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

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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