The Deep Hearts Core – Spiritual Direction for Difficult Times

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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“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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 When beauty touches our lives, the moment becomes luminous. These grace moments are gifts that surprise us.

John O’Donohue, Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

We have to be allowing of beauty. As advised by John O’Donohue  we have to trade our knowledge for bewilderment.  We have to allow the wildness of the feminine to express through us.

 

Most of us are gifted beyond our wildest imagination. To be the expression of Love in form would surprise us beyond our limited sense of who we are.  We have learned and often been encouraged to lose touch. We have armoured our bodies and surrounded ourselves with briars of judgement and doubt about our own creative flow that is the movement of beauty into form.

 

We have imprisoned beauty high in the tower of intellectual knowledge where all is consigned to the known. In the tower of this type of knowledge there are limited surprises but not the miracle of that which is luminous with beauty.

 

Grace moments, as the grace writer and poet John O’Donohue reminds us, come along and surprise us. In music there are what are called grace notes. These tend to be the notes that are surprises and arise out of improvisation. The musician has been graced a response to the moment. These notes tend to be delicate and fleeting but add much to the music being played.

 

What do you do with such grace moments? Do you honour them? Do you say ‘thank you’ for them flowing through you? Or do you claim that they are your own and bank them in your knowledge bank of things that you know about?

 

Alternatively, do you allow them to become an invitation to the return to beauty? You make Her invitation your invitation. You do what it takes to become one of the beautiful people we in Ireland call the Tuatha de Danaan – the Shining Ones. You make it your aligned purpose to become a vehicle for grace.

 

How do you do this? Through a practice of discipline that is the more active part and the paradox of surrender that reflects the feminine aspect.  This is the marriage of the masculine and feminine within you. It is the unification of your energy system. It is health giving but its intention is sacred, meaning to make whole.

 

This has to be of value to you. It has to have some sense of passion. You cannot really be grace-filled without your willingness to give your heart away to the Beloved. You cannot really be surprised if you aren’t willing to let go into what is unknown. You cannot become a beautiful birthing of grace without entering the wild divine within you.

 

The journey into love is not lukewarm. It involves passion that grows into compassion. It burns away all that is resistance to the entry of beauty into the grace of the moment. This is not hellfire but the fire of Love. It is often very wild and bewildering. While your ego will resist, your soul will persist in its invitation to Love. Your choice is to follow knowledge or wildness.

 

These grace moments are true gifts.  They are gifts that leave you feeling expansive. You are for a moment filled by that Divine invisible embrace, warm and timeless. It grows you spiritually, which is a paradox. You grow by letting go into the luminous.  You can then do nothing more than give this flow of grace away. This is what such grace moments are. They are the flow of the boundless into a boundary that then expands and flows into other boundaries.

 

An Anamcara invites you to learn practices and ways of becoming attuned to the beauty that is ready to radiate from within you and grace this world of form.  Are you willing to trade your knowledge about beauty for being wild that is at the heart of who you already are?

 

This trade means giving away your rags of limitation for the riches of creation that you were designed to give away.  Then you live in a real sense of abundance that no one except yourself can take away from you.

Are you ready to radiate the beauty within you?

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And in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart

 William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey

This writer has taken the above quotation from Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue, the late Irish poet and writer.

 

A sound practice for the spiritual journey is to make it your intention each day to invite communion with the heart. This is the invitation for soul friendship. It is true communication and on of its indications is how it lifts the heart. It becomes your heart’s song.

 

How many people do you meet that you can say “and in thy voice I catch the language of my former heart”? I suspect that they are all too few. On your journey into the heart, which is at the core of the spiritual journey, you will find you have fewer and fewer heart friends. 

 

Those that remain to companion you are your soul friends.  They are, as John O’Donohue says, “an invisible embrace to mind your days.” They speak the language of your former heart that was once in love with the dance of creation that is still you.

 

The sound practices of a soul friend engage with are daily connection with heart language.  This can be through poetry, music, song, or story.  Story includes reading and spiritual cinema.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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When beauty touches our lives, the moment becomes luminous. These grace moments are gifts that surprise us.

 

John O’Donohue, Divine Beauty :The Invisible Embrace

 

We have to be allowing of beauty. As advised by John O’Donohue , we have to trade our knowledge for bewilderment.  We have to allow the wildness of the feminine to express through us.

 

Most of us are gifted beyond our wildest imagination. To be the expression of Love in form would surprise us beyond our limited sense of who we are.  We have learned and often been encouraged to lose touch. We have armoured our bodies and surrounded ourselves with briars of judgement and doubt about our own creative flow that is the movement of beauty into form.

 

We have imprisoned beauty high in the tower of intellectual knowledge where all is consigned to the known. In the tower of this type of knowledge there are limited surprises but not the miracle of that which is luminous with beauty.

 

Grace moments, as the grace writer and poet John O’Donohue reminds us, come along and surprise us. In music there are what are called grace notes. These tend to be the notes that are surprises and arise out of improvisation. The musician has been graced a response to the moment. These notes tend to be delicate and fleeting but add much to the music being played.

 

What do you do with such grace moments? Do you honour them? Do you say ‘thank you’ for them flowing through you? Or do you claim that they are your own and bank them in your knowledge bank of things that you know about?

 

Alternatively, do you allow them to become an invitation to the return to beauty? You make Her invitation your invitation. You do what it takes to become one of the beautiful people we in Ireland call the Tuatha de Danaan – the Shining Ones. You make it your aligned purpose to become a vehicle for grace.

 

How do you do this? Through a practice of discipline that is the more active part and the paradox of surrender that reflects the feminine aspect.  This is the marriage of the masculine and feminine within you. It is the unification of your energy system. It is health giving but its intention is sacred, meaning to make whole.

 

This has to be of value to you. It has to have some sense of passion. You cannot really be grace-filled without your willingness to give your heart away to the Beloved. You cannot really be surprised if you aren’t willing to let go into what is unknown. You cannot become a beautiful birthing of grace without entering the wild divine within you.

 

The journey into love is not lukewarm. It involves passion that grows into compassion. It burns away all that is resistance to the entry of beauty into the grace of the moment. This is not hellfire but the fire of Love. It is often very wild and bewildering. While your ego will resist, your soul will persist in its invitation to Love. Your choice is to follow knowledge or wildness.

 

These grace moments are true gifts.  They are gifts that leave you feeling expansive. You are for a moment filled by that Divine invisible embrace, warm and timeless. It grows you spiritually, which is a paradox. You grow by letting go into the luminous.  You can then do nothing more than give this flow of grace away. This is what such grace moments are. They are the flow of the boundless into a boundary that then expands and flows into other boundaries.

 

An Anamcara invites you to learn practices and ways of becoming attuned to the beauty that is ready to radiate from within you and grace this world of form.  Are you willing to trade your knowledge about beauty for being wild that is at the heart of who you already are?

 

This trade means giving away your rags of limitation for the riches of creation that you were designed to give away.  Then you live in a real sense of abundance that no one except yourself can take away from you.

 

Are you ready to radiate the beauty within you?

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