Easily Amazed

[thomas]

From an article in today's New York Times, an inspiring quote from Neil Young.

I want every song to be coming from me, not coming from who I was or who I’m
trying to be or who people think I am or who they want me to be. All those things
are out. It’s just got to be: Is this going to flow like water through me? Can I swim
in this sound?

How do we find our authentic voice and create the conditions to allow our gifts to
flow like water through us? That is my inquiry these days.


Photo by Kevin Scanlon for The New York Times

[kang]

Hi All.... hope this finds you well. It sure has been a while!!

I am glad you guys have decided to come out and play for a bit



How do we find our authentic voice and create the conditions to allow our gifts to
flow like water through us? That is my inquiry these days.( thomas )

Cool question Thomas.... and i love neil young.....

There are so many gifts
Still unopened from your birthday,
There are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to you by God.
The Beloved does not mind repeating,
“Everything I have is yours.”
There are so many gifts, my dear,
Still unopened from your birthday.
HAFIZ

Here are some of my thoughts on the gifts we are born with…… and finding voice.........

1st- our freedom and our power to choose
2nd- universal principles
3rd- our 4 intelligences

1. The essence of being human is being able to consciously direct our lives.

We are self-determined through our choices.

Here is how Steven Covey describes it:

Between stimulus and response is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.
In those choices lie our growth and happiness.

S ( shit happens )--------- R ( our chosen response )

2. Principles are your bed rock foundations. One must choose
to consciously pick the principles you live by. The task here
Is to determine “true north”, your compass…. To be used as
You make your choices under number 1 above. You align your
Choices with your principles.
What are some of your bed-rock principles that you live by???

3.4 Intelligences-

•Mind- Mental
•Body- Physical
•Heart-Social/Emotional
•Spiritual- Spirit

The highest manifestations of these 4 gifts are:
•Mental- Vision… Creating what is possible. Applied Imagination

All things are created twice. First and mental creation then a physical one. What do you want to create????

•Physical- Discipline- Doing what needs to be done to create the vision.
What are you willing to do to achieve your vision? How badly do you want it???

•Emotional- Passion- The fire…the desire… that sustains the discipline to achieve the vision. What creates your fire??? What makes you feel most
alive???

•Spiritual- Conscience- The inward moral strength to sense what is
Right and what is wrong… and the drive toward meaning and contribution. Ends and means are inseparable.
What inspires you??? What makes you cry????

Manifesting these gifts represents the highest means to express our voice.

It is at the intersection of these 4 gifts that are voice comes alive.


Be well.... mike

[christy]

Mike -- how good to feel your presence again! Thanks for the thoughtful guidelines for "allowing our gifts to flow like water through us" .... I will sit with them some more ... and that is one of my favorite Hafiz poems ...

Thomas, the sense of swimming and flowing reminds me of David Lynch's newish book "Catching the Big Fish" -- ideas are like fish, and there are little ones, and deep down there are big, beautiful ones, and you've got to sink into the silence to catch those ones...

let's go fishing

love, christy

[ashley]

Thanks Mike for this thoughtful breakdown and thought-provoking questions.

I wonder about this one... From any of you reading...

What are the principles you live by?


without much thought, here's what comes to me:

Respect for life and living essences
Experiencing what is happening now is important
Love is essential, Love is a driving force
There's always room to grow
There's always more to 'see' (experience, notice, etc) -- There is more happening than I am aware of
I'm a part of a whole
There is a greater good

that's a start... what about you?

[kang]

Hi All........

hey...great video of Thomas..... it was really special to see what you
do Thomas.

Here you go ash:

Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
and with the young, and with the mothers or families,
re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
and dismiss whatever insults your own soul;
and your very flesh shall be a great poem....


~ Walt Whitman ~

Be well...... mike

[kang]

Hi All.... Happy New Year.....

yikes 2008- Dad was right, the older you get the faster it goes

But lately this old dog
Has been chasing his tail
Round and round and round
And the circles in my mind
They have been winding slowly down
Everybody's breezing up
But I'm seizing up
I'm freezing up
And I'm fading away ( old james taylor )

Playing around with the “feel” of integral ( wholeness and human development)…….. and thought I would use some of the work of Bill Plotkin from his books, Soulcraft and my new favorite Nature and the Human Soul.

Plotkin defines soul as….. a things ultimate place in the world.

Defining terms: Spirit- moves upward. It is an Ascent. At birth we tumble out of a great night womb into the daylight and into our frail human lives. It is a great mystery.

Birth is in the East of the Medicine Wheel, the house of the rising sun. What a mystery birth is !! Where were we and what were we- during the vast amount of time before we were born?

Watching a new born baby, we are watching a human being who’s center is still all sprit.
A baby and her mother, for a short period of time are both connected to the spirit. The bond is quite lovely to notice and the task of the adults is to create a safe nest for the new born. The people of Bali… believe that infants and the elderly to be of “God” more than human.

Soul- moves downward. It is a Descent. It doesn’t really appear until late adolescence ( if development goes well). In our culture, most people do not experience this stage until a crisis is reached and this does not occur until mid-life.

It happens to people in our culture at around 40 years of age. It is a time of “immense loneliness” because you must surrender many of the old beliefs you have held about how the world works.

You are being asked to radically simplify your life. One needs to recognize that they are not just depressed…. They are in the stage of life known as the Cocoon.

In our cocoon the work that we need to do is to begin to heal ourselves…. Our deepest wounds from childhood and the ones we have collected so far in life need to be healed.

In effect, it is a time of solitude to heal and be re-born…. Most people in our culture hide and run from this stage of life. Many men trade in their wives for younger girls get sports cars and pretend they are not in a descent…. Women too can do crazy things to avoid the descent.

It is however…….. unavoidable.

WHAT IS YOUR EXPERIENCE IN THIS PLACE????

•Life invites us to grow in many ways — physically, emotionally, interpersonally, and spiritually.

Spiritually, we can grow in two directions:

toward spirit, on the one hand, and toward soul, on the other.

•People who live excessively upper world lives take a transcendental view of everything. They tend to see light, love, unity, and peace everywhere. They are attracted to the Course in Miracles or aspire to “enlightenment” via an ungrounded approach to Buddhism.

They avoid getting dragged down into the particulars of life or actively addressing the social, political, or environmental deterioration of the world. They want to exist above it all and are encouraged to do so by many approaches to spirituality.

But eventually they feel the downward pull of dark events in the world, in their families, or within their own psyches.
They resist, perhaps submitting only after a great struggle.


•People who live excessively underworld lives see the world darkly. They tend to see hidden meaning, mystery, and the undoing of things everywhere. They gravitate toward the occult and the paradoxical.

They prefer the night or the shadows and may find themselves addicted to the gothic and the arcane.
They want to penetrate to the center of everything and to understand it all.
But eventually they feel the upward pull of the light.
They resist, but sometimes love brightens and lifts them.

A holistic approach to spirituality interweaves the ascent and the descent, rendering balance to the experience of both the upper world and underworld.

WHICH PLACE DO YOU SPEND MOST TIME IN???



•Most cultures, traditions, and philosophies emphasize one pole of spiritual development or the other; few embrace both equally. The shamanistic traditions of indigenous, oral cultures emphasize the discovery and embodiment of our unique soul, as do the twentieth-century depth psychologists Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Marion Woodman, Robert Johnson, James Hollis, and others.

•In contrast, the major world religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam focus upon the realization of — or union with — spirit, as do the theories of some transpersonal psychologists such as Ken Wilber, or the lessons of contemporary spiritual teachers such as Eckhart Tolle.



• 3 Realms of Human Development-----

Different sets of practices are employed to facilitate development in the three realms, although some individual practices support progress in more than one of the three worlds.

1. The middle realm of ego growth includes the healing of emotional wounds, the development of personal bonds, the cultivation of physical grace and emotional expression, and the blossoming of empathy, intimacy, and personality-level authenticity.

A healthy ego is skilled in imagination, feeling, intuition, and sensing, in addition to thinking. Adequate ego growth is essential to personal well-being and cannot be by passed through the other two realms. Meditation practice by itself is not going to facilitate growth in this realm; nor is the journey of descent.

Ego growth takes time and effort, and indeed it is never finished no matter how much we may also be developing trans personally. There is always more to heal, more to express, and deeper levels of intimacy.

The middle world is the realm of ego growth. We need big healthy EGO’s. It is what allows us to make it in the real world, pay the bills, do what has to be done.

The first half of life is about developing the EGO…. To go and stand on your own 2 feet in the world.

What has your EGO been able to manifest in your life so far???

2. The second realm of development, the underworld of soul embodiment, deepens individuality through the discovery of our particular place in the world and the embodiment of our unique form of service.

Soulcraft practices evoke non-ordinary states of consciousness that reveal aspects of ourselves hidden from everyday awareness.

Many of these practices are found in the ancient (and continuing) traditions of nature based peoples. Currently soulcraft is finding its way back into contemporary Western life and through the work of depth-oriented psychologists such as Carl Jung and James Hillman.

Underworld experiences deepen individuality through our discovery of our ultimate place in the world.

•Only the EGO is capable of manifesting in the world the soul’s desire.

But it is in the underworld that one finds your souls desire. Each of us is born with a treasure, an essence, a seed of potential, that is hidden for safe keeping in the center of our being.

Have you found your soul's desire??? How will you use your EGO in the world to manifest it????

•Our personal destiny is to find that treasure and to become it through our actions in the world. This is the task of your soul, to find your gift and to give it back to the world… it is what you were born to do!!!

•“our calling is where our deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meet.” (Buechner)

3. The third realm of development, spirit realization (sometimes referred to as Self-realization), supports the upperworld journey. On the path of ascent, we surrender attachment to individuality and learn to transcend both ego identification and soul identification, ultimately seeing through the illusion of a separate self. We ascend toward an ecstatic merging with the Infinite, the Eternal, the Absolute.

Development in this realm is brought about by meditative and yogic disciplines, by many religious traditions (especially their mystical branches), and by transcendental paths and schools.

Most often, the core practice is meditation, prayer, or contemplation, disciplines that quiet the mind and cultivate peace, stillness, and centeredness in the present.

The descent and ascent are opposite and complementary poles of spiritual development.

They share the intention of becoming more present in our lives—present to soul and to spirit and thereby more present to the world. Since the ascent and descent are paired opposites, one cannot exist without the other.

The world and the psyche seek balance. Upper and lower. Male and female. Light and dark. Spirit and soul. Right and left. Universality and uniqueness. The ascent and the descent.

There’s no conflict between spirit-centered being and soulful doing, between transcendence and inscendence.

Each supports and enhances the other.

Like Rilke, we discover we can have both:

You see, I want a lot
Maybe I want it all;
The darkness of each endless fall,
The shimmering light of each ascent.



Be well…….. mike

[ashley]

thanks Mike.

I don't have a response but I find all of this informative and appreciate the bringing these concepts into my awareness... and letting them cook me (as Christy would say).

warmly,
Ashley