As a writer on divine purpose I am interested to see and read what others are writing on this beautiful invitation.  I have to say that what I read is, metaphorically speaking, old wine in new wine skins.  As one who was once one who was an earnest wine drinker, seriously in love with ‘the women with the dimple in her bottom’, I can say that in my opinion it is not even very good old wine.

So I am writing this article to give you some guidance on who to recognise a true invitation to the revelation of the beauty you create and what can be called Divine Purpose.

1. The Issue of Time

Does the teacher ground you in the issue of your relationship to time and your relationship to the timeless? Or is it simply more goal setting techniques that offer you the ability to live in the prison of time a little more or a lot more comfortably.  Get comfortable in the Timeless.  It is the only comfort that lasts.  Get comfortable in time and you will be ‘doing time’ rather than having the time of your life.

2. Are they inviting you to serve?

Does the teacher continually live the invitation of service to the Divine or are they living their ‘divine purpose’ as invitations of self-interest.  Service is understood by all true teachers of Divine Purpose to be at the heart of what it is to live in form as a revelation of the formless.  This is fundamental to the process of divine purpose unfolding.

3.Are they creating clear boundaries?

Does the teacher offer you a license to say what you think or feel just because this happens to be what’s on your mind? This might sound silly to you but there are those teachers of divine purpose promoting a ‘tell it like it is’ approach. They proudly wear the badge of unbridled self-expression.  While this might be understandable in small children, divine purpose requires that you actually create clear boundaries with precepts. The boundless that is your Divine Purpose is not revealed to those engaged in narcisstic self-absorption or self -expression.

4. How do they deal with conflict?

This may be difficult to know until a conflict arises!  Anyone intent on the unfolding of divine purpose within and through them will meet resistance from within and without.  You are not going to transform lead into gold – the spiritual alchemical process of Divine Purpose – by living a life of pure self-interest and comfort.  Conflict is inevitable. It is not its absence that makes you grow, but how you alchemise it. This is not done through unbridled self-expression. If takes humility to be the authentic expression of the Self.

5. What language are they using?

Does the teacher hold himself or herself up as an example? Do they give you a sense that they are broadcasting an “I did it My Way” wavelength? Do they use paradox, metaphor, or poetry to invite you into the river of presence?  Divine Purpose is a presence that embraces those willing to surrender.  The more you are invited to do your purpose the more you are likely to get in the do-do.  You might end up doing all you ever wanted to do but never know who ‘you’ are.  If your divine purpose teacher is not asking, “Who are you?” then go and seek again. Be open to other invitations. Knock on a few different doors. Anyone that is intent only on making the prison house of being separate from Love a more comfortable prison truly has your divine purpose at heart. As all the mystics will tell you that way can only end in tears.

So whom can you trust? You can trust any of the following teachers of divine purpose. This does not mean you can trust those who profess to be their followers.

You can trust Rumi. You can trust Hafiz. You can trust Christ. You can trust invitations from the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Chang Tao.

Modern teachers you can trust with the invitation to Divine Purpose include Eckhart Tolle, Guy Finley, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, David Whyte, Mary Oliver, John O’Donohue and Gangaji.

So be very discerning.  The invitation to Divine Purpose was not popular two thousand years ago.  It still is not popular.  When it is then Heaven will be on earth because the consciousness of duality will be transcended and sacred unity know to be the true purpose of living in form.  Anything less on offer is what this storyteller calls the invitation from the Dreamstealers.

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Lonely looking sky!

Lonely looking sky!

And being lonely

Makes you wonder why.

Neil Diamond from the soundtrack of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull

One of the great invitations from storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book Women Who Run With the Wolves is “Do not fear not knowing. In various phases and period of our lives, this is how it should be.”Most of us fear this ‘not knowing.’ We are like trees pushing for the buds to open. We wait in a lonely looking sky and push with our logic chopping brain to make sense of it all.  We might wonder why but there is more of the why than the wonder.

This place of ‘not knowing’ is uncomfortable.  We are taught that life is about get up and go.  We are taught that life is about producing.  We are not taught that life is about birth and death and life.  In this cycle there is a time of incubation.  There is a time when the old is dying for the new to be born.

This is the phase of not knowing. What we tend to do is extend this period through resistance in order to avoid this frustrating ‘not knowing’ and we rehash the old and dress old wine in new wine skins.  This rehash is willed from the discomfort of ego rather than creative birthing from the soul.

We see this approach in our collective relationship to nature.  We view nature as something we use as a productive resource.  In a natural organic cycle of food production we allow the land to rest.  With our agribusiness focus we pour more chemicals on the soil to speed up the product cycle and do not allow the soil to recuperate.

What is the answer to this issue?  First, become aware of your fear of not knowing what the future holds.  This is usually a projection.  Come back to the present moment through focusing on the breath.  Do this as a regular practice and you will find this can become an anchor when your mind starts to fly off into a lonely looking sky and rather than feel any sense of wonder being filled with worry.

The next exercise is not popular but I am going to write it.  You are here to ser creation and you are not here to serve yourself.  This is why many of us get lonely and even get depressed.  We don’t know what to do with ourselves and we don’t know who or why we are here.  In one sense depression is a healthy response to a sick situation.

Krishnmurti, this writer’s first teacher, was interviewed by a press correspondent who began by asking, “Well, Mr. Krishnamurti, it is said you believe…”  Krishnamurti quickly corrected this correspondent’s view by replying, “You are wrong. I do not believe at all. I know.”

Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist, issued a similar reply to such a question. “Why believe when you know.”

This is the invitation from “Do not be afraid of not knowing.”  It can be the prelude to your becoming the knowing of who you are.  It can become the prelude to you being born anew into the full realization of your being here now.

Real education that focused on the cycle of creation would teach you this.  Then you would be less resistant to change that invariably comes.  You would grow into your soul invitation and you would become an Anamcara.  The experience of not knowing might never be a delight but at least you would not feel so afraid of going into the unknown.

All mystics will issue the greatest invitation: “Die before you die.”  To the logic chopping mind that wants to know everything and arrogantly thinks it can know everything this does not make sense.  To the soul it is wisdom that is sensational.  If you live this invitation you will not be afraid of not knowing for you will become the not knowing that paradoxically is the experience of infinite intelligence.

Out of what appears to be ‘not knowing’ can come ‘all knowing’.  The way to get there is a paradox.  You let go and you trust the process.  You practice a sense of humility and get out of the way.  The creative intelligence that creates you also creates all things and knows what it is doing.  If you had faith in it the size of a mustard seed you would know this.

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I am the Lord of the Dance!

Dance! Dance! Wherever you may be.

I am a recovering alcoholic.  I am also recovering from the impact that Christianity had on my heart. Both these processes are ongoing.

I was brought up in the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland. This is the city of Armagh, the city of saints and scholars, neither of which applies to myself.  I love this city but it haunts me in many ways.  I was in that town scripted someone who it seems had the word ‘sinner’ on his forehead like a scarlet letter.  Then there was the other idea.  This was that God had a plan and that I had better get in line.

This invitation is still being dressed up in new books and sermons.  Essentially it is old wine in new wine skins.  Both of these invitations to recognising that you were a sinner and that God had a plan for you seemed intent on creating feelings of guilt.  As someone with very low self-esteem at that time this was an emotional experience that until I left Northern Ireland when I was twenty-one years old.

Little has changed. This is, in part, the reason why this site exists and for The Work I do.  It is an invitation to the awareness of the beauty that is at the heart of creation and which you are created to express without any sense of guilt.

Guilt has a value when it arises from one’s internal wisdom.  It is an invitation to correction, to take action that follows Love.  It is corrosive to the spirit when imposed from an authority outside oneself.  There can be outside corrective instruction but there is no place within such instruction for the invitation to feel guilty.

This writer is for conscience and not guilt.  Conscience is there as a protection, not a punishment.  Close it down and you wound yourself and shut down your power.

For years I was a reactionary to the word ‘sinner.’ If you attend some of the Protestant churches I have attended you would suspect that this word was an obsession.  This writer thinks that in many places the institutional mind reigns rather than Love.

I am less of a reactionary than I was but my alter ego Mrs. Batty still appears when I hear or read about us ‘all being sinners’ who need to follow God’s plan.  Mrs. Batty can be a bit of a ranter.  It is my work to keep her contained.  She has a problem with what wisdom traditions refer to as ‘right speech.’  She likes to shout her mouth off and say exactly what she wants and consequences be damned. One thing about Mrs. Batty – she is sure she is right, which is always a dangerous card to play.

So let me share where I am now as a recovering mystic/seer wounded by the institutional mind called christianity. I deliberately am using the small ‘c’ to indicate the small mindedness of that mind set.

Am I a sinner? The answer to that is ‘Yes.’ Am I to feel guilty? The answer to that is ‘No.’

A sinner is someone who misses the mark, misses the centre.  The centre is Love.  So a central to the sinner’s experience is the absence of Love.  All I do is invite awareness to this absence.  This does not condemn any of us. Your are being invited into a love affair that was created to last forever and you are one side of it that, paradoxically speaking, you are never apart from.  You certainly leave Love but it never leaves you.

Does God have a plan for you?  At this stage in this storyteller’s life the answer is ‘Yes’ and it is ‘No.’ God is not a planner.  All those who tell you God has a plan are focused on time.  When you question them you will find that most, if not all of them, think that eternity is a time beyond measure.  This is one key to knowing that they do not know.  Any teacher who teaches the invitation to the timeless, who has not been graced the knowing of eternity here and now, ought to shut up.

God is not a planner because a plan has to have a beginning and an end.  God – Creation – is in love with creation.  This is why creation is.  It is a manifestation of Love in form. To say that God has a plan would involve you in saying that there will come a time (within the timelessness of Creation) when God ceases to Love.  This is childish nonsense. Not only that. It wound the mystic heart that is a heart seeking missile for the Beloved.  It screws up this inner guidance system.  Not only that but it sets up an idea of a chosen ‘elect.’

God is a dancer.  You are a part of this dance of eternity that is stepping into higher and higher forms of Love.  If there is a plan it is contained in the word Love.  How this Love is expressed needs a boundary.  You are that boundary designed to contain the boundless.  This is more a love affair than a plan, more a dance of the timeless than within the prison of time.

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I have a soul friend who when we first met did not like me.  He thought I was opinionated and arrogant. Not much change there then. He had one unusual trait to his character. He would go to cathedrals and churches and there he would cry but not know why.

I don’t know if he still cries when he enters beautiful church or cathedral spaces.  I suspect he still does but for very different reasons.  He has become a reverend and a reverence to what was calling his heart on that time when we each were searching for the understanding of that cathedral space within us.

It takes tremendous courage to enter the paradox that is living in the cathedral space of the heart.  It is not give the title “The Hero’s Journey” for no good reason.  In order to live in that twixt and between place you have to be prepared to give up what you think will make you happy and risk entering a place of unknowing.

You are asked to risk all for nothing.  You, as an ego, are a bargain hunter.  You, as an ego, think that you are something.  You, as a sense of separateness from Love, think that you are the one to do and have it all.  You are only reminded of this illusion when you enter the cathedral space for no reason at all.  Not a popular invitation for most people.  Except that it is the invitation from all those madmen and mad women we call mystics.  They say, like Rumi says

I used to be shy.

You made me sing.

I used to refuse things at table.

Now I shout for more wine.

 In sombre dignity, I used to sit

on my mat and pray.

 Now children run through

and make faces at me.

From Birdsong- 53 short poems translated by Coleman Barks

This is sometimes the best reason to cry.  It is beyond logic.  It is the heart calling you to wake up from a life devoid of purpose, passion and real prosperity.  Real prosperity is the ability to give yourself away freely.

I love poetry.  In a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye she asks, “What makes you cry?”  She is asking a key question here. This is the body’s response to either absence of fullness.  She isn’t asking you what make you sad.  She is asking what make you cry for joy.  What is it in your life that allows you to live the heart paradox that is an emptiness filled with joy?

This is the emptying of your life so that the One life can flow through you.  This is a feminine virtue.  It is the virtue of surrender and allowing.  It is the allowing of the space within you to open up to that spaceless, timeless dimension within you.

This Irish storyteller will guarantee you one thing.  It will make you cry and you won’t be crying for lack of understanding.  You will be crying because it is all too much to believe in because your feeling connection to that outpouring of creation through you is beyond belief.

Find time for those cathedral spaces within.  Allow them to be sanctified and to become your sanctuary from the trials and tribulations of the shifting sands of time.  If you find yourself crying for no reason it could be the call to become reverent rather than grasping.

Strange to say your soul friend is glad of heart to see you crying in the chapel.  The chapel here is not a reference to any formal religious affiliation.  It is a metaphor for one who has entered that paradox of unknowing, where emptiness is felt as an fullness.  What you felt was empty is what you were looking for.  You have come home to a house of reverence.  You are to be revered for the courage it takes to go and cry willingly for union with Love.

Go now and quest.  Ask a poetic question, “What makes me cry?”  Trust the process and you might arrive at a point where, like George Bailey in the film It’s a Wonderful Life you cry out “I want to live again!” Which is to say, “I want to Love again.”

Would that make YOU cry?

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Many of you will know that I am a storyteller and writer on “Seven Ways to a Wonderful Life.”  Each of these seven ways is individually important in their own way but I start with purpose.  This is foundational.

As a storyteller I promote the invitation to the Anamcara Experience. This is an invitation to unfold the divine purpose that you are here on this planet to allow to flow into and through and up.  To do this you need to be grounded.  You will not be able to unfold your divine purpose without some key precepts to build on.

As a storyteller it will come as no surprise that I love stories.  Most of all I love healing stories.  Having been brought up in Northern Ireland I carry old baggage around the teachings that I call christianity. The small c is intentional. I am conflicted around this issue because my heart is in love with the Divine.

When I was graced what Buddhism calls stream entry, I fully expected to experience an intense love affair with the Buddha and the four noble truths.  What I did not expect and did not really want (although of course my soul’s inner wisdom wanted this) was to fall in Love with the Christ.

Notice here that this storyteller is not saying he fell in love with Jesus.  Notice here that he did not say that he fell in Love with christianity. Notice that it has been stated that this storyteller did not fall in love with the Bible. In that grace experience I fell In Love and became Love.  This cannot be understood without such a grace experience.

However, here is the crux of the matter. I think that the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is one of (if not the greatest) of storytellers to have graced this planet as an invitation to awareness of divine consciousness in human form – the new man/new woman.

At the time he was telling his stories they were not always popular.  The stories I tell are not always popular so I have a role model! The Christ story has never been ‘popular.’ The christian story is in decline although the corpse is being risen from the dead by such best-selling books as The Purpose Drive Life, which is apparently the most popular hard backed book ever published (although I would have imagined the Bible had it beaten.)  Rick Warren, who gave the inaugural blessing to the new President of the USA Barack Obama, wrote this best seller.  This President is, for this writer, an invitation to the mystic.

Having said all the above I absolutely love Bible stories.  Especially those told by the Christ in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. I particularly love the story of the moneychangers in the temple.  I have heard it many times.  This storyteller thinks that were it told the way that Christ intended it to be understood the churches and chapels would be empty.  That is why you don’t hear this story in the modern money changing temples of divine purpose.

When this story is told people think it is an anti-profiteering, anti-business, anti-riches story.  If christianity fully embraced this teaching even on a literal level there would be more justice for the poor.  The rich would not be caught up in the prison of never quite enough and the churches would not be attached to real estate and simply ‘gather in my name.’   In ‘my name’ has nothing to do with church dogma but is a whole other energetic relationship to the Divine and Divine Purpose.

It is not a popular story if you read it as it is intended.  You will tell this storyteller that this story does not apply to you?  You think that it does not apply to you because you have never traded in a church? You might have engaged in fundraising for, say, repairing the church roof, but you are not a moneychanger in the temple.

Now if you take this story literally, as most people do, then you can say, “Okay, so the moneychangers were thrown out of the temple.” If you are graced the insight contained in this story it becomes a beautiful invitation to the mystic.  You get the invitation, the words of the great Van Morrison, “to sail into the mystic.”

From the point of view of the mystic, from the point of view of the Anamcara, you are the moneychanger.  Now you may well be offended at this idea. This storyteller has been offended by the idea.  This is to be expected.  If you are not engaged in the service of the Divine Purpose of Love you are a moneychanger working to profit from your life for your own purpose.

How popular do you think the church would be if each week your religious authority were to tell you that you are defiling the sacred temple of Love with your energy of self-interest? Would you not seriously think twice about going back! You would protest.  You would think, “I haven’t come here to be insulted!” 

Matthew Fox tells a story in “Radical Prayer” (CD available from www.soundstrue.com) about a Native American who decided to ‘travel in the light’ and educate school children about his spiritual tradition’s wisdom. The children always would get the point of his stories but immediately the word “Great Spirit” got mentioned the teachers got really antsy. He told Matthew Fox, ” I don’t get invited back.”  On the other hand, there are an awful lot of schools in the USA and he just keeps moving from one to the next and the next and the next. The stories and their wisdom get planted.

I can relate to this myself when I tell children about the Tuatha de Danaan and that they, too, are Beautiful People. The only teachers who seem to get these stories are those who work with the so-called ‘handicapped’ or ‘special needs’ children.

Popular is not necessarily the best measure when it comes to wisdom.

There are those on the World Wide Web who are inviting you to simply change the cloth on the temple’s money table.

Why is this story so very important?  Because it shows why the incarnation of Love in form got angry.  He’s not angry about making a return on investment. He’s angry because you and I have claimed the temple of Love as your own.  You have changed the currency of sacred unity for the currency of ego. 

He is angry because you are changing gold into lead.

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Alchemy is a process.  It is not an easy process.  It is a practice of commitment to the highest good.  It is the highest responsibility.  You commit to accepting that your energy is your energy and you are responsible for how it is expressed.

There are various densities to lead.  Hatred and bitterness are a kind of lead that you have allowed to grow heavier and heavier until they, in a literal sense, become immoveable.  These immoveable objects often begin as less dense leaden aspects such as irritation and anger.

Alchemy is the process of learning to change these leaden aspects of emotional experience into more positive aspects before they become calcified and harder to move or less flexible.  This process begins with awareness.  It is to become aware of how one feels.  Allied to this are the thoughts that one allows to surface in the mind.  It is your mind.  You are the guardian of your mind.  At the gates of your mind, metaphorically speaking, you create with practice threshold guardians.

This storyteller works with anger.  It takes a lot to make him angry (or at least he thinks it does) but when this energy is evoked by outside circumstances all hell can be unleashed and, metaphorically speaking, divine purpose goes out the window of awareness.

In such an experience one loses one’s centre.  The mind goes racing.  The intention is to remain centred but the intensity of the experienced hurt or injustice is highly emotionally charged.  One literally is on a raft going down a white water experience.  I am being carried down the rapids and all I can do is watch.

This is why you do a spiritual practice.  It is not in order to chase experiences of bliss like going to a spiritual supermarket to shop for self-aggrandisement.  Such states are graces and are not available for your personal use.  You can and will enjoy (and I mean in-joy) these experiences but their real intent is to serve the highest good for all.

The measure of your spiritual maturity is not how long you can sit in meditation but how long you can work with energy that seeks to destroy or hurt or inflict pain -whether this is physical, emotional, or spiritual pain.  This is shambala, the experience of becoming a spiritual warrior.

In the ranks of the spiritual army I would consider myself a rank amateur.  This is not to denigrate the effort. To quote an Irish mythological metaphor, riastradh (combination holy anger and battle rage) arises yet it often appears that nothing much has changed.  The reactive self is still reactive.  What is important, however, is the intention.  Keep intending that you will work with the process and honour it.

Honouring it does not mean getting rid of it.  Neither does it mean indulging it, which tends to weaken the power of the threshold guardians you, as a spiritual warrior are intent on developing.  What you do is it to witness the experience and its power.  This is essentially why all spiritual traditions have practices of meditation.  It allows you space to witness intense emotional states as they arise and change them within that space as they arise.

You, as a spiritual warrior, turn that power against the forces that have invoked this experience.  This means that you do what you need to do without recourse to injury or harm while all the time being aware that you are experiencing anything from mild irritation to boiling rage.

Then there is the hardest part.  What if you do all that and the forces that have invoked your experience win?  What if nothing changes and you’re left feeling that it is all a lost cause?

It is here that spiritual practice and spiritual experience come into their own.  One of the most powerful practices of all spiritual traditions is the practice of detachment.  This does not mean absence of feelings.  It means the witnessing of emotional states.  This allows for the creation of the guardian at the mind’s gate.  Then the guardians are really in charge.

Winning and losing are also a concept in time.  Winning and losing are also an ego experience.  Winning and losing is a concept of separateness.  They are an experience of duality.  The one is always becoming the other.  The elation of the win is the seed for the birth of loss.  The sense of death at a loss is the seed for the birth of the new.  This is samsara.  This is suffering.

It happens to us all.  It happens to this storyteller, this rank private first class in the realms of spiritual warriorhood.  This is no reason to despair.  What are important are the intention, the witnessing, and the practice of the will to Love.  You are going to come out battered and bruised but you will have moved on one way that is central to the process.  You will have moved to the centre ground.  You will have created a clearer boundary and you have moved nearer the circle of Love than the circle of time.  Your reward will be in Heaven.  This is not some other place or time but within the dimensions of the timeless.  The forces of Love know what you are doing and they are there and are always there beyond this time, space form continuum.  They are more real because they are forever.  You are learning to know how to become the guardian of your own birthright, which paradoxically is your birthless/deathless nature.

So remember that alchemy is not easy but the reward is to know the beauty of who you are beyond this time-bound form called ‘little me.’  You don’t get it as a reward. You get it because you reveal it to your Self from your Self.  Let this Irish storyteller assure you, this is more reward than enough.

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There is a wonderful invitation given in the Native American tradition. It is the request May you walk in beauty.  This is very different to the invitations that our ‘dominator culture’ invites us into.  This is the invitation into the dream of arriving at a place where you can relax and do what you want.  For many of us this dream is fading further into the future.  Retirement ages are rising. Pension plans are in free fall.

What if the dream were only just that – a dream? What if the dream is an illusion all along and that the real way to relax and to accrue is simply to wake up from the dream?

What if you woke up from the dream and you found that what you dreamed of you already have and always have had.  Wisdom teachers of all times and all traditions are constantly making this invitation.  There are plenty of people who are soul friends who live and walk the beauty of this invitation.

There is a paradox in learning to live a life of happiness.  This is that it cannot be done. You can learn to live a life of satisfaction but you live a life of happiness by being in free flow. Happiness arises indirectly.  It isn’t something you do but it is who you are.

To walk in beauty is to learn how to process those energies that keep you out of the direct knowing of who you are.  This is the invitation from a friend of your soul.

You are not created to be unhappy.  You are created to express joy in creating.  Unhappiness arises from feeling blocked from this flow of energy.  This feeling blocked first leads to unease and then dis-ease.  It leads to journeying on a path that takes you deeper into the dark wood referred to by Dante.  The family, the community and wider culture, often sanctions this dark wood.  We see this happening as a consequence of our sense of how we value our environment.

It concerns this writer that one growth indicator that is on the rise is the incidence of depression and suicide.  This is hardly an indicator of success.  It is an indicator of a response to a way of life that does not allow us to walk in beauty.  This is because where we are walking is a place that is absent of soul.

This writer uses the word soul in his own way.  He takes this word to mean the felt connection to the source of unconditional love.  This is the daily bread that is the metaphor used by the wisdom teacher Jesus of Nazareth in his beautiful invitation that we know as The Lord’s Prayer.

Are you visiting soul places where you are led to a feeling sense of connection to love that feeds you unconditionally?  How do you know that you are in such a place or space? You know because you feel inspired. You feel thankful. You become a devotee of the blessing of such a place and space.  You actively go there and build a sanctuary. That is you engage in creating a place that is sanctified and made sacred.

The most important of all soul places is the space you call your headspace.  Your outer world for the most part is a reflection of this space. Most of what goes on in this space gets filled up with fear, doubt, the odd and fleeting satisfaction and hope for a better future. Only beauty is not of the future.  It is the present moment absent of judgement, resistance and conditionality.  It is energy in free flow, energy in motion – emotion rather that emotionality.

When these pictures in your imagination are taken off the walls and the space appears empty then you create an opening for the new.  Beauty will appear but you need to trust it. Jacques Prévert beautifully illustrates this trust in the poem below.

First pain a cage

with an open door.

then paint

something pretty

something simple

something beautiful

something useful

for the bird.

Then place the canvas against a tree

in a garden

in a wood

or in a forest.

Hide behind the tree

without speaking

without moving…

Sometimes the bird comes quickly

but he may take long years

before deciding.

Don’t get discouraged.

Wait.

Wait years if necessary.

How fast or how slowly the bird comes

has nothing to do with the success

of the picture.

When the bird comes

if he comes

observe the most profound silence

till the bird enters the cage

and when he has entered

gently close the door with a brush.

Then

erase all the bars one by one

taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers.

Then paint the portrait of the tree

choosing the most beautiful of its branches

for the bird.

Paint also the green foliage and the wind’s freshness

and the dust of the sun

and the noise of the creatures in the grass in the summer heat.

And then wait for the bird to decide to sing.

If the bird doesn’t sing

it’s a bad sign.

a sign that the painting is bad.

But if he sings it’s a good sign,

a sign that you can sign.

So, then, so very gently, you pull out

one of the bird’s feathers

and you write your name in a corner of the picture.

To Paint the Portrait of the Bird, Jacques Prévert, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971) Copyright 1949 Editions Gallimard.

How about sharing places that you go to in order to be fed your daily bread.  This can be a place in nature, in prayer, in poetry, or in story.  If it is a true place of beauty then you will be expanded and desire to give away that walk in beauty.

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” But at some point we may meet the shadow of a spiritual authority…”

From The Holy Longing, by Connie Zweig, Ph.D.

I write about purpose and specifically about life’s real purpose.  It appears that more and more people are doing the same. While this is to be celebrated it also raises other issues about the shadow of spiritual authority.

Those seeking purpose in life are often vulnerable.  They are often ready to give their authority over to teachers and experts who they think know more than they do about the endless journey into love.  There is too little written about the what I refer to as the ‘the dark side of the light worker.’

The purpose of this article is to remedy this in part. This storyteller and writer is intent on providing the direct experience of friendship with the soul.  To this end he works every day to promote this work both on the web and beyond the web.

This journey into divine purpose, which is the allowing of love to express in form through you, has many surprises.  One can expect to meet darkness from sources that are intent on resisting its emergence.  What this storyteller is finding more and more is the resistance to the light by ‘light workers.’

On the spiritual journey you are going to have to be, as the Bible advises, “As wise as a serpent and as peaceful as a dove.”  You are going to have to trust deeply in order to come into your true purpose.  However, you are also going to have to be extremely discerning.

There are teachers, experts, gurus, coaches and writers out there on the World Wide Web who promote the light but who claim this light is their own.  The spiritual journey is the hero’s journey.  It is a journey that each and every one of us will take in to what Marianne Williamson calls “The return to Love.” However, you need to be a spiritual warrior and test those who would claim to be invitations to divine purpose, which is your divine purpose.

Let this writer be clear.  Your divine purpose is unique but paradoxically it is not yours. We human beings are unique. While a flower, a tree, or a river lives its divine purpose we have to unfold ours.  The tree cannot resist becoming a tree. The rose cannot become other than a rose.  You and I, however, can resist becoming who we are created to be.

The invitation to your unique and divine purpose is assisted through language.  Increasingly, this storyteller is finding that some light workers are trying to patent or trademark or legally circumscribe language as their own.

There could be some who will email me with warnings not to use the language such as ‘spiritual invitation’ unless it is agreed and permitted by them only.

Is this new?  I think not. It has been going on throughout history.  Forces that brand themselves with the authority of the divine ‘seal of approval’ have always threatened the language of the mystic lover and seeker after the direct experience of the Divine

As a storyteller and writer I will continue to write the way in which grace moves through me. I will continue to invite the perfume of the holy longing into this.  With intention, I will work to expand the light while taking the Biblical advice about wise serpents and peaceful doves.

Please remember to listen to the true wisdom voice within you but do not claim it as your own.  This is the paradox at the heart of the spiritual journey.  The more you are not the more the Divine is.  In the end, which is not an end at all, you realise your Divine purpose when you become a Nobody through which everything is given.  Purpose becomes you as a revelation rather than something you do.

Those who have lived the purpose of the Divine do not claim the language of spiritual invitation as their own.  They are not searching the web with the intent of protecting what they own.  The very fact that they are doing so tells you more about them than the people they see as a threat to their claim to the language of love.

So, use discernment.  Choose wisely. Remain peaceful even when all hell breaks loose, which sometimes happens.

So who can you trust? 

Rumi, Hafiz, Tagore, Jesus Christ, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Thomas Merton , John O’Donohue to name just a few.

Oh, and YOU!

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“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

I wonder can you tell me who said the above lines?  This storyteller could hardly imagine the one who is quoted in the insight above.

It was the father of modern day science and this to this storyteller’s mind, also a modern mystic – Albert Einstein.

I love this quotation. It is a quote that one could easily live by. You would think that a scientist of Albert Einstein’s stature would tell us that knowledge is more important than imagination.  How much time is given to acquiring knowledge in our schools and universities? How much time is given over to the imagination?

One instruction that we are invited to empower ourselves with is to “think outside the box.”  Albert Einstein, it appears, would have us imagine beyond the box and to imagine what it is to be the box and the emptiness outside and inside the box.

In “The Intuitive Way: A Guide to Living from Inner Wisdom” Penny Pierce writes:

People often ask me if they can trust their imagination. I remind them that the logical mind would have nothing to do but repeat itself ad infinitum. If it weren’t for the creativity and genius of imagination life would have no juice, no zest.

So what is important in your life is to be imagined. This is why you are given an imagination.  It is your connection to the creative force that creatively imagines all things into existence.

Here are four steps to getting in touch with the imagination.

1. Decide what is really important in your life

This is not the life of your children, your partner, or your community, but what is important to the being that you are.  This importance is not something you judge but that you express.  It is signalled by joy and inner excitement.

 2. Follow the yellow brick road

The yellow brick road is the metaphor for the golden thread that runs through your life.   This is what Ralph Waldo Trine, the writer who helped shape the current crop of self-help books such as The Secret: The Law of Attraction, calls this road. Where will you allow this golden thread to lead you?  This is the golden thread that runs through all wisdom teachings.

 3. Know the limitation of knowledge

Knowledge is not the same thing as knowing or insight.  Insight comes from within.  Insight is holistic and arises from being in tune with the infinite potential that is available to play through you.  Knowledge is information. It is useful but it is always partial in the sense that it arises from the rational (ratio meaning ‘in part.’)

 4. Trade your knowledge for bewilderment

This is an invitation from the poet Rumi.  This is an invitation to let your imagination run wild.  This is not something to be afraid of but to invite it, welcome it. Your brain is designed for imagination. You only use 5% of your brain. Invite imagination to light up your brain and claim your attunement to infinite possibilities for your life.

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Much of our life is spent judging.  This is judgement of ourselves and others.  This lowers our energy vibration and we fall out of a sense of refinement. We say that we feel less than fine, which is a statement of our energetic flow.

All spiritual traditions invite you to practice in one form or another the art of witnessing.  This is witnessing your thoughts and actions.  This is what the writer Colin Turner, writing in “Shooting the Monkey,” says  is the key to life’s fulfilment.  Here is what this wonderful writer on secrets of the new spirit of business has to say about this practice:

“Everybody is capable of reaping the infinite benefits available, yet most don’t even get close to it.  We are too busy judging others.  Although each of us carries the key to the door of fulfilment, very few ever turn the lock.  All that is required, however, is to take time to meditate.”

This instruction comes from a leading entrepreneur and teacher whose ideas have been influenced by such wisdom teachers as Chang Tzu, Rumi, Wayne Dyer, Vernon Howard and God, to name just a few.  He is representative of the new business spirit that the world of work needs in order that there be justice in the world in the use of economic resources for all people.

In “Shooting the Monkey” Colin Turner goes on to say that the powerful practice of silent witnessing of our thoughts and actions is a spiritual practice.

” Sitting cross-legged and half-naked under a tree humming to yourself is not meditation. Millions of people miss out on meditation because of false connotations.  They think it is gloomy and serious, or religious and monastic, or downright weird and bizarre. Yet meditation affords the opportunity to embark on the greatest adventure the human mind can take. In truth, total awareness is a form of meditation”

That quote is from someone who teaches in a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) programme.  Can you see this instruction, the key to the door of fulfilment being included in the mission statement of many leading companies or corporations?

Can you see such an invitation being extended on the trading floor of the world’s stock exchanges?

Yet, this is being done.  Poets and storytellers are being invited into the boardroom of multi-national corporations. One such poet and storyteller is David Whyte.  This is a storyteller who tells fairy stories. He tells his listeners about the Tuatha de Danaan – the people of beauty and grace that have been overlaid with judgement.

This is one of many secrets of the New Business Spirit that allows us to become invitations to presence.  This means that we work more effectively when we are detached from outcomes and emotional involvement.  This does not mean we cease to fee but that we feel fine.  We trust the process of creation as we witness it in flow rather than in judgement..

The monkey you are invited to shoot in “Shooting the Monkey” is what wisdom traditions who practice silent witnessing call monkey mind.  We all have such a mind.  If you doubt this then sit for five minutes. Practice breathing in and breathing out. Now watch. You will probably be planning something in the future. Thinking about is not being present to and in the moment. Absence from the present moment is how most people go about experiencing their life.  The secrets of the New Business Spirit invite you into the present and the gift that you are and are intended to be.

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As a storyteller I am drawn to communicate.  This I do in words but the stories that I write are invitations from beyond words.  They are pictures that come out of the blue.  They are invitations that come from beyond.

It is hardly co-incidence, therefore, that one of my most favourite pictures is called ‘Communion’   by an artist called Rosekrantz. This is a picture full of blues, gold and light.  It is a picture of a man standing with his hands held together, his head bowed. He is giving thanks.

In the Way of Soul Friendship which is the Anamcara Experience this storyteller writes not only stories but writes about pictures that help reminds each of us about this incredible journey called life and the invitation that flows through your life.

This picture, so loved by this storyteller is, called Communion.  It is not a picture breaking bread or drinking wine.  It is a picture of open minded and openhearted devotion.  There is no God or recognised symbol of a God or Godman in this picture. It invites devotion to that which is unique within you.

The Way of Soul Friendship is a quest.  One asks questions.  These are questions of value.  These are questions that create real value in the sense that they create an opening for the transcendental and the experience of paradox. To have the time of your life requires that you tune into that which is timeless.  In Irish mythology this invitation come by way of the story of the Land of the Forever Young, Tir na Nog.

One way to invite this attunement is to choose a picture that draws you to it.  Choose a picture that you might not understand on an intellectual level but that you feel a connection with.

Let such a picture be put in a prominent place where you will see it often.  In this way your unconscious picks up on your intention to evoke the values that this picture invites within you.

Clearly then you will want to choose a picture that inspires rather than one that has images of violence or destruction.  In this way you are creating a picture of how you intend to invite the infinite to tune into your personal space. 

Do not rush this process.  Simply begin to be aware of the possibility that there is an opportunity here to go deeper than words.  There is no practice, no time, no having to give up something other.  There is the invitation to living a life of purpose aligned to your highest values, beyond the surface of the everyday experience of time and space.

This is the invitation from all great art in whatever form it appears.  If you want to walk in beauty then you have to begin to have it around you.  This is one of the great benefits of living today.  You have available to you a picture that says more than words and that is a heart invitation to real communion.

Ours is a lonely age.  It has mass communication but much of this is talk-talk.  This is not intimacy, which is about vulnerability of the heart.  A great picture will invite you into what the artist saw and the ‘heart reason’ that it was painted.  This was in celebration of the communion with that which created you in order that you too could commune.  The taste of communion is not bread and wine (although it can be that for a true devotee.)  The taste of communion is the creation arising out of the blue of nothing creating through you.

Picture yourself drawn to your highest values. Let a picture remind you of these values each day.  Then you and the picture begin to communicate in ways you might never have imagined.

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The best way to pay attention is to trust the creative process that creates all things.  It wants to create through you because that is its intention.  Your alignment with this intention is the degree to which life flows and things seem to happen in a miraculous way.

Trust is the opposite of doubt. Trust invites Love and doubt invites fear.  Trust invites expansion and fear invites restriction and regression.  In mythological terms one invites the Eros, the God of Love and the other invites the Thanatos, the God of Death.

A person who trusts in the creative process is generally once relaxed and happy.  They don’t have to do it all. They cooperate with the creative life force and trust it to do what it is best at – creating from inspiration.  This requires that you let go of the reins and trust that you will be directed to the source of fulfilment within you.

What are you to pay attention to? In a word, synchronicity.  This is when little things seem to be coincidental. Often we simply notice that a coincidence has occurred and we negate the power by dismissing it as a meaningless recurrence of some trivial event.  In this way we dishonour the way in which the creative process speaks to us.

When we begin to trust and pay attention to these synchronicities we begin to experience ‘Ah ha!’ moments. These are moments of seeming magic when it all fits together where before it might have appeared it was all falling apart.

These meaningful coincidences arise from the voice of your inner teacher.  This is the voice of intuition – inner tuition.  It is not just linear. It is not what we understand as more knowledge about something.  This writer calls it ‘knowing.’  In some wisdom traditions it is called ‘insight.’

Insight can be developed.  It is the real invitation to education.  You are not on this planet to become simply an accumulation of knowledge whose primary focus is to serve an economic idea called increased GDP that ravages the very planet that sustains our life.

You are here to grow in Love.  The extent to which you are in alignment with this primary purpose is the extent to which you will experience happiness.  The extent to which you are not out of alignment is the extent to which you will feel uneasy and experience suffering in some form.

What tells you that you are in tune with the creative process that when asked gives you what you ask for? Simply stated, it is your feel state, your station of vibrational refinement.  Do you think fine thoughts? Do you live in a fine environment? Do you invest in fine food, fine music, and fine company?

Are you attractive? Not merely in a glamorous sense.  Would you commit to marrying yourself as you are right now?  If you are not sure, then start to pay attention.  Pay attention to the ways in which you negate the magic that is always trying to express through you.  This is through feelings of doubt, cynicism and judgement.  If these feelings are paid attention to, which does not mean they are indulged or judged, then they will move deeper into despair, anger and hatred.  There is no sense of refinement to be felt in these emotional states.

Pay attention to how you feel.  Feelings are the rudder on your life’s direction.  They are pointing you to the power within you to express the unique magical and mysterious being you are and are intended to be.  Wake up! Put away doubt and fear and trust the process of creation. It intended that you be here. Was that intention out of Love or was it an accident.  All the seers, mystics and prophets will tell you that you are the stuff of Love.

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Over Christmastime I was in a car accident and I was not in a car accident. The car’s handbrake slipped on a hill and went careering down the hill. Our two dogs were in the car at the time. The car eventually came to a stop about twenty metres at the bottom of the incline.  No one was hurt but people were in shock. One other car was scratch and our car sustained a broken wing mirror. The dogs seemed unperturbed.

As a storyteller I am a metaphor hunter. This means I look for the invitations from beyond within my day-to-day life experiences.  This is important when life appears to be throwing what easily can be viewed as negative situations.

There are no such things as accidents.  They are metaphors for what is happening in your and my life.  What then can I learn from this experience? In dreams and in life the car is often a representation of how we see ourselves.  It is also a representation of our creative energy.

For this storyteller this accident is a statement of what happens when you don’t hold on so tight to that which is controlled. When you hold on tightly to your emotional and creative expression it will one day not be able to hold on to. Life experience will ratchet up the tension and the hold you have on your emotional expressiveness and creative energy will break. You will be forced to let go.

The result will then be anything but creative. I believe that life invites us to pay attention to such minor accidents.  In this way we make the necessary changes and we avoid more major accidents.

The car careering down the hill in reverse in a small Irish town could have been anything but a minor accident. As it happened it was, in fact, a minor or maybe even a major miracle.

The likelihood of only one other car being scratched is not very high.  It was as if angels had driven the car down to where it finally came to rest. You could take this accident and see it metaphorically for your life situation. What would it tell you?

My own interpretation is this.

You have been holding on too tight to your creative energetic expression.  You need to let go the hold you have on it.  This may feel like you are going backwards.  There might be a few scratches on the surface of the ego but you will be guided to a safe place where you will find rest.  The representations of unconditional love within you will be unharmed.

What might tend to happen in such circumstances is that you call yourself all sorts of names.  The accident invites you not to be aware of the conscious need to let go and trust but that you tighten the hold on your sense of creative self then needs to find a more powerful way to find creative expression through you.

If you use this technique of metaphor thinking you are in fact making conscious that which is below the surface but which powerfully wants to express through you.  Using this technique gives meaning to that which appears meaningless. It also helps you listen to the way that life’s creative energy wants to move.  It can also allow you to avoid more intense suffering.  It also can tell you that there is a force that created you to be an expression of Love in form and will not allow you to be less than the totality of who you are.

Remember that your life need not always be an uphill struggle although that is how it might appear.  Sometimes you will be out of control and you go careering downhill.  Your ego gets scratched but if you allow it the infinite can get a chance to flow through you.  You might wake up to find that you are being invited into something that is more than accidental, that you are being invited to express Love’s purpose as it is intended to move through you.

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For anyone of this Irish storyteller’s age, one of the best music albums of my time was the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  It is one of those moments in my life when I remember the day of its release. It was a sunny day in North Wales.

This was an album of major innovation.  The Beatles created it by becoming different characters. These characters were the members of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. On this album is a song written by John Lennon called ” A Day in A Life.”  This song invites us to live each day of our lives rather than, as he writes:

“Woke up, fell out of bed.

Ran a comb across my head.

Made my way down stairs and had a cup

And somebody spoke and I

Fell into a dream.”

Many of us fall into a dream upon waking.  This is the dream of habit.  We do things routinely.  We fall out of bed and we comb our hair mechanically.

The somebody that speaks when you make your way downstairs (a metaphor for habitual thinking) is what Zen calls monkey mind.  It is the mind that you see operating in the character played by Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day.

In this movie Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) goes to the annual Groundhog Day festivities.  After a surprise blizzard traps him in a small town hell, things get even worse. Phil wakes the next morning to find its Groundhog Day all over again, again and again.

This is what many of us, in a psychological sense, are doing in and with our lives.  Everyday we play the same day over and over again. A Day in A Life becomes the same day, just like Groundhog Day for Phil Connors.

One reason for this is that the day is taken for granted.  It is not seen, let alone felt to be a potential grace note, not only in your life, but the lives of everyone else.

How do you, how does Phil Connors, leave the hell of everyday sameness? One key is that he begins to lose his main character trait.  This is cynicism.  He has become cynical about life.  He thinks he knows it all.  He even tries to end it all but when he wakes up the next morning it’s Groundhog Day all over again.

The way out of the sameness he finds is to develop his talents in full, feel what he feels, to fall in love, become vulnerable and available to others.  In this romantic comedy he is well assisted to really wake up by the character of the relentlessly cheerful girl played by Andie McDowell.

A life of purpose and a fulfilled life is a life filled with intention to serve the highest creative expression you have come here to be.  It means really waking up one day,, one moment at a time.  When you really are awake you enter the timeless.  This is the state of being that we in Ireland refer to as the Land of the Forever Young, Tir na Nog.  This is the opposite of living a Groundhog Day existence.  This is the invitation to the forever now.

Wake up each morning, before someone speaks and you fall into a dream, the dream that you are playing small, take five minutes to ask yourself what you truly value.  This is what your heart values and what your talents are intended to express.  Write these values down and make it your heart’s intention to be true to them.

Be sincere in this asking.  Ask that you be enabled to radiate that which is intended to be played through you. Then each morning you can awaken with a sense of empowerment to the one true power that animates all life. 

Then you can play the great tune that you have come here to feel attuned with.  Then there will be no Lonely Hearts Club Band but a band that surrounds you and makes each day in your life another day of loving.

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“Beauty is not made.

Beauty is.”

 -Emily Dickinson

Creation does not create a world absent of beauty. As persons we have this idea of our separateness. Because of this we fail to see beauty. As the mystical poet Emily Dickinson reminds us “Beauty is.”

Notice that she is not adding anything conditional following these two worlds. Notice that she is not making beauty conditional or dependent.  What is Emily Dickinson saying? More to the point, what is she inviting? Does this woman know something we don’t or is this sense of the beautiful only something for poets?

If one has to be a poet to be and see beauty, then we place a boundary of conditionality around the experience of beauty.  Beauty, like happiness, is something that is best not pursued directly.

Creation created you to be the expression of beauty in form.  This does not mean that you are intended to be glamorous in form but grace in form.  Grace is the ability to walk in beauty.  Walking in beauty is the movement of form in free flow.

When you experience a sense of beauty and grace you are in tune with your essential being.  It is enough and forever enough.  When you are out of tune with this wavelength you have to have forms of compensation.

An Anamcara invites you to remember, “beauty is.” It is in every moment.  It is beyond definition.  This is your real source of joy and happiness.  It is a real sense of fulfilment.  In such connectedness there is no sense of needing other than the natural expansiveness that arises from such a connection.

One of the key ways in which to be the beauty you are and to expand is to cease judgement.  Notice how you judge yourself and others.  Indirectly, start to create a ground in which the seeds of beauty can bloom.  They do not grow in a soil that is fed toxic thoughts for oneself and others. They grow in the fertile soil of trust in the process of creation that is ever able to create.

Beauty arises out of appreciation.  Most of us spend very little time consciously expressing gratitude.  Many of us living in the Western world now live more prosperous and healthy lives than kings and queens of old. Our focus, which is promoted as our reason for being, is on what we do not have.

What we do not have is our ability to be attuned to what is the beauty within.  Without this attunement all is pseudo-beauty.  This is why we are surrounded with magazines and programs about the lives of the rich, glamorous and famous.  This is our collective metaphor of our longing for what we feel to be beautiful.

However, glossy magazines will not compensate for what cannot be created.  Faith and trust in our inner sense of self that is able to create unique expressions of beauty in each moment will give true fulfilment.  This is because it does this from an unlimited sense of abundance arising from the one true dynamic of Love.  This is unconditional and, as Emily Dickinson points out, it just is.

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One of this Irish storyteller’s favourite things to do is to pick up his white guitar and sing songs.  I have sung at various venues in England and Ireland with many kinds of singer and musician.

Sometimes you come across a song that simply speaks to the heart. It is a song that works on many levels. A very talented young lady sang such a song at a club I recently played at. It was the song “What if God were One of Us” by Joan Osborne.

The chorus goes:

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home

For this writer it is almost a mystical text. It asks a question that invites you into the mystery.  Some might think that these lines are sacrilegious and that they are in some way dishonouring of religious sentiment.  This is only if you take the words literally.  Even then, this storyteller thinks that in a literal sense these are an invitation that manages to be both funny and profound.

Some people have issues around the word God.  This is hardly surprising given the way we are as a species, having used the word for purposes of greed, power and self-interest.  However, every time you see or read the word God it can be changed to the word Love (yes, with a capital L).  You can also change the word from His to Her.

For this writer, the song is a great invitation to the quest into Love.  Like many great questions it invites the creative imagination.  It does this through the opening words “What if…” The great poet and writer Rudyard Kipling composed a world famous poem of invitation using these same words.

When I sing this song or any song (or any song I sing for that matter) I sing from different levels of intention.  I sing for entertainment. I sing to invite the heart into the awareness of God. In other cultures this is called Kirton. This is what most authentic singer/songwriters intend to invite.  This is not just sentimental love songs but invitations to know that you are not a stranger to Love nor is Love a stranger to you.

Of course, we are estranged from Love most of the time.  Music and song invite us to remember this estrangement and try to make our way home. We are the prodigal sons and daughters of Creation travelling on the bus of time and form, not quite sure where this mode of transport is heading.

For this storyteller God is one of us and all of us together. God is apart and whole and wholly us.  You are not the Godhead but neither are you separate from the Godhead.  You are a reflection of the divine in form, ready to radiate the return to Love.  All mystics and soul friends invite you to live this life of Love flow from the eternal.

God is a stranger on the bus trying to find his way home in the sense that you are estranged from your essence and you will feel incomplete until you find each other.  There was a mystic, I think it was Meister Eckhart, who said:

It isn’t so much that you are looking for God (or love) but that God is looking for you.

This is the ultimate homecoming.  When this homecoming is felt within the heart then no one is truly a stranger.  Everyone on the bus, train, car or any other form of transport you can think of is seen to be God playing at finding His or Her way back home.

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Storytellers, bards, séanachie and wisdom teachers all teach the essential lesson. Trust!

This is the key to their living a holistic and holy way.  It is a way of inner seeing and insight into the nature of their place in the world.  They are living from inner wisdom.

Our wisdom voice, which is our inner teacher, comes to us through our intuition, our inner tutor.  Our inner tutor blossoms when we play with our imagination.  The key here is the experience of playing with images and symbols.

Play is something we have forgotten to give time to.  We did this naturally when we were children.  It was our delight.  When we were children we had vast reserves of energy and we hardly ever ran out of ideas about how we might create a play filled experience.

This storyteller uses his imagination to create stories.  These are stories intended to heal and make whole those who receive them. These stories come from nowhere.  They come out of the blue. But for this to happen a number of conditions need to be in place. 

There has to be trust in the process

The creative process is just that – a process, often a very delicate one. I liken it to the birthing process. It is best if you allow it to have its own time. While it may be measured nine months chronologically for a human being to gestate, it takes two years for an elephant. Just trust!

Practice patience

For this Irish storyteller, this has been and remains one of the hardest aspects of the process.  This storyteller wants the play of creation to happen his way, right now! Otherwise, there is the threat of a tantrum. Quite unseemly for one his age! There is great truth in the paradoxical saying, “Infinite patience brings instant results.” Remember this. 

Love symbols

What you love you will play with and attend to and be attentive towards. Symbols are not just nice shapes. They have meaning and they give meaning.  They are an outer representation of an inner state of being.  If you pay attention then you will, over time, begin to identify those symbols that keep repeating in your life and which you have to deal with in order that creation express as Love through you.

 Be Imaginative

 Please notice that this fourth invitation begins with the word ‘be.’  You cannot ‘do’ imagination. It arises from trust in the being you are.  The creative intelligence that created you does not lack imagination. It can and does the action of imaging through billions and trillions of forms. Every snowflake is a miracle of imagination from the intelligence that lives inside all of us.

To become conscious of our wisdom voice, or higher self, we need to hold our intention and trust the process, to have patience and to pay attention to our imagination.

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