THE LENTEN SERIES

Day 1 - Ash Wednesday

“I never ask God to give himself to me,

I beg him to purify, to empty me.

If I am empty, God of his very nature

is obliged to give himself to

me to fill me.”

~Meister Eckhart

Meditation: Contemplate deeply what it is that you wish to die in yourself. What do you wish to transform into a new form? What needs to burn to ashes so the phoenix can rise? Consider old patterns of dysfunction, false beliefs about yourself, and defenses that keep you from knowing your deep inner suffering.

Contemplate how you keep your shame and suffering in the darkness of unawareness with the outer casings of defense and belief. Are you willing to burn away the outer covering? It is in this process that we are transformed and resurrected.

Prayer:

I vow, Great Spirit, this Lenten season to allow myself to become aware of all that keeps me separated from my feelings and needs and meet them with the Love of the Holy Spirit, that lives within me and has its life in me. I commit to giving up all that stands in the way of my meeting my own suffering and wounds with Love and Truth.

Practice: Start listing the ways you avoid your own inner suffering in thought, word, and deed

Advanced Study: For a deeper understanding of facing the temptations of defense, read here

Day 2 - Giving up “Keeping the Peace.”

Meditation:

“It could be said, I think, that we all try to choose peace, but that many move further and further away from it by evasion of the struggles and necessary conflicts of the human journey. What the one on the way to hell chooses all the time is peace for himself; rejection of everybody else except his own ego… The point about peace is that true peace does not come until one has accepted boundaries and conflict to the bitter end. That’s what the whole Christian story is about. That’s what the cross is.”

~Helen M. Luke from the interview: LETTING GO, PARABOLA, Volume 10, Number 1: Wholeness.

Practice: Examine how you “keep the peace” to protect yourself from conflict, change, loss, anger, rejection, judgment, and punishment - see if you can find the fear of feeling shame that informs this kind of “keeping the peace.” How have you given up on protecting and respecting yourself, just to “keep the peace”? How does this enable others to use and abuse you? Is this loving?

Prayer:

May I be a true peacemaker in the world by always asking myself if it is loving to avoid the hard issues and conflicts of life.

I surrender to my fear instead of protecting myself from it.

I vow to embrace my fear with love and respect and set limits with myself that might result in conflict, through your Grace, Power, and Courage within me.

I vow to give up all defenses that stop me from becoming a true agent of lasting Peace in the world.

For advanced Study: Read here about the dysfunction of “keeping the peace,” at all cost - to yourself and others.

Day 3: - Giving up “worry.”

Mediation:

“I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers 

flow is in the right direction, will the Earth turn 

as it was taught, and if not, how shall 

Should I correct it?

Was I right? Was I wrong? Will I be forgiven?

Can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows 

can do it and I am, well, 

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading, or am I just imagining it? 

Am I going to get rheumatism? 

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally, I saw that worrying had to come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body 

and went out in the morning, 

and sang.”

Mary Oliver - I worried. 

What is worry? Have you ever thought of the definition of worry? Worry is a spinning of thoughts regarding a negative outcome… in the future. But why do we worry about the future? When I was five years old, I was stung by a bee, and the pain of the sting sent me running into the house. My grandmother was there to greet me, quickly put some ice on the sting, and then noticed the stinger was still in my hand. She told me we had to get the stinger out and explained that it would cause an infection if we didn’t. I asked her what would happen if I got an infection. To which she explained that I could get sick from the infection, and that my hand would even get more sore. She then took a needle and dug into the sting in order to remove the stinger. The cure for the bee sting was far worse than the actual sting! 

For many years, I feared being stung again. If I saw a bee, I would freeze and refuse to move, hoping it would just move on. But as I froze, I would embark on a whole series of thoughts and worries that would play out quite organically: getting stung, my hand swelling, my hand getting really, really sore, getting an infection, and finally needing to go to the doctor!! Ha! But isn’t it fascinating to really look at the progression of my worry? Can you see that the worry was not true? Nothing about it was true. Nothing had actually happened. All that had happened was that I saw a bee! The actual truth was that my worry wasn’t happening now; it had ALREADY happened. Worries, then, are simply a memory of what we have already experienced.

Practice: 

For your practice, allow yourself to investigate your worries. Reach beneath the worry to find the fear that informs it. Every single worry we have is a projection of fear into the future. We are so scared of what will happen, but the truth is it already happened! Can you see that time spent worrying continues to abandon the feeling from the memory and robs you of experiencing the present moment? 

Prayer:

I vow to notice my worry and to investigate what feelings and memories I am trying to avoid.

I vow not to abandon myself to this feeling, as happened to me in my childhood.

I vow to investigate how the feelings and thoughts associated with worry have already happened.

Advanced Practice: https://youtu.be/s2AUI-7GRJc

Day 4: Give up Past and Future - I commit to staying in my present experience

Meditation:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUFs_1vKYlY

“The chief beauty about time 

is that you cannot waste it in advance.

The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled,

as if you had never wasted or misapplied

a single moment in all of your life. 

You can turn over a new leaf every hour

if you choose.” ~Arnold Bennet

So many of us live in a perpetual state of wishing things could be different, and then living in the longing of how things might be one day, far from now. And as we dream about things being different, we convince ourselves of many various reasons why that can’t ever happen.  We use the wish as a replacement for the feelings and experience of now. As a teacher for many years, I have often heard in the teacher’s lounge about what life will hold once teaching is no longer their profession. Teaching can be an all-consuming career. Many teachers start very early in the morning, setting up the day of learning, and then work late into the evening correcting papers. Life for so many is on hold. This is a cycle of continual rinse-and-repeat. Teachers will often talk about the travel theywill take, the hobbies they’ll nurture, the relationships they’ll foster… once they retire from teaching. In the meantime, years of life and experience go by uninvestigated and unnoticed. 

Practice:

As a practice, allow yourself to scan your life and notice the ways in which the present moment was/is lost, in imagining and wishing for what might lie ahead. Notice, too, the ways that you resist living for each moment. How do you make excuses about why things can’t ever be different? Notice the feelings that are informing those thoughts. How about a meet-and-greet to the feelings right now?! How about a meet-and-greet with your experience right now?! What feelings can you find in your own moments of wishing/longing? Can you become aware of the resistance that keeps your life stuck?

Prayer:
”You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, and find your eternity in each moment.” ~Henry David Thoreau

Let’s change that quote to speak to yourself in prayer…..

I vow to live each moment, launching myself on every wave, and finding my eternity in the feelings and experience of each moment.”

Day 5: - Give up Living for an Outcome

Meditation: 

“Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.” 

~Simone Weil

Every day, sometimes many times a day, Lyndall and I will be asked ……What should I DO?, How DO I change it?, What comes NEXT? How LONG will it take? How DO I make this stop?. Often, these questions, upon further investigation, show a desire to avoid the current feeling and/or experience. And so, in the desperation to find a way out of the feeling and/or experience, Lyndall and I are asked to “tell me what to do, say, be, so that I can not feel this way, and be done with it”. Just listen to that internal message. It’s the same message most of us received as children. Most of our parents, in their own unawareness, were constantly telling us in various ways to stop that feeling, be someone else, grow up faster!! Basically, most of us were getting the message over and over that where we were in our own development was not enough. And so we learned to avoid at all costs feeling fear and/or shame. But what we actually needed was not to avoid our experience or feelings, but instead to develop a relationship with our feelings and experience. In response to all the questions about what to do to achieve an outcome, Lyndall and I never waver…There is no doing, there is only seeing. And from the seeing, you will be filled with knowing.  And from knowing, you will know what to do.

Practice:

In your practice, investigate your relationship with your feelings. Which feelings do you reach for? Which feelings do you resist/deny? Do you live a life filled with fear? Are you over-cautious and controlling in order to avoid fear? Or, do you spit in the face of fear, as the saying goes? Do you live life without considering fear? Do you take unhealthy risks? Do you live a stifled life to avoid your shame? Do you blame others to avoid your shame? Do you assume responsibility for others’ feelings as a reaction to shame? Can you begin, instead of leaning into fear, to lean into shame? Acknowledge the feeling without letting it affect your value. 

Prayer:

I vow to stop chasing outcomes in my relationships/experiences.

I instead will look internally when I feel fear and shame and commit to seeing, rather than doing. My shame and my fear need only one thing……a loving relationship with me. 

Advanced Practice: Expectations

Day 6 - Giving up Defense against Shame - Unite all in Love

Meditation:

“You cannot let go of anything if you cannot notice that you are holding it. Admit your 'weaknesses' and watch them morph into your greatest strengths.”  ~Neale Donald Walsch

 Bring to your contemplation those shame-filled experiences of which you have a cognitive memory. Sink as deeply as you can into the emotions that you experienced at the time, but are now heavily defended against feeling. You must see and experience this to be able to “let it go” or integrate it into your Being. Breathe into the shame and fear, embrace the full experience, and stay present with your ever-present, all-accepting, loving awareness. Feel the inner squirming and agitation of your suffering and hold it in the stillness of your being.

Prayer: 

I pray to be aware in all moments of that which exists within me as emotional memory.

I am the one who was scorned and shamed, and the one who will reach with comfort into the humiliation.

I am the one who has scorned and hurt others, and the one who will heal all divisions I have created.

I am the one who brings forgiveness to my transgressions,

joy to my suffering,

love and acceptance to all that is human within.

I am committed to living the life of Christ - fully human and fully divine in the embrace of each other and in allegiance to the God of Love and Truth

 Practice:  See if you can write your own statement of relationship by watching carefully all the roles you play in relation to yourself internally.  How are you the wounded child and the perpetrating parent, for instance? What are you willing to give up or transform as you see these dynamics, in order to create unity and a resurrected, unified life?

Advanced Teaching: Read “Perfect Thunder Mind,” or watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hvB_2ElxaM

Day 7 - Giving up Wastefulness

Meditation: Contemplate today all the ways in which you waste the resources of the earth. Notice your rationalizations, excuses, denial, justifications, and blaming. Notice how you are a perpetrator of attack and destruction to the outer environment and the inner environment of your own being. Bring your defensiveness into the heart of your love and seek to understand why you are rapacious, greedy, selfish, demanding, wasteful, ungrateful, and possessive. As you read this, feel your defensiveness of the words used, instead of your contemplation and questioning of how you are indeed acting in these ways. Think deeply about how you try to find external comforts for internal distress. Sink into the inner impoverishment of your soul and be present to it with your all-abiding presence and bountifulness.

 Practice:  Set a loving limit with one aspect of your wasteful consumerism that can never compensate for the loss of inner presence to yourself, by yourself. What are you willing to give up, out of love for yourself, others, and the world?

 Prayer:  

Great Spirit, give us hearts to understand;

Never to take from creation’s beauty more than we give;

Never to destroy wantonly for the furtherance of greed;

Never to deny giving our hands

For the building of Earth’s beauty;

Never to take from her what we cannot use.

Give us hearts to understand

That to destroy Earth’s music is to create confusion;

That to wreck her appearance is to blind us to beauty;

That to callously pollute her fragrance

Is to make a house of stench.

That as we care for her, she will care for us. Amen

~U.N. Environmental Sabbath

Day 8: I commit to recognizing my privilege and to giving up an attitude of superiority. Meditation:

“The most dangerous advantage of privilege is the power of the privileged to deny its existence. “ ~ Colton Poore
”What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude. “ ~Brene Brown

Most of us know we live a life of privilege. At least, we know this intellectually. But very few of us have spent much time investigating our privilege, and even fewer have considered why understanding it is important. But owning our privilege is imperative for our internal development and for experiencing empathy, gratitude, unity, and joy. 

As an example, Lyndall and I are committed to getting a little exercise, and we try to make it happen most days. If it’s nice enough, we walk outside, but on the bitterly cold days, we find a place to walk indoors….the Mall of America, Burnsville Mall, the Galleria, to name a few. For the most part, we love this time and make it a priority. But some days, you should hear us grumble about it. We complain about the chill, we make an issue about not having the time, we mention the creaks and discomfort we feel as we age. Very normal expressions that we all feel and speak every day. That’s ok. But what is there to see in this? There is actually extreme privilege simply in our grumbling. On a very cold day, we get in the car, we warm it up, we drive to the mall, we talk nonstop…sometimes deep, sometimes mundane, sometimes hilarious. We reward ourselves at the end of the walk with a designer coffee, we get in the car, and we drive home. What the hell is there to complain about! Our sore feet? Do we need to rush back to a session? Our aging body that can’t walk as fast? The extra pounds I carry (due to too many designer coffees)? 

Now let me contrast this with what we see every time we are walking….every single time. During the morning hours of a very cold day, the mall is peppered with the homeless. They wait for the mall doors to open. They lug their way there from whatever hovel they found to stay warm at night. They carry with them everything they own; they are filthy, their bags are filthy, their faces are empty. Once in the mall, they find a hidden perch to sit on and try to get a little sleep. If they get caught sleeping in the mall, they will be escorted out. So they find a way to sit and conceal themselves so they hopefully won't be seen sleeping. They do not in any way have the privilege of grumbling, of rushing to a session, of not having enough time to buy a designer coffee, of having a warm car, of driving to go exercise, on and on and on. 

To understand my privilege in this situation, is NOT that I walk past and tell myself how lucky I am to not be them. To understand my privilege is to investigate the experience. To feel the way I have felt when my eyes were empty. To feel the ways I have tried to conceal my pain. And to see and feel deeply the ways I have been able to experience more than that. That is my privilege. The true experience of understanding privilege will then open you to authentic empathy, gratitude, and joy. We must investigate our privilege. To do this through a loving lens opens our heart to true connection and unity in the human experience. 

Practice: 

Open yourself to the intention of seeing privilege. Connect to the ways others are oppressed in ways you experience freedom simply because of your gender, your religion, your color, your economic status, your intelligence, or the country you were born in. Investigate the messages you hold about yourself. See how you receive value simply from those characteristics that were just born to you. Investigate honestly the ways you judge others who do not have those same characteristics and life circumstances. Can you enter the other's experience? Can you see what you take for granted? 

Prayer:

I commit to seeing what others experience,

to find that experience in me,

and to investigate the ways I have privilege

that allows me to have a different, more expanded experience in my life.

Not because I am better, but simply because I am privileged.

Advanced Practice: Life is a Privilege - write your own poem as to why your life and suffering are a privilege

Day 9 - Realizing and Repenting the Repetition of Defense

Meditation: “I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.

And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly,

that I am ill.

I am ill because of the wounds to the soul,

to the deep emotional self,

and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time,

Only time can help

and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,

long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake,

and the

freeing oneself

from the endless repetition of the mistake

which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.”

~D.H. Lawrence

Contemplate the mistakes you have made and the repetition of these mistakes, even though you know they will lead to shame and suffering in the long run.

Practice: List all the ways in which you continue to do the very things you wish you did not do in awareness. Repent. Choose and submit to your inner Witness, who does not judge, but stands by watching you create your own suffering for the approval of society.

Prayer:

I submit to YOUR WILL, your desire, and your love for me to live in accordance with the laws of Love, not the laws of society.

I promise to surrender the patterns of comfort and defense, pleasure and power, control and judgment that I choose to have stand in defiance of your love for me.

I surrender my whining and complaining, my resistance and defiance, my pretense of helplessness over what I have chosen for myself that is harmful, destructive, and disobedient to YOU.

For Advanced Study: Surrender or Submission - read here

Day 10: I commit to experiencing the “pause” and giving up my relationship with simply doing. 

Meditation: 

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. 

But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is 

Where the art resides.” ~Arthur Schnabel

I was thrilled to find this quote. I have often tried to find words for this experience. I remember once trying to explain to a friend that when playing the piano and listening to music, it is not just the notes that will move me, but the pause, the silence in between the notes that can bring me to tears. She looked at me like I was crazy. But this is true for all of life. We can be so invested in the busyness of our day that we forget to notice the pause, or the silence in between and under the moments of our day. I had a profound experience in India a few years ago. India is an overload to all of our senses. It’s overwhelming and exhausting. One of the most difficult experiences to process is the begging. You are barraged nonstop by pleading voices, people following you, and people literally pulling at you. Please mam, please mam. They are often emaciated, filthy, deformed, and desperate. I like most, felt incredible dis-ease in wanting to give everyone of them something to ease their suffering. But when giving to one, you will be immediately surrounded by a new level of intensity from all the others. And so, you are instructed: “do not give.” It was heartbreaking. But one day, there was an experience that I will never forget. I was being followed by a whole group. And was feeling a little desperate to find a way out of the confusion. When before me there was a man. Our eyes locked, and in that instant, all of the noise, all of the confusion, all of the fear, faded into silence. We didn’t talk; this only lasted a few seconds. But in that moment of the “pause,” this man and I felt deeply into each other’s experience. I saw past his face, past his grime, past his hurt… to see into the “pause” of him, the space in-between his experience. We held each other’s hands for a few moments, and I knew that I had just experienced something I would never forget. In that experience of the “pause,” this man and I met in a place outside of the present, outside of who we were and where we came from. We shared a moment of intense relationship in divinity. To me, that is the “pause”… it is the experience of the divine. 

Practice:

I surrender to the busyness of my day. And in that surrender, I commit to opening myself to the experience of the divine, in the pause. So that, as I struggle to achieve my long list of to-dos, I can open myself to seeing that the “pause” is always there… just waiting for me to see and experience what is outside and in between the “notes” of my experience. We so often talk about seeing the beauty, and so we will often carve out “time” to see and feel beauty. But, to carve out time, will result in missing so much of life’s beauty and divinity… compassion, connection, unity, forgiveness, and peace. To find all of that, we have to commit to living our very messy, sometimes miserable, mundane, irritating lives, while at the same time holding ourselves responsible for seeing deeply into the experience through the eyes of the divine. 

Prayer:

The Divine Image

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love 

All pray in their distress; 

And to these virtues of delight 

Return their thankfulness. 

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love 

Is God, our father dear, 

And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love 

Is Man, his child, and care. 

For Mercy has a human heart, 

Pity a human face, 

And Love, the human form divine, 

And Peace, the human dress. 

Then every man, of every clime, 

That prays in his distress, 

Prays to the human form divine, 

Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. 

And all must love the human form, 

In heathen, Turk, or Jew; 

Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell 

There God is dwelling too. 

~William Blake

Advanced Practice: Try drawing a picture by drawing the shapes of the gaps - not the thing. Try listening to the silence between the sounds of a piano concerto. Try looking for what is not said but is implicit in what people say. Try seeing the life force that makes the flower grow, not the flower. Try looking into eyes and seeing the soul rather than the outward appearance.

Day 12: - Die to the bondage of dualistic thinking

Meditation: 

Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing

There is a field. 

I’ll meet you there.  ~Rumi

As little children, we learn very quickly and at a very young age that there is a right and a wrong. And in the right and wrong, we are either good or bad. And in that, good or bad, we are either valuable or not valuable. And in that value, we are either worthy or not worthy. That is the field in which dualistic thinking is born and fed through most of our lives. And so we spend day in and day out trying to achieve enough, be right enough, be smart enough, funny enough, wealthy enough, interesting enough, to convince others of our value, so that we can then see ourselves as some value! What a crazy system! 

The truth is that we are already worthy, we are already valuable. The truth is that we are intrinsic value, we are divinity in form. Fully Human, Fully Divine. The field of dualistic thinking robs us of knowing that. In the work we are all doing, we are trying to undo the beliefs that have fed the never-ending need to be seen as valuable by everyone else, so we can rest in our value! We are trying to uncover the ways we buy into the bondage of duality. In shedding duality, we find another field. Let’s all meet there. 

Practice: 

In your practice to get aware of how you live a life informed by duality, keep a log of the judgments you find yourself feeling not only about yourself, but also about others. See how this judgment informs your beliefs about good and evil, right and wrong, good and bad.

Choose one difficult relationship in your life. Allow yourself to write about that difficult relationship. Allow the judgments, beliefs, feelings, etc., to be written. And now… bring all of what is written in to see and feel how all of what you are judging in the difficult relationship is also in you. To break dual thinking, what is now required is for you realize and bring your love to all…..in both. 

Prayer:

A Great Wagon

Read by Houman Pourmehdi https://onbeing.org/poetry/a-great-wagon/

When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
You appear; all studying wanders.
I lose my place.

Water turns pearly.
Fire dies down and doesn’t destroy.

In your presence, I don’t want what I thought
I wanted those three little hanging lamps.

Inside your face, the ancient manuscripts
Seems like rusty mirrors.

You breathe; new shapes appear,
and the music of a desire as widespread
As Spring begins to move
like a great wagon.
Drive slowly.
Some of us are walking alongside
are lame!

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.

Now my love is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.

In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul
And you are that.

But we have ways within each other
That will never be said by anyone.

Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

Advanced Practice: As a prayer, write this in your own words. 

Day 13 - Giving up Ingratitude and Complaint

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”
~ Meister Eckhart

For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether? ~Khalil Gibran

Meditation: Imagine if humanity really did destroy itself by turning in on itself like cancer, turned inward in self-hatred and condemnation that is projected outward onto others and the world. Mother Earth self-corrects. What is not brought into alignment with the laws of Love will die. See the world devoid of all humans, restoring herself to her natural beauty and wildness. Imagine the restored world without anyone in it to be aware and know her beauty and power, without any creature having the capacity to “know” the experience of life and death. The tree does not know itself as a tree; it is just the experience of a tree - and so it is for all creatures except humans. What a privilege to have the capacity to be aware, whether in suffering or in joy. To be aware of and experience being in form is a gift beyond any superlative description. Can you every day say - “I am grateful for the gift of being alive - alive to all that today brings me. I am grateful to be able to know and be aware of myself having this experience.” What a miracle is this experience of life!

Practice: Notice and be aware of all your complaining, whining, ingratitude, taking life for granted, self-entitlement, wanting more, and better and bigger, and only the parts you choose and demands for all that brings you ease and pleasure. Notice how you deny your real feelings, and complain about not having enough defense (wealth, ease, power, etc.) against them. Can you welcome the feelings and be grateful for the experience of b being human and having the full range of this human experience? Write your own poem of gratitude to the Mother in whom you have your origin and your ending. Be grateful for it all.

Prayer:

God, unto whom all hearts are open,

unto whom all wills do speak,

from whom no secret thing is hidden,

I beseech thee

so to cleanse the purpose of my heart

with the unutterable gift of thy grace

that I may perfectly love thee,

and worthily praise thee.

Amen

Advanced Practice: Read here for more on gratitude

Day 14 -  Give up unawareness in communication, and commit to investigation of my feelings and needs, motives, and intentions.

Meditation:  https://youtu.be/zKJL6IxqhjE

This adorable video is fun to watch and giggle at. But the hard truth is that most of us throughout the day communicate at a similar level of awareness to these little kids! Although it's very cute to watch kids behaving like adults, if we really investigate this, it can make us a little uncomfortable and raise awareness of the importance of knowing our intention and motive when we speak. These children are merely imitating what they see their parents do. In the imitation, these kids are not aware of what the words mean, what feelings they evoke, what needs they express, and/or the intention of the conversation. The same is most often true of us. Communication serves the important purpose of giving us a way to connect with others through the sharing of words and bodily expressions, allowing us to send and receive information. Unfortunately, as little children, we were taught to use communication to get our needs met externally. We were NOT taught to use our communication to connect internally in a way to know and meet our own needs. And so we most often communicate with others out of unconscious feelings and needs. We have not learned to stop ourselves from speaking externally long enough to investigate… why am I saying this? Do I know my feeling, my unmet need, and therefore, my motive in this communication? Because of this, we are all searching for meaningful connected interaction with others. But just like these kids, without an internal awareness of connection to feelings, needs, intentions, and motives, having meaningful connections externally is literally impossible. 

Practice:

In your practice, choose a particular time to investigate. You could start by choosing texts and phone calls as an area of investigation. The reason is that it is a bit easier in both of these situations to require yourself to be mindful of the process. So prior to making a phone call or sending a text, ask yourself these questions: 

• Why am I making this connection?

• What is my feeling?

• What is my unmet need?

• Am I trying to get my needs met by the person I am reaching out to?

• Is there a way I can meet my own needs?

This does not mean that you won’t still send a text or make a phone call. No, not at all. But it will make your communication intentional and aware. 

Prayer:

I will surrender myself to seeing how often my communication is not fully aware.

I will notice how I often do not take the time to investigate what I am feeling, what my unmet need is, and what my motive is in communication.

I will also notice how much of my communication with others is meant to avoid awareness….I gossip, I talk about surface topics, I avoid talking about feelings, and I avoid intimate connections in my communication.

In my noticing, I commit to growing my awareness in my communication with others. 

Advanced Practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_htmLcJa00

Day 15: I commit to investigating what it means to have a loving relationship to shame, and give up having it define me. 

Meditation: 

Paul Young (author of  The Shack) says that shame destroys our ability to distinguish between an observation and a value statement.  We can’t differentiate between our behavior and our identity.  When something goes wrong (and that’s pretty much the entire state of life on this planet: things are wrong), we think the problem is not what went wrong.  We think the problem is us.

Shame says things like:

• I am defective (damaged, broken, a mistake, flawed).

• I am dirty (soiled, ugly, unclean, impure, filthy, disgusting).

• I am incompetent (not good enough, inept, ineffectual, useless).

• I am unwanted (unloved, unappreciated, uncherished).

• I am weak (small, impotent, puny, feeble).

• I am bad (awful, dreadful, evil, despicable).

• I am pitiful (contemptible, miserable, insignificant).

• I am nothing (worthless, invisible, unnoticed, empty).

Letting Go of Shame, Ronald Potter-Efron and Patricia Potter-Efron

In Repenting of Religion, Greg Boyd talks about this very thing:

“Our fundamental sin is that we place ourselves in the position of God and divide the world between what we judge to be good and what we judge to be evil.  And this judgment is the primary thing that keeps us from doing the central thing God created and saved us to do, namely, love as he loves.”

Practice: In your contemplation, investigate the ways in which you define yourself through the value statements you learned about yourself as children. “Turn the sound up”, to the continual loop of messages you give yourself throughout the day….I’m not smart, I’m very smart, I’m successful, I’m a failure, I’m better than, I’m less than, I’m attractive, I’m unattractive, I’m uninteresting, I’m very interesting, etc. 

Through the lens of finding what is loving… allow yourself to see that none of this is a definition of who you are in terms of pure essence and the grace God Within. And whether we give ourselves messages of how we are wrong and bad, and/or how we are special and good… all of these messages are informed by shame, or the fear of shame. 

The grace of God within informs us with knowing ourselves as love, in love. The value statements we have formed about ourselves take away from our knowing of the God within; they are creations of the ego. And until the ego messages are investigated, there is no possibility of connecting to our knowing of the God Within. 

There’s a wonderful story about Thomas Keating, a teacher of contemplative prayer.  After a session of prayer, one of his students came and complained, “In 20 minutes, I failed over and over again!  My mind wandered ten thousand times.”  Father Keating replied, “How wonderful!  Ten thousand opportunities to return to God!”

Time to return to God. 

Prayer: Read this Poem by Cleo Wade as a prayer to your own awakening of a loving and connected relationship to shame, and a correction to the value statements that distance you from knowing the God Within. It is powerful to read this prayer by changing the words “you” to “me", reading it as a prayer to yourself. 

Love Never Lies

Shame never tells

the truth

It tells you

You are not good enough

The truth is 

you are

It tells you 

You have to be perfect

The truth is

You don’t

It tells you 

your mistakes 

are fatal wounds

The truth is

you heal

It tells you 

Everything has fallen apart

The truth is

You will rebuild

It tells you 

that you will stay sunken in despair

The truth is 

You will rise

It tells you 

you failed

you lost

& you got hurt

The truth is 

You learned (what to do next time)

You gained (knowledge from your knockdown)

and you found out (just how strong you are)

it says 

You will never make it

The truth is 

keep going

for

shame said 

You would never 

survive

And the truth is

you 

are

still 

here

Advanced Practice:

TED Talk on Shame by Brene Brown - https://youtu.be/L0ifUM1DYKg

Day 16 - “Dying to” the illusional structure of ego

Meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChcR2gKt5WM

“Fly like a cannonball, straight to my soul
Tear me to pieces
And make me feel whole.”

What in you needs to be torn to pieces in order to find the wholeness of your soul and the light within? What part of you has the resolve to tear your defensive structures to pieces?

Practice: Make a list of the bricks in your wall, the wall you are so determined to keep in place, to keep the starving little child on the other side.

“Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~Rumi

Prayer:

From your great Love, shatter my structures of pretense, defense, offense.

I submit to the cannonball so that the light can fall on me.

For advanced Study: The Role of the Ego on the Spiritual Journey

Day 17 - Giving up Judgmentalism (not discernment)

Meditation:

“Your thought describes laws, courts, judges, and punishments. Mine explains that when a man makes a law, he either violates it or obeys it. If there is a basic law, we are all one before it. He who disdains the mean is himself mean. He who vaunts his scorn of the sinful vaunts his disdain of all humanity.” ~Khalil Gibran

Sit silently and face within yourself, all the hatred you have for yourself and the world. Breathe in the dark clouds of judgment that annihilate your Being, cover you in a swirling cloud of misery, depression, and shame. Find within the oppressor, the perpetrator of unmerciful law that punishes, diminishes, destroys, rejects, and humiliates. Make it a daily meditation to notice these thoughts and breathe them in, so that you know, see, and accept the inner critic and judge of your Being. This is the one who wants to be God. This is the idolatry that you engage in.

Even this one who does this needs your acceptance, your mercy, your understanding, and your compassion. Who will love the perpetrator, if not you? Who will replace the judgments with understanding and limit, if not you?

Prayer:

Lord God of Mercy and Compassion, help me see beneath my superficial judgments of myself and others and seek to understand what lies deep beneath those judgments.

May all my judgments be replaced with understanding, discernment, and limits without calling into question my intrinsic worth, or that of others.

Practice: Write down every inner and outer judgment that arises in your mind and comes out of your mouth. Ask yourself what fear gives rise to your judgment and what the result of the judgment will be. See Motive/Behavior/Consequence - the endless cycle of fate - or hell in which you are trapped.

For advanced Study: Read here

Day 18 - I will surrender to experiencing all of my life

Meditation:

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds”. ~James 1

‘Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice;

You will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy ~John 16:20

During our recent cold snap, I, like so many others, went to my garage to find that my car would not start. When I got it replaced, the young repairman said to me, with some sarcasm and judgment, "Do you know that your battery was the original battery!!??" I looked at him and smiled, saying, "Isn’t that wonderful? I wrung out every mile I could. He couldn’t resist and smiled as he said, “That you did, ma'am.” 

We, as humans, have spent a lifetime nurturing our egos and developing strategies to avoid feeling the ways we were hurt as children. We have lost our internal steadfastness to be present to ourselves. But what an incredible waste of experience and relationship. When I am speaking to groups, I often, in telling my story, make reference to….yes, there was lots of pain, but it was MY pain. And the little girl who lived through that pain survived it alone. I have every intention of uniting with every second of that experience, not wasting or denying a minute of it. The truth is that in our lives, the level of pain we ignore is directly related to the joy we ignore. The joy of each of our lives can only be found in this internal, loving relationship with all that we have experienced. As little children, we all needed an aware adult to come sit with us, listen to us, validate our feelings, holding us as valuable. I am filled with joyful awe at the idea that it is never too late, because the little person is alive and well in each of your bodies, AND here you sit, the adult who is committing to lovingly connecting and relating to the feelings and unmet needs of that little person. What could be more beautiful? 

Practice:
Envision yourself sitting with the little person you were. I will often ask someone I am working with to imagine sitting at a table with the child that they were. Allow a conversation between the adult you and the child you. Ask questions, allow answers. Feel deeply for the hidden feelings, and validate them. Allow yourself to investigate the beliefs you attach to the feelings. This can grow into a practice of active meditation for being in a relationship with yourself. 

Prayer:

I surrender to knowing that in me is a little person who experienced pain that I push away.

When I push away pain, I also push away joy.

I have a growing commitment to hearing and validating my childhood experience.

I commit to a growing awareness of my feelings and to experiencing each moment with the intention of loving presence and an internal relationship.

This is my new path to sustainable and everlasting joy. 

Advanced Practice:

No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, by Thich Nhat Hanh. 

Day 19: I commit to holding my projections, relating to, and loving them instead

Meditation:

Projections change the world into a replica of one’s unknown face.”  ~Carl Jung

What a profound statement. It is completely descriptive of what happens when we spew onto the world all our unknown, uninvestigated projections. And if we each took this quote to heart and chose to relate to the unknown in us, we would clearly see the reasons our world, our people, our environment are in such a state of deep despair. All of us, unknowingly put into the world, all of the aspects of self we can not tolerate. In this way of relating to the world, there can be no relationship, either inner or external. And so, we live life in a constant state of not seeing, not relating, not loving. 

But what is a projection?

Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities by denying their existence in themselves by attributing them to others.

Most of you know that prior to joining the Aslan community, I worked with children in the school system who had communication difficulties and emotional/behavioral challenges. Many of my students were experiencing varying levels of neglect, trauma, and abuse. In working with them, I, along with a team of talented teachers and specialists, attempted to meet the needs of these little ones, educating them, yes, but more importantly, exposing them to love when most of their lives held very little of it. It is not surprising to any of us that this group of children would be filled with levels of shame and fear that were intolerable. And so, they all learned projection very young. Just as all of you. 

In my work with kids, I had to come up with relatable phrases they could use to become more aware of the patterns in their lives that kept them from fitting in and forming friendships. Often, these kids were impulsive with their thoughts, actions, and words. Those projections were constantly getting them in trouble, constantly accentuating a feeling of not fitting in. It is such a vicious cycle, and we all share it. 

A phrase I used often with kids……was …..” think it, don’t say it”. In this phrase, I am not saying to hide and push away a thought, but quite the opposite. If we could become aware of how quickly we respond with a projection, quickly spewing out onto everything and everyone in our path, we could begin to form a relationship with what we are so afraid of feeling and knowing.

I have one story from a little boy in first grade that taught me so much about projection. During a classroom read-aloud, parents came to listen to the children read the poems each had written. All parents listened to all students, with the idea that each student would practice reading their poem many times. As the children got started, I was tending to some of the activity when a wide-eyed parent came and touched me on the shoulder. She pointed to one of the students and told me I might want to go check in. As I walked up to the pair, a woman looked horrified, clutching her purse straps as if she was about to bolt out of the room. At hearing distance, I could hear my student saying to her, "You have 11 flaws ( this was a word he made up to combine the words faults and flaws). He then said that her shirt didn’t match her earrings and that her nose was too big for her face. Therefore, I can only read 11 words……Here is where I jumped in and stopped him! 

This little boy and I did a lot of work on learning to “think it (we cannot stop a thought), don’t say it (that thought is about you). When you hear it this way, can you hear the tragedy of his home and what he was learning about himself? He was showing through his projection how flawed he felt and how sure he was that everyone could see it. And that, based on what they could see, he didn’t deserve to be heard. Can you now see how crucial it was that he take in his projection, investigate it, challenge it, so that he could find that ....he, in fact, IS NOT his thought. it isn;t true. 

To risk seeing our projections means we can challenge our incorrect beliefs about who we are, to find our way to what is actually true about us. 

Practice:  Stop yourself as you speak, act, and react. Don’t allow the impulse to push that feeling, thought, or behavior out to the world. Give yourself time and space to bring your thoughts in. You are not your thought. Investigate the feeling. You are not your feelings. When we investigate the thought and the feeling through this lens, you will get more clarity on what is not true about you, and more importantly, you will get more clarity on the truth of who you are. 

Prayer:

Therefore, you have no excuse, every one of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. ~Romans 2-1

I vow to give myself the loving time and space to hold my projections, to be aware of what I think, and rather than to quickly say it, I will investigate how this is my own belief about myself. I do this so that I can more clearly know the truth of who I am and who I am not. 

Advanced Practice: Beannie

Day 20 - Giving up all that is not loving

Meditation:

“The thought manifests as the word;

The word manifests as the deed;

The deed develops into a habit.

And habit hardens into character.

So watch the thought and its ways with care,

And let it spring from love

Born out of concern for all beings (including myself).”

~The Buddha

Prayer:

I pledge to hear my thoughts, my words, and my deeds,

my patterns and habits

and how it has hardened my heart.

Give me thy Grace to soften and ask myself, “Is this loving? Is this loving?

So that I may live in accordance with your Law and not my demands of myself and others.

Practice: Listen to your thoughts, words, and deeds. If you are the listener, you are disidentified with the thoughts, words, and deeds. You become the subject instead of the object of life. The observer, rather than the observed. Ask yourself what emotions and needs underlie your thoughts, words, and deeds, and see how hardened character is the calcification of memories.

For Advanced Study of ego functioning - Read here, and states of consciousness - Read here

Question: I was struck by the last Q&A about the two thieves crucified with Christ. As a child, I was told that one of the thieves was forgiven and redeemed through his repentance, confession, and atonement, and through Christ's forgiveness.

I'm trying to understand all of those as internal relationships. 

I'm asking because I have always had a terrible time "forgiving" someone once I feel I've been hurt by them. My heart feels wounded and doesn't seem to want to reopen and make itself vulnerable again to someone I've begun to see as a potential perpetrator. 

 So I want to revisit this old idea through the awareness that all this is actually an internal dynamic.

Answer: Yes, you are on the right track - all of this is about an internal dynamic. The question for you is, “How have I sinned against myself?” i.e., how have I separated and split off from myself, as this is the definition of sin. Original sin is the separation, in perception and experience only, from unity with God - in other words, being conceived into a physical world where attention is focused on what we are NOT, not what we are. (Separation from God). Our attention from conception onwards is on our immediate suffering and deprivations - our unmet needs when we feel hunger, pain, cramps, cold, alone, and later parental demands and punishments. This suffering is intolerable, and so we split off again from our suffering into defense (Secondary sin - split off from ourselves, our experience, and our suffering). We betray ourselves and live in defense, defending our defense. This is called idolatry - a false god. The refusal to admit our defense, and the suffering it is covering,  is called pride, and so is the mortal sin of the church, where you condemn yourself to living in a doubly split way - from god and yourself, and cling to your defense with pride and self-righteousness. This is as far away from unity with yourself and God as you can be. This is as far from God and yourself as you can get. This is to be alienated in an outer space of extreme loneliness and disconnection, yet we cling to it as if our lives depended on it. We damn ourselves to the hell of separation. No one else ever does this. 

So, you are called to repent - on your knees with humility….. “Yes, I have lived in defense and self-righteousness, and in so doing, I have been an inner perpetrator to the inner victim (the suffering part). I have refused to listen, see, hear, and know my suffering soul. I have sinned by separating myself and living above it all in self-righteousness and pride. I admit there is no truth and love in this. I have done this myself, and I now choose to start listening, seeing, hearing, knowing, and feeling the suffering and be in relationship to it with my heart pierced wide-open with contrition, compassion for the suffering of my life, my young, wounded soul.” May this be your Lenten prayer. 

“I will pay penance by my practice of presence and connection to that from which I was split off. I will create a reconciliation between the part of myself that perpetrated against myself and the part of me that has been victimized and abandoned by the split I created. I will call on the Love and Truth of God to help me see Reality - not the illusions, lies, and hypocrisy in which I have lived. I will submit and surrender to Love and Truth and bring this into alignment with you, and in relationship to my suffering self, instead of covering up with defense, pride, and the fake pretense of goodness.” Make this your Lenten prayer.

This process is the process of “forgiveness.”  It is the healing of that which was broken, the reconciliation of that which was divorced and separated, it is the full self-responsibility of recognizing what we have done and how we will repair our original sin and our secondary sin and live in unity, truth, love, reconciliation, and peace with ourselves. It is a long, long process, not a one-time act or intention.

In terms of forgiving others, this is merely another act of pride and self-righteousness projected outward. If you do not know the inner process, trust the inner process and yourself; you will have no trust or care for others either. Not trusting others is not trusting yourself. Try seeing how you have hurt others by projecting this inner split outward, and repent of that rather than just indulging the feeling of being wounded by what others have done. This is the 4th step, internally and externally.

Question: Are we to expect to "outgrow" the role of outwardly-directed prayer in spiritual practice? 

Or is the expectation that, once we understand it to be a projection, we keep all the relationality internal?

I'm asking because, in times of greater emotional distress, the idea of external validation, approval, and "love" seems soothing, but those are the times I seem unable to meet my own need for them.

 Answer: There is no outwardly directed prayer. Pray to God, but that is the Infinite,  beneath and beyond and above and below and within and without your mortal container. If you are a drop of the infinite ocean, then you can petition the ocean to give you power, strength, knowledge, truth, and love so as to recognize this is the ground of your own being as a drop, so as to be true to yourself and God as a drop of the Ocean. Your ongoing prayer is to be in complete alignment with the will of the Ocean -  not think that you yourself, a small drop, can be something else and do something else and pretend to be something else. Depend with your whole mind, heart, and soul on the Ocean, pay allegiance to it, be in alignment with it, reconcile with it, be in it, and of it. Pray to it unceasingly. Worship and give thanks to that which is your Being and your Life. Submit in full allegiance to it, within and without, above and below. Be an obedient drop, a good child, a willing, enthusiastic, and committed little drop. Talk to the ocean without ceasing. Listen to the ocean without ceasing. It is all about relationship - within and without, above and below. Sit at the feet of God and be God’s most devoted child. Wash the feet of God with your own hair and anoint God with your tears and most precious perfumes and oils. Seek knowing and experience of Love and Truth, so that you might finally begin to bring this to yourself and others, instead of the overlay of what you think love and truth are.

 Smash the jug that surrounds the drop of water you are, so that it may be reunited with the ocean. You are a projection of God…. a tiny little holograph. The cell in the body of God. It is again idolatrous to think that you are God. Pray to God. God is not a projection of you.

Be careful that you do not expect God to meet your childhood needs for approval, validation, and soothing, but you align yourself with the Will of God so as to know what it means to be approving (rather than excusing), validating (instead of praising), and not to soothe - but learn to be present to suffering. Ask God to reveal to you what is required for your eternal good and salvation, not your worldly pleasure and avoidance of suffering.

Day 21 - Giving Up Talking and Learning to Listen

Meditation:

“I pray to the birds.

I pray to the birds because I believe

They will carry the messages of my heart upward.

I pray to them because I believe in their existence,

the way their songs begin and end each day

- the invocations and benedictions of earth.

I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love

rather than what I fear.

And at the end of my prayers,

They teach me how to listen.”

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Prayer:

Today, I vow to listen to the God within me instead of my usual mindless, thoughtless, demanding, complaining, petitioning, and attention-seeking. I will listen to myself, sinking deeper and deeper beneath the surface chatter, to my deepest feelings, beliefs, meaning, purpose, needs, and desires, until I sink far enough and deeply enough to hear your answers and your prayer for me.

Practice: Notice how often you are not listening because you are caught up in your own reactiveness to yourself and others. Listening means searching for the deeper meaning, feelings, needs of self and others. When you find yourself reacting with responses, defenses, and judgments, practice just biting your tongue and rededicating yourself to really hearing yourself and others.

Advanced Practice: https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening/

Day 22 - I commit to seeing the violence in me

Meditation:

“It means nothing to go around merely repeating Buddha’s teaching that peace is important—we must confront the violence in the outside world.” ~Dalai Lama

In the past few months, we have witnessed extreme examples of violence in our world. We have watched as children were ripped away from their parents and locked in cages. We watched a black man murdered on the streets of Minneapolis. We watched riots, burning buildings, looting, and physical attacks, spread first through Minneapolis, and then throughout the world as so many responded to the murder. We watched as examples of police brutality were contrasted with police heroism. We witnessed the storming of our capital. We watched the defiling of our history with cigarette butts, feces, and urine. We watched as lawmakers were threatened with lynchings, beatings, and death. But the truth is, in our despair as we watched this happen, we didn’t think to stop and notice that most of us completely ignore the vast and insurmountable human travesties that happen all over the world, all the time. 

What each of us chose to do with the witnessing of such violence and oppression was most likely in direct relationship to the defenses we formed against the violence and oppression we faced in our own childhood. Some of us turned off the TV and said it is too much to see, I just can’t look.  Others of us raged with defiance, repulsion, and despair. Others of us became the peacemakers, painting pretty murals to cover up the pain. Some returned the violence with more violence. Still others… protested. Others… justified and rationalized. The number of ways we as a society have dealt with the violence of this world is countless.  Just as there are a number of ways that we have learned to defend against and ignore our own violence, our own pain.

But what does the Dalai Lama mean when he says we have to confront violence in the outside world? He doesn’t specify. The truth is, we can not confront ANYTHING in the outside world, from the place of our defense, nor from the position of looking OUT. 

I think if we asked the Dalai Lama to explain what he means, he would say this…..Violence in the outside world is produced in only one place….in the inside world of each one of us. Just as peace in the outside world can only be attained in one place… the inside world. If we want to save the world, we must first save ourselves. 

Practice: Contemplate the shades of violence in our world. In your contemplation, commit to seeing the violence in yourself first. Require yourself to hear from deep within, the ways you self-criticize, rationalize, judge, and condemn. Notice too, how you push away your pain, deny your struggles, numb yourself with addictions, shame your mistakes, rationalize, and tell yourself a story rather than seeing/telling the truth. As you notice these internal transgressions, bring the much-needed love to those deep, hidden feelings and thoughts we learned so long ago. Place limits on your belief systems that are a source of inner violence. And hold yourself with the peace that you wish to see in the world. 

Prayer:

Open my eyes that I may see the hurt in me, 

so that I can then see the hurt in the world.

Open my ears that I may hear my cries, 

so that I can hear the cries of others.

Open my heart to what I dislike about myself, 

so that I can have a heart for what I dislike about others. 

Show me where love and hope and trust are needed in me, 

so that I can bring hope, love, and trust to others. 

Allow me to bring all of these vestiges of peace to myself, 

so that I can be a beacon of peace in this world. 

Advanced Practice: George Floyd Murder

Day 23 - Giving Up Spiritual By-pass

Meditation: Sit very quietly and consider how your meditations have been, avoiding the experience of your own inner being, not working with them. Consider how you have breathed in light and relaxation and pretty images and affirmations and sayings to cover up the truth of your inner shame, fear, and judgments,

Now, instead of breathing in the light, breathe in the dark. The dark needs your light; your shame needs your acceptance; your guilt needs your forgiveness; your fear needs your calm; your hatred and judgments need your love and acceptance. Examine deeply within how you give your darkness to others and expect them to bring you light, your guilt to others to give you forgiveness, your shame to others to exonerate and accept you, and your judgments to others instead of correcting them yourself.

Breathe in and accept your dark, and on the out breath, give yourself what you need, so that you can be in a loving relationship with yourself instead of a demanding, tyrannical relationship with others. Consider all the ways you smother and cover up and soothe, ignore, and try to change your feelings and experience - instead of relating to your experience with wisdom and compassion, not excuses, indulgence, affirmations, and specialness.

Breathe in dark, breathe out light. Both are needed to be whole. Breathe in dark and breathe out light; you cannot have one without the other. Breathe in dark and breathe out light - deny one, and you have no inner relationship. Accept both without control, without force, without change.

Prayer:

God, who is only Love, grant me grace so that I may bring it to my suffering,

Grant me the patience to not try to control and change my experience, but be present to it.

God grant me the wisdom to bring to my ignorance and lack of understanding.

God grant me the compassion - the ability to be present to my own suffering and in relationship to it, with only your Love and Truth.

God help me to stop expecting from others what I can give myself through your gracious presence in my life.

Practice: I will use all spiritual practices to get in touch with my suffering instead of trying to soothe it away, knowing that my suffering needs my healing presence - not soothing practices

Advanced Practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x95ltQP8qQ Remember, this practice is not for others primarily. It MUST first be for you for it to ripple into the world

Day 24 - Give up Procrastination

Meditation: Breathe in all that you have not yet done that you think you “should” do. Feel the worry and anxiety. Breathe it in, sink into it, and feel it fully. Answer the question of what will happen if you do not get these tasks done? What will you feel? Do you want to do the thing you are worrying about? Are you in conflict - i.e., you want to, but you don’t want to? Why do you want to do it and finish this? Why do you not want to? Recognize that your procrastination is a useless attempt to get away from your fear of failure, and so feeling shame, your fear that you have no intrinsic value unless you do “important things,” are “good, right, perfect, on time, getting straight A’s in life as determined by others. How much of your life is given to doing what others want and need, and not what you want or need? Once you have determined why you are procrastinating (and it is not because you are lazy), you can decide whether to do something or not. When you have decided you do want to do it, then work through your fear of shame as a memory state and DO IT. Compassion means understanding and being with the memory state of fear or shame, and also setting limits with the defense against the feelings - procrastination and avoidance.

Practice: Write the above meditation in steps on a form. Work through the form every time you see yourself procrastinating.

Prayer: Mother of the Universe,

I draw on your compassion for the child in me that was shamed and frightened into achieving.

I draw on your wisdom to understand the beliefs I developed.

I draw on your courage to take risks in saying NO to what I do not want to do and YES to what I do want to do.

I draw on your firmness to set limits with avoidance and do what I fear and also want to do.

Advanced Practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x95ltQP8qQ

Day 27 - Give up immediate rationalizing, minimizing, blaming, excusing, denial and justifications when confronted

Meditation: Breathe deeply and go to an incident in which shame was triggered in you recently by something someone did or said that you heard as criticism. Breathe into the shame. Consider carefully: was the criticism correct? Is this something I need to look at? How do I want to rationalize and dismiss the criticism because of “how” it was delivered? Will I only hear things if they are said in a certain way? How am I turning this feeling into criticism of the other person instead of looking at myself? Was it actually criticism, or did I interpret it as such? What am I making this incident MEAN about me, that I have to defend so mightily? Is there something I need to look at and change? Is my shame realistic, in which case this criticism is a gift that will herald a change in me, for me. Can I do this without making it mean that what I need to change makes me defective, bad, unlovable, and worthless? Bring all of the light, love, and wisdom you have to the part of you that feels so shamed and diminished. Correct the beliefs. Hold the suffering with honor and reverence. Keep breathing in the questions and breathing out the loving answers. Relax into the pain. Create a pause. Choose to examine, not react.

Prayer:

Great Consciousness of the Universe that finds its life in me, help me remember to Pause, not react,

Help me see deeply into the dynamic of thought, feeling, and need that is activated in me,

Grant me the compassion to hold the pain, the wisdom to correct the cause within myself.

Give me the grace to know how to respond to others with the same compassion and wisdom.

Practice: Notice all the ways in which you defend yourself against any feedback from others, whether offered gently or unkindly.

Advanced Study: The Sin of Pride

https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_tamm_first_step_to_collaboration_don_t_be_so_defensive - awesome talk!!!

Day 28 - Give up Cowardice and step into Courage

Meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFa324V1kgU

Contemplate your life through the lens of the rose as a metaphor for your growth. The Rose is the Western symbol of the enlightened, resurrected, and ascended states of consciousness.

Prayer:

For Courage

When the light around you lessens

And your thoughts darken until

Your body feels fear turn

Cold as a stone inside

When you find yourself bereft

Of any belief in yourself

And all you unknowingly

Learned has fallen

When one voice commands

Your whole heart,

And it is raven dark,

Steady yourself and see

That is your own thinking

That darkens your world

Search, and you will find

A diamond-thought of light,

Know that you are not alone

And that this darkness has purpose

Gradually it will school your eyes

To find the one gift your life requires

Hidden within this night-corner.

Invoke the learning

Of every suffering

You have suffered.

Close your eyes

Gather all the kindling

About your heart

To create one spark.

That is all you need

To nourish the flame

That will cleanse the dark

Of its weight of festered fear.

A new confidence will come alive

To urge you towards higher ground

Where your imagination

Will learn to engage with difficulty

As its most rewarding threshold!

~John O’ Donohue

Use this blessing written for you to write your own prayer

Practice: Find a picture of a rose that speaks to you and use it as inspiration. Study all the stages the rose has to go through to produce a rose. Although we let go of our attention on the lower stages of development and focus on the newest growth and stage, that does not mean that the seed, roots, stems, leaves, thorns, and branches disappear - they are always still there - even when the roses are in full bloom.

Collect 12 poems and inspirational quotes about the rose and study them. (Hint: the Sufi saints, like Rumi, Kabir, and Hafiz, have many.)

Consider the cultivation of roses. What makes for the best yield of flowers? Consider all the elements, including the importance of pruning.

Advanced Practice: https://www.ted.com/talks/raphael_rose_how_failure_cultivates_resilience

Day 29 - Renunciation

Meditation: For your meditation today, go to this beautiful sermon by Pema Chodron: https://tricycle.org/magazine/renunciation/

Prayer:

God of Eternity,

Help me move past the edge of my fear into a greater expansion.

Let me see all the petty, small constraints I place on myself

and give me the courage to take the next step that leads to

a great view, perspective, and freedom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6KGpLgdhqo

Practice: Identify a fear today that keeps you stuck and too afraid to take another step

Advanced Practice: Courage

Day 31 - Giving up External Solutions to Loneliness

Meditation: Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness gives way to a sense of true belonging. This is a slow, open-ended transition, but it is utterly vital to coming into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense, this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home. ~John O’Donohue

Excerpt from the book, Eternal Echoes

Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

Prayer:

Spirit that permeates everything in the Universe,

Help me remember that desolation, loneliness, and emptiness are the conditions of being disconnected from myself and from You.

Let me remember to enter the loneliness and meet it with companionship and listening.

May I find a sense of belonging, unity, and connection within myself before seeking solutions from others? Let me not bring my emptiness to others to be filled, but may I bring my love to my own lonely soul and know I belong internally and to the Universe, knowing that when I do this, I will have love to bring to others who are disconnected too.

Practice: Seek to find God within and in everything around you. Can you connect to Spirit in the rocks, the trees, the creatures, and other people? Take one photo a day on your cell phone that reflects your spirit in all matters and everyone.

Advanced Practice: Order the book: SEEING THE SACRED by Julie Neraas https://julieneraas.com/writer/

Day 32 - Letting Go / Giving Up /Dis-identification with the object of your Seeing

Meditation: Letting go means seeing/witnessing and understanding onto what you are holding, that harms you and others (Maya or illusion) and relaxing your mental grip or strong attachment and identification with what you see, think, and feel. In this way, you will attain freedom and unity.

             “The forgetfulness of one’s true Self is the greatest suffering for a human. Everything that is not Atman is trivial. There is no real happiness in the trivial; the only happiness is in the Infinite.” ‘Tell me precisely the Brahman that is immediate and direct —the self that is within all."... You cannot see the seer of seeing; you cannot hear the hearer of hearing; you cannot think of the thinker of thinking; you cannot know the knower of knowing. This is your self that is within all; everything else but this is perishable." ~Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

Practice: witnessing and creating a pause between what you witness within and your action (thought, speech, behavior), and see if your action changes. Face the grief of letting go of your self-created illusory self and face the fear of the unknown.

Prayer: God of Consciousness, help me to remember that I am the awareness of what I experience, not the experience.

I am the seer of what I see, not that which is seen,

I am the one knowing the feelings and thoughts that arise; I am not the feelings and thoughts that arise.

I am the one experiencing life, not the experience of life.

For advanced Study: The Spiritual Practice of Detachment, Sacrifice, Letting Go, Renunciation, Dying to Self, Surrender

Day 34 - Give up Despair and Embrace Vision

Meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0hsR3p5Mok

Practice: Create a vision board for your next year of life - what inner transformation do you wish to see within?

Advanced Practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iamZEW0x3dM

Day 35 - 4 Things to Surrender

Meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6PJA33JvhI

Prayer:

Lord of Infinity, help me to identify with all that is infinite, that is my True Self, in you and one with you.

and surrender my attachment and identification with all that is finite.

Practice: Notice each day how much of your attention is focused on the finite with complete forgetfulness of the infinite. When you notice give a prayer of thanks for the moment of awakening.

Advanced Practice: Detachment and Letting Go

Day 37 - Give up all that is in the way of Loving Kindness

Meditation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzPTHstpJ2I

Prayer:

Mother of Loving Kindness,

Let my heart, encased by coldness, disinterest, and distance, break open to my own suffering,

and so the suffering of the world.

Let all coldness be replaced with warmth, all disinterest be replaced with interest, and distance to

be replaced by your Loving Presence, that has its life and beingness within me.

Practice: Examine every thought, word, and deed and ask yourself, “Is this loving to me?” “Is this kind to me?” If it is not, then it is not for others either. If I observe myself being unloving and unkind, can I bring love and kindness (not excuses and justifications) to my unloving and unkind self with deep understanding?

Advanced Study: The Spiritual Practice of Loving Kindness

Day 39 - Hallelujah

Meditation: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Hallelulia+youtube&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Prayer:

Lord of Infinity,

As I walk through the desert experience of life, enter the darkness of despair and suffering,

Let every word that leaves my lips be Hallelujah for this precious experience of Life,,

May I use each experience to transform me, expand me, and awaken me,

So that each step is a celebration of gratitude to You

and a remembrance that it is You within whom I have my Life

and it is this that is infinite, ever-present, all-loving, and all-powerful.

Practice: I will notice each day when I am distracted by the finite and forget my infinite Self, and when I awaken to this recognition, there will only be Halleluia on my lips

Advanced Practice: The Spiritual Practice of Gratitude

Day 40 - Easter Sunday - Expanded State of Consciousness

Meditation: How have you expanded your awareness, knowledge, and insight as a result of your 40-day practice? How did you descend into suffering so as to ascend into a more expanded state of awareness? Contemplate the descent and ascent, and how one cannot happen without the other. Study the Apostles Creed (Not the Nicene Creed), and contemplate what it means to descend into hell and then on the 3rd day, to rise into a new, expanded state.

Resurrection

 The reversal of what was thought to be absolute.

The turning of midnight into dawn, hatred into love,

dying into living anew.

If we look more closely at life, we will find that 

Resurrection is more than hope; it is our experience.  

The return to life from death is something we 

understand at our innermost depths, something we 

feel on the surface of our tender skin.  

We have come back to life, 

not only when we start to shake off a shroud of sorrow

 that has bound us, 

But when we begin to believe in all that is still, endlessly possible.

We give thanks for all those times we have arisen 

from the depths or simply taken a tiny step toward something new.  

May we be empowered by extraordinary second chances.  

And as we enter the world anew, 

let us turn the tides of despair into

endless waves of hope. 

 ~Molly Fumia

Prayer:

May we all be resurrected from

the heavy leaden feelings of shame,

that deadens our bodies 

so that our hearts thud slowly and sadly

pulsing blood through us sluggishly 

like a river weighted with debris and mud.

May we be released from the intricate weaving 

of thoughts that annihilate, bind, constrict, reduce 

as if wrapped in a cocoon spun 

by the black spider of death

leaving us lying catatonic, unmoving,

alive in an unending and hopeless death.

May we be freed from the bondage 

of tyrannical dictators in our minds

that drive us, demand from us, expect more and more,

judge what is done, tell us that nothing is good enough,

quick enough, right enough, until we collapse

exhausted, hopeless, and beaten down, slaves to the last.

May we feel the sweet freedom? 

from anger that scorches us, 

Resentments that blister our souls,

Revenge that blackens and turns to ashes 

the truest desires of our souls.

May we be born again to the sweet bliss

Of golden light that shines on an 

Endless meadow of green,

To the infinite joy of finding that we

Are unflawed rubies embedded

in the carnellian heart of God,

May we awaken to the unfathomable 

peace of being wrapped in 

the gentle softness of white silken

light from the moon goddess,

flowing sensate, and luxurious 

around our being.

May we be stirred and aroused

by the breath of love on our cheeks,

and to the knowing and eager response

of love for the beloved, always reaching for us.

©  Lyndall Johnson 

Lent 2007