Reflections on the heart

As it turns out, the heart can be an organ of direct communication. I was just in a workshop with Hameed Alee, the founder of the Ridhwan school, discussing the qualities of the heart. When Hameed said the heart could be an organ of direct communication, it gave me a deeper understanding of the work I have been doing for the past 30 years. At the level where you can feel a direct transmission from heart to heart, the heart seems to transcend its individual nature and take on a multi dimensional, collectively felt quality that is experienced differently by each recipient of the transmission. 
You are welcome to come feel how this transmission lands with you. 

Our little group meets every Tuesday. If you can’t come today, but are interested in this experience mark it in your calender or call any time for a free demonstration of this work and how it can address your individual needs and aspirations as we accelerate into the middle of 2012. 

What is your heart’s desire? Perhaps our deepest hearts desire is to know the truth. Suffering is simply separation from the truth. What lies between you and your direct experience of truth? Maybe less than you think. What if all you have to do is be willing to meet what is present in this moment? What are you waiting for?

Tags: desire, heart, love, presence, realization

Direct connection to Source, how-to video

Tags: embodied presence, meditation

You are so beautiful

YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL
MY MIND CANNOT EVEN SEE YOU.
IT SEES A HINT OF LIGHT IN AN EMPTY PLACE.
WHEN I LOOK AT YOU THROUGH THE LENS OF MY HEART
I AM A RAINDROP FALLING INTO THE OCEAN.
AS I GET CLOSER THE DISTANCE BECOMES INTOLERABLE
THE ACHE OF LONGING BECOMES STRONGER
THE ANSWER GETS STRONGER
I REALIZE I AM IMMACULATE
THIS ACHE, THIS ANSWER IS WHO  I AM
IT IS WHO I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN.
I AM UTTERLY TRUSTWORTHY
I HAVE NEVER WAVERED.
I AM UNTOUCHED BY THE LOSS, THE SUFFERING
THE DRAMA, THE SUPPOSED SINS AND SHORTCOMINGS OF MY LIFE.
THE FEAR AND GUILT AND SHAME THAT RAN MY LIFE ARE GONE.
KNOWING WHO I AM I BEGIN TO RELAX. 
I HEAR THIS SONG WITH NO SOUND THAT QUICKLY
EXPANDS INTO A SYMPHONY,
HEARD THROUGH MY HEART, OF UNUTTERABLE BEAUTY.
IN THIS FORMLESS BEAUTY ALL THE PAIN AND SUFFERING
AND LOSS AND WASTE
AND HATE AND DARKNESS AND FEAR OF THE WORLD
IS FRAMED IN LIMITLESS COMPASSION
WITH SUCH POIGNANCY ALL I CAN DO IS WEEP.
THIS WHOLE EXPERIENCE HAS A FRACTAL QUALITY:
IT IS COMPLETE INA SECOND, AN HOUR, A LIFETIME.
THIS WHOLE EXPERIENCE IS COMPLETELY ORDINARY.
YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL
YOU DISGUISE YOURSELF IN EVERY IMAGINABLE FACE.
I HAVE TO FIND YOU OVER AND OVER WITH EVERY BREATH
YOU ARE ALWAYS WITH ME
RIGHT HERE.
RIGHT NOW.
 
And then I forget the whole thing and go back to sleep for a while, arcing in and out of the experience over and over again.

Tags: beautiful, compassion, I am, immaculate, limitless, shortcomings, sins

Meditation as Action

As a meditator, I have to out my self as a spiritual materialist. I am in it for for a greater appreciation and deeper awareness of truth or true nature. I meditate to cultivate a quality of awareness that allows experience to move and reveal its true nature. This translates into a more peaceful, focused, less freaked out emotional affect. This helps me do stuff that supports my vision instead of watching TV, for example.

My meditation practice is very simple: I notice my physical experience and whatever emotional flavor that’s present. I welcome whatever is showing up and deepen into the experience. I suspend my prior knowledge and assumptions about what I’m experiencing. I defend against self attack about the experience simply try to notice what’s present. The focus on the physical helps bypass the usual mental chatter. If I find that I’m stuck in my head I notice what that’s like.

This practice empowers me to penetrate the layers of fear, sadness, helplessness and loss etc. that can permeate my experience to find the peace, resource and purpose that underlies these surface feelings. Every feeling, every experience be it good or bad, is the surface of a deeper reality that is calling for our attention and participation. Meditation helps me sense into and align with the field of intelligence that supports all life. Hopefully this will enable me to live in a way that is more conducive to our continued survival on the planet.

Group meditation takes it a step further by creating a strong field of shared intention that helps focus the mind and get past some of the hurdles that impede deepening. Each member of the group will have a different experience. When we share a bit of these experiences we are making our embodied knowledge more real for ourselves and helping each other ground their own truth. We are also forging a collective connection that empowers the group to be and do together.

Tags: embodied knowledge, meditation, metabolize experience

Inquiry reveals stark truths on the way to waking up

I noticed today that I am addicted to media. I use it to self medicate away a chronic low level angst about simply being present. When I am working with people I can be amazingly present because I am on the job holding space for another person. When I am just doing my day between clients its a different story. I am intrinsically uncomfortable with the possibility of discomfort…of some future discomfort that might occur if I am not careful to manage my experience very scrupulously by jacking into Amy Goodman or Rachel Madow or The Best of the Left pod casts. It regulates my nervous system to hear of calamity and disaster, war,famine, pestilence and impunity to keep me safe from my own broken heart.
This reflexive avoidance is really a joke because meeting the broken heart is the surest way to waking up, and nobody knows that better then me. My own conditioning is so strong that I tend to avoid the very thing that provides the quickest way home. Can you imagine such a thing?

I also noticed that when it comes to feeling hurt, my super ego would rather I not exist at all than feel hurt. Feeling hurt is for children or the oppressed, not for one as blessed with good fortune as I. This is unfortunate because that hurt is what rips open new holes in the heart where emptiness can be met. Its very tricky to let yourself feel hurt. Try it sometime.

Wow!

I just did two remote sessions today. Each one made me weep with joy. I cannot express how beautiful it is to get to meet people in the present moment and track the deepening that always happens when a good faith effort is made to simply welcome what is arising in the moment. Sometimes it is enough to just follow what is present and sometimes it is good to inquire into a specific issue that is showing up in your life.

When you choose an issue and deepen into your experience of your body responding to your thoughts of the issue, the layers of appearance quickly begin to fall away to reveal a surprising resolution to the original problem. The egoic mind might never have thought of such an outcome. This is a different cognitive approach to problems than the usual figuring them out. The resolution comes from metabolizing false identifications rather than figuring out new behaviors.

This metabolization comes from meeting and abiding with the uncomfortable feelings and sensations that might arise when dealing with an issue, rather than trying to manage the discomfort by “letting go” of the perceived block or some other way of manipulating yourself like affirmations positive thinking. Whenever you reject your experience, you are rejecting a part of yourself. This is different, and less effective then meeting and deepening into whatever is happening, no mater how uncomfortable.

Why did I weep with joy? The beauty that is present when what is is allowed to be, and acknowledged is simply too powerful to behold without being deeply moved.

This work Rocks!

As I do more and more non-local connection sessions with people far and wide, it becomes more and more clear to me that this is a very powerful tool for people who are brave and trusting to be with their own experience enough to let it move without manipulation.
All of the amazing states of awareness illuminated by the great sages are available to you directly through this process of simply meeting what is present and allowing it to move as it will. Everything you are experienceing is just the surface of a great depth that will lead you unerringly to your personal awakening and remembering Who you are in an embodied realization. Each breath can be a movement toward awakening or conditioning,