The 8th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity for Endings

 

Note: Please go to the blog to read the comments (and to post your own). The comments really enrich the experience. Thank you. You can also read this message and all the previous ones on the blog.  http://www.innerchristmas2010.blogspot.com

Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), 563 - 483 BC

At the beginning of the year, which so appropriately falls in the mid-Holy Nights, let's notice our  unpeaceful feelings about endings.  Endings are death.  Living attention is no longer paid to what had been evolving through time.  Interest is over.  Meaning is complete or can go no further. Or something has reached the point of enough, of satisfaction, of desire met and of destiny fulfilled.

How do you feel about endings, death, enough, over and other states of finality? Do you feel the withering hidng in germinating?

I will be personal here.

I avoid and resist endings. I ignore endings. I rage at endings. I feel the same thing about completions and fulfillments.   I live in a mood of constant development and process. For me even happy endings are lacking.

So this capacity for endings needs so much growth in my soul.  As I seek this growth, I quake a bit.  Where does this lack of peace with death in life come from? Or with satisfaction?  How does it keep me from meaningful beginnings, from true vitality? What thresholds push me back not letting me cross? Am I afraid of the tears or afraid of the joys?

These are my emotional feelings.

Now I contradict myself.

If I didn't love endings, I would not be writing a Holy Nights Message about them.  I am at the age where I consider completions and "last times." I recognize endings sooner and bless them. Finality seems like an opportunity. I am at the threshold of the end of this life.

I love death as much as I love birth.  I celebrate thresholds, transitions and metamorphoses. And witness them with peace, seeing glory.  I also feel them as a continum, a never-ending full of endings! Every death is a birth.

Slowly, I am learning to attend to feelings of satisfaction and good enough. I've stopped always wanting or needing more. I can let go.

And all this changes my relationship to the eternal, the infinite, the cosmic and the universal.  I imagine being at peace with endings means knowing the peace of now and enough and never again.

Tonight write down your thoughts and feelings about endings.  Go to that place of ending hiding in the beginning of the year and ask yourself what you want to end over the next 364 days. And I don't mean "get rid of" or vanquish from your life as in a New Year's resolution to stop smoking or a wish to end poverty and hunger in the world.  What will simply or complexly end this year? I am asking you to live into your relationship to death.

Here is a poem with many beautiful expressions but the one I find the most freeing is "Accustom yourselves to death gently."  Embrace the little deaths, the endings of the year.

Chorus of the Clouds
Nelly Sachs

We are full of sighs, full of glances
We are full of laughter
And at times we bear your faces.
We are not far from you.
Who knows how many tears you have shed through our weeping?
How much longing forms us?
We are players at dying
Accustom yourselves to death gently
You, the unpracticed ones, who learn nothing in the night.
Many angels are given to you
But you do not see them.

Learn something from the Holy Nights, listen to the Buddha and see the angels.

 

 

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 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.