#6 Are you meditating?

Dear friends, I am away on retreat, so this will be brief.

As we venture into this tender territory of religious hurt, and we must find our way to the living  presence, the taproot of all genuine spiritual wisdom. It is not enough to get discover and understand the real hurt, betrayal, and numbing. Our souls longing cannot and must not be set aside in cynicism, despair, resignation, giving up, that comes from spiritual and religious wounding. We must see through this and reclaim our living presence. We must open ourselves up to the living truth so that we can know for ourselves the nourishment, love and wisdom that rises up through the taproots and veins of all sacred wisdom. 

So in a way we are on an archeological dig. It is not easy, especially because the betrayal of churches, ministers, gurus, superego laden theology runs deep. Even if we were not directly wounded we have taken in thousands of years of ignorance, misunderstanding and violence done in the name of Truth. So as we peel away at layers of confusion, damnation, and hurt, humiliation and betrayal of what is most sacred,  we need to be ever so gentle. We need to feel the support of our grounded presence, our shared need for sacred space. We need to watch for the return of the superego manifesting as god, Jesus, the Buddha, the goddess. 

One way to support this exploration is to keep returning to your practice of becoming present. Not only during meditation-- are you meditating?-- but during our daily lives. Especially when life is simple and ordinary. When you are in crisis and  triggered it is not easy to remember to breathe, to feel your feet, and to find your belly center. Your emotions, your nervous system are caught in well heeled brain storms. So practicing presence during meditation, while you are brushing your teeth, walking down the alley in the supermarket, eating a donut.... are ways to remember to come back to your embodied now. Eventually with much practice, self remembering becomes natural. And even then hours, even days can go by when we get lost. The mercy is that our willingness, our best efforts are enough. Coming back over and over is enough. Perfection is not only impossible but a barrier to presence.

Wishing you all very well from 8500 feet in the Rockies. See you on Monday 29th.Alison 

playlist session 5

Kyrie. Robert Glass. On wings of song.

If it be your will. Antony

Pie Jesu Sarah Brightman

Dank sei dir, Herr. Barbra Streisand. Classical Barbra

The image of God/Holy and Mystery

Dear friends. Last night we took on God/Holy. All in the space of a few hours!!! 

We began by exploring our experience of the God in your history. Many of you spoke of the terrifying, punishing images of God that were passed onto your through church and even your parents. God was remote, cruel, stalking, watching your every move. So you tried very hard to be very good to avoid hell or punishment. And this was impossible. Some of you spoke about the confusion about God. "Do what I say not what I do". Some of you spoke about the absence of God. Others of you described how the image of God lives in the extreme from loving connection to damnation. Others spoke about the God of childhood, the white male surrounded by children. For all of you it seemed that you have found over time some crack in these images of God. Perhaps by calling God by another name, or leaving God behind, leaving official religion behind and finding spiritual practices and teachings elsewhere. Some of you have discovered with that with age God, the Holy becomes more and more unknowable.

We then moved into the  mystery of God/Holy.  We discussed how any image any idea, any concept, even any emotion about God are ultimately simply beliefs stored in our brains from the past. The mind is built to create images, to turn experience into concepts, to create memories. It does so in a split second. So whenever we have a taste of God, the mind will inevitably say something like" Ah thats it. I got it!" Now it is mine. I can keep it, talk about it, write great spiritual treatises about it, teach it. Nothing wrong with any of this. It is what we humans do when we discover something important and precious. We turn the experience into a memory, into an idea or concept. We can't stop this. The brain is wired to do this. And it is incredibly useful. The problem arises when we confuse the concept of God, the memory with the living experience. And since the idea, the felt sense  of God started before we can remember, and is the imprint of the powerful authority of our parents, we unconsciously associate God with all kinds of beliefs and ideas that having nothing to do with the mystery of God, the Holy. Some people call this making God into an idol. So we end up worshipping the idol, the concept, the belief, rather than the mystery. Notice how the mind will even try to concretize mystery!

It is important to see that in the scientific world of no god, then rationality, the scientific method becomes  God. All can be known rationally and eventually proved and verified. This makes it very difficult for those of us coming from secular, atheist background. Not only is God dead, actually God never existed, but there can be no opening to mystery because it cannot be known scientifically. Mind you many atheists I have known live in awe and wonder at this creation and love deeply. But they would never call this spiritual.

God is known directly through experience, through the touch of divine consciousness, not through a microscope or telescope. It is our souls that slowly discover through repeated openings the mystery of the unfolding holy through the course of this precious life. This is the mercy of grace. In the meantime we have our work to do. We need to clear the soul of the beliefs, ideas, distortions  from our histories and  the superego. This is a process. Gradually the soul becomes clarified and it becomes clear, transparent, sensitive enough to be receptive to the touch of grace, to this mystery of God and the Holy. By practicing presence and by understanding our not so conscious assumptions about who we are and what we believe, the soul becomes transparent enough to receive the light of revelation. 

So you can see that not knowing is an important and necessary opening for mystery. And yet many of us are very ambivalent about not knowing. We use knowing to decide whether we are stupid or not. We use knowing as a way to be secure and to be in control. We use knowing as a way to be successful. Knowing is important. But knowing is useful to fix the plumbing or to the discover the Higgs Boson! We learn all the time. The problem is the kind of knowing at the spiritual level is different from our usual mind's way of knowing. Some people call this knowing gnosis, direct revelation,  or divine intuition. This is profound knowing and it only arises out of the emptiness of not knowing. Not knowing is an open, awake and receptive mind. Ever had a moment in the shower or walking down the street, when the light goes on, and in a flash you know something deeply. Often it feels like the stars line and there is deep alive understanding. That is gnosis. ! And it seems to come out of nowhere! 

For many of you, our last time together was difficult and tender. Not surprising when you think about the images of God that we carry around.  You can anticipate that the superego will put up a fight and try to beat you back into your conventional beliefs conforming to what you learned about God years ago. So take care of yourselves. Ground yourselves, meditate, and most of all banish the superego.

Next Monday we will be holding Spirit Singing with Kath Roos. I hope you will join us. This is a precious way to enter into a celebration of presence. And you don't need to be a great singer. 

Our next session of practicing presence will be October 29th. Hope to see you all then.  

This and the playlist is posted on: practicing-presence.blogspot.com

Take care and in peace. Alison

playlist session #4

Lux Aeterna, Requiem, Simon Rutter. Cambridge Singers

Incantation, Deva Premal

Spiritual Superego and Strength

Dear Friends. During our last session we focused on the spiritual superego. This is about our relationship to authority modeled on how we experienced the authority, bigness, godlikeness of our parents. As a toddler looking up at our parents they are literally big and powerful. We are so small and dependent that we need to be able to look up at Mummy and Dad and see them as omnipotent, larger than life. Assuming that our parents were good enough their bigness makes us feel safe and secure. We all look up at to them in a kind of worship. "This is my Mummy and Daddy and they are the best in the whole wide world." In fact we often brag to our little friends about how wonderful and big our parents really are. Some of don't have this possibility, when we look up, we feel fear, dread and even terror. So we learn to shrink, hide. Some of us will fight to win some love, some truth, some safe place. But the fight ultimately is hopeless. Our parents hold all the power. There can be no real victory.

In either case, whether we look up in worship or we look away in fear, the image of our parents is our first imprint, our template for our relationship to authority.

So as we enter into spiritual or religious life; we join a church, or a spiritual circle like ours we will be exposed to spiritual teachings. We will be directed to holy books, dogma and spiritual wisdom. This is big stuff to the little one inside us. Thousands year of wisdom written down. Powerful words expressed by the Guru or the teacher. Anytime we are confronted with an external authority the early template of our relationship to the authority of our parents will rise up. And inevitably spiritual teachings will be co-opted by the superego, in this case what we are calling, the spiritual superego. So the teachings become about being perfect student, devotee, church goer; diligently following the rules; offering up endless self sacrifice. Or we may feel like a failure, unable to live up to the standards, and expectations of the spiritual superego. How many people walk away from  churches, spiritual communities, defeated, deflated? 

Our relationship becomes one of a child to a coercive or seductive authority/superego. We become codependent and we loose our sense of self. Or we become deeply disappointed when we discover that the Guru, the priests, teachers are not the perfection we need them to be. The spiritual journey is about growing into ourselves as adult souls. Being a child of God does not mean that we are meant to be a child. Rather we are meant to open into the purity, innocence (freshness and newness), openness (vulnerability) of grounded divine presence. We see those qualities in children, because they are still open. They have not yet grown a necessary ego shell to be able to live in the world. We see their divine nature shining through. But children are profoundly immature. They are run by powerful instinctual needs and their brains have not yet developed enough to become self reflective. That remarkable development comes much later. 

So as we sit together it is important to see how the spiritual superego works for you. In some families, like mine, it was a scientific superego that wiped out all possibility of the sacred, of wonder, of God. For some of you it will condemn you; it may drive you to being perfect; it may seduce you in believing that the spiritual teacher is perfect and you are not,....  The net effect is that it will suck the life, the truth, the joy, the love, the wonder, the creativity, the brilliance out of our soul's desire for more depth and opening. 

It is only since Freud that we have some understanding of the superego. It is a very new understanding. So our ancestors did not know that they were sliding into the territory of the superego. Many of them were sincere in their belief that they were preserving the truth. So it is really not surprising  that religious/spiritual teachings  over the millennia loose the wisdom that points to freedom and liberation, but become about rules, about good and bad, about purity and sin, about unworthiness, guilt and punishment.  

So there is a lot at stake here. My hope is that the more you see this your soul will awaken to the outrage and heartbreak of the situation. We need to feel angry in order to tell the superego "enough", "get the hell out of my spiritual life"; " I don't need you"; "I want to understand these teachings for myself, so get lost". We need to feel a soul strength, that is hot and clear.

Last sessions questions: Tell me a way you are supposed to be religious or spiritual. Explore how you feel when you see spiritual wisdom being co-opted by the spiritual superego. 

I am posting this along with the playlist on practicing-presence.blogspot.com

Poem. Hope by Lisel Mueller

Hope

    

It hovers in dark corners

before the lights are turned on,

it shakes sleep from its eyes

and drops from mushroom gills,

it explodes in the starry heads

of dandelions turned sages,

it sticks to the wings of green angels

that sail from the tops of maples.

 

It sprouts in each occluded eye

of the many-eyed potato,

it lives in each earthworm segment

surviving cruelty,

it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,

it is the mouth that inflates the lungs

of the child that has just been born.

 

It is the singular gift

we cannot destroy in ourselves,

the argument that refutes death,

the genius that invents the future,

all we know of God.

 

It is the serum which makes us swear

not to betray one another;

it is in this poem, trying to speak.

    

~ Lisel Mueller ~

Playlist session 3

What a wonderful Life. Tony Bennet & k.d Lang

Incantation, Om Hraum Mitraya. Deva Prenal

Hope for Enlightenment. Lama Gyurme & Philippe Rykiel. Lama's Chant

Session 3: Superego, emotional regulation and presence

Dear friends, This week we looked at how the superego sees you. It is surprising and even shocking to see what a distorted, one dimensional picture the superego has of you. However it sees you, it is quite different from the person who is alive today, sitting in our circle of presence. In a nut shell the superego sees you as a child, small, dependent not as the grown adult that you are. So why do we give it such credence, why do we believe this aggressive, coercive voice?  

I suggest that you explore the following question this week. "What's right about believing the superego?" I know this is a weird question, because the obvious answer is that there is nothing right in believing the superego. But the fact is that we do believe what the superego tells us, screams at us, whispers to us. So to some part it is "right" to believe the superego. This question gets at our not so conscious beliefs. So for instance you might discover that what's right about believing the superego is that the superego knows what is true and not true about us. Or you might unearth that you believe that if you don't believe the superego you will go "postal", or you will run amok, or you will make impossible messes, or people won't like you, or you will be exiled or abandoned, or you will go to hell. Use your journal this week and ask yourself this repeating question and see what you discover. 

This weeks questions: Draw a picture(s) of how the superego sees you. Tell me a way you are different from the way the superego sees you. Sense your arms and legs for five minutes, then explore your experience right now.

I want to talk about the emotional intensity that some of you are experiencing. As we expose the superego this will unearth its power, sometimes terrifying, overpowering aggression. And this can awaken a lot of fear and anxiety, even panic at times. This is normal, not a sign  that you are failing. If the feelings become too intense, know that you are not alone and they are welcome in the circle. If you feel you need to get up and walk around, take a breather please do. It is important to be able to regulate these feelings, walking around, breathing will help. I urge you to come back to the circle after you have settled. There is so much support in this growing field of presence, support and kindness. What ultimately allows the nervous system to settle and regulate (the fight, flight and freeze responses) is the holding and support of grounded open presence. When we have the support of each other to simply welcome where we are, we are stepping out the brain that is freaking out (the limbic system). So when you feel like you are is bordering on too much, take a step back, and breath. Return to the practice of sensing yourself. Feel your feet on the floor, your pelvis planted on your chair. Let your breath gradually slow down and drop into the belly. Don't try to repress what you are feeling, talk yourself out of what you are feeling, judge yourself, simply welcome and stay embodied and present. This is a practice and we get better and better at it over time. The flight response is to run away; the freeze response is to shut down, and fight response is to attack. None of these responses will help you find the your groundedness, your center, your own emerging capacity to hold your experience. The presence of your friends who are also practicing staying present, staying embodied is an enormous and mysterious support.

I want to say how touched I am by your courage, sincerity and caring. We have only met a few times and already there is a sense of a sacred circle emerging. It can hold all of us wherever we are. It does not require that we perform or change. Presence is an open welcome to all of reality including and especially our divine nature.

I hope to see you all next week. I do appreciate when you let me know if you are unable to attend.

Warmly, Alison