An Anam cara who guides your spiritual direction can be your undoing.  They invite you out of constant need to be doing your life situation that leads you into the prison of never enough. Spiritual direction is not about telling you more about something.  Most of us already know more than enough.  Except that the Anam cara will tell you that knowing about something is not real knowledge.  

Nor is spiritual direction about telling you what to do.  It is an invitation from someone inspired (meaning in spirit) who already knows the beauty within themselves and thus can invite it to blossom within you.  The Anam cara trusts and lives this beauty within themselves.  They invite you to trust it and more to the point to live it.

In your day-to-day life situation you can learn to enhance your skill base in many ways.  This assists you in practical ways to achieve your goals.  However, in following any spiritual direction you are invited to learn that less is more.  Your spiritual director or Anam cara knows you are already magnificent beyond anything you can think about yourself.  They know that you are inspiration in form.  They know you are more than enough.  The work of one who offers you spiritual direction is to remind you of this. 

They do not remind you because they believe this is simply a nice idea.  They remind you by their presence.  The work of the spiritual guide is to invite you to allow this beauty within you to flower rather than continue along the same old known way of doing that only gets you deeper in the do-do.

 Spiritual direction points you toward allowing.  This is often experienced as frustrating for anyone intent on getting somewhere.  The A+ personality type, which most of us subscribe to, wants to have the answer right now.  Only spiritual guidance is not something you achieve by doing.  It is realised by seeing in ways that you did not see before.   Spiritual direction comes from one who does not lead you up a blind ally but gets you to connect to vision.

 The spiritual guide watches you without judgement.  They watch as you metaphorically pull up the young seedling of your unique creative potential by the roots.  They watch as you criticise it for not growing or getting somewhere fast enough.  They watch as you criticise it for not being beautiful enough, for not being the right shape.  They watch as you plant it in places where the sun never shines.  They watch as you neglect it in all sorts of ways while you compare it with how others are doing.  Then you wonder where the wonderful flowering of your creative potential has gone.

 An Anam cara who is a spiritual guide invites you to leave the seeding alone.

 They give you directions on how to tend it and how to care for it.  Then they invite you to get out of the way and allow the unique expression within the seedling to flower within you.  They suggest that you don’t compare your flowering with any other bloom.  They suggest you ground yourself and stay in the light.  How each person does this is unique.

 The Anam cara who is a friend of your soul invites you to learn another language.  This language is not the language of go getting.  It is not the language that will make you more successful.  It is not the language of sound bites masking as communication.  The Anam cara teaches you the language of the soul.  This is the language of the

Source

Of

Unlimited

Love.

Unlimited here also means unconditional.  This soul language is not the language of self-improvement but the language of opposites and the language of parable, paradox and of fairytales.  It is also the language that invites real communion.

 An Anam cara invites you into the Anam cara Experience.  This is were you become able to source your own spiritual direction.  This is where you are able to access intelligence that is beyond the intellect and the rational.  This is where you learn to tend to the seed potential only you can grow to its full majesty.  You learn to be come the King/Queen of your own magical Kingdom.  Then you begin to flower in ways unimagined and you too become an invitation to beauty.

 At the Anamcara Experience we invite you to tend the flowering that is always being expressed within you.  This flowering never stops because it is essentially who you are.  It is that you have forgotten how to source this beauty within.  At the Anam cara Experience we invite you to tune into this unending Source Of Unlimited Love.  We invite you into soul friendship.

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” Never confuse intellectual understanding for insight.”

 - Michael Langford, The Most Direct and Rapid Means to Eternal Bliss, Vol. 1

This Irish storyteller refers to insight as knowing.  Knowing is not the same as intellectual knowing. Intellectual knowledge is always ‘about’ something. It is dualistic. There is the knower and that which is known.

Insight is transformational.  It changes your worldview.  You see from a higher plane.  You get a larger, wider and more expansive understanding.  There is, however, a paradox with insight.  It will make you humble.  If it does not humble you, you have claimed it as your own and not as the gift of and from Love.

There is a difficulty here.  You must have a contrast in order to avoid confusion.  You have to have had the experience of insight to be able to distinguish it from intellectual understanding.  Most of us have had the experience of intellectual understanding.  Too few of us know and become the experience of the ‘insider.’

“Love is an inside job,” says Paul Ferrini.  Insight, as the word implies, is also an inside job. It is not seeing with the physical eye but is the experience of becoming a Seer.  A seer sees in a way that we ordinarily do not.   A seer experiences life without being an ‘I’ to experience.  This they know is the way to be in the world, the dying before you die, and the dying to a sense of separateness that keeps you anchored to death.

‘Your experience’ as you experience it is filtered.  This filter you call ‘me’ and ‘mine.’  You call it ‘your experience.’  You have it within the boundary called time and space.  When you have a particular experience you say now ‘you know.’

The now your know may be intellectual understanding.  It may change your life’s situation but it will not change the way you see the world.  Insight changes the way you see the world.  You become a seer beyond time.

What if you never experienced insight?  What if you have not seen for yourself with the eye of the Seer?

First, you need an intense desire to become the knowing of who you are or have the intense desire to put an end to suffering.  In the beginning, this desire can be for yourself alone.

The root of suffering is in your sense of separateness.  Insight allows you to recognise that this sense of separateness is created by your sense of attachment to the ‘I’ you call ‘little me.’  To have insight inoto this separateness of self means you feel  the connection to Oneness.  This gives you the ability to distinguish between knowledge and knowing.  More intellectual knowledge may assist you in creating a more comfortable lifestyle.  Insight will lead you to a feeling relationship beyond belief and beyond limitation called ‘my life.’  Instead of satisfaction one experiences joy.

Insight turns rags to riches and lead into gold.  Fairy tales invite insight.  They invite you to kiss the Sleeping Beauty within you locked away in the ivory tower of intellectual knowledge.

In the Hans Christian Anderson’s story The Ugly Duckling the farmyard can still be improved through intellectual and scientific progress. There is nothing wrong with this unless you get stuck in the upgraded farmyard.  You will still be the Ugly Duckling who has not had the insight that he is given when he goes to the lake and sees his true reflection and insight into the true Self.

The work of getting insight is something you do but do not ‘do.’  Insight is a grace.  When you receive it you will know that this is so.  You will know that you could never in a million lifetimes earn this.  You cannot buy it with effort but you need to make the effort. Consider yourself a gardener of insight.  All you do is plant the seed and tend it.  It is, as the word implies, already within you.  It requires practice and patience.

What is given to you through insight you will want to give away.  Only you will be disturbed.  Now you are the knowing of that no thing that is everything and this is the beginning of an endless becoming! You are now an outsider although you have also been  an insider. Now you have to choose which master you are going to serve. Insight?  Or separateness?

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Come out of the circle of time

into the circle of Love.

-         Rumi

What if you were not who you think you are and you went through life living an illusion?  What if you were not the only one?  What if the illusion continued only because everyone lived the same illusion and believed it was real?  What if we were all naked behaving like we wore Emperor’s clothing?

What if someone came along who knew that everyone was living this illusion and simply said so?  What do you think would happen then?  You would probably do what many people do.  You would continue with the illusion and go one your not so merry way and live not so happily ever after.

What would be the one thing that might make you want to live beyond this illusion?  It might be the experience of suffering.  If you suffer enough you might ask the question, “Is this all there is? Is my life worth anything?”  It is this sort of question that gets you turned on.

This is not our usual understanding of what it means to be turned on.  The experience of being turned on is what is known in the story of the Hero’s Journey as The Call.  This is The Call to fully express your unique way of being in form.  It is a unique question.

When you begin to become a questor it is not the answer that turns you on but the initial question.  Wisdom teachings say that the quality of one’s character is known by the questions being asked.

Certain kinds of question lead you on the adventure of what it is to feel Divine within form.  Other questions lead you deep into the prison of time.  You might be comfortable.  You might be called successful.  Yet if you think that who you are is this body living in time, space and form, you are living the illusion of one world.  The world of separateness.

Ralph Waldo Trine writes beautifully about this in his book In Tune with the Infinite. This is what an Anam Cara invites you to tune into.  Only before that can happen you have to get switch on.  Getting switch on means you get passionate with the intention that this passion aligned to the Infinite blossom into compassion.

Most, if not all of us, will suffer in some way in this world.  Suffering can lead to breaking the chains of the illusion of the separate self.  If this happens, and it does happen, then suffering is seen for what it is.  It is not a punishment.  It becomes an invitation to transcendence.  What is worse is suffering that has no meaning.  Who give it meaning?  You do.

To turn on you need to ask a real question and commit to living it.  This is the question. What am I passionate about? Now you can live this question and you will miss.  This is because there is a second, companion question.  This question is the second question. How am I going to serve? Put together they begin to look like this: How am I going to use my passion to serve humanity?

I will guarantee you that if you commit to learning to live and Love this invitation that you will get switched on and tuned in.  The illusion that you are separate from Love will begin to dissolve.

Do you know what you are passionate about? Do you care enough to find out?

What makes you feel angry?  That is a pointer but not an excuse to act irresponsibly. Anger is no excuse.

Most people want an easy life rather than a passionate one.  Passion does not mean being fiery all the time.  It is the full flow of emotional response in tune with the Infinite.  It becomes compassion in Buddhist terms and Love in Christian terms.  When it is available you know what to serve and how to give yourself away.

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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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