The Way of Irish Blessings - The practice of Anam cara (Soul Friendship) as a Way of Life

are fully enlightened. Children will unconsiously absorb their parent' fears and biases

attitudes and find ways to release them. This is normal; this is the work we all have to do.

The Blessing of

The Road (4)

Regular readers of this ezine will know we are intent on examining the deeper meaning of this Irish Blessing which is one of the most well known, but to my mind, one of the least well understood. Let us now go into the deeper meaning of the line

The writing of this ezine Blessings for YOU comes out of a daily practice of prayer and meditation and, of course, writing. I have been graced a life situation that allows me to engage with these soul practices. However, this life situation equally arose because there was the commitment to this work of the soul that I have followed.

Much has been written about the soul. I will give you my working definition that I use for the purposes of writing this ezine and for the foundation of many of stories that I write and tell. The soul is not a thing that exists within time and space. It is a word used to describe what is called in Ireland a threshold place. You could describe it, metaphorically speaking, as a door or a bridge. This door or bridge is not visible to the eye of the body but is felt inwardly through the heart.

The soul, as I personally define it, is a doorway or bridge that you cross into the knowing of eternity. This door is never locked although you have to open it. It is you who have to open the door because you are the one who shut it. It is usually shut by the experience of a betrayal in Love. This usually takes place at a very early age. The bridge is never closed, but you do have to cross it. The door is a symbol used in Christianity and the bridge can be considered a Buddhist metaphor that takes you to the other shore. The other shore being the state of enlightenment.

The soul is an in between place that we intimate in wonder tales and fairy stories. This is the purpose of the wonder tale and the fairy story. Their purpose is not just entertainment but the tales should be entertaining. Their real purpose is to invite you into a threshold place of remembrance of the truth of who you are.

The place of the soul is a nowhere place that is available everywhere. You cannot lose your connection to the soul but you can lose your awareness of it, which has the same effect as losing your connection to it. The word soul, that is not the soul itself, can be considered the connection between you and the All One that is given different names in different religious traditions. In Taoism it is called the Tao. In Hinduism it is called Brahma. In Christianity it is called God and in the Native American tradition it is called The Great Spirit. In the above Irish Blessing it is represented by the word Sun. The face that the Sun is being invited to shine on is what is called in Zen Buddhism ‘your original face.’

When this connection is lost then the world you walk in has to have created some sort of meaning. Your connection with the Source is two way except that the Source never disconnects from you. If it did then you would not be able to be in existence.

You see in young children how this connection is still open between the Source of All Creation and themselves. They have not yet closed the door and become totally separate and disconnected from what gives them joy and the ability to express freely through the body. They have not yet become what the modern sage Osho called logic choppers. They have not yet become disconnected from much of the body.

When the door is closed or the bridge shut you are the one doing it. As a consequence you will want one thing. You will want to be compensated for the loss of joy. You will search in the world for all sorts of ways that will give you some sort of remembrance of what it was like when you were in the flow of the grace of Love. You will look for love in all sorts of ways. You will search for it in another. You will look for it in your work. You will even project it into a country and fight for it. You will even look for it in the idea of God. You will be as the prodigal son or daughter who has forgotten their way home through the door that is not locked or over the bridge that is forever open.

Personally speaking, I think the hardest part of opening the door or crossing the bridge is that we find it hard to accept that we do not need to earn the right to open the door. We find it hard to imagine that the right to cross the bridge does not require we earn enough merit to buy the ticket.

This need to earn a right makes sense to ‘little me.’ At least then ‘little me’ feels that it has some sort of control over the situation. At least in the long term or short term there can be the hope that something might be done. There can be the hope that something might be achieved in order to be worthy of crossing the threshold into the knowing of eternity that is the knowing of unconditional Love forever.

This writer loves the story of the prodigal son. Many of us can identify with the other son who stayed behind and who did what he though was right and didn’t go and squander the inheritance. Surely we think this is the son who should be celebrated and not the loser who left home and literally fell apart and came back in a terrible state. The word son in this story refers to the human being and not just about gender.

This beautiful story tells me, and invites you to know, that there is nothing you have to do to earn the right to return home to your homeplace of Love forever. There is nothing that you can do to earn such a right. To say that you must earn such a right is to say that the Love that creates you in each moment and every moment is conditional. It is not and never can be or will be conditional. This is what I mean when at the end of each Blessing for YOU edition I write, “The Blessing is already here and you are it.

As adults we project unto the Source of All Creation. This is what we did with our parents when we projected onto them the idea that we can earn their love. How many of us have lived this script? We live our lives looking for ways to compensate for the fact that we feel unloved or that the love we received was conditional which is not Love at all.

There are billions of souls now and in the past who walk and have walked this world carrying this burden of feeling unloved that negatively impacts their lives and the life of the collective known as humanity. The one hope they carry even after Mum and Dad have left this Vale of Tears is that there is something that can be done to make it better. There is the hope that there will come a time when they can say, “I am loved just for being me.” In so many hearts this desire is unspoken but is lived unconsciously in so many destructive ways.

What most of us will not do is to allow ourselves to come to the place where you realise that there is nothing you can do. You are in a double bind. If you earn the love you long for it is still conditional. To realise there is nothing that you can do is a place of terror because you are left naked and alone.

This is why I think there is so much emphasis on doing our lives. It is for the most part a compensation for the one thing we would have more than all else. This is the sense of being loved beyond conditions. We can’t stop doing our lives because we might have to look at how poverty stricken we really are in a soul sense. We would see that there is no vitality arising with our hearts and no dancing the joy of creation. Instead we engage with the do do of my life and at best opt for satisfaction.

Out of this realisation that there is nothing you can do to fix it comes another possibility. In that darkness a light will come on. As this Irish Blessing above beautifully states, the Sun will shine on your face. You have looked over the abyss. You have come to a point of surrender. You have come to a point where you stop chasing a dream of love. You, in that place, begin to see that you are not and never have been to blame for any of it. This is the awakening of compassion in Buddhist terms and the awakening of forgiveness in Christian terms.

You are now empty. You have been hollowed out. The wound has been cleaned out ready for wonder. The etymological meaning of the word wound and wonder are deeply related. You are now the womb of creation. Jesus uses this metaphor of the womb in one of the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount when you translate it into his original language of Aramaic. Creation is now able to pour into you that which is your birthright. This is your right to unconditional Love. Now your soul can truly express in form. You have, metaphorically speaking, shut one door and now you begin to learn how to knock on the door that when open pours into you Love that you cannot earn. This is because it is free, without conditionality.

The ego lives in a conditioned world. It lives in measures of high and low and particularly good and bad. It cannot enter the child heart that dances for no reason. For the ego there has to be a reason. For the ego there has to be a reason to love or be loved. The ego is the sense of separateness that tells you the door to your true homeplace of unconditional Love for Eternity is locked. What you are not told is the ‘little me’ is the one who perpetuates this untruth. This is also true of the collective ego represented by many religious institutions and a culture that tells you that you are never enough unless you buy and own the next product.

All I really do, and all I really want to do, is to invite you to remember that this door is always available. I want to remind you that the bridge is always free to cross. Opening the door is not easy only because you are taught that you have to prove something that says you are worthy enough. You are a child of the Beloved and this makes you worthy forever. The terror for the ego is that it is not needed and the joy is that you are. You are needed in order to be a mirror for God. You get to know that you are Loved forever and God also gets to share in your knowing. The great modern mystic Alan Watts said that we go to sleep for the sole reason of knowing absolute joy when we wake up.

When you know this Love that is your birthright without conditions you can, as Rumi reminds us, go out into the streets and gardens and share it with others. People will think you are mad. You will simply have become crazy with the Love of the Divine. As the Sufis say, you will have become drunk on the Beloved.

Remember that the Sun is always shining on your face. You have to turn away from the darkness that is this sense of separateness that you create in your mind called `little me.’ You have to turn toward the warmth and the light that is shining forever in your heart and mind that knows this to be true. Then you will understand this Irish Blessing for what it is beyond a simple Blessing related to the weather. It is a soul Blessing. This is was it means to bless others and in doing so you come into the light of a Sun that radiates Love forever.

When you know this, and this ezine Blessing for YOU, invites you to come to this knowing, then you will know the truth of the Blessing you are.

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If you haven`t already downloaded your copy of our FREE ebook entitled New Irish Blessings for Life - 12 Blessings for the Journey Home then please do so by double clicking on the link below. There you will be given instructions on how to download this ebook.

There are 12 new Irish Blessings designed to mirror the journey through life from beginning to end. This Ebook is in three parts. It begins with blessings approiate for a new born, a young child and a young person. The second part deals with career, home and relationship. The final part deals with growing old and preparing for entry into the dimension beyond Time.

This FREE Ebook will be available for you to give away to as many people as you would like. The idea is that together we start a chain of Blessings that takes us higher and higher and then road really does rise up before us. In this way you really can begin to bring Heaven to Earth.

The Anamcara Experience

Website and Course

Shortly, the writer will be launching his new website called The Anam Cara Experience. It is subtitled “Ready to Radiate.” This is an invitation to radiate the beauty that is flowing within you. This writer is also launching a new course that will invite you into the experience of this beauty.

He will not be teaching you what you do not already know. He will be focusing on education in its real sense. Education means, to bring out. He will be a constant invitation to bring out the direct knowing of who you are. He will be the invitation that invites you to the wisdom teaching that says, “To your own self be true.”

In this Soul Friendship course entitled Ready to Radiate you will be introduced to the Anam Cara Training.

This is a training that will not fill you up with more information but will invoke the flowering of your heart. It is a training that will allow you to feel the paradox of being more by knowing less. These are practices and techniques that the writer uses in his everyday life and is intent on sharing with as many people as are interested.

This writer takes you through practices that you can adopt within your daily life that will invite you again into wonder. Not only that but you can build on these practices and become a deeper and deeper friend of your Soul and to the Souls of others. This paradoxically speaking is the one no thing that will give you all you could ever imagine and more.

This course will train you in entering the heart. These practices engage you not on a cerebral level but on a heart level. These practices will open up your mind, your body and your spirit. They include the use of poetry, songs, fairy tales, movies, people, blessings, prayers, practices and places to invite into you that which is sacred.

That which is sacred in you is whole and holy. You do not have to do anything except learn to trust this wholeness in deeper and deeper ways. This is the invitation to let go and relax and allow the intelligence that you are to dance the dance it longs to express uniquely through you.

Soul friendship involves a different kind of language. It is not a language that you have been taught at school, college or University. In fact the teaching you will have received in such places will, in all likelihood, close the door on the heart and focus you in your head. The language of soul is a Universal language.

Universities originally grew out of wisdom schools who taught this language of the Soul. Universities today, however, do not teach wisdom but teach facts about things. Wisdom is not something that you learn. It is who you are when you are prepared to allow the Timeless to flower within you.

The primary language that you engage with in learning to be a Soul Friend is the language of mystical poetry. This is not simply rhyming verse but contains hidden invitations into the Timeless. There are are also many new songs and old songs that also have this hidden invitation. On this course called The Anam car Experience - Ready to Radiate the writer takes such poems and modern day songs and unpacks their deeper meaning. This is their invitation to Soul Friendship that is contained in them.

When you listen to the song or read such a mystical poem it is more than just the words and even the feelings that they invoke. It goes beyond that to remind you of your true home in the Timeless. This is an invitation to an experience that will take you way beyond anything your logical mind can ever comprehend. It takes you into the deep sense of security in knowing you belong to that which is creating forever in Love.

The writer will invite you into the real spirit of song, the real spirit of storytelling, the real spirit of poetry and the many powerful practices that impact your day to day living experience in a postive and uplifting way. In addition you can meet with like-minded people who are similarly engaged in this process. It is the writer’s intention that we as a group raise the vibratory level of the collective soul so that everyone can be invited to bring beauty into the world where she is so much needed.

It will be available at the above website Anam cara Experience which is presently being set up. It is intended that this course be available with various bonuses for the cost of €19.97.

It is also intended to that anyone who wants to finish such training at any time can have a full refund of any monies that they have paid without any questions being asked. So in this way there is absolutely no risk involved expect the risk that you lose a opportunity for the real life. Until that time I will keep you posted.

and you will be notified once this course is completed (around end of August 2008).

This course is intended to give you access to your birthright as a being of unlimited creative potential. It is a course intended to ground you deeply in your heart and uses practices and techiques specifically intended to promote this as a way of living your day to day life. This is the way of wonder.

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