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 9th Holy Night

The Growing Capacity to

Stand Tall and Stand Still

 

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

If in our souls, we stand tall and still what can we observe? Being tall we observe our surroundings. Being still we observe all movement. And we observe the experience of standing. We need to grow taller and more still and we need to stand more often and for longer periods of inner time - timeless time.

There is no word "stiller." Still implies an absolute.  When I still my soul, I need to still my thoughts, my feelings, my will.  Stillness is the absence of movement or the containment of all movement.  What movement do you so identify with that you can neither release it nor contain it? What does that movement protect you from?  If you were still, what would you feel, think, or will?  Is there a part of your being that would speak to you in a voice you could only hear if you stilled all your other voices.  Do you imagine the stillness, the growing stillness, being painful or peaceful? If the stillness grows will it move you through the pain of your emotions to the peace of your inner divinity?

Tall always allows for growth in our language because we witness the growing tallness of our children and the growing tallness of trees.  Imagine the sunflower.  Imagine Jack's beanstalk.

Now give thought to the verb, to stand.  Will the real you please stand up?  When do you take a stand? a practical stand, a spiritual stand, a moral stand? How does your soul stand out? or for? or behind?

Imagine standing on the strong shoulders of a giant. What could you see?

What if the shoulders belong to the giant whose name is "I."

From those shoulders, what surroundings can you observe? All the magnificent complexities and simplicities of your three worlds - the earthly world of time and space, the spiritual world of the absolute and the ephemeral and the world of self with its complex relationships.

 

Imagine...and if no answers to these questions appear, ask again and make up an answer. Have fun.

Tonight stand in your soul? What are you standing on?

Tonight experience growing stillness. What begins to vibrate your still self?

Tonight experience growing taller.  What new vistas appear in each of your worlds?

Is this a time for wondering, focusing, naming poetically? Is it difficult?  Feel the forces at your back and the ground reaching your feet.  Align with your unknown truth.  Embrace your feelings of ambivalence and note your emerging desires. 

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.