The Growing Edge

Dear Friends, During our last session we focused on the thread(s) that have emerged over the months that we have been meeting. What have discovered, learned, struggled with, delighted in over the many sessions? It is useful to keep that contemplation alive. It is a way to integrate the journey into consciousness.

This opened into an exploration: what is our growing edge? What is exciting to us, what is the challenge that we need to be open to. What is growing, bubbling up. Is it time to pay more attention to the supergo; is about sensing the body and breath more;  is it about how I bring my presence into my life; it is about creating the time and space to meditate; is it time to slow down... This journey is like a thread unfolding itself in and as our life. If we pay attention we will notice how miraculous this thread truly is.

We ended the evening with greeting each other face to face, presence to presence. It was lovely!

It has been an honor for me to be with you and to witness the unfolding of each of you and to feel the grace that has grown and matured in our circle. We will begin these sessions again at the end of August. Joe and I will keep you posted about details.

In the meantime we have an evening of spirit singing with Kath and Laurie next Monday. I encourage you to come. It is a way to practice presence, to sing... and to have fun too!

Starting in May we will be meeting on Monday nights for meditation. I will guide you through sensing your arms and legs and then we will meditate in silence together. We will begin at 7.30pm and end at 8.00pm. If you arrive a few minutes please join us.

Sending you all my love, Alison

Book that has me on fire!

Hi,
Some you wanted to know the book I was reading yesterday.

The Prophetic Imagination, by Walter Brueggemann.

According to Joe, Walter Brueggemann is the greatest living interpreter of the Old Testament. This book is especially for all you who care deeply about the world and the crisis we are all in. It speaks to the numbing of Empire on its people. That includes you and me. This book is on fire. The language is scholarly, perhaps dense, but the truth of ancient times -- Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Jesus-- and these modern times, is  beautifully articulated by this prophetic voice.

Whenever we practice presence we are stepping out of the ordinary conditioned reality, the empire of ego, the empire of the culture, the empire of consumerism. When we are free from the numbing, from denial, even for just a few moments, we are participating in prophetic imagination.

Summer Practice Circle

Dear Friends, This is a space for you to ask questions, to post your own reflections about the practice of presence. Perhaps you find quotes, poems, writings, books that you have found helpful on your journey. Feel free to post what you find along the way.

I will try to respond from time to time with my own reflections over the summer.

This is a way to stay in touch with each other and the circle of presence that we have created over the months. Remember this is a sacred space. This is not a place to give advice but rather a place of listening, sensing and sharing your own experience. As with any sacred space it thrives in openness, vulnerability, sincerity. Superego be gone!

This is another experiment. Lets see if this kind of circle can support our journeys in presence more and more. Your feedback is always welome. Warmly, Alison

Surrender

 As we approach our last teaching session this coming Monday I would like to ask you to make donation to the church if you have not already done so. None of this would be possible without the support of Joe and this church. I will put the donation basket on altar. You can give cash or a check made out to ECI. Thank you for your generosity.

This last week we looked at the issue of surrender-- allowing, relaxing into, accepting, yielding.  On this journey we are discovering over and over that if we turn towards, if we allow our experience, surrender into it, there is a relaxing, and the possibility of an opening into presence and grace. This runs counter to our usual ego orientation which is to resist especially suffering or unfamiliar newness.  In the face of suffering we tighten, we numb, we dissociate, we push away, we go to sleep. In other words we resist. When there is no resistance surrender is natural and easy. In fact ego cannot surrender. Ego is essentially complex tension patterns. So trying to surrender only adds another layer tension, the tension of trying. So what to do.

What need to explore, meet and understand is our resistance. This is not easy. Much of our resistance may be unconscious. But if we turn towards the inevitability of resistance, if we meet it, hold it gently, it will begin to relax and open. This takes time. But if realize that resistance is an attempt to avoid, push away, deny suffering, perhaps you can see that becoming curious, kind about our resistance will allow to rest a bit. Maybe the resistance experiences your presence, your curiosity as a kind of holding, a kind of care. Then maybe a little trust can arrive.  Perhaps the resistance is not needed so much, maybe it's safe to open into what the resistance is trying to protect. (exercise: tell me a way you resist). We spend so much energy resisting out of habit, out of lack of support and understanding. It's exhausting.

Surrender arises when the obstacles, the resistances start to dissolve. It is a quality of presence. It seems to arise out of the ground of holding and support that we explored a few weeks ago. It has has a yielding, melting, ease to it. It seems to be inviting in a warm way, inviting us into more relaxing and more letting go.  The support of the ground provides the ballast, the trust into  surrendering into ever deeper relaxing. Not by trying to relax but by the natural effect of presence on our souls and bodies. In a way surrender is like a simple 'yes' in the heart.

As the weeks have passed we are noticing how the field of presence is growing. Sometimes it is warm and tender. Sometimes the presence is more robust and alive. This last time I was aware of the sweetness, appreciation in the air. This is what happens when a group of people come together  week after week to practice presence together. As the openness, realness grows amongst us, as we feel safer to expose the truth of what is arising now, this sincerity and courage opens up the field of presence in and amongst us. We feel held, we feel safer we feel more open, and that invites grace to be among us. It is so precious.

Holding

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.)

Poems

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

- e. e. Cummings

Holy Vulnerablity

We settled into the issue of vulnerability last time. We discovered  both our resistance, sometimes fierce, and also our longing for the openness, delicateness of our presence, which is surprisingly safe, clear, intelligent, and alive. How is it that something that we usually associate with weakness, foolishness, fear, unprotected, shameful, is something  we long for.

We explored this with the following questions: tell me what vulnerability means to you; tell me a way you resist your open vulnerability; and explore your open vulnerability or lack of it. 

We discovered that being being open to vulnerability AND being open and curious to our resistance to our vulnerability that a presence opened in and among many of us on Monday night. There was a sense of a shared sense of alive, vulnerability, open and safe. Even those of us caught in our fears could see that simply the openness to the questions could bring us closer to this miracle of us as humans of being. Being by its very nature is open and vulnerable. And really openness is simply another name for vulnerability.

All of us have scars, wounds from our past and even the day to day wounding and suffering of our current lives. And we learned as children to brace, to create boundaries, to hold ourselves tight, small. Some of us pretended to be big and powerful, some of us focused all our attention  on the needs of others. Some of us went to sleep. We all buried that openness that we are all born with, the amazing transparent presence of the the baby and the young child. We had to bury our delicate, impressionable presence as an emerging baby soul, to protect the core of our preciousness until such time as we were grown up enough, safe enough, courageous enough, intelligent enough, loving enough, discerning enough, and longing enough to begin this journey back to ourselves not to the infant presence, but to the open, vulnerable presence of us now! And as some us discovered on Monday night this open, vulnerability is the essence of ease, safety and receptivity. This is the door way to the many face of our presence, whether it be the fire of I can, the stillness of silence or the sweetness of love. Without receptivity we are stuck in all the barriers, defenses of the ego shell, and the soul is frozen at that stage of development.

I described on Monday night one way to think about the ego and its development. We arrive as an infant soul, open, transparent, infused by love and also buffeted by all the survival instincts which insure that we will live in this utterly dependent state. We utterly open vulnerable to all the ways our environment is attuned and all the ways it is not, and worse yet how it may be destructive. So the soul goes through a transformation it becomes an ego, a shell if you like, a separate self, that becomes me, who I am. Deeply buried is the remembrance of me as an open soul of presence. But for all practical purposes we no longer know ourselves as presence. Sometimes events happens that crack us open and we may get glimpses. Or we may have found ways to tap into this source of who we are. But mostly we live in ego, and as ego. And so it should be. This is part of the course of human development. And we grow into more or less functional adults, doing the best we can to show up, be in the world, to live, to engage and to contribute. 

But at the core for some of us we intuit that something vital is absent. It can be a longing, or a deep sense that something is missing, or simply a desire to know more and more about what this is all about. I mean really what is this all about!!!!!  And that itch, that longing, that curiosity is the smoke signal from our presence deep in our unconscious. Gradually we know that we must seek and we must find this. And we think mostly that it is seeking out there. And that searching out there can go on for a long time, even a life time. But when we hear from the teachings from all the traditions that what you seek is inside, is the true you, the self deeper than the ego, our divine nature,is closer to you than your own breath, then we realize that we must turn inward. So when we turn our attention to this quest-- note this is different from therapy--then the ego starts the next stage in the journey of the soul. In a curious way our ego is called to return home. So this is not about killing the ego, but allowing for this new stage in growing to emerge with greater greater confidence and commitment. And gradually the ego finds its proper place, not as master, but as servant to what we really are. And gradually the ego can stop its incessant struggle to be in control, and come to rest and even disappear for periods of time. The ego is finally held by our true divinity and so it can rest! What a relief.

Without receptivity, without openness, without vulnerability this journey is impossible. The good news is that we are not thrown off the ten meter high diving board, although sometimes it might feel like that. No, we are asked to enter the wading pool, gently testing the waters of vulnerability. We learn slowly, tenderly that this vulnerability is not the vulnerability of the child within us, but is living presence, mature, open, grounded and exquisitely delicate and responsive to the currents of being.

As you can imagine the superego is adamantly opposed to this. So with each opening watch to see if and how the superego operates.