Peace, stillness, dying

Blessed are all who create peace, for they shall be called offspring of God. Matthew 5:9

Dear friends,

Last Monday we honored the darkness, beauty and mystery of this holy season by sharing our practice together. Can you begin to understand how your practice, your work, is a gift to the circle? Each drop of practice adds to the shared presence. It's like a pearl which grows, layer upon layer,  as a reaction to the irritant of the grain of sand caught in the oyster shell. Our practice, our struggle with practice, builds presence. On Monday night as we grappled with our resistance to darkness, our fears of dying and getting lost in this blackness, the collective presence grew into  a peacefulness and stillness that is so near during these halcyon days of solstice time. We shared the lighting of candles and the singing of Silent Night -- thank you Janet-- and the glory of Holy Night (performed by Holly Near). A silence dropped in and over our circle. Such a blessing. These are the fruits of your hard work, your sincerity, and your practice. 

Monday night's questions:

Tell me a way that blackness evokes fear or dread. 

Tell me a way darkness invites you into the stillness

Explore your feeling of peace. Explore your distance from this peace. 

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season. Stay warm and safe. Hope to see you all on January 5th for our first session of practice of presence in the new year.

Disconnection and Opening

Dear Friends, Next Monday, December 8th, we will hold our contemplative worship service. On Monday December 15th will hold our last practice of presence session for 2014. We will resume our practice of presence on Monday January 5th. Please be sure to check your email before each session to see if  we need to cancel because of poor weather.

On Monday we focused on Matthew 5:3.

Those who are lowly of spirit live in a state of blessedness, for out of their very Being the Reign of Heaven arrives. ( Traditional translation: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven)

Our session focused on what it means to lowly of spirit. There are differing meanings and they all have their place. Lowly of spirit means a state of humility, that of the beggar begging. It can also mean a state in which ego is absent, or the state of hitting bottom or the state of disconnection.

We spent some time exploring the place of disconnection. The place of a rock bottom emptiness, dullness, despair, hopelessness. A place we all run from. This is the place where ego developed and arose over the course of our development. And it was necessary. It is the root of the sense of separation; of the "gap" (we used this expression earlier this fall); of the existential sense of meaninglessness, helplessness, powerlessness. If we allow ourselves to surrender, be with, hold, allow, be present with this sense of nothingness, an alchemy can happen and does happen. What arises is a sense of an exhale, a relaxation and sense of inner spaciousness and mysteriously the sense of connection returns. We are back from the sense of exile into a world where life seems possible once again. This alchemy happens all the time. We often feel better and then we jump back into the maelstrom of life! If we stay in this subtle opening patiently and expectantly, more treasures will arise. Out of the mystery of this spaciousness come the flavors and faces of presence. Sometime we feel love, or clarity, or joy, or peace, or strength.... This is what the turning means, what metanoia means. We turn towards the disconnection-- the lowly state of spirit-- instead of running away, distracting ourselves, and going to sleep one way or another.

This is difficult and tender work. So don't let the superego attack you. Don't loose heart or courage. This is a practice, not a one shot deal! We deepen drop by drop-- sometimes with splurges-- but mostly drop by drop. Each time we taste the opening our trust can grow.

Exercises:

Tell me a way you avoid inner emptying.

Tell me a way you experience the inner state of emptying or inner poverty.

Explore your relationship to inner emptying. What happens if you allow yourself to feel this emptiness in your body, in your belly.

Hope to see next Monday.

In peace, Alison

Inner eye: direct knowing

Dear Friends.  A quick reminder we will be hosting a contemplative worship service next Monday November 24 at 7.30pm. All are welcome.

On Monday we focused on Matthew 6.23-24.

Matthew 6:23-24

The lamplight in your being is the inner eye. If that eye is open and sound,then your whole being will be flooded with illumination. But if your inner eye is clouded, then your being will grow dark. If it is extinguished, how great will be your darkness!

As we have been weaving our way through the Sermon on the Mount, we have focused on the orientation to the practice of presence, especially the felt sense of the embodied now. What is the direct experience, the felt experience in the body now? In these words from Matthew we are moving towards direct knowing, or knowing through what he calls the inner eye. Over the last few weeks we have found that there are layers of obscuration-- judgements, beliefs, defense mechanisms, numbness and ultimately unconsciousness-- between "me and my experience". There seems to be a gap. This is the experience of living and experiencing through the lens of the separate self, otherwise known as ego. And this gap is the root cause of suffering.

Direct knowing, seeing through the inner eye is knowingness that rises up through presence, through the direct experience. It is immediate, spontaneous, flowing knowing. It is revelatory. Ordinary knowing, what we assume is the true way and only way to know--- is mediated through thinking, evaluating, comparing. It is knowing through the lens of ego, and so here too there is a sense of a gap, a separation.  Ordinary knowing is very useful if you are navigating through the Healthcare website!! But in the realm of presence ordinary knowing is veils us from deeper wisdom.

Direct knowing has access to memory and prior knowledge, but it is often experienced as a leap of insight, an ah ha moment. A moment when the dots line up. It is also quite ordinary. When you are in touch with presence you know the quality of presence. You know when it is warm love, and not still clarity. You don't have to figure it out. Presence knows itself. Its capacity to know directly is not separate from presence. So knowing as this kind of wisdom is the nature of presence itself. And it is available to us all the time. We just don't recognize it.

We ended with there are these wonderful lines from Matthew 5:15-16. Nor do you light a lamp then put it under some basket, but on a lamp stand where it can illuminate the whole house. So let your inner light shine before humanity, so that they may be able to witness your works of beauty and so worship the Beautiful One, your source in heavens.

Journal first impressions. What is your inner eye? What is illumination?

Turn me a way you distrust, ignore or avoid direct knowing.

Tell me a way you experience inner seeing/ direct knowing.

Explore the difference between ordinary, familiar knowing and knowing as revelation or illumination. How does the practice of presence help us discern between the two ways of knowing.

Stay warm!!! Alison

The narrow gate: the embodied now

Dear friends. Just a reminder next Monday we will be hosting the Contemplative worship service. This is a mix of prayer, chanting, readings and collective reflections and silence. I hope you will join us.

On Monday we focused our practice on the passage below.

Matthew 7:13-14

So go in by the direct path, through the narrow gate, for the road that leads to ruin is a broad way, and the gate stands wide open, and many are taking it. But the way that leads directly to Life has been compressed down to a single entry point, and few have been able to discover it.

It is easy to read this as elitist. Only a few are smart enough, privileged enough to find the entry point. The rest us are just dolts!!

But what if we look at this from the point of view of our practice of presence. Some questions arise immediately. What is the entry point and why do we miss it? What is it? What makes it compressed? Why when we know it do we turn away?

In our practice we have discovered that the embodied now is the opening to presence. We have all felt the opening into sweetness, stillness, peace, love... once we bring our gaze, our attention inward, into the felt sense of our experience in the body. This is the single entry point!! It is available to everyone, not some special elite. We have to remember to return to this present moment and let ourselves feel. 

We miss it because we forget. But also because the familiar ego gaze is always outward. You are looking outwards or even heavenward  for the answers, the bliss, the wisdom, the goodies, the guidance, the consolations. Our outer orientation is deeply hard wired neurologically. So in a sense when we come back to our inner experience we are going against the grain of deep habit and conditioning. And the superego is right there to attack you for doing it wrong, for wasting your time, for being incapable and on and on. This is why we have to practice. Over and over we come back when we are meditating and also in life. When we wake up that we have left our inner or direct experience for moments, for hours, days, weeks :) and we come back to the embodied now we are returning to the "narrow gate".  You have to wonder who and what is that remembers when you are lost in your thoughts, in your self judgements, your distractions. Is this not your consciousness, your presence waking us up out the sleep that we live in our so called normal lives. It is quite a miracle when you ponder this.

So what makes the narrow gate compressed down to a single point. I don't know what the theologians might say about this, but when we first begin to find and enter the narrow gate it feels very compressed, tight, reactive, agitated. This compression is caused by all the layers of defense, beliefs, conditioning, superego judgements which are designed to keep us away from the entry way. 

What we encounter right away is what we have been calling the gap. This is the sense of disconnection, alienation, dullness, emptiness. No wonder we turn away. This the gap between me and my experience, me and the outside world, me and presence. In short this is the sense of separation inherent in the ego self.  There is no presence here, or so it seems. As we have been exploring, we need to allow and feel this experience of profound disconnection otherwise we will  move away from the narrow gate and so miss the possibility of opening into the spaciousness of presence and life.

So far in our journey into the Sermon on the Mount we have discovered that we need to close the door to practice (ie turn inward); we need to let go of the religious and pious (ie the spiritual superego; and we need to discover the direct path through the narrow gate, (ie our direct experience, embodied and in the present moment). 

Exercises from Monday night:

Journal: first impressions.

Tell me a way you feel the gap between yourself and your experience.

What happens when you open to the emptiness.

Follow your direct experience, Notice what happens when you allow your direct experience. Do you experience the gap? Does it open up into spaciousness? How is this different from the experience of the gap?

I look forward to seeing you all soon. Peace, Alison

Religious and pious, the spiritual superego

Dear Friends, Happy Halloween. Looks like we might be turning towards winter! Please note we will be holding our next session of the practice of presence this coming Monday November 3rd. I still have plenty of booklets of the Sermon on the Mount for sale. I will bring them to the next few meetings.

Matthew 5:20

And I tell you this, unless  your own inner virtue transcends that of the most pious and religious here, you cannot enter the realms of Transcendence (heaven) there.

On Monday we explored how we easily turn to outside authorities-- the pious and religions--, for direction. And how this outward source of so called authority is often our own spiritual superego. The spiritual superego takes precious spiritual teachings and turns them in perfectionistic standards, turns them into rigid rules that our based in the need for control. It also creates the tribal loyalties which lead to doctrinal wars, excommunication, persecution and war all in the name of the superior God. This teaching like last week asks us to turn inward. In this week's quote from Matthew we are asked notice how we create our own idolatry, our own fixed beliefs and standards.

And what about inner virtue. What is Jesus pointing to. Is he asking us to become good virtuous children? This is an easy misinterpretation. Virtue here is pointing to Presence-- and the many tastes and faces of presence: stillness, love, compassion, openness, clarity, peace, true power.....This cannot be fabricated by the ego. Although we all attempt this. We can feel the difference between the fakeness of ego compassion and the tenderness of the presence of compassion. Ego desperately tries to imitate presence. 

This week you might focus on the way we fake, or try to imitate the qualities of presence that we believe we SHOULD be expressing. If you feel into this you will inevitably find the superego telling how you should feel. But also you may also feel the actual fakeness; how it feels in the body, the taste in the mouth, the tension in the eyes and face; the shallowness of breath.

We also discussed the difference between direct experience and  usual experiencing. In direct experience there is no gap between ourself and our experience. This is the taste of oneness. In the  egoic or familiar way of experiencing life there is me and and then there is my experience. This can feel quite subtle or like an enormous chasm. The ego goes to town attempting to fill the gap: distraction, repetitive thinking, moving onto something else, compulsive habits, addictions...This gap is what separates us from what we love: the intimacy with ourselves, awake, at rest, alive and also from the deeper mysteries of our divine nature and the divinity of everything. You have joined this circle because the gap nags at you, haunts you, drives you crazy... If you never felt the deep dissatisfaction with this deep sense of separation you would not participate in our practice together. As we go deeper you may discover that the pain of the gap is the root of all human suffering.

Monday's exercises:

Journal:  What is your literal, rational, take on this. 

Tell me a way your spiritual superego— the eyes of the most pious and religious —blocks your inner ways of seeing and knowing.

Tell me a way your experience this inner seeing.

Explore  the arising of direct experience. Notice when the surface way of seeing arises and takes you away from the immediacy of direct experience. Do you feel the gap between you and your experience. What is your relationship to the gap.

Hope to see you all soon, Alison

Turning inward

Dear Friends,

A reminder: next Monday October 13th at 7.30pm at ECI we will be holding our contemplative worship service. There will be no session on Monday October 20th. I will be away.

If we simply ground ourselves in experience we can we can go astray; if we simply ground ourselves in Scripture without experience it becomes stale and riddled with superego; by bringing scripture and presence into the tradition of centuries of prayer we open to the living moment grounded in the depth of a kind of ancientness and newness all in the now.

Last time we focused on holding; holding in the body.

Tonight we are going to explore the turning inward. But more than that is beginning to learn the language of knowing from the inner vs the knowing from the outer. Or the different wisdom that arises in the esoteric vs the exoteric. The exoteric is the surface, the way of knowing, the way the ego knows, the s/ego interprets, the dualistic mind, the linear rational mind, the right and wrong. The knowing that comes from conceptualizing, dividing….

The inner way of knowing the esoteric way of knowing requires eyes that can see and ears that can hear. This is a new operating system. We all know it. It is the flash of inspiration, the sudden synthesis, the dots lining up; the silence revealing something deeper; it is a way of knowing without the usual thinking mind.

I am suggesting that the Beatitudes can be read from the exoteric, egoic, by the superego, familiar way of knowing, or from the way of wisdom, the way of knowing that comes through silence, oneness, through mystery; wisdom comes out of a non dual way of being.

Over the next months we are going to learn and experience this way of knowing. how we know through superego vs living presence; how we know literally vs through living presence; how we know rationally vs knowing through living presence….

We start with the entry into practice:  turning inward.

Matthew 6:6: 

Enter into a private place to pray, shut the door, and then commune there with your Father privately, and your Father, the Hidden One, who observes you secretly will reward you.

Journal: what are your literal interpretations? What were you taught? How does the superego hear this? 

What if the private place to pray is your own body, your private temple, your inner experiencing. What if your embodied opening into the now is prayer, the deepest form of prayer, the prayer of silent, wordless prayer?

Tells me a way you resist shutting the door.

Tell me what draws you into a private place to pray.

Explore what it means to you to commune with the Hidden One. What does communion feel like?

Remember that the superego will thwart you as you go deeper, as you claim your experience, as you take your unique journey. Don't let it stop you. 

In peace, Alison

Engaging the superego; superego as god

Dear Friends, Take heart! We are ploughing deeply into a major obstacle to Oneness. I know this work with the superego can feel impossible, frightening, maddening, hopeless... But it does get easier.

I was struck on Monday by the amount of pain caused  by  churches, ministers, the theology of sin, damnation. As children we can't help but take in these abuses of  religious power and internalize them into self hatred, resulting into an utter sense of disconnection and betrayal.

No wonder so many of us fled. It is a testament to some mysterious courage that you venture back into a church sanctuary. It also speaks to the unquenchable hunger of the human spirit to recover the freedom and goodness of living presence-- or to use religious language of our living, loving God.

It occurred to me that it might be useful to continue the exploration about how we project the superego on God and the church.

I did this exercise years ago and I found it very liberating. 

On a sheet of paper  write a letter to God, and let it rip. God can handle your rage, your disgust, your fears, your pain....all of your feelings. Tell him exactly what you think of his Church, his ministers... all of it. I use the "he" pronoun deliberately because we are mostly conditioned to ascribe the masculine to the face of God.

Then on second sheet of blank let yourself be drawn into by the image of God as   the God of love, the God of freedom, of compassion, glory, beauty, truth, ..... Spend some time sensing your arms and legs, breathing into the belly. After a few minutes  words may come, images will come... write them down, drawn them.. scribbles, doodles...this is not an art project!

On a third page let it remain empty. Meditate for a few minutes. What ever images emerge, feelings, words, let them arise and let them go. Then let yourself gaze gently at the  blank page-- or if it works better gaze out into the space in front of you-- allowing the possibility of being drawn into the divine that is beyond all names, all images, all ideas. Let yourself be drawn by the God of mystery. And remember you cannot think your way into this. Its about relaxing and waking up. Don't judge yourself. 

After a few minutes journal your experience with the three pages. Please bring these pages to our next session.

Here are the questions from our last session:

Tell me a way your inner child engages the superego

Tell me how this engagement with superego impacts your capacity to relax and stay awake.

Explore how you project the superego onto your images of god. How does this block the nowness of living presence, how does this block your openness. 

Practicing presence and the superego

Dear Friends, we tackled the superego, the inner critic, the voice of judgement head on last time. Unless we face this demon we will be shackled by our history. Especially if we undertake spiritual work, which by definition will take you beyond the comfort zone of your ego self. And the superego is designed to keep you inside that zone, by whatever means at its disposal. This can be violent inner attacks-- statements like 'you idiot', "you fuck up', 'you never do anything right' to outright verbal abuse. Or it can keep you in line by telling to "watch you, you know that nothing you do ever works", by endless self doubt. Or it can praise you for being such a good person. Or it may be silent because you are implicitly conforming to its standards and expectations. As you begin to recognize this voice you will feel its impact in the  body: anxiety, heart racing panic, dread, contraction, numbing out, cutting off, collapse, obsessive thinking. The superego does not know you as an adult soul; it sees you as a five year old, or even younger.

So when you start to meditate and introduce the practice presence into your life, you are inviting the divine, the living waters, the life force, spaciousness to enter. And this will expand you beyond your familiar sense of self. So guess who shows up. Yes, the superego. So I encourage you to keep a log of the superego attacks this week, and maybe for a long time!! So by seeing  the superego you are waking up to your conditioning and this awakening which brings you closer to the freedom of presence that you long for. This is a practice and not an easy one.

These are the questions we focused on last time:

 Tell me a way the superego impacts you?

Tell me why you believe the voice of the superego?

Explore what you are discovering about the superego and its impact on your openness to presence.

Next Monday we will focus on how we engage the superego and how the superego becomes God. This is vital to understand if we are to enter the presence of oneness. 

The music from last time: Arvo Part. Fur Alina: 1 and Spiegel im Spiegel:2

Chopin. Impromptus Op.90 D.899, no.3 in  flat

Calling all Angels Jane Sidberry and K.D Lang

I keep these emails and old ones at: http://practicing-presence.blogspot.com/

Fall is here. Hoping to see you on Monday. Alison

the practice of presence

Dear friends, it was so good to see familiar and new faces in our circle. If you are joining for the first time it can feel like a sudden dive into unfamiliar territory. We are not used to learning and sharing in this way. It can feel exciting or awkward and scary. But as I said this is about a practice and all of it takes time. Whether it is the meditation practices, this kind of inquiry, the vulnerability of sharing... So take your time. For old timers it can feel unsettling when the familiar circle of friends suddenly expands. Presence is always asking us to expand beyond what has become familiar and cosy.

This kind of practice will open us to the depths of presence, of grace. It takes time and practice. It takes a safe and sacred circle of fellow travelers and the growing ability to relax and wake up to what is happening in this moment.

I will do my best to circulate the questions after each session so that those of you who were absent can follow along.

Questions:

Tell me a way this practice of presence disturbs you.

Tell me a way this practice of presence attracts you.

Explore your relationship to the practice of presence. Does it invite you. How does your body feel. Do you notice judgements.

We are opening the door to presence, even if we don't recognize it or feel it yet. As I mentioned last time this will activate the superego whether self judgements or criticism of others. The superego does not want us to engage in  spiritual work, especially work that takes us into the depths of our being.

For me it is a joy to begin this journey with you again. Hope to see you all next Monday. Alison

Silence of the heart

Dear Friends, Here are the questions from Monday night.

Tell me a way your superego reacts to the practice of worship
Worship involves learning to listen and feel into silence or stillness, especially in the heart. Ego/superego blocks us, distracts us. Doubts, unworthiness, confusion, beliefs based on our history or experience of church.  Ego and superego resist vulnerability. It wants an operating manual and it wants things fixed.
What is stillness in the heart. It is a kind of emptiness, a lack of reactivity, an openness that allows a space of receptivity and sensitivity. First we may feel deadness, numbness , emotional turmoil, dissociation into the head, distraction. Or we may feel drawn into the stillness and discover the desire of the heart to worship.  Inevitably we will have to contend with the grasping, avoiding, deadening nature of our emotional heart. It is territory we have to traverse with patience and compassion. This  clarifying or purifying of the heart transforms it  from being a center of emotions into the organ of sensitivity and receptivity that is capable of knowing the silence.
Explore what opens you into silence/stillness  in the heart and what blocks that opening? What does your heart feel like right now?

We will be holding our Contemplative Worship Service this coming Monday, February 3rd from 7.30-9.00pm. 

You may begin to notice hopes and expectations arise.Perhaps you had a lovely time during our previous service. You may notice fantasies about how you want it go next time. You may notice expectations. Welcome to the grasping emotional heart! This is almost inevitable. No worship service is the same. Practicing presence allows us to return to our experience in the now, noticing all the grasping, all the judgements, sensing ourselves into our feet and belly. By allowing and by holding our experience we can rest. This is the doorway. 

Or perhaps you had a miserable time and you believe that you will always be cut off. This too is a grasping. We are grasping at our fixed self, convinced that we know what will happen and beset by the attacks of the superego. It is important to recognize the superego and push it away. We may also have to untangle many beliefs and ideas we hold about worship. These beliefs come from what we learned as a children. But they also include deep seated confusions about the languaging of worship. What does God, Lord mean? Are we worthy of being blessed, of being the beloved of the beloved?

By the way the author of the longer reading was Rumi.

Looks like we may warm up a bit. Don't fall, stay warm. Hope to see you next Monday

worship service

Here is the Monday night service and some notes about contemplative worship.

Contemplative worship.
Worship comes from the old English O.E."condition of being worthy, honor, renown,”  and sciepe, and -scip "state, condition of being," "to create, ordain, appoint." Worship is to lift up what is worthy.
Contemplation: The Latin word contemplatio was used to translate the Greek word θεωρία (theoria). In a religious sense, contemplation is usually a type of prayer or meditation.
Practicing Presence is the gentle focus on the embodied now. Sensing the arms and legs, sensing the belly and breath deepens the  grounded embodiment. Sensing in the heart allows us to become closer, more intimate with this moment of nowness. Sensing in the mind allows an opening into deep stillness and clarity. The practice of presence is simply opening to being awake and aware now.
Silence is not the absence of thoughts. Silence is the nature of presence.
Distraction and resistance are to be expected. Simply gently return to sensing in the body.

Contemplative Worship Service
Opening with 3 bells

Acclamation

Listen deep within yourself
To hear the voice of God
Who shepherds us and leads us forth in life.
Let not our hearts be hardened or grow closed,
As many did when the waters failed
And bitterness became their food.

Chant.
Bless  the Lord, my soul
And bless God's holy name.
Bless The Lord my soul,
Who leads me into life.

Prayer
Oh God of peace, Oh presence of peace, you have taught us that in returning and rest we shall be met, in quietness and  in confidence shall be our strength; by the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God.

Grounding meditation

Chant.
Bless  the Lord, my soul
And bless God's holy name.
Bless The Lord my soul,
Who leads me I to life.

A short reading
The soul becomes so quiet in ecstasy, so quiet. Love speaks in silence, not in the heights of passion.
Central remembrance

Central chant 
Be still and know that I am God  (x6  Bell)
Be still and know that I am (x6 Bell)
Be still and know (x6 Bell) 
Be still  (x6 Bell)
Be (x6 Bell)

Silence
 (5-10mins)

Longer reading
 Make everything in you an atom of your sensing being. And you will hear, you will sense at every moment what presence is whispering to you, just to you and for you, without any need for my words or anyone else's. You are--we all are-- the beloved of the beloved one, and in every moment, whether you hear it or not, the beloved one is whispering to you exactly what it is you need to  feel  and know. Who can explain such a mystery? It simply is. Listen and sense and you will discover in every passing moment. Listen and feel and your whole life will become a conversation in thought and act between you and the  divine presence, directly, wordlessly, now and always. It was to enjoy this conversation that you and I were created.             
Quiet reflections in threes  Read three times. Explore what draws you. 
Brief sharing in the large circle

Central chant
Be still and know that I am God  (x6  Bell)
Be still and know that I am (x6 Bell)
Be still and know (x6 Bell) 
Be still  (x6 Bell)
Be (x6 Bell)

The Silence
10-15  mins
Returning to the world

Listen deep within yourself
To hear the voice of God
Who shepherds us and leads us forth in life.
Let not our hearts be hardened or grow closed,
As many did when the waters failed
And bitterness became their food.

Closing chant
My peace I give you,
My peace I give you,
Trouble not your heart.
My peace I give you
My peace I give you,
Be not afraid.

Closing bell 3 times.  

contemplative worship

Dear Friends,

 Joe and I are excited by a new direction that is emerging out of our three years of the practice of presence. We feel a call to create a contemplative worship space. As with everything this space will emerge over time. We will be listening, experimenting and with time a form will emerge that will support worship deeply rooted in silence, chanting, readings and the practice ofpresence. We will dip into this every other week. Everyone is welcome. You do not need to attend the other sessions of the practice of presence, although they will certainly support this new opening.

Our ongoing group will resume on January 6th. We will be exploring what it means to worship, what blocks the heart in its natural longing to praise and celebrate our deepest love. You are welcome to join us.

Our first session of contemplative worship will be held on January 13th 2014 at 7.30pm at ECI. All our welcome.

We wish you all a very happy new year. Alison and Joe

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