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 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 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.