The 12th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity to

Wear the Three Crowns

 

 

This is the last of the Holy Nights for this Inner Christmas.  (Tomorrow I will write an Epiphany message framing the portal into the ordinary year.)

Never before have I felt a need to attend to what it means to my inner life that the Holy Nights are at an end. Is this because I wrote so personally about the growing capacity for endings?

Twelve is really a number of a full circle of consciousness. We have gone through a full circle of consciousness in the clear presence of the spiritual world and in the clear insight of our "I." Maybe we don't exactly know what that means but all of us sharing Inner Christmas have been active during the Holy Nights - we have moved through a full circle together.

Why would the presence of either the spiritual world or our "I" consciousness fade or blur? Perhaps it is our attention that now dives into ordinary life.

Are the Holy Nights, a yearly spiritual feast, filling us with 12 spiritual dishes that we then digest and make our own? We can then ask which of these dishes did our soul enjoy immediately, which will we savor over the year.  Which dish gave our soul something to chew on? Has it been a good meal? Is tonight's message a sweet or savory ending?

What are the three crowns the soul can grow to wear? The crown of Truth.  The crown of Beauty. The crown of Goodness.

The soul, your soul, can only wear the crowns through much moral striving. It is moral striving to work with the question, "What is Truth/Beauty/Goodness?" This asks you to wonder - growing the last capacity is dependent on growing the first!

Ask 12 questions about Truth.

Then ask twelve questions about Beauty.

And finally, ask twelve questions about Goodness.

Write them down. Do not try to answer them but do reread them and keep them somewhere to read next Christmas before beginning the Holy Nights.

In your whole life, have you ever asked even three questions about Truth, Beauty or Goodness? Isn't it about time?  It is for me.

This is how we begin the year and end the Holy Nights, finding our simple questions about the three crowns of our soul.

Let the questions you have grow in your soul through the year.

If you would like to share your questions and inspire others, please do so at www.innerchristmas2010.blogspot.com

The 11th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity for Forgiveness

 

 

The Holy Nights and the unfiltered light of the spirit have led us deeply into our soul as an evolving, developing inner moral imagination.  Over and over again, the spiritual hierarchies ask us to reflect on the experience of becoming, the experience of polarities and the experience of freedom.

Do pause for a few sacred moments and consider your personal sense of becoming during these nights. Do you feel different than the way you were before the Holy Nights began?

What about the polarities of human consciousness?  Can you feel a center or see a center between two opposing experiences? Have you sought the awesome and awful point of balanced ambivalence?

And have had any moments where freedom from your numerous identities appeared -  when you realize the spiritual sense of "I" that lives free of all qualifiers, containers and judgments.

If you have experienced any of these awarenesses, tonight's message will be, maybe not easy, but less difficult. If you have some awareness, you have forgiven something.

Without forgiveness, can you become an evolved self, can you live between the ever-present polarities and can you be free?

Tonight look at both aspects of forgiveness - to forgive and to be forgiven. Do you seek both equally?  Just imagine yourself in the inner experience of both.  What do they feel like?  If during the Holy Nights you can truly imagine forgiving and being forgiven, the coming year will be blessed.

Don't go into any of your stories or dramas tonight. The specifics of our stories generally keep us from forgiveness, so release any specifics and just focus on feeling forgiveness.  Feel a release, a restoration, a renewal.  Feel wholeness and lightness.

Now think about the five sense that perceive the world - sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.  How does each sense forgive? Can you forgive easily through one sense? Is there one sense that cannot bear to forgive something that offends it?

Here is another Holy Nights imagination that calls for poetry.  Begin writing down a list of  feeling words connected to forgiveness. Choose three words from the list and use them in a poem (or a paragraph)  about the coming year and how forgiveness will live in your soul.  Please share your efforts.

The 10th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity for Intimacy

 

Note: Leave comments and read the previous messages at
http://www.innerchristmas2010.blogspot.com

"My soul and the world are but one." Rudolf Steiner

Intimacy in the soul is so spiritually and practically essential, but what does that mean?

I've mentioned the three worlds of the soul - the earthly world, the spiritual world, and the individual's inner world. How do we become one which each of these three worlds?

It's not easy but the work of soul intimacy is powerful. It is about discovering your tenderness.  Tender intimacy is the willingness to sweetly hold the object close so that knowledge is revealed with a beautiful proportion. What is the beautiful proportion between the self as subject and matter, spirit and self as object.

Now you must ask yourself how willing are you to hold close with true interest all things material, all things spiritual and all things personal.

Remember we are working with growing capacity in the mood of self-compassion. So no demand and no perfection. No silly sense that if you are not on the mark you are deficient, that if you harbor any self-judgment you are off the path, that if you have any doubt, you lack the fortitude.

If we are to understand the principle of moral development there is no perfection and no failure, just courageous devotion to growing soul capacities.

Back to intimacy and being one with the world. Of the three worlds, pick the world that is most difficult for you.  Is it the world of materialism? the world of spirit? or the world of knowing yourself? Begin with that world tonight.  Notice something small in this difficult world - my guess is the world that is the most difficult is the world of the personal self - and hold it tenderly with your thoughts, your feelings and your will.

What do you think about this little bit of the difficult world? What do you feel about it?  What do you want to do with it or because of it?  These are tough questions.  Please write down your thoughts, feelings and intentions as writing gives you a sense of distance for new intimate observations.

What is the benefit of growing intimacy? Intimacy cultivates love. Nothing more need be said.

Two more nights of the Holy Nights.  Breathe and attend. Love your soul, intimately.

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 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 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.