Month: November 2016

Sacred time, sacred friendships

/ Lanae / Leave a comment Featured

Recently, I read a book called Sacred Time, and the search for Meaning, about time, our seeking and longing for sacred time. Sacred time as time that’s different than clock time … time measured in the depth of timeless meaning contained within it, time that is not-time, time that is like the Eternal Now. Or, as it’s sometimes called, Kairos, God’s time … Sacred Time.

The more rushed we are, the more we seek this time, we seek ways to carve out this time in the midst of all the rush and stress and busyness and expectations of modern life.  Sacred time, Sabbath time … timeless time.

Technology and social media were perhaps supposed to grant us this time, this liberty of time, and yet seem to have instead robbed us … robbed us of sacred time, robbed us of connection, connection to rest, to stillness, to one another …

Leaving us with a longing and craving for this sacred time.

And I realized, I long for it, too, and something more – and maybe I’m not the only one!

I desire deeply to have sacred time IN my friendships.

Sacred friendship time – time that’s timeless, time not measured by the clock, not scheduled, but spacious, with the liberty to be. Friendship time where time is forgotten, where it’s not the master (or mistress), where watches and planners and phones are set aside, and we just ARE … We just are there, we just are who we are, hearts and souls in sacred time together, in sacred conversation and connection.

I know our modern world doesn’t exactly allow this … but what if it did? What if we together remade it to allow this?

What if we defied the rush and press of clock time and created such sacred spaces in our own lives?! What boundless abundance might we discover?

I think there’s as much a seeking and a longing for sacred friendships as there is for sacred time. Only, I suspect many aren’t deeply or keenly aware of a need, or of a lack, and perhaps seek either to ignore it or to fill it in other ways, with work or other activities, things that are needful, valuable, beautiful in themselves …

Yet, are those things as fruitful as they could be if they fill available time at the expense of nurturing sacred friendships, soul connections? Are they as fruitful for the individual soul or the soul of the community, the world?

Is life itself as rich and fruitful and meaningful without the presence of sacred friendships, soul connections, soul friends?

I don’t think so. Not for me, anyway!

Maybe it’s harder to nurture those sacred friendships, to find those soul friends, when sacred time itself is so hard to find … but maybe the secret for finding both is to become still, to become very present in your life, and allow yourself to be found by them!

So, what is a sacred friendship? A soul friend? What do those concepts, truths, mean to you?

Here’s how I know sacred friendship:

It invites and cultivates a strong spiritual connection. It’s a spiritually intimate friendship, where deeper things can be shared: ideas, emotions, fears, needs, wounds – not just at mind-depth, not just at heart-depth, but also at soul-depth.

A friendship where deep vulnerability and transparency are present …  where each of you is safe to be deeply vulnerable and transparent with one another. Where there’s safety because each of you loves the soul, and the heart, of the other …

A friendship where not just the social and emotional needs are met, but also the soul needs.

You are friends with each other’s souls …

In the Celtic tradition, Anam Cara is the term for soul friend … some lovely, powerful things have been said about what Anam Cara means:

A soul friend is one who walks with and supports the soul of another human being.

Or, as John O’Donohue writes:

The Anam Cara was a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging.  [It] cuts across all convention and category.

And:

In everyone’s life, there is great need for an Anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of acquaintance fall away. You can be as you truly are …

Such a rich, restorative sacredness in that sort of relationship! Such a safeness, a spacious safeness, perhaps not for the ego, but certainly for the soul.

I think there’s a longing for such meaningful friendships within many of us … yet also perhaps a fear.

Because it means vulnerability and authenticity, a realness and an honesty … an intimacy that perhaps seems too deep, or too intense.

Yet, it’s not an intimacy that needs to feel frightening … or be consuming. It can be, should be, an intimacy that’s comforting, spacious, expansive, generous …  an expansive closeness, full of grace and space. As the poet Khalil Gibran said – Let there be spaces in your togetherness …

Spaces of stillness or physical apartness…

But perhaps the first soul friend you need to seek and find is yourself, to befriend your own soul. Because you are never truly apart from yourself … wherever you go, there you are!

Learn how to be with yourself in stillness. And in the stillness, awaken to know and love your own soul …

And then, you are awakened to the sacredness in your relationships … and your soul friends find you! And you can love yourself, and your neighbor as yourself.

Oh, I am so grateful for soul friends I’ve had in my life … who have held a mirror up to me, so I could see my soul reflected there.

Who have loved me as I am, and have encouraged me to live in truth and love …

Who have explored deep places with me, and have taught me precious, wise things …

Who have seen my darkness and walked with me in it, and have been the flame that kept my candle lit …

Who have not been afraid to speak the truth, even hard things, in love, and yet have known when to keep silence in love …

Who have known how to hold space and when to give space.

My soul gives thanks for you!

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Oh my friends, may you all be blessed and bless yourselves with sacred time, sacred friendships … your souls and lives nurtured and nourished through spacious and gracious relationship!

 

 

 

Election reflections: thoughts on change, stillness, and the pressure of light

/ Lanae / 7 Comments Featured

Initially, I felt purposed not to publish my deeper reactions to the election outcome.

I wanted simply, only, to point people to the light, to grace … to implore people to remember kindness and compassion toward others, toward both those elated over election results and those disheartened by them, those rejoicing and those grieving.

But something shifted me toward sharing more, come of it what may.

I’ve never felt this sort of visceral reaction to any previous election, so I find it telling:

Election night, a nameless, depthless dismay welled up inside. I glimpsed a sense of powerful forces and movements of spirit afoot, which were (are) far too big and deep for me to even put words to …

The following day, a fire burned in my chest, throat, forehead. No matter how my mind said to me, look, the sun still came up; the world is still beautiful; don’t make catastrophic assumptions … the fire burned.

And all day long, I practiced deep, cooling breaths, trying to quell the heat and flame. In the midst of this, though, I tried to listen to what my body seemed to understand about the gravity of the situation.

A wise friend, whose profound perspectives I respect deeply, shared a lovely thought with me that has helped me process things.

She spoke of the pressure of light, of how she believes there’s actually more light in the world now, but paradoxically, it’s that very light to which people are reacting in such intense ways. Some people are being provoked to love, others to anger, to fear. The light is provoking transparency, causing hidden things, some of which are painful, to rise to consciousness …

I think she’s right, that there IS more light. Oh, I think there’s always been light, but it’s breaking forth more brilliantly, fiercely! Yes, I know it’s so hard to believe, with all of the fear, anger, and anguish present, with the apparent resurgence of dark, nasty roots of bigotry and basest prejudices of all kinds, with the shadows of hatefulness and evil that seem to loom.

Yet, I suspect perhaps these things are happening because of the work of the light, because the light is driving them into the open, where they should be!

The pressure of the light is breaking through into places of darkness and making the seeds and roots that hid there visible … biases, wounds, ancient, unhealed traumas of oppression, violence, and injustice that we all bear stains or scars of, harmful beliefs that collectively or individually burden us. Deeply embedded patterns of perception, communication, and relationship that desperately need transformation …

And the pressure of the light is painful, isn’t it … to see, to feel what it reveals hurts.

But what we can see and know, we can heal! And therein is the hope … but also the urgency. The urgent need of holding on to the light, being the good, watering seeds of peace, seeking stillness in the chaotic swirls of societal and personal emotion …

Yes, stillness is needed, now. You and I, we need stillness, to be able to sit with all the powerful emotions swirling up, to hold space for them. To sit with anger and fear and learn to bring the fruit of loving change and genuine justice from it.

You and I, we need stillness, so that we can then rise up and be the good, be the love, be the light, that is needed now.

Out of the stillness is born the deepest living and the purest action.

Out of the stillness, the brightest light shines.

And in the stillness, we can bear the pressure of the light, and respond with love and grace, to even the hardest and most painful, devastating things.

I’m not naïve to the presence and power of evil, but I believe whole-heartedly, whole-soulfully, that goodness is strong, is strengthening, is the strongest force in the world. Everywhere, I see a surging of fierce grace, fierce pleadings for grace and light. People expressing powerful intentions to bring the pressure of light to bear against hate and injustice … and powerful intentions to be willing for the pressure of light within, to let it reveal, heal, and transform.

I am willing for the pressure of the light. Willing to let it provoke unbounding, unconditional love in me. What about you? What will the pressure of light provoke in you?

May it provoke belovedness.

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One other reflection: We are in the midst of a massive societal transformation, a change in consciousness, and it won’t be stopped. Regardless of who won the election, it was/is happening, anyway. Some experience this as beautiful and good, but others as painful and terrible.

Rather like an intense grief reaction, because there’s loss involved, the loss of the familiar/status quo … but for some, a way of life is dying. It’s hard to see the goodness in that dying, and they’re grieving. And anger is a part of grief. Fear, resistance, a part of it. It’s important to try to understand that, to allow compassion toward it, whether we see it in others or in ourselves.

I’ve read so many reactions and reflections the last few days, people pouring their hearts out, lifting their voices. Pain from all sides, pleas to be heard. It awakens a question: as we’re seeking to be heard, are we also listening? Are we in a space to listen; can we find it?

Listening with belovedness, to the hurts and the hearts of those who voted differently than we, as well as to those who share similar views? Listening inclusively?

Listening leads to understanding; understanding to compassion. Then, to loving, to healing.

If we’re wondering how we got to this point in our world, perhaps one reason is because we have been raising our own voices to speak our truths, yet not listening to others’ truths, not listening for or hearing the hurts and the hearts of those with whose choices or voices or truths we disagree …

Make no mistake, hatefulness and injustice MUST be spoken against, lived against, and love must be lived into, even if it costs us the dearest friendships or asks us to let go of privileges we’re attached to. Yet let’s not be so quick to assume hate is the truth of a heart and soul without first listening deeply to hurts there!

What a beautiful thing if this pressure of light would also provoke us all to listen more to one another … if it would provoke the awakening of stillness so that we could listen in belovedness.

A healing journey

/ Lanae / Leave a comment

I would like to try to reflect upon my recently completed yoga teacher training experience … but I have no adequate words to express the journey. Sometimes there aren’t words and all words are adequate for is to say that they are inadequate to describe the immensity and intensity of an experience …

I suppose I really want beautiful words, the most beautiful words, to paint the most heart-stirring and gilded, evocative and fluid and flowing, picture possible … I feel that the experience is worthy of the most beautiful words that I could find! But what I carry forward is gratitude, for the journey and for those beautiful people, beautiful souls all, with whom I shared it!

I would not have imagined the big-ness of the spiritual journey upon which I was embarking … the layers of my soul that would be exposed to me, the depths that I would plumb, the magnitude of relational shifts, to myself, to others around me, to closer friends and family, to the earth herself …

Oh, like the unfolding of a lotus, a thousand petals opening infinitely outward! There it is, one image to illustrate it …

But perhaps I have to return to the spiral … like that in the trinity labyrinth tattoo that I have on my inner left ankle. Three spirals seamlessly flowing into a center and back out and around in an unbroken line, this labyrinth represents a spiritual journey, re-creation, awakening, transformation …  spiraling in, spiraling out.

As much as the lotus ever unfolding outward even while the tight bud seems to remain at center represents my feelings about this yoga journey, so does the labyrinth, spiraling in, spiraling out.

Sometimes you must fold in on yourself to open outward and bloom, sometimes you must go deep inward in order to find your way back out.

Sometimes you must walk through the darkness and the fire to find light and peace and stillness … be burned to nothing to find cleansing and purifying and wholeness.

I feel that this is not only what happened in the actual teacher training weekends once a month, but also over the entire seven months in the midst of the training …

Did the experience of beginning the teacher training begin opening my heart to an even deeper searching for truth and deeper willingness to live it, regardless of the cost to my ego and my comfort, or did the searching of my heart for truth and my soul for a voice lead me to the teacher training? Perhaps both. Perhaps it matters not.

All the threads were unfolding as they were meant to unfold … as I walked the path, the path opened itself to me, and as I embraced it, it embraced me.

I began the journey with the conscious thought that I needed to learn a deeper physical practice, to know the asana aspect of yoga better … perhaps to bring a balance to mind, body, and soul that I have always sought and craved. I began knowing that I was not in balance … I knew meditation, contemplation, reflection. Well, so I thought!

Those spiritual elements were my focus, perhaps I should say, my idol … ego was in my spirituality. Ego was in my meditation …

Even though I loved to exercise, to run, and found it a spiritual thing, I still did not have what I would call body/soul integration. There was a disconnect, an imbalance in the way I lived with my body, used my body, thought of my body, shamed my body for being a body, for being an imperfect body. For being less important than my soul.

I didn’t live in a soul-ish way in my body. I lived with much ego in my body … a prideful discipline, not a compassionate discipline.

And going through the yoga teacher training, I learned that deeper and more compassionate body discipline, I found that body/soul connection. I found the soul in the asana practice … and it brought me back around to the meditative elements, but deeper into them, deeper into the soul.

Because I learned to find the soul in the body and the body in the soul, and to know that the soul and body need to have a loving relationship … and I need to have a loving relationship with both …

And as I came through to the end of my training, I found myself back where I had begun … where I had never left, having but gone deeper, through the body into the soul … using the body to let go of ego, and in the letting go, finding the soul. In the letting go, the self-surrender, the surrender to the sacred, finding the stillness …

I learned the art of stillness.

I learned that I want to teach the art of stillness.

I learned that I CAN teach the art of stillness. But only if I stay in the space where I am willing to keep surrendering ego and surrendering to the sacred, to the light, to belovedness …

And I want to show that stillness is a safe place … that it is a safe space to be, to see the soul and know it.

May I teach, may I live, may I be with others in such a way that people can see stillness is a safe and beautiful and healing space to be … a safe space to wake up to the soul and find wholeness and healing in the stillness,  and then live awake and whole!

I am grateful that I have found wholeness and safeness in stillness. That I have come to know stillness as the safest space to be and to become anew, to always be becoming anew …

And coming, becoming, from that place of stillness, to be in my body and my soul in a new way, to be in my relationships and in this world, in a new way, a deeper way.