DAILY This is a March for the record books. This is a month we usually try and high step through sleet, mud, and relentless frozen landscape. It is a tippy time of chaotic polarities, weather and otherwise. Bodies, like the earth, are bursting with a spring desire that cannot yet be expressed. In warmer climes, where the scent of jasmine defines March, the madness is less tippy, but nonetheless imbalances are alive and well. Consciously, and un-consciously, we anxiously await new birth. Easter, Passover, and Holi, or Phagwa, did not happen from, “Oh, by the way, we need more eggs.” They are rituals of regeneration; festivals that affirm that this earthly birth is partially formed from spirit. They ask us to re-boot, re-confirm, and re-align matter, spirit, and soul intention. This March happens to be a seminal, pivot point for transformative and highly charged options in the arena of birth, as the electro magnetic field is being pinged by extraordinary possibility. The body may be exhausted. The mind~ over-loaded. But the future calls, and it calls from the alchemical polarity of spirit and grounded reality. You may feel in meltdown mode, but it’s time to step up and learn a new dance. To move into the nebulous, no-boundary territory of spirit, the ego must be solid, of firm structures, and clear realities. Before we can move beyond anything we must be it. We rely on the ego’s foundation to support movement in the world. The mystic, or spirit-self has no boundaries, no structure and this is terrifying to the ego, especially a weak ego. For the ego to be well it must do. For the mystic to do well it must be. Being requires attentive loving. When the ego loves, it goes outside self to find affirmation. The mystic goes within…. Read more »
Read moreInspirations: Polarities
A Divining GPS
Pulled inexorably into life, we cry and yearn for the womb. Yanked unceremoniously into death, we hunger for life. Between these two polarities lies the DNA of every subsequent face-off. In the first polarities of inhaling and exhaling lies opportunity for renewal, vision, and reconciliation of opposites. You’d think by now we might have learned to not struggle with polarity. You hope that at this stage we would have enough angelic and human intuition for a divining GPS that embodies the light of who we are, what we need, and how we are to navigate. A ‘job description’ for taking an earthly incarnation could be: Synthesizing, assimilating, and digesting polarities. We are no sooner done with one than embroiled in the next. They now line up like planes waiting for take off at LAX. This incessant struggle makes the breath shorter and smaller. Perhaps if we re-trained the breathing, along with re-balancing the physical with the mental, and the emotion with the intellect, we’d have a stronger center, better at coalescing the mountain of incompatibilities. Even the large picture, the uber-issues that we feel don’t come under our personal jurisdiction, such as the weather, illness, and big business. Even those could shift and grow less contrary if we addressed the polarities that have made them un-manageable and over-large. The ancient Huna of Hawaii had the power to control weather until they lost it due to love of power. It might now be our task to learn from them and take that power to love, creating ways and means of reconciling from center. Polarities are hard to give up because not only are we used to them, not only are they part of every diet, like refined sugar, but they are often much loved. Polarities create chaos, and drama, grabbing limelight… Read more »
Read moreCrossroads
The Autumn Equinox is one of the four potent crossroads in the year’s cycle. Many cultures through time have marked these four quadrant turnings with prayer, ceremony, and celebration. They symbolize gateways in the relationship of light and dark, spirit and matter, outer and inner life. These moments when the world stops to shift, offer animal and vegetable-life doorways of change. Death or life? Renewal -or Same-O-Same-O? Ritual and ceremony create not only greater power and recognition of an event, but deeper connection to layers which remain hidden. Most of the modern world has lost its tribal roots as well as its dependence on ritual. We may be more connected with more people, but we depend less upon each other, and we rarely celebrate sacred moments. We cannot change the world, but we can we create a balancing between these polarities of loss and gain, sacred and profane, which in its own small way will contribute to transformation. This is a true and good undertaking at the four quadrants. Each of the portals offers a moment to focus intention, and step into a new demand. They are “energetic gateways” (Stephanie Austin) that support and re-set desire. The Fall Equinox, particularly, asks us to come out of extremes and re-align center. The question for this moment might be, “Which polarities do I want to continue dancing?” It’s important to honor and use what is best of ancestral heritage, as well as leaving its tribal excesses behind. Mining and moving with the earth’s energies gives our efforts greater ease and support. We don’t fight the current so much. As the Sun moves into Libra on the Autumn Equinox, dance with the polarity of your own unique being and that of ‘the other.’ Place your choices on Libra’s ‘scale of justice,’ to tune… Read more »
Read moreTruth & Lies
Finding the truth is much like finding Nemo. The cartoon film revels in facts of life, seen as a fish tale, revealing truth through laughter. We are shown that the Self we hope to be, and truths we must comprehend are as much the work of imagination and intuition as they are of reality and hard work. Deep truths lie in the balancing and adventure of becoming. Truth, with a capitol T, is no longer the ‘the whole truth,’ if it ever was. Recognizing some of this depends on evolving from the burden of who we are supposed to be to embrace who we hope to be. * This world has always been a magical place of truth and lies, tall tales, and dedicated honesty woven through a human matrix of confusion, bad memory, and desire. We work at defending who we think we should be, bolstering it with stories and warm, if not hot air. We rarely think the lie sits on our side of the table. Rather it is ‘the other’ who exaggerates out of all proportion. We are offended. We grow defended, and desiccated. As our days become drive-by practices in everything from eating to meditating, learning anything new requires true dedication. I propose we spend ten minutes a day practicing the art of lying. This will engage under-used muscle that supports and builds understanding, and use of truth. It is the same with everything. How can we feel compassion if we haven’t been hurt, and hurtful? How do we know who we can be unless we’ve struggled with who we think we should be? When we only tell the truth, when we only work at ‘shoulds,’ when we are only nice, where is the balancing polarity to see and be otherwise? There are fine and righteous things… Read more »
Read moreAlchemical Lives
If we are to live, we are to be blown off course. It is the willy-nillyness of the blow that calls spirit down off its high horse in the high heavens so that we learn to wallow. It is in those dark hours, as we perch precariously between the moat of crocodiles and a fire breathing dragon, that we wake up and come alive. In ancient alchemical tradition, this blackening process was the beginning of transformation. Blackening has everything to do with going down, being off-course, and suffering. It is 2013, another year in the 21st century. It still the same, time worn process. As a society, we have grown more and more masculine; working longer, taking on greater responsibility, trying to be more spiritual, if not religious, and attaching ‘excellence’ to all of it. These are ego driven elements of fire and air. They hope to push and pull us out of the mundane, off the earthy, to take flight. What balances this yang expression? The yin of earth and water. The higher we ascend, the more fiery and ballistic we react, the more we require the grounding of practical earth solutions, and slower muddy waters of emotional silence. You can’t see very far from down below. The only exceptional view is within. Ascending a spiritual mountain, home to gods is far easier. There is nothing wrong in standing tall among at the peak, except it usually comes at the expense of suppressed yin. When we don’t use or allow balancing yin energies, there is a rise in violence, addiction, depression, and illness. They behave as un-invited guests at the bliss-banquet. It is the old spell of the 13th fairy godmother who was not invited to Sleeping Beauty’s christening. As you know, anything not invited, not listened to, or… Read more »
Read moreDancing Heaven & Hell
The muchness of who we are is created from a dynamic dance born of the resonance of 10,000 polarities. As these polarities flow and ebb, they teach the difficult steps required to execute this dance. When lucky enough, we then perform it with full heart and flying feet. The dance states that if we only look backward, moving forward is difficult. If we only waltz the light fantastic, gliding through dark shadow is arduous. If we only snap a leg up to hold it high, no matter how fabulous it looks, we have only an event, but no sequence. We don’t understand how we got there, or how to leave. We have no ‘prepositional moves.’ If we only dance duets with the prince, we have no idea if we can solo, or, far more difficult, fit in with the corps de ballet. Twirling and leaping faster and faster to make people clap louder and longer, we relinquish an ability to connect to our internal vibration. We fail to hear our true resonance, which is the sum of ALL parts; all steps, styles, and tones. In the outward highly excellent performance, not only do we have no balance, it becomes difficult, if not impossible to dance with others. We can’t identify, or feel their resonance. We have no sense of who they are because it has grown too difficult to dance with our own 10,000 polarities. We grow one-dimensional. We partner poorly, if at all. The prince cannot prevail and hold us up. Yes, the steps seem more difficult, because we are driven to learn them faster, and everyone else is whirling by at such a speed that taking a deep breath before sailing off into a beautiful waltz, is the luxe of a by-gone era. But remember, this dance needs… Read more »
Read moreDancing With Our Daimon
Do you find yourself shutting out your inner voices because you have no time to listen, much less do what they ask? Do you see yourself so overwhelmed by ‘helpful technology,’ and the day’s requirements that neither dharma, soul purpose, or spirit can get through? It is time to create space for our Daimon to come home. To the ancient Greek’s, Daimon meant genius, which had to do with one’s potency, not so much smarts. Plato wrote about it in “The Republic,” calling it a guiding spirit, or a fiery spirit that was not only responsible for our destiny in this life, but carried the soul from life to life as an ‘inner deity.’ Plato’s daimon was pure energy, a beacon to pull us into life’s rich, true purpose, to learn necessary lessons. There was no judgment about good or bad, moral or immoral. It was about the drive to dive into the mulch and manure and simply have a living experience. Why do we need our daimon more than ever? We need lynch pins for our multiple selves, that army of complex voices begging for attention and care. Multi-tasking is nothing compared to multi-being. We must embrace the paradoxical notion that every truth has a valid opposite. We need all the help we can get to see us to the other side of the many hard-choices big change demands. We cannot give up a ‘destiny’ to merely survive as a mushroom, can we? Embarrassed though we may be, most of us would nod ‘yes’ to being a mushroom if it keeps us safe. It requires so much courage and energy to continually throw ourselves out there, to step up to the plate and risk in new ways…no nets, no bungee cords, only re-newed passion for each experience. The psychologist,… Read more »
Read moreMiracles & Wonder
Paul Simon had it right. “It is the time of miracles and wonder.” The Universe is instructing us to let go, to devolve, to embrace divine discontent, and it doesn’t matter how we do it. In this new ‘embrace,’ do we see how destructive we’ve grown, how carelessly we walk upon the earth, how intolerantly we stand against one another? These are high surf warnings, but they are also part of the miracle-equation, for miracles are born of balancing anxiety and change. We also demand them when on high alert in high surf. If “violence is anything that causes separation,”* then hold on to hope for the wonder of miracles, for it is here we are most capable of change. In extremes, we see what is toxic, and what is not. We are able to perceive ourselves as ‘separate from.’ Despite, great effort, we remain tribal. This is about societies unable to rise above petty desire and small world- views. When we cannot embrace ‘the other’ as self, division contaminates the country. The issue is, we’ve allowed this violence within, otherwise it would not live without. When we shift from allowing the patriarchy to dominate- and begin equally trusting the feminine, when we learn to value feelings as well as logic, when intuition tells us as much as intellect, then we are on our way to the miraculous. We are on our way to union. It is in the balancing of the other, not in the dismissal of one over the other that we create wonderous possibility. The masculine call “to do” rather than “to be,” forces some of the speed we are struggling to master. At a breakneck pace, we are only in our heads, going in the direction of will, with little-to-no fluidity. The ability to listen to our feelings, to connect… Read more »
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