Imagine A Woman

Imagine a woman who believes it is right and good she is a woman.
A woman who honors her experience and tells her stories.
Who refuses to carry the sins of others within her body and life.

Imagine a woman who trusts and respects herself.
A woman who listens to her needs and desires.
Who meets them with tenderness and grace.

Imagine a woman who acknowledges the past's influence on the present.
A woman who has walked through her past.
Who has healed into the present.

Imagine a woman who authors her own life.
A woman who exerts, initiates, and moves on her own behalf.
Who refuses to surrender except to her truest self and wisest voice.

Imagine a woman who names her own gods.
A woman who imagines the divine in her image and likeness.
Who designs a personal spirituality to inform her daily life.

Imagine a woman in love with her own body.
A woman who believes her body is enough, just as it is.
Who celebrates its rhythms and cycles as an exquisite resource.

Imagine a woman who honors the body of the Goddess in her changing body.
A woman who celebrates the accumulation of her years and her wisdom.
Who refuses to use her life-energy disguising the changes in her body and life.

Imagine a woman who values the women in her life.
A woman who sits in circles of women.
Who is reminded of the truth about herself when she forgets.

Imagine yourself as this woman.
- Patricia Lynn Reilly

Human Incarnation

" Inevitably, maintaining our authenticity means constantly living within patterns and breaking patterns.  It is not about eliminating our humanness.  Not about eliminating our want to be loved, but curbing the stubborn ways we hurt and disrespect ourselves to get that love.   This involves recognizing the unhealthy patterns we fall into and correcting our course.   It is not helpful to label what doesn't work as bad and then strive to rid ourselves of our human flaws.   The aim is not to make ourselves pure and one-sided in our aliveness, but to inhabit all of who we are, living into the dilatations and constrictions of our strengths and weaknesses.  It is about learning how to live through being human, until the rhythm of being human can be celebrated as the magically imperfect vessel of Spirit that it is."  Mark Nepo

Soulmate

Most people have more than one soul mate. You may already be in several soul mate relationships with friends and loved ones. A soul mate can come in the form of a life partner, treasured friend, child, or lover. A soul mate can be someone with whom you share a spiritual path, a joint work in the world, or a commitment to be parents to certain souls. It can be someone whose growth you are sponsoring, such as a child.
~Sanaya Roman

Listening from the Heart

From the one heart...

Hear from the heart wordless mysteries!
Understand what cannot be understood...
In our stone-dark hearts there burns a fire
That burns all veils to their root and foundation,
When the veils are burned away,
the heart will understand completely...
Ancient Love will unfold ever-fresh forms
In the heart of the Spirit, in the core of the heart.

- Rumi

When was the last time you sang?

"We often underestimate the power of giving voice, bit it is real and sustaining.  It is the basis of all song.  It is at the heart of all hymns and matras.  And it works it's healing, not so much by being heard as by the fact that in giving voice to what is within, even through the softest whisper, we allow the world of spirit to soften our pain.  In this way, the smallest moan is in itself a lullaby.  In giving voice to what we feel, the darkest cry uttered with honesty can arrive at the holiest of songs."   Mark Nepo

We have not come here to take prisoners,

But to surrender even more deeply

To freedom and joy.

We have not come into this exquisite world

To hold ourselves hostage from love.

Run my dear

From anything

that may not strengthen

Your precious budding wings

Run like hell my dear,

From anything likely

To put a sharp knife

Into the sacred, tender vision

Of your beautiful heart.

We have a duty to befriend

Those aspects of obedience

That stand outside of our house

And shout to our reason

"O please, O please,

Come out and play."

For we have not come here to take prisoners

Or to confine our wondrous spirits

But to experience ever and ever more deeply

Our divine courage, freedom and Light! 

Hafiz

Spiritual Warrior

"When the spiritual warrior progresses on the path he paradoxically finds himself more alone.  He is like an island sitting alone in the middle of the lake...Although the warrior's life is dedicated to helping others, he realizes that he will never be able to completely share his experience with others.  The fullness of his experience is his own, and he must live with his own truth.  Yet he is more and more in love with the world.  That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others.   By renouncing his private world the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart.   This is not something to feel bad about; it a cause for rejoicing."   Chogyam Trungpa

Spirtual Adventure

"I had been on an adventure, searching for a genuine and fearless kind of spirituality.  Id didn't want to become anything more than my most vibrant, peaceful and grateful self.  I wanted to find a sacred path through the fullness of life in the real world -a daily discipline that reached into the heavens even as it dug deeply into my psyche, helping me to overcome resistance, falseness and mistrust."  Elizabeth Lesser

Suffering

"I am a lover of what is, not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality."
— Byron Katie

Pain vs. Suffering

"There will always be pain in life.   This is something we learn in life as we progress spiritually.  We also learn that if we resist pain, if we fear it, then we create additional pain, called suffering.  Our resistance to pain stands between us and full-emodied living; it keeps us at war with our problems and from making peace with life's dual nature."   Hazrat Inayat Khan

Effort

"As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky and water bears them, as hawks rest upon air and air sustains them, so would I learn to attain freefall, and float into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, knowing no effort... earns that all-surrounding grace." --Denise Levertov

"The work you have done has prepared you for the next part of your spiritual journey.  Through meditation, heartfulness work and care of the body, your mind is calmer, your heart is more open, and your body is less blocked.  You are simultaneously more grounded and more sensitive; more sure of who you are, yet less attached to being 'somebody'.   You are learning to die."  Inayat Khan

Spiritual Maturity

"A growing surrender to the unknown is a sign of spiritual maturity and encourages us to give up illusions of immortality we still might have and to experience in a new way our total dependence on God's love, a dependence that does not take away our free selfhood but purifies and ennobles it...those who have learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to, are the really creative people.   The are free to move constantly away from the familiar, safe places and can keep moving forward to new, unexplored areas of life."  Inayat Khan

The Noble Edge

 The Noble Edge

Upon the Noble Edge we meet
And never are apart
Upon the razor's edge we dance
To experience the heart.
The heart of understanding
The heart of letting go
The heart of being all we are in the ever changing flow.

FREE at last if I-dentity
We serve, love and allow
Living Holy Spirit
Sharing forever NOW.

So gaze at every rainbow
And wipe away the fear
Always dancing in I AM
Upon the Noble Edge
That mirrors.

There is no separation
I love the me I see
I AM the me I see
I love the all we be
I AM the all we be

I AM

There is no limitiation
I love the mirror I see
I am the mirror I see
I love the all we be

I AM

Holy Spirit
Conscious I AM
Always NOW
We transcend
The separation of duality
To shroud no more
Our unity

Same in you
Same in me
We are I AM

You are with me wherever I go
I am with you always
ONE breath
ONE life
One co-creator
Thy will is one
Thy will be done.  

Love

"Love is the fruit of spiritual labor; it is not a technique you try or a dogma you adopt.  Love is the secret you unmask yourself to find; the destination where all roads of the journey lead.  But it does no one any good to rush the process, nor enforce loving behavior.  You cannot legislate forgiveness; you cannot make hate illegal.  Just as you cannot pull a shoot out of the ground and demand that it flower then and there, love cannot be forced.  Spiritual work prepares the ground.  Love will blossom when our egos and our wounds and our fears have been worked with, tilled into the soil of our understanding."  Elizabeth Lesser

Listening

"One of the greatest steps we can make on the spiritual path is to learn to stop before we judge experience and give it a chance to tell us something about reality - to impart news about ourselves about the seeds we have sown, about the nature of life.  If we can intercept the reactive nature of the mind and the habitual defensiveness of the heart, then we will find ourselves in a world that never runs out of messages."  Elizabeth Lesser

Inner Work

"Real and abiding consciousness change doesn't just happen.  We have to work for it, in our own hearts and in the world.  I am just as impressed by the inner work that each one of us does as I am by the work we do in the world.   By inner work, by spiritual work, I mean living the examined life; watering the seeds of wisdom, confronting our shadowy parts, because I'm telling you, inside each one of us is our own little mean mini-Maciavilli.   It takes work to tame our mini-Maciavilli.  It takes spiritual work that quiets the reactivity of the mind and expands the heart in wider cirlces.  It takes psychological inquiry to heal our family wounds and uncoil our unconscious ego urges to dominate and punish.  Without this kind of inner work our primal, tribal reactivity waits in the wings and it takes over when crisis' loom.  I'm not saying the point is to become some egoless saint.  I'm just asking you to consider trying to change yourself even as you try to change the world because how we do what we do is as important as what we do."  Elizabeth Lesser

Shadow

"We see the shadow most indirectly in distasteful traits and actions of other people, OUT THERE, where it is safe to observe it.   When we react intensely to a quality in another individual or group - such as laziness or stupidity, sensuality or spirituality - and our reaction overtakes us with great loathing or admiration, this may be our shadow showing.  We project by attributing this quality to the other person in an unconscious effort to banish it from ourselves, to keep ourselves from seeing it within."  Zweig and Abrams

Spiritual Adventure

"The spiritual path is the process of fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life and relaxing our mental and emotional grip on our own place within it.   Learning how to do this opens the way to a kind of wisdom that answers our own questions and touches the deepest strands of our longing."   Elizabeth Lesser

The Mystery

"The wisest, sanest, and happiest of people are not those who profess a complicated and rigid spiritual doctrine.   Rather, I have gained the most from those who's paths lead them and their students gently, humorously, and fearlessly into the Mystery.   The most useful spiritual techniques are those that have taught me how to relax into the Mystery.  Once there, the path home lights up from within."  Elizabeth Lesser