November 2008
Monthly Archive
A Beautiful Understanding Beyond Words
Posted by admin on 30 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: anamcara, celtic spirituality
In the Celtic tradition there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul love; the old Gaelic term for this is Anam Cara.
- John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom of the Celtic World
In the work of The Anamcara Experience there is a beautiful understanding. This is the understanding of soul love or sole love – love of the One by the One to the One for the One.
The word understanding here does not mean a more intellectual understanding but means seeing. It means insight. This is an understanding that is holistic, whole and holy. This understanding is not something you get; it is given. To be given such understanding is a great grace and a great responsibility.
To be given this understanding is to walk in beauty. This means a personal commitment to be faithful to that understanding that has come through you. It is always looking for you. The Beloved in you is looking to unite with you – is longing for you to come in sight and to see each other.
This is a quiet beauty but is nonetheless powerful for all that. It does not have a political agenda. It is not out to save the world. It is, however, out to empower creativity innate in all form. It is out to express the beauty in form that friendship with the soul gives. The world is not saved but the world is known in a way that empowers justice to be in the world
John O’Donohue says in Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom of the Celtic World, that we are here on this planet to be creators with the divine. We are not here to be dominators as is demonstrated by our present relationship with Mother Earth.
0The Sacred Wisdom of Burning Your Boats
Posted by admin on 26 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: spiritual storytelling
Sacred story can speak to us of timeless lessons (many of them painfully relevant to us in our present age) and offer us different ways of looking at our innermost being.
- Frank MacEowen, The Celtic Way of Seeing
The Anamcara invites you into the experience of sacred story. This is story that invites you into wholeness and the holy. Most of the stories of our present time are stories of deep separateness and fear.
Irish mythology is full of sacred stories. These are not just ‘quaint’ stories of days of old. Irish mythology contains, as all mythology does, maps of the journey of humanity into higher and higher levels of Love in action. The intellect has forgotten that there are ways that the heart has of knowing that the head knows nothing about.
There is the story where the Tuatha de Danaan, the Beautiful People, burn their boats of silver and gold on the shores of the land that will come to be called Erin – Ireland.
When this writer tells this story to children they are in some ways aghast. Some are aghast that the boats burn for three days and three nights and block out all light. Others tell this storyteller that it is silly to burn ones’ boats. The real difficulty for some is imagining that anyone would destroy the wealth of gold and silver in the boats themselves. Such has become the materialist mindset of our young.
What is misunderstood by the children (and many adults) is that there is greater treasure to be had. This is a treasure available on a new shore. This new shore is a growth within consciousness that no gold or silver will substitute. It is the growth in the ability to expand your connection to that which is forever creative.
This story indicates what one is required to do in order to venture into this new land of Erin – this land of possibility arising from the unknown. One has to give up what one holds dear and sacrifice it in order to move on. This giving up is an emptying out of the old in order that the new may be birthed.
All wisdom teachings speak about the issue of detachment. Buddhism in particular has much to say about being attached to things including experiences. Our gold and silver boats are our ideas about who we are. Many of us will resist any idea of change.
In this way, we move against life. We make our life situation the way we want it to be rather than the way our soul has invited us to be. We become attached to our roles. We live within this script, which are the bounds that I call ‘little me.’
But ‘little me’ is not the ocean of life in constant creative flux. ‘Little me’ tends to build a pond away from the flow of the river moving ever forward toward the fathomless ocean of Love. It tends to build an identity that it can cling to and never need to make a real effort to grow in Love.
The soul is the movement of this energy toward higher expressions of Love in form. It will burn all boats of silver and gold because it loves the adventure. The soul is not afraid of new birth. The ego tends to live in fear of the unknown. The soul relishes the unknown. The ego tries to save the life situation of ‘little me’ and loses its real connection to the life of Love ever expanding.
Burning your boats on another shore might mean you change your job. It might mean that you go and leave living with your parents. It might mean you seek counselling for a form of addiction. The symbol of burning your boats of gold and silver means you claim full responsibility for the way the flow of life moves through you. This is the beginning of maturity. It is the beginning of the call to adventure that is the hero’s journey.
0Steering A Course of Spiritual Direction
Posted by admin on 25 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: Manifesting Your Dream
If you build it and they will come.
From Field of Dreams
One key element on the spiritual journey is trust. One must learn to trust the path. One must learn to trust that the force is always with you. It is not that the force of love in action is available to you only at sometime of its choosing. The force is unconditional. It is timeless.
In the wonderful movie Field of Dreams the main character played by Kevin Costner is called to build a baseball stadium in the middle of a cornfield far from anywhere. Everyone thinks he is crazy but he follows his heart’s calling and builds his field of dreams. And they do come.
The Anam cara invites you to unfold your creative potential that will come through you if you trust it will. This creative flow is needed to be felt as a force within you before it can be made manifest in the world of form. This requires the ability to trust your creative imagination.
Most people have shut down this imaginative ability to a large degree. It has been scientifically measured to find that before we are educated our creative imagination operates at a level of 97%. When we leave school this ability has fallen to 3%. This has not fallen by 3% but fallen to 3%, a net 94% loss!
You leave school well informed. We have, however, lost touch with that creative force beyond from. This is the force that gives you what you want would that you build your trust in come what may.
This learning to trust the course of the heart’s imagination is the Anam cara invitation.
0Love really is ALL You Need
Posted by admin on 24 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: Divine Love
“Love is All You Need”
-The Beatles
An Anamcara loves songs. There are not just sentimental love songs but songs that invite the feeling connection to the creative source that moves as Love in form.
The Beatles sing that Love is easy. Most of us would dispute this and say that Love is anything but easy. This is because we do not fully embrace the movement of Love in form. It has four phases – as does creativity.
There is birth. There is expansion. There is regression. There is death.
All forms move through this process. It is how life creates. It is how life creates all life. We tend to have a problem with allowing regression. We have a major problem with death.
Love just loves expansion, which is to say, Love loves creation. Put another way Love loves Love. Don’t you love Love? When you are in Love it is in that moment easy. Is there somewhere in that moment you would rather be? It’s easy because you aren’t resisting the process!
0How to Build Your Field of Dreams
Posted by admin on 24 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: Life Purpose
If you build I, he will come…
From Field of Dreams(1989), written & adapted by Phil Alden Robinson from W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe”
An Anam cara who is a friend of your soul will tell you that one way of seeing the divine is a through a field of dreams. This is a timeless flow of creation that dreams everything into existence.
You too are a field of dreams from the One Field. Quantum physics, which is today’s leading edge science, tells us what the mystics of all traditions and all ages know. They know that we are all One. They know that the experience created by the senses and the ego as a separate sense of self is not the whole picture.
We are all building our field of dreams. For many of us this dream or those dreams turn into nightmares. An anam cara will tell you that this is because you build all your dreams of living a future life of security and happiness on a core dream that is false.
When you build your sense of self on the sense of separateness you are like a fish living in the ocean looking for water. The Anam cara will invite you to wake up from your dream of separateness and build on the real foundation. This is the ground that does not move when all else is quaking inside you. This is the felt experience of oneness with the Source.
When you build from this realisation of Oneness those that need to come will come. They will come to guide you on your journey into the deepening relationship to the flow of creation as it moves through your body and manifests as your ability to create in form.
You are a field of dreams but you have to be attentive to every image that you create within this dream. An Anam cara invites you to relax into the flow of your creative imagination. This is your dance with that which is the source of all creation. It was given to you to be creative.
The Anamcara Experience is the moment-to-moment experience of allowing this flow of creation that is unique to you to be expressed. This dance knows how to dance through you. It created you for its own purpose to express uniquely. When you allow this you radiate. Your life gets to light up and lightens up. Then you become a light unto others. You provide spiritual direction for creative inspiration.
The question is not only are you prepared to build your dream. The more important question is, “What are the qualities of being that will come through me as a result of my intention(s)?”
Importantly, will those intentions come to be for the benefit and good for all? Or will those intentions benefit the nightmare of separation from Love?
0How Myth Mirrors the Truth about Ourselves
Posted by admin on 12 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: mystical poetry
There is only one journey-
Going into yourself.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
If one were a detached observer of our world you might conclude that there is only one journey – the journey to the shopping mall. This writer thinks that this, together with sport, have become the new temples of meaning. We have replaced Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” with “I am, therefore I shop.” Or perhaps, “I am, therefore I spectate.”
Many stories of old, which are referred to as wonder tales within many cultures, contain stories about mirrors. Mirrors are a device used to signify a threshold place. It is said that the mirror does not lie. It is simply a reflector of what is.
What is within you is reflected out into the world. The way each of us sees the world is a reflection of our inner state. The journey within yourself is an endless journey. One simply goes deeper and deeper. It is a journey into a void. Only this void is not empty. It is filled with creative potential waiting to be given birth.
0The Magic Swirling Ship of Irish Mythology
Posted by admin on 10 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: Irish mythology
Take me for a trip upon
Your magic swirling ship
Bob Dylan – Mr. Tambourine Man
Most of us are on a trip. The question is, “Is this trip taking me anywhere?” There is a paradox to the answer. If you think it is then you are not on a trip that is magical and will make your head swirl.
We need to have our heads swirl. Heads can be so full of knowledge that there is no room for the new. In our heads that have bee taken over from the “swirling ship” of the heart resides the inner critic, the doubter and various related members of the ‘playing small’ family devoid of magic or mystery.
Irish mythology, which is a language of magic and mystery, can become a magic swirling ship. This is not just a trip into some historical time and place but the invitation to real magic. This is the invitation to the Timeless – the NOW.
The Mr. Tambourine Man can play a song for you but you will be in a whirl. This is because all Tambourine Men (which also includes women) will play you YOUR song. You will tell them that this song is just too beautiful for words. They will then ask you, “Why aren’t you playing this song.”
The Tambourine Man will then disappear and this song will haunt you until you meet again. Only this time you will be attuned to your unique time. The one that you came here to sing. The one that will take you as a magic swirling ship going in the true direction.
0Bard’s Tales Free Your Spirit
Posted by admin on 05 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: spiritual storytelling
When we start telling stories we gave our lives a new dimension: the dimension – apprehension – comprehension.
Ben Okri – Birds of Heaven
Are you committed to giving your life a new dimension? Are you ready to enter a dimension of expanded creativity aligned with expanding creation?
If so you become a bird of heaven. You are attuned to the source of the infinite. You learn to fly the nest of resistance to growth in Love.
To tell the story of who you truly are involves tremendous risk. Yet the rewards for such risks are equally tremendous. In the Irish traditional folk song “She Moved Through the Fair” the meeting of two lovers ends because one refuses to tell their story. This is indicated in the lines:
But One has a sorrow
That never was told.
There are very few of us living the human story who do not have a sorrow that never was said. In this writer’s family many sorrows were left unsaid out of fear and guilt. So the story of fear and guilt is visited upon the sons and daughters for generation upon generation.
This is until one child comes along to change the dynamic. They are often those children thought of as the ‘black sheep’ of the family when often the truth is that they fight to be free of the burden of sorrows unsaid. They are really Birds of Heaven.
To be a storyteller for your family, for your community, for your nation, for the world is a great responsibility. The true storyteller suffers the chaos and the madness, the nightmares and dreams to resolve it all, to see clearly and then guide you surely through the fragmentation of a shifting world.
Still and all – you get to fly!
0It’s a Myth? No – Wonder!
Posted by admin on 04 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: spiritual storytelling
Sacred story can speak to us of timeless lessons (many of them painfully relevant to us in our present age) and offer us different ways of looking at our innermost being.
- Frank MacEowen, The Celtic Way of Seeing
The Anamcara invites you into the experience of sacred story. This is story that invites you into wholeness and the holy. Most of the stories of our present time are stories of deep separateness and fear.
Irish mythology is full of sacred stories. These are not just ‘quaint’ stories of days of old. Irish mythology contains, as all mythology does, maps of the journey of humanity into higher and higher levels of Love in action. The intellect has forgotten that there are ways that the heart has of knowing that the head knows nothing about.
Storytelling has been at the heart of most civilisations for millennia. The oral tradition of storytelling has been the primary way of communication for most of this adventure in form we call humanity.
These sacred stories (sacred meaning to make whole) offer us a different way of seeing the world. They invite us to reclaim our true sense of creative power. This is the power of our innermost being. This being understands stories that transcend time and invites paradox, magic and wonder.
These sacred stories are Wonder Tales. These are no tall tales but tales that invite you to connect with a real sense of wonder. With sacred story you are invited to give up your intellect for bewilderment. You are invited to move beyond the sacred to the wildness of the sacred. Such is the invitation of The Anamcara Experience.
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