Hug Yourself

Be sure to hug yourself
with the hug of God,
because God's greatest delight
is to feel us hugging ourselves
in the divine Embrace.
That is how we awaken
and prepare for the sacrament
of hugging each other.
If you think this is silly,
your haven't wrapped yourself
around your own forgiven body.
Now run out in the back yard,
sink down in stinging wet grass
and spread your arms.
Become the horizon.
Carry the earth like a baby.

Elemental

Not taking air for granted brings vitality. Not taking light for granted brings clarity. Not taking water for granted brings purity. Not taking earth for granted brings stability. Just breathe, open these eyes, taste, feel the stinging wetness on the soles of your bare feet: this is true wealth, complete enlightenment, heavenly grace. Thank you, Mother.

Your Body is the Flower of Silence

A beautiful soul said to me with longing, "I miss the silence! How can I find it again?" This touched me so deeply, I cried. It is the most important question, the question of a child yearning for the Mother, the question of one who could not ask it unless every particle of her body was already pervaded by the answer!

My darling, do not look for silence in the mind. The mind is never silent.

Instead, find silence through the body. Don't pay attention to New Age voices that say, "You are not this body." Your body is sacred. Of course you are this body, and much much more...

The body, not the mind, is the gate of meditation. We need no longer separate spirit from matter, nor heaven from earth.

Let mind dissolve into sensation, sensation into energy, energy into emptiness: the path to Holy Spirit through Holy Matter.

Become aware of your cells. Let mind descend into every cell of the body. Feel all your cells vibrating as one sensation. The astonishing intelligence of nature carries out the infinite complexity of cell physiology without any planning, without any thinking. Let your mind rest in bewilderment, be-wilded and witnessing the primal Radiance of your body....

Listen to the bell-bowl of each cell. Feel those hollow spaces throughout your flesh: the cavity in the mid-brain, eyeballs, nostrils, ears and throat, chest, heart, belly, abdomen, bone marrow. How spacious is the body, how empty!

Now become aware of the vacuum in a single atom, at any point in the body. Enter that  silent subatomic expanse.... 

Now be aware of a black hole in the center of the densest proton. Fall into That. Feel the silence...

Let every particle of your body dissolve into the void, yet the void cannot but hum and sparkle with virtual photons, waves of purest clarity.... Now you discover the womb of creation, where matter and consciousness have not yet divided into subject and object. You've returned to your source in true Silence, and the mind is thunderstruck.

Layam vraja: "Dissolve now!"

A Practice for this Moment

True faith means not asking for any other blessing but this breath, at this moment, from the One who breathes you. And we don't even need to ask for that.

 Caress your chest with this breath. Loving your own heart softens the whole world: A practice for any moment.

Now gaze into the eyes of a friend, partner, child, or perfect stranger, and carry their gaze into your chest with this breath. Nourish your heart with the pain and beauty of the other: A practice for dissolving the illusion of separateness.

Desire in the Sacred Body

Desire is not a linear path that leads us toward a goal. Desire is circular. The fulfillment of a desire is not progress toward some end. Rather, it carries us back to the state we were in before the desire arose.

In actuality, we are always there, in the same desireless place. We come from this space, we are destined for this space. And in this space there is no time.

Yet through desire we create time. We make constant little excursions and side trips of desire, sensation, and return. Finally, we tire of desire-tripping and awaken to just being here.

Now we desire one last thing: Fully awake, to explore this home space, this Om space, the unfathomable ocean of not wanting.

I do not desire to go "beyond" desire. I desire to rest before desire, a priori desire, deeper than any sadness or joy.

So I watch desire without suppressing it. I witness desire and the fulfillment of desire, remaining awake. Without judgment, I notice where I Am at the beginning and the end of desire.

By fulfilling this desire, do I possess anything I did not own before I began this excursion? Have I advanced down any sort of path? Is the present moment at the end of this desire and its fulfillment any different than the moment when the desire arose? Or are they actually the same eternal moment?

Again, I watch my desire rise and fall, without suppressing or grasping it, or naming it "right" or "wrong." What if I honor this desire and feel it completely, but do not enact it?

What if I sense my desire, not as the repeated image of a past experience, or the imagination of a future one, but as present living energy in my body?

Now I feel this desire fulfill itself. I feel it burn itself away, a galaxy of dissolving electrons in my forehead, throat, chest, belly, or groin....

Have I lost any pleasure by not putting my desire into action?

Or have I in fact gained something quite profound: a more established, solidified, permanent Witness, a deeper inner Silence?

Just Being Meditation

Your body rooted to the earth,

where it is, as it is,

its very weight a sacrament,

gravity the Mother's love

pressing to her breast your softness,

and all around this flower of flesh

the kiss of space, the sky

come down to caress you…

Breath rises through the stem

of your hollow spine

connecting earth to galaxy.

Breath sinks down,

laden with stars,

pouring them into the loam.

Inhalation dissolves the world

into boundless blue.

Exhalation offers heaven

on the alter of the soil.

No soul but this breathing flesh,

no flesh but this breathing soul:

you are the sacrament,

you are the wedding

of Shiva and Mother Divine,

Christ and Magdalene.

Their bridal chamber is your heart.

Repose in the Body.

Rejoice in the Self.

This is the deepest meditation:

being as you Are.

Sacred Body Meditation

Renaissance alchemical diagram of the human body as microcosm

The human body is the microcosm of the All. Meditation through the body reveals the power of the five elements, and opens the gateway to all possible worlds.

Feel the weight of this body as grace. Surrender to gravity as to your mother's love. Thus honor the Earth element.

Do not rise above the body, but sink into the body. Feel every cell as an ocean of peace, shimmering with blue-green iridescence. Thus honor the Water element.

Allow this human form to dissolve into electricity, exactly what it is. Dance in the void as countless infinitesimal photons of delight. Thus honor the Fire element.

Glide on ultra-voilet wings of breath into the sky of the heart. See beyond thought: the hollow of each atom, the boundless expanse that contains all galaxies. One and the same space. Thus honor the Air element.

Now merge into the black hole of a proton. Touch the ground of no-thing and discover that the vacuum is as dense as diamond. Become silence itself, the dazzling light of emptiness. Thus honor the fifth element, quintessence of pure awareness.

Softening Perception

 "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." ~William Blake

The practice of softening our perception softens the world we perceive.  

Anoint the earth through your senses. Redeem creation by perceiving it more gracefully. Pour your inner light outward through intentional acts of sacramental seeing, hearing, smelling, touching. A soft caress of perception infuses Prakriti with Purusha, the womb of Mary-Matter with Christ-Consciousness.

Until now our senses have been receptors, passive recipients of a world flowing into us. But in the dawning age, we become transmitters, blessing the world with wands of sensation. Sensation activates the hidden potential of matter. Perception is blessing. Awareness is a priestly function.

Sunbeams radiate, not into our eyes, but from them. Thrush music rises from inner silence, reverberating from our ears. Our hearing is half the song. Breathe out the musk of awakening. This world is a garden: we are the Spring.

Practice: Softening Perception

Practice this exercise no more than a minute or two, without concentration or strain. Then resume your work. If you are on a hike in the wilderness or a daily walk, you can pause to do this little exercise now and then for short moments. Please be without force or concentration. In fact, this exercise asks you to de-concentrate. Diffuse your attention to the creature's periphery, where hints of the Creator glow through the thinnest veil of physical creation.

• Begin by perceiving the space around a flower, a leaf, any still small living creature. Later, practice this with a person's face.

• Notice the subtle luminosity at the outline of the object, the fractal edge where material form dissolves into space.

• We usually focus on an object, not the negative space around it. In this intentional act of softening perception, let your focus gently shift to the empty space around the object, so that the object is background and the space around it becomes foreground.

• Let the surrounding void deepen in its silence. Be open to the possibility that the space becomes more substantial and solid, while the form it contains becomes more ethereal and translucent. The object's form is like a ray of sunlight refracted and softened by water in a still green pond.

• Space itself becomes downy and soft, a living presence. Space is awake. As you move through it, you float in the divine Presence.

"Soft" perception is not imaginary, just indirect. This indirect seeing is actually a very ancient shamanic technique for entering the world of the nature spirits and animal guides. Through indirection, we perceive what is more subtle.

Quantum science teaches us that a "material object" only appears concrete at the gross level of perception. But at finer levels, the reality is that the object ever dissolves into subtler layers of energy, and is part of the boundless energy-field around it. At the subtlest level of the physical world, particles arise and dissolve instantaneously in an all-pervading vacuum. Ultimately, these particles are but waves of emptiness.

In softening our perception, we see the true pointalism of matter - to borrow a term from art history. We allow old patterns to gracefully deconstruct into finer and finer particles of light. We let the radiance of Creator outshine the mirage of creation.

Softening is not weakening. Softening perception does not make our awareness frail: it makes awareness more substantial, more solid in its silent foundation. In truth, the pure awareness we used to perceive as abstract now becomes solid as diamond. It is not awareness but the world around us that is ever-changing, passing, ephemeral as a dream.

Buddha's Heart Sutra begins, "Form is emptiness; emptiness is form." Softening our perception puts this sutra into practice. The goal of this exercise is, in St. Paul's words, "to behold all things created anew." (2 Cor. 5:17)

On a golden afternoon, practice this in the forest with a wildflower. Then practice with someone you love in a moment of stillness, softening your gaze from direct encounter to the aureole at the edge of the physical form. Soon you will sense your beloved enfolded in compassion.

Next, practice in a mundane public place: waiting in line at the supermarket, sitting on a train, attending a meeting at work. You will awaken compassion for the ordinary, and for the stranger. You will begin to see the beauty that envelopes all wondrous weary human beings.

Finally, practice soft perception in a negative situation: while gazing at someone in deep distress, someone dying, or someone with whom you are in conflict. As their face dissolves into its luminous essence, this face becomes the light of Christ. There really are no negative situations.

When you acclimate to this practice, allow your awareness to descend from the head to the heart: quite literally, from the brain to the warm area in the chest. Even while using your eyes, ears and nostrils, the source of your attention can flow from the heart. As this shift occurs, you literally see through the eye of the heart, and the world around you becomes a Sacred Garden.

Pratyahar and the Inner Senses

 

"Do not go to the garden of flowers. O Friend, go not there. In your body is the garden of flowers! Take your seat on the thousand petals of this lotus, and here gaze on Infinite Beauty." ~Kabir

 Sexual Stimulation

We have an age-old attraction to sensory stimulants, especially sex.

And when the New Age seeker gets hold of sex, watch out! We romanticize sex, we spiritualize sex, we imagine that having sex will reveal mysterious esoteric powers, yet all this is but the mind's attempt to justify a basic, innocent, animal craving. Why do we feel so compelled to justify sex with spiritual concepts? Because, for generations, we have attached guilt and fear to it. Now we over-compensate for our sexual guilt by exaggerating the mystical significance of our sexuality.

The truth is, sex is neither a sin nor a spiritual practice. It is simply a powerful attachment, and our sexual need is not much different than a donkey's. What we require is not to exaggerate sexual delight, nor to repress sexual delight, but to supplement sexual delight with an interior source of pleasure. Then external attachment simply drops away - the way a child gives up playing with a toy.

As the rising sun outshines the glow of  a candle, so the bliss of the Inner Light outshines the pleasures of sense and sex organs. The fountain of spiritual light bubbling from an awakened heart is a never-ending sweetness that transcends any momentary sexual pleasure. It is not that spiritual Light and sex are antithetical, but that they should not be confused.

In sexual release, the physiology de-stresses for an instant and we taste total relaxation. At that moment, we may have a glimpse into the realm of the Spirit, the luminosity of boundless consciousness. This glimpse was not caused by sex, but because sex momentarily freed the mind from its desire, so that awareness could became settled, silent, self-effulgent, and blissful in its own nature.

Sexual experience does not cause spiritual experience: it simply provides a moment of relaxation where we perceive what is always already there. This same phenomenon may occur during extreme sports, sensory deprivation, fasting, exalted aesthetic appreciation of music, nature, or the beauty of the cosmos. What we really crave are not sense objects, but moments of wonder that stop the mind...

The Inner Senses

Hypnotically absorbed in the sensual stimulation of the external world, few of us know that there are inner senses more pleasurable than the outer. And, while external sensation drains our energy, internal sensation actually increases it.

Through meditation, the Inner Light dawns. And with that dawning, our inner senses wake up to see, hear, taste and feel the subtleties of the Light. As the Biblical Psalmist cries, "Taste and see that the Lord is good!"

Anyone who tastes celestial sight, sound, fragrance or touch, knows that the world within is even more attractive than the world without. In external pleasure, there is an expenditure of energy, and a constant danger of addiction. But in the interior realms of celestial sensation, there is expansion of energy along with freedom from worldly attachment. According to Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, this inward turning of the senses is called Pratyahar, one of the eight limbs of yoga.

Pratyahar is not a discipline to be practiced: it is the natural effect of consciousness drawn inward through meditation. As attention plumbs subtler fields of consciousness, there is a corresponding refinement of the nervous system. We begin to experience more refined levels of sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. These spiritual senses actually connect us to inner worlds that extend far beyond the realm of our physical planet. The inner senses are avenues to the stars, and to the star beings. We discover the greatest secret in creation: the stars and their inhabitants dwell within, not above. Our earthly body is not an obstacle to the spiritual path: our body is the gateway, and each of our chakras, the energy-centers in the subtle body, are portals to heaven.

Through pratyahar, we reverse the flow of sensuality. Satisfied from within, we no longer crave worldly delights. We enjoy them, but in non-attachment. Repression and self-control have nothing to do with spiritual practice. The state of joy in non-attachment is eloquently described by William Blake:

He who binds to himself a joy
doth the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
dwell's in eternity's sunrise.

Now streams of delight pour outward, not inward. Our spiritual senses overflow into the world. Through our eyes, ears, voice and skin, we bless and heal the earth, rather than binding it with desire. Sunbeams do not flow into our eyes, but out of our eyes. Our senses become fountains of light that infuse spirit into matter, elevating the dormant consciousness in a dragonfly, a daffodil, a pebble, or whatever we behold. The highest work we can do for our Creator is to marvel.

Don't seek blessing. Bless.