Summary of Fall retreat and First Monday night session

Retreat:

 Session 1 Friday night: practice of presence, the Embodied now

Journal: What blocks you from being with your living embodied experience. 5

Tell me a way you leave the present moment? 

Tell me a way you sense your embodiment now?

Explore what you include or exclude in your sense of the embodied now. Do you select what to focus on? Do you ignore what you think is not appropriate in your experience to speak about. what do you grasp onto? 

Session 2:  Resistance, doubt and superego

Tell me a way you judged yourself since you woke up this morning. 

How do you feel when you judge yourself. 

Explore how your superego manifests. Is it loud, frightening and shaming. Does it whisper. what does it say. Do you recognize the voice.

Why do we believe and listen to this voice? Who hears this voice (child) how do we react to this voice. We get defensive, rationalize, make excuses,. We go on the attack mode. We collapse bodily

Tell me a way you believe into the superego

Tell me a way you child react’s to the superego

Explore in your circle how being attacked by the superego affects your ability to be present. 

Session 3  The alchemy of welcoming and holding. 

Open inquiry. By staying present explore what is arising for  you during this retreat so far.  Check in with your body. 

Journal: explore your resistance to practicing presence, meditating at home.

Tell me what you are experiencing now.

Explore your embodied experience. Notice how you leave your felt experience into your mind, into judging. What happens if you return and include your embodiment.  

Monday Night Sessions:

Monday 30th. Depth or surface.

Tell me a way you stay on the surface of your experience.

Tell me a way you allow yourself to go deeper. 

Explore what you are bringing into this session ? From your life, from the retreat? Notice if you are staying on the surface? Are you going deeper in the feelings, sensations  in the body? What happens when you and sense yourself for a moment.

Closing-- for now

Dear Friends.

 We ended this season of sessions on Monday. We spent our time together reviewing our work together. We focused on the following questions:

How has the practice of presence entered your life? Do you see some kind of personal thread emerging over the months we have been meeting? What is most difficult about the practice of presence? Did you feel like giving up? Why did you come back?How What supports your practice of presence? Where would like this to go in the fall?

Some of you were unable to attend. I suggest that you review the questions for yourselves. If there is something you would like to share with Joe or myself please send us an email.

We have been holding these sessions for two years. It has been an effortless outflow and inflow. Without your participation none of this would have been possible. Presence is cultivated when people gather sincerely, openly and with longing for depth and realness. This circle of presence is more real, deeper and robust (strange word!) than two years ago. And it appears that transformation is afoot. 

I know that there are a number of you "out there" who have been reading the emails and who have not joined our circle or may have discontinued for some reason. We would be interested to hear from you. How do the emails support your own journey? Are there reasons you discontinued that you would like to share with Joe and I. 

It is important for us to take a break for now. We need some time to let this settle and gestate over the summer.

It is our intention to resume our circle in the fall. We will be opening the group up at that time for newcomers. 

I am so grateful for this opportunity to be with you. I hope you have a fruitful summer and remember to come back to your embodied sense of your experience. That is the doorway.

Warmly and in peace, Alison

Vulnerability and Courage

Dear Friends, This Monday we met a few hours after the horrible bombing in Boston. The tragedy was fresh in our hearts.

We focused on vulnerability and courage. As we open up, hide less we feel vulnerable. As we taste presence we can sometimes confuse this with the normal and real vulnerability of childhood. We are profoundly vulnerable as children. We cannot survive without the care and protection of our parents. We are slow to develop both physically and cognitively. And along the way we need the attuned support and holding of our parents, later our schools and larger community. And most us have experienced times when the support was far from attuned and sometimes non-existent. So we all developed ways to cope and to hide our vulnerability. The ego in a sense is a complex layering of protection around the pure openness of our souls. The superego develops as a way to insure that we don’t get too close to our vulnerability. It tells us that we are weak, stupid, girly if we are vulnerable and sensitive. We also associate vulnerability with being powerless, victimized, and abused. All these experiences and layers of self protection make staying with the openness and true vulnerability of living presence quite difficult. We instinctively associate it with the real defenselessness of the child.

Despite all the defensive pulls to hardening up, to hiding, to numbing our vulnerability, there seems to be deep sense of longing for the possibility of being ever so close to our own experience and to others. We long to feel close, to relax and to simply be. This letting go is our vulnerability, our openness settling, relaxing. 

We explored two questions: Tell me a way you react to vulnerability? And tell me a way you experience the preciousness of your vulnerability.

Our defense mechanisms are the ego’s way of trying to protect us from being, hurt, humiliated, betrayed. If we are to open to living presence we need a kind of boldness, a kind of courage that supports us.  Courage is a juicy, loving, strong heart that can meet threats, and take on superego attacks head on. Gradually as we come to love our precious vulnerability, our precious openness-- the doorway to our depths, to living presence-- we cannot help but let the bold heart bubble up to protect us. Ego defenses try to protect us, but they always disconnect us from our living presence. Courage, this bold face of living presence protects, defends the truth, but does not cut us off. How can it? It is living presence.

Question: Explore your courage to protect your living presence. What does it take to stay faithful to what is most precious to you. 

Correction: Thanks to Ruth, we are meeting on Monday 22nd for our last session. (Not 21st as I mistakenly emailed you a few days ago!)

Sunshine today. Spring is really here. Hope to see you on Monday. Warmly, Alison

Beauty and Image

Dear friends, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is a common expression. But who is the beholder? During our last time together we explored how the superego defines beauty and becomes the beholder. It has all kinds of standards, all kinds of rules, judgements that we take in from our parents and the larger culture. And when beauty is reduced to an image, to appearance it begins to feel dull, flat, stiff, lifeless. Beauty becomes about the surface of things and people. 

We discovered that when we approach beauty in the present moment it comes alive. We are touched by beauty, we feel depth. It enlivens us, it inspires us. And most importantly it opens us to love. Sometimes it is hard to know whether we love what is beautiful or what is beautiful becomes what we love. Beauty evokes the heart.

When we are touched by beauty almost invariably we will cling to it, try to replicate it and consume it over and over. What was fresh, immediate becomes lifeless, flat like an image. There is an immediacy to beauty; it lives in the now, and it is the exquisite face of our own presence. Presence is the source of beauty. It is reflected all around us. So naturally we assume its source is out there. But when we are cut off from our own presence, beauty becomes an idol. Something we worship, but which is completely disconnected from the ground of being. We see horrid caricatures of this everywhere in our image obsessed culture. I keep seeing Joan Rivers' face as I write this. Scary and such a violent distortion of beauty.

Aging is perhaps one of the greatest challenges. Where does beauty go when our faces fall off, and we bulge this way or that? It goes for sure. We are not helped by the superego and its harsh condemnation or our merciless culture. This loss is the portal to what we discover when we turn inward, feel, touch and know what lives us more and more directly. When our sight dims, our hearing goes, our brains become foggy,  there is loss, no doubt. One way of thinking about aging is that we are being weaned- hopefully slowly- from our perceptual capacities so that the door of the inner landscape of presence can open.  Helen Luke in her book Old Age writes about this beautifully.

And what about the tyranny of beauty in adolescence and adulthood? Whether we are male or female, young or old, beautiful or not, this is a tortuous landscape of suffering, judgement, self hatred and struggle.

Beauty is so precious, so vulnerable that we may recoil from expressing it. We hide it away and most importantly we don’t let ourselves recognize that we are this beauty. It is perhaps safe to know and feel the beauty of what we love "out there".  But can we know ourselves as a soul, as living beauty. We got a taste of this on Monday night.

Each of us brought an object, a photo, flowers, something  personally beautiful. We shared this with each other. There was such sincerity, tenderness, preciousness, and love in the air. And yes beauty

Questions: Tell me a way the superego judges beauty? Tell me a way beauty becomes an image? How does beauty as an image, or as appearance feel? Share your feelings about the object you brought. Focus on your felt experience in the moment.

There will be no Spirit Singing this month. Instead during our Earth Day church service on Sunday April 21st, at 10.30am Kath and Sam will be leading Spirit Singing. I will also be leading a meditation during this service.You are all welcome. We will be holding two more practicing presence on Monday April 15th and 22nd. 

Hope to see you soon. Alison

Love and the outer gaze

 Dear friends.

 This last Monday we Monday we explored the presence of love. We began the evening with the question. 'Tell me a way you resist love?'

 How often has our natural sensitivity, our openness, our lovingness  been betrayed, misunderstood, ignored, judged? Many, many times. Especially early in our lives when we were so defenseless, so dependent. Those betrayals, those times of deep mis-attunement  left us deeply wounded. And naturally enough we began to stiffen, to pull away from the openness of love, ours and the love of others. It was simply too risky, too frightening too painful. So as much as we long to love and to be loved we find ourselves resisting the vulnerability, the utter sensitivity of our hearts. We flinch, or we grasp. Either way the heart closes and we develop a hard shell, or an agitated shell around our heart. There is neither the trust nor the ground  which can allow our hearts to settle and open.

 You could say that that the heart is an organ of sensitivity, the capacity to be touched. The mind is the organ of true discernment, intelligence, illumination. And the belly is the organ of centered presence.  Each of the centers brings different and vitally important flavors of wisdom. This is why the practice of presence, especially in the belly and the legs is so important. Centering and grounding offers the heart center  desperately needed holding and support. It is what we needed from our parents when we were too young to know this support as our own ground. The true mind brings the objectivity and clarity that the heart needs. In concert then, the heart becomes the seat of the integration of heaven and earth: loving, luminous, strong, courageous, mature, transcendent, personal. This is a far cry from Hallmark sentimentality, romance, attachment, codependence. Jesus called this the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

 We then explored the question: 'tell me something you love'. There is so much we love, especially our pets! And as we discovered the multitude of our loves, we began to feel more and more love. There were  many sweet tender smiles in our circle on Monday night. We began to  see how our love is always about something  'out there'. This outer orientation  starts from the earliest moments after birth. We associate our love with mother or the care-taking person, her breast, her holding, her care. This is hard wired in order for our survival. This basic template is the utter conviction that in order to be loved, to have love we have to find the someone or something outside of us. And when we believe we have found it how tight we will grasp to keep it. And gradually what began as love becomes attachment, possession, dependency, even addiction.

 When we find it out there, we may rest for a moment or two and then the search begins again. Over and over. And what we forget is that the source of love is within, it is the nature of living presence itself. It is us!  We can't help but look for it out there. And thank God we find it enough out there to get here.

 As we engage spiritual work, and as we practice the return  over and over to our immediate experience,  we may begin to discover that what we long for is our own heart, a heart of living presence. This is not emotional intensity, nor the grasping of something, nor the attachment to something outside, but our own presence. This love has no desperation in it, no drama, no pursuit. It is simple, tender, intimate, gentle love. At first it is often quite subtle. We are used to big emotions, big attachments and we may ignore the silk-like undulation of quiet precious intimate love. Or we may have numbed ourselves, so hardened ourselves that we have to endure much deadness  before the sweet taste of love begins to subtly arise, almost like the whiff of perfume. With time this love grows, fills out, deepens and is our unmistakeable presence.

 The heart center, this organ of sensitivity, of being in touch with our experience  is what is needed to feel the  subtle flavors of love. Practicing presence is what allows the ground of support to develop but also cultivates the refinement of our ability to perceive, recognize and sense  the subtle perfumes of love.

 And when we finally open to this inner secret source of love it goes away. And we are bereft; we try to get it back; we judge ourselves. And so the pursuit starts up again. This turning inward, away from the outer gaze, away from the original template of mother is a radical turn. We are turning away from the unconscious habit of seeking love. The turning inward takes us into the wounds and all the protective armoring. So no wonder we resist, no wonder we turn away. But you may  find the insistent call of your heart irresistible. I hope so. In the meantime we practice the coming back to our embodied experience. This is the way home to the source of what we long for. This longing is the whisper of your own heart, your true heart, begging you to come closer. 

 Last question for the evening: explore the movement of your heart as it moves from the outer orientation to the actual felt sense of your inner experience of your heart. How does the feel in the moment.

 Next Monday we will focus on beauty. Please bring an image or an object that you find beautiful and which inspires and opens you. Warmly, Alison.

 

Alison's Musings Blog at alisonhine.blogspot.com

Alison Hine, LMSW
734-668-0475
Psychotherapy and Spiritual Guidance

playlist

Schubert. Impromptu Op 90 No 899, 3 G flat, Andante. Alfred Brendel

Chariots of Fire. Theme song from movie Chariot of Fire

Incantation Deva Premal

Yemaya Assessu, Deva Premal

Gayatri Mantra, Deva Premal and Miten. Satsang-a Meditation in Song and Silence

Truthfulness/realness and Falseness

Dear friends.

As we approach the ending of this year's sessions (end of April), we are going to explore some of the fruits of practicing presence, some of the faces of presence. Presence shows up in many flavors or tastes. Sometimes we feel a stillness, or a kind of clarity. At others we feel a settled gentle compassion.  Sometimes we feel this sense of surging strength or capacity. In the Sufi tradition they say that God has ninety faces, the hundredth being unknowable.

This last Monday we looked at the quality, the flavor of the essence of truthfulness. Since this word truth can be  daunting we used the words realness. We all know this particular  taste of presence. Realness rings true, things line up, we feel clear and we feel alive and awake. We feel a sense of opening in our heart and  the mind clears, and there can be a deep 'ah', or 'I get it'. And most importantly we feel real. The phrase  'the truth will set you free' makes sense. The realness of the truth feels free, unencumbered. There is a kind of inner freedom.

In contrast  to realness we explored falseness. Mostly we are not aware of how false, fake or even dishonest we are. But as you turn towards your experience, as you practice being present you may begin to notice the actual flavor or taste of falseness. You may feel edgy, sticky, brittle, mushy, vague, agitated, dull, sleepy. Falseness has a bad taste. Something feels off. We feel defensive, off kilter. When feel this way we may become more defensive, trying to cover up something, trying to hide. We may even pretend to be real and honest. The superego can arise at this time attacking us for not being authentic.  It can shame us for not being real. Or if we do expose more of the truth it can attack us mercilessly afterwards for being too open, for being vulnerable and exposed.

We can't help but be fake. Our ego is fake. It is made up of layer and upon layer of defense mechanisms, habitual unconscious patterns of responding that we learned in our formative layers. It developed to protect us from the pain of an unresponsive, abusive or miss attuned environment. We needed this shell to survive and function in the world . Thank god it developed. The fakeness arises out of the mechanicalness of the shell. We think we are free and spontaneous but once you turn inwards you begin to see the same repetitive, conditioned patterns. It is shocking at first to see how mechanical we really are.

Inner work is not just driven by the desire to be free from suffering but also for the longing for realness. We want to know and feel the truth of who and what we are, both at the level of our engagement with the world but also in the depths of our being. The inner journey inevitably forces us to face all the falseness, all the ways we distort ourselves, tie ourselves into knots in order to be accepted and loved, to avoid conflict, to be successful in a world immersed in so much superficiality. We try to be authentic and we try to be truthful. And these are vital efforts. They are part of our development. But you may notice that these efforts often involve hiding the falseness. We try to improve ourselves. But something is still off.

Curiously by embracing the falseness, by admitting it to ourselves and perhaps to others we actually begin to align with truthfulness. We are being real about our fakeness! This is not about a guilty confession. Nor is this about bashing people with 'my truth'. This gesture of aligning with the truth of my falseness takes sincerity, courage, vulnerability and especially a kind of love. This means admitting we cover our confusion, our doubts with a false bravado, an arrogant certainty; we are strong and yet we pretend to be small, we are silent and yet we desperately want to speak up; we pretend to be loving when we really feel hatred or indifference. Perhaps the most surprising cover up of all is when we deny our true presence, and insist that we are deficient egos.  We discovered on Monday night that recognizing the inevitable falseness, allowing it to be held gently, allows an opening into presence. This is the presence of realness, of truthfulness. 

 

Over and over we have seen that by turning toward our experience we open, and the grace of presence may arise to greet us. Presence holds all of us, all of reality in fact. Presence is not some mental, philosophical notion. It is palpable, it is welcoming. Nothing is rejected. This is not the realm of the judgmental punishing God or the superego. It is the mystery of blessing, which invites us to open into all our brokenness, into all our sins and all our falseness. As we turn inward, unlike what happened when we were children, we discover that presence meets us, greets, holds us and we can relax into the vulnerability of our humanness.

Questions from last session. Tell me a way you are false? Tell me a way you experience realness? Explore the movement of falseness to realness and back to falseness. How does realness feel? How does falseness feel?

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater/Preciousness

Dear Friends. Through these past months we have focused on the ways many of us got injured by religious institutions, religious ideas and religious teachers.  We have explored the many ways the superego sneaks  into sacred language, into our most precious longings. We become numb, or we leave; we accommodate and become dutiful church members. Many of us became disillusioned by the hypocrisy of church leaders or spiritual teachers and  we walked away, looking for other paths or simply giving up. And yet we are here. Perhaps we are called by some intuitive feeling that there must be something real in all this religious stuff. Or perhaps it is a quiet longing and a need to find some depth. Some of us are facing life challenges or have been beaten down by difficult past histories, and we  long for a safe way to connect spiritually. Some us came because we are drawn to inner work  with fellow travelers  Whatever your motivation for participating in this circle it means that you are turning away from something, and are turning towards something, drawn by some mysterious longing, by some insistent pull. This turning is crucial. It is the journey back from our spiritual wounds, all the disappointments and betrayals. It is not about fixing all of those wounds, but about an inner discovery of something that maybe at some level we knew all along.

Over these many months we have focused on how our particular spiritual or religious  circumstances hurt us. Last Monday we explored how in order to protect ourselves we walked away, and what we lost in the process. For me, the turning began with my anger that somehow fundamentalists had taken over sacred language and distorted it so much, that for me, it had become a language of judgement and fear. The language and the  spiritual practices had become dead skeletons and lost the power of living truth and wisdom. My own journey has taken me on a deep archeological dig through time to recover the essence of this language. It has been a thrilling five year journey  of deep study, reflection and contemplation. And along the way living presence has opened up and now these sacred texts, these teachings both contemporary and ancient, are alive. Not all by any means and not all the time, but something is emerging as the living word, rather than the dead, boring, word. At the beginning the fuel was anger but along the way the fuel became an abiding curiosity and love.

Sometimes it is anger that wakes us up. Or it maybe grief of what we left behind, what we threw out with the bathwater. Sometimes it is the press of fear that time is short and there is an imperative to get beyond the superego and all the ways it permeates  all that is sacred. This loss of presence is inevitable, it is occurs choicelessly through our early years. Layer upon layer of ego arises as self protection but also as a way to adapt and function in the world. By the time most of us go to school we have lost contact with our living presence. This is the initial turning away from presence. We don't decide to do this. It happens gradually. In someways this is the deepest wound. By necessity we all betrayed our divine nature. We had to. But the pain of losing the connection is very deep and painful. When we begin to see and feel what we have lost it can bring forth deep grief. This grief is not so much  about the missed opportunities in life, the risks not taken, the mistakes made. This grief is more fundamental, it is the loss of what is most precious to us. 

This is a necessary crisis  and it is what brings us to spiritual work. People who are comfortable, secure enough most likely won't  even consider this kind of journey. It is not journey for the faint of heart. We are on a mission to recover what is most precious, what some have called the pearl beyond price. We are drawn to this because we love what is precious to us. Often we project the preciousness onto our beloved, our children, our homes, our clothing, our pets, our special places. And they are precious to us. But what we don't understand is that this preciousness which seems "out there" is really a reflection of our own inner preciousness. Living presence is so, so, so precious; it is who you are, always have been. You are the preciousness. This face of precious presence lives mostly in the unconscious hidden away until the time is ripe. And when it is time the turning inward begins. You have all begun. And the turning never stops, as long as we keep coming back to this moment, this moment, this moment.

Last Monday's questions: Tell me something that is precious to you? Tell me a way you walked away from what is precious to you? Explore what it means to reclaim and recover what is precious to you in the midst of your wounding?

Alison Hine, LMSW
734-668-0475
Psychotherapy and Spiritual Guidance

Spiritual/Religious Community.

Dear Friends. Last time we explored our relationship to spiritual and religious community. We looked at what attracts us to spiritual community and what has disappointed us. There is deep longing to come together, to belong, to feel a kinship with others who share what is precious. Some of us come to community, this circle in particular, to do our own inner work only to find a kind love for others in the circle. There is a kind of presence that can only develop when "two or more gather".

We saw that our disappointments ran deep. Some have felt the hypocrisy of community: saying one thing but acting quite differently. Others spoke about how their search for spiritual community was about finding the perfect family and then watching it all fall apart. For others belonging to community meant losing themselves, betraying their own values. For others the lovely church of their childhood became untenable when they reached adolescence and could recognize and feel the falseness and even the abuse of the Church. For some joining community mean't playing a fixed role, an obligation. And sometimes the "price of admission" was simply too great. 

When we join a group we will unconsciously, or not so unconsciously, relive the dynamics of our family of origin. So the over responsible one will become the group organizer; the caretaker in the family will become the caretaker in the group; the rebellious one in the family will become rebellious in the community; the scapegoat in the family will find themselves being blamed and even scapegoated by the group; the one who sits on the outside will sit on the outside of the group and feel alienated; the popular one will become the popular one; the clown in the family will replay this in community, on and on. We do this, until we wake up to what we are replaying. We are creatures of habit, of what is familiar even if it is unpleasant. Notice how this plays out for you in this circle.

(Questions: Tell me something that attracts you to spiritual/religious community. Tell me a way you have been disappointed by spiritual/religious community. Explore your relationship to spiritual or religious community. What role do you play over and over? How do you grow in community?)

We noticed that there is the possibility of our relationship to community evolving over time. Becoming less about meeting the unmet needs of  childhood, or replaying the customary roles we play when we join a group. Being in community is not about losing yourself, or about rebellion, or about avoidance, or about dependence. It is about being and becoming yourself and within the context of a group of people. Its about working together, its about maturation; its about sharing yourself without losing yourself; its about a living shared/we/communion presence that insists on evolving, growing. Most groups, work, living situations, have an explicit or implicit contract. If I am an college student there are demands, responsibilities, certain freedoms. If I am a teacher likewise there are norms, boundaries and expectations that govern the relationship between student and teacher. If I am being paid for work, then again there are expectations that govern the relationship. How often do these kinds of relationships that form the basis of  specific communities become blurred, confused and destructive as other needs emerge and are acted out, especially the needs of the child to be loved, protected, attuned to.  Being part of community is very complex. 

In a way spiritual community offers perhaps the greatest possibility of growth, experimentation and true communion. We come together seeking what is most precious, most sacred, most mysterious. We are bound to stumble and fail as we venture to uncover what it means to be Humans of Being who share some strange intuition that we are more than we know. In my experience spiritual development rarely happens alone in a cave somewhere. We truly need each other. Our presence needs the support of the presence of the field, of this mysterious feeling that develops amongst each other as we open gingerly, gently into being more real, more exposed to each other. It involves a special kind of work. The practice of presence is the work that we undertake with each other in this sacred circle of friends. Even the word friend conjures up all kinds of images. Socializing, gossiping, shopping, hanging out, telling our stories our secrets and so on. Some of us barely know the names of everyone in the circle, and yet are we not friends in some real and tangible way. The word community conjures up all kinds of fantasies as well. Especially in these times, when we are attempting to live out all kinds of communities as the old structures of neighborhood, family fall away. We are in a time of enormous change and evolution. We are struggling to find the new ways of being together and much of the time we will fail. If we leave every time we fail, we may unwittingly throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes we must leave.  But how often do we leave because we have not taken some risk?

The question is are we present?  Are we awake? Are we open to what lies to deeper than what we know? Or are we running away, a wounded betrayed child? Are we reliving some old conditioned pattern? What does it mean to grow into maturity in a community? 

As I write this I realize my struggle to find the words to express what we are exploring. This is new, this hunger for becoming One and yet being Distinct Beings, sharing together a love for depth, for God, for ourselves. It is an a vital tension.  I can feel the limits in my words today. But I feel the love that pushes the curiosity to discover what it means to live in this circle  in ever deepening vulnerability, sincerity, honesty and love.

Hope to see you tonight at Spirit Singing. See you next Monday. Love, Alison

-- 

The teaching relationship

Dear friends,  We have been journeying through the broad territory of religious and spiritual wounding. We have looked at how the superego is projected onto sin, onto God, onto all the great teachings. This week we focused on what we project  onto spiritual, religious, philosophical teachers, living or dead.

The teaching relationship is a precious relationship. We all need teachers. And yet so often they go awry. We approach teachers with hopes, wishes and sometimes a kind of magical idealization. They have something we need and want to learn. Perhaps that can be relatively straightforward if we are trying to learn organic chemistry (although that did not go so well for me years ago!!!). But when we need a spiritual teacher what we need to learn and embody is quite mysterious.

Once again we are confronted with our earliest projections onto our first encounter with mother who we experience as godlike, her loving breast or a bottle of warm milk. This experience of love, nourishment, warm embrace, holding, merging is a powerful imprint on the soul. Those of you who have had children will remember the rooting behavior of the infant, the insistence to be fed, the howling out of hunger and this bliss of finding the nipple and satiation of the need. This orientation to the mother becomes unconsciously our orientation to the divine. It is outside of us, in heaven, in the Guru, in the teacher, in the priest, ultimately in mother. We don't have it, whatever the it is. Someone else bigger and wiser than we has it. Hopefully the teacher does actually know something, has realized some spiritual wisdom and is not a complete fraud. Sadly there are false teachers. We really do need something from our teachers, but because of the earliest of imprints we may unconsciously become childlike, dependent, and incapable of discernment. And so we fall into deficiency, we give our power away, and lack the maturity to hear and receive the teachings. This can be extraordinarily painful especially if the earliest experience of mother was less than optimal. Then we may relive or recreate old patterns of victimization and abuse. In a nut shell the kingdom of heaven is outside of us, not our very nature, our very own living presence. And so we keep seeking outside.

The practice of presence is so important because it challenges this tendency to look outside. This outer gaze is hard wired, and we need it for our survival. Our practice brings our gaze, our attention inward, into the body, into sensation. We are going against the grain of our conditioning, the orientation of our egos. Perhaps you can see why this is a practice.  We are working the muscle of the inner gaze, bringing it inward over and over, until at some point it becomes second nature. We don't loose the outer gaze, it is incredibly useful, but we are bringing forth a depth, a sensitivity, the landscape of our living being, our living presence.

One of tendencies of the child, around 2-5 years is to idealize the parent. This an important stage in development. It makes us feel secure, very special, very important to be blessed with the best mommy and daddy in the world. They become godlike and may even seem to have superhuman powers. And if we don't have idealizable parents we will find surrogates like characters on television or in books, or teachers in school or in church. There is something about the mystery of the spiritual realm that invites this kind of idealization. And we give them our all, our love, our devotion, our trust. It almost seems inevitable. Can you see that tendency in your life? And when we find out that they are very human, or even unethical the crash is very painful. We feel betrayed, we feel a deep loss of love and trust.

Some of us never recover from this and walk away from any teaching relationship. So we throw away the chance to learn and grow in this way because the hurt is simply too painful. Or we become rebellious and create adversarial relationships with our teachers. In either case the relationship is blocked. And what is precious is lost.

We explored the phenomenon of projection last Monday. How and what do we project on our teachers. What impact does this have on our openness and receptivity to receiving what we long and need to hear?Are we too distrustful or too arrogant to allow the mystery to open up?

I have been blessed with many teachers over my life. Some have blown up and left me reeling in pain, others I outgrew. Most I idealized and when the projections became clear I felt disillusioned and walked away. But throughout I have known that I could not do this work without their help and wisdom. All of these experiences have taught me much, how I got lost in the drama of projection.  I am now discovering what it means to have teachers with fewer and fewer projections, expectations and superego judgements. It is a profoundly mysterious relationship. It truly opens many doors. I hope that as you take a look at this rich history you will find ways to see through the many layers of projection and come to see that what you see and love in the teacher is your own nature reflected back to you. It is your nature, who you are. We mistakenly think it is out there. That is the mystery of projection!

We won't be meeting next Monday 5th. Hope to see you on February 10th. Prayers for all of you suffering from the flu.  Warmly, Alison.

Land of Perfection

Dear Friends, Last Monday we visited the land of perfection and the stress of living with the demand for perfection.

What is this imperative for perfection? Mostly it come from the superego which demands that we strive for the impossible, that we never make mistakes, disappoint, or fail miserably. For some aging, even dying is a failure. This striving is stressful. Our thinking becomes anxious and obsessive. Our bodies tighten up. And most of all we disconnect from our living embodied presence. This pressure is relentless and in fact for some it becomes the normal way of operating. We don't think twice about it. And if we fail to live up to these perfectionistic expectations we fear we will drop the ball-- the many balls-- and ultimately collapse. We believe that life will become dysfunctional without the drive for perfection. We will end up like blobs eating bonbons all day! If we don't measure up we feel guilty, we feel ashamed and frightened. At its worst we may give up trying at all. The stress is simply too much. The standards of perfection are imposed by the superego. Pressure, stress is the nature of superego. It is aggressive, coercive, and relentless in its demands. We internalized these demands when we were young. And they live on in our consciousness unexamined mostly unconsious. These standards do not take into consideration our limitations or our true desires. There is simply no room to discover what we desire; no room to discern our capacities objectively; no time to breathe,to  slow down and discover where we are and what we want and truly need.

There is something compelling about perfection. It feels great when we actually succeed in keeping all the balls in the air. There is pleasure and pride in the accomplishment and we are certainly rewarded by the outer world. The results may be magnificent and beautiful. But the implicit assumption is that without the kick of the superego none of this would be possible.

So what happens is the supergo is banished. Does this mean we are doomed to fail.

As a species we seem drawn to excellence, to beauty, to incredible discovery. Spiritual work especially seems inspired by some kind of perfection. We only have to visit gothic cathedrals, gaze at the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, listen to Bach's B Minor Mass to know that they were inspired by great love and a vision of a kind of perfection. Being is complete, needs no improvement. Divine presence is not worried about being graded, nor is it on some self improvement project. Grace unfolds  with ease and with an implicit perfection. Perhaps that is why we are drawn to spiritual work. 

It seems that we-- our egos with the so called help of the superego-- attempt to imitate the perfection of Being, of God, by trying to achieve perfection in our work, in our bodies, in our personalities, in our relationships. Rather than unfolding ease, effortless effort, seamless concentration and love, we push ourselves, we become obsessive, anxious, grandiose demanding more and more of ourselves and others. In the end we suffer and we ultimately fail. How many of us don't try something new and fresh because we are sure we can't make it perfect, we can't make it right.

So the question is who rules the land of perfection. Is it the superego? If we are to discover the perfection we long for, we need to banish the superego and all its aggressive and ultimately impossible demands. When we get closer to our essence, to Being our lives become infused with a grace. Is it possible to liberate our hearts, our efforts from the allegiance to the standards of the superego? That is the work of practice of presence. That is why it is so important to recognize when we are under the influence of the superego and banish it!

So this is not about walking away from excellence, or from great efforts. On the contrary this is about freeing the creative energies and love of our souls so that we can live fully and enjoy the fruits.

Hope to see you next Monday. I appreciate you letting me know if for some reason you are unable to attend our sessions.  Warmly, Alison

Practicing Presence

Dear friends. Thank you to those of you who braved the bitter cold last Monday. 

We focused on the practice of presence itself. What is it? Over the months we have explored the importance of coming back into the body to directly meet this moment of experience. The more embodied we are, the less we are caught in the stories that roam around in our mind. When we land and meet our embodied experience something new can unfold. Then feelings can morph into other feelings, memories can arise directly out of the felt sense, understanding can arise. In other words our experience becomes fluid, it unfolds and reveals more. Instead of the usual way we know ourselves --through the habitual figuring of the mind; or our judgements about our experience; or by all the ways we reject and push away our moment to moment experience-- we  begin to discover that we are more that our usual, conditioned experience. We begin to know ourselves as a living tapestry of feelings, sensations, insights, deepening and most importantly a kind of expansion, a kind of clearing away the clutter that obscures our direct experiences and contracts us. This is the movement towards presence. The doorway is this moment of experience.

This is a practice because this movement into this embodied now, runs counter to the usual egoic way of knowing ourselves. So the practice of returning, arriving, deepening cultivates a of kind of essential muscle if you like. Some call this the muscle self remembering. What is that we are remembering? What is it that we have forgotten, ignored? A very long time ago, before we became able to reflect on our experience, we moved away and cut off from what some call True Nature, others call the Body of Christ, the Self, and what we are calling living presence. This process of self remembering and understanding begins to clear away the obscurations, the dullness, the usual clutter of our habitual experience (such as the superego and all our responses to it), and this organ of perception-- you!, your soul!-- becomes more transparent and what lies deeper in the unconscious begins to shine through.

All of you know what it is like to gaze into an infant's eyes. There is something amazingly lucid, limpid, clear, transparent, immediate about their gaze, their consciousness. It seems pure, open, pristine. And it touches us deeply. Its as though this gaze can pierce through all our worries, anxieties, frustrations and for a moment we shine too, we are still, we are open. Breathtaking and so attractive. This is living presence before the vicissitudes of life leave their mark on the infant. Slowly, or not so slowly in the case of trauma, an ego shell by necessity forms around this pristine consciousness and the personality forms gradually obscuring, our true source, and eventually cutting us off from living presence. This is not bad, it is simply a stage in the journey of the soul. The open, completely innocent soul slowly becomes an ego so that it can function in the world. At some point for some of us there is a hunger to rediscover this living presence. We think we lost it, or we think we sinned so that is why we lost contact with our divine nature; or we think we are too deficient, not worthy enough to deserve presence. But none of this is true. Presence lies hidden within us. Always! Never lost. Forgotten or obscured are better words. 

So the practice of presence needs this itch or desire to recover what we are sure we lost.  But there is some deep intuition, perhaps based on those moments in life when the moment opened up, or perhaps because we simply long for more realness, more immediacy in life, more intouchness. In my case it was an urgent need to know God that erupted in my early forties. (My midlife crisis) The practice of presence is a process of clearing, clarifying, opening our consciousness, our souls. 

I find it very curious that this practice is showing up in many ways at the moment. The Christian Contemplative tradition calls this Welcoming Practice. In the mental health field the Buddhist practice of mindfulness and Focusing are both entering the main stream of clinical practice. We are participating in something bigger than our circle. Its quite mysterious how these new and old ways start appearing. A kind of synchronicity.

It looks like we are heading into rain on Monday. There is some warming trend coming our. Please check your email in case we need to cancel our session.

Warmly and in peace. Alison

-- 

The religious/spiritual superego

Dear Friends, Last Monday I shared that I have been on a kind of archeological dig over the last five years. I was drawn reluctantly at first and then passionately to recover the essence of my religious heritage,  and to reclaim what is precious and true from the fundamentalism of the superego. This was completely unexpected since I was raised by an ardent atheist and thought I had found my spiritual path. 

Sadly it seems that most Spiritual and religious teachings gradually become the territory of the superego. What is alive, vibrating with spirit becomes codified into purity codes,and  into a moralism that condemns, threatens, punishes and  shames. We need spiritual and religious teachings, desperately. But they become rules, shoulds, obligations and standards rather than sacred words that point us to the mystery of our divine nature.

Many of us recoiled against this. We rebelled, we fled, we became judgmental.  Or we submitted to the distortions and we tried to become good and religious. Or we hid away our "sins" and sank into the guilt and shame of our failure and brokenness. Or perhaps we retreated into the certainty of scientific objectivity. When the superego, spiritual superego claims, appropriates, co-opts the teachings in the name of being reasonable, good, secure, safe, we are cut off from something very sacred--the living word, the living wisdom of our spiritual and religious heritage. In a way we throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

We react to the distortions, to the lies, to the violence done in God's name. And so we must. The problem is that this reaction is by its nature a rejection and the rejection is complete. We reject God, we reject the wisdom of our ancestors, we reject communion and community, we reject teachers. We reject them because we feel betrayed, duped, seduced and then abandoned and so it goes. It takes maturity to reject what is distorted and to discriminate what is real, alive and pointing to the mystery of Being. And this is difficult especially if our wounding goes deep. 

So it is essential that we begin to see how the spiritual superego operates. We need to see how our superego cloaks itself in religious imagery, words, theology, rules etc. So if our parents our tyrannical, chances are God will be seen as tyrannical. And so we fall into terror and fear.  If our parents are all loving then God will be seen as all loving. But when life is ruthless, impossible and not loving we feel abandoned, and disillusioned. If our parents are rigid and rule bound then God may become a set of purity rules and commandments. And then we may become righteous and judgmental. If our parents rejected God then there is a big emptiness that nothing can fill.  Sometimes it is extraordinarily confusing. Your parents claim to be good Christians and yet are cruel. You heard God was a loving God, that salvation was at hand and yet despite your prayers no one saved you. So God becomes seductive and betraying. And so examples go on. How did the original imprint of your parents become the template for your spiritual superego? How is it for you?

About five years ago I became angry that I had lost something precious. As I was drawn into this church I felt my father's condemnation. His own rejection of all spiritual and religious longings showed up in his sarcasm and judgement. And even though he was dead at the time I felt ashamed, hiding my visits to Sunday services. Gradually  I could see this was all superego, and my  father's own rejection of any faith. And for goodness sake what did my father's religious issues have to do with my own journey of discovery. And so I began to peel away his reactions and peer through the ways the superego over the ages has been projected onto and written into sacred texts. This history of projection has created a spirituality rooted in fear and judgement, rather than in love, freedom and truth. My anger allowed the desire for truth to become stronger than the shame. Without strength, without seeing the superego in all its shapes and forms, without the passion arising out of my anger for what is real and sacred, I could not write to you. It would be impossible to even dream that some of this fire, your fire, God's fire, the fire of Truth might ignite your own journey of recovery. We are recovering presence in all its manifestations and especially as it arises in you.

I left you with a contemplation last Monday. What would happen if all  the spiritual superego judgements magically disappeared. What would you be left with? Let yourself imagine this.

Questions from last time: What words would you use to describe the major religious/spiritual superego? Tell me a way you respond to the superego. Explore how you have been controlled, hurt and diverted by the religious/spiritual superego.

I have posted this to practicing-presence.blogspot.com

All you are sick with the flu I hope you recover quickly. And prayers to Karl and Dana on their journey of healing.  In peace, Alison

#14 Playlist

Avro Part, Alina. Spiegel im Spiegel.

Anger/aggression verus Strength

Dear friends, it was delightful to see you all last Monday night. Last time we explored the difference between strength and aggression/anger. 

Whenever there is rebirth the forces of resistance will rise up. The resistance can come from the superego, with its shaming, attacking, numbing attacks or from our own fears of change. Resistance also comes from the outside from those who are threatened by our becoming bigger, stronger, clearer, more honest, more loving. Resistance will arise whenever the status quo is threatened. And the ego, the personality, the usual way of being, represents the status quo. Whenever we embark on the spiritual journey we will begin to discover that we are  presence (the Body of Christ, Buddha Mind, the Atman,) not bound by history, not bound by the rules (superego) that we learned in our childhood. This presence of consciousness expands and reveals more and more what we truly are. This is a journey of expansion, growth, and maturity.This expansion will bring forth the superego, the prime engine of ensuring that we stay small, disconnected, childlike, fearful, and completely cut off from our presence, our divine nature.

So in order to go very far on this jounrey, we need strength. We need the capacity to resist the forces of inertia, of resistance and collapse. I call this strength. And we all know strength. It shows up as clarity, a courageous heart and a stable, grounded sense of solidity. When we feel strong we feel mature, functional, capable of being with what is happening and responding in useful, fresh and creative ways. In a nut shell we feel alive, and balanced. This is the life force operating through our maturity. The problem is that life force often gets co-opted by anger and aggression.The life force gets channeled through the superego and the more primitive parts of ourselves, in particular through the ways of the child and our instinctual nature. 

The child has only two ways of managing the intense charge of aggression; either by suppressing it, or discharging it. Aggression can show up as violence, or as suppressed rage, as underhandedness, manipulation, passive aggressiveness, or as depression, self hatred, passivity and numbness. As adults we have to the capacity to actually sense these intense feelings. With time and practice by actually feeling the energy, the heat, the agitation, of the anger, a mysterious alchemy occurs. What began as out of control, too much, too scary, too threatening, coalesces into the presence of strength, with all its vitality, clarity, and groundedness. This presence of strength is one of the faces of presence, one of its vital expressions. God as the face of strength. You as the embodiment of strength.

We need strength  to deal with the resistance of the superego to rebirth, unfolding, emergence of presence.  Unlike many spiritual traditions where anger is pushed away, judged, or"purified", in our practice of presence we invite anger when it is present. We sense it, we hold it, we understand it. That is the doorway to strength. This is not easy at first. But at some point we wake up to the outrage of being denied our birthright, our presence, our maturity. In a nutshell we want our freedom from our history, from our superego more than our fear of change. This takes strength. Every time you wake up and take on the superego you are inviting your inherent strength to arise. At some point the life force captured by the superego becomes your juice, your vitality, your truth. 

I invite you to pay attention to the comings and goings of the inner voice of judgement, the superego. Notice what affect it has on your vitality, your awakeness, your responsiveness. Notice when you feel strength. Feel it, enjoy it. The more you pay attention to your strength the more it grows. The more you disentangle from the superego the less power it has over you. This is a process.

Hope to see you all next Monday. And here comes the balmy weather. Scary really. Alison

PS. You will find this email and the playlist posted on my blog: practicing-presence.blogspot.com

#13 Playlist

Rutter, Requiem, Lux Aeterna, by the Cambridge Singers.

Holy Night, by Holly Near.

Rebirth

Dear friends. I want to wish you all a happy new year, guided by rebirth. 

Last time we focused on rebirth. We brought the spirit of rebirth and emergence by chanting at the beginning of our time together as we lit the candles that each of you bought. The candles, every shape and size, flickered throughout the evening at the center of our circle. 

We explored our resistance to rebirth. (Questions: tell me a way you resist rebirth? Tell me a way you allow rebirth? Explore what and how you are being reborn. How does the practice of presence affect this birthing. What is being born?)  We all know our fears of change; fears of not being in control; fears of entering unknown territory; fears of some kind of  new responsibility. And yet we are attracted to and desire a rebirth. We often think we know what that rebirth should be, what we want it to be. But rarely does it come exactly as we wish. Sometimes it comes as a big explosion, an outside or an inside upheaval. These can be wild, wondrous and extremely difficult times.

But often the rebirth appears subtly, so subtly that we miss the upwelling. Often we don't know how the rebirth came about. Something changed and we had nothing to do with it. Perhaps in hindsight we can see the germination, but often we don't see it. Grace or presence works in mysterious ways; underground, out of our consciousness. Like the farm field that is left to go fallow. On the surface it looks like hell:  bits of corn, soybean from previous plantings, a hodge-podge of weeds. Our lives often look like this. Kinda messy. But under the fallow field, the nitrogen fixing nodules of plants are in the process of rejuvenation. The soil is fed. And in the next year's planting there is renewed vigor. This is how our practice of presence works. We meditate, we come back over and over. Our meditations are terrible. There are moments of opening and we grasp at those gifts. And then it all turns to hell again. As we practice we are preparing the field, the vessel, our bodies for rebirth to have its way with us. We are cultivating patience, steadfastness, courage. These qualities may be the rebirth itself. For without them we will be spiritual day trippers. Not a bad thing to go on day trips, fun and precious but a day trip cannot take you deep. And the more you practice the more you become a pilgrim, a pilgrim through life. Each step, each breath.

I walked the labyrinth with two friends on Christmas Day. The Chartres labyrinth --dedicated to the mother of god-- is a poor person's  pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  The only choice you make is to enter the labyrinth. From then on it is simple: one step at a time. At times you are tantalizingly close to the  center (shaped like a rose) then in the next few steps you are way out at the periphery. It winds back and forth until you end up at the center for some moments of rest. And then this whole process unwinds itself until you exit the labyrinth. This patten traces the spiritual journey. I experienced boredom, cold toes, moments of stillness and silence and love for my friends who journeyed with me. No big deal. No parting of the heavens on this Christmas morning. But this was how the practice of presence showed up that day. 

I have come to trust the quiet rebirths more than the big ones, not that I have any choice in the matter!  And with all rebirths the superego will rise up to reestablish the old familiar way of being. Our familiar way of being resists rebirth and becomes, angry, judgmental, anxious and fearful.  This is like the movement from the inner path to the outer path on the labyrinth. 

Staying faithful, means returning over and over to this moment. Will we fail? Yes! But the amazing thing about the presence of grace is that your failures are not graded or tallied up. What matters is that you return. Sometimes we return in the next breath and sometimes we return years later! It helps to have fellow labyrinth walkers, fellow pilgrims. We remind each other when we forget. We inspire each other when we loose heart.  And when we practice together the communion of presence grows. 

Joe and I have decided to open up our circle until the middle of January we will then close the group. If you know people who are interested please ask them to contact Joe or myself. We are sensing that the theme for this winter is the continuation of exploring rebirth on the one hand and spiritual and religious wounding on the other. Our wounds are deep and real. What does it mean to be reborn in the midst of our wounding. Perhaps the surprise is that our wounds, our sacred wounds, are the very place of the opening into grace. By holding in presence what is injured, a healing openness can arise, and then perhaps the sweetness of truth begins to emerge. Nothing is fixed. All is allowed.

Blessings to you all in the new year. Hope to see you January 7th. Alison