Honoring the Feminine

"Any individual or society that fails to honor or provide the opportunity for women to fully exert their power can never truly prosper.   All creativity, growth, imagination, nurturing-all possibilities are born from the womb of the Divine Feminine.   To deny her a rightful place, either within ourselves or in the world in which we live is to do irreparable harm and endure the loss of countless joys."  Rod Stryker

Darkness

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Rilke 

Dark Night of the Soul

"Things are not better, but you are in a different state.  Perhaps you are now where the Dark Night has been trying to take you for so long.   Now you are almost ready for a new life, and that is the purpose of bardo.  Slowly, a different kind of light begins to glow from inside you."  Thomas Moore

New Beginnings

"It can be helpful to distinguish between depression and the sense of existential emptying.  You are beyond emotion.  You are sensing your reality and your personhood.   The emptiness you sense may not be yours, not even personal.  It may the the vacuum of life.  You may be standing at the edge of your atmosphere, looking out on the empty space of your unknown world, as though you were in a space station looking out into the universe."  Thomas Moore

Change

‎"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another." Anatole France

Identity

"It is important not to take care of or be taken care of all of the time.   They [mothers/women] are always caring, always wanting care.   They are stuck, fixated on the nurturing mother-child archetype.  But you don't always need to be cared for.  You don't have to justify your existence by caring for others.   Instead of making mutual care an absolute principle, you could understand that need, absence and ignorance allow wonder and new life.  You need to feel your own essence - who you are when you are not acknowledged and supported by someone else.   This empty underworld of your identity is an important ingredient in your reality, and when you are learning this lesson you may think you are in a dark night."  Thomas Moore

Honor Yourself

"Go with developments, rather than against them.   If you feel lost, be lost in ways that suit you and make you feel like a participant in your life.   If you feel empty, empty out your life where it needs it.   If you feel sad, let sadness be your dominant feeling.   Being in tune with your deep mood is a way of clarifying yourself.  Speak for it.  Honor it."  Thomas Moore

Depression vs. Dark Night

"Depression is a strong emotion, but a dark night is a slow transformation fueled by deep issues at work defining the very meaning of your life."   Thomas Moore

Depression vs. Dark Night

"One difference between depression and a dark night of the soul is that depression is a mood you endure and try to get through, while a dark night is a process in which your course soul is refined and your intelligence deepened.   How you imagine your ordeal makes all the difference."    Thomas Moore

Grief

"Grief is not the same as depression.   If we gloss over our grief, we might become depressed.  Unfelt feelings and unexpressed gief have a way of dulling life.    It is as if with every grief we do not feel, we stuff another handful of vitality underground, until we are numb or sick or embittered."  Elizabeth Lesser

LIfe Questions

When you are caught up in one of those chain saw massacre cycles of life, you come face to face with some important questions:

1. What REALLY matters to me?
2. What precisely do I need to learn, change or transform within myself?
3. From what, or whom will I take my direction and motivation?

Elizabeth Lesser

William James says there are two types of people:  Once-born and Twice-born. 

Once-Born:

1. Do not stray from familiar territory of who they think they are and what they think is expected of them.
2. If pushed to the edge (of Dante's dark woods) where the straight way is lost.
3. Don't want to learn something new from life's darkest lessons.
4. Stay with what feels safe and what is expected/acceptable to their family and society
5. Stick to what they already know -even if they don't necessarily want it or like it.
6. May go their whole life and never know what lies beyond the woods.
7. May question later, "Is this all there is to life?"
8. Lives as if the soul was a figment of a flighty imagination.
9. Leads to confusion, numbness, sadness, depression, anger.
10. Avoid, deny or bitterly accept the unpredictable changes of real life.

Twice-Born:

1. Always pays attention to the soul poking it's head through a half-lived life.
2. Whether through choice or calamity- goes into the woods, loses the straight way, confronts that which needs to change within himself in order to live a more genuine and radiant life.
3. The journey into the woods of change and transformation is an inner one. 
4. The most ordinary-looking lives are often being lived by the most extraordinary spiritual warriors; people who have chosen the road less traveled, of self-reflection.
5. Uses adversity for awakening.
6. Trade the safety of the known for the power of the unknown
7. Something calls them into the woods (betrayal, illness, divorce, loss, death), where the straight path vanishes, and there is no turning back, only going through.