David's Desk 180 Gourmet of the Soul

My father was an engineer by profession but a gourmet chef by hobby. He loved to cook and in particular, to create amazing dishes from scratch relying not on a recipe but on his own sense of flavors. His mouth was like a chemical analysis laboratory. Give him a taste of something, and he could tell you the ingredients, the spices that may have been used, the proportions of one thing versus another. He was a virtuoso of the kitchen.

I inherited none of that talent. In fact, I have virtually no sense of smell—never have had—and thus a diminished sense of taste. When it comes to fine dining, as long as I have ketchup, I’m good! Still, I loved watching my dad cook, seeing his delight at producing something wonderful, and I always enjoyed whatever he concocted.

I got to thinking about this when I read something this past month about the importance of having a spiritual path in these challenging times. This is a sentiment with which I would agree, but the author’s definition of a “spiritual path” was different from my own. He was thinking of something formal, a tradition that had its own beliefs, practices, rituals, and so on, all of which would provide a place of comfort and relief from the buffeting of world events. It was as if there was a “daily path” that we walked while doing our work and attending to our affairs and then there was a “spiritual path” that could take us out of the world for a time, allowing us to renew and refresh ourselves.

I think having practices that renew and refresh are important, but my idea of a spiritual path is different. In thinking about this difference, I got to thinking about my father in the kitchen. For him, cooking was about combining the main ingredients such as meat, vegetables, grains, and so forth with spices. Dad knew how to cook the main ingredients, but it was in knowing and choosing just the right spices and their combination that his talent shone. He had a large rack of spices, and he knew precisely how and when to use each one to get the effect he desired. For him, spices weren’t the meal—you still needed the main ingredients—but they made the meal and transformed it into something special and unforgettable.

This is what a spiritual path is, for me. It is a collection of spices that can transform the ordinary fare of everyday activities into something special, something uplifting, something healing, something inspiring, something enriching. These “spices” are flavors like love, compassion, listening, respect, forgiveness, understanding, calmness, bravery, and so on. Life gives us plenty of opportunities to try any or all of these out. A spiritual path for me is having access to a spice rack of spiritual qualities and knowing which to use, when and how to make a moment shine with Light. Walking the spiritual path is really learning to cook in the kitchen of everyday life.

There are lots of recipes for how to live a spiritual life and act in a spiritual manner. It’s wonderful having recipes. I’m certainly not against them. In fact, you wouldn’t want to eat a meal I’d cooked unless you knew I’d followed a recipe. But life is unpredictable. We don’t always know what ingredients it’s going to present us or what the “kitchen” of the moment will be like. There may be no recipe for the situation in which we find ourselves, no “right way” to solve a problem or fulfill an opportunity. This is when we have to improvise with the spiritual spices we have, the qualities we’ve developed in ourselves.

My dad learned about spices by using them. I’m sure he made mistakes; not everything he cooked was always a gourmand’s delight. But he practiced tasting them and using them until the nature of the spice was part of who he was.

This is what we do with those qualities which we call “spiritual” but which are really the qualities that make us most human and enable us to create wholeness and joy in our world. We practice them in daily life with each other until they become part of us. We master the taste of joy, love, courage, compassion, trust, kindness, and so on by using them. Sure, we may make a mistake, but we learn how to make these qualities our own so that we can make them part of our world. We become gourmets of the soul.

It’s the spicy spiritual path!

David's Desk 179 Sweet Sixteen

With this essay, I’m starting my sixteenth year of writing these monthly David’s Desks. Honestly, I had no idea when I started doing this in 2006 at the age of 61 that I’d still be sharing my “Desk” when I was 77. That these essays have continued for so long is due in no small measure to you, my faithful readers, and to your support. You have given my thoughts a warm reception, and this has encouraged me to keep going.

When I started David’s Desk, George Bush was President. We were two years away from the subprime crisis that came close to derailing the world’s economy. We were two years away from seeing the first African-American elected President of the United States. For that matter, we were one year away from Apple introducing the iPhone in 2007. While not the first “smartphone,” (IBM has the honor of having produced that in 1994), it was the first to give unfettered complete access to the Internet, in essence putting a computer in your pocket. That opened up whole new worlds of interconnection and communication, giving us the modern phenomenon of social media with all its benefits and challenges, its rewards and its dangers. And speaking of social media, Facebook opened its doors to the public the same year as David’s Desk began.

In other words, a lot has happened ever since I began writing these essays. Through it all, my intent here has not been to “follow the news” or to write about whatever current event is in the headlines. As it says in the prologue above, my desire has been to share “thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey,” as seen from my perspective. As best I can, I have tried to make each essay reflect on who we are and the resources we have as spiritual beings in touch with timelessness, resources that can then inspire the life we lead in the midst of time and the events of the world.

That will continue to be my objective.

Thinking about the history of David’s Desk (some of the earlier “Desks” were collected and published as a small book, The Flame of Incarnation), I went back this morning to re-read the very first essay I wrote. I wanted to see what thoughts had been in my head all those years ago. True to my objective, they were not tied to any particular event in 2006 but spoke to a truth about our own whole nature. I found them as relevant now as they were back then. So, I decided that in honor of starting this sixteenth year of David’s Desk, I would send you the one that started this experiment. I hope you enjoy it!

NO MUGGLES HERE

I don’t know if your family is a fan of Harry Potter. Mine is. As the books have come out over the years, we have enjoyed more and more J. K. Rowling’s engaging tale of the boy wizard and his friends. In fact, my youngest daughter and I have made a ritual of attending the midnight release parties at our local bookstore whenever a new Potter book has come out. When our four kids were younger, we would all gather in the living room and listen while my wife read the latest installment. It was fun and exciting. Rowling tells a great yarn.

In Harry Potter’s universe, the world is divided into magic-users, known collectively as wizards and witches, and non-magic-users, known as muggles. Much of the fun of the books comes from reading the author’s invention of new words and terms; as neologisms go, muggles is about as good as it gets.

The big difference between Rowling’s fictional universe and ours is that, however fun a word it is, there are no muggles here. We are all magic-users.

Now I’m not talking about fantasy magic, the kind that Harry uses or a wizard in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Stories, while fun, deceive us about magic by turning it into something implausible. We come to think of magic as wizards hurling thunderbolts and flying through the air.

But there is an everyday magic that surrounds us that is so common, even in its occasional unexpectedness, that we don’t pay attention to it. And I’m not talking about the “magic of life” or the “magic of our senses” or any other metaphor for the wonderment we can find in life.

Here are some examples. I’m about to say something, and someone else says the same thing before me. I’m thinking of a friend and she calls unexpectedly. I need to see someone and I accidentally run into that person in a store. I need money that I don’t know how to get and a check arrives out of the blue in the mail from an unexpected source.

Here’s a true story of magic at work. A friend of mine wanted to buy some special bells for her mother but could not find them anywhere. One afternoon she phoned a friend but accidentally dialed the wrong number. The person at the other end turned out to be the clerk in a gift store she had never heard of. More importantly, this store turned out to be the sole importers in the whole city of these special bells.

We call these kinds of events synchronicities, manifestations, good luck, God’s hand, or coincidences. We see the way people long married can complete each other’s sentences, and we talk about them “being in resonance.”

What all these kinds of events and experiences have in common is that something intangible—a thought, a desire, an intent—is having an effect upon something tangible. The immaterial and invisible is affecting the material and the visible. For example, one day I had to give a lecture in the city at a place that is notorious for having very limited parking as one has to park on busy city streets. It was raining, and I was not anticipating a long walk from wherever I could park back to the lecture hall. So I visualized an empty parking place right in front of the hall. When I got there, though, all the parking spaces were full, but on a hunch, I went around the block. Nothing was available, but as I came in view of the lecture hall again, a car pulled out right where I had visualized my parking place. I was able to park conveniently right in front of the hall. An invisible, intangible thought in my head had a visible, tangible consequence.

We can call this coincidence, but it happens time and again in everyone’s life in one way or another. Our thoughts, feelings, intents, desires, wishes, fears, and hopes have a way of manifesting, the invisible world becoming visible.

The evidence is that life responds to us; it configures to our inner nature, to our thoughts, feelings, and spirit. This is real magic.

Why does it do this? How does it happen? What makes this magic work and create a response? Over the centuries, people have come up with different theories: the law of attraction, or the power of thought, of imagination, or of the will. All of these undoubtedly contribute and are part of this magic. At the same time, we all have examples of when they don’t work, of when we thought positively about something and it did not happen or wasn’t attracted or when our will or imagination did not bring about the result we wished.

The point then is not that there is no magic but that it operates more holistically than we may have thought. It isn’t just the law of attraction or the power of thought or the use of the imagination. Other things may be involved, at least some of the time. And if you think about it, this makes sense. Life responds to us as whole beings, not just as thinking beings or feeling beings or imagining beings. What evokes a response at a given moment may be a mystery; we may have to do some attentive observation and experimentation to gain clues about what works for us and what doesn’t. Each of us may come to this magic uniquely, based on our particular individuality; what works for someone else may not work for us because we are different people. But what is certain is that life will and does configure to us. It does respond. Who we are affects and shapes the world we experience. We are the makers and unmakers of worlds. This is everyday magic.

Experiment with this. Try it out. It may not for you be as straight-forward as thinking, “I want that new car,” and it will appear. How magic works for you may operate differently based on your unique relationship with life, the way your interiority and inner nature relates and configures to the world and vice versa. But your magic will work for you and is working all the time. Be a scientist of your own invisible world and investigate to find out how.

The first step into using your magic may be the same for everyone. I believe it is. It consists of simply acknowledging to oneself, “I am not a muggle. I am a magician.”

Celebrating the March Equinox, Spring and Fall: A Festival of Balance, Inviting, Widening and Focusing

This year in the Commons we are exploring ways to create nature festivals as Gaian celebrations focused on the earth’s seasonal experience of its wholeness from both the Southern and Northern hemisphere’s perspectives. As we prepare for the March Equinox, the second in our seasonal Gaian festival explorations, our planning evoked new images and insights for the Equinox, what that gateway brings the planet, and what it can mean for us.

The term ‘Equinox” is derived from aequus (equal) and nox (night). At the time of the Spring and Fall Equinox, day and night, light and dark are balanced and of approximately equal duration all over the planet. The Equinox marks a moment of Threshold, Balance and Pause, when the tilt of the planet in its orbit means that the sun’s rays fall in a horizontal line along the earth’s equator.

In our planning conversations we observed that the March Equinox becomes a Threshold/Doorway where Gaia’s breath, expanding since the Winter Solstice in the Northern hemisphere, and contracting since the Summer Solstice in the Southern hemisphere, meets in the middle, so to speak, at the equator. We in the North stand in the Doorway between Winter/Spring, inviting new growth/blossoming and widening light. Members of the Commons from the South stand in the Doorway between Summer/Fall, inviting the withdrawal and narrowing of light/life into seed and more focused intent. By celebrating Spring and Fall Equinox together, we are once again working with a rhythm, a rhythm of balance and invitation as Earth’s breath expands and contracts.

Our festival movement/gesture for the December Solstices was the spiral. Those of us celebrating the Winter Solstice walked a spiral of our making inward, to a point of stillness and introspection–Sovereignty and Identity. This mirrored the pause at the point of Gaia’s greatest in-breath, and the greatest manifestation of darkness. Those celebrating the Summer Solstice walked outward from the center of the spiral–their place of Sovereignty and Identity–mirroring the time of Gaia’s most expansive outbreath and the greatest manifestation of light.

When we were considering what gesture/pattern of movement we might use for the March Equinox, the lemniscate (the symbol for infinity, the figure 8) came to mind. This seemed right, and we imagined that pattern stretched out horizontally, with the point in the center as the Doorway/Threshold where we all stand in Balance and Equilibrium together at Equinox time.

From that place in the center, we can experience both the pause, the balance and the moving flows of life. As the light expands in the Spring, Gaia’s breath and energy widens, expanding into leaf and bud. As the light decreases in the Fall, Gaia’s energy and breath narrow and focus, concentrating summer growth and life force into seed and bulb.

Our festival gesture/movement will be one of “invitation and inclusion.” As we walk our lemniscates, either physically or meditatively, we can intentionally invite and include the spirit of our homes and our land, our local nature spirits, house angels, genius loci of land, unseen allies and companions to join us in weaving our seasons together, and standing at the moment of pause and balance and equilibrium together. 

This spirit of “invitation and inclusion of other” seems particularly appropriate for an Equinox Festival. The quality of the Solstice is reflected in its deepening alignment with inner and outer Sovereignty and Identity, in ourselves, and in seed and flower. The quality of the Equinox invokes widening and inclusion, expanding Sovereignty and Identity into recognition of Connection and Interdependence.  At the Equinox time, Gaia is both widening and focusing–in the North expanding into growth and diversity of flower and blossom, and in the South, contracting into focus and formation of seed and potential. 

Here is the suggested movement for our lemniscate pattern:

We will stand or focus at the Threshold/Doorway in the center of our lemniscate. We will move out from that point of balance, creating a flowing movement that goes backwards around the loop, to honor and embrace the gifts of the season we are leaving behind. We will be circling the loop behind us, to reach the present moment again at the center Doorway. Then, facing the loop before us, we will move forward, to invite and discover the gifts of the season ahead, and to bring those gifts when we go round the loop and return to the center of the present moment.  We will then pause together at our Doorways, a moment of “betwixt and between,” a moment of Wholeness. 

When those from the Northern hemisphere work with Winter/Spring and those from the Southern hemisphere work with Summer/Fall, and we do this together, we are celebrating Gaia in her point of equilibrium and balance, embracing all four aspects of her own life expression and all four seasons in one festival. This is a festival of Wholeness.

To bring beauty and form to our celebration, we can weave together the seasonal gifts we find, in any creative way we wish–physically as an altar, a wreath, an arrangement, a mandala–anything that we find in nature or our homes that represents the two seasons of our hemisphere’s transition. Alternatively, in our heart and mind, we can hold the image of the blessing of the season’s gifts in symbol or poem, thinking back to what has come, and forward into the future. You are invited to share these gifts, creations and musings, either at our Gaian Equinox festival on March 20th or online in the Commons. 

Festivals create moments of pause and reflection in our busy lives, and provide new meaning and context for us to come together in a spirit of honor, fun and celebration. Festivals help us to play: they allow us to include, distill and understand our relationships with all life. Celebrating together is a way to strengthen our Gaian connections, and make them more active and present in our lives.

The March Equinox festival helps us explore what it means to stand at a threshold point of balance and equilibrium in our lives. With its focus on equity and balance, it is a timely and important gesture for our times.

(Download How to Create an Equinox Lemniscate below for a more detailed explanation and meaning.)

David's Desk 178 The Light Bank

For many reasons, including jobs lost due to the COVID pandemic, there are many people in our area who are experiencing food insecurity. To meet this challenge, neighborhood food banks gather and distribute food to those in need. These food banks are invaluable not only as a place from which to receive help but also as a central place, a hub to receive donations of food and money. If I contribute to my local food bank, that’s a way for me to reach and help those families who have needs but who are unknown to me personally. Our local food bank does know these specifics and can distribute aid accordingly.

This past week, along with millions of others around the world, I’ve been filled with sorrow for the events transpiring in the Ukraine. This is a tragedy for the Ukrainians and for the average Russian, who has no more desire to invade another country and wage war than I do to invade Canada. One man’s megalomania is adding millions of victims to the ranks of an already too-large number of those suffering from the many ways humans can persecute each other.

As most of you know, my experience embraces the reality of a subtle, non-physical dimension of spirit and energy in which we are all profoundly interconnected, even, to borrow a word from quantum physics, “entangled.” What affects one can affect all, and vice versa. I don’t write about this dimension much here in David’s Desk; I leave that to my classes and workshops. But today, I feel I want to offer an insight from that side of my life and work.

Consciously or unconsciously, we all participate in the subtle dimension of the world. When we are aware of this as a reality in our lives, we discover we have the ability, through thought, feeling, imagination, and embodiment, to create a field of energy around ourselves that can hold a spiritual quality such as love, peace, courage, compassion, and the like. Such a field of energy, when shared with another, can be a source of vitality and blessing, transferring that quality from our life to theirs. As part of their life and subtle energy field, that shared quality can make a difference. 

What we create through our love and caring can be shared through our love and caring. Most importantly, where the subtle dimension is concerned, distance is not a factor. Resonance is. If I can feel connected with someone in my mind and heart, then it doesn’t matter where that person is in the world. As far as transferring that energy field of quality from my life to theirs is concerned, they might as well be standing next to me.

Sharing a helpful, vital, spiritual, emotional, or mental quality with another who is in difficulty or who is suffering somewhere in the world, in order to enhance their ability to deal with and change that difficulty, is called subtle activism. It can envelop a person who is in despair with hope, with courage, with clarity, and with attunement to their own sacred core. Such subtle activism can be directed towards individuals or towards environments or towards collective fields of thought and feeling. 

The more specific one can be when doing subtle activism, the easier it is to establish resonance between yourself and another (even when that “other” may be a collective field of energy shared by many). Simply put, a general rule of thumb is that you can share best with whom or what you know best. For example, if I know a family who is suffering from food insecurity, then I can bring them food directly, and more importantly, I know exactly the kind and amount of food that they need. I can tailor my response to their specific situation.

But when it comes to subtle activism, more often than not, I don’t have that kind of specific connection or information. Here is where the example of the food bank is a useful metaphor. There are “Light Banks” in the subtle dimensions held and managed by various spiritual beings whose purpose is to do exactly what a food bank does: to receive “donations” of Light, of prayers, of goodwill and blessings from individuals who wish to help but don’t know specifically where their good energies should be directed.Such Light Banks do know and can “distribute” or share these blessings specifically with other individuals and situations that are reaching out for spiritual help, for guidance, and for blessing. In my own subtle activism work, therefore, I connect with an appropriate Light Bank and know that by adding my intention and blessing to it, help will be given where it is needed, even when I don’t know who or what that recipient may be.

To help you visualize this process, here is a sample example of how I might go about this. If you wish, you can adapt this example to your own unique style and way of engaging with subtle and spiritual dimensions.

A SUBTLE ACTIVISM EXAMPLE USING A “LIGHT BANK:”

I begin by imagining what quality of subtle, vital energy I’d like to share with people in the Ukraine and thus which I’d like to “donate” to the Light Bank. Let’s say, I’d like to share the qualities of courage, steadfastness, hope, and resilience with the citizens of Kiev as they live through the siege of their city and seek to protect their homeland. The first thing I do is imagine as fully as I can what I feel like when I embody these qualities. I don’t want this to be just a mental or imaginative image but something I really feel in my body. This aspect of embodiment is important. We generate subtle energies and qualities as a full person, not just as an act of thought or feeling, a mind or a heart. Our body is definitely a participant in the process.

Therefore, I want to discern in myself the felt sense of the quality or blend of qualities I want to share. I want to know myself as an embodiment of these qualities.

Once I have this felt sense and I can feel the quality or qualities I wish to share as mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical realities in and around me, then I put my imagination to work. I know what a Light Bank feels like in the subtle dimension, but I don’t know what it looks like in any physical sense. But I don’t have to. Subtle allies can read my intention. What I need is a pictorial or imaginal language that demonstrates my intention and enables me to connect with the proper subtle ally.

So, I picture a building (and it could be anything: a person, a place in nature, an abstract geometric form, etc.) over which hangs a sign: “Kiev Light Bank: Donations Welcome!” I’m using the physical model of a local food bank to give shape to my subtle intention. This image of the Kiev Light Bank is a symbol of where I want my blessing to go, and those in the subtle realms who are in charge of such a Light Bank can easily read this symbol and discern this intent.

In my imagination, I go up to this building, holding steady in myself the felt sense of the quality or qualities I am bringing to the Light Bank, and there I meet its “Custodian,” the being who receives my “donation.” I can imagine this Custodian anyway I wish; again, I’m working with symbols here that connect my physical mind with the non-physical reality of the subtle and spiritual dimension. Standing with this Custodian, I visualize my package of energy, the felt sense of qualities I’m holding in my whole being, shifting from me to this representative of the Light Bank. If you are doing this, you can see this happening in any manner that gives you a felt sense of the reality of what you are doing. 

Once this sharing and exchange has taken place, I give thanks to the Custodian and to the Light Bank, affirming that it knows how to both magnify and distribute my blessing and contribution of energy to the city of Kiev, to its over-lighting angel, and to the people who are part of that city.

At this point, I let it all go, bringing my awareness fully back to my everyday self, my everyday life, and to my own wholeness and balance.

This is a simple example, one that, as I say, you can adapt however you find useful to yourself, should you wish to work with a Light Bank. In this context, I would also remind you that you can do this work with Light Banks connected to the Russian people. They are as much victims of this tragedy as the Ukrainians. Perhaps, if their Light, their resolve, their courage is empowered by subtle activism, they will find a way to bring balance and justice back to their country and peace to the world.

The important point about subtle activism is that it is rooted in the fact that we are all part of one world, which includes a shared ecology of spirit and energy. None of us is without the power to contribute to this shared world and help nudge it in directions of wholeness. We are all citizens of every country on earth, part of nature, part of Gaia. Subtle activism is a finger pointing to this reality as well as offering a way of acting from that connectedness for the blessing of all.

May all our Light Banks be filled to overflowing, their blessings advancing goodwill and peace on Earth.

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Editor's Note: Here are some of Lorian's resources on subtle activism if you would like to learn more:

Webinars and classes, including:

• Free webinar, March 10: Why Subtle Activism?

• March 17-30: Subtle Activism Card Deck: Making a Difference in the World

• Subtle Activism Self-Directed Study (scroll down the page to find it)

• Free webinar, March 31: Exploring Subtle Perception

• April 7-May 18: Subtle Energies I Standing Whole

(the latter class and webinar are not directly about subtle activism, but provide an excellent foundation for all subtle activism work)

Books and Card Decks, including:

• The Subtle Activism Card Deck and Manual

• The Wonder-Full World of the Home

• The Wonder-Full World of the Home: Second Story

The above book links lead to Amazon.com via Lorian’s affiliate link, which allows Lorian to receive a small commission on the sale at no extra cost to you. Most of the books are also available through Barnes and Noble online or can be ordered through your local bookstore.

Psychotherapy and Incarnational Spirituality: A Sketch

Psychology, which properly includes everything in the human mind and experience, can seem like the Blob from the old sci fi movie of that name. Psychology will absorb into itself whatever it encounters–from economics and cooking to astrology and energy healing. This is why therapists of all stripes keep adding stripes. We take courses and trainings and we keep learning and using new perspectives. If it’s good for humans, we’ll take it! And we’ll blend it into our work. So of course psychotherapists, like other healers, apply Incarnational Spirituality to the therapeutic situation.

As a psychologist in full time private practice, I have been enormously helped and inspired by I.S. But then (full disclosure) I met David in 1983 and my training in Clinical Psychology only began in 1986. I was already fruitfully challenged by several perspectives, including Anthroposophy, energy healing (Brugh Joy!) and Zen Buddhism, that would not be found in my psychological textbooks. I.S. has continued to enrich my own development personally; it informs how I co-create the therapeutic field with my patient; it gives content that I sometimes offer explicitly to the patient.

There are at least three distinctive features of I.S. that are of both theoretical interest and practical help in therapy: 1) the Living Environment, 2) the Self-Creating Self, and 3) the Instreaming of Improvisation.

1. Living Environment

Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Family Systems, as well as current movements like Internal Family Systems, Neurofeedback, EFT and EMDR, have little to say about the non-human surround. I.S. takes this surround very seriously, and directs us to the life within the man-made environment as well as the kingdoms and processes of nature. So it involves us in the earth, in the world, but not the world as understood by natural science alone.

The “life” of the I.S. living environment is the energetic life that is aware and intentional at various levels, and that is not necessarily co-extensive with the biological processes or even the physical presence of the elements of the earth. When English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott contemplated his death, he found himself praying, “Let me be alive when I die!” He meant a kind of life that includes consciousness even if the physical body is on its way out or gone altogether.

This elemental life of our surround can be felt quite directly and simply by many people, perhaps by everyone. It overlaps with the chi of Tai Chi, the energy of the chakras, elemental beings, and the sense children often have that there really is no inanimate matter. It can be derided as anthropomorphism or animism, but it is simply there, and I.S. offers exercises and perspectives that bring this ambient life to life for us.

It matters for therapy because, above all, it means that human beings are never as alone and alienated as the dominant physicalist, materialist perspective on the universe would have us believe. Becoming alert to the life in our immediate environment gives us an anchor and an interlocutor at all times, and a felt sense that life is something co-created between ourselves and a responsive surround. When we feel into what is going on around us, in the furniture, the plants, the air, the landscape, we can help to move the flow of events in a positive direction. The living universe is one in which we are active rather than passive, and activity is a key to health–even if it is the activity of slowing down, noticing and releasing mental habits, and smelling the roses. Well-being begins in participatory activity.

In our time, nature is threatened as never before, a process in which we are all victims and perpetrators. Climate anxiety now accompanies or underlies many of the issues patients face, and this is a trend that is on the rise. There is no one right way to respond to these anxieties in oneself or one’s patients. Yet when we become aware of the subtle life around us, we can collaborate with it in new and surprising ways that enhance the healing, wholeness, and creativity of the earth. This sensitivity to not-exclusively-biological life is part of our possible response to climate change issues as they grow ever more evident.

The living environment has a particular application in the therapeutic setting. An I.S.-informed practitioner is likely to work toward a healing and holding environment, an energetic chalice that promotes the therapeutic process. Also, this living environment of I.S. is tipped toward positivity and potential (an open system). It is good, while the patient may too often feel that existence itself is a closed and hostile system. Exercises like the Touch of Love, Innocence, and Soma to Aura, point the therapist, and may point the patient, toward this life-filled, life-giving direction.

Here’s an example.

Since COVID, I have conducted therapy sessions while walking in the woods near my home in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts. Sometimes patients walk with me. More often, I am walking alone and talking to the patient on my cell phone. But I am not alone. The woods around me are filled with life and presence. I greet this presence and am grateful for it. It helps me in what I say or how I listen to the patient. At times, I all but disappear and it feels as if it is the forest itself, or me-plus-forest, that is speaking with the patient on the other end of the line. Most patients appreciate it, and some get inspired to come and walk with me.

2. The Self-Creating Self

In most schools of psychology and even spirituality, there is either a self to be found or a supposed ultimate absence of self.

The self to be discovered in classical psychoanalysis and contemporary trauma theory tends to be a damaged and scarred self. A narrative of uncovering accompanies this idea of a broken person. Strangely enough, uncovering and over-asserting the broken persona is similar in structure to what happens in some spiritual orientations if they look to discover an eternal and glorious self. The common denominator is the idea that the self is already there, and we just have to go and find it. Or find it and put it through its paces to heal it.

In a slightly mis-understood Buddhism, slogans like “no self” (anatta) may suggest that there is no individual identity at all; there is no one ultimately at home; we are just karmic processes working their way out. This is close in structure to a completely physicalist take on human individuality as an illusion or an epiphenomenon from brain activity which operates according to physical laws.

But there is another way, a more radically empowering way. A different take on the idea of “anatta” or “no self” may point more in this direction, similar to what is suggested in I.S., and that is the self that creates itself.

If asked, “Who are you?” one good answer offered years ago by Georg Kuehlewind was, “I am the one speaking to you now.” This brings the speaker radically into the present possibilities of the moment, and foregrounds the speaker’s self-ownership in a world of meaning and relating.

On this view, you are the non-localized orchestrator of your current presence and activity on earth. You are that which, or the one who, aligns and harmonizes and extends your past, your ancestry, your body, your physical and energetic surround, your soul’s essence, your connections to humanity and nature, your future potentials.

There is something quite self-less about this self. To undertake exercises like Self-Light or Presence, even though they are all about “you,” is to move immediately away from the patterns of negativity and worry, in fact from all the patterns, by which we normally know ourselves to be the same person each day. Instead, we take ourselves in hand and begin.

Who we become in these practices has no fixed characteristics, but is the invoker and inventor of characteristics. Anything said of this self-performing self would be an underestimation. It is nothing less than the local face of the Generative Mystery itself.

I.S. exercises like Standing, Self-Light and Presence are occasions for this self to heft its capacity for self-manifestation. As we deepen our practice of creative inclusion in these and related exercises, we find there is in principle no upper limit: we can grow ever more and more actively present and engaged.

How refreshing this perspective is for patients (that is, all of us) who are caught in repetitive patterns, shame over who we imagine ourselves to be, and all too often a loss of any sense of home, identity, or agency.

Here’s an example.

A man whose schizophrenic mother had no time for him now has trouble with his narcissistic ex-wife who will not live up to the custody arrangements of his divorce. In her presence, as in his mother’s presence when he was little, he becomes paralyzed. He cannot think, can hardly move. He enters into a frozen state of being. We were walking together during his session one day, and I started to tell him about the principles of sovereignty and self-orchestration. We stopped and I guided us both through the Standing exercise. He felt the benefits immediately, took it up as a regular practice, and now can meet his ex with less in the way of “fight, flight or freeze.” He is coming into self-possession and self-direction. His career has taken off too!

3. Instreaming Improvisation

In a living environment, where we are capable of current self-performance, we naturally make ourselves available to needed intuitions. Rather than operating out of techniques and beliefs, we open to whoever and whatever might accompany us in our current situation.

For some, this takes the form of a dialogue with subtle colleagues and friends who may offer their own perspectives. Perhaps more generally available are simply ideas and fresh impulses that enhance one’s capacities.

The living world is continually radiant with its intuitions, its realities, its fields of possibilities. Normal awareness filters this incoming world so that we receive almost nothing of it. Yet all our understandings, all our perceptions, all our free actions, depend on our getting something of the available radiance. Sparks start to fly through every conversation between self and environment.

For the therapist as for the patient, health depends on some further opening to this possible world, the instreaming improvisations of which we are capable.

Freud and Breuer, in their groundbreaking Studies in Hysteria (1895), noted that “our hysterics suffer from reminiscences.” Today, we might say that “the body keeps the score,” or simply that mental and emotional trouble tends to be repetitive. There is something fixed about thoughts, emotions, body and behavior in any psychological problem. The antidote tends to be freshness, invention, some kind of news from beyond the apparently closed system of the mind. Through I.S.’s emphasis on a conversational world in which “God happens at the boundaries” between beings, we can have access to the right medicine for the given patient and moment.

Exercises that focus on our personal Pit Crew field or representative and on Alliance Space can open our minds and energies to the manna of the fleeting moment. It gives new life for the journey, but it can’t be stored! (Exodus 16:19) There is always collaboration and nourishment available, which sometimes seems to come from outside us, sometimes from inside us; sometimes from the intertwingling of these two.

Here is an example:

A patient with a terrible trauma history was caught in a dangerous and self-destructive spiral. She was self-harming in various ways. We were sitting by a lake outdoors (in my new style of walk-and-talk therapy), and I was in some distress about how to help her. Without any preconceived model for it, I suddenly got the idea to offer her the world to take care of. Together we pictured the whole earth, complete with its atmosphere and oceans, as a sphere about 5 feet in diameter floating between us. I suggested she draw it into her heart and care for it there. That was months ago, and she is still improving, no longer self-harming, and still taking care of that inner earth.

Fine as it is at times to have healing intuitions for our patients, it is also deeply gratifying when we see them have healing intuitions of their own that completely surprise us. This happens to many clinicians, I.S.-inspired or otherwise. For example, patients often come into a session grateful for the previous session, but it turns out what they appreciated in that previous session was not an idea from the therapist, but a new take on things that developed quite within themselves. It is a delight when patients experience themselves as sources: of insight, wisdom, love, and creative action in their world.

Patients come to psychotherapy for so many reasons, often having to do with habits of behavior or relationship, feeling or thinking, that they want to change. I.S. can help with these problems by shifting the perspective and placing the human being in a wider field of concern and interest. This wider field includes elements of the person–such as subtle energies–but more radically also elements of the whole world as a living and engaged collective. So a newly-understood human individual integrates into a newly-understood world. This work of harmonizing, integrating, and connecting–which is both to the benefit of the individual and of the world as a whole–tends to right-size personal troubles while also giving the patient new experiences of agency and fresh arenas for love.

David's Desk 177 Heartful

I was unloading the dishes this morning and practicing mindfulness as I did so. One benefit of mindfulness is that it draws your attention to the present moment. So often our thoughts go to the future or the past, and our awareness of the present gets squeezed and constricted between remembering and anticipating. Yet, it is in the present that we find our power. I cannot act in the future or in the past; the former has yet to materialize and exists only in imagination; the latter is over and exists in memory. It’s in the present that I can summon the wholeness of my being into action. Even as basic an action as simply being aware in the moment makes my surroundings and my presence in them come alive, opening possibilities that I might miss otherwise.

So, mindfulness is a powerful practice for marshalling our attentiveness and potentials in the present moment. Its usefulness is shown in how ubiquitous the teaching of mindfulness has become; it can be found in schools, institutions, corporations, even the military. In some ways, it is in danger of becoming a cliché. Being mindful is a powerful, even a life-changing tool; it would be a shame for it to become only a fad.

This morning, though, while unloading the dishes from the dishwasher, I reflected on the primacy that we give to mind, a bias left over from the Age of Reason in Western culture. Why not a practice of “bodyfulness” or “sensory-fullness?” Why not “heartfulness?” The body has its own form of attentiveness, as does the heart. 

Actually, we do have such practices. Professional athletes, dancers and martial artists, for instance, all develop a high kinesthetic awareness, a form of “bodyfulness,” which, like mindfulness, draws one’s attention to the present. 

I, however, am no athlete (whatever fantasies I may entertain!). If I were to describe my daily spiritual practice, though, it would not be mindfulness as much as “heartfulness.”

For me, mindfulness focuses on myself and my being aware and present in the moment. Heartfulness, though, focuses on the “other” and what I might add to their life or beingness in the moment. This “other” doesn’t need to be a living being. It can be an artifact as well. Incarnational Spirituality has an exercise called the “Touch of Love.” It’s very simple. You focus upon a source of love within you, which many people find located in their heart, and you draw the energy of that love, like drawing water from a well, into your body, down your arms, and into the fingers of your hand. Then, you touch something, visualizing that love flowing out from you as a generative source to bless whatever you are touching. 

It’s very much a heartfulness exercise, one that honors the life, the integrity, and the wellbeing of the object you are touching. It forms a connection of love in the moment, and I have found that where such a connection exists, the blessings are reciprocal. Beyond that, it reminds me as I do it that everything is alive at a subtle, energetic level; I am—we all are—a part of a living universe

The wonderful thing is that we can “touch” the world around us in more than just physical ways. The “touch of love” can be through our eyes in the way we see, acknowledge, and appreciate something or someone. It can be through our ears as we appreciate the sounds we hear and the sources from which the sounds come. It can even be through our thoughts and imagination as well, which is where mindfulness and heartfulness can merge and reinforce each other.

Mindfulness makes me aware of the moment. Heartfulness makes me aware that I am part of a living community all around me, one with which I can commune and relate, especially through love. This morning, as I took each dish, each piece of cutlery, each utensil out of the dishwasher, I could let my appreciation and blessing for that object flow through my fingers. After all, whatever it looks like on the surface—whether a plate, a bowl, a fork, a pan—it is always a manifestation of the Sacred, an expression of the One Life that permeates all things. How could I not be heartful with it? We are kin on the long journey of evolution; we are participants in the manifestation of a universe.

So much of what divides us at the moment and generates conflict exists on the level of concepts, ideas, and perceptions. They are conflicts of the mind, of misinformation, of “fake news,” of propaganda and deceit. Perhaps in heartfulness we can find the bridges over the chasms that thoughts are creating.

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!]

David's Desk 176

In my last David’s Desk, I offered a prayer for December as we entered the Holiday season and its celebrations of Light. I wish to do the same for January as we enter a new year, filled with possibilities, with challenges, with needs, and with hope.

May this be my prayer each day of this New Year:

May I appreciate this day the presence of love in my world.
May my actions increase this presence.

May I appreciate this day the value of my life and my power to make a positive difference in the lives of others.
May I act with this power.

May I appreciate this day the wonder of the world and all its life.
May my actions serve the wellbeing of this life.

May I appreciate this day Humanity’s efforts to unfold a global awareness that brings peace and nurture to the Earth.
May my actions support this unfoldment.

May the Light of my Soul be present to me this day, and through me, to all whom I meet.

May I make this day a chalice to hold and share the blessings seeking to manifest in my world.

May I make this day a seed of Hope.

Celebrating A Gaian Festival of Light and Wholeness

Freya: “Think like a planet” is a phrase my colleague, David Spangler, used once in an early online class. It was a phrase that struck me: how could one think like a planet, and what would that mean? Intrigued by the thought, I have tried to live into the idea in different ways. Some attempts were too grandiose and caught in mental constructs that lost connection to the soil of experience that could nurture. Some were too tight and gave little scope for expanding possibilities. Feeling my way to that Goldilocks zone of “just right,” I find participation is my key to thinking like a planet.

Lucinda: In my years of celebrating seasonal festivals with families and communities, I learned, not only to “think like a planet,” but to be with the planet, to breathe with the planet, by aligning my daily life with the earth’s seasonal cycles and rhythms in nature, and in the land where I lived. Now, my body, heart and soul naturally participate, as Freya says, with the planet. In celebrating the festival gateways of the year with others, and in communion with the seen and unseen realms of life, we come to know Gaia as a living breathing being, one whose inhaling and exhaling breath creates the seasons of our lives, both physically and spiritually. The festival gateways–especially the Solstices and Equinoxes, celebrated by all cultures–become invitations and opportunities for us to remember our place, and our steps in Gaia’s dance.

Freya: Gaia’s essential being is reflected in the seasons, revealing itself in a seed as it sprouts and grows, flowering, and dying back so that its seeds can scatter to the wind to renew its life. Celebrating the seasons of the year is a natural and accessible way to appreciate, to align with and to participate in the planet’s life. Through the earth’s yearly rhythms, we touch the depths, heights and breadth of Gaia’s soul-in-action. The seasonal regenerative rhythms of earth’s life are the energy that powers our world’s thinking.

So, to think like a planet, with its global life cycles of expansion and contraction, we need to acknowledge and work with the reality of Wholeness–that the earth is always mirroring and balancing the cycles of life and death, increasing and decreasing light. When we are celebrating the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, folks in the summer hemisphere are celebrating the Summer Solstice. Both are Festivals of Light. So how can we create a Gaian Festival of Light, one that celebrates this balance of forces, this mirroring and Wholeness at the heart of our planet’s experience?

Lucinda: It is helpful to live into an experience of Gaia’s Breath as a way of exploring Gaian and planetary ways of celebrating the Solstices and the Equinoxes. Gaia’s Breath can be seen as a unifying force that weaves the world together. In December, in the northern hemisphere, Gaia is breathing in. As that breath contracts, the leaves fall from the trees, the seeds drop into her waiting hands, the days grow colder, and the darkness deepens. The Winter Solstice marks the time of Gaia’s greatest in-breath and her time of attentive listening and awakening, in the deep stillness, in the close and holy darkness time of the year. Gaia wakes up, as the Sun “stands still.” (Solstice means the Sun “Sol” standing still).

In the southern hemisphere, the Summer Solstice marks Gaia’s greatest out-breath. As Gaia breathes out through the spring and early summer days, the life force of her breath buds out the branches, raises the sap, brings blossom and flowers into being. And at Summer Solstice, Gaia once again pauses, stands still ( metaphorically) with the Sun. Some say that at this point, the earth falls into slumber, weary after all her work of creation, and that the abundant beauty and richness of the harvest are the earth’s dreams made manifest.

These two pictures of Gaia’s breath bring our experience of the two Solstice festivals into a mirrored alignment, a Wholeness we can celebrate together.

Freya and Lucinda: This December, in honor of both the Winter and Summer Solstices, we invite you to consider creating a Spiral of Light that you and your family and friends can use in a ritual and meaningful way. The Spiral is a well-known and beloved ritual for honoring Winter Festivals in the northern hemisphere. We thought that if folks in the southern hemisphere also created a Spiral of Light, in honor of the Summer Solstice, and people from both hemispheres walked their spirals at the same time–walking into the Darkness for Winter, and out of the Light for Summer–we would be mirroring the Earth’s breath and rhythms, and weaving ourselves together in celebration.

Room-size or table-top, or created outside in our garden, the spirals we create can be gifts to our homes, and to our land and environment. They can serve as a sacred focal point–an invitation to our local nature spirits, house angels, genius loci of land, unseen allies and companions to join us in celebration of our Gaian home.

So please consider joining us, in whatever ways feel right to you, this holiday season. We will be “thinking like, breathing with, being part of our beloved planet Gaia.” We will be “celebrating like a planet,“ forging a new Gaian Festival of Light and Wholeness together.

David's Desk 175 The Presence of Light

This is the month when, in one form or another, we celebrate Light: its presence, its return, its wonder, and its miracles in our lives. My “Desk” this month comes in the form of a prayer on all our behalf.

May we know the Light that is eternally within us.
May we be that Light to the world.
May we know the Light within all the life around us.
May we serve that Light that all may thrive.
May we know the Light that yet seeks to unfold.
May we be its unfolding that our tomorrows may be blessed.
May Light be Present in who we are, where we are, and in all that we do.
May we celebrate the Presence of Light.

However you celebrate this December, may your life be enriched with blessing and with joy. I will see you again in 2022. A Happy New Year to you!

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!

David's Desk 174 Changing the Game

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

When I was ten years old, I read Homer’s Odyssey (not, I assure you, in the original Greek!). I was enthralled with the whole story of the siege of Troy, the actions of heroes like Achilles, Hector, Ajax, and Ulysses, and the interventions of gods and goddesses. What a tale to fire my imagination! I immediately set about to translate it into a board game so that I could play out the story. It took me a couple of months, but eventually I had a full-fledged board game with rules that only I could understand and play, which nevertheless brought me hours of enjoyment. I was a strange kid!

This began a life-long love of board games. Not just the “family classics” like Monopoly, Clue, The Game of Life, and Careers. In the Fifties, an obscure board game publisher named Avalon Hill produce a line of historical war games in which you could play a famous battle, like Gettysburg, and, in the words of the publisher, “attempt to change history!” I was well and truly hooked.  

Avalon Hill was the first of many small, independent game publishers that made up what came to be called the “adventure game hobby.” These companies produced board games that allowed the players to be famous generals from history, run your own multinational corporation, lead an expedition to an unknown planet, or delve deep into an ancient dungeon filled with gold…and monsters. They were all a feast for the imagination.

They also tended to have long, complex rule books, which I loved. In my geeky mind, there was nothing like curling up with a sixty-page rule book! Obviously, this was a hobby for nerds, and when national board game conventions came into existence, there were thousands of us!

For years, nearly all these boardgames were competitive with winners (usually just one) and losers.

Recently, though, there has been a change in the industry. New generations of gamers (including my own children) are enjoying board games that encourage or even require cooperation rather than competition. Either everyone wins or everyone loses. These games not only present compelling challenges to be met and dealt with. They also give players the fun of discovering how to work as a team and of overcoming obstacles together.  

The cooperative mode has become so popular among many gamers that now many new board games are designed to allow for cooperative, as well as competitive, play. Many games are entirely cooperative. This is a huge change from the games of my youth.

I think about this when I think about the climate crisis and generally about the various social and economic crises that humanity is facing. For millennia, we have been playing competitive games with each other and with nature. Winning, often called “survival of the fittest,” is everything. We are seeing the consequences of this in our world today.

One of my friends from the Lindisfarne Association was the microbiologist Lynn Margulis. One of her seminal discoveries in her research with single-celled organisms was the vital role symbiosis plays in evolution. As it turns out, it is cooperation, not competition, that gives the greatest advantage in evolutionary survival and advancement.

This is a truth well-known to our indigenous ancestors who saw us as a part of nature, not as a competitor against nature. It’s a truth that the climate crisis and other environmental and ecological crises is forcing modern humanity to remember.

What we are discovering is that it never was really a competitive game. It has always been fundamentally a cooperative game. Ignoring this is now threatening us with species survival, which would make us all the biggest losers ever.

When I listen to the news and look out at the world, what is evident to my gamer’s sensibility is that many haven’t realized that rules have changed. They are still acting, still legislating, still behaving in politics and economics as if competition and winning were the way the game is played.  But many others have realized or are discovering that, living on planet Earth, we are in a different game and now need to play in cooperative mode.

It’s not and never has been the game our society taught us to play. It’s past time to learn new rules.

---

An Apology

In my last David’s Desk, I quoted from an email that my friend Patrick S. Wolfe sent me. Here is what I said:

“I want to close this essay with some thoughts shared with me by another friend, Patrick S. Wolfe, a writer living in Canada.  Over the years, he has taken part in several of my online classes and forums, and he always has good, wise thoughts to contribute. After taking part in a recent online forum focusing on how we can meet the future, he sent me these comments in an email. I could not have said this better.

May all who can, open to the qualities of fiery hope, peace, joy, and love, and to the potential and energy of the new civilization unfolding around us.  May love, not fear, hope, not despair, joy, not distress, compassion, not anger or hate, enfold each of us in safety, protection, and courage.  May we have the will to do what is available to us to bring the new civilization into being.  May my strength, my calm, my courage, my joy, my love empower at least one other person to join in this enterprise and become a source of vision and new life.

Be peacefully urgent and aware, open to engage with love and power with what the world brings to your doorstep.”

As it turns out, I may not have been able to say this better, but in fact, I did say it, translating something one of my subtle colleagues had said.  The challenge is that when I receive a communication from a non-physical source in the spiritual realms, it is rarely in words. It is a direct transmission of meaning through a blend of telepathy, the sharing of thoughts, and telempathy, the sharing of feeling. I then supply the words so I can put it on paper or share it with another. After doing so, however, I often forget the actual words I’ve written, though I always can remember the actual energetic transmission itself. That, for me, is where the meaning is, not in the words themselves.

For this reason, when Patrick sent me this quote, I didn’t recognize it as something I’d written but went ahead and shared it with you as something he had said. Patrick immediately let me know, wondering humorously if I were setting him up for a charge of plagiarism, making it seem as if he were laying claim to the authorship of my words. It was an inadvertent mistake on my part, a quirk and consequence of “trans-dimensional” communication and a seventy-six year old memory, for which I take full responsibility. You’re off the hook, Patrick, my friend, and I do apologize for any inconvenience my mistake may have caused.

Being a Commoner

Historically, a Commons was usually a piece of land shared and used by a community, such as a meadow for grazing animals. No single person owned the land, and the community as a whole—or a group within it—took responsibility for its care. The well-being of the Commons benefitted everyone, while conversely, damage to or the destruction of the Commons lessened or injured everyone. In time, the term came to mean any resource shared by a group for the benefit of the whole rather than just for the benefit of an individual.

It has become increasingly evident that all our lives are affected by the health of the Earth, and that we prosper or suffer as it prospers or suffers. For this reason, the Earth itself is now seen as our planetary Commons. All of us are being called to attend to its welfare and well-being.

Some years ago, I had an experience of being contacted by a subtle being whose work, as far as I could understand it, involved tending to and supporting all the non-physical life and subtle forces within a localized energy field that included my neighborhood. This being had made itself known to me on other occasions, but only briefly, as if to just say hello. This time, our interaction together was much deeper and more involved than before. He (for it appeared to me as a young man) reached out and blended his consciousness and energy field with my own. The effect of this was to enable me to perceive through his eyes. Like most other subtle beings I’ve experienced over the years, he had a 360° perception, seeing in all directions around him, which was disconcerting at first to my mind accustomed only to a forward-facing field of vision. There was nothing in his immediate environment of which he was not aware.

As a consequence, I found my own consciousness flooded with impressions and information which at first, I couldn’t sort out.  Too much was going on all at once! However, my subtle friend did something which reduced the amount of input I was receiving—in effect, turning down the visual volume—which made it easier to see what it was he wanted me to see. What then became clear were a large number of subtle beings, all of whom were working within the energy field of which he was a custodian. A few of them I recognized as nature spirits whom I had seen before, but the majority were unknown to me. I suppose the physical analogy would be as if I were seeing all the various microorganisms within a drop of lake water or a cubic inch of soil–a multitude of species.  It was a complex community of subtle organisms, all embodying and working with Light and with currents of energy manifesting as different colors.

What stood out, though—and I quickly realized that this was what my visitor wanted me to see—were the relationships existing between all these subtle beings. In addition to whatever work they were doing with the fields of life and energy within and around the various physical elements of my neighborhood environment, there were lines of Light connecting all these beings in a dynamic web of love, mutual empowerment and support. I could see that each of these different subtle organisms was drawing upon and drawing out the Light, the sacredness, within each other, weaving and adding it to the other subtle forces with which they were working.  

This experience didn’t last long. Frankly, while it was exhilarating and even ecstatic to feel all the love and Light being generated, it was also exhausting trying to hold in my mind and sort through all that was happening. Once he was clear that I had seen and understood what he was showing me, he withdrew his energy field, allowing me to return to my natural state of awareness and perception. Then, making certain I was OK, he gave a blessing and disappeared.

Reflecting on this experience and on the way that these different species of subtle life connected to each other and enhanced each other to maximize the Light that was being generated, I realized that the image and word that came to mind as best describing this phenomenon was a Commons. In effect, they were treating each other as a valuable resource: a shared source of sacredness. The loving and mutually supportive relationships they had together were themselves the substance of a subtle Commons.

It can take me some time to fully digest and assimilate experiences like this. Sometimes, upon further reflection, my initial interpretations turn out to be limited or even in error. But in this case, the impression of a living subtle Commons operating within the non-physical environment around me not only remained clear and unchanging but was even reinforced by subsequent perceptions when I deliberately sought to tune into this phenomenon.

One of the ubiquitous experiences I have had for my entire life when tuning into the subtle environment has been that of love.  The presence of love is everywhere around us as a fundamental connecting, unifying, blessing, and holopoietic(“wholeness-creating”) force. But this perception of a subtle Commons gave even more substance to this presence. The love wasn’t just an abstract, mystical force descending upon the earth from some higher, Sacred realm. It was a force being actively generated as a resource by the way subtle beings related to each other. They were enabling each other to be sources for sacredness, sources of love and blessing. They were seeing and tending to each other as if collectively they were a Commons.

There is no question that creating this kind of “relational Commons” can come naturally to subtle beings with their capacity to form connections and to blend energy and consciousness with each other. If this were a phenomenon only possible in the non-physical dimensions of the Earth, then seeing and knowing it would add to our knowledge of how the subtle environment functions but would have little relevance to our incarnate lives here in the physical world. But the message of my visitor that day wasn’t to say, “Look! This is what we can do!” He was saying, “You have a subtle dimension as well as a physical one, therefore this subtle Commons is for you, too. It’s not just something we can do.  It’s something you can do, too. It’s something Life does!”

This subtle Commons enfolds the incarnate, physical world. It is all around us. It’s something that we can participate in. What my visitor showed me simply expands upon the emerging idea of our world as a planetary Commons we all share, extending its “Common-ness” into the subtle realms as well, making it a “Gaian Commons.”

The ecological perspective of our world affirms how all life, including human life, is interconnected and interdependent. This is a reality of our physical life, one we have been ignoring to our peril and one which we must now rediscover and to which we must adhere if we are to survive, much less thrive. But we are more than just physical beings. We are energetic fields of life, subtle beings, as well. This makes the subtle Commons as much part of our home as the ecology of the physical world.

The main difference is that we cannot help being part of the physical ecology of Earth, but we can avoid (and have been avoiding) being part of the subtle ecology as well, part of the subtle Commons. Because the latter is based on loving relationships, we can choose not to enter into such relationships.  We have the privilege of experiencing a private world—a laboratory—of separated individuality. There are valuable things we can learn and capacities we can develop in such a laboratory, otherwise the incarnate physical experience would not exist. We, with the help of many formative beings, including Gaia, the World Soul, itself, are creating this physical world—or at least the human aspects of it—in order to provide specialized conditions for growth and service. But the challenge of this experiment is that we can turn our “laboratories of privacy and individuality” into fortresses of separation and isolation. Rather than supporting and empowering each other, we can choose to actively diminish and disempower each other. We can choose attitudes and behaviors that destroy our Commons rather than cherishing and enhancing them. Those attitudes and behaviors are now bringing us to the brink of catastrophe.

Understanding that this subtle Commons, based on love and mutuality, exists can provide an emphasis on fostering in our physical world the same kind of relationships. We can extend the promise and power of the subtle Commons into our lives, making our world a true Gaian Commons. We know how to do this in our own way; as a species, we have just lacked the intention and vision to do so. Hopefully, the idea of the subtle Commons will inspire us to use our innate abilities to love, to connect, and to create wholeness to bring this Commons down to earth.

This is the theme of the upcoming 2021 Lorian online Summit, Friday, October 22, to Sunday, October 24: “Co-Creating a Gaian Commons in our Sacred World.” In it, we will explore how the presence of the subtle Commons is meaningful and relevant as we engage with the future that is unfolding. The idea of a planetary Commons can give us tools for shaping that future because the life and spirit of that Commons is already within us. We ARE the Commons, for we are part of this planet, part of Gaia. It’s now a matter of acknowledging that this is so and acting accordingly.

The message of the Commons is simple: we are each a source of sacredness, a resource of love that when tapped and expressed becomes a shared field of energy that can nourish us all. We can each become a “Commoner.” In so doing, we will be better able to find the skills, the tools, the will, and the love to bless each other and our world.

May it be so!

David's Desk 173 Climate Crisis

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

I decided some years ago that in David’s Desk, I would not try to “chase the headlines,” as they say. I would not comment on current events in the world. This was not due to a lack of interest or concern but from feeling that there were already many skilled and knowledgeable people writing essays, blogs, reports, and commentaries calling our collective attention, almost daily, to the problems and challenges our world is facing. I felt that my best contribution would be to focus upon and write about the inner journey, as I say in my preamble above. That is where my strengths and my knowledge lie. Given that all things are interconnected, I felt that success in our spiritual lives could not help but reverberate outwards and benefit our positive efforts to meet these challenges. 

However, our spiritual, our psychological, and our physical lives are intimately interconnected within us and to the environments in which we live and work. If we lack wholeness within ourselves, this will affect the wholeness of our environment, and vice versa. We cannot separate ourselves from the Earth. We are, in a way, one entangled, interdependent, interconnected organism, a planetary life within which every person, every plant, every animal, every stone and river, mountain and ocean, prairie and desert has value and meaning.

I talk about this all the time in my classes, but I have not done so here in this monthly essay. Now, I am. Every voice is needed to shout out, cry out, sing out, say out that it is time to change how we live upon this world and with the life that surrounds us. The world needs us, Life needs us, WE all need us to say “Stop!” to the habits of “business as usual” that are feeding the intensity of the climate crisis. The fate of our civilization—perhaps even the fate of our species—hangs in the balance. 

One of my very good friends is Vance Martin, the President of WILD. He and his organization are doing important work on behalf of the Earth and the non-human species that share this planet with us; if you would like to know more, their website is www.wild.org. Vance and I met at Findhorn back in the Seventies, and I’ve watched his work with growing admiration as the years have passed.

Vance recently began a blog, to which you can subscribe by going to WILD’s website. I was moved by what he had to say about the climate crisis—he is definitely one of the experts in this field—and I received his permission to quote a relevant passage here:

“We will not escape the consequences of human actions…the natural world that supports us has laws not feelings…but there is much we can do to avoid catastrophe. Everything helps: nothing is too small. But some things matter more than others.

1. Be politically active at every level—demand and create enlightened leadership.

2. Be financially active at every level – demand and create responsible business and finances.

3. Be a personal demonstration – make the changes in your own consumerism, travel and food that makes a difference.

“All of the above are important. But even more important is how you/we respond with each other to this crisis. Danger, emergency, and threats can drive us inwards, defending and isolating ourselves from others as a matter of what we perceive as self-preservation. That is not the answer and, in fact, will only worsen the negative impacts of our situation. This is the time to reach out, not in; to integrate, not polarize; to be sharing, not selfish; and wisely loving, not negatively suspicious. More than anything be hopeful, not hopeless. And don’t forget that your sense of humor is a great ally!  In short, be the best possible person you can be.”

To Vance’s list, I would add a fourth action that we can take:  Be spiritually, psychologically, and physically active to foster and maintain inner wholeness—acting as a whole person helps create wholeness in our world.  

Vance implies this, but I wish to make it explicit. The time is long passed when we can imagine a divide between being spiritually responsible for the state of one’s consciousness and being and being an activist taking responsibility for the state of one’s planet. The distinction and boundary between our inner and outer worlds simply is not there. We cannot foster a whole world if we are divided in ourselves. We cannot walk our spiritual journey divorced from the physical well-being and wholeness of each other and of our world. It is a shared path, a mutually dependent path.

From this perspective, the climate crisis can be seen as involving both the outer climate of the planet and the inner climate of our minds and hearts. As wildfires are raging in the world, so also anger and hatred are raging in our inner lives. As floods are swamping the land, so also fear swamps our inner stability. It’s not a matter of dealing with one or the other but rising to deal with both. The wholeness of the world is not divided between human and non-human, organic and inorganic, the spiritual and the material; it is one world sharing one future.

We may not know what to do to help with the outer manifestations of the climate crisis, though there are certainly many sources now available to give us that information, such as Vance has done in his blog and continues to do through WILD. One of the newest, and to my mind, one of the best, is Paul Hawken’s new book, Regeneration. It is a clear statement of practical actions anyone can take to, in the subtitle of the book, “end the climate crisis in one generation.”

But as Paul and many others, like Vance and like I am doing here, are pointing out, what we are facing is as much a crisis of consciousness as of climate. It is a crisis of who we believe we are, a crisis of changing to be the kind of humanity the planet needs us to become. In this area where we face the inner manifestations of the climate crisis, none of us is powerless. Here we can do something to learn, to grow, to change. In the process, we also discover how to act in ways that will build a new world with a new way of being human within it.

I want to close this essay with some thoughts shared with me by another friend, Patrick S. Wolfe, a writer living in Canada.  Over the years, he has taken part in several of my online classes and forums, and he always has good, wise thoughts to contribute. After taking part in a recent online forum focusing on how we can meet the future, he sent me these comments in an email. I could not have said this better.

“May all who can, open to the qualities of fiery hope, peace, joy, and love, and to the potential and energy of the new civilization unfolding around us. May love, not fear, hope, not despair, joy, not distress, compassion, not anger or hate, enfold each of us in safety, protection, and courage. May we have the will to do what is available to us to bring the new civilization into being. May my strength, my calm, my courage, my joy, my love empower at least one other person to join in this enterprise and become a source of vision and new life.

Be peacefully urgent and aware, open to engage with love and power with what the world brings to your doorstep.”

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)