The 7th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity to Attain Alignment

Note: Please go to the blog to read the comments (and to post your own). The comments really enrich the experience. Thank you. 

Not being a mature soul I can only imagine and strive for this capacity of alignment.   A wise soul keeps all "things" in appropriate relative positions. Right!

How much of your inner life is in alignment? What in your life - your thoughts, your feelings, your deeds - is in the appropriate relative position?

What is alignment for you? What is appropriate? How do you observe the relativity of position? These are big Holy Nights' questions.  Take your time to respond.

Here is the imagination that came to me:

I feel like I am decorating a Christmas Tree, a cosmic moral Christmas Tree that presents my soul to the universe.

Bright lights strung together and wrapped around the branches in a lovely spiral from top to bottom.  They are my thoughts.

Then colored balls of different sizes - my feelings.  Red for good energy.  Blue for grief and loss. Purple for my noble feelings of selflessness. Orange for arousal.  Iridescent green for love.  Gold for wisdom. Silly shapes for adding some humor and gayheartedness.

Under the tree, beautifully wrapped presents - my deeds.  These are the gifts I've given through my will. Most of them are small packages, but there are a few that are big.

Then on top of the tree a star - the star I feel and that finds me, my destiny and my I.

It is a beautiful tree.  And everything is just right and balanced in form, color, light, placement.  Harmoniously related to everything.

Tonight begin to imagine everything in your inner life in its right place. All appropriately related to your "I," your shining selfhood.

Wrting this message puts a smile through me. I feel soft and sweet.  Each year we need to decorate an Inner Christmas Tree.  What is in those gifts at the bottom of the tree that holds the purpose of the star at the top? How did that purpose spiral down through the lights and swirl around the colored balls?

Are your gifts aligning with your star? Actually, the question is really are your gifts moving into alignment with your star? Your soul is growing>

The 6th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity for

Gratitude for Difficulties

 

Here we are at the 6th Holy Night. As we move further away from the Day of Nativity, we must work harder to remember we are in the midst of the Holy Nights. Yes, with tonight's message we have completed the first half of Inner Christmas.

What have you found appearing in your soul during these nights? An insight, a feeling, an intention, a spark of freedom, a moment of love? Or have you found yourself feeling a new emptiness or perhaps a resentment?  Do you wish you were paying more attention to opening up to connecting with the spiritual world and to connecting with your own emerging selfhood?

What were your goals when you began celebrating Inner Christmas?  If you didn't have any clear goals, notice it.  Maybe now is the time to consider (from the Latin -  con-with and sidere - star).  Rudolf Steiner writes, in my favorite verse, "I feel my star. My star finds me." In the bold mood of the Holy Nights, feel your star and let it find you! Let it be your goal to simply consider what finds you.

It may be difficult to trust your feeling or to want to be clear about it. Bless the difficulty.

Difficulties are springboards to inner and practical development. Difficult jobs. Difficult relationships. Difficult health. Difficult childhood. Difficult moods. Difficult days and difficult nights.  It can feel as if everything you seek, even deserve, is met with resistance, a coninuing echo of "No room at the inn."

Difficulties direct us to the manger, the unexpected shelter where we give birth to something new, something glorious, something redeeming in our hearts, minds, and endeavors.

Physically, it is very difficult to birth a baby - I've done it twice. It is labor. It is transition that comes too fast and too intensely. The feeling of ambivalence in the process is unspeakable.  Then the joy, joy, joy of the new.  Then comes the difficulty of parenting and of nurturing the child to meet its destiny.  And everybody learns lessons, grows and becomes wise with each difficulty that is faced. Some "baby" is born, some epiphany strikes the soul.

The mature, ripe soul has learned to benefit from difficulties and the wise soul feels gratitude. Our goal is to birth ourselves anew many times and labor willingly. And welcome the sudden and often painful epiphanies.

Tonight look at the lessons of the year, the moral lessons that made you a better you. How difficult was the learning? Be grateful.

The 5th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity to

Embrace Ambivalence and Modulate Desires

 

With the conscious feeling of spiritual forces intimately flowing into your heart from behind and up through your feet from below, you can find a new strength for becoming free from patterns and identities living out of the past and the wishes and hopes living into the future.

As our inner life develops, we can begin to modulate our contradictory desires to remain the same and to become different. Or the contradictory desires to hold on or let go.  Or to know how to have a good laugh and a good cry over the same thing. Or to love and hate the same person.

The first step is to dive into the dilemma of ambivalence or valuing opposites and holding opposing values. I love the Holy Nights and I love the challenge of writing the messages but there is also the feeling that I wish I could just forget them and not have to struggle with the messages. Each year I get more comfortable with embracing the ambivalence - I am growing this soul capacity.

We all face ambivalence in many areas of our lives. (Intimate relationships, anyone?) What are your ambivalent feelings around the Holy Nights and the Inner Christmas messages?  Do you want to work with the questions? Or do you just want to ignore them? Ambivalence usually keeps us in the lower realms of pain or pleasure and profit or loss. It's that little  word "or." Spiritual development is not the overcoming of ambivalence. It is the self-compassionate embrace of ambivalence which leads us to the morally awake presence of  joy and suffering. Notice "and."

Once we find a more spiritually mature relationship to ambivalence, we can then modulate our desires.  We can vary the frequency, the intensity and the duration of our hungers and our satisfactions. We don't feel greed or the need to avoid. We can bear inner growing pains calmly. We can persevere in our inner development.

The Holy Nights offer us the two portals of innocence and wisdom. Innocence is free of ambivalence and desire. Wisdom is the result of our struggles with both.

Feeling the spirit behind you and beneath you, move toward wisdom.

In your soul's Holy Night, observe your struggles.  Forgive your ambivalences and play with the frequency, intensity and duration of your desires.  Wonder first, then focus, then name.

With desires, how often can you imagine having a desire fulfilled (a hundred times in a day or once in your lifetime); how intensely can you imagine experiencing your desire being fulfilled (as if you could die from the intensity or as if you were lightly brushed by an angel's wing); and how long could you endure the experience (forever, years, months, days, hours, the blink of your eye). Play with your wicked desires and your saintly ones.

With ambivalence, imagine light without shadow? What could you see? Would it seem significant? If love did not need to overcome hate, would it be love?

If the Holy Nights, didn't ask us difficult questions, would they be holy?  Think of the Babe in the manger and how he grew to carry the ambivalence and desires of the world and we only need to embrace and modulate our own.

The 4th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity to Feel the Spirit

Have you thought about your soul being able to contain contradictions? This is so powerful to grasp.  We grow up learning the laws of nature and the social life. We believe truths we are taught and conform to behavioral expectations. Then as we start paying attention to our inner life we find conflict. We seek a new inner worldview and most of us think that new view will be another set of laws to obey, truths to believe and a new more enlightened set of expectations. 

In my counseling and teaching, I find our souls begin to radiate from within when we let go of laws, truths and expectations and we find confidence in the creativity, love and freedom that appears in cosmic chaos and cosmic contradiction. 

Tonight I want to invite you to enter into a possibly contradictory experience that is simple and significant and quite joyful.

I want you to think about how spiritual light and spiritual strength pour into you. Most of us, thanks to art, nature and religious training, experience spiritual forces or presence coming toward us from above and that we move into the spirit in front of us.

What is the experience if you find spiritual forces beneath your feet giving you a ground and a path?  What is the experience if you feel spiritual forces at your back - a quiet warmth and light centered behind your heart giving you direction and confidence? Both of these feelings have an immediacy of connection - the spirit is not far away but right here supporting you in your incarnation.

During the Holy Nights, this experience of the forces of the gods being right here with us is very, very real.  To experience them as the ground you walk on and the support of movement at your back will bring you strongly into the New Year.

Please share your feelings and thought of this sense of the spirit in the comments on the blog.

The 3rd Holy Night

The Growing Capacity for Inner Poetry

Tonight we look at our soul’s capacity to rename and redefine.  In Genesis, God gives Adam the gift of naming so all things can be useful to him. For us the gift is renaming and redefining. We no longer live in the Garden of Constants, we live in the Garden of Change. As we evolve what is useful to us evolves.

The Holy Nights give us this open threshold, this open soul, where our inner evolution appears to our inner eye/I. We see things in new ways, ways that ask us for new names and new purposes.

This can be disturbing.  We seem to be just learning the names and uses of so much in the world of space and time, in our sense of ourselves. This is why we must experience our souls as inner poets.  Poets live in the mystery of evolving language and suffer their art gracefully.

Nurture the inner poet. Cultivate the art of evolving language - your own language, not anyone else’s names or definitions.  Your own Garden of Inner Becoming.

Tonight you can simply read some poetry. This is always a good thing to do during the Holy Nights.

Or you can warm your soul in the spiritual sun that shines for these few nights and do some creative and poetic reflection.  Of course, I have a suggestion.

In the year past, find a moment that had meaning and purpose for you.  Now write a short poem about this moment that celebrates the experience. (No attempts at perfection as perfection does not allow for evolution.)  Reflect on your celebratory poem and its moment for a few minutes.  Maybe get up and walk a bit. Or stretch.

Now come back to the memory of the moment and write a grieving poem about it. What do you mourn, what was lost?  This is a poem of poetic courage.  You are renaming and redefining.  No room for sentiment or attachment here. You are not contradicting yourself, you are containing contradictions which the Inner Poet loves to do for you.

Or do the reverse, begin with the inner poem of grief  and follow with the inner poem of celebration.

Grow your capacity for inner poetry in renaming and redefining.

If you are comfortable, I invite you to share your poetic Holy Nights work in the comments on the Inner Christmas 2010 blog.

The 2nd Holy Night

The Growing Capacity to 

Focus and Direct while Dwelling in Chaos.

Oh, if the soul only had to wonder at simple things. Are there any simple things in the face of growing wonder?  I think not. 

Things are layered, swirled, tumbled and twisted. Things rise, sparkle, dance and dim. Things delight and disturb, stimulate and soothe, confound and clarify.

We do not wonder in our sleep.  Wonder wakes us up. But wonder needs the support of focus and direction.

Awake, our souls wonder at all these things: All our thoughts, all our feelings, all our intentions and all the stuff of our stories, our perceptions and our bodily sensations. Most of us automatically tune out most of what is going on in our souls, but as we grow our capacity to focus, we can direct more and more of the creative chaos we dwell in.

Can you smile an inner smile when you find yourself in a wondrous chaos?  Can you choose one thing and direct your attention to it? And go deep into it? and deeper again? Can you direct your wonder so that your questions become illuminating, focused on the true, the beautiful, the good? Do you focus on the past, the present, the future, the very flow of time?

Our souls grow the capacity to dance between the forest and the tree.

Tonight recollect your soul’s vast numbers of encounters and experiences of just today.  Choose one experience or encounter and focus into it.  If you are journaling, write down a question about this one thing and then begin to answer your question.  Stay focused and maintain your direction into deep meaning. Be surprised.

Here’s a sweet suggestion: If you love Christmas music, like I do, choose one carol or one song.  Listen to it. Now focus on one phrase like “Angels we have heard on high,” “Let heaven and nature sing,” “Joyful and Triumphant,” or “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” Now focus on this one phrase and direct your attention to what this means to you.

Focusing and directing warms your heart without sentimentalizing.  Enjoy and grow your soul’s capacity.

The 1st Holy Night - The Growing Capacity to Wonder

The Growing Capacity to Wonder

 

I am spending the holidays with my 10 month old grandson.  He wonders at everything in his new earthly life.  It’s beautiful to see how wonder moves him into experience and understanding. His innocent wonder is not the wonder I am asking us to consider in our Holy Nights inner work tonight.

My grandson’s wonder is innate and instinctual.  The soul’s capacity for wonder is more conscious and actively chosen.  We must remember to wonder.

His wonder is graceful and constant. Our soul’s wonder is often awkward and erratic.

Somewhere in our youth wonder loses its openness and becomes desire for the immediate need.  We become eager to live in the familiar and lose interest in the unknown.  We focus on appearances and stop seeking the mysteries. We become impatient or resigned.  Our attention to what is beyond our worldly experience is often brief, distractable and superficial. 

And too often we come to rely on doctrine, dogma and conformity for our guidance when we seek enlightenment.

As I watch my grandson, I see wonder that is original and solitary for him.  We don’t tell him what to wonder at or how to wonder or what to learn from his wondering.  We witness and encourage and watch to gently guide him away from dangers he is too innocent to recognize.

When our self-aware souls choose to wonder at  the natural world, the heavenly world, or the human world, we find no doctrine, no dogma and no conformity.  In our adult wonder we are blessedly alone and creative. Rarely is there anyone witnessing, encouraging or guarding.

In wondering we become artists, scientists, shepherds and wisemen. We become comfortable with the unknown and the sublime.  Our wondering becomes graceful and constant and grows in its capacity. Our capacity to wonder keep us innocent and makes us wise.

Now on this night of Nativity, reflect on your capacity to wonder.  Look at something of nature and wonder.  Look at an image of something divine and wonder. Think of someone you love and wonder.

Wonder is the capacity you will need each of the Holy Nights.  All the Inner Christmas messages ask you to wonder.

Tonight wonder at your growing capacity to wonder.

And go to sleep and have wonderful dreams.