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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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Spiritual Resistance
Holman Hunt - The Light of the World For Jesus, the Kingdom of Heaven was not a place. It was a particular level of consciousness, one we now call Christ Consciousness, the highest level of human awareness. - From "Death of a Mythic God" - Jim Marrion At the centre of the Earthsong Camp is a huge tent of many colors. It is there each morning that those at the camp sing a heartsong. For me this is a central, if not the central, aspect of what this camp gathering is about. I could hardly image what it would feel like without such an early morning invitation to the heart. To the leaders of this group experience I cannot express gratitude enough. This experience is often, to say the least challenging, because it demands that you feel who you are and what you resist. This often brings up big time (big top) resistance. One morning when I was singing I came up against my old chestnut of a resistance. I find it interesting that I use this image of the chestnut as it relates to the place of the heart - chest - and to a nut - something that you break open. This old chestnut is my hearts relationship to Christianity and to Christ. When it arises I want to run a mile. I tend to quickly shut it down. Inside I want to shout, "No not that, please not that, anything but that. Give me Rumi, give me Hafiz but please don't give me Jesus." Yet I also know that what one resists persists. I know that often what is resisted is the invitation to something new and something beyond. Often it is a call from the soul to be recognized. When I hear the word Jesus I am reminded of all the images from my childhood in Northern Ireland. I am reminded of the images and feelings that colored so much of my young adulthood. I am reminded of the return to Ireland following my sisters death. All these memories and feelings I want to chase away related to what is for me the experience called Christianity. It was for me an invitation cloaked, not in Love, but in a death wishes allied to guilt and more guilt. I want nothing to do with it. There is a part of me that hates it and I do not like this feeling. Guy Finley the modern day mystic rightly says that what you hate you cannot know.
Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there. Bonnie Raitt
Inside the heartsong circle I get a glimpse of what it means in some little way to willingly take on the pain and suffering of a circle of people. Then in my imagination I extend this to the world and wallah for one moment I realize I am experiencing as a potential within me what one divine individual called Jesus Christ took on as an invitation to each of us. Then I immediately shut it down. I don't want this. I want to be a servant of Love but I don't want this Jesus guy being any part of it. For God's sake I was brought up in Northern Ireland where we have one or two fundamental Christian teachings. One is that the wages of sin is death and the other is the invitation to feel guilt and more guilt as some kind of path toward what is holy. I find myself hating this. I hear myself using exactly the same words that the guilt inducers use and we are miles and miles apart. Yet I am afraid to use these words of spiritual invitation. I prefer to use every other word but Christian words in order not to turn people of this Love invitation to Christhood. Frankly, I feel embarrassed and I feel ashamed and so I avoid using the Christ and the Jesus word. I use the words of other Christ's such as Rumi, Hafiz, Krishnamurti, the Buddha and others. I never have a problem with this yet when I am drawn to use the words of Jesus Christ I feel defensive. When I recall the heart song "What a friend we have in Jesus" I cringe. I think the Christian church has betrayed the heart of his message and it seems that I am being called to change that in some little or large way. I don't belong to a church. I wouldn't take my heart to a church that has any kind of hierarchical structure. I take it into the Earthsong Camp and lead it to the centre under the big top were it isn`t required to fit in. Even there I resist mentioning the words Christ and Jesus. There under the big top I feel so very along and afraid. Yet in that circle we are all alone and All One. Many of us in that circle are afraid of our own hearts sorrow and our souls invitation. This is why we are gathered in this place of safety and sanctuary. I don't talk to anyone about this. It is core heart stuff. When I have done so in the past I have been made to feel controlled. I trust no clergy, no priest, no religious authority outside my own connection to the Beloved. I trust the blank page and the writers and poets and mystics of all times and all traditions. This heartsong is a journey I take alone through a blank page each morning and through tears of longing and the experience of resistance to being broken open for the sake of Love. Rumi, Hafiz, Krishnamurti have all invited me to be broken open for the sake of Love but I don't want to be broken open for the sake of Jesus Christ. Yet is seems this is where it is going. I need to work with the anger and the hatred I have for those who have broken my heart with their invitations to death rather than life via their distorted message of the invitation to live in Christ Consciousness. There is no use my judging them. They could become "my people my love" to quote from a song sung by Leonard Cohen. I am still attached to the pain of their guilt inducing message that is a fabrication of the ego and its sense of separateness from Love - Love that is the core message of the Friend - the one called Jesus the Christ. The Sadducees and the Pharisees are still central to the Christian church but I belong to a church that is build without hands. Jesus Christ never came to form a religion. He was for direct personal experience beyond hierarchy. The Kingdom isn't separate from you. Your priest, your guru, your pope, your clergyman are a barrier to your union with Love if you give your authority to them. The man Jesus Christ who divinized himself to become the Christ invites us into a state of consciousness beyond the sense of separateness that 99.9% of us feel and try to transcend in so many ways. This teaching was radical then and for much of the present institutional Church still too radical. I think I need to get over my disappointment and stop making apologies for the message of the worlds greatest Lover. Where this will take me I do not know. Yet I write and I invite others to go to places unknown in their hearts. Maybe I should follow my own hearts promptings. Maybe I should do what my favorite heartsong invites and listen to the wind in my soul and not worry about where I end up. This is the heartsong called "Listen to the Wind" by Cat Stevens who became Yusuf Islam. I listen to the wind to the wind in my soul where I'll end up only God really knows.
I leave you with some advice from a master who I have no issues around loving.
we have not come into this exquisite world to hold ourselves hostage from love run my dear ones from anything that may not strengthen your precious budding wings run like hell from anyone likely to put a sharp knife into the sacred tender vision of your beautiful hearts ~Hafiz
Listen to your heart by Jackie Ludtke
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© Tony Cuckson 2009
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