post and incredible photo!

The River - Khalil Gibran

 It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing the forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there  seems nothing more than to disappear, forever.

But there is no way back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that's where the river will know
it's not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

Khalil Gibran

with thanks to No Mind's Land
for post and photo

The Cosmic Dance...

 I have conversed with the Universe,
contemplated and cogitated,
ascended and descended,
polarized, conceptualized and spiritualized;
dis-membered and re-membered -
and still, I find no -
"plan"...

Only vastness and immensity,
beyond theory, framework and perception.
The Greatest, Grandest Mystery
in an ever unfolding nebula,
procreating itself in billowy clouds
and golden streams of stardust
in and endless infinity...

A golden thread weaves through space
without beginning or end, through
the Silence beyond creation, through
Sound beyond sound, and
Light beyond light...

Matchlessly weaving its Eternal vibration
through timelessness,
into time and times beyond time,
with one theme braided into its
unending spiral
through dimensions,
distortions, and
dysfunctions...

~ Love ~

From this divine, mysterious weave
we dance the dance of duality,
complete in our light and our dark
within a vast Cosmic Love
of Divine Embrace...

Mystic Meandering

1999

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

20-Watts of Energy - Robert Lanza

 Many of us fear death.  We believe in death because we
have been told we will die.  We associate ourselves with
the body, and we know that bodies die.  But a new
scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal
event we think.

One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain
observations cannot be predicted absolutely.  Instead, there
is a range of possible observations each with a different
probability.  One mainstream explanation, the "many
worlds" interpretation, states that each of these possible
observations corresponds to a different universe (the
'mutliverse').  A new scientific theory - called biocentrism -
refines these ideas.  There are infinite number of universes,
and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some
universe.  Death does not exist in any real sense in these
scenarios.

All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of
what happens in any of them.  Although individual bodies are
destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling- the "Who am I?' -
is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain.

But this energy doesn't go away at death.  One of the surest
axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be
created nor destroyed.....

The linkages between the various histories and universes
transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time.
Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting
either this or that result onto a screen. .....it's still the same
battery or agent [source] responsible for the projection.

According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard
objects we think.  Wave your hand through the air - if you
take everything away, what's left.  Nothing.  The same thing
applies for time.   Everything you see and experience
right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind.
Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything
together.

Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world.  In the
end, even Einstein admitted, "Now Besso (an old friend) has
departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.  That
means nothing.  People like this...know that the distinction
between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion."  Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual
existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of
time altogether.

After the death of his son, Emerson wrote: "Our life is not
so much threatened as our perception."

Robert Lanza
Excerpt from The Huffington Post - Dec. 8, 2009

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Create Silence - David Whyte

 The object in meditation and all of our contemplative
disciplines is silence.  But...  that silence is in order for
you to perceive something other than yourself -
what you've arranged as yourself to actually perceive
this frontier between what you call your self and what you
call other than your self,  whether that's a person or a landscape.

One of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence
through attentive speech - speech that says something in
such a way that it appears as a third frontier between you and
the world, and invites you into a deeper and more generous
sense of your own identity and the identity of the world...

Poetry is the verbal art-form by which we can actually create
silence...

Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard
of fixed identities.  Real silence puts any present understanding
to shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond the
well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the
unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about
to break in upon our lives.

In silence, Essence speaks to us of Essence itself and asks
for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential
nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery
atomizes and falls apart.

As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation
through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability,
revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive
eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion,
and belonging to a different person than the one who first
entered the quiet.

David Whyte
Poet
from - Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and
Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Photo by Aaron Burden

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

The Celestial Symphony...

 The Cosmos plays a continuous symphony of Silence
that only Inner Stillness can hear...
We have forgotten the music of the
Celestial Songs
that sound the stellar light language of 
Love ~

Our remembrance lies hidden deep in
the cave of the Heart - untouched...

The unspoken language of the Heart
longs to be opened - awakened...
The dormant vibration calls to us,
to resonate with the tones of Creation

in the Space of Silence ~

Listen deeply and hear the
Celestial Symphony
within the Stillness
of the Heart ~

Follow the cosmic waves,
the pulsing sound of Life,
into the Vastness
of Silence ~

Find your own resonance
with The Rhythm
in your Heart ~

~ and know ~

we are all a tone of Love
playing our uniqueness in the 
Chord of Life,
reverberating with the
Sound of Source ~

Mystic Meandering
August 1, 2001

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Mandala Art digitally altered

The Silent Self - Thomas Merton

 There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing
precisely because it is so silent: it can't be spoken.
It has to remain silent.  To articulate it, to verbalize it,
is to tamper with it, and in some way to destroy it.

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which
is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this
inner, silent self.  We live in a state of constant semi attention
to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise
of what goes on around us all the time.
This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words,
a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted;
we are not quite "thinking", not entirely responding, but we
are more or less there.

We are not fully present and not entirely absent,
not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available.

It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything
and we may in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and
resentment.  Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague 
sense that we are "part of something"...

Although we are not quite able to define what that something
is...  and probably wouldn't want to define it even if we could.

We just float along in the general noise.
Resigned and indifferent,
we share semi-consciously in the mindless mind of Muzak
and radio commercials which pass for "reality."

Thomas Merton
from Love & Living

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~ 

Photo - Mystic Meandering

This little tulip (maybe 6"tall") is growing
in a planter tub amongst the weeds - 
the "silent self" amongst the "noise." :)

Have no idea how the bulb got there!

The Totality of Experience - Shinshu Roberts

 ...As soon as we return to the totality of this moment's complete
expression, responding to the whole of our situation, we are
not caught by anything.  Even though we are still subject to
the repercussions of our past actions, we are free to
respond skillfully in the present moment/situation.

If we have been rude to someone in the past and that person
is wary of us [or if they have been rude to us], our total
participation in this moment of meeting that person will not
necessarily take away the effects of our past meeting.  What
it will do is free us to respond skillfully in this situation.
Since we are not caught by "piled up" or overlapping
experiences, we are freed to enact the new paradigm of 
[seeing the whole of the situation] and being present for
the next opportunity...

Holding on to a past mistake will often hinder your ability
to respond skillfully in the present, although you still file
away your mistake and make adjustments.

Our understanding of self can become a fixed idea of
accumulated ["piled up"] traits and experiences.  The self
 is both independent and the totality of all being-time.  We are
no-self and a particular self at the same time, caught by
neither and more than both.  [This] realization is not
predicated upon a particular set of circumstances.
Realization is present in each moment.
Realization is each moment.

Shinshu Roberts
from an article on Dogen in Insight Journal
from Barre Center for Buddhist Studies

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

You ARE Life! - Don Miguel Ruiz

 Your are Life,
passing through your body,
passing through your mind,
passing through your soul.

Once you find that out, not with logic, not with the intellect,
but because you can feel that Life, you find out that you are
the force that makes the flowers open and close, that makes
the hummingbird fly from flower to flower.

You find out that you are in every tree, and you are in every
animal, vegetable and rock.  You are that force that moves
the wind and the wind breathes through your body.

The whole universe is a living being that is moved by that
force, and that is what you are.

You cannot lose life.
You are Life.

Don Miguel Ruiz

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Living the Fantasy of Becoming - Jim Harrison

 Nowhere is it the same place as yesterday.
None of us is the same person as yesterday.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.

This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the winds, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter.  But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

We whirl with the earth, catching our breath
as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained
except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.

Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

Jim Harrison

from: Saving Daylight

with thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

"Only the rocks live forever."

James Michner
from - Centennial

 

Mystical Fog...

 

Unable to sleep, I pattered down to the living room
at 3:45 am and was surprised to find fog out the
window.  I haven't seen fog in a very long time...
I grew up in New England, but have lived in semi-
arid Colorado for more than 40 years.  There's not
often fog here...  So what a delight to find my
child-like wonder again! - on a sleepless mystical foggy
night; falling in love with the simple beauty and
magic of nature in the wee hours...

Here's a different view out the back window.
The chimney on the house behind us looks like
a lighthouse. :) A matter of perspective I know... 

And here I inverted the color for even more magic... :)

~

Regard everything as fantasy...

Regard everything as transparent...
See through everything...

See that everything is in transition...

Liberate concepts and beliefs...

Let go of the need for an "answer"/solution...

Rest in the nature of Essence ~ the Primordial
State of everything...

Be a child of fantasy...
Be curious instead of afraid...

Pema Chodron
Buddhist teacher

The Great Transition - Matt Licata

 In the current global environment.....as we navigate this
period of great transition, while we don't know exactly where
we're headed, we can slow down and prepare for what is 
coming next by deepening our wisdom and compassion,
both for ourselves and others.

By turning toward the Soul, the Heart, the Self, and attuning
to its intelligence and guidance, we can recommit to our
unique path of transformation, and remember what is
most important.

Each of us is called in our own way towards a life of
wholeness, purpose, and meaning, and we each have our
own hurt, pain, grief and wounding to tend to.

We affect, and are affected by, those around us.  We are
affected by life everywhere.  We come to this life with
unique gifts, and ways of engaging The Mystery.

We have all been wounded and the path of seeing our
wounds as initiation is one that is as old as recorded
history.  It is not an easy path, but one that is imbued
with mercy, grace, and a certain poetic beauty.  It is a
path of courage and kindness...

It is essential that we honor our unique sensitivities and
eccentricities and open to the possibility that even our
deepest wounding may be filled with guidance,
medicine and meaning.  [It is essential] to recommit
to the path of [the Soul], to embodied transformation
and healing, to participate consciously and access the
alchemical gold  at the core of our wounds as a gateway
to a life of deeper meaning, connection and aliveness.

Matt Licata, PhD

~

Photo from the internet

Emergence - Paul Levy, Betty Kovacs, & Andrew Harvey

 Humanity has become affiliated with a mysterious
psycho-spiritual disease of the Soul - the virus of the mind.
The very source of madness is to be found within the
unconscious psyche of humanity.  There is a fissure, a
primordial dissociation, a split deep within - a state of
fragmentation deep within the collective unconscious.

We are truly living in dark times where the darkness is
emerging from hiding in the shadows and is becoming
visible...  Confronting the darkness and viewing the
collective nightmare [requires looking] through the 
mystical lens of our intimate connection with the Divine.

We are currently living contrary to our innate creative
impulses, out of integrity with our Soul, [which has]
created a collective insanity/madness that we are
playing out.

What the world needs is for each of us to have the
courage to follow our calling, step into our true vocation
and share our creative gifts with the world such that we
co-inspire each other.

When intense darkness manifests within an individual's
process it can potentially lead to an emergence of an
unknown light within that person of which they are
previously unaware...

Paul Levy
from the Forward in Radical Regeneration by
Andrew Harvey

~

The first darkness we have to face, is the story we've
been telling ourselves about ourselves.  We have become
addicted to a story that now has the power to negate the
entire world.

Betty Kovacs
Merchants of Light

~

Because we may well be standing on the threshold of a new
story that is destined to emerge, we must open to the crisis
that makes its emergence possible.  Staying open and vulnerable
to exploding suffering and danger on every level demands
everything from us.  The industrial civilization has become
intoxicated with itself.

Andrew Harvey
from - Radical Regeneration

~

"Thinking" is the story we tell ourselves
about our world, about our experience,
about our existence, running scenarios in
the mind of the way it "should" be or
shouldn't be - how it will play out -
in our heads...

"If you touch one syllable of that story
you will suffer."

I touched the syllable
It's torture
I suffered

Mystic Meandering
April 18, 2021

With thanks to Mitch Rosacker
of Self Discovery Studio
for the quote: "If you touch one syllable
of that story you will suffer."

~

Art - Mystic Meandering
from a larger piece
2012

Accepting the Seasons of the Heart - Kahlil Gibran

 Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart
may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily
miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less
wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of the heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass
over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters
of your grief...

Kahlil Gibran

With thanks to Death Deconstructed

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The Path of the Wounded - Matt Licata

 Many of us on the ["spiritual path"] have been wounded -
physically, emotionally, or at a soul level.  Whether this 
wounding takes form by way of relational trauma, or
through personal betrayal, it has a way of coloring our
perception and affecting our capacity to feel safe.

Our increasingly speedy and fragmented culture has 
pathologized valid human experience, such as grief,
melancholy, anger, and uncertainty, giving rise to a
psychiatric and self-help community determined to
"cure" or "transcend" dimensions of the psyche that
contain important (and even holy) data for our unique
 paths of creativity and meaning.

For some, this occurs only by way of transition, dissolution,
and loss, through an embodied confrontation with the
unconscious and the unlived life.  These experiences are
not signs of error or mistake, but calls to depth and
evidence of how our wounding can serve a function.

At times, deeper "healing" will require that the wound
disclose itself in more subtle ways within the psyche and
the body, where it can seem like things are getting worse.
Tending to this organic unfolding of the healing process
requires newfound levels of courage, patience and trust.

It is not an easy life/path - one that we do not choose
consciously....  It requires that we walk in this world
against the grain and remain open to further wounding
 and revelation of shadow, and dare to consider the
radical possibility that the ally will appear in infinite
ways.  Not to harm, but to reveal.

Even though it may seem as if we are alone - and in
part we must walk this path by ourselves - we are never
truly alone, as unseen helpers, friends, and companions
are always nearby...

Matt Licata, Ph.D.

From the Path of the Wounded Healer

~

The wound is the place where the light gets in.

Rumi

~

Photo taken by my brother

Still Mind - Hazrat Inayat Khan

 Where is the voice of "God" [The Sacred] heard?  In silence.
The seers, the saints, the sages, the prophets, the masters,
they have heard that voice which comes from within by
making themselves silent.  I do not mean by this that because
one has silence one will be spoken to; I mean that once one is
silent one will hear the word, which is constantly coming from
within.  When the mind has been made still, a person also
communicates with everyone he meets.  He does not need many
words: when the glance meets he understands.  Two persons
may talk and discuss all their lives and yet never understand
one another.  Two others with still minds look at one another
and in one moment a communication is established between them.

Where do the differences between people come from?  From within.
From their activity.  And how does agreement come?  By the
stillness of the mind.  It is noise which hinders a voice that we hear
from a distance, and it is the troubled waters of a pool which hinder
us seeing our own image reflected in the water.  When the water
is still it takes a clear reflection; and when our atmosphere is still
then we hear that voice which is constantly coming to the heart
of every person.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Sufi Teacher, Poet and Musician

with thanks to No Mind's Land
Photo also via No Mind's Land