playlist #10

Hope for Enlightenment &  Guru Rinpoche, Lama Gyrurme, Lama's Chants

#10 Thankfulness versus falseness

Dear friends. Thanksgiving marks the beginning of the season of declining light and an ever increasing cycle of frantic activity. Over the next few weeks we will  focus our practice of presence on this precious time of year. Can we pierce through all the demands, expectations, misplaced hopes, the stress of dead traditions into the living essence at the heart of these times?

On Monday we focused on thankfulness. How are we supposed to be thankful? The superego has many ideas about what we should be thankful for and how we should be thankful. This left many of us with a bad taste, even anger, at being coerced into being thankful for things and people that we are not thankful for. We looked at what blocks our thankfulness. How can we be thankful when we are cut off from ourselves? Having a self in some religious teaching is considered selfish. So thankfulness becomes hollow, empty of truth, empty of life. A soul with no inner life, no heart at its center becomes an empty, resentful shell, becoming ever more false as it tries to live up to the demands of the superego. Being thankful for some meant going along, even participating in the lie of presence, of gratitude in the midst of abuse. Thankfulness becomes obligation, duty and a show.

So how does our practice of presence bring to life thankfulness. We considered that thankfulness is a state of being, a quality of presence an out flowing of the heart, a response to truth and the abundance of living presence, in ourselves, in others, in the world around us. It cannot be faked. It is a far cry from the obligatory Hallmark card. It arises quite naturally when we allow ourselves to be where we are. If we are angry or disheartened that is the truth. And perhaps simply allowing and holding our distress is an expression of thankfulness. Thank God that we are free to feel, to be where we are without the coercion of the superego bullying us to be thankful when we are not. Or perhaps we discover by coming into the moment that thankfulness arises in unexpected ways.

Gratitude or thankfulness is an expression of an open heart, a full heart, a fleshy living heart. A numb heart, a stony heart, an angry heart does not need the added burden of the pretense of thankfulness. It needs the kindness, patience and generosity of our presence and our practice. 

#9 playlist

Yemaya Assessu Deva Premal, The Essence

Watermark, Enya, Watermark

Hallelujah. K.D Lang. Hymns of the 49th Parallel

#9 self remembering

Dear friends, All fall we have been inviting presence by practicing sensing our embodiment in the present moment. This is sometimes called the practice of self remembering. We start with the most basic sense of ourselves as our physical body. And then with practice we discover that we are remembering something far more fundamental, sometimes quite subtle at first. We begin to remember that we beings of presence.

On Monday we focused our attention on presence. We explored the movement from forgetting, distracting, even rejecting, to the present moment meeting ourselves with acceptance and kindness. As we land, as our attention begins to relax into our experience, whatever it is, we notice that our presence, our awareness, our consciousness holds our experience, and is the very presence we long for.  Our presence, gentle, subtle touches our experience. We relax, we become curious, we awaken just a bit. Experience begins to unfold, to move.  As we welcome this moment we discover that the nature of presence is different from the presence of our conditioned self, the ego. The ego is always restless, grasping avoiding, frustrated, helpless, resisting. This is the root cause of suffering.Presence simply is, simply holds, allowing the essence of kindness and generosity. It is so part of us, so close that we miss it. We get entangled in the struggle of ego. We believe this is the sum total of reality and we unavoidably suffer.

Practicing presence is a gentle practice of relaxing and waking up to what is!

Here is what D.H. Lawrence has to say:

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us so that we do not know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.

playlist #8

Lama's Chant: Songs of Awakening . Lama Gryume and Jean Philippe Rykiel

Beethoven. Sonata for Violin and Piano. No 5 in F op 24. Andante

#8 Sin versus Missing the Mark

Dear Friends, It is amazing how it has all gone quiet, at least in my inbox. No more fundraising requests, at least for now!

On Monday we explored the issue of the word sin and what it means to each of us and how it becomes the property of the superego. It is interesting that the origin of the word sin is "missing the mark". Surely we are always missing the mark. Small and large missteps. But before we can sort out some response we are berated by the superego. And before we know it we have collapsed into shame, guilt, self hatred, damnation. In a nutshell we withdraw into denial;  hide away in self hatred; spin into action to make everything better; go on the offensive; fill ourselves with recriminations and anxiety. And in the mean time whatever objective response to missing the mark, to the "sin" is lost. We cut off from living presence, from our maturity to respond.

So once again something precious is lost to the attack of the superego. There is the possibility  of growing, of becoming responsible when we miss the mark. But this cannot happen if we are crushed by the superego. We know people who spend all their time apologizing, or people who persist in denying any responsibility. It takes courage to come into the moment, to feel into what has happened. Sometimes we hurt people, sometimes we make big mistakes. And to open to our limitations and mistakes, to our sins, actually takes courage, maturity and vulnerability.  Remember the superego does not see you as an adult, it sees you as a bad child. You are either a good child or a bad one. If you sin you are a bad child for sure. Bad children are punished. God will punish you just like your superego!

I hope you are beginning to see how the superego prevents the possibility for our maturity and but also it cuts us from the healing balm of our presence: our compassion for ourselves, our humanity and for others. The superego is about some kind of perfection and since that is impossible we are dammed, we will inevitably fail. What is damned is the most vulnerable part of us, our woundedness. Perfecting ourselves in one way or another is not the path to inner or out healing. This is not the path to true strength and courage. The miracle of presence, of God, if you like, is that presence holds all our wounding, all our betrayals, all our "sins". It does not white wash us. It allows us to see beyond the black and white world of good and bad, not to find some kind of grey, but into the life as growing living presence. This emergence, some call it a rebirth, is gradual, sometimes painstaking slow, is a life lived from the maturity that we are and can become, bathed in the consciousness of presence. Bringing us out of the falseness of living under the domination of the superego as wounded children. We are evolving souls desiring  for inner freedom, outer freedom. The freedom to be ourselves: human's of being!

Next time we are going to focus on presence. 

I will post this and the playlist on practicing-presence.blogspot.com 

Blessings to you all, Alison

#7 Wounding and Compassion and Holding

Dear friends,

We live in such turmoil these days what with hurricanes, elections and so much suffering. In these times our practice of presence becomes ever more important. These are called chaos times, times of deep transformation, end times. When the tectonic plates of the collective start to break up, when the planet groans, our souls are bound to shake too. Your practice not only helps your soul to remember its true unshakeable, indestructible ground, but it mysteriously adds to the collective soul of all of us, the global consciousness that is bursting forth pushing away the old and demanding a radical new. Some are calling this the Second Axial age (the first being the time of the Buddha, the birth of the monotheistic religions). We are in for a ride, fraught with fears and dangers. We are being called to attune to the need  for deep transformation and for the leap in consciousness. We are all involved in this. If we wake up, step by small step we are participating in this leap, this evolution. So don't loose heart when the journey gets painful, difficult. It is easy to succumb to cynicism, despair and loose all faith and courage. 

Rumi, the great Sufi poet writes:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

We are called to wake up and trust, even when the way is completely obscured. That is our practice. Don't go back to sleep! And waking up is the process, the unfoldment of a life time. It is not a sudden explosion/enlightenment-- that does happen sometimes- rather it is the gentle awakening of what is precious and sacred in each of us. No journey looks the same.

On Monday we were drawn into the deep hurt as we explored how our most sacred and precious was and is betrayed. Our divine nature is our most precious and sacred.  All of us have felt how deeply people, parents, churches, religions, spiritual teachers have trampled on our preciousness. We believe that this sacredness was destroyed because we cannot feel it, find it, or know it personally. The good news is that this spark cannot be destroyed, we all hid it away, not by some conscious act, but simply out of choiceless self protection. And where did we hid it? In the unconscious! We hid away this spark of living light, buried this living presence, so that when the time came we could begin to recover  our sacredness. We all do this. Ego development is necessary. It creates a shell, protection for us against all the injury, all the hardships and also is the normal way we grow up and leave mommy's lap and eventually move into the world as so called adults. And then for some of us there is a longing for something. We know something is missing, something is not real, some further evolution needs to happen. That is the beginning of  spiritual seeking.

On Monday tears arose and the superego arose in its hateful attack. We need to understand that this is part of the awakening. Not to fix it, not like therapy, but to meet it as one of the many many layers that separates us from our living presence. What we discovered in our circle was the sweet tender presence of compassion. Our pain was met with the softness of our voices, the tenderness in our eyes. This is an expression of presence rising up to support what feels unbearable, feels too much and overwhelming. Compassion is not just a word, it is palpable and it lived in our shared presence on Monday night. This is presence as compassion.

Along with compassion, the strength of the 'no' to the superego also arose. Firm, integrated, clear and unequivocal. As I said, we our fighting for our living souls. This not a time to let the superego smash us or sneak in quietly through the back door. The superego holds such aggression against us and others. It does not trust this opening into vulnerability, into the hurt of what was betrayed, what brutalized us or into what slowly numbed us and  turned our hearts into frozen stones. Don't feel, don't hate, don't trust, don't open, don't love.... In a word 'don't'. This is the aggression of the superego.

By practicing presence we are inviting openness, the opposite, if you like, of 'don't.  Some of you are noticing that there seems to be an expansion followed by a contraction. We discover something, we understand something, and then there is an opening. A kind of "ah yes" or a joy or a relief that what you thought was true, turns out not to be a true as you thought. With this opening, presence can enter as grace. You may feel it as a quiet smooth ease, or a flash of understanding followed by relaxation. Or you may experience it as strength, as a kind of clear uprightness. Some of you may feel it as steady capacity to be with your otherwise rejected experience. Or you may feel it as simple love and appreciation for your friends in the circle. Presence has many faces. It arises to meet the experience. With hurt, compassion arises; with superego, solid firm strength arises; with confusion, there is spacious clarity as the dots line up into insight; with difficultly,steadfast, patient ease, arises. We assume that the face of the divine is simply one face: frightening power, passionate love, eternal compassion; judgment, you name it!  Big God, far too big and  for our smallness.Yet what we discover is that presence can show up so very simply, easily if we are willing to come back to our experience, whether it is numbness, hatred, resistance, fear, falling, sweetness, joy, love, power, aggression. All is welcome in this growing field of presence. Week after week you bring your presence, your willingness, your curiosity, and your sincerity. Such a gift, such a support for each one of us.

So during you week don't be surprised if you find yourself contracting, shutting down, or if the superego comes in for a serious visit. This is how this practice works. Its like breathing in and out, like the tides going out and coming in. Can we be with this more and more. And can we forgive ourselves when we get lost, forget everything, eat leftover Halloween Candy until we are sick! Presence will find you if you come back to yourself.

Peace, Alison