Community Views

Spirit of the Wild: Lorian and WILD Team Up for International Environmental Action

In the physical world, we are separated by distance. What happens to someone on the far side of the earth may seem to have little consequence or effect upon me. We believe our thoughts and feelings are private, locked within our skulls and our skins. But in the subtle energy world, we are all connected in profound and interdependent ways. It’s as if we were all standing on a great trampoline. When one person bounces, it makes the whole trampoline move and we all bounce to some degree. Subtle energies are not limited by distance. 

Subtle activism is a procedure for taking advantage of this invisible connectedness. It is a way of working with your own subtle energies and spiritual resources to create a clear, clean, positive, vibrant and healthy energy environment that can be a helpful contribution both to people and places in trouble anywhere in the world and to people and places where opportunities exist for something good to arise for the benefit of the world. It can be used as a response to challenging or difficult situations in which people or nature are suffering, or as a way of empowering and boosting the emergence of positive actions and developments that bless the world. 

It is not meant to be, nor can it be, a substitute for physical action where and when such action is possible; rather, it is a complement to what we can do physically, a way of deepening and empowering our physical activism. It recognizes that the world is more than just the matter we can see and touch; it is also a world of thought, feelings, subtle energies, and spirit, a subtle environment that can benefit from our attention and helpfulness as much as can the physical. 

–David Spangler (edited excerpt from Lorian’s Subtle Activism Card Deck manual)

Many people in our society see traditional activism and subtle activism as being mutually exclusive. Some on the more spiritual side might feel that activism is futile without consciousness change and so they choose to focus more on the subtle side of things. Some on the activist side might deride what they feel are futile and self-indulgent “thoughts and prayers,” feeling that the only valid way to change the world is to stop injustice and institute new laws and policies via boots-on-the-ground protest and lobbying.

For the past 13 years, I have been working behind the scenes with Vance Martin, the president of an organization called the WILD Foundation to enhance via subtle activism their on-the-ground, grassroots, national, and global efforts to protect and defend our wild Earth (thus helping our planet stabilize climate change, halt mass extinction, and reducing the likelihood of new pandemics) . We feel it’s now time to share this work with you.

One of the basic tenets of Incarnational Spirituality is that our living planet Gaia is a wholeness comprised of both human and non-human life, and both subtle and physical life, and together we are part of a whole planetary community. Vance and I have repeatedly witnessed how effective this physical-subtle partnership approach to activism can be.

After years of intense but discreet field testing, we’re ready to share some of our successes:

The first project we worked on together was the 2009 WILD Congress in Mexico. It was a challenge with swine flu running rampant, the global economic downturn hitting hard, and the drug lords leaving bodies everywhere. Signups for the congress were way below what was needed to make the event a success. 

After consulting with David Spangler, we decided to work with beings that David whimsically calls “underbuddies.” These are an amazing, very primitive, etheric species of being. They seem to exist in a kind of threshold space between the manifest and unmanifest. What they do is they anchor qualities and energy into a space. So if you've been depressed for a month, they're going to anchor that into your walls, into your furniture and everything. If you meditate every day, they anchor that energy. They don’t have independent agency, they just anchor what's there, for better or for worse, but you can work with them and consciously have them anchor a particular energy into a space. They exist both in an individuated sense within a specific space and there's also an overlighting underbuddy, like a drum skin all across the world, so that you can work with locations at a distance.

Vance would bring me pictures of the Expo Center, a kind of cold metal building in Merida, Mexico where the Congress was going to be held, and we started working with the underbuddies to anchor in love and joy into the space. The signups gradually began to increase and by the time the congress started we ended up with around 1600 people from 65 countries around the world.

President Calderon of Mexico was scheduled to speak on the first night. At the time because of the drug lords, he was the most targeted leader in the world, so he brought 3000 troops, as well as tanks and snipers. Plus there were multiple checkpoints with metal detectors and men with machine guns. There were literally over 1000 people lined up around the building, delayed for over an hour because of all the checkpoints. It would be reasonable to assume that people would be irritated at the long wait to get in, but when Vance went to check on everything, arriving a half hour late himself because of the roadblocks, he was surprised to find an atmosphere of joy and celebration all along the long line of people. Jane Goodall, who also spoke on the first day and had been scheduled to stay for only two days, liked the energy so much she changed her schedule and stayed for the whole week. She said, “The energy here is fabulous. I think I must stay.” This meant a lot coming from a woman who travels more than 300 days a year and is busier than most presidents.

A more recent example:

WILD has been been working for many years now to get acceptance by the U.N. and various government institutions for a policy that we call “Nature Needs Half,” which boils down to the scientifically proven fact that we have to restore nature in a large portion of the planet in order to save life on earth. The institutional response to this proposal up until recently has been that its neither pragmatic nor politically possible. 

Over 11 years, Vance and the team at WILD gathered a large, diverse coalition of mostly NGOs and finally got the opportunity to propose the “Nature Needs Half” policy (known in the jargon as a “motion”) for debate and vote at the next big meeting of a major international conservation organization. This was a big deal because most of the motions from this organization get taken up in the UN conventions or in government policy. It’s the starting place of a lot of international conservation and environmental policy.

Because this is a very large bureaucratic organization that operates in three official languages in over 130 countries, Vance realized that we needed to connect with the overlighting deva of this institution to hopefully be able to come to a sense of consensus with its diverse membership.

He put out a sort of “all points bulletin” to ask the deva of this organization if it would work with us. Its response was startlingly quick, but very neutral–neither friendly nor aggressive. It evidently had never been contacted by humans before, so it was like “What do you want?” 

We entered into dialogue with it and over the course of four to six weeks of regular contact, the energy lightened up considerably and started to become even friendly. Vance was able to introduce it to other members of the institution and other organizations. 

When the time for the gathering came, there were 5000 masked people in person, plus a lot more online. There was a lot of confusion and several negotiating sessions over how to deal with this unusual situation.

When it finally got to the floor, the motion was approved with virtually a bigger majority than any of the others. We were surprised because usually when governments don’t like something, they abstain from voting so as not to be seen as naysayers, but there were only a few abstentions and 87.5% of the governments voted "Yes."

This drove home the fact that inner work and the focus on connection, relationship, love, and curiosity can bring very pragmatic outcomes.

There are a variety of other examples of WILD’s successful combination of subtle and boots-on-the-ground activism. They include areas considered by the UN to be some of the most dangerous places in the world. Yet WILD has counter-poaching units actively patrolling in those locations.

I spend about one to two hours a day every morning doing subtle activism to support various projects, including WILD’s. We have beta tested at large world gatherings and some of the most dangerous areas on the planet and it works. It works for both improving bad situations and for supporting positive situations, and it’s something you can do at any level, from your own home to your neighborhood to anywhere in the world. It takes practice and persistence, but all the tools you need are here within Incarnational Spirituality, thanks to the work of David Spangler.

Here is an episode of the Lorian Podcast that I participated in along with Vance Martin and David Spangler, where we talk about our subtle activism work with WILD.

If you would like to get involved with subtle activism Lorian has several resources to get you started:

The Subtle Activism Card Deck

–My books, The Wonder-Full World of The Home and The Wonder-Full World of The Home: Second Story

–Classes on subtle activism and classes based on my book (see our Class Schedule page for our current offerings)

The Subtle Activism self-directed study course (scroll down the page to find it)

[The book and card deck links above are affiliate links through Amazon.com. Lorian may receive a small commission for your purchase at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support!]

Giving Thanks

Here in Michigan, it is the season of harvest, the bounty of the summer’s growth overflowing the markets with vegetables and fruits. It is a time of thanksgiving when we celebrate earth’s joyful abundance. It is also an opportunity to turn, recognize and gather in the blessings of our lives, the blessings of family, of friends and community that hold us steady in the world. We look back on the past year and give thanks for all we have experienced and shared, sorting seed from chaff, drawing in the learning as seeds from which will grow the next steps in our lives.

There is another element of the northern autumn season that I notice but this year I see it in a new way. I am struck by the fiery blaze of color that washes the landscape. Here is an energy of vitality that does not just focus on the past but inspires a link to the future and turns me to meet what is yet-to-come with a sense of hope, fiery hope. I realize that giving thanks is also about welcoming the future.

Planning for our Thanksgiving meal, I am appreciative of the rich abundance of harvest my family will share together. Looking through recipes to prepare, I imagine the shapes and colors and smells that will fill my kitchen with the life of earth’s recent summer growth. I feel the rooted vitality of soil and water, sun and air and all that weaves together to create the richness of life that nature so freely shares. I am inspired by the qualities of generosity, diversity, abundance, joy, growth. 

I am grateful for the earth and its bounty of resources and I give thanks for the nourishment that comes from its generous gifting.

Thanksgiving is also a time I am called to give thanks for my community. “Ding, dong,” the doorbell rings, and I answer with anticipation, “Come in, Welcome! So good to see you! My how your little ones have grown! How are you?” Coming together to touch in, share a meal, and hear stories of the last year from those who have been away, I feel the warmth and experiences of my life and the people and places of my history weave together in the fabric of this present moment. I am strengthened and upheld in the qualities of resilience, commitment, perseverance, faithfulness and hospitality.

As I reconnect and remember my roots with family, friends and community, I honor the many connections that strengthen the fabric of my life.

These two aspects of the Thanksgiving season help me to frame what is present and what has grown in my life. I am nurtured, strengthened and deepened in qualities such as gratitude, honor, thoughtfulness, generosity, love. This is the ground, the wellspring energy of harvest and Thanksgiving and it is characterized for me in the traditional symbol of the cornucopia, baskets overflowing with fruits and produce, the generous gifts of the earth and the wealth of human caring and creativity. 

But the Fall is also a turning point in the year. We are carried into a shift of focus as nature draws its energy into root and seed, contracting from the expansive abundance of harvest into the hidden potency of winter’s possibility. Standing at this fulcrum of harvest time I realize there is another element to the fullness of this season. Giving thanks faces us toward the future as well as to the past. 

In this moment of seasonal pause after the harvest, quiet descends, darkness lends mystery and there is time to rest from the busyness of doing. How does my thanks find its voice in this more contracted time? 

Here I am called to a seed of light within myself, not out in the earth or my community. I am drawn to be one who will call out light and life within others and the world. I notice my sense of giving thanks takes the shape of hope and invitation. The fiery colors that are left in the leaves when the tree’s energy returns to its roots are a symbol for this essential source of hope in me. Present to myself, I find the humility and courage to stand in hope’s colors too.

In this standing, the backdrop of harvest bounty and welcoming community becomes a resource I can call upon. It offers a memory of connectedness with the earth and with others that is a source of balance and orientation in the midst of a time as yet unfixed and unknowing. The qualities of will, intention, courage, and service come into focus. I feel invited to be a source of hope for the future. 

A third time, I stop and share in thanksgiving, this time for the unknown future that calls to bring new possibility to life, potentials inherent within the earth, within my community and within me.  

In this season of giving thanks, I celebrate the earth, my community and the light of Self with gratitude. Recreating the fabric of this connection in celebration and thanksgiving, I seek to open the door to the past, present and future with grace, with creativity and with joy. What is known and honored brings me the strength and resilience to say “Yes” to what is unknown and so engage the emerging new with willingness and creativity. 

With Blessings and Thanksgiving!

Standing and Walking in Our Sovereignty Wherever We Are

Ed, my husband, and I met David and Julie Spangler shortly after 9/11. Though we live on opposite sides of the country, David and Julie in Washington, and I in Massachusetts, the sense of being right with them in thought and heart deepened over the years as I corresponded with David and got involved in online Lorian classes. Ed and I subscribed to Views from the Borderland from its start and helped to organize an Incarnational Spirituality study group in our area.

To go back a step, I was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church but was certain God was too vast to be confined to a church or any religion for that matter. I was also certain one could talk with rocks, plants and rivers and if one was still enough could hear the stars singing. When I was 22—the year I met Ed—the work of Rudolf Steiner also came my way. I was overjoyed to read about many other dimensions reaching beyond religious experience as I had heard it defined, beyond the reach of conventional historical thinking as it was then expressed, and out beyond the beauty, vigor and resonance of the natural world.  

While Steiner took me, and Ed also, into wonder and mystery without end—and I still read Steiner with amazement and gladness—our introduction to Incarnational Spirituality brought three things home to us:

1. The first was how important the horizontal dimension of spirituality is. Prior to Incarnational Spirituality Ed’s and my focus was far more on the vertical, primarily on the divine as being above and in many instances, beyond us. I realized the overall standpoint I had lived in, rather unconsciously for most of my life was that I, as a human being, was inferior to the divine. Yes, the divine was in the world but still it was, basically, above me. And a worthy goal in life was to attain, by way of study, exercises and meditations, to greater awareness of this fact. Some teachers said it could take many life-times to enter into a closer relationship with the spiritual dimensions. Incarnational Spirituality, however, helped to confirm my own sense that these dimensions are right here, all around, not up in the clouds or in some distant time.

2. Though Steiner fleshed out my awareness of the spiritual worlds—and this continues to be an ongoing process—Incarnational Spirituality has taken this awareness a step further. It actually took a while for me to recognize a step was being taken and, though it may sound like a small step, it was a big one. It consisted of this: not only were my interactions with the spiritual worlds real and important, they are no big deal. Such interactions included my understanding from an early age that death does not mean the end of life; being aware of the so-called dead is no big deal. Anyone can sense them, may in fact be sensing dear departed souls, strangers also, without being fully conscious of it. Such Spiritual experiences are available to all of us regardless of age, background, religious upbringing, education, race or gender. In the physical world we may feel or find ourselves outwardly limited by such factors but in the subtle realms we are all souls, free spirits. 

3. This, in turn, brought me very naturally into an appreciation of two words that are central to Incarnational Spirituality: Self-Light and Sovereignty. I say “very naturally” because I often saw the light in people’s eyes but hadn’t given thought to this light as also being within myself. And suddenly I knew I could see it because it is also in me. Even more importantly, it was not only visible in the eyes of others, it is within the whole human being. “Sovereignty” became the word expressing this radiance, on many levels: physical, mental, emotional, psychic. It is also the word that, for me, best defines the connection of our innermost, our soul, to our physical body.

These three learnings from Incarnational Spirituality--the importance of the horizontal dimension of spirituality, the no-big-dealness of spirituality, and recognizing and saluting the self -light and sovereignty within oneself and others–were of immense help to Ed and myself. They encouraged us to know ourselves as sources of light and active participants in both the obviously tangible visible world and less obviously visible subtle worlds. And they found practical expression when Ed and I had to face the final challenge of our lives together.

In 2008, on his 64th birthday, Ed was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. The challenges that followed as the disease progressed were at first few and far between, then there were more of them, then they became more complicated, then they began to accelerate at a frightening pace. Ed died of complications of Late Stage Parkinson’s and COVID April 19, 2020. Throughout our lives—we were for married 52 years—and particularly during our journey with Parkinson’s, Ed and I observed a daily practice that included giving thanks for the gift of being incarnated and for the presence of the ordinary-extraordinary spiritual worlds we are a part of. We knew our actions in and through life, together as partners and separately in our own work were always clearer, and more fluid and joyous when we acknowledged and honored the interweaving of both even if we couldn’t see or understand what was going on.

The need to acknowledge this interweaving became more acute as the Parkinson’s intensified and the outcome, I must add, was an intensified awareness of several things. 

First, the closeness of help in the horizontal dimensions—for example, the exact “right” people appearing at the exact “right” moments to assist us, as if directed our way by an invisible choreographer. Second—and this awareness was painful rather than joyous—we both knew Ed was on his way out about eight months before he passed over. We knew this from within as Ed lost his ability to write, type, cut his food, drive, move without freezing up, dress, remember names and dates, think clearly, and more.  Yes, his body was failing and his brain was sinking into dementia, but his soul was still present. And those who loved and awaited him on the other side—his mother especially—were also, I realized dimly, then more vividly later, very present for him.

It’s my impression we may think we think in our brains, and Parkinson’s had clearly scrambled up plenty of things in Ed’s brain, but our true thinking to which our soul and consciousness are connected arises elsewhere in us, in our heart area, the center of our sovereignty. And through love we can see when the thoughts that arise, or which we invite or allow into our hearts, are light or dark, and act accordingly.

Fortunately, Ed and I had always talked together not only brain to brain but heart to heart and when Ed’s physical brain began to go off the rails I listened closely for and spoke to his heart.  In this way I sensed when he passed through times of regret in regards to the incarnation he was ending, and grief that he was coming to its end. (I went through them too.) Moreover, I could sense where he was even when I was not near him physically, in the very same way it is possible to sense the soul moods and trails of the so-called dead on the other side. 

This last point—that we can know how those we love are even when we are not with them in body—made it possible for me to be with Ed after he was admitted to the hospital, where our daughters and I couldn’t go because of the COVID lock down. So it happened that during Ed’s last week when I got the inner impression he was in need of inner help I was able to offer that by standing in my sovereignty and addressing Ed in his sovereignty. I will close this account with a description of that experience, taken from my book, Unraveling>Reweaving. Passing Through and Beyond Parkinson’s. I hope my  observations here and in the book might be of help to others dealing with similar challenges. How we are with those who are dying and have died seems more important now than ever. It’s my impression many of the so-called dead want to continue to connect and to work with us now during these crucial times.

Before sharing the account from my book I wish to express heart-felt thanks to David Spangler and Incarnational Spirituality for showing Ed and me the more of who we are and can be, and how deeply the physical and the spiritual can be interwoven in us when, and as, we continue to incarnate. That interweaving –what it is like and what it can be--IS the big deal!

*********

It came to me early one morning before the COVID spiraled downwards that Ed needed some inner assistance. There was this feeling of inner “stuck-ness” that reminded me of  the physical “stuck-ness” Ed had displayed in March when he first went to the hospital ER and I knew I’d reached the end of being able to care for him physically…

I used a meditation Ed and I had done. The core of this meditation is called The Standing Exercise.

To describe roughly what I did: I sat in the chair I always used during the morning time imagining Ed, in his chair to my right. After being quiet for a few minutes I stood, eyes closed, inwardly seeing Ed also rising to stand beside me. 

We were facing south. I spoke aloud, offering thanks first for our physical bodies and the fact that we could stand upright. Then thanks for the fact that Ed and I had met and shared so many years together. Followed by thanks for our families, our parents and brothers, our children, their children, close friends, colleagues, and others, all also standing. 

Then Ed and I turned, facing west, eyes still closed. Still speaking aloud, I offered thanks for the Earth, its beauty and its bounty, the seasons, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, the winds, waters, and more. 

Next we faced north and I gave thanks for the times into which we had incarnated and historical highlights and challenges that came to mind. These particular thanks –ending with thanks for COVID and PD—were harder for me to express. I ended that list with a quote I’d found in one of Brian Doyle’s books: 

We are part of a Mystery we do not understand and we are grateful. 

Then we turned and faced east. I got the strong inner impression of a path opening up before us. We’d hiked together for years, up and down many mountains in different parts of the United States and abroad, but I knew this path was just for Ed. It was truly time for us to part. First I expressed thanks for the sun, the moon, the stars and the many celestial beings around and out there overseeing this path. Then, without looking in Ed’s direction, keeping my eyes on this path, I thanked Ed again, said I looked forward to meeting with him again, and wished him Godspeed on his journey.

He moved forwards. I saw his back, then I couldn’t see him anymore. 

(p.67-68)

Subtle Incarnation

One of the more provocative and interesting statements to come out of the inner incarnational school of spirituality as described by David Spangler is, "The problem with humanity is not that you are too incarnated but that you are not incarnated enough.

When I first heard this statement, part of me thought, Oh god, as if I didn't already have enough problems. Now I'm being asked to take on even more of the physical world and its burdens. It’s an odd statement in light of the many religious world views that warn about being too identified with the world; there’s a part of ourselves that wants to be free of the restrictions of physicality. In the words of the Christian hymn,

This world is not my home I'm just passing through
my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
the angels beckon me from Heaven's open door
and I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

So, on the one hand, we have many voices advising us to follow a spiritual practice that leads us away from identification with the earth through transcendental meditations, aesthetic practice, self-sacrifice, elimination of ego and the like. On the other hand, we have this the contrary advice to incarnate more deeply into the world.

With this prologue, I would like to tell a story.

A couple of years ago, my wife Freya and I traveled to the Findhorn community in Scotland to present a program and took the opportunity to travel around Scotland and parts of the UK, visiting Stonehenge and other ancient and historical sites like those found in Glastonbury.

If you’re familiar with the Sidhe deck for which I’m the artist, I have an interest in faerie traditions and in connecting with this realm. One of the more fascinating characters in this tradition is Reverend Robert Kirk who lived in Aberfoyle, England from 1644 to 1692. He was a minister, Gaelic scholar and folklorist, best known for The Secret Commonwealth, a treatise on fairy folklore which was first published in 1815. He was said to have inappropriately revealed secrets of the "Good People" and as a consequence was required to leave humanity and live in the "Hollow Hills" with the Sidhe.  He reportedly attended his own funeral, told of his fate, and, according to legend, is not the true resident of his tomb. He’s considered a mediator by some between the worlds of faerie and humanity.

John Matthews has published this story in a delightful illustrated book called The Secret Life of Elves and Faeries: The Private Journal of Robert Kirk and RJ Stewart has also written of him in his book Robert Kirk: Walker Between the Worlds. 

Being familiar with the lore surrounding Robert Kirk, Freya and I visited Aberfoyle. There’s an old cemetery which surrounds the ruins of his small stone church, and we took some time finding the good reverend's marker and investigating the grounds. We then set off hiking to nearby Doon Hill, on which Robert Kirk was said to walk frequently and have his encounters with the Sidhe. Following the well-worn path, we eventually arrived at the top of the hill, on which many sojourners had left their tokens of respect–colored ribbons, handwritten notes, and talismans of all sorts adorned a large oak and many of the smaller trees and bushes in the area.

After spending a half hour or so attuning to the area, we once again set off on the path which led to Fairy Knob, another hill nearby, and eventually back to the village of Aberfoyle. Upon arrival at the Knob, we found this area quite wild and obviously much less frequented. We went off trail for a bit, crashing through the bushes to get to the very top. After a time of enjoying the land, we found our way back to the trail.

Now, obviously, one of the reasons pilgrims visit an area like this is to pay homage to the tradition. In addition, if we're honest with ourselves, we probably also want to have an "otherworld" experience of some type which verifies our interest in the phenomena–something which triggers the numinous in us. Many of the sites we had visited had offered just such rewards, but as for Aberfoyle–nothing!

I found this baffling and a little irritating since this was supposed to be the epicenter of Faerie magic and I, after all, was a practitioner. But one cannot force subtle perception, so after reluctantly accepting the situation, we headed down the hill and back to the road which lead to the village.

As we were walking I began wondering about the connection between the work with the Sidhe and Incarnational Spirituality.

For some reason, I decided to do an exercise David had taught in one of his classes–or at least my simplified variation of what I remembered of the exercise. Walking along the trail I began to imaginally expand my sense of the space I occupied. I pictured a transparent bubble around myself and  felt into that space as if I had sight or hearing or touch receptors within the bubble.

Almost instantly, I found myself in connection with a nature being of some kind walking along beside me. If pressed, I suppose it could be called a faun, but there was not a detailed sense of shape. Certainly the presence was unmistakable–like someone entering a room in which you are working. 

"Where have you been all this time!" I blurted out. This perhaps was not the most polite way to greet this companion, but as I mentioned, I was a bit irritated. Now that we were leaving the area and the party was presumably over, he chose now to show up?

"I have been here all along," he said, "but you have been so focused on your constricted goals and constrained perceptions you have not been aware of me.”

I had a sense that I had been walking with blinders on and looking down at my feet the whole time.

He then surprised me further by launching into a commentary on Incarnational Spirituality. He seemed quite familiar with the ideas. He said that to incarnate fully meant to him to be increasingly aware of the larger subtle ecology in which one operates and the myriad of connections which are natural to being woven into the world. In other words, to be more fully incarnated did not mean to be more narrowly focused on the physical earth and the immediate senses but to be widely open to the energetic environment and the inhabitants within those realms. At the heart of what he was saying was a vision of a way of being in the world that was in touch with the physical world but also the life and subtle forces that animate the world.

About this time, we were approaching the narrow paved path that lead along a stream and back toward a bridge into the village. He made it clear that the paved path was the edge of his territory and he could not (or would not) go past this point. I thanked him for his arrival and insights and offered him my blessing in return.

I suppose a lot more could be said about what it means to be fully incarnated. Certainly, love is at its heart, and blessing is a fundamental practice. But for me, it includes honing my subtle perceptions in whatever way I can–working with the Sidhe, with the life of nature, with techno-elementals, with under-buddies, with the great Devas, with Souls of countries and continents, and with whatever else presents itself. This is all part of the great discovery of a deeper incarnation. I try to imagine and engage the unseen life that dances just at the edge of my everyday perception, ready to engage with me, and to delight with me in the joys of earthly life.

How to Be Here: Lessons in Incarnation

1.  Coin of the Realm

I remember being born.  

How this is possible, I am not sure, but indeed I do have a vivid and visceral memory of my arrival, and perhaps more significantly, a memory of my conscious process as I assumed physical form. At that moment, as I balanced on the threshold of incarnation, I experienced complete freedom of choice–to be or not to be, you might say. And I was conflicted. To put it bluntly, I was not at all sure I wanted this. At least not at first. I felt ambivalent about transitioning from a form of awareness that held me in closeness with source and filled with a sense of unconditional love. 

As I wavered on the edge of entry, two or three distinct presences stood with me, encouraging but not directing me. These felt to be family of a sort–familiar, loving and trusted, but certainly not physical or even identifiable in any anthropomorphic form. They are best described as fields of energy containing consciousness, extensions of something more, with an ability to connect directly and intelligently with me. Our interaction revolved around my 11th hour hesitation to incarnate, and gentle review of how I got to this point, with loving reminders of what my decision-making process had been.   

Ultimately, I did choose to come into my body, as an act of love and a means of participation in this earthly possibility. It was a deliberate and conscious choice, one that I made without total assuredness, but with certain purpose to share and serve.

Having decided to take the leap, I quickly landed in a hospital delivery room. It seems as soon as I made the free choice of physical incarnation, then I was suddenly here, instantaneously, and not wherever my consciousness was before. And then, in short order, a clear sense of bewilderment washed over me, incomprehension, an inability to process, a kind of shock. I suppose there was a sort of physical shock, but that is not what I recall; rather, I remember the profound disorientation of time and space, a sudden feeling of confinement, a sense of being contained in some fashion that was not what I was used to, a kind of narrowing or contraction of reach in some way. I did not doubt my decision; I was simply overwhelmed by it.

My mother was unconscious, having been heavily sedated. The doctor was disinterested in me, thoroughly preoccupied with his clinical routine. I emerged into a room of pale green tile walls and hard surfaces, and it seemed gray in its lighting, not nearly the brilliance I was used to. As I experienced the sudden shift in perspective from wider awareness to the subjective view of this life, I was somewhat surprised that there was no welcoming committee! I remember feeling alone, but even more strongly I remember the feeling-sense of displacement, a kind of surprise that is nearly indescribable. I simply could not understand this new environment. 

And then it happened: my first lesson in how to be here. Within 10 minutes, perhaps sooner, for it is hard to gauge time in this memory, I had my first experience of human engagement—and love. It came in the form of a nurse I was handed off to, who held me and looked into my eyes and lovingly welcomed me with personal connection as she cleaned and swaddled this newborn, surely just one of hundreds of infants she tended to in this way.

I remember this first experience of connection with tender appreciation. It was a reassuring and much valued introduction to the key ingredient in navigating incarnation: loving engagement with others. As she shared her inner radiance and love with me, this nurse showed me where to find the light I was used to and was missing as I first arrived. She gave me my bearings.  

Alas, recalling my pre-birth consciousness has also come with some baggage: I have struggled at times with longing for what I remember—wanting to recapture the feeling-sense of unconditional love and comfort and expansion I experienced in that place of non-physical awareness. And so, from an early age, I have been motivated to figure out how to be here, and how to do it fully, without being distracted from living by the draw of memory. Mine has been an explorer’s journey of finding “home” in being human, and that is very much a practice of emergence and integration, merging memory and presence, here and now, and unfolding of self through incarnation. Sharing my discoveries is itself an example of incarnational spirituality: as we each share our own experience and insight, we open our hearts and engage each other, inviting collaboration in building incarnation for each of us.  

Incarnational Lesson One: Love is coin of the realm, the medium of exchange between souls, the common currency of nonphysical and physical being. It is the bridge that connects us to our full selves and to others, the medium of relationship, and ultimately what enables us to integrate fully as incarnate spiritual beings. It is simple, really, but often we forget how simple it is: heart to heart acknowledgement. I see you. I honor you. I love you. I join you.

2.  What’s This All About and What Am I Doing Here?

My recollection of my non-physical self, my origin, and my choice for birth was my initial, and a greatly formative, life experience. The memory is clear and compelling and has shaped my approach to and understanding of life and incarnation and purpose. But this is not to say I did not have to confront all the same questions we humans ask ourselves across a lifetime as we try to make sense of this embodiment: Who am I? Why am I here? What do I bring? How may I share?  Actually, I suspect the memory made me more preoccupied with these questions and finding the answers.

My own experience and work with others shows me consistently and convincingly that we are spiritual beings of great prospect, and that the answers to these questions lie in believing the truth of our selves—who we each are as unique and creative individuals, recognizing the possibilities of incarnation and seizing those opportunities by taking action, and  by sharing of ourselves.  

The starting point: You’ve got to be you.  

You are the only you; a perfect manifestation of physical form designed to enable you to express your truth and the uniqueness of your spirit, insight, and creativity. A healthy embrace of your self and the feeling-sense of your identity is the foundation for all you can and will do in this lifetime—for yourself and for others.  

When you find and trust the certainty of your self–the one you know is you, that voice you recognize, then anything is possible. This is when you light up, when you feel motivation and excitement and anticipation and enthusiasm and joy. This is when the pieces fall into place.

So, how and where do we access this essential self that is our core generator?  

Through engagement—with self, with others, and with the inner and outer worlds.

Children, especially young children, display their self-light easily and can remind us of our own light. Think of that luminous quality you see in a young child's face–what we might call innocence. It is actually self-light, soul shining forth, still close to source and as yet unencumbered.  

I am reminded of a bit of self discovery and soul emergence my granddaughter displayed at age 5. She is a child of great imagination and equally grand intellect, not altogether comfortable with other people yet, but very fond of her menagerie of stuffed animals and imaginary friends. Her delight in and appreciation of animals is clearly an important part of her essential uniqueness.

She and her family were invited to another child’s birthday party. She was shy about engaging with too many others, but she was thrilled to discover their hosts had two dogs—real live ones! She was captivated by these pets and spent two hours engaging with them, touching, talking, and playing, truly transfixed, oblivious of the surrounding party events. My daughter, quite struck by the peace and comfort and joy that came over this child as she played with the dogs, described it thus: “It was as if I was watching her soul unfurl.” And indeed, she was—a view of emergence captured! What a beautiful way to describe the dynamic and light of self-alignment!

It was clear in watching my granddaughter that multiple incarnational developments were unfolding: her connection with the animals brought her into her self, and as her own light emerged, she radiated in a way that began to touch others; a kind of collective generative process was set into motion. All of this was made possible by the initial action by her parents of social engagement, which presented the child with a new environment and the novel opportunity to meet her live animal friends. Each of these elements were vital in setting the stage for her unfurling, and yet each so commonplace we might overlook and take for granted the very stuff of incarnational development and how it happens: connection, community, mutual support, unexpected discovery and consequent growth and delight.

This is what incarnation is about, how it is done: Being here, being together, creating together.

Just like my granddaughter, we each have our own direct connection to our “original self,” the part of us that is an extension from the creative, generative force or source, the oneness; the part that decided to incarnate and grow in new and as yet unrealized ways through incarnation. By making and taking opportunities to relate with people and environments, we provide our soul with (and support others’) needed conditions for “unfurling.” And this is a glorious thing.

As we each find our authentic self and discover and connect to the feeling sense of love there, we may then look outward and extend and express our unique identities from that place of knowing. This is a blessing for all of us.

Incarnational Lesson Two: I can only be me, and you can only be you and not who anyone else is or others wish us to be. And this is good, for we each bring something essential to the world that only we can bring. You are matchless, one-of-a-kind, and your individuality and unique gifts and insight are your great asset—and ours. Our interconnection supports our own self discovery and growth. Know thyself. You are a blessing. Discover your self. Be true to your self.

3.  Spread Your Self Around

As a person with awareness of nonphysical, nonlinear, and unseen realms which hold great attraction, I have thought much about why to be here, physically incarnate, rather than in the nonphysical dimensions. I have found the answer lies in the creative possibility of life: a chance to make something new as we connect with this realm and with each other. As humans, we are in an exciting position to shape change and form through love. We are each here as a blessing, as an extension of the sacred, of source, embodied to create and bring beauty and growth in the world, each in our own unique ways, supported by the essence of self; to grow ourselves and this world in the spirit of love.

But to exercise our creative options we must take action to share our selves in some way. 

The act of sharing your self is as simple as smiling, and easier and more important than you may realize. I am always impressed that just about everyone is willing to engage if you smile and engage first. We are beings with a desire to connect and to share. It is one of our best and distinguishing traits, essential to setting the stage for creative collaboration. 

There is pure pleasure in engaging with another person in even the most modest contact: it lights up the circuits of the brain and heart, it makes us feel fuller, more connected to something bigger than us, more whole. It instills faith and hope, promotes smiling, and is downright therapeutic. 

I spent part of my childhood in France, where it was (and still is) the custom upon entering a shop to say hello and exchange greetings, no matter who you are, and if you don’t it is considered rude. In Provence, it is typical when passing another person on the street to say “Bonjour” just because you are passing them, not because you know them. Imagine doing that the next time you walk down a street! It is so important we maintain these forms of contact, even as we become ever more focused on our digital devices, more isolated from each other, and are challenged to navigate divisive and sometimes combative social and political currents. Greeting is such a simple gesture—with such great impact: a greeting makes a connection both consciously with the mind and voice, face and body language, but it is more; it is an initial extension of self, and an acknowledgment to another of the sovereignty of his or her self. It is a connection of heart and soul. And think about this—it is much easier to greet with a smile than to greet without smiling (even with a mask on!) From this momentary contact, it comes naturally to then expand simple human connection.

Engagement–with others, with community, with environment–is about sharing the love and light of your soul as expressed through your self. I like to think of it as personal incarnational outreach. It can be as simple as the hello on the street or can rise to level of a calling. Or perhaps saying hello is a calling.  

We live in a complex system, one in which ego has gained a strong foothold at the expense of true (soul) identity and wholeness. There are many among us who have lost their sense of personal worth, who have not been encouraged, indeed who have suffered sure and often intentional depreciation. This mass devaluation of individual value is our collective loss for it robs us of our human capital: the talents and generative potential of those who feel lost, insecure and afraid to stand in their uniqueness and full expression of self. We are in dire need of incarnational outreach services! Your life force, your heart field, your love offers reassurance and support—share it as often as you can. 

If love is the medium of creation, then relationship is what shapes it into form. As a practice, incarnational spirituality invites us to help others emerge. As I appreciate another, I help him remember and self identify and express and respond, and in that course we each take another step into the fullness of our own incarnations and possibility. There is a kind of creative combustion that happens as we kindle the sacred flame within each other through the simple act of engagement.

I cannot think of a better example of how this works than to look to our families and our roles as parents, children and siblings. Families are holistic systems–microcosmic versions of the matrix of larger systems of community, nation, world, and universe, subject to the same developmental dynamics. A look at how we stand and create and engage and integrate within our families really brings home how the incarnational process works. 

It is through our families that we begin to learn the meaning of self and identity. Family is most often our initial community experience and it is here that we first learn to see others and strive to be seen. It offers our first experiences with bonding and affection, safety and security, acceptance and love. Here we begin to learn about connection and participation and boundaries and how to negotiate all of this. And all the while we are still trying to come to understand our bodies and emotions and physical experience. Wow! What a lot going on! Family provides us with some of the most indescribably joyful and poignantly painful possibilities of life. 

Family introduces us to the ups and downs of being human together. It is a veritable incarnational laboratory!

Given this context, good parenting is one of the most important acts of incarnational service we can offer. It can be harmful when family fails to provide the foundation we each need to emerge in healthy full self-identity and participation. Parenting invites us to model to our children how to come from the heart and embrace and respect and accept each other with appreciation and gratitude. At the same time, it provides us with a catalytic environment for yet more of our own growth. As we foster familial connection, teaching collaboration and contribution, we are making a difference–and giving our children the tools to make a difference as they go out into the world.

There are many viable frameworks for what constitutes “family” and we need not limit ourselves to conventional concepts. Family may be built out of many forms of community. I have found family is defined by our relationships rather than our bloodlines. My own family is a lively cross-cultural blend, ever expanding with more novelty. My husband and I came together with three very young children between us from prior partnerships, and then added a fourth of our own. Our oldest three children all lost their other parent in childhood. We put together a family stunned by traumatic loss, and then set about reconstructing our lives.

How do you trust loving again? How do you restore peace and trust to children who have been confronted with the ruthlessness of life so young?  

We put our faith in the generative force of love and learned in real time and outcomes that it is our greatest resource. We bonded together with intention and respect and appreciation and gratitude, for each other and for life, changed by loss, but affirmatively choosing to make joy wherever possible, in each moment. We chose our family, and we chose to create and connect and share. We cross-adopted our children, blended our dissimilar cultures and holidays, invited each other’s families to join us, and engaged in living and loving with exuberance. And in so doing, we showed our children a way forward. 

Each of us have been challenged and tried and shaped not only through our losses, but as well through our common understanding and collective resilience. We held each other in pain indescribably deep and blessed each other with the healing power of love. We encouraged each other—by going on together with optimism and hope, laughter and humor, wonder and awe. Even as we honored the past, with memories and stories and photos, and included our respective extended family networks in our lives, we chose to show our children how to delight in the present, in themselves, in each other, and in the world around us. Delight is contagious, you know, so as they felt it they could not help but share it. 

My intent in raising my children has been to build their trust and sense of security in this world by nurturing their uniqueness, applauding and encouraging them in their dreams and desires and imagination and creative capabilities. My most often repeated instruction to my children has been: "You need to be you.” To truly support each of them in emerging into full self, I had to let go of any preconceived ideas I might have had about who they should be. I abandoned attachment to any particular outcome other than to see them grow in their original selves, and I did this happily for I knew this awakening in self is what would allow them to regain a sense of safety and to stand in strength and confidence, unafraid and empowered, and fully integrate in this life as loving and productive individuals. In order to spread themselves outward into community, they needed to first find safety in their own certainty of self.

Our familial interactions lay foundations for growing our selves and our children. Family—however configured–offers us an occasion to learn cherishment. I cherish my husband. I cherish my children. This teaches them to cherish. And from this understanding we move outward: I cherish my friends and community, I cherish my incarnational opportunity.

The connections we weave are the weft and warp of the fabric of our lives. As we strengthen and build the fibers and knit in new filaments, we strengthen the material of our incarnation. The richer the tapestry and the tighter the weave, the more securely we are held, both in times of pain and times of joy. We can shape our fabric; it is flexible, and resilient, too. It may catch us as a safety net, or unfurl as a parachute, or wrap us in warmth. Its strength and integrity hold us together in times of wear or tear, for every thread we have added to it makes it more durable. 

Together we stitch together our material into great and textured quilts, interweaving contact and relationship into our lives to build our selves, our families, our communities, our nations and our world. This is how we forge alliances and trust. This is the means for sharing our wealth, our generative resources, our individual love and genius. This is world crafting.

Incarnational Lesson Three: Don’t hide your light under a bushel! Share your self with the world. Make waves—by allowing your self-light to spread outward. Bring your unique talents and gifts into motion as we create and initiate and transform together our environment and ourselves. Practice your power of blessing, manifestation, collaboration, and loving engagement with life. Cherish.

4.  Eat Chocolate 

Our greatest sense of peace and well-being as humans lies in the integration of our spiritual access with our physical bodies. We are spiritual beings in earthen bodies, and we balance in equipoise between heaven and earth (so to speak), inner and outer, ethereal and physical. In real and pragmatic terms, this means living and doing and being in our bodies. Not just our minds, and not only through our souls. We sometimes long to escape to disembodied places, whether non-physical spiritual or imaginary realms, for respite from the pain and effort of life. These are nice places to visit, but as long as we are incarnate, it is necessary to counterbalance with grounded presence. Otherwise the body begins to suffer, and emotional, social and physical stresses eventually compound into great discomfort from imbalance.  

I am here. I chose to be here, and I want to experience here in every way I can, to explore physicality completely. While I am here, I am not focused on trying to get to another “not here” place. I am present.

Incarnation is a delectable sensory occasion grounded in physical engagement with the universe. It blesses us with the remarkable opportunity of physical perception, allowing us to experience through the senses rather than through nonphysical consciousness. Physicality gives us much: beauty (inner and outer), intelligence and mind, heart, the capacity for pleasure and for pain, and for compassion as well as a result of our own painful experiences. It allows us to express and share our creativity through all of the arts, including language. Our embodiment gives us the means to be who we are. Soul and body are equal partners in incarnation.

It is our physical senses that offer us the means for discovery, engagement, and then loving what we have discovered. One of the best things about being incarnate in this body is its sensation. And your sensation is yet another expression of you, as only you can experience your feeling-sense.

I have vivid memories of just how sensory experience worked to help me “make sense” of things in the world. When I was a little girl my father's work moved our family to France. Rather unexpectedly, and not prepared, I found myself plucked out of familiar and American surroundings and deposited in a small French village, feeling much as Dorothy must have felt when she found herself in Oz (and not unlike I felt when I arrived in that delivery room ten years earlier.) I was unable to rely upon my cognitive or conscious process to understand what was happening. First, I had to experience the new before I could integrate it. And the delivery mechanism for the new, for experiencing, was through my physical senses.

Having just completed a long transcontinental flight, my parents and all four of us children arrived exhausted at a small apartment hotel, the Hotel Mirabeau, a drab building still not recovered from the damage of World War II. Everything was unfamiliar and impressive for that very reason, beginning with a perilous looking old wrought iron cage elevator and strangers speaking words I did not understand. There were no groceries in the apartment when we arrived, and so my father asked the attendant downstairs to bring something to us for breakfast. Soon after, he arrived with steaming hot chocolate and a bundle of still warm flakey buttery crescent shaped rolls. With mild curiosity, but mostly hunger, I bit into my first croissant, and to this day I remember it as perhaps the most marvelous thing I have ever tasted. Darkly browned, not the light golden color generally seen nowadays, crispy and sharply curved into tight arcs, the ends touching each other in the middle--I made a mess, as my buttery fingers left crusty flakes everywhere. The hot chocolate was unlike any I had ever had.  

Aha! I understood something about my surroundings in that moment. I couldn’t articulate what it was, but a connection had been made. It is these little, and often ephemeral, moments of sensory discovery that engage us with and develop our incarnations. And that is why they are important.

This full immersion sensory navigation started me on my way to understanding the importance of balancing my inner awareness with outer experience. I was plunged into a rich array of new experiences quickly, nearly overwhelming me at times, propelling me into a fast-paced learning and growth period. Within days I found myself in the stern Madame Hashim’s classroom, where only French was spoken, a language to which I had no exposure. I understood not one word, and I distinctly remember my mind’s inability to compute. I vacillated between a kind of dissociated inner process and being present, trying to figure out this new world. I absorbed the environment through both my inner and physical senses, but quickly discovered that my physical perception was most important in this setting. I mediated in this way for about a month, understanding nothing, but as each day passed, I became more aware that I didn’t need to understand with my mind, I could and would understand in other ways. And seemingly suddenly, one day I understood what was being said. It was as if it all clicked into place at once in whole comprehension.

I learned something else: the significance of the ephemeral. These Proustian moments of croissants and chocolate survive to inform self and identity, to inspire and shape expression, and move us each toward creative contribution. We pursue new experiences grounded in past sensory experience, and we learn to cook, or at least to taste, we travel and look and see new shapes and colors and places, works of art and nature and people; we love, we laugh, we cry and we engage in ways that offer new moments and insights and growth and expansion.

Sensory perception connects us to conscious awareness and thought. Our sensory organs serve us as matchless retrieval and input mechanisms, necessary to navigate incarnation. Physical engagement is a necessary condition that keeps the incarnational process moving. The richness of physicality–the voluptuousness and sometimes messiness of life—is a necessary ingredient for discovering self and celebrating others.

Our physical form allows us the visceral experiences of ego and emotion, both positive and negative, and allows us to feel attachment—to people, places, experiences and outcomes—in ways that are both wonderful and difficult. We are enlivened by joy and pleasure and challenged to grow by loss and pain.

We nourish our incarnations by seeking ways to experience through our bodies and its senses, just as we nourish our bodies with rest and food and exercise. If I were not here in this form, how would I know the sweetness of my child’s touch, the sound and happiness of laughter, the warmth of a friend’s embrace? How else could I know the incomparable elation of holding my newborn child, or experience the quality of love she engenders in me, to look upon her and feel the ineffable wonder of creation that produces a new life? How would I have discovered warm croissants, or the multi-sensory delight of really fine dark chocolate? Would I know the uncountable pleasures of making love? Is there any way I could know the warmth of the sun on my skin other than to be in my skin?  

What are the simple things that you love or that give you pleasure? Perhaps the colors and scent of roses, the feel of swimming in salt water, the majesty of nature, playing with your dog, blue skies, running brooks, the smell of coffee, the feeling of dewy grass on bare feet, sunsets, baseball, laughter, holding hands, a song, fresh baked bread, sweet silence…and once you have attended to a list of your own, then remember to come back to these simple and life affirming experiences as often as you can. Linger with them, savor them. In other words, engage with the world around you eagerly and with a sense of conscious and feeling appreciation. This will help you remember your self, feel and feed your body, fill you, and fortify you in times of difficulty.

As you sample the sensory smorgasbord laid out before you, you will find innumerable likings – how and in what is subjective; what matters is that you discover for your self. Your enjoyment shines upon those around you and it is radiance fomented and fueled directly through your own incarnate sensory capacity.

Incarnational Lesson Four: Get physical. Taste! See! Touch! Smell! Hear! Move! Appreciate all around you. Be present to the fleeting moment. Feed your senses, and you will grow your self. Grow yourself and we grow, too. Savor the incarnational opportunity. Live Love. And Love Life.

5.  Staying Connected

Being human is a balancing act. We are unavoidably preoccupied with our physicality, especially as we adjust to it, and exploring the possibilities and limits of physical embodiment. And yet, it is our soul that chose to incarnate, and it is the partnership between soul and body that allows us to generate for ourselves and others as we discover our individuality and expression. As we become absorbed with the practical aspects of living, we must remember to attend to our inner connections, for incarnational development lies in the integration of inner and outer, physical and non-physical as each of these parts come together in the wholeness of who we are and what we bring. 

Soul is a channel of love and purpose that informs and inspires and guides us. It is a conduit we need to keep open and flowing, but we can become disconnected from it—often just from the distraction and busyness of life. Inner awareness is like a muscle that must be used to stay strong and flexible, and the way to exercise it is through some practice of attunement—to self and the sacred and subtle realms.

Inner attunement isn’t as foreign as you might think. It does not require special ability or training or tools or practices, for it is already part of you. We are always connected to the inner realm because we are part of it and it is part of us. What we need is to remember to check in with our awareness, each in our own ways.

Most of us have some idea that prayer or meditation or even lucid dreaming are viable practices for inner attunement, and so they are. But there are many other ways to get there! And it is so much simpler than we have been taught to believe. In my work with individuals, I am always struck with how easily so many doubt their own capacities to access intuitive awareness; yet, I can say that without exception I have never met anyone who couldn’t find his inner voice. It is just a matter of knowing what inner access means and how to find a doorway.

We knew where the doorway was when we first arrived in these bodies, and we traveled back and forth with ease, traversing with lingering pre-birth awareness and imagination. As children, our imaginations are boundless, flexible and fluid, and we are able to think magically. One of my favorite approaches to the subtle inner realms is through imagination. Returning to that kind of expansive play is a great practice for attunement. As humans we are adept imagineers, able to suspend reality naturally, and without much effort. Think of how you follow the thread of a daydream—and there you are, exploring imaginal realms! These imaginal realms share many characteristics with the subtle realms, especially in how we can approach and relate to them, and practice in the imaginal serves to refine our inner access skills. And it is fun! I join my young grandchildren gleefully as they travel to many fantastical places on a daily basis, and I see how this maintains and nurtures their inner connections. In exploring through imagination, they uncover and grow their selves as they apply new ideas in play and dream up even more novel inventions along the way. Imaginal play is a foundation for discovery, insight, and breakthrough.

My inner contacts arrive often through focused meditation—but equally often without focus as I am walking in the woods or gardening, simply enjoying the fresh air and the peace and beauty of nature, or listening to music, or watching waves break on a beach.  

Inner access comes through finding a way into your self, and whatever way works for you is the right way. The key is to find a means to limit stimuli from external sources, to quiet the noise of our lives, and take a break. And to do so regularly, even if only for a few minutes at a time.  

You are indeed always in contact with the inner world, but you need to remember to shift your state of mind and get your inner wavelengths open to know it. 

Stop and take a quiet moment and go into yourself, without agenda or expectation, just settle into stillness with quiet mind. Listen to your body; notice your physical and emotional responses, for they are tools of discernment. Pay attention to your dreams and imagination, they often contain markers as you find your bearings. Pay attention to what comes up: what do you feel or see or know?  

It is in this way that I find the voice that I know is mine and feel assurance and safety and comfort as I navigate incarnation. Inner connection helps me remember who I am, and in this felt self-recognition I find certainty, confidence and inspiration. And most of all it allows me to know the expansiveness of my heart. This is attunement.

Incarnational Lesson Five: Exercise your inner access skills. Balancing your inner and outer awareness makes you stronger in both fields. Connection with your quiet inner self allows you to keep open your channel of love. Staying connected to the nonphysical realms helps make us whole.

6.  Making a Difference

We come into life and learn. Through our incarnational development, we find our selves and our ability to love and serve and express compassion and understand truth and integrity. But there is more to it than that. We come as creators, initiators, makers. We are each sources of spiritual energy, each uniquely configured to shape our own lives with intention and to bring blessings to ourselves, to others and to the world. Human beings are living sources of spiritual energy, and we arrive here in this form with the chance to direct our own creative abilities in original and positive ways.

We each make a difference. First by arriving here, by being physically present. We come into the world each with our own talents and potential, each a personification of a distinct aspect of the universe and ready to participate in creating. It is essential that we recognize the importance and strengths of our individual selves as creators and generators of the future.  

We assume the dense form of human matter in anticipation of the opportunity to explore our essence, our souls, through a new medium, a material form. The idea is not to spend our embodied time waiting to get out or to get somewhere else, but rather, to bring something, to add something, to participate in the unfolding of creation here, and at the same time add to our own understanding, all by and through our unique presence and being.

Imagine you are an artist. Your body, your mind, your heart and its field, and your physical senses of touch, feel, smell, taste, vision and hearing are your means of expression. This life, this beautiful, gritty, complicated, poignant, dazzling and messy mass of persevering matter and creation is both your toolbox and your canvas. What will you make? How does the “difference” that is you manifest?  

And, we make a difference together. We do not work alone. My expression is informed by yours.  As you touch me, then you touch each person I touch. There is great power and prospect in our collaboration, for as we interact and ally our selves, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We do best together, in partnership and community. Collaboration and service spark our own growth and development and help move us towards personal and systemic integration.

As we move through this life, we often ask: What do I bring? What action am I called to take?  What are my rules of engagement? Who may I collaborate with? Who and where is my community? And one of my most frequent queries: how do I answer these questions?

Check your blueprint. I think of each of us as having a passive and an active component: the potentiality and its implementation. We arrive as the incarnation of a complex soul, with great capacity and possibility—a good blueprint, to be sure. But action is required to move towards wholeness, both for ourselves and for the world we live in. We are doers.

The possibilities for contribution, sharing, engagement—your action—are unlimited. It depends on you. Your mark need not be made in civil or social causes; it could be made in parenting or gardening or cooking or inventing or educating or healing or smiling or myriad other ways to express yourself as only you can do. Because you are one of a kind. Callings come in many shapes and sizes, and none is greater than another. What matters is that yours is yours, and you respond to your own; it is the unique expression of your soul in unison with your individual identity. What is important is that you initiate action in some form, no matter how small, whether or not it is seen by anyone else, to realize your blueprint, to bring your soul into fuller expression through your physical self and identity, to bring what only you can bring to us: the light of you.  

Don’t underestimate yourself. Remember, the future lies in your thoughts and actions. When you share your idealism and hope and give of your self, then we are all touched, and your unique contribution moves us forward. We each have the potential to generate change. It starts first with personal intention, the root of your own action, and your own action is what then ripples out and influences those around you and the greater field beyond. Even when you think you are acting alone, you are never alone because your thoughts and actions have life and trajectory and reach others. 

As you extend a hand to others, you also nurture your self. I find this is true over and over in my own life. In my work, I often help others to find a sense of self, guiding them to connect up to that awareness in support of emergence and integration between soul and personal identity. And in the process, I know my self. It can be a delicate business, as remembering and recognizing and knowing self may involve some reframing of self-concept. But we have each other; we are able to support each other in this process of incarnation, and it is important to have that support, to feel sureness and safety and comfort as we explore and discover. 

So why are you here? Remember, the answer lies in your self and your connection with heart-centered living and engagement, loving and giving, informed by sacred soul, not controlled by ego and its instruments–emotions such as fear, anger, desire.

Most of all, remember what really matters:

Love. Life. Laughter. Joy. Giving. Doing. Sharing. Cherishing.

Incarnational Lesson Six: Recognize you are a creator. We grow as we share our selves and our loving, creative intentions. Participation and partnership serve and empower and transform us. You are an agent of change. Together we co-create.

Happily Ever After

When I was a child, I loved reading myths and fairy tales. I read through them all: Greek, Roman, Chinese, Arabic, Native American, Norse; and the fairy tales – Hans Christian Anderson, Grimm’s, and folk tales from many cultures. They captured a world that I felt to be real in some way and I held deeply to their lessons and example.

But one thing always frustrated me. They all ended with the idea “and they all lived happily ever after." Wait! I wanted to know more about “happily ever after”: What was it like? How did this mysterious world unfold for my beloved characters? How could I fill out my pictures of this magical place and where did it exist? Was it always somewhere else, or could it appear in my life?

Although these questions faded to the background in the busyness of growing older, they have never really disappeared. Every once upon a time, in a reflective moment, they re-emerge. That is when I check in with my life events and experiences, I reflect on their overall tone of satisfaction and consider, have I found any clues to happily ever after?

Now much life has been lived and I have become more familiar with happily ever after. What have I found?

First, I would say that happily ever after rests in the experience of sovereignty, of self. Life has brought me experiences and choices and I learned through those relationships and choices what is true for me, where I stand. Standing in self is where happily ever after begins.

Secondly, happily ever after is always reflected in relationship, whether that relationship is with myself, with another, or with the wider world. It is not a physical place with one single set of coordinates; it emerges through a dynamic engagement between people, the natural world, and the fluid circumstances in life.

Thirdly, it is fostered by a stance – an attitude. I have come to find that, just as in the stories, it is a result of welcoming and engaging our life with openness, humility and honor for the beauty and possibility within each person and situation. Through my attention I empower the best in my world and draw out the happiness that is within it. Within the spaciousness of my love and appreciation happily ever after emerges through a constantly renewing dynamic that accepts and stands present to self and to other with honor and respect. Standing clearly and joyfully present to my life is what creates a happily ever after world.

But while right choices and self-reflection, open and respectful appreciation, tolerance and love are important and valuable skills and attitudes, these lessons did not draw out the full magic of those happily ever after endings in me. That has only emerged out of searching for the sacredness within life. It is my effort to engage both my incarnation and the Sacred that has provided the foundation for opening a meaningful, integrated happily ever after life.

Incarnational Spirituality is the worldview and practice that has brought sacredness and incarnate life together for me. It explores the possibility that the earth itself is not only a place that receives light but like a sun is also a source of it; and each individual, similarly is a source of creative action in their life. We are not only receivers of blessing but we can ourselves generate it. The earth experience is ultimately one that expands the sacred, gifted mystery of life, the ultimate Happily Ever After.

From this foundational principle of the generative nature of all life, Incarnational Spirituality goes on to posit that our earth is a co-creative partner to us adding its own unique intelligence and gifts. It encourages a dynamic relationship between self and world, creative whole to creative whole. It is this view of world and self that has created a transformational shift in me and has brought the idea of happily ever after out of childhood dreams and into an applied reality.

Happily ever after can be very different for different people. For one it might include a bustling city life, for another quiet country living, or a large family experience or a focused life of study. There are infinite expressions of happily ever after– as many as the grains of sand in the earth. I have defined some markers for myself that have been common to the various shapes and options I have explored.

I can embrace myself. I have the resources within myself to fulfill a life. When I stand simply and fully in myself and look honestly at my strengths and weaknesses, I am enough – no more, no less and I have the capacity to fulfill my life’s promise. Most of my fairytale friends had something to learn about themselves, about finding and using their particular gifts before happily ever after could enter their lives and so do I. Affirming, with humility by standing in my own gifts for shaping a life is integral to creating my particular happily ever after. The first incarnational principle is standing.

I can embrace the parameters of my own life. I look first to what I have to work with in my existing options, and how I can enhance them. When I look at my experiences as a path to learn from rather than an obstacle to avoid, possibilities begin to unfold. If I find myself admiring another’s gifts or experiences or opportunities, I see that as an indicator of something that has interest and relevance to me. I don’t like the experience of envy, it cuts away at joy for me. But it doesn’t go away just because I tell it to go. Over time I have had to learn to embrace my envy as a signpost to an interest and desire that I have been ignoring. Now when envy comes up, I try to step back and look to what exists in my world of opportunity as the foundation for this new interest. Looking to essence, I ask how the qualities it represents can be nurtured in my life.

I can embrace others. I am the executive director of my life and guardian of its resources and I am supported by and responsible to the community around me. The meaning and relevance of any life comes out of its connection to the community of life in which it exists. I want and need to recognize the multiple layers of community which surround me. I am a partner offering respect for others and respect for myself to shape a happily ever after world that can sustain itself over time.

I embrace the unknown and unexpected. One of the things that was not easily developed within my experience of happily ever after was the need for adaptability and the unknown. To my childhood understanding, the fairytale world seemed ordered with specific directions that the hero or heroine learned to follow to accomplish the task. When I look back at those fairytales however, being able to be responsive in the moment was a test that every adventure seemed to include. Their capacity to respond to the unexpected with grace and creativity was the key. Most of them had some experience of leaving their path, forgetting their instructions or challenging the rules in some way, and that brought the tests of learning they required. They then would overcome the tests with hope, trust, determination, and often the gift of friends. Including flow and change as one of the foundations of happily ever after feels very risky and dangerous; life is definitely a deep wood filled with unknown creatures. Gradually, I have come to recognize that there is no one right path through but multiple good options; it is the choices we make at each crossroads along the way that are important. To include the unknown from the beginning as a part of our life equation is important.

These markers of happily ever after have come to my attention slowly over the years, at first dropping in and out without my noticing how they appeared or why they disappeared. But gradually one learns to plant oneself in life and notice what widens the field of happiness within it. My understanding grew even more specifically when I began noticing there was a felt-sense for the energy of happily ever after. There was a quality to the experience that I felt in my body, a resonance of connection that was outside of a mental and emotional consciousness. This felt-sense drew my attention to noticing the commonality of these essential threads when logic or psychology could not see them.

What is also interesting about these markers is that as strategies I could be good at any one of them in a particular moment of concentration, but bringing them all together at one time was difficult. Something else was required to create the whole picture. It related to where and how happily ever after can exist. Happily ever after is a fluid and responsive land, changing to meet the needs and serve the blossoming of each person and therefore it can only exist in the present moment, refreshed by our choices and relationships as they unfold.

I have a quote from an unknown author posted in my office that upholds me and provides much support in this area:

“To love God is to love the two things closest to Him, Change and a good Joke.” 

The respectful acceptance of whatever and whoever comes–whether it be help from small creatures, or mysterious old ladies, advice from talking mirrors or magical lamps, and respecting the unexpected gifts within the opportunity and relationships that come to us all–speaks to the willingness to incorporate and engage the unknown elements of life, the spark of possibility from which new things emerge. The joy of shared laughter is another hallmark. But as I noticed recently, it is love that is the objective. It is love that brings parts together into a new whole.  

In the incarnational framework love is held in the principle of emergence. It brings together parts so that they rediscover their wholeness. It is the glue that binds the parts into a whole.

My work with incarnational spirituality as it has developed in me over the years has helped to craft the idea of happily ever after into a structure of life that enriches and satisfies. An incarnational perspective acknowledges each person’s thinking, feeling, and action through the choices, the attitudes and intentions they express. From there it embraces a community of life both subtle and physical that upholds and builds through mutual respect and responsibility. I love noticing my own unicorns, wise ones, magic fairy wishes, elves or woodland creatures who appear in my life as friends with gifts, personal challenges met, or books falling open off the shelf with just the right thought to point me to a problem’s answer.

Within this experience of choice, happily ever after is affirmed as a very individual experience; there is no one perfect expression that fits everyone. With every small or large choice I make, I venture out and away from the shared, known world to explore new territory.

I have noticed that happily ever after requires me to stand in a place that affirms individual sovereignty and an interconnected weaving of relationship with others–friends, family, society and the natural world around me as well as subtle levels of beingness from microscopic and atomic levels of matter into energetic levels of intelligence. All are unique and responsible for themselves, all are interconnected and ultimately accountable to the whole within which they exist.

It empowers me to become the heroine who shapes my life through a connection to the sacredness of all life and my response to the experiences that come to me. Happily ever after is a way of receiving and engaging experiences which results in a life well-lived.

Fuel for the Journey

The engineer, therapist, and let’s face it, often off-kilter human being in me is drawn to the Twelve Steps as pioneered and practiced by members of Alcoholics Anonymous and many other spin-off 12-Step programs. Why? Because the program of progressive steps packs a wallop when looking for a way back to the land of the living from a place of darkness and destruction. They carve a practical path, a straightforward road for working with those errant energies; clearing one’s energy field, not to mention cleaning up the wreckage of the past. They provide a method, an accessible path to clearing a space for progression on any other chosen spiritual or philosophical discipline. The 12-Step program is, in essence, a darned good spiritual kindergarten. 

Incarnational Spirituality, not a kindergarten of any kind, is a system that affirms the reality of a complex and miraculous journey from the spiritual realm, into the physical and back to the spiritual realm, honoring each stage of that journey with a big-picture view of the part we humans play in the evolution of the planet as a whole, and in even larger arenas. It promotes and helps students to develop the often latent abilities of humans to recognize, engage and co-create with energies and entities both physical and subtle (non-physical) for the healing and evolution of the planet and beyond. The mind boggles.

According to I.S., one of the effects of incarnating into a physical state is the resultant birth of one’s own incarnational light or self light. I.S. suggests that this light or personal star is an energy generator in its own right, as opposed to a more conventional way of thinking of a human being’s energy coming from the ability to tap into and channel transcendent energies (although self light can also certainly be enhanced by transcendental energy). This internal star is the natural birthright of every human; it comes with us as does breath at birth.  

This star light belongs to each human throughout their incarnation. It is also thought to be their personal ‘light signature,’ their identifying ‘name’ and presence to other entities, physical or subtle, that recognize light and vibration. Perhaps the presence of this incoming light star is what partially fuels the mesmerizing experience of looking at an infant. Pure juju.

As life progresses, I.S. teaches, there are opportunities to enhance or dampen this light. Indeed, we may have chosen to incarnate this time in certain circumstances, with certain others, in order to work with particular elements or situations. Some of these situations are choices, some of these are from the environment, some are from exploring and adventuring. Over time, such causes as abuses, trauma, lack of nurturance, fears, and sometimes addiction perhaps play a part in dampening the luminosity of one’s star. Addiction can be connected to external or internal chemicals: externally produced chemicals such as those in alcohol, drugs and certain food substances, and internally produced chemicals which are generated during gambling, sex, raging, controlling, gaming, or any high-risk, high-intensity activity. 

There are countless ways to collect issues, problems, self-doubts, fears, and stuck points, and if there are not coping skills and a support system to help work through these issues, the energy “packets” of these things can get lodged in the subtle field(s) of the person. Just as dirt and bugs collect on headlamps, the self star can become more and more dimmed and less and less accessible because of these distractions and interferences. As a well-lit lamp can light up a path, so a dimmed lamp can obscure it. 

David Spangler has used the metaphor of a campfire in a campground strewn with kindling to illustrate the relationship we have with issues and complications in life. They are like fallen pieces of wood both in the immediate clearing and farther afield in the forest areas. These ‘kindling’ issues come in many forms and from many sources and areas: physical, mental, emotional, psychic and spiritual, as well as from the personality, the physical environment, the transcendent, the human condition. Many sources. Some of us have relatively orderly campgrounds, and others of us, this author included, may have a veritable beaver’s dam of wood for the fire.

Dealing with the kindling and dead wood brings to mind, within the 12-Step program, the process of working with resentments and life issues that are journaled in the 4th Step Inventory and shared in the 5th Step. The process of listing resentments against persons, places, things or institutions, and examining one’s fears and past is conducted with the intention of moving from a place of stuckness and blame of others to looking at the part played by self in each situation, no matter how small one’s own part might be. (This is not to be taken as a perspective of blaming victims for their injuries; for often the only part the victim may have played was to have been in a state of innocence or in the wrong place at the wrong time.) 

Looking at one’s own part in a situation, however large or small, begins the process of clearing out the junk of the past, cleaning up the kindling, and reclaims one’s own power. The resultant responsibility and freedom for moving forward and making changes and adjustments in one’s own life in the present and in the future is placed squarely on the person and the sources of energy with which they connect. In 12-Step programs, the generic term for this source is one’s Higher Power. 

Self-examination, sweeping up our side of the street, and being of service is good for the body and soul. This is not news. So, what is the twist, the leap in combining the perspectives and processes of Incarnational Spirituality and the direct work of the 12-Step programs? It is in the potential in the kindling. What the 12-Step program shows in a practical way, Incarnational Spirituality describes energetically. 

Twelve-Step programs demonstrate that showing up, cleaning up, and being of service can keep one’s addiction at bay, and lead to a much more fulfilled life; indeed, for anyone, whether they have addiction issues or not. 

I.S. shows that the kindling, examined, owned, and appreciated for the energy and information packet that it is, and released to the transformative fire, is fuel that expands and enhances our star light. It actually makes us brighter; cleans the bugs off the head lamps, and increases our luminosity. 

The more we put into the fire, the bigger the fire becomes. The bigger our fire, the brighter our light—our star. The brighter our star, our light signature, the more possibilities are available to be visible to subtle entities and others that do not see the physical, but are only able to see light. (Remember the Who’s down in Whoville? “We are here! We are HERE! WE ARE HERE!”) The more visible we are to a wider variety of subtle beings, the more opportunity we have for connection, collaboration, and co-creation across the kingdoms, the transitional and non-physical realms. The more collaboration we have with allies, the more effectively and rapidly our healing and growing process as a collective whole can be.

If that is not enough, a really exciting piece is that we all have deeper and deeper areas, deeper parts of the forest in which to gather our kindling. Moreover, through individual avenues of service, this flame can be offered as assistance in helping others to burn up their kindling or as assistance in world work on the subtle or energetic planes. That means that there is no lack of fuel for the flame and that we shall never be left without fire for warming our transcendent toes and roasting our metaphysical marshmallows!

Meeting the Sidhe

by Jane Ellen Combelic

Over the last ten years at Findhorn, I have occasionally studied Incarnational Spirituality with Freya Secrest, Mary Inglis, Judy McAllister and others, including David Spangler via video link. Every year when Freya came from the States I signed up for her workshops. Last year, in September, the workshop was called “Holding Wholeness” and for the first time her husband Jeremy Berg was one of the teachers.

It was on the third day, when Jeremy did his part, that I first encountered the Sidhe. One day that changed everything.

We were sitting, about thirty of us, in a circle in the Upper Community Centre. The moment I saw the oversized Sidhe cards Jeremy was setting out around the central candle, something stirred deep in my soul. As I caught a glimpse of images of stones, I felt a shivering in my heart, the same thrill I feel in a medieval church or an ancient shrine—an expansion into the mind of God.

Jeremy laid out the Stone Circle of the Sidhe and guided us in a series of visualizations. When I closed my eyes, I saw distinct images and heard messages totally relevant to my own journey. I know that I have a vivid imagination, but this was of a different order.

The first image that came to me, as Jeremy guided us to the Howe or central altar, was a small round female figure, perhaps an elder, who emanated serenity and warmth. At the Gateway to the Earth I saw an immense horse. I put my hand on its pale flank and felt its physical strength coursing through me. At the Gateway to the Dawn, feeling some fear about the horse and vowing not to be afraid, I heard the gift that is mine to give is the gift of non-fear. I didn’t want to leave the Gateway of Stars, where I knew that I would use my voice to share my vision and speak truth to power.

I felt accompanied, protected, affirmed. In the last visualization, the Gateway of Twilight, I saw myself walking along a stream with a Sidhe at either hand, all three of us dancing and laughing. I was totally there.

How can I describe the joy, the sense of partnership, the feeling of completion? For the first time in my life I felt whole, as if long-missing parts of me had been restored.

Filled with excitement I shared my story with the group; to my delight they lit up as I spoke, receiving and reflecting my joy and inspiration. My whole body vibrated with power, my skin tingled.

I knew viscerally that I had crossed some kind of threshold.

It wasn’t easy, though, to integrate such a deep transformation. Over the following weeks and months I had trouble finding the ground under my feet. Everything had shifted. How did this amazing experience fit in with my ordinary life?

Everything had shifted, yet nothing had changed. In many ways I doubted my own experience. It had felt real, and yet it wasn’t real in our consensual reality. I approached several elders for guidance, and some of them helped me understand and accept this new reality. Still, I didn’t know what to do with it. The best advice I got, from friend and colleague Adele Napier, was to put one foot in front of the other. Not think about it too much, just allow it to unfold. But no one could walk this path for me.

Meanwhile, the Sidhe continue to visit me when I seek them in my imagination. I don’t see anything; it is more a felt sense of presence, a beautiful knowingness, a joy in being alive. My sensory perceptions are heightened and everything shimmers with luminosity, every blade of grass glimmers and glows. When I invite them into my body, I feel a tingling in every cell, an intensity of sensation that’s just delicious.

First, however, I need to be fully present in my body. This, for me, is sometimes accompanied by grief, the sorrow of everything that is lost, in my personal history and for us as a species. It is my own and it is the existential loneliness of being human. When I really feel the grief, I drop through it into love. My heart is broken open. It is from that soft and sovereign space that I can connect with the Sidhe.

Sometimes my mind throws up doubts. Yet affirmation comes in many forms. Just today, for instance, as I was writing those words, I came across this message in an email from Michael Lipson, a student of both David Spangler and Rudolf Steiner, and a wonderful teacher in his own right:

"We invoke these energies [of pain and misery], because they help us bring our tender human presence to the table, and with it our ability to notice and be changed by the unexpected. We want our hearts to be unguarded, open, vulnerable.... This radical availability lets us meet and endure the presence of beings and energies from unseen parts of the world."

The solutions to all of humanity’s problems, especially the climate crisis, will come to us from another dimension, from Gaia herself, in ways we cannot fathom with our intellectual thinking. That is another insight that came to me during Jeremy’s guided meditation.

The Sidhe, our long-lost cousins, want to help us, if we will only learn to listen.

When I listen now, what I often here is something like this: “Be still. Slow down. Feel what you feel. Be on the earth.” The coronavirus, though it has brought much suffering and chaos, also brought the gift of last spring’s Great Pause. Who could have imagined commerce shutting down, airplanes grounded, city centers empty, roads nearly free of vehicles? People stayed home, sang from their windows, spent a precious hour every day out in nature. The skies cleared, we could breathe fresh air and hear the glorious singing of the birds.

With the added presence of the Sidhe, my life took on a radiance I had never known. I often walked in Roseisle Forest and onto the beach of the Moray Firth. Every leaf, every fern, every pine tree shimmered with inner light. Surrounded by magic, I felt a deep peace. When I encountered someone, I smiled, knowing that we were all facing the same predicament. I relished that sense of oneness, that stillness and slowness.

Once life started going back to “normal,” it was harder for me to tap into that. Now I find myself getting busier, attending all kinds of wonderful events on Zoom, meeting friends when I can. Life has speeded up again. Sadly, my connection with the Sidhe has dimmed over time. Yet when I enjoy the beauty of nature, or fall into grief and despair at the unraveling of our world, and really feel it, love opens up. My heart softens, my mind slows, my body grows still. When I call on them, the Sidhe are always there. They bring guidance, comfort, joy and hope. And more than anything, companionship.

I am not alone. We are not alone. And everything we need is right here.



Time Magicians: Part 1 of 3

Image and Essay by Mary Reddy

Lately I have been pondering time. I’m old enough to look back on decades of experience. And I long to distill the essence of certain moments in my history as an offering to my children. So I am writing a memoir. The way women once constructed quilts out of patches of old worn garments, I am snatching time here and there to describe memories that are lodged in my heart. Someday, I hope to string these moments together, like a rosary of beads tracing the story of my life.

In one of my life fragments, I am five or six years old, squatting on the edge of a suburban Texas curb, my arms wrapped around my legs. The land and houses and concrete stretch out around me like flat bread baking in the Texas sun. I see brown grass or unplanted dirt yards, newly built ranch houses, newly planted young trees—not another person in sight. And above it all an endless blue sky—not a cloud in sight.

Maybe it was the sensation of all that space, hot and still. I don’t know but suddenly I was simultaneously aware of my own legs, the curb, the street, the heat of the day—but also of a vaster self inhabiting a very different space/time. The sensation was powerful, there and then gone again. I had just experienced “more” of me, beyond the little girl I was, beyond the hot summer morning slowly drifting toward midday. I remember staring up toward the endless blue and wondered where was I before I was here right now?

We humans live in time but how much do we know about time, really? The sun and moon count out the rhythm of our days and nights and their positions around our earth dance us through the seasons. Because we live with intimate awareness of the ticking of the clock, can talk about our plans for the coming week, and can name where we were the moment we heard about the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, we proceed as though we understand time. We don’t waste time wondering about it. What we did yesterday is written in stone, what we’ll do tomorrow is a guess—though perhaps a well-informed one. If we wonder about time, it may only be to wonder how much we have left. Is there more sand in the bottom of our hourglass than at the top?

Over the centuries, scientists and philosophers have examined time more intently than those of us just trying to keep our schedules straight. To put it simply, Aristotle proposed that time does not exist independently of events. If nothing happens, there is no time; time is change. Isaac Newton, on the other hand, described an absolute time which ticks away in a void even in the absence of any event. Is time really that definite, irreversible, and inescapable? Albert Einstein cracked open the established wisdom by describing the relative subjectivity of time. Our clocks appear to tick at different speeds in different places.

Mystics know time differently. Shamans enter altered states where they travel into the past, forward to the future, or into worlds where our time does not apply. The plasticity of time has been a common thread over the centuries—for example, in stories of human-faery encounters, where a person’s hour-long visit to the land of the faery might actually take years in human time. And in dreams, in mystic reveries, or sitting on a curb in a Texas suburb, we can feel as though we’ve left time behind to enter other realms.

A theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, has been studying how to join a quantum-physics view of time with Einstein’s relativity. In his book, The Order of Time, he suggests that there are no things, only events. Ephrat Livni reviewed the book and put it this way, “Even what might seem like a thing—a stone, say—is really an event taking place at a rate we can’t register. The stone is in a continual state of transformation, and on a long enough timeline, even it is fleeting, destined to take on some other form.”

Rovelli believes the more you widen your scope to look at the universe, the less relevant your human sense of time becomes. As I understand it, the more micro you go, down to the levels of unseeable particles, the less you can measure time. The same seems to be true of the macro. In Rovelli’s eyes, the time we all agree on and experience daily is a human construct.

In my eyes, rather than a limit to struggle against, time is an instrument we can play with creatively. Maybe time is one of our magic powers. In this moment—now—our identity, sovereignty, and presence engage in relationship with the rest of the world. How we interact with each moment of our lives constitutes how we wield that human tool of time.

I picture it like this: I am a time magician. I funnel my lived time through this small cylinder or tube which is the present moment. I hold that small cylinder in my hand. A great flood of all potential past events must narrow itself enough to fit through my cylinder. Coming out the opposite end, the narrow stream of the present moment expands vigorously into a flood of all potential future events. As I move this cylinder high or low, here or there, I alter not only the direction of the flood coming out in front of me (the future) but I alter the direction of that coming in from behind (the past). The slightest shift in my conscious engagement with the present moment can magically alter the flow of what comes next.

This excites me—every ‘now’ that I encounter carries the promise of change. Will I move the cylinder in the direction of great delight and wonder? Or is it a moment where I must hold it steady to channel grief over an acknowledged loss? Where can I direct the flow? How much love can I tap into Now as I channel the flow?

I reached out to David Spangler to see if he had a unique IS perspective on time. Several of his subtle colleagues came forward with comments about how we experience time in a uniquely human way. I will share their comments in future blogs. In the meantime, I’m eager to hear your time stories and/or your emotions about time, dear readers.

Lessons in Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear

Last week I nearly lost my car — and in the midst of discomfort recovered some valuable lessons in being human.

On Tuesday evening, thieves broke into my 2006 Subaru. I awoke to a broken hood, disabled alarm and the car’s ignition switch dangling from the steering column. All things considered, I’m lucky I woke up to any car at all! Ironically, at the beginning of this month I moved from an apartment complex in a deteriorating part of my community to a private garden level on the other side of town.

On the surface the situation unfolds as one might expect: expensive repairs and unexpected delays, not to mention the need to purchase an immobilizer to ward off future theft attempts (apparently older model Subarus are blue light specials to thieves because they deliver high value in the stolen car market and are relatively easy to steal).

No one appreciates a violation of their personal space, and I’m certainly no exception — but at the same time, as a person who looks upon the world with spiritual eyes, I cannot help asking the question, “What might I learn from this situation?”.

I tend to approach all difficulties, especially unexpected life occurrences, as opportunities for reflection. Having said that, this situation in particular has not been easy. For one thing, it’s been a long year. Seems like one life-learning opportunity after another has steadily piled itself outside my door.

Though it pains me to admit it, on some level I’ve been waiting for all of these unexpected deliveries from the universe to magically dematerialize so that I could shake off the dust, all lessons learned. If pressed, of course I would never suggest that there ever comes any point in time when people, no matter how spiritual, become immune to occurrences of life. Did I buy into the idea that the spiritual path might itself be a protection against upset, inconvenience, pain — even temporarily?

When I confessed these feelings to a friend, she said, wisely, “Drena, I think you need to...expand your perceptions.” So I did.

For the past several days I’ve been sitting with the situation, reflecting upon it and allowing it to communicate with me as I would a loved one. The opportunity to expand our perceptions is perhaps the real gift of any difficulty we face. In my case, widening the view has revealed some unexpected insights.

First off, the practical, grounded view — everything is a tradeoff.

In connecting with my new neighbors, I’ve learned there’s a higher rate of car theft in this safe, upper-middle class environment. Vehicles are regularly trashed and tousled for valuables. “No matter how safe, this is still urban America”, a new acquaintance offered wryly.

Conversely, the working class complex I left had a higher rate of social violence. In fact, safety became the decisive issue inspiring my relocation. So now it seems I’ve traded one concern for another. With full awareness I can assess and accept this new risk because it was my choice to move, just as it is my choice to live in such a large city to begin with. Grounding my perspective in the particular details of my environment allows me to stand in a space of empowerment, rather than victimization.

Which leads to my second, more spiritual view — choice is the apex of Incarnational Spirituality.

If we strip Lorian principles down to their wires, then we must acknowledge that, at the core, every being reveals the power of incarnation. Every person inherently possesses a spark of the impulse (that some call God, Source, the Sacred, the Divine, Big Bang, etc) which infuses creation.

But if this is true, then how do we account for the seemingly endless list of examples of human beings misusing their spark? What separates the villains from the saints?

Actually, Julie Spangler and I debate these finer points on occasion, and this is the place where we inevitably get stuck. If everyone and everything reveals the sacred impulse of God, then at what point does Incarnational Spirituality become a practice rather than an idea?

Simply stated, at the point of choice.

Choice is the crux of sovereignty. We each get access to an assortment of decisions and possibilities. My spiritual practice is revealed by how I carry myself through the world, not by how the world interacts with me.

Especially in the metaphysical community, I think there’s an assumption that the more spiritual we are, the smoother our lives tend to flow. Or, stated another way, the better we are at our spirituality, the less impact the material world will have on us. We tend to approach the difficulties of life as symptoms of spiritual “dis-ease.” If we’re sick, it’s because we have unresolved childhood issues calcifying in our bodies. If we’re poor, it’s due to unreleased beliefs around scarcity. If bad things happen to us, then we’re clearly doing something wrong, and there are any number of meditations, reflections, tinctures, readings and healers to help us get back on the right track! Certainly, any and all situations can be opportunities to heal, to improve and to reassess — but as the old saying goes, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.”

So what if difficulties are occasions to practice making choices which ultimately can inspire us, and those around us, to live meaningful, more purposeful lives?

Which culminates into my final, aerial view: how we choose to interpret and live in the world mirrors back to the world.

Regularly, I do check-ins with colleagues on the healing path; this past weekend we connected and I opened up about the car theft and other recent stresses. It was pointed out that I have difficulty receiving. “You are someone capable of giving, but you don’t allow yourself to receive from others. You need to learn how to ask for help and to let others care for you.”

Confession: for a moment I thought, somewhat sardonically, So...the universe let my car get broken into and nearly stolen and now I’m saddled with a thousand dollars in repairs so that I can learn how to...receive?

But I shook these thoughts off because, well, the universe didn’t cause anything to happen to my car. Life happened to my car. (Or, rather, thieves happened upon my car conveniently located on the corner.)

In considering the point my colleagues made, though, I had to admit that it’s true I don’t like asking for assistance. Needing help does make me uncomfortable. Initially, waking up last week to a stripped car felt like the final straw. More so than a violation of space, it seemed like an attack upon my independence and ability to take responsibility for my own needs so that I could…

avoid reaching out for others?

So, relaxing into this discomfort, I gazed into the proverbial mirror held up before me and noticed a number of peripheral blessings:

Upon learning about the break-in and attempted theft, my boyfriend immediately rearranged his schedule to be of assistance.

I had to cancel several appointments at the last minute and my clients and friends were kind and understanding.

I received a referral for a towing company that offered a generous rate; also, in spite of the damage and state of the car, the tow itself went smoothly, without any glitches.

My regular mechanic kept the car for several days and ultimately wasn’t able to get the parts to complete the repair; yet he helped me get the car to a specialty Subaru shop and did not charge me any fee.

The Subaru shop loaned me a Forester to drive while they repair the damage.

Last week I chose to park my car on the street outside my new apartment. Last week car thieves (thankfully, unsuccessfully) chose to steal it. Ever since then friends and clients and mechanics and tow truck drivers and colleagues have made choices that continue supporting me. And I get to choose to receive these blessings and hidden gifts.

I also get to choose to interact with this experience in a way that affirms the world, not as I wish it to be, but as I want to be.

From this vantage point, it seems impossible to not recognize the truth that how we see the events of our lives impacts the quality and care we bring to every moment. Ultimately I think the point of an incarnational spiritual practice is to willingly partake in the risks of being human and in the process to recognize that we can change the world by giving it the opportunity to impact us.

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org.

Fullness of Incarnation

By David Spangler

Editor's Note: This blog post is an excerpt from the upcoming issue of David's quarterly journal Views from the Borderland.


There is no question that we are living through a challenging time in our history. Climate change alone would be a major danger to deal with, one demanding our full attention and response, but there are so many other problems confronting us as well. I don’t need to enumerate them; simply watching the evening news for a week shows us a world struggling to find balance, struggling to change, or just plain struggling.

What I want to explore in this issue is how we can navigate this time in partnership with the subtle worlds. More precisely, I want to share how I navigate it personally, given the worldview I’ve been sharing these past seven years in this journal. Of course, our individual situations, capabilities, and connections in life are unique, and we each need to discover what works for us. My approach may not work for you. But like cooks sharing recipes and cooking tips in the kitchen, it can be helpful when one person shares his or her “tricks of the trade” with others.

To be clear, this issue is not about subtle activism per se. We’ve talked about that in past journals. It is certainly a related topic, and you can find more information on it in my book, Working with Subtle Energies. Lorian also has classes on that subject.

What I have in mind here is something both more personal and more universal, not focused upon any specific event, need, or opportunity in the world. The question underlying this issue of Views springs from letters I received this summer asking me generally how a person could make a difference, or more simply, cope with what is happening in the world.

Although these letters were inspired by specific events happening in the world over the past few months, the question their writers asked is one I am often asked, usually by people feeling both overwhelmed by the seeming immensity of the problems facing us and, at the same time, called to be of service. It’s a question I face in my own life, and it’s one that I’ve put to my subtle colleagues as well from time to time.

In this issue of Views, I’d I want to begin, though, with a few thoughts about Incarnational Spirituality.

Incarnational Spirituality

The development of Incarnational Spirituality is something to which I’ve devoted my entire life. As those who have read my memoir, Apprenticed to Spirit, or have followed my work over the years, know, Incarnational Spirituality is the externalization of a project within the subtle worlds. The primary purpose of this project is to liberate people from thought-forms of limitation and separation based on being in embodiment and to empower them to recognize, celebrate, and use sacred resources that are inherent within them as incarnate individuals. As such, its unfoldment and manifestation in the world are the product of many minds and hearts both here and in the subtle realms, not all of which are identified with Lorian or with Incarnational Spirituality as I present it. It is at heart a proclamation of a human heritage and identity, something that belongs to everyone.

Lorian already offers a plethora of books and classes, with more on the way, on our approach to Incarnational Spirituality, so I’m not going to go into details about it here; it’s also been the subject of previous issues of this journal. But there are three ideas I want to share as they provide a context both for the comments of my subtle colleagues and for my own insights and perspective.

The first is that incarnation—the act of a soul taking on physical embodiment—is fundamentally a sacred act. That is, the principles and powers that enable it to happen are the same as brought the universe itself into being, stemming ultimately from an act of love and will. This makes each person a manifestation of sacredness whatever the expression or outcome of their life may be. Each of us matters! Each of us is valuable.

The second idea is that we come into life with a toolbox of subtle and spiritual resources. Love and Sovereignty—our ability to choose and to express agency—form the key that opens this toolbox.

The third principle is that the world we incarnate into and therefore inhabit exists in both physical and subtle dimensions; consequently, our incarnation embraces both these dimensions as well. There is no such thing as a purely physical incarnation. All incarnation is “bi-dimensional,” a taking on of an integrated system that is a combination of both a physical and a subtle body. By forgetting or denying this, we operate as partial people, stumbling in the dark even as we think we are seeing where we’re going. Learning to engage with subtle energies and the subtle environments around us isn’t an excursion into an other world; it is a reclamation of our other half.

The fullness of incarnation is to embrace all aspects of our presence on Earth, not just those of our physical and psychological natures, as long as we do so with integration and balance.

Curious about more of David's perspective on the subtle worlds? Click here for more information and to subscribe to Views from the Borderland.

Questions

By Freya Secrest

When I was in high school I didn’t like questions. Asking a question felt like showing my ignorance and that made me uncomfortable. My home environment had put more emphasis on finding answers. A good question was one with a specific and defined response that I could produce quickly.

That changed in high school. I remember my 11th grade Government class discussions where the favored question was one that evoked a dialogue. “Good” questions in that classroom were those that moved beyond a specific and obvious answer and invited discussion. I distinctly remember the sense of accomplishment I felt when I finally asked a question that was given the label “a good question.” It generated a dialogue around our experience of a democratic principle rather than an answer memorized from a book.

Then in college I was faced with questions that had no objective answer or goal of dialogue, but aimed to evoke more of an individual subjective reflection. That is when I first was introduced to this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke in his book Letters to a Young Poet:

…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Living into questions – that was a whole new connection that my previous schooling had not really developed. I was intrigued, but it was still just an idea and a bit mysterious. I wasn’t particularly good at asking questions with patience and certainly not good at taking time at that point of my life to live into them, as Rilke suggests.

My ease with questions has grown as I have gotten older.  It has become more of a life-long process than I anticipated. I have developed more appreciation for the distinction between the inquiry that a "dialogue" question could help to shape or expand and an "answer-oriented" question which could lead to a solution for an immediate issue. And I have gradually found more ease with taking the time I need to acknowledge my questions and to “live with” them.

What I notice now as a growing point for my questioning is the way in which I am learning to not just “live with” my questions, but to “live into” them in order for an answer to emerge. This process, living into questions, is becoming clearer for me. I have observed the process requires that I am clear about what is true for me currently in a situation and then standing honestly and openly in that place. From there I can let myself be curious about what else is around. This has built a new relationship with questions and it unfolds from a place of curiosity and my own interest in newness, rather than from meeting others’ expectations.

This new connection to questions is helping me to find my way of living the answers. In this connection the focus shifts from a relationship to the question, into testing my relationship with an answer and noticing if it increases a sense of coherence in me. For example, my husband and I have been looking for a new house to be closer to family. In visiting houses for sale, I hold the question, “How does the envisioned image of living in this house and neighborhood feel in my body? Does it bring a sense of openness or hope?” With the understanding that there are many possible responses, this living into a question helps me to recognize and in the end expand my place of ease with what is true and coherent for me.

Also, I am noticing my attention focuses around the connection between the questions themselves and answers that emerge; there is an attitude of possibility that holds them together within a wider field of interest. To really hold a question over time requires me to entertain a spirit of invitation to both question and answer– a spacious field of potential within myself that facilitates something to emerge from their interaction.

At this layer of inquiry, I find I hold more of a frame of “we” rather than “them” or “me”. There is an ecology of question and answer that is made up of all aspects and participants in an issue. I am interested in letting new information emerge both within myself and within another and any answer must somehow include all involved. In the example of my search for a new house this means I am not focused only on the house itself, or my perceived needs. I begin to think of the way I can relate to the world when living in the overall environment of that particular house; the natural world in that location; animal and human neighbors; what I can contribute to the overall ecology; and what I can learn and how that new relationship will shape my activity and my attention. With this I am called to live into the whole ecology of an answer and with the ripples that reverberate (as far as I can see and feel) from that particular configuration. It involves relating to overall facts, to where I can stand and contribute, and to how I can recognize and support other needs and truths in the situation.

This third layer of questioning is the one I am actively exploring in my life right now. Such questions do not shift me away from a responsibility to settle upon an answer and take action;instead they widen the circle of resources and responses I can draw upon. I have come to understand my questions now as invitations that serve to open up possibility for my future. And answers are about discovering the ground I can stand upon to build that future.


Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org.

Reconciling India

By Susan Beal

My husband, David, and I, went to India for two weeks in December. Siddhant, a beloved exchange student we hosted many years ago, was getting married. His family arranged for us to spend a week with them for the wedding festivities. We decided to spend a second week at a spiritual community planned around utopian ideals that we hoped would be restful after the wedding week.

There is little to rival the beauty and splendor of an Indian wedding. It was an overwhelmingly sensual experience – food rich with ghee and spices, henna paste painted in intricate designs onto our hands, trumpets and drums beating out wedding cadences, riotous dancing in the blazing sun, dazzlingly embellished clothing – everything swirling and teeming with colors, sounds, flavors and textures so unlike our quiet life in rural Vermont.

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As Sid’s “American parents” we were welcomed as honored guests and treated like family. We participated in pre-wedding rituals we barely understood, were fed more Gujarati wedding food than we could handle, and were loaned traditional clothing so we were properly attired. Everyone wanted to meet us and tell us stories about Siddhant and his family or ask us how we liked India. Despite cultural differences between traditional Indian and American weddings, there were enough similarities to provide context and give us an emotional anchor. Through it all, we felt supported and protected by the warm hospitality of Siddhant’s family. And had we returned home at the end of that week, our trip to India might simply have been a delightful, if at times overstimulating, experience.

But as soon as we left for the Chennai airport and boarded the plane for Pondicherry, we had no one to mediate or interpret the intensity of India for us. I hadn’t realized how much the energy field of Siddhant’s family had buffered us from the psychic and sensory extremes of India. The sheer sensory overload began to catch up to me as soon as we left, not only from the wedding week, but from the scenery that flashed by us in disturbing polarities: ancient temples, ornately carved; gaunt, hard-faced women cooking meals for their children on rubble-strewn sidewalks; waves glittering on the Bay of Bengal; waiflike child beggars tapping on car windows; glossy cows strolling majestically through green fields; mounds of plastic trash tangled in the roots of banyan trees.

I suspect many of the readers of this blog, like me, are very sensitive to energies and environmental influences. I’m particularly sensitive to sound. I’m used to mostly natural sounds in Vermont—wind, birds, the sound of the brook, an occasional passing car. India was teeming with people, colors, noises, and smells unlike anything at home. The racket in India exacerbated the difficulty of taking in so many unfamiliar sights. The cacaphony of two-stroke rickshaw engines, diesel engines, blaring horns, barking dogs, rattling air conditioners, cement drills, and jack hammers made it hard to find my own center.

Despite my sensitivity, David and I are easy-going people. Normally we’d have taken such things in stride as an expected part of adventure in a new place. But we also knew we’d need down time to maintain our equilibrium. We thought we’d arranged for just that—a quiet, contemplative week to digest the wedding experience. Instead, the community we’d hoped would be peaceful and welcoming was opaque and almost impenetrable to casual visitors. We’d envisioned a serene setting, a meditative oasis, but the same scenes of deprivation and suffering were everywhere on the outskirts. Our guest house room, though clean, was stark and ill-lit, and filled with curry fumes from the kitchen exhaust fan below our glassless window. Hot water and electricity were intermittent. To top it off, we’d both picked up parasitic infections in the first week – the infamous Delhi belly. It seemed fitting that my digestive system was roiling along with my emotions. 

The morning after we arrived at the community, we came upon a tiny puppy lying, unmoving, in the heat of the sun by the side of the road. The owner of the café nearby said the puppy been hit by a motor bike. He seemed unconcerned, and his apathy was understandable. Why worry about one little dog in the midst of so much other human and animal suffering? The wall my heart had built to cope with the grief and intensity of India started to crack. I wanted to help the puppy. I wanted to walk away and not face the tide of utter helplessness I’d felt since we’d arrived. I didn’t want to drown in that tide I’d held at bay, and I struggled as I stood there, between opening my heart or closing it, trying to help or turning away. I struggled with my American assumptions in the midst of Indian realities. Suddenly it felt like a test, my heart being weighed on a scale.

Hesitantly, I asked the café owner for a bowl of water and a towel. I washed the puppy’s wounds, nestled her in the towel, gave her an energy healing with the help of my inner colleagues, and blessed her. Though I didn't think she'd survive the night, I resolved to find out if there was an animal shelter, or at least a concerned person who might help. I couldn’t do anything for the begging children, or the women raising families on landfills, or the skeletal cows eating trash, but I could do something for this puppy. I clung to her welfare in the midst of my overwhelm as a tiny act of love I could take to buoy my drowning heart.

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I teach a form of meditation called Yoga Nidra, which means yogic sleep. It’s deeply restful and restorative, but one of the most powerful practices within it is called playing with opposites. First you focus awareness on, say, an emotion like fear, noticing how it feels in the body. Then you focus on the opposite emotion—perhaps safety. Then you move back and forth, noticing differences in how the body responds. And then you hold both opposites in awareness simultaneously— hard to do intellectually, but revelatory when you surrender to it as a felt sense in the body.

We tend to think of opposites as, well, opposite; but in practicing yoga nidra, I’ve discovered that sometimes they’re the same energy in the body, just interpreted differently by the mind or psyche. For instance, joy and grief feel strangely similar – a strong sensation of energy in the heart, although, given my different associations with them, they moved differently in my body. Grief feels stuck and lumpy; joy shines and flows. Yet when merged, they melt into each other and become a radiance in my heart center.

No matter how much we might try, we can’t escape our cultural and individual biases and the way they influence our perception. In these times of increasing sensitivity to the flashpoints of prejudice and privilege, all I can claim about my experience of India is that it was mine, and it was up to me to integrate its extremes within the context of my own life. One day, while leaving the elegant courtyard of our inn, I almost stumbled on an old man lying in a heap of rags on the sidewalk. I looked at him and then around the street. People – Indians and white tourists alike, were streaming past. I steeled myself, and walked past, but my heart tore apart. It took the little puppy to help me find a way to back to my center. Tending to her helped begin to reconcile the opposites of India in my heart. All the love and kindness I’d experienced during the wedding, all the horror and helplessness I’d felt in the face of so much deprivation and suffering, narrowed down to a single point when I decided to try to help that little puppy.

She made a seemingly miraculous recovery by the next morning. She was up and about and wagged her tail when she saw me. Even the café owner seemed surprised and happy by such a turnaround. But alas, we didn’t save that puppy. We had gotten the name of a member of the Auroville community who worked at the animal sanctuary and promised to search for her. He never found her, although he found several others while searching and brought them to the safety of the sanctuary. 

Our bodies can make sense of what to our minds may seem like irreconcilable differences. But because our intellects often resist what our bodies understand, the body often reconciles such extremes through illness or injury. I was nauseous and utterly without appetite for over two months after returning from India. I lost 15 pounds and felt anxious and haunted. I cocooned in my safe, quiet bedroom for days on end, grateful for silence and stillness in which to slowly decompress and integrate. The whole trip to India—the joy, the pathos, the beauty, the horror—seemed to pivot on the moment I decided to help that puppy. All I could do was surrender to my body’s slow and steady healing, and wait for my appetite and energy to return.

What I’ve learned from the practice of playing with opposites in yoga nidra is that wholeness springs, in part, from the willingness to embrace it. Wholeness is implicate and ever present, waiting for us to recognize it, but our resistance to bridging differences and our love of neat categories can make us blind to it. It’s a common belief that beauty and joy are fragile, and even obscene in the face of suffering and degradation. We in the West seem to need dichotomies to make sense of the world. Our legal system is built on duality, as are our political and religious systems that define right and wrong for us. But the funny thing is, when you hold space for seeming opposites, when you really feel them in the body and the heart, the mind quiets down and paradoxes collapse. It’s not unlike eating food, in which something that is entirely separate from us, through digestion, becomes part of us.

One morning in India, while stopped in traffic in our taxi, I saw a toddler in the meridian, tied by her ankle with a strip of plastic to a shrub. Trucks, cars and auto-rickshaws whizzed past her on all sides while she poured water from a plastic bottle into the dirt and patted the mud onto her bare legs. She looked happy, utterly absorbed in play. A woman I assumed was her mother was knocking on car windows ahead of us. Just beyond the woman, a young boy and girl dressed in tatters were trying to cross the busy highway. Arms linked, they skipped and danced between cars, advancing and retreating across lane after lane of chaotic traffic. They were laughing as if it was the best fun in the world to make it safely to the other side.

I cannot know what lies ahead for that mother and her children. It’s difficult not to judge their lives from the standpoint of my own, and I feel many varieties of guilt and confusion. But the obvious joy of those children is what stays with me the most. It is there, in that innocent union of joy and suffering, where wholeness lies, and our divided hearts heal.  

Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org.

From the Archives: The Fires of Joy

By David Spangler

Editor's Note: From the Archives features reflections by David Spangler that are out of print or not readily available to members of our community. This essay was first published by Yes! Magazine in May of 2004. You may read the original post here.

Part of my spiritual practice is to “stoke the fires of joy.” This seems to me especially important at a time when the antithesis of joy is unleashed upon us and upon the world once again.

There are many images I could use to describe what I feel here. One that comes to mind is of a lighthouse. When the storm breaks and all is fierce winds and lashing waves, it is a lighthouse that penetrates the darkness and keeps the ships from crashing into the rocks.

Now that war has come, we are on stormy seas. The rocks of despair and depression, anger and fear threaten to sink our inner energy and vision.

There are many dangers—new diseases, famine, pollution, starvation, and so on and on—that confront us with stormy inner seas and challenge our humanity.

Yet, around all this and permeating it, is the presence of what I think of as the sacred, and it has power, too. Its power is rooted in love and in the sheer joy of life, of engagement, of making connections, of being part of wholes larger than ourselves.

I think of joy as an inner quality that is like medicine within the world. It is healing and restorative, vitalizing and protective. In the days ahead, the spiritual forces will be called upon even more for healing and grace, regeneration and blessing. They in turn are empowered by the inner medicines we supply—the joy, the love, the vision, the forgiveness, and the gratefulness, the light that we can produce.

I believe we forget the power of joy at our peril, for when we lose it, we can sink beneath the waves and become, to switch metaphors, breeding grounds for the forces of despair and destruction, frustration and fear. We become part of the storm, not part of the lighthouse. I don't have an exercise or specific practice to recommend here. We each know what brings us joy. But there are two elements I would offer.

The first is simply to allow joy to be in us. I may feel in the midst of a world of sorrow and pain that it is somehow wrong or shameful or at least selfish to feel joy. But does my anger or fear or hatred or despair or depression remedy the world's pain? Perhaps there are situations in which they can be of help by motivating me to change or to create change, but most of the time, they drag my energies down.

We may think of joy as selfish, but anger, fear, hatred, and certainly depression and despair are infinitely more selfish and self-involving. Joy is a quality that by its nature reaches out to more than just ourselves. It enlarges us, expands us, gives us a reason to keep on living and striving. Joy gives wings to my heart. Depression and anger are stones that weigh it down.

Will I become insensitive to the needs of others or the suffering in the world if I am joyful? No. I can be selfishly happy but not selfishly joyful. Joy does not blind my eyes to others. But fear, depression, despair can make me insensitive. They can lead me to denial. I try to escape into pleasure, distraction, addiction to avoid the pain, to blunt the suffering, to take the edge from despair.

Joy does not lead me to escape. It leads me to embrace the world with all its suffering and all its wonder and creative powers.

So do I have a right to be joyful? In a world of war and despair, do I have a right not to be? Shall I deny the world the gift of a buoyant heart and mind that can attune to the powers of spirit, the powers of love, the powers of the sacred, and the power of humanity to change and to grow?

Joy is not denial. Joy is not placid or resigned acceptance. Joy is a passion for the well-being of all and a courage to shape the world on behalf of that well-being. So the first step is to give ourselves permission to be joyful.

The second is to pay attention when life brings joy to us. It is a cliché, but still true that little things like sunsets and children's smiles can bring joy. A flower can bring joy. Being with a friend can bring joy. For such a powerful force, joy can enter our lives in such small and trivial ways. Pay attention!

Keep alert! Joy can ambush us at any moment. It is a fierce warrior that wants our hearts as its captives, so it can liberate them to new possibilities and to a power to heal and transform. Surrender to its claims. Be open to its arrival. At a time of war, we should welcome the joy that is power, the joy that is peace, the joy that is medicine for the ills of the world.

There's still time to sign up for David Spangler's upcoming class, Fiery Hope:Forging the Creative Path. In this week-long forum (May 17-23) David will explore hope as a spiritual force that can be harnessed to transform one's experience of life and positively impact those around us. For more information and to register, click here.  

Love Song

By Goeff Oelsner

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What is precious is distilled at dawn

as sun peeps over the transom of morning

as newborn light burnishes your body

GAIA

with your migrant cloud-herds

vagrant tribes of upper air

with your azurite necklace of lakes

tangled skein of rivers

with gushing knots of ice melt

drip of thin rivulets over stone

with your maze of hairy roots

heft of hoary branches

with transparencies of cricket song 

bird song inlaying silence at dawn

with your spired and lucid crystal choirs

O blue jewel swaying on a stalk of sunlight

GAIA

What is precious is distilled 

each dew wet dawn 

we are dew-wed with you

If you have a story you’d like to share of your personal experience with Incarnational Spirituality, please email drenag@lorian.org.