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

#12 Playlist

Call in the Angels. Jane Siberry and k.d.Lang
Shostakovich Quartet, #15 in e flat. Elegy, adagio

Utter Darkness, The Halcyon Days

Dear friends, I am so touched by the growing sincerity in our time together on Mondays. Each of us are in different places, and each of us is welcomed as  we are-- how can we be any other way-- into our  circle of growing presence. We will always be in different places from each other, and from moment to moment. There is no cookie cutter way to presence. Each soul has its own journey, its own struggles and its own expression. That is the grace of presence. All is allowed and all is held. Over the weeks each of you have brought your sincerity, your vulnerability and your practice of presence to this circle. 

These are the Halcyon Days, well not quite. They start seven days before the solstice and end seven days after the solstice. The Halcyon days come from a greek myth. As is so often the case,  a couple of lovers piss of Zeus and he freezes them into oblivion. But some other gods-- thank God for those other ones-- come to the rescue and change this couple into a pair of Kingfishers. They build their nest by the sea. So in order to protect the nest and the delicate eggs, the god of the wind stills the winds for 14 days during the Halcyon Days. Go outside at night and feel the stillness, when the wind has dropped. Let yourself feel the pull of interiority. These are very thin times.

We are journeying into the darkness of this season. Last week we explored the frenzy of filling as we enter this season of emptying. This Monday we welcomed the utter darkness. It awoke childhood fears of monsters hidden away and fears of death, loneliness, abandonment, brokenness. And yet at the same time we discovered our longing to rest in the utter stillness of the darkness, the curious intimacy of this peaceful rest. It is as though for a moment we discover that all the agitation in the mind comes to a stop. The darkness welcomes us into the perfect rest of stillness and silence. (Questions: Tell me a way you fear total darkness; tell me a way you are drawn to darkness. Explore your experience of the movement between stillness and agitation. Apply your practice of presence to this exploration)

Following the poetry of Rilke we turned all the lights off in the chapel and sat together in silence. At the end of the evening we held our dear friend Karl in loving presence as he heads to Maryland to find out the results of his chemotherapy. Our prayers go with him.

Next time we will focus on the light of rebirth. If you have an unscented candle please bring it our next session. This will be our last time until we gather again on January 7th 2013. Love, Alison

…whom should I turn to,
if not the one whose darkness
is darker than night, the only one
who keeps vigil with no candle,
and is not afraid--
the deep one, whose being I trust,
for it breaks through the earth into trees,
and rises,
when I bow my head,
faint as a fragrance,
from the soil     (I 2, p. 32)


You darkness, of whom I am born---
I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations--just as they are.

It let's me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.
I believe in the night.  (I. II p. 63)


…when I lean over the chasm of myself---
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.
More I don't know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirring only by the wind.   (I.3   p. 47)

-- 

Playlist #11

Arvo Part. Spiegel im Spiegel for Piano and cello.

#11 Emptying and Filling.

Dear friends. It is curious that as the days get shorter and the nights longer that the shopping, lighting up, eating frenzy increases. So what is going on? Sure capitalism has taken over and appropriated this sacred time of the year. Catalogues arrive daily in the mail and online, with tempting images of good cheer and beauty, and Christmas music accompanies us everywhere. This tradition of gift giving at Christmas began during the Victorian era, when the merchants saw the opportunity to cash in. Nothing wrong with gift giving. It is fun and generous. But something has gotten out of hand. The spirit has been replaced with a kind of compulsive ritual every year. And in January the bills come due and followed by the crash.

We began talking about emptiness on Monday. We all know someplace inside that feels hollow, like something is missing. It feels like a place where we are cut off. We don't know what we are cut off from but there is nagging sense that this hole, at the very center of our being,  must be filled. Mostly we don't get close to the actual emptiness, the nothingness. We experience all kinds of reactions. There may be intense agitation, addictive filling ( spending, shopping, eating, drinking, using drugs, gambling, over working...). Of we withdraw from the possibility of being disappointed, giving up and sinking into despair or a lazy collapse. Netflix is the perfect companion into the couch! Or we may engage in endless social activity fearing being lonely. Or we simply keep ourselves constantly busy. Or we our bodies freeze up in fear. What is your favorite way to reaction to the hole of emptiness.

So what is it about this time of year that seems to exacerbate this agitation, this filling up? The darkness of these long nights invites the soul into a kind of interiority. The darkness pulls the soul into a kind of silence or stillness. And this pull takes us closer to this place that feels like nothing, like a dull deficiency, that feels empty and cutoff. And the closer we get unconsciously we begin to resist this pull and we are off on the hamster wheel. We see what a culture does with this pull. Earlier and earlier each year, the lights go up, the jingles start. "Buy, buy, buy! Busy, busy, busy! Keep filling this hole." This is the implicit and explicit message.

The tragedy is that this nothingness, this place of cutoff-- where we unconsciously, by necessity, and through the normal and healthy development of ego,-- is actually the doorway to our divine nature, our presence. What you may discover as you befriend this emptiness, as you bring your practice of presence to it, that this empty hole, this disconnection is simply a kind of empty spaciousness, an opening, that allows what is deeper and truer to arise. If we are caught up in all the reactions we believe that this emptiness is a kind of annihilation, an intolerable meaningless, a place of terror and we never actually let ourselves land in the nothing to discover that it is simply an opening, a portal. 

Years ago I was in the Southern Hemisphere and Christmas was in the height of summer. Of course Santa on slays in blazing heat was all wrong. But more importantly there was so little darkness. My soul could not find the tug to go inward. Back then I did not understand what this pull was but at some intuitive level I could feel that some kind of deep dark gravity was missing.

So I invite you to go out at night. Let the darkness in. Next time we will focus on the Blackness of these nights.

Blessings to you all, Alison