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To support the development of this site and the work of soul friendship you are invited to express your appreciation through the spiritual practice of Dana
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Other Articles
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The Mystical Heart As a storyteller I sing, listen too and contemplate songs for the mystical heart. This often makes me dance with joy and weep for the sorrow of the world and this experience of separateness from Love called Tony Cuckson tramping the world of Boogie Street.
Dark Night of the Soul "You cannot find the Light unless you enter the darkness. " Dark night of the soul, spiritual crisis, spiritual madness, spiritual emergency, divine madness, holy madness... these are various phrases that have been used to describe a unique experience - a profound test of faith and spiritual endurance - that seems to be a necessary part of walking the path home to God.
Tony's New Ebook Irish storyteller Tony Cuckson invites you to claim your Irish Heritage through stories and songs and blessings.
There is no requirement that you be Irish. There is a requirement that you still wish to feel a sense of beauty at the heart of who you are.
This ebook "An Irish Heritage includes songs such as Danny Boy, Raglan Road (as sang by the great Luke Kelly of the Dubliners) and My Lagan Love. These are songs of inspiration and connectedness a land steeped in the timeless.
I am so enjoying your beautiful writing and presence on the web. You offer us such a glorious invitation each time you write. You have a true gift... Blessings all around Jan Lundy - Retreat Leader, Public Speaker and Author -Your Truest Self: Embracing the Woman You Are Meant to Be." --------------
Work as a Spiritual Practice By William and Debra Miller A partner with a large CPA firm taught us about selfless service when he shared an experience he had with a young employee. This employee had made some key errors that brought negative attention to the firm. While the partner agreed with the decision to let the employee go, he also sought to selflessly assist the employee by meeting him personally. He had the young man fly to his city and throughout their meeting together he treated him with respect and dignity. The partner's intent was to help the employee leave the firm with self-respect and self-confidence, so that he could learn from this experience and be successful in the future. What does "seeing work as a spiritual practice" mean to you? How can you see work as an opportunity for furthering your spiritual practice?
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Doing the Time of Your Life
Frank Cadogan Cowper St Agnes in Prison Receiving from Heaven the Shining White Garment
We are all just prisoners here Off our own device. And in the masters chambers they gathered for the feast They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast. From Hotel California - The Eagles
Many people the world over have a romantic attachment to this land called Ireland. They have links here to distant ancestors. This gives them a sense of belonging. Yet as a storyteller I think it goes deeper. It connects to a sense of wanting to be long and deeper than that a sense of longing to be. Being, however, is a paradox. It is sensational but it is experiencing beyond the senses and experience that comes through the senses. Being is deeply connected to human being and to the experience of breathing in and out. Human means to be the sound of God in form. It means to be the good vibration of Love that you are here to express. Except we have a problem. The problem is that we are all prisoners here of our own device. Each of us has our own device. The rich man or woman is held in the prison of inequality. The spiritual man or woman is often held in the prison of ideas of transcendence of form. Each of these is the metaphorical beast that one cannot kill and killing does not make the problem go away either. The real prison that we are all in is the one of 'doing time.' Our culture buys us time. It buys our time for much of our lives. We buy forward and we become a prisoner to incessant desire. Our politicians and experts tell us that the way out of the prison of time and desire is to have more. This is a prison story perpetuated by the media owned by those who have little or no vision other than more of the same. We need radical change on an individual level and this storyteller means we need to radically change our relationship to the fundamental called time. You are doing time in a prison of your own making. This time will come to an end and you have as you are encouraged to do, sold it for a treasure that corrupts the being you long to be and know and dance. Like many others you buy into what is called 'the American Dream.' This is not a criticism of the USA as a nation state. But the popular interpretation of this dream has become a nightmare for many. Few of us have time to stand and stare and those who do are often marginalized in poverty or denigrated as meaningless. Very many of us are tired. Many of us are even exhausted. Many of us are dispirited. We have little or no time except that we feel we must fill it with something to do. We do this because we fear that if we stop and rest we will be overtaken. We fear if we stop then we might find that inside ourselves is this darkness, this beast that we might not be able to handle. Better then just to be on the go and do our lives like everyone else. We work and we work and we work. Many of us work in meaningless jobs. We work to support a system that rewards the rich who get richer and the poor just get poorer. We know this. We know this does not work. We know that those nations who have the highest incidences of health and security are those whose wealth distribution is the most equable. We know that the greater the distance between rich and poor, the greater the level of unhappiness there is amongst the population including those who live at the upper end of the wealth spectrum. What drives all this is the fundamental emotion of fear. In this respect we are all fundamentalists. We mentally internalize fear and it is no fun at all. What is the greatest growth industry in the world today? Security. The paradox is that it is driven by fear and this fear by the Law of Attraction attracts the very thing you want to avoid. Fear breeds fear. What is it that creates fear? In a word - thought. Most of the fears you think about never materialize as real. They may materialize as unease leading to disease but 99% of what you fear does not arise. It is a phantom. You think your thoughts are who you think you are. You fill your mind with thought and you say, like Descartes, "I think, therefore I am." You rarely question the idea that it is thought that imprisons you more than anything else. If you sit for a moment and ask yourself what is happening right now you will find that for the most part there is the experience of being present. You will begin to experience that you move from your head into your body. The mind settles and the body becomes relaxed. The brain waves change to alpha waves. What has changes is your relation to time. You have become present. Your relationship to time changes with your relationship to these fundamental things. The first is your breath. The second is your body. The third is your thought process. The beast you cannot kill with your steely knives of your will is your thought process. The beast is what Zen Buddhists call 'monkey mind.' Your breath is fundamental to your quality of life. It is so fundamental that without it you want to be alive. For most part you ignore it as you do with the presence you call your body - until it starts to draw your attention to the fact that for the most part you ignore it or when you are not ignoring it you criticize it in some way because it isn't quite what you think it should be. Your breath takes you into the present. It is the string that controls the kite of your mind. It is the control mechanism that does not kill the beast with a steely knife but calms it and allows you to claim the power of that which you judged to be beastly. The Beast gets to awakened from the spell by Beauty. This beauty is the power of inspiration that is the relationship of the breath in the body. The best thing you can do to come out of the prison of time is to be present in the body through a conscious awareness of breath. It was given to you by creation. When it leaves the body it does not mean that you leave - except that because you are identified solely with your time nature and not your timeless nature you will fear this experience. To live a life of power and beauty is to feel inspired (in spirit-ed). Your breath keeps you connected to this but you have to spend time making this awareness fully conscious. This will expand your sense of time. You will feel more rested. You will feel fine. The word 'fine' in relation to you emotional state relates to the word refined. The word refined is connected to the experience of a fine breath. The word refined means to re-find what you have lost. We are all just prisoners of our own device. We are prisoners of a thought process gone awry. We call this thinking but most of our thoughts are fear-filled and projected into the future. We live in a future of fear and we hold our breath. We have no power because we have no presence. We have no power because we have only time that we fill. We have not time for the only real power that is infinite - the power beyond time itself, the timeless creative potential available forever. Mary Oliver sums it up in her poem Wild Geese: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Let the soft knowing of your breath/body allow you to feel fine and then use this power in service to Love. In this way you get it returned tenfold. It is the only investment strategy that gives guaranteed results because it is allied to the creative process.
© Tony Cuckson 2009
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