Sometimes in your day you may reach an impasse. It is a place you cannot go through. You are unable to function with any accustomed ease or smoothness. The order and sequence in your daytime schedule, anticipated or improvised, flounders. Panicky feelings of purposelessness begin to circle above you, vulture-like. You may resort to futility, to some superficial task but its meaning is paper-thin. You try a drink, tea or coffee;  you invent some pressing task but it is not really pressing or worse you find you haven't the materials to do it. You begin to feel like a mouse on a wheel and there is a strange ennui that draws you down into some forgotten darkness.

When this or something like this happens our every impulse is to flee, avoid, or otherwise change the situation. Don't! Stay in it. Allow yourself to feel the edges of your constraint. The limitations of your circumstances. Allow experience, although it may be unpleasant, unnerving, almost intolerable.

The key word here of course is almost. Almost intolerable is not the same as intolerable. If you can find the inner strength to bear the conditions that take you to your edge, you may discover great sources of insight. This is not suffering for suffering's sake! On the contrary it may be the very cutting-edge of breakthrough. By staying in, rather than opting out, you face the limits of yourself.

You may witness with great clarity the power of mind, for example. What is happening as distinct from what are you thinking, interpreting, and criticizing, and therefore bringing into being. You may become aware of your attachment to the outcome of your actions. Rather than performing actions in vibrancy and presence you may see that your mind always throws you ahead to some desired outcome.

It may be more serious. Perhaps the impasse is calling you to look more deeply into your life. How it is structured, the priorities you give it, the purpose and outcomes you have assumed. The impasse then can be a call for you to make deep changes in your life.

So next time you reach an impasse, don't shy away from the discomfort, the challenge, the opportunity. Instead, seize it and be open, ready, and available to receive its gifts of wisdom, encouragement, and blessing in your life.

BLOG entry #20

Just for fun, let's begin this week's BLOG with the words that we ended last week's with! We will come back to them.

As a small boy I would lie in bed under the covers and feel the terror of death. I had little in the way of images or guidance other than the Biblical passages that seem to have introduced so much debilitating dread into so many childhoods:

This New Testament description of the torments of the damned in Hell was clearly meant for me (I thought as a little boy). When the scripture goes on to reveal the gloating of saints and the chosen over us, the sinners, as we are cast down into eternal suffering, I couldn't but think I would never be one of the chosen but rather one of the damned. After all, schooldays were full of humiliation, punishment, unfairness, injustice, guilt, blame, and competition. From the sports field to the exam room, wheat and chaff, goats and sheep, all were weeded, separated, and divided according to some seminal law of favoritism or perhaps simply innate ability and talent.

Like most of the people who later come to therapy it seemed to me that I was the outsider, a stranger to the world, some place I had come to which didn't seem to resonate with my inner consciousness at all. I resigned myself to what Albert Camus called " the benign indifference of the world." In The Stranger, Camus wrote:

Strip aside the thoughts and images, imagined relationships and various forms of so-called relationships here and in the world and what are we left with? For feeling to flow unimpeded without thought or inhibition is to let a great torrent of energy and compassion loose in to the world of both form and formlessness. The beating heart of a single human being contains enough love to feed the world many times over. How can you be so naive to think that this is anything but the Kaliyuga?

The time of great ignorance and darkness besets us now in insidious and blatant ways. I have and I will continue to group the blight under these three headings. They are exhaustive. They help to focus our need to grow and develop. They contain the truth of what Gurdjieff eloquently called "the terror of the situation."

The three veils to authenticity and compassion are thought, relationships, and nature. Let me expand. When you and I think, we create forms. These forms are separative, divisive, and they identify us and, as we identify ourselves, so we fall into "sin," i.e. we miss the mark. We become other than ourselves, for every virtue we expound within ourself and identify with, an enemy must be created to bring balance. Thought is the ego and the ego-processes are a term I use to describe the activity of thought.

Relationships are an extrapolation of the thought "I." They are therefore projections of "I" and not in the true sense relationships at all. Relationships must be between two, right? Wrong. In the relative world of time and space relationships look like that, but what does that make them in the realms of Truth. The teachings of spiritual Truth show us that we are not separate, undivided, and not even in any Real sense identifiable. There is merely a convention, a convenience of labeling, whereby I arrive at the tag "I." Real relationship is, in the true spiritual sense, expressed in the Hindu greeting Namaste: The Divine in me recognizes and bows to the Divine in you.

Namaste is an expression of our unity with each other and by extension our sameness with all beings. Real relationships or spiritual relationships grounded in reality recognize and are based in our unity. Hence what usually passes for relationships in the modern temporal world are merely projective events in which the other is perceived as disowned parts of ourself.

Nature is both beautiful and barbaric. Violence and tenderness abound, as does our awe in witnessing it. Many find that the spiritual coincides with Nature and seek it out as an external manifestation, so fascinating, entrancing, and mysterious that it becomes by default the very thing it symbolizes. But Nature, however close it may get in its impersonal, expansive, aware inspiring-ness is not the numinous, the spiritual, or the Divine domain itself. It may be similar! And when we seek solace and comfort in its welcoming arms to walk quietly in the countryside, to climb a hill and draw breath, to take in a sunset, sit by the lakeside or hear the pounding waves of the ocean we may feel exhilarated and near... and yet. Near is not the same as in or one.

Relinquishing thought, relationship, and nature feels tantamount to a kind of death.  As I sat in the darkness contemplating death as a small boy I had yet to grow in wisdom, yet to understand what had to die in me that I might be truly born.

The three veils of illusion—thought, "relationships," and nature—must all be forsaken for Truth. As the mystics, the adepts, and the masters have been telling us for all eternity, everything must be stripped away. "Let go of yourself completely," says Meister Eckhart, "drown yourself in this bottomless sea" for the splendor you carry within you is this divine light.

BLOG entry #19

The spiritual teacher is a poet, an artist, a balladeer. And let us hear this once and for all: organized religion or spirituality or paths to enlightenment or systems of spiritual practice must be transcended. You cannot organize a storm. You cannot contain the nuclear fusion at the core of the sun. You cannot predict the trajectory of a leaf in the wind. You cannot even dictate your mood on any given day.

Nothing natural and real and organic can be constrained by predictable structures. The most natural thing in the world is the Divine. Everything is divine. Everything from the biggest to the smallest is participating, merging, through and through permeated, created, and destroyed in the Divine. It is not structured, predictable, or organized. It is rebellious, wild, spontaneous, and perfectly random. There is no master plan, no divine assembly line of life lessons and world predicaments through which some Creator makes His point. He neither showers you with blessings nor inflicts great cruelty with a view to your edification.

Truth, Reality is. It is a simple matter. In order for you to find it, take away, take away, take away, and then take away some more. Everything must go! Then what remains is the god Reality. No father in the sky. No voice of guidance in your heart or your head. No miracle worker heeding your prayers, your thoughts, or your worries. It is an act of great self-responsibility, this learning to go beyond indoctrination, beyond belief, beyond the forms you have been taught to believe.

It is, as Joseph Campbell amplified for us, a hero's journey. This is where the spiritual teacher comes in. Teaching through parables, wisdom stories, metaphors, anecdotes that hint at profundity while appearing simple. We use means and paint word pictures and etheric shapes to explain, to guide and cajole, to point and describe... what?... that which is of course indescribable. That which is beyond thought is necessarily indescribable, that which is outside of time contains no narrative, that which is beyond relationships as we know them is void of connection.

It matters little exactly what the spiritual teacher does , says, or how he or she presents Truth. Truth is. Can you be sure of what is in your life? Are you convinced of the verity of your word, your step, your every action? Do you live, breathe, and imbibe Truth, Love, God, Reality, Compassion in every moment... every day. In every encounter you have an opportunity for illumination. To show, to reveal light and to receive it. If you are not there, perfectly present and alive in each moment please see this as an exciting occasion for a stock-taking of your life. What needs to change? What must go? What needs to be brought in? Consider time, relationships, your daily schedule, your activities throughout the day, the balance in your life.

You cannot organize a storm, but you can organize your life so that the Divine can enter in. Let's end with some inspired words of encouragement from the great master of unknowing, Meister Eckhart:

BLOG entry #18

[continued from last week's BLOG]

Continuing this marvellous litany of healing virtues, the next is I am suppressing the gift of really listening to Life or the other... sometimes it gets obstructed by the impulse of telling people what needs to be done. Nothing is stationary, no thing stands still, everything is in a process of change and transformation. The difficulty therefore with attempting to bring about change is that in the very process of trying to make it happen we miss the fact that change is already taking place. We may not be able to change the change that is happening. We may not be able to hinder the natural processes of life, however we may become unaware or even oblivious to them when we are caught up in the impulse to interfere.

In healing therapy as well as in life itself we are wise to harmonize our interventions with the natural energies of existence. When we go against existence we are sure to become frustrated. Therefore, the wise person only intervenes in a way that is confluent with the forces of natural energy and change. Tell people what needs to be done, by all means, but be clear about where this impulse is coming from. If it is from the ego-self then it is in conflict with the natural forces of developing life. These forces sometimes lead us into creative chaos or fruitful stillness or a thunderstorm of change. When they do it is just like the ego-self to want to intervene and set everything straight again. There is a part of us that resists natural change and transformation. When the ego-self feels like interfering bring your awareness intensely to the situation and contemplate how you can tolerate chaos, the interruption to routine and habit, the upsetting of the structures and template of present life, in order to surrender to some greater change and development. If your impulse is impeding natural growth and development then stop and tolerate the process as it grows into fullness. The whole of life is full of a series of changes, changes that challenge the conservative ego and our imagined sense of security. Listen to life and be receptive to the changing events and circumstances. Meet them all with dignity and courage. Then in the fullness of grace you will live into full surrender and live the truth that in life you need not be angry or controlling, frustrated or opposed, but rather you can accept the gift of life by receiving, by listening in the fullest sense of the word and opening your heart to life's blessings.

Next is I am suppressing the big part of me that loves to hug, to say loving nicknames, to hug, to caress others. Since we were young we have learned to suppress emotions and spontaneity. As we grow older that early conditioning becomes calcified and fixed. In an effort to fit in, to behave acceptably to the culture, we suppress our life force, our energy, our sexuality, our awareness, our soul, and our uninhibited spontaneity. Regain the freedom you forfeited in early life by actively rebelling against this suppression of your life essence! Allow yourself to behave in natural ways that are uninhibited and unrestrained. Then and only then may you in time realize your inner stillness, the deep truth of your connection with all life, with all beings and, following your process of release from the conditioning, attain a place of balance in which you are hugging and caressing the world even as the world is hugging and caressing you and you live in the heart embrace of unity.

And finally, When I make love I am suppressing the enjoyment of foreplay... it almost always gets lost in favor of the urge to come to climax and get it over with. In healing-listening it is just our ability to be with the other in the moment that is effective. Why does this simple—or apparently simple—ability yield such profound results in relationship, connection, and healing?

People do not live life—they think life. We have been indoctrinated to think everything. We think a picture of who we are. We live a narrative of our life. We live a fairy story of our primary love relationship, a romance of prescribed events condoned by society, hardly anyone is living outside the box. We discuss today the topic of artificial intelligence, robots have been under discussion for a long time, mind control, systems of belief, indoctrination. These topics are discussed as if they are in the future, whereas they are of course here-now and very present. Almost everyone you know is indoctrinated. It is a radical insult to humanity. How have we created a world of people who are automatons? Who cannot think, feel, or behave for themselves? Everything is done with an ulterior motive. No one does anything without a view to the outcome of their actions. Hardly anyone is present, living here in this moment at this time. No wonder we are so alienated in our society; no one is here, not even ourselves.

When we eat we are elsewhere, when we drive the car we are fantasizing being at our destination, when we are studying we internalize a picture of the grades we will achieve, and when we are making love we are oriented to the climax of the act.

Life is desired and desirable only if it is a copious ejaculation, a mighty orgasm of imagined delight. We move ahead with one idea only—toward purposeful ecstasy. Yet ecstasy is not purposeful and a fantasy is not really authentically delightful; it is merely a thought.

Try taking this insight to people and they will glaze over. They will deny it inevitably. They have been pre-programmed to eat the menu, to enjoy the vacation in the glossy brochure. They see their friends, their partners, and their loved ones through a veil of idealized fantasy, the product of a lifetime of pre-programmed propaganda.

Take a group of people who are willing and conduct a process workshop with them together. Have them become aware of breath, aware of their bodies in movement and in repose. Have them eat and taste food, the textures, the experience of the eating and the digesting. Have them look into each other's eyes and occupy the soul-space behind the looking itself. Have them learn again to touch and be touched, to hear each other, to listen to the sounds of life, of their own bodies, of voices, of birds, of music. Have them look and see with new eyes in order to not merely look but to see without expectation, assumptions, or pre-programming for the first time what is before them. Have them walk in truth, holding another's hand and feeling what it is like to be together, to talk and breathe and hug and love with another human being and then another and finally a group. Have them learn to speak truth from the heart, from the depths of their being, from their soul, speak truth to each other without guilt or shame or repression or inhibition.

You touch on something very important here—in fact several important points. You say When I make love I am suppressing the enjoyment of foreplay... but this is not making love. When you suppress you are not making love When there is no joy you are not making love and when there is no play you are not making love. Perhaps what you mean is duty, going through the motions, energetic release, the machinations of sexual intercourse but it is not truly making love. I suspect it is a picture, a picture created by the mind, a kind of inner movie that is played out in physical life—an inner movie of making love. Just these clues are enough to transform the fiction of "making love." No suppression, no lack of joy, no lack of play. Without these what is there? The essence, the soul, the truth, and uninhibited spirit, the wildness and ecstasy of human connection and psycho-physical, emotional, spiritual communication: the great depth of wild joy, illimitable enjoyment of the dance of pure ecstasy in the moment  and the lightness, the humor, the innocence and freedom of playfulness and play for its own sake, without anywhere to go, not with any goal in mind other than present delight.

You say it almost always gets lost in favor of the urge to come to climax and get it over with. When we lead life with a view to outcome, orientated to the future, to the goal, to the end result inevitably our fantasy collides with the ending... and the ending is death. Strangely enough there is nothing quite so comforting as death, the end of effortfullness, the end of pain and sadness, anger and fear... nothing quite as secure and sure as death with its resolve, its resolution, its fantasy of eternal rest and heavenly happiness.

This too is a picture and if you were raised in the west it is the indoctrination you received about life. Live and endure the pain, the suffering, and receive your reward in heaven. But the indoctrination of heavenly rewards has driven us to be end-orientated. We make love to climax and get it over with, we live through the year to get to the last day and get it over with and start all over again. We are happy when Christmas has finished and we get it over with, happy at the end of the working day, when the long school summer holidays have ended, when our periods of study or training or commitment or even holidays and breaks are over and we get it over with and can get back to work. We "look forward" to what?

The remedy is to try life, try living. Embrace life. It is a mystery you will never fathom. But to live in this mystery without indoctrination, because that is not living is to risk, is to be alive, feel alive, to breathe, to experience, to not conform, to be true to yourself, to stop chasing your orgasm, the climax of life, but live!

If you want to try a very powerful exercise with yourself and/or close friends, try discussing how you make love. Contained in an honest account of how you make love is everything you need to know about yourself or another. There is nothing else... nothing else other than the real experience of sacred-spiritual life lived freely... with no limits. 

BLOG entry #17

[continued from last week's BLOG]

Tenderness carries the meaning of vulnerability, the ability to feel and resonate with others. It is the precursor of compassion. For without tenderness we are less than human—emotionally, energetically, and spiritually. Tenderness means soft, delicate, full of kindness and affection. But over and above its nuances and shades of meaning tenderness carries the further sense of offering or extending. It comes from the same root as the middle English word tenden which means "to attend to."

Tenderness is central to healing-listening and it is crucially important therefore in Sacred Attention Therapy which takes its name from the original meaning of therapy: “attending to soul.” As SAT therapists we listen with the whole self to the soul of the other. This is what therapy should always be, or at least always aim at, because this is the profound depth of healing and reverence which "two gathered together in My name" can bring about.

I bring this up here because the flood of insights you now report are a litany of primary qualities required of the true healer, the authentic therapist-listener, the one who receives the soul of the other. You write:

I am suppressing the quality of tenderness and the ability to be gentle towards myself and others... to be soft and patient. I am suppressing the quality of patience... sometimes it gets overshadowed by the pull or energy to get things done. I am suppressing the quality of taking the other in, without wanting to better them or change them... taking them really in just as they are, this also applies to myself and to situations. I am suppressing the gift of really listening to Life or the other... sometimes it gets obstructed by the impulse of telling people what needs to be done. I am suppressing the big part of me that loves to hug, to say loving nicknames, to hug, to caress others. When I make love I am suppressing the enjoyment of foreplay... it almost always gets lost in favor of the urge to come to climax and get it over with.

The first of these is I am suppressing the quality of tenderness and the ability to be gentle towards myself and others... to be soft and patient. Being gentle, profoundly gentle, is essential practice in healing therapy. With gentleness comes trust and the fulfilment of faith, in time the ability to surrender, and develop confidence in the inner workings and outer help and assistance that Life offers, as we grow and develop on our path. To be gentle with others we must first learn to be gentle with ourselves. Softness and patience likewise are qualities required in true healing. Softness to feel along with the person we are sitting with and listening to and patience to constantly return and reapply ourselves and see the process of change and transformation through to completion.

The second is I am suppressing the quality of patience... sometimes it gets overshadowed by the pull or energy to get things done. In healing listening we "do" being—less doing and more, far more, being. It is this quality of being and presence, when being is expressed through presence, that centers and heals. To be rather then do takes some sidestepping of that doing energy, the energy that is overly concerned to get things done, to accomplish and achieve. Ultimately the being energy presides in everyone's life. You come from being and to being you return. Living your life from the core sense of your being means that you are connected inner to outer, essence to action, inspiration to manifestation. Without this vital quality of the being sense you are like a holey balloons simply floating in the vastness.

The third is I am suppressing the quality of taking the other in, without wanting to better them or change them... taking them really in just as they are, this also applies to myself and to situations. This is wonderful! And it precisely describes the quality of acceptance and positive regard that the trainee therapist must cultivate through self-acceptance and non-judgment. In both therapy and relationships outside of therapy we must meet people where they are. Acceptance is immensely healing, warming to the soul, and ultimately transforming.

As therapists we work to flush out and heal the disavowed aspects of ourselves, the inner orphans, those parts of us we fear and/or loathe overmuch, too much to own as ourselves. When we have resolved these darkest corners of our psyche, we attain self-acceptance and are able then equally to offer it to others.

[to be continued and finished next week]

BLOG entry #16