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And so this is Christmas 2014

12/19/2014

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And so this is Christmas 2014

Christmas, mid-winter festival, just after Solstice: celebration of things to come; celebration of the coming light; celebration of how the greatest things grow in and from the dark.

Three wise men are led by a star, a star that is visible because of the darkness, to a new-born infant, a mere babe, a sapling, but one who will grow, through his own investigations and explorations into his own authority; who will grow, through his own study and practice, into a Master.

Tested by trials in the desert, tried in times of darkness, he is annealed so that he can complete his Christing and still shine with love when the sky turns black on Good Friday. When even the sky, symbol of space, and possibility, turns black, still there he shines. The ember of his spirit stays aglow. Persecuted, tortured, hung out to die, his love cannot be corrupted or overcome. There is a light that never goes out.

And when we know this for ourselves, once we have been put to the test, once we have passed through the eye of the needle, then we can incarnate the Christ of our Inner Being.

And that light is in the Cross – in the centre – in the crossing point, junction point, intersection, in that place of harmony where the pairs of opposites meet and duality falls away. The cross symbolises (among many other things) that place of integrated awareness, where the light of love: the energy which accepts, forgives, and includes, can flow down, illumine, and re-calibrate all our ‘lower’ energy centres.

And this light, this knowing, can never be put out. To extinguish it would be impossible, because it is the very light of consciousness that enables all our experiences, even those of hate, of anger, of frustration, or resentment. Even the limited understandings that chain us to misery, or give us transient thrills, are only possible because of the endless light of consciousness that underlies them. And so, this light of love can never be defeated. Its embers can never be put out. Even in the darkest night of desperate pain, even if we are anaesthetized, we can still notice the darkness, still feel, at least to some degree, the pain; and so we are conscious; we are, at least to some degree, awake. The embers are still aglow. Sooner or later, they will take again, and the fire will catch, and the light will start to show us a bigger picture.

And when we are in that place of deepest struggle and sorrow, of the most desperate isolation, we are not alone, but in the company of so many of the truly great, who have held to the light of their unique gifts and understanding even through the greatest trials and persecutions. And every time we choose to act in truly wholehearted courage, we are stoking the embers of the collective human Spirit. The diamond is formed under pressure and in darkness. This time of challenge is an opportunity of great magnitude.

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Necessary heartbreak

12/18/2014

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The heartache and the thousand necessary shocks that flesh is heir to

Chances are, most of us would not say that we want our hearts to be broken. Chances are that most of us would say we would like to feel happy in our hearts.

If we ‘would like to feel’ happy, it reveals we are not quite there. And what is holding us back? Yoga teaches us to look inside and examine the structure of attachments and aversions that are limiting our wellbeing. Yoga practice can begin when we acknowledge that we’re not quite where we’d like to be; our centre of wellbeing is not as thoroughly established and robust as we feel it could be. We own up to the fact that things happen that do disturb us and shake us out of the spacious ease and flow of the centre. This acknowledgement creates the space for new understandings. However, these new understandings will often necessitate a dismantling of the structure we have previously lived by. Sometimes the structure has been built in such a way that the most efficient way for it to be expanded into one more conducive to sustained balance and wellbeing is to demolish it.

And so, heart break is necessary.

And, if we are striving to become established in yoga, in a place of steady fullness, robust wellbeing, then really we are asking for heartbreak.

Following a kirtan the other day, one of the participants reported how it was ‘exquisitely painful’, that she felt her heart ‘breaking open’, and it was ‘wonderful’. Sometimes in practice, like the warm light of morning ‘breaking’ over the horizon at dawn, the break can quite easily feel exquisite. We allow ourselves to open and are swiftly rewarded with a surge of wellness. Sometimes though, the breaking is more difficult.

Heartbreak is painful, but it is the way of growth.

Think of the rose… this beautiful symbol of romantic love.

What does it take for the rose to bloom and be able to adorn the land with its colour, anoint the air with its scent, and spark the imagination with its presence? It takes pain. Of course, it takes many factors, but it also takes pain. If the rose is to grow robust and strong so that it can share its gifts all summer long, it has to grow a thick, hard, thorny stem. The transformation from the tender young ‘sapling stem’, to a tougher-skinned, robustly armoured, thorn-protected conduit of beauty takes hard, painful, honest work. The rose that grows to maturity does so through fierce, fearless honesty. It faces the reality that the soft, familiar confines of its body up to now, beautiful and perfect though they’ve been thus far, are not really going to cut it when it comes to issuing forth a bud, never mind blooming open. So the rose has to allow its infant self to die and make way for its fuller incarnation to emerge. It has to allow itself to break through. It has to allow its skin to be shed. And so do we. To let be and let go the tender infant skin, to shed the adolescent idealist skin, to slough the burnished skin of the somewhat seasoned but still callow lover, this takes honesty and courage. If we really want to honour the fire of love, then we must learn to be its watertight channel. Love is the light of the eternal flame at the core of our being. For most humans, there come points when it takes pain to break out of the now comfortable skin and grow into the scar tissue hewn container that is tough and fluent enough to hold and carry us as we live true to that flame.

Think of the archetype of Jesus: Prince of Peace, God of Love and Understanding. There he is, dying on the Cross. The Cross is at Golgotha - the skull. In that place, of meeting in the centre of the skull, where the mechanisms of individualised awareness join in oneness, the individual conscious being can cross from the realm of dualistic division and separateness to integrated cohesion and belonging. There, he dies, to the limited identity that has imprisoned him to confines less than his Truth. Established in love, having understood it, i.e. standing in and inhabiting the energy of love, even though so much of him would turn away from it, he is able to enter the meeting space of the Cross: the crossing point, the place of the junction, of integration, and die to limitation and be born anew into the Christ consciousness that he always was. In Jesus’ case, the crucifixion is the culminative ‘Christing’. With the forgiveness and dying away that he allows so completely here, he allows himself to be so thoroughly crucified that no dregs of limitation keep him from the fullness of eternity, and he can walk again, on the Earth, but still in Eternity. Through his fierce and courageous honesty, the scope of his true love has been set free so it can forgive him his previous clinging to limiting patterns bound to the wheel of duality and allow him to actually walk and live in the centre, in the space of the Cross, where the energy of Love can flow and carry him into the full bloom of his human-body-held, skull-borne Divine consciousness.

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Dark Awakening

12/18/2014

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Dark awakening

The darkest time of night is before dawn.

When we are waking up.

When we are waking up, it may well feel like we are getting lost more deeply in the dark, in greater uncertainty and confusion, in a seemingly impossible or overwhelming situation. But actually, when the difficulties we face thicken and coagulate, they take a more solid, graspable form. This will then allow all the layers of our awareness, including the more surface and rational layers of our mind, to actually comprehend what has happened when we do make a shift. The thickening of the problem and our experiencing its subsequent dissolution allows the change to actually be realised.

Here too, it can be helpful to consider how the dawn comes. It is not like a light switch. Gently, gradually, the light begins to warm and soften the tone of the horizon, almost as if embers of a fire beyond it are starting to breathe and flare more fully again. Gradually then, the day breaks. How beautiful this phrase is! The day ‘breaks’ open, but how is this break? Soft and smooth, the light of the day grows out of the harmonious meeting of the dark and the dawning light, flowing into fuller expression from that magical junction point.

And so it is with us. As we learn, steadily, more and more what it actually means to live in the junction point, the dissolution of limiting habits starts to unfold more smoothly and efficiently. This dissolution of our congealed, previously limiting patterns itself becomes a habit. The thickening darkness of what might previously have been felt as an overwhelming ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ crisis, is now recognised, with liberating and energising gratitude, as the herald of a brighter dawn and a renewed way onwards, closer to the Sandhya (junction point) of eternal meeting.

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