it is a miracle to me
that meeting what is
in each moment
with love and acceptance
brings me to
open tenderness
and freedom
rage felt and embraced
this morning
delivers me to
happiness and ease
in the afternoon
ahhhh…
everything
is always
inviting
everyone to be
f r e e
“The scariest places to say ‘yes… and’ are also the most rewarding—relationship.
Whoever you choose…, your partner will make you see more about yourself than any navel gazing and solitude could ever reveal. And if the process isn’t totally horrifying and frustrating, then you’re just not doing it right.
This will be your most vulnerable place. Your partner will inevitably see your soft underbelly. Shocking behaviors you have only read about will start to become your own. Your demon will rise up righteously to destroy your relationship in the guise of saving yourself from really seeing your self. And your partner will say to you with all the tenderness the situation allows…. “What the f***!?”
You will want to break up with your SELF.
Don’t be afraid of this horrible version of yourself. Face it. Embrace it. Coddle it. Write it a poem. Maybe it just needs a hug. Shine the light of day on this part of you. Unclaimed and unacknowledged, it’s got the power and it’s darkest forces will have you enslaved. Accept its influence. Mine it for its gold. Yup, sometimes saying ‘yes… and’ is going to take everything you’ve got. But the payoff, trusting in love, is just incredible.”
~ Jane Lynch, Smith College commencement speech
Aham Prema
I am love.
Ocean of compassion, fill me with love.
i am noticing
and lingering
in the ease
that arises from
accepting
everything
and everyone
as it is
as they are
a gentleness
and gratitude
and appreciation
for the mosaic
of our wild
humanity
nothing wrong
no-one wrong
no thing to fix
just be present
with
appreciate
embrace
allow
let be
let free
let live
all well
i wonder
what can
be created
from this
ease
where i am
for nothing
against nothing
just being
nothing
a smile finds my face
i love so much
this love
this love
is a strange love
a 10,000 things
love
an enduring love
a true love
is it so
that the one
i love is
everywhere?
p.s. congratulations darling, i celebrate you today
and all that is being birthed through your fireheart!
I’ve seen too much of my own darkness and division now to judge another. Dear God, keep my heart and mind focused on love, acceptance and compassion for myself and for all beings. Guide my vision to my wholeness and integrity and away from assessing and judging others. Expand this experience of unconditional acceptance and love that is growing from the seed of my own heartbreak, vulnerability and this deep acceptance of the shame, grief and rage that is making itself known to me. It is my heart’s desire to love well. Amen.
There is a path to love among the ruins.
The Alchemy of Relating: Expanding the Cauldron, By Randall Alford
If you haven’t yet read Tom Kenyon’s article called “The Alchemy of Relationship” — http://tomkenyon.com/alchemyofrelationship – it’s worth the effort. My wife and I, after reading this years ago, had a conversation about why we are in this relationship (our own) … and what it is that drives us to seek any kind of connection through other forms of relating. Basically, Kenyon’s article nails the “this relationship” piece. It echoes (very eloquently) the themes that emerged for us.
But the broader piece about relating with others (with levels of intimacy and connection that most people judge as inappropriate or even unwise) … well, that takes us into levels of alchemy this particular article doesn’t address. In my case, this impulse currently expresses through the more conscious exploration of sexual and healing energies, and seeking to more fully cultivate the resource that those energies represent within and between all of us.
Ships are for Sailing
The common thread is this: It takes courage to “voluntarily put ourselves back in the foundry.” Not just courage – a capacity for enduring transformative pain for the “gold” of some newly minted awareness or insight or resource.
Most people look at relationship as a way to create safe harbor. A place to restore, renew, and find shelter. And that it is. But if we stop there (which all of us have at least some inclination to do – to treat it as a place to avoid pain!) this would be like stopping with only “two of the three elements needed for alchemy.” And as that one famous poem asserts: “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are for.”
My partner and I are always grappling with the reality that “Sacred Relationship is not for everyone.” While we are clear that the possibilities for Sacred Relationship need not be so narrowly defined as they tend to be by our more habitual, ego- and fear-driven preferences, we are also clear that most people consider us nuts (or even dangerous) for supposing that anyone who has “safe harbor” should ever venture out of it … or suggesting that anyone who has not yet created it should “waste their time” taking an entirely new tack into yet another uncharted sea.
Elegance and Abundance
The human mind prefers simplicity, yet the abundance of life speaks of an elegant complexity. The human mind tends to resist abundance until it discerns (“understands”) the underlying elegance, and expands accordingly. This one way to describe human progress, and it reflects a great quote from Henry Miller: “Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood.”
When two human souls relate, it is never simple … and it is always simple. The challenge is to open to the opportunity at least long enough for the complexities to reveal their elegance and crystallize into their essential simplicities. Sometimes, the simplicity is: “Yes, this heals, this affirms.” Sometimes it resolves into: “No, not this … move away.” Sometimes, the complexities never seem to resolve into any kind of elegance because, while there is no toxicity involved, neither is there any underlying appropriateness, any organizing affirmation. This may be life’s way of telling us, “This just isn’t about you. Your path is simply elsewhere.” Not good/bad, right/wrong, nourishing/toxic … just not relevant!
Another key distinction? Simplicities are of the moment … and eternal. The “Yes, this heals, this affirms” is not an answer that you can take to the bank and horde away. It could dissolve in the next breath. Likewise, the “No, not this …” can turn on its head in an instant. And once any aspect of life is truly healed and affirmed, it is forever healed and affirmed. The instance, the appearance of the situation may totally change, but the gifting remains.
When “yes” turns to “no” or vice-versa, nothing is undone. It is simply a new revelation, the next unfoldment.
Again, the human mind experiences such reversals as “complexity” and resists … yet in the long, graceful arch of time, they too are a part of an elegance – and abundance – that sustains life and nurtures our ultimate Divine connection.
Honesty and Respect
I believe that any relating that is undertaken with honesty and a deep respect for the soul of the Self and the Other is sacred and appropriate. Of course, the ways of the ego are such that honesty and respect can be mimicked – even (especially) deceiving the (less conscious) self. If those things are at any moment revealed to be artificial, the choice must be made: do I honor the sacredness of this connection by speaking my deeper truth, or do I dishonor it in a vain attempt to maintain the pretense?
While “collective consciousness” may bemoan it, I believe we, as a society, are getting better at honoring the sacred seed in each relationship by being less willing to invest in pretense. Divorce may sometimes be an unconscious lapse into nihilistic behavior … but it may at other times reflect a very legitimate, conscious and responsible affirmation of the sacred call for growth.
Society expects that relationships be appropriate. But “appropriateness” is not a product of meeting some socially-condoned recipe for proper relating … it is an expression of honesty and respect.
Religious and spiritual communities expect that relationships be sacred. But again, “sacredness” is not a product of some lofty, spiritual intention … it is an expression of honesty and respect.
So sacredness – like sex, like life itself – is both lofty and mundane. It has no meaning and significance … and every meaning and significance. It is treated, simultaneously, as too important … and not important enough.
The question remains, why would any rational, self-interested human being ever invite the pain of transformation through relatedness? Well, I suppose the honest answer to that is never!
Thankfully, we are not as rational as we might usually pretend, nor are we as fully self-interested as we might fear to confess.
Relatedness or Relationship?
Most people make that first, tentative and irrational step forward into the field of possibility predicated on one condition: that it at least possibly result in the creation of a Relationship (with a capital “R”). In other words, they risk the journey on the promise (hope) of the destination. Even people who invoke the New Age mantra of “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” get caught up in this one quite understandable “exception.”
The good news? It keeps us moving. The not-so-good news? Once we think we’ve “found it,” we drop anchor and set about domesticating the beast … and it cannot really survive that approach, for long. (Although we might succeed in maintaining appearances, like keeping Snow White under glass …)
This is why I have shifted to a focus on relatedness over relationship. The one speaks of the present moment, the other of the past and future. The one is based on reality (the “suchness” of the current experience), the other on expectation (preference, control, and the illusion of permanence).
One of my teachers, Shantam Nityama, once joked about how some thing called a “relation-SHIP” is usually valued over the crew that is on board that ship! More time, energy, and resource is spent trying to keep a leaky vessel afloat than is spent seeing to the true needs (physical, spiritual, emotional) of the more precious cargo – the people involved. As a result, that which is no longer appropriate (the “thing” perpetuated between people) takes the life, energy, and possibility out of that which is always appropriate (the people themselves). In a most inappropriate manner!
A Simple Namaste
Time and again, I return to the simple and touching truth contained in the Sanskrit word Namaste. While there are many translations and interpretations of the word, the one that has always resonated for me is: “The divine in me greets the divine in you.”
What better way to set the context for relating? It is an acknowledgement of the sacred reality as well as the sacred potentialities that exist in each of us. It alerts us to the importance of being honoring, respectful, and attuned to the moment, which is where the divine resides.
When the God/Goddess in me truly greets the God/Goddess in you, no mere mortal can pretend to predict, control, or manipulate the outcome of such a meeting. And even more wondrous is the ever dawning awareness: there is no need to!
Jung believed that soul and image are one and the same and that they exist as a mediating factor between body and mind. As a mediating factor, soul/image enables an integration of body and mind, which have been separated in dualistic consciousness most dramatically since Descartes, though the split goes back even further. So the soul/image can make us whole again. It heals and restores us. Corbin went further to say that images are the thoughts of the heart and that the heart is the seat of the imagination, which is the authentic voice of the heart. So to speak from the heart is to speak imaginatively. As the English poet John Keats said, “I am certain about nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.”
