This is a video created by a friend of some of my photos put to music. Enjoy
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Summer Reading
Summer Reading
The Soul Without Shame, by Byron Brown. (Shambala Press)
Everything you ever wanted to know about the superego, its impact on your soul and how to banish it. Great book.
Dog Heart, by Alison Swan. ( Alice Green & Co). A delightful book of poems by Alison who participated our fall series of sessions.
Hymn of the Universe, by Teilliard de Chardin. (Harper and Row) Out of prints, second hand copies on Amazon. Meditations on the Evolving Christ. This is the beginning of a new vision of Christianity that sees evolution as evolving love. Finally there is no war between science and religion. Remarkable Jesuit Priest, stretcher-bearer during World War I, later censured by the Vatican, discovered the skull of the Peking Man in China. Died in the sixties.
Revelations,Visions, Prophecy & Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels. (Viking Press). A fascination exploration, history, deep archeology into the early Christian Church. How things went wrong so early on.
The Meaning of Mary Magdalene. Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity by Cynthia Bourgeault (Shambala Press). Cynthia is a wonderful writer, mystic, Episcopal priest, who blowing open the closed doors of dogmatism. She has also written books on centering prayer.
Falling Upward. A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr (Jossey-Bass). A Franciscan teacher, writer, mystic, general trouble maker who is on fire with fresh winds of change. This points to the flavor and gifts of spiritual life as we age.
The Soul Without Shame, by Byron Brown. (Shambala Press)
Everything you ever wanted to know about the superego, its impact on your soul and how to banish it. Great book.
Dog Heart, by Alison Swan. ( Alice Green & Co). A delightful book of poems by Alison who participated our fall series of sessions.
Hymn of the Universe, by Teilliard de Chardin. (Harper and Row) Out of prints, second hand copies on Amazon. Meditations on the Evolving Christ. This is the beginning of a new vision of Christianity that sees evolution as evolving love. Finally there is no war between science and religion. Remarkable Jesuit Priest, stretcher-bearer during World War I, later censured by the Vatican, discovered the skull of the Peking Man in China. Died in the sixties.
Revelations,Visions, Prophecy & Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels. (Viking Press). A fascination exploration, history, deep archeology into the early Christian Church. How things went wrong so early on.
The Meaning of Mary Magdalene. Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity by Cynthia Bourgeault (Shambala Press). Cynthia is a wonderful writer, mystic, Episcopal priest, who blowing open the closed doors of dogmatism. She has also written books on centering prayer.
Falling Upward. A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, by Richard Rohr (Jossey-Bass). A Franciscan teacher, writer, mystic, general trouble maker who is on fire with fresh winds of change. This points to the flavor and gifts of spiritual life as we age.
Embodiment 1
Embodiment.
Thursday Oct 13, 2011
Thursday Oct 13, 2011
Dear friends,
Embodiment, becoming flesh, takes time. In our culture we have cut ourselves off from the body, and so we have lost a doorway into the now, into the possibility of presence. The body can only live now. Even the tensions that are patterned in from our past histories can only be felt in the now. The ego takes us into the past or into the future. It is how it is made. Not bad, simply that's how it functions. And it has served us well. We are here. We survived, we made it here. This is precious and quite miraculous really.
But something in us wants more, otherwise why do we come together to practice. That longing, that itch that intuits that more life, more presence, more depth, more meaning, is possible So we look for the doorways. Embodiment is such an opening.
And immediately we have to face the superego. We judge our bodies, we hate them. The body is sin, the body is to be denied, the body is to be punished, shaped, manipulated, defiled..... So when we begin to practice presence through the body, the superego will show its face. Yell at it if that helps to push it away. The superego is the structure that wants to keep you small, not capable of growing.
I suggest that when you awaken, you sit on the side of your bed. Start with your right big toe and sense it, feel it, then your toes, then you sole of your foot, then the whole foot, then your ankle, your calf, your shin your knee, your thigh up in the hip. Feeling sensing all the way. Then bring your focus to your right hand, your thumb, fingers and palm. Moving up through your wrist, elbow, upper arm into your right shoulder. Take you time. If you get distracted, and most of us will, come back. Then move over to your left shoulder and sense your way down the left side, until you end with your left big toe. If first thing in the morning doesn't work find some other time. At other times during the day just sense your arms and legs. No need to scan the body, just a simple sensing of your arms and legs. I do this a lot when I am driving, when I am sitting relaxing. Remember there is no right experience- right is the language of the superego. The point is simply to feel and sense what is arising in your big toe, in your shoulder, in your hip. Every time it will be different. Sometimes you will feel nothing, numb, sometimes heat, cold, sometimes aches, sometimes energy and sometimes something very subtle, like a quiet presence. Your superego will want to evaluate what you are experiencing. Notice how that takes you away from your direct experience.
You may also want to journal and discover what the superego has to say about simply sensing and feeling your body.
Take good care and see you soon. Alison
Monday, April 16, 2012
Holding, Support
Dear friends.
Perhaps you are beginning to see that this practice of presence allows for a new relationship with our experience, especially our suffering. When we turn towards our experience, even our resistance, and we allow ourselves to get closer, more intimate with the felt sense and some alchemy starts to happen. Our turning towards is the movement of our consciousness, our presence. It is as though our presence wakes up and rather being lost in the experience, identified with the suffering, we become present with the experience, awake in the experience. And this changes everything. We discover that we are more. We thought, we believed we were simply a suffering ego, a suffering me, cut off, frantic, lost, and yet when we wake up, even just a little we find that our living presence, our consciousness deeply affects our experience. We are still suffering but now we are more than the suffering. Somehow we are not so alone. We may notice if we can breathe and settle into being with ourselves that we are being held by presence.
This holding, this buoyant ground of being, allows us to relax and feel safe. We feel less cut off and hopeless. This ground is always there, but we get so lost that we don't know and don't recognize it when it arises. We actually take it for granted most of the time. We only know it by it's absence, when we are in dire straits. At first it may be a subtle. Like a simple feeling that all is well. A simple okayness. But if you pay attention you will notice that is a palpable presence: Supportive, buoyant, reassuring, safe. You may feel that you are sitting in, floating in a field of this beneficence. The more you become aware of this, the more your nervous system can relax. We loosen our grip, we find some trustfulness that indeed all is well. And as we settle a quiet hope may arise, understanding about the suffering may bubble up, and there is a sense of flow. What was frozen suffering, cut off, stuck, becomes a fluid unfolding and our suffering morhps, opens into clarity, understanding, healing. What I am pointing to is that our living presence holds us, holds our experience, and this holding makes all the difference.
As children many of us experienced real abandonment by our mothers, our care takers. We were not held, and I mean physically, well enough. The holding was cold or rejecting or we were even dropped, parked somewhere. So we didn't have the real support that our bodies, our souls needed. As infants we needed mother's holding to help regulate our nervous system, to feel safe, loved, welcomed. We needed to feel that the world was good, trustworthy. And we learned this by being held, by being responded to in an attuned way, over and over. Mother's physical holding invited this support of presence. It was there implicitly and explicitly.
This lack support so early on creates a sense of being abandoned, cut off, a deep fear and agitation. And we learn that there is no holding and so we choicelessly turn away from this precious ground of support. And we forget it, ignore it, discount it. Mother was not there, so presence was not there, god was not there. But presence is always here, it cannot be otherwise. We abandon this precious support that we so desperately need. We never can have the mother we needed, as much as we spend our livings looking for the perfect holding, the perfect love, the perfect relationship. What we are seeking out there is right here now. Sensing yourself, remembering to come back to your experience now, kicking out the superego is the way back to this precious sense of presence as holding.
(exercises. Tell me a way you experience the lack of support; tell me a way ou experience being held. Explore what is like to be held. What happens to your sense of being held as you become more embodied.)
Happy springtime, Easter, Passover. Warmly, Alison
This holding, this buoyant ground of being, allows us to relax and feel safe. We feel less cut off and hopeless. This ground is always there, but we get so lost that we don't know and don't recognize it when it arises. We actually take it for granted most of the time. We only know it by it's absence, when we are in dire straits. At first it may be a subtle. Like a simple feeling that all is well. A simple okayness. But if you pay attention you will notice that is a palpable presence: Supportive, buoyant, reassuring, safe. You may feel that you are sitting in, floating in a field of this beneficence. The more you become aware of this, the more your nervous system can relax. We loosen our grip, we find some trustfulness that indeed all is well. And as we settle a quiet hope may arise, understanding about the suffering may bubble up, and there is a sense of flow. What was frozen suffering, cut off, stuck, becomes a fluid unfolding and our suffering morhps, opens into clarity, understanding, healing. What I am pointing to is that our living presence holds us, holds our experience, and this holding makes all the difference.
As children many of us experienced real abandonment by our mothers, our care takers. We were not held, and I mean physically, well enough. The holding was cold or rejecting or we were even dropped, parked somewhere. So we didn't have the real support that our bodies, our souls needed. As infants we needed mother's holding to help regulate our nervous system, to feel safe, loved, welcomed. We needed to feel that the world was good, trustworthy. And we learned this by being held, by being responded to in an attuned way, over and over. Mother's physical holding invited this support of presence. It was there implicitly and explicitly.
This lack support so early on creates a sense of being abandoned, cut off, a deep fear and agitation. And we learn that there is no holding and so we choicelessly turn away from this precious ground of support. And we forget it, ignore it, discount it. Mother was not there, so presence was not there, god was not there. But presence is always here, it cannot be otherwise. We abandon this precious support that we so desperately need. We never can have the mother we needed, as much as we spend our livings looking for the perfect holding, the perfect love, the perfect relationship. What we are seeking out there is right here now. Sensing yourself, remembering to come back to your experience now, kicking out the superego is the way back to this precious sense of presence as holding.
(exercises. Tell me a way you experience the lack of support; tell me a way ou experience being held. Explore what is like to be held. What happens to your sense of being held as you become more embodied.)
Happy springtime, Easter, Passover. Warmly, Alison
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