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