The Path That Has No End

To enter deep listening, I’ve had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning. I’ve had to lean into all I don’t understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear.

- Mark Nepo

Though this book is called Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, there is obviously no secret number, no secret math involved.

This is just a way of pointing to a path that has no end. 

I offer what I’ve learned and am still learning, not as a map or set of instructions but as one way to open our humanity.

As you read and gather notions of listening, I invite you to interchange them and grow your own sense of meaning along the way.

For example, “Ways of Listening” might also be understood as:

“Ways of Keeping What is True Before Us” or

“Ways of Receiving” or

“Ways of Encountering the Unspoken.”

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Listening is a personal pilgrimage that takes time and a willingness to circle back. With each trouble that stalls us and each wonder that lifts us, we are asked to put down our conclusions and feel and think anew. Unpredictable as life itself, the practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous, and challenging art forms on Earth. Each of us is by turn a novice and a master, until the next difficulty or joy undoes us.
- Mark Nepo

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Listening is being present enough to hear the One in the many and the many in the One.

Listening is an animating process by which we feel and understand the moment we are in: repeatedly connecting the inner world with the world around us, letting one inform the other.

Listening is an ongoing way of relating to experience.

There are many interchangeable names for listening.

The placeholder we call listening is merely the eyehole to the kaleidoscope;
the shell we hold to our ear that somehow reveals the music of the ocean.

It doesn’t matter what you call it but that you find the entry that works for you. What matters is that you keep trying and keep putting your attempts together, that you gather your own understanding.

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Ultimately, a devotion to deep listening remains the simple and sacred work of being here and by listening our way into lifelong friendships with everything larger than us, with our life of experience, and with each other.

Our friendship with everything larger than us opens us to the wisdom of Source – this is the work of being.

Our friendship with experience opens us to wisdom of life on Earth – this is the work of being human.

Our friendship with each other opens us to the wisdom of care – this is the work of love.

While we may feel lifted or overwhelmed by each of these on any given day they are intertwined and inseparable - three friends we need to stay connected to if we have any hope of living an awakened life.

These three friendships - the work of being, the work of being human, and the work of love frame the journey for this book.

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I welcome you to this conversation between the stars, the animals, and the trees of language sprouting from the Earth. I invite you to engage in the work of reverence; in the work of staying freshly connected by entering your friendship with this mystery we call life. I invite you to listen in every way you can, for listening in all things is the first step toward friendship. 

– Mark Nepo

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When we lose our map, our real knowledge of the path begins.

- Mark Nepo

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Speechless

In the silence that is never quite silent,

I listen.

Not with the intent to “hear” anything

or “get” anything

or “achieve” anything

but just for the sake of listening.

It takes a little while for the path to unfold,

and then I see

the path is inviting and it is endless.

My ears relax

the filters dissolve

the inner chatter stops

and I feel a sensation in my heart

that I’ve never felt before

My heart is actively sensing the world

and the world is sensing my heart.

And I hear,

and there are no words.

- Patti Wardlaw

Walking Each Other Home

All of us are One.

One consciousness…

And that is the way the world can right itself.

Start with your peace, your love, your compassion and go from there.

Love everything…everything!

Let’s all walk each other home.

- Spoken by Ram Dass in the 2018 movie “Going Home”

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WELCOME TO OUR CIRCLE

Dear Wise Women,

My beloved mentor, Pamela Wilson begins each Satsang (sacred gathering) by saying the word “welcome” two times…followed by a little bow of her head.

I invite you to pause for a moment and really listen as I say these words:

Welcome, Welcome.

I invite you to open your heart to receive and feel the intention - more than a greeting, this is an invitation to open the heart and to receive and to feel the unifying power of this circle.

May our time together be sacred and purposeful.

May we create an authentic and safe environment to be vulnerable and be seen.

May we listen with an open heart to ourselves, to each other and to the silence.

This week we embark on an eleven week journey together, which spans over the course of fourteen weeks. I invite you to feel into the intention for our time together, and I ask you to make an inner commitment to yourself and to each other. This is much more than a weekly class…it is a true opportunity to co-create energetic transformation.

The work we will do together goes much deeper than meets the eye. By gathering with a common intention and a shared commitment, we activate a unifying presence. The energy of this presence extends far beyond the two hours we spend together each week and beyond the fourteen weeks of our session. The one and only prerequisite to the creation of this unifying energy is the unconditional presence of each one of us.

Deep listening is the portal to presence.

Eckhart Tolle says that when we are able to “listen to the space between the words” we hear the voice of stillness and we activate presence, or life energy. In this session, we will explore and practice the infinite ways to listen and, together, we will deepen our ability to listen with what Ram Dass calls the “ear of the heart”.

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One Living Sense

For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration. In reality, they are the same thing. It is interesting to note that in the Italian language this distinction does not exist. The verb sentire means to hear and the same verb, in the reflexive form, sentirsi means to feel.

Hearing happens physically when a signal is generated in the ear that gathers discrete pieces of information from all the senses and sends the aggregate to the brain, which creates a brief and comprehensive sound from it all.

What we call listening is actually an innate process that integrates an array of sensations we encounter through different ways of knowing (sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound). What we hear is the sum of life’s vibrations, which constantly arrives like waves that soak into a perceptual shore that the oldest traditions call the mind-heart.

A vibrant example of such fundamental hearing is Evelyn Glennie, one of the most innovative percussionists in the world today, who is profoundly deaf. She says she lives the rhythms and feels the vibration of the music, not instead of hearing but as the foundation of all hearing. Her gift comes alive from opening herself to where the senses begin as one integrated sense. She views the hearing world’s insistence on separating the living whole as a disability.

- “Seven Thousand Ways to Listen”, by Mark Nepo

“By holding the stick tightly I feel really quite, believe it or not, detached from the instrument… and from the stick. If I simply let go and allow my hand, my arm, to be more of a support system - suddenly I have more dynamic with less effort, much more drum sound and I just feel, at last, one with the stick and one with the drum… and I’m doing far, far less.”

- Evelyn Glennie Ted Talk “How To Truly Listen” TED 2003

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There's a voice that doesn't use words. Listen.

- Rumi

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Walk with Me

Come be with me

and let’s just walk for awhile

side by side

let’s watch our feet

move upon the same earth at the same time

step by step

moment by moment

let’s listen together

to what we know is true.

We are soul.

We are infinite.

We are just walking each other home.

- Patti Wardlaw

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See as Grace Sees

Grace sees the differences in the world as integrated parts of one wholeness.
- Deepak Chopra

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Dear Wise Women,

Thank-you for journeying within our circles for the past five weeks! Our exploration of “Manifesting Grace Through Gratitude” has been one of the most beautiful experiences of my life! Together, we gained a deeper understanding of the principles of gratitude and grace and, I believe, created a vessel for authentic gratitude to flow and reveal the beauty and mystery of grace in her endless forms.

This week, I would like to review some of the most captivating teachings of our time together. I am going to start by re-reading the Rumi Oracle “Resplendent With Grace”:

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Is it difficult to see your magnificence? Without a mirror the size of a galaxy, how could you possibly witness all that you are? You must just catch glimpses of your truth now and then. Oh, if you could see yourself as I see you in all of your glorious fullness of being! You are swathed in robes of grace, so light and freeing that they do not weigh you down, and yet so luscious and full that you cannot help but stir the movement of all of creation as you step this way and that.

Of course it matters not to grace whether you see or do not see, for grace simply is, without witnessing being required. Yet you might live rather differently, my beloved, should you realize you are not only worthy of grace, but are actually dripping with it, saturated with divine presence so rich it leaks out of you and causes sunlight to pool at your holy feet. Oh yes, you are resplendent in holiness and sanctity. Should you come to know this as I do, you would take each step with awe and reverence. You would decide that not a thing in your world could be classed as mundane, and decide, with bold fervour, that you are living in godliness and must create your world through choices that honour love.

You may be wondering if you can attain this next stage of growth in your life. You are already well-equipped to do so, no matter what you might believe about the situation, circumstances, or others involved, even yourself. You have within your soul possession more than enough grace to see you through anything you are bold enough to envision for yourself, or for any vision you feel life has bestowed upon you. So pray, through unconditional love to access all that you are, to be supported by those beings that love you without condition. Pray to realize that you are so drenched in sacred grace that the well of your being is full. All that is needed to nurture you onto the next step of your life path is within you now. How could it be otherwise, for you are one with grace.

- Rumi Oracle: Invitation into the Heart of the Divine by Alanna Fairchild

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Gratitude is a two-way flow of appreciation between your thanks and the uplifting response that you feel in return. The flow of gratitude from the heart is received by nature in the same spirit it is given, and it is returned back to us as grace.

- Deepak Chopra

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Genuine gratitude comes from a feeling of contentment, safety, and being welcomed in your life.

- Deepak Chopra

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Grace is the knowledge that we belong, that we are understood, that we are a meaningful part of something big, deep and powerful.

- Oprah Winfrey

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Devotion is entirely about finding love in everything, as a universal quality. 

- Deepak Chopra

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Loving fearlessly through gratitude is one of the most courageous things a human being can do.

- Oprah Winfrey

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There is no step-by-step guide to attaining grace, there is only an opening of the soul. Open the door. Step in.

- Oprah Winfrey

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The water moves

from source to ocean

and back again

never following the same path twice.

The constancy we see is an illusion,

a single drop of water washes over a rock

and then moves on

never to visit that rock again.

Beneath it all

the river bed witnesses the flow

erodes, bends, and transforms.

It neither clings to nor resists the current,

but savours the sensation of every

swirling rapid

plummeting waterfall

and gentle trickle

sensing the aliveness of every moment

with joy and curiosity.

- Patti Wardlaw

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Living in Grace

There is no step-by-step guide to attaining grace, there is only an opening of the soul. Open the door. Step in.
- Oprah Winfrey

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To live in a state of grace is to go beyond the behaviour and attitude of gratitude, and to let gratitude and grace become our way of being and living in the world.

In the past, feelings of grace may have been rare and fleeting moments. To make grace permanent, we need to establish gratitude as a habit, so it becomes our default mode of relating to others.

When gratitude is the natural way we approach life, it is no longer an activity we try to remember to do. Gratitude is simply how you express who you are and how you feel. The practice of gratitude naturally and invisibly becomes a life lived in the state of grace.

“Grace is perfect even when my life isn’t”

Living in grace is for everyone, not just for those who feel called to a secluded life of prayer and devotion. Society has assigned grace to saints, sages, spiritual masters and holy people who have led their lives outside of society, but grace is not about who walks away from society and who stays behind.

Living in a complete state of grace happens when we we allow our true self to shine forth, that is the only requirement.

Now that you have experience first hand how beneficial it is to express gratitude, you are ready for a new role.

Having seen the big picture It is time to become the big picture…for your personal story will unfold on a much larger canvas.

This sounds difficult, but it isn’t. You have already taken the most important step, you have a wider perspective than before. You can look around and see how everything is interconnected, you have felt how nature’s abundance is ready to give everything, you understand that grace exists in every moment.

These are truths to live by, but how? The how actually comes second, what comes first is to have a generous spirit.

Generosity of spirit mirrors grace itself: you are simply acting from the same attitude that grace has shown you. Generosity of spirit means that you are open with everyone. You accept and respect their point of view, you see them with kindness instead of judgement or criticism you don’t pass up a chance to show appreciation – these things don’t make you a saint, they make you a person who knows grace is real.

The most natural way to be generous of spirit is to follow your inner feeling – speak and act when you feel something inside tap you on the shoulder, giving you a slight encouragement to say or do something kind or appreciative. In this way you become an agent of grace – you are doing its work. This is the highest form of the phrase, pay it forward. Now you embody grace which is the most fulfilling way for anyone to live.

- Deepak Chopra

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Resplendent with Grace

Greetings from my heart
to you who are always with me,
hidden inside as the heart.
You are the compass of my life.
My course is your way,
no matter where I go.

You exist everywhere and in everything
always watching over us.
My soul brightens in the darkness
when I speak your name.

Far beyond the body,
there is an opening from my heart into yours.
Through that opening,
I send you secret messages like the moonlight.

I polish the mirror of my heart
to be your reflection.
I make my ear the receiver
for the tenderness of your words.

You are in the ear.
You are in the mind.
You are in every burning heart.
What am I saying? You are “I”.
This is my way to describe you!

- RUMI

Is it difficult to see your magnificence? Without a mirror the size of a galaxy, how could you possibly witness all that you are? You must just catch glimpses of your truth now and then. Oh, if you could see yourself as I see you in all of your glorious fullness of being! You are swathed in robes of grace, so light and freeing that they do not weigh you down, and yet so luscious and full that you cannot help but stir the movement of all of creation as you step this way and that.

Of course it matters not to grace whether you see or do not see, for grace simply is, without witnessing being required. Yet you might live rather differently, my beloved, should you realize you are not only worthy of grace, but are actually dripping with it, saturated with divine presence so rich it leaks out of you and causes sunlight to pool at your holy feet. Oh yes, you are resplendent in holiness and sanctity. Should you come to know this as I do, you would take each step with awe and reverence. You would decide that not a thing in your world could be classed as mundane, and decide, with bold fervour, that you are living in godliness and must create your world through choices that honour love.

You may be wondering if you can attain this next stage of growth in your life. You are already well-equipped to do so, no matter what you might believe about the situation, circumstances, or others involved, even yourself. You have within your soul possession more than enough grace to see you through anything you are bold enough to envision for yourself, or for any vision you feel life has bestowed upon you. So pray, through unconditional love to access all that you are, to be supported by those beings that love you without condition. Pray to realize that you are so drenched in sacred grace that the well of your being is full. All that is needed to nurture you onto the next step of your life path is within you now. How could it be otherwise, for you are one with grace.

- Rumi Oracle: Invitation into the Heart of the Divine by Alanna Fairchild

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To see Grace

is to see the stillness behind all that moves.

To hear Grace

is to listen to the silence in between the sounds.

To feel Grace

is to find the softness in what feels hard.

To live in Grace

is to know

what the mind will never understand

and for that to be enough

indeed

for it to be everything.

- Patti Wardlaw

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Relating with Gratitude

Loving fearlessly through gratitude is one of the most courageous things a human being can do.

- Oprah Winfrey

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To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn’t come with guarantees – these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. But, I’m learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude and grace.

- Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

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Gratitude Creates Oneness

The gratitude we feel for the people we love is a recognition of the unity we share with them. Love means overcoming the feeling of separation. It brings a sense of completion that is denied to the ego. So if you take a moment to say either silently or to someone you love “thank-you for sharing this life together with such love”, know that the two of you are connected at the deepest level where grace unites us all.

- Deepak Chopra

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Marianne Willamson teaches us that there are only two emotions in life: love and fear. When we open ourselves to feeling love from a place of gratitude, something miraculous happens – fear starts to melt away. When you choose to love everything and everybody around you, you send a clear message to the universe: my love transcends fear, anger, rejection – I love even those who have hurt me, because they are the ones who need it the most. I’m thankful for every experience good or bad and for how it has shaped into the person I am today.

- Oprah Winfrey

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As you may already notice, your ego, will object to this way of living. Our ego will argue and present ample evidence as to why loving and thanking everybody, especially the difficult people in our lives, is a very, very bad idea. It is helpful, at this point, to remember the true nature of the ego. The ego, by definition is the sense of separateness and it thrives on judgement and comparison. Because the ego evokes a very strong sense of “me” and “I”, the idea of extending unconditional love and gratitude towards others evokes immediate resistance. The ego will try to tell you that if you do this you will get walked all over, you will be letting them get away with such and such.

The truth is that the authentic gratitude opens up an energy exchange in which relationships can flourish, or if they need to end, they end with ease.

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Relationships flourish when we are able to offer ourselves to one another with unlimited love, compassion, kindness and understanding. This ideal is impossible to reach without expanded awareness.

Our own desires and ego needs stand in the way, but our true self knows better…grace accomplishes what the ego cannot.

- Deepak Chopra

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Compassion and Forgiveness Open the Pathway towards Relating with Gratitude

Compassion is the key to recognizing and honouring what links us together, it is the knowing that because you are human and I am human that we are really more alike than we could ever be different. When you judge another human being you deny the connection that ties us all.
- Oprah

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Judgement is fuelled by a sense of righteousness that the ego enjoys to the fullest. It likes nothing better than to feel that it is in the right. Being thankful is the opposite of being judgemental – when you are thankful for something or someone you can’t be judgemental at the same time. This fact has healing power. Stepping down from the judge’s chair brings a complete shift in attitude, even the person’s worst faults become something you wish to help with, not condemn. The next step towards compassion is to forgive. In the absence of judgement there is nothing to resent – grudges start to loosen their grip. When you forgive your awareness becomes more inclusive – it expands beyond “I”, “me” and “mine” …this is when the window of compassion opens. You empathize with the common humanity that links you to everyone else on earth. This shared sympathy deepens our humanity.

True compassion purifies the soul and reveals the deepest truth:

When you stop judging others, you stop judging yourself…
and once you get to that place, you are in the state of grace.

- Deepak Chopra

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Ho’oponopono: the Hawaiian Forgiveness Ritual

The Ho’oponopono ritual can be applied to any relationship or situation in which you feel disconnected or troubled. More often than not, you may find yourself saying these four sentences silently… they need not ever be spoken out loud. Please note that when saying sorry you are not blaming yourself rather you are expressing a heart-felt apology for being part of a situation or relationship in which there is disharmony. Ho’oponopono is about opening the heart and liberating guilt, blame and shame - it is a method of accessing the universal energy of unconditional love.

Ho’oponopono means a return to the Divine Plan…

Ho'oponopono belongs to a system of ancient Hawaiian teaching called the 'Huna'. 'Hu' means 'knowledge', and 'na' represents 'wisdom', and the guardians of this ancient teaching are called 'kahunas' - Huna experts.

The Hawaiians call their group of islands 'The Land of Aloha’, the Land of Love. 'Aloha' contains the essence of the Huna teaching of knowledge and wisdom, and it forms the basis of Ho'oponopono. Aloha has a single commandment: never to harm, always to help. The command to harm no one begins with not harming oneself. And thus, to love your neighbour as yourself. 'Mana aloha' is the essence of God's energy, the energy that penetrates and informs everything. The wise Hindu monks call this energy 'bhakti' , meaning 'devotion', and the Tibetan monks call it 'compassion'. By this, they did not merely have in mind an emotion, but a directly experienced energy that influences the environment and creates a new reality. Ho'oponopono is this compassion in action.

Ho'oponopono is a simple way of arriving at unity, inner peace and returning to harmony. It expresses the deep need to live once again in harmony with oneself and with humanity, nature and God. Ho'o means 'to make' and pono is translated 'right' or 'correct'. And so ho'oponopono quite simply represents to 'make rightly right'. To 'make anything rightly right' means to join oneself again with one's Higher Self and the Source of All Being - to be in one's own centre, returned to harmony, and balanced once again so that one is able to realign the environment and reshape reality.

The forgiveness ritual of Ho'oponopono is love in action. You forgive yourself and others for having inflicted any sort of hurt, or for having failed to help when needed. 'Making things rightly right' is a simple four-step procedure that helps you learn to forgive yourself unconditionally, to love, and, additionally to make things better.

I am sorry

Please forgive me

I love you

Thank you

These four sentences seem like a mantra or a magical formula, but they are rather a mediation and a prayer. They operate through time and space, beyond cause and effect, and transmit themselves directly to your Inner Family, the Higher Self, the Inner Child and your waking consciousness. After a short while you achieve inner peace and change from disharmony to harmony.

- Ho'oponopono: The Hawaiian forgiveness ritual as the key to your life's fulfillment, by Ulrich E. Dupree

What I most want to emphasize is the power of these four simple sentences when applied to oneself…anytime you feel regret, self judgement, doubt, self-criticism or are otherwise separated from Oneness (aka: Source, God, the Universe, Divinity, Energy, Qi, Presence)…simply pause and say to yourself and to Oneness:

You move yourself from separation to union while you say:

I am sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.“I am sorry. Please Forgive me. I love you. Thank you.”

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Mantra:

Aham Prema

My true essence is divine love

As you repeat this mantra, let your heart open and feel pure love flow through all your relationships and into every part of your life.

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Unity

I Am Sorry

for thinking we were separate

for believing that I needed to earn your love

and you needed to earn mine

for treating love like a currency

that needed to be saved, guarded and cautiously spent.

Please Forgive Me

for forgetting that we are walking the same road

and for the hurt I have caused.

I Love You

the you that is the same as me

Thank You

for receiving me

and showing me

our shared unity.

- Patti Wardlaw

Living in Gratitude, Living in Devotion

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“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are”

 – Joseph Campbell

“Appreciating that privilege and being grateful for the full spectrum of possibility in each moment is the ultimate connection to grace.”

-       Oprah Winfrey

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Precious Human Birth

Of all things that exist, we breathe and wake and turn it into song. 

There is a Buddhist precept that asks us to be mindful of how rare it is to find ourselves in human form on Earth. It is really a beautiful view of life that offers us the chance to feel enormous appreciation for the fact that we are here as individual spirits filled with consciousness, drinking water and chopping wood.

It asks us to understand that no other life form has the consciousness of being that we are privilege to.  It asks us to recognize that of all the endless species of plants and animals and minerals that make up the Earth, a very small portion of life has the wakefulness of spirit that we call “being human.”

That I can rise from some depth of awareness to express this to you and that you can receive me in this instant is part of our precious human birth. You could have been an ant. I could have been an anteater. You could have been rain. I could have been a lick of salt. But we were blessed – in this time, in this place, to be human beings alive in rare ways we often take for granted.

All of this to say, this precious human birth is unrepeatable. So what will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands? What will you ask and of whom?

Tomorrow you could die and become an ant, and someone will be setting traps for you.  But today, you are precious and rare and awake. It ushers us into grateful living. It makes hesitation useless. Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.

- Mark Nepo, “The Book of Awakening”

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Devote your one precious life to gratitude and behold the miracles of manifestation.

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The Power of Devotion

Gratitude is a powerful form of positive input – it can generate new brain cells and open new pathways. These new pathways give us the physical basis for seeing and feeling the state of grace and of opening up to more love.

As you test out the experience of being more loving, a feedback loop is being set up in your brain. You are training it to notice something new, and the more it notices, the more sensitive, alert, and perceptive you will become in matters of love. You are on a path known in Sanskrit as Bhakti, the path of devotion. Devotion is entirely about finding love in everything, as a universal quality. 

- Deepak Chopra

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This week I heard the word “devotion” several times, both in conversations and in meditation…and whenever that happens, I pay close attention. As it turned out, my healing journey offered a powerful opportunity to witness and experience devotion. I was fortunate to benefit from the skills of my surgeon, which she cultivated through a devotion towards her vocation, and it was a privilege to receive the care and support that my husband and my children devoted to me in my time of need.

The more I sat with devotion, the more encompassing it became. Like grace, devotion touches a person in a way that cannot be explained, but it can be witnessed.

Though associated with discipline, devotion, it seems, is a propelling force that comes from a very different place. When a person is devoted to a task, he or she does it with a lightness and ease and joy that no amount of disciplined and concerted effort can ever create.

Devotion, it seems, opens up the doorway to a higher power. A power that turns “shoulds” into “wants”.

The image of a sailor comes to mind. A disciplined and determined sailor can raise his sail, set his point, and expertly tack and jibe… but try as he might, he cannot create the wind. The devoted sailor is patient and trusting in the process and knows when to turn it all over to grace.

This got me thinking about my ongoing struggle with “self-discipline” and the frustration that I feel so often from failing to follow through on my daily “goals” (for example to meditate, do qigong, do yoga, exercise, stay off my phone, eat more vegetables).

Could it be that, like the anxious sailor, I have mistakenly believed that I alone have to put the wind in my sail?

And then it dawned on me.

As with gratitude, true devotion unlocks the power of grace.

And grace turns discipline into dedication.

The famous author, Robin Lafever summarizes this beautifully:

”Devotion implies joy and zeal and ardent affection. I think of it as the big yellow Labrador puppy approach to writing.  It is a process oriented stage. It encompasses dedication and can appear from the outside to look a lot like discipline, but its origins are very, very different.”

True devotion, like gratitude, has very little to do with things in the external world. Though we can be grateful for our circumstances and devoted to our crafts, it is gratitude for life itself and devotion to the source of life that manifests grace and, indeed, can change the world.

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And, now I would like to share a true story, shared in the poem below.
What struck me most about this experience was the depth of devotion and gratitude that I felt from my ancestors…

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June’s Moon

It is the first of June

in this very strange year

 of change and contrasts

of hope and fear.

The scent of lilacs

pink cherry blossoms

small blue eggs hatching new life.

Events unfolding

senseless suffering

inflicted on humans, by humans,

again, and again, and again.

It is after midnight and I toss and turn

sleep is not coming easily tonight.

An email message from my dear friend, June:

“Trying to sleep,
thinking of you,
I opened the blind and saw
the moonlight reflecting on the venetian blinds
like teardrops.”

I  wrap myself in a blanket 

and step outside

the wet grass is cool beneath my feet

the sky is clear

the air is pure

cleansed by today’s rain.

There it is,

the waxing moon

the same moon

that beckoned June,

the same moon

that has borne witness to it all.

And, then I feel their presence

a circle of women stand around me 

my sisters, my ancestors

wise women from millenniums gone by

lit up by the moon

 I see the lines on their faces

I can feel their stories

their pain

their hardship

yet, arm in arm, they stand

in forgiveness

in gratitude

in love.

Relentless

Steadfast

Committed

Devoted

these warriors assure me

“we are here, our work continues on”

- Patti Wardlaw

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I leave you today with a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr. that, I hope, opens your heart to faith and hope and ignites a new sense of devotion during these important times on earth.

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Devotion

With a grateful heart,

I bow to you,

the One Heart

that beats and breathes

life into all beings.

With a free heart,

I choose you,

the One Heart

that knows only

benevolence and compassion.

With an open heart,

I devote my life to you,

the One Heart

who’s devotion to me

has been

and always will be

unwavering and unconditional.

Your love for me

brings me to my knees

and,

knowing I am worthy,

I receive

so that I may give.

- Patti Wardlaw

The Nurturing Power of Grace

What I know for sure is that everyone of us is seeking the same thing.

Each of us wants to know:

do you see me?

do you hear me

do I matter?

In fact what we want is grace.

Grace is the knowledge that we belong, that we are understood, that we are a meaningful part of something big, deep and powerful.

And gratitude is the catalyst. When we express gratitude, grace responds.

Through gratitude we turn grace from a noun to a verb, we activate grace and grow our presence within it – through gratitude we actually become grace personified.

Be present in gratitude, and grace automatically responds and awakens the bigness of even the smallest things in life. You see things differently, you hear things anew, everything matters.

And that is what we are all seeking.

Indeed that is grace.

Let’s listen to the signals of grace within us and all around us.

- Oprah Winfrey

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Grace is the nurturing force in nature.
Like the rain, grace falls on everyone alike.
- Deepak Chopra

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“Grace is always present. You imagine it is somewhere high in the sky, far away, and has to descend. It is really inside you, in your Heart. Grace is the Self. . . .You are never out of its operation.”
- Sri Ramana Maharshi

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Grace is not knowledge or reason, but rather, grace is the amount of light in our souls.
- Pope Francis

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The silence of our awareness is the source of grace within.
-Deepak Chopra

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The energy of gratitude knows no bounds and it returns to you bringing unlimited goodness. Something within you changes and everything around you changes. That is what is called grace.

- Oprah Winfrey

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Your life is a cosmic gift – a gift of grace that renews itself with every breath.
-Deepak Chopra

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When we offer the world our gratitude, grace responds and completes the circle.

As we use our gratitude to join this awakening of joy and beauty around us, we also find that our life becomes easier, more fun, and more meaningful.

This nurturing power of grace comes from the source of Being which sustains everyone and everything in the universe.

As human beings we can consciously choose to step into this flow of grace to enrich and elevate our lives.

- Deepak Chopra

Being aware, human beings can reach out and ask for grace.

Deepak Chopra

Because grace comes from a deep source within you, it is intelligent and creative. It knows what you want and who you want to be, so it tailors its response to fit your situation.

Grace when it is alive and flowing works like a feedback loop: you give something to the source and, in turn, a response comes back to you.

But how do you know grace is responding?

Some signals come from within. If you express gratitude, the signal that comes back to you could be a sense of peace and calm. There could be a moment of joy, your perception could shift. The bare tree outside your window in winter suddenly looks perfectly shaped and harmonious – a beautiful creation instead of a bare skeleton.

Other signals come from outside. In response to your gratitude given silently to yourself, suddenly someone shows how much they appreciate you – a difficult task becomes easier, an unexpected answer arrives.

- Deepak Chopra

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Grace is our True Self

Many wise teachers tell us that our true selves is like the ocean.

At the surface there are waves, movements, many rhythms.

Just beneath there are currents in motions and different schools of life.

At the deepest fathoms there is a profound silence, pure silence, a deep peace.

The deeper you go within the more profoundly you become one with your true self – your own grace.

Gratitude is your beacon guiding you to that rooted place of acceptance, peace and beauty.

Cultivate a state of appreciation and you actually create grace.

- Oprah Winfrey

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Grace Melts Obstacles

On the path of grace, obstacles are not your enemy.

No matter how frustrating the experience is, an obstacle is a signal from your true self – it is asking you to take a fresh look at the situation.

Being grateful comes naturally - but stubborn beliefs can get in the way and block it. These stuck beliefs are generally pessimistic.

But once we start the practice of gratitude, our perspective opens up. We start to see how the universe supports us in countless ways. From this shift in perception, optimism naturally emerges.

In moments when you feel resistance inside yourself, close your eyes and allow yourself a moment to become centered.

Now see a candle sitting outside in the noon day sun.

See the small flame flickering in the breeze.

Now visualize how the candle is bathed in sunlight.

The sun grows brighter and brighter and as it does the candle flame starts to vanish.

After a few seconds you can’t see it at all, only the blazing light of the sun.

See all this light around you and say silently: this is where I really am, this is what is real.

When I don’t resist, I am in grace.

- Deepak Chopra

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Kripa Hum

“I am divine grace”

This mantra sets in motion the flow of grace through gratitude, as you repeat the mantra feel yourself as both the giver and receiver of blessings.

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Here also is a wonderful mantra to start each day with: rt your day by saying the following:

“ I give thanks for being in Divine Timing and Divine Grace”

(thank-you wise woman Gabriole for sharing this)!

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Grace Within

Still enough

brave enough

and willing enough

I dive within

past the waves

through the currents

noticing

the many schools

swimming and swirling around me

Still

I dive deeper

and finally

I exhale

as I remember

the ocean within provides infinite breath

A voice beckons me

to go deeper

and I go

to where there is only stillness

I feel a warm embrace

and my body melts

into the arms of

the One

who knows me,

guides me,

carries me,

breathes me

She whispers,

“I am here, I never left you”

and my True Self remembers

She is Me.

I am Grace.

- Patti Wardlaw

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The Energy of Gratitude

“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”
- Dalai Lama

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Though conceptually understood and appreciated by most, gratitude is not often recognized as the energy and force of change that it is. Over the next six weeks, it is my desire to unlock the life changing power of gratitude! Together we will deepen our understanding of gratitude, nurture its practice, sense its aliveness and become awestruck at the ability of gratitude awaken the grace inherent in each of us.

Our journey will be guided by the wisdom of Deepak Chopra as we reference his and Oprah Winfrey’s powerful and inspiring 21 day meditation called “Manifesting Grace through Gratitude”.

“Gratitude is a two-way flow of appreciation between your thanks and the uplifting response that you feel in return. The flow of gratitude from the heart is received by nature in the same spirit it is given, and it is returned back to us as grace.”
- Deepak Chopra

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“Gratitude is a sacred space where you allow and know that a force greater than your ego is always at work and always available.”
- Wayne Dyer

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“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life, it turns what we have into enough and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Nothing around you changes – you change. When gratitude shifts the moment, it shifts you.”
- Melody Beattie

“Gratitude is like a secret key that shifts your awareness. Gratitude changes your relationship with life from an attitude of rejecting and defending to one of acceptance and appreciation. Research has shown that this shift involves emotions, beliefs and even our bodies. Because it has a positive effect even on our cells, gratitude is an engine for holistic change. Change begins inside by performing meditation as gratitude from the heart.

Genuine gratitude comes from a feeling of contentment, safety, and being welcomed in your life – what Buddha called the “gladdened heart.” This natural energy of gratitude is awakened when we meditate. Our intention in meditation is to invite this warm attitude of appreciation into our awareness and perception. With this recharged heart of thankfulness we find reason to be grateful wherever we look.

To generate gratitude, first you need to recognize what this particular energy feels like in yourself, it is the feeling that you are welcomed and safe in your life. You feel that you are supported in whatever you want to be. The good things in your life show that abundance has included you. This is the natural energy of gratitude when you find it inside your own awareness. The next thing is to renew this energy, which happens when you meditate. You are specifically requesting the warm attitude of thankfulness. At the deep level where all possibilities exist, your awareness will renew this energy that is unique to gratitude. You can feel a surge of  gratitude simply by gazing at a beam of sunlight and watching how the bright particles are dancing in it. True gratitude comes from knowing that you belong in the infinite dance of life. To gladden your heart, consider the perfectly precise chain of events that created this very moment. There is wonder in perceiving how the tiniest element fits into the whole. How your existence is woven into the existence of everyone you love, including every memory of love. Whenever you feel something outside yourself to be grateful for, it is not the thing that creates gratitude, but the energy of joy inside you. A gladdened heart is our birthright. To awaken it comes naturally.”

- Deepak Chopra

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Gratitude is in the Present

“Always say yes to the present moment. Surrender to what is. Say yes to life and see how life starts working for you.” This what Eckhart Tolle, one of my favourite spiritual teachers says. Change the phrase “say yes” to “say thank-you” and Eckhart’s wisdom becomes even more powerful.”

- Oprah Winfrey

“Gratitude is in the present. When we are distracted, distant and not fully immersed in the here and now, nothing is ever enough. We never feel complete, we never feel actually satisfied. When we make gratitude the essence of each present moment, abundance multiplies. Simply being and being grateful creates a wholeness and completeness that is ultimately grace. It is by expressing our thanks that we align ourselves with the universe. Gratitude and grace are always available and here for us.

Gratitude enriches the present moment, bringing it alive. Every moment has its own energy, its own feeling, its unique signature. These are beautiful realizations and they bring out something practical. Grace can only be found in the present moment. It lives in the here and now. There is nowhere else to find it. When you feel alive you are in the present moment. The connection happens automatically. If you awaken your gratitude right now, grace is there to respond.”

- Deepak Chopra

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“Think of one good thing in your life, whatever you feel in your heart. It does not have to be big, it can be the sunshine or a rose in a vase. Say thank-you to these things, the words “thank-you” are helpful but the real importance is the feeling. Now imagine whatever you are grateful for is aware of your thanks, see it smiling back at you shimmering with the same warm feeling. Your thanks has been received and welcomed. You have successfully started the flow of grace.”

- Deepak Chopra

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Ananda Hum
”I Am Bliss”
This mantra awakens the inherent joy in our hearts so that we look out at the world with love and gratitude. As you repeat the mantra feel your heart swell with love and joy.

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Our Closing Prayer

Thank-you

dear tree

for the shade you cast

for the fruit you bear

for the birds you house.

Thank-you for your beauty

your splendour

your grace.

I could gaze at you forever

I see you

…I really see you.

What is that dear tree, did you say something?

Yes, you did, I heard it!

You said “you are welcome”

I can feel your response

and your appreciation

for my gratitude.

I feel

your bliss,

I feel my bliss.

Thank-you.

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The Illusion of Time

“The separation between past, present and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.”
- Albert Einstein

I wish to wrap up our final class in this session by addressing one of the biggest obstacles to maintaining presence: our relationship with what Shakespeare calls this bloody tyrant, time! How, after-all, do we be fully present to Now when there is so much that needs to be done by a specific time in the future?

A clue to unravelling this conundrum may be in deconstructing our beliefs around the following commonly used expressions:

“If only I could manage my time better!”

”I ran out of time!”

”There is never enough time in a day.”

”I saved so much time today!”

”What should we do to fill the time?”

“When will I ever find the time to get finish this project.”

“Stop wasting time!”

“I’m just killing time.”

“I was robbed of time”

”Where did the time go?

“Time flies by too fast.”

Can you spot the paradoxes in each of these statements?

How, for example, can we “manage” time? We may be able to manage what we “do”, but we cannot manage time anymore than we can manage the rising of the sun! Though we may become more efficient, we cannot “save” time anymore than we can save the sensation of kissing a newborn infant. We say we “ran” out of time as if it is the same as the contents of a milk container.

Yes, I am just playing with words here…but the point is to demonstrate how our perceived ability to control time is the work of our identified egos… and a recipe for endless suffering!

“One of the great illusions of our time is that hurrying will buy us more time.”
- John Ortberg

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Over the past several weeks, many of us have expressed how much we are enjoying the extra time that we have as a result of the pandemic. Some of us have shared concerns about how we will find time to do everything again once the pandemic ends. This awareness is a gift.

We have been presented with a tremendous opportunity to birth a new relationship with time! To enter into a new paradigm where there IS ALWAYS ENOUGH TIME!

And how do we access this new paradigm? You guessed it - through a willingness to be fully one with the present moment!

(This plus a heightened resolve to catch the voice in our head that will periodically pipe up to argue with us and present ample evidence that there is not enough time and that stress is the only solution).

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“Accept the present moment and find the perfection that is deeper than any form and untouched by time.”

“On the surface, the present moment is “what happens.” Since what happens changes continuously, it seems that every day of your life consists of thousands of moments in which different things happen. Time is seen as the endless succession of moments, some “good”, some “bad.” Yet, if you look more closely, that is to say, through your own immediate experience, you find that there are not many moments at all. You discover that there is only ever this moment. Life is always now. Your entire life unfolds in this constant Now. Even past or future moments only exist when you remember or anticipate them, and you do so by thinking about them in the only moment there is: this one.

Why does it appear then as if there were many moments? Because the present moment is confused with what happens, confused with content. The space of Now is confused with what happens in that space. The confusion of the present moment with content gives rise not only to the illusion of time, but also to the illusion of ego.

There is a paradox here. On the one hand, how can we deny the reality of time? You need it to go from here to there, to prepare a meal, build a house, read this book. You need time to grow up, to learn new things. Whatever you do seems to take time.

Everything seems to be subject to time, yet it all happens in the Now. That is the paradox. Wherever you look there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the reality of time - yet you never find direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only experience the present moment, or rather what happens in it.”

And rest assured…

”There is no incompatibility between being present and being aware of what time it is, or how much time you have left to get to a particular place. What I call clock time, practical time still operates in our lives and our civilization. So you don’t lose presence when you keep track of time.”

-Eckhart Tolle

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On Grace…

“For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.”

- Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor

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Our Closing Prayer

Dear Time,

I am sorry

Please forgive me

for believing I was bigger than you,

for thinking I could

manage you,

control you,

stretch you,

shrink you,

waste you,

and even lose you.

I am sorry

for blaming you,

resenting you,

and feeling stressed “by” you.

Oh Time,

How misunderstood you have been,

viewed as an object and an enemy

instead of celebrated for who you really are:

a marker of the

endless, eternal and infinite Now.

- Patti Wardlaw

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Awakening is the Realization of Presence

I changed the title of this Treasure Trove three times before it felt right.

First try: “Awakened Consciousness”

Nope , too vague.

Second try: “The Awakening of Consciousness - Turning an Elusive Concept into an Attainable Reality”

Nope, too loaded.

Third try: “Awakening Is The Realization of Presence”.

Yes, just right.

Thank-you Eckhart Tolle…so simple and True!

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Over fourteen weeks ago we gathered at St. Stephen’s Church and I shared a passage entitled “You are Needed”. And I began with this quote from Pamela Wilson:

“You are required right now. There is an amazing shift in consciousness occurring, and you are needed. Consciousness is silently inviting you into your bigness”

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We went on to discuss consciousness and even attempted to define it - which we discovered is not really possible.

“ Consciousness, the traditional word for which is spirit, cannot be known in the normal sense of the word, and seeking it is futile.

Although you cannot know consciousness, you can become conscious of it as yourself. You can sense it directly in any situation, no matter where you are. You can sense it here and now as your very Presence. It is the underlying I Am, the underlying background to every experience, thought, feeling.

Consciousness is the luminous space in which the world arises and subsides. That space is the life that I Am. It is timeless and eternal. Consciousness can also be called:

God
Spirit
Eternal
Source
Formlessness
Space
Stillness
Silence
The Unmanifested

- Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now”

So, though we can never really know consciousness, we can experience our union with it.

We enter into this union every time we experience sacred silence. As Friar Richard Rohr says: “Silence has a life of its own. It is not just that which is around words and underneath images and events. It is a being in itself to which we can relate and become intimately familiar. When we connect with silence as a living, primordial presence, we can then see all other things—and experience them deeply—inside that container. Silence is not just an absence, but a primal presence.”

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Now, with only two weeks left in our session, it’s time to bring it all together!

We have talked extensively about presence, the ego, the pain-body, and the practice of Tonglen. We have practiced techniques for welcoming painful emotions, for embracing uncertainty and for viewing everything with a beginners mind. Last week we shared our collective desire to see the emergence of a new or, at least a different earth, and we reflected on Eckhart Tolle’s notion that a new earth is the physical manifestation of a new heaven, which is not a location, but is the emergence of a transformed or awakened state of human consciousness.

And through the sifting of all this rich and informative pointers you you have repeatedly heard me say (and I have heard you say). “Hmmm…it all seems to come down to Presence, doesn’t it?”

So you can only imagine how elated I was when I read Eckhart Tolle’s word’s :

“Awakening is the Realization of Presence”

“The foundation for a new earth is a new heaven - the awakened consciousness. The earth - external reality - is only its outer reflection. The arising of a new heaven and by implication a new earth are not future events that are going to make us free. Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free.

That realization is the awakening. Awakening as a future event has no meaning because awakening is the realization of Presence.

- Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

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The key to awakening, and thereby ending suffering, is to to unite with Consciousness (or God, Spirit, the Eternal, Source, Formlessness, Space, Stillness, Silence…feel free to substitute with the word you feel the most resonance with). Only then can we dis-identify from our limited sense of “I” and our destructive ego.

And the only way to experience this union is to listen to the silence, that is, to become fully present.

We intuitively feel this union when we are in nature. Nature teaches us how to find our way home, to listen to the silence and remember our union with it.

“Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.”

- Eckhart Tolle, “Stillness Speaks”

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… and so at the risk of sounding unoriginal, the focus of this week’s teachings are simple and profound.

Awakening is the Realization of Presence

Embodiment is the flowing of Presence into all that we do.

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On Grace…

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent on things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.”
-Eckhart Tolle

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Our Closing Meditation:

I have searched

I have strived

I have surrendered

I have cried.

Seeking answers to my questions

Seeking freedom from my pain

Looking everywhere

Out There

Always looking

Out There

The search is over,

I have found IT.

And wouldn’t you know?

IT was HERE all the time.

How ever did I miss it?

- Patti Wardlaw

The Portal to A New Earth is Open

The light frequencies we generate are fine filaments of elemental light. They are the “material” from which all is created. The one who carried the Christ Consciousness spark, implanted it [the Divine Feminine energy] in the consciousness of Earth 2000 years ago - and that spark is now ready to ignite fully and illuminate the entire earth. As this consciousness pervades the planet and awakens in the heart of her people, a purging of what has been in shadow occurs and this is happening and is necessary. Centering in the Heart – feeling and sensing and luxuriating in the essence of the Soul is only accessible through stillness and resting there, holding compassionate space and aware presence as that material arises, is your service to this process of Awakening Gaia. This alignment brings high frequency light to all for transmuting dark energy and upgrading consciousness so that the value system can also upgrade its frequency.

- Ariel Learoyd, 4-4-4 World Mediation, April 4, 2020
RE: Venus/Pleiades Transmission

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I have heard that Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth, has resurged in popularity since the COVID outbreak. . Though written 15 years ago, his words seem to hold the answers that many are seeking now. Could it be that the time that Eckhart predicted would come has finally come? Many feel it to be so. On April 4, 2020 millions of people around the globe gathered to meditate and to witness and amplify the emergence of what is believed to be an opening in a portal to a higher consciousness….to a new earth.

Here is what Eckhart wrote 15 years ago.

A New Heaven and a New Earth

“The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of a “new heaven and a new earth.” We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus. Earth, on the other hand, is the outer manifestation in form, which is always a reflection of the inner. Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected. “A new heaven” is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and “a new earth” is its reflection in the physical realm.

What is arising now is not a new belief system, a new religion, spiritual ideology or mythology. We are coming to the end not only of mythologies but also of ideologies and belief systems. The change goes deeper than the content of your mind, deeper than your thoughts. In fact, at the heart of the new consciousness lies the transcendence of thought, the newfound ability of rising above thought, of realizing a dimension within yourself that is infinitely more vast than thought.”

-Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

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Excerpts from “Staying Conscious in the Face of Adversity, A Special Message from Eckhart Tolle”, shared on March 21, 2020.

“Use this precious time that is here, because it is part of the awakening consciousness of humanity.

Humans don’t awaken when they are in their comfort zone, they awaken when they are taken out of their comfort zone. Not everybody does. It is an opportunity. If you do not awaken when you are no longer in your comfort zone you suffer, you are unhappy, you are anxious, you are fearful, you haven’t found the rock.

What is happening now is a wonderful opportunity to go deeper, an acceleration of the awakening. So as much as possible, especially when you feel yourself drifting off into fear, realize that you have lost the present moment, that you have lost yourself in the mind, in the thinking mind and that the emotion reflects that mind activity. So the moment you notice it you say, ok, I have lost the present moment. A few things are helpful, be aware of your breathing be aware of the inner energy field in your body, feel the aliveness in your body, be aware of your senses. Become aware of the presence that is inseparable from who you are. Be aware and appreciate that you needed the adversity, either to find this, or to deepen the realization.

“When the ego weeps for what it has lost the spirit rejoices for what it has found.”

Be here. Be present. Don’t lose yourself in the mind. Don’t lose yourself in fear. Find and be rooted in this rock that is your essence identity.

Thank-you.”

Watch entire video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKpmXhGVMxI&t=319s

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Our Wisdom Changes the World

“We can’t have an enlightened society or a sane and peaceful world if the individuals within it are stuck in small, fixed mind. Out of our individual ability to connect with big mind and big heart - in other words our basic goodness - we can manifest a culture where people care for themselves and care for each other.”

– Pema Chodron

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“The Sun of Wisdom has never stopped shining. And that clarity and warmth is available to us always.”
- Pema Chodron, “Welcoming the Unwelcome”

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I wish to share with you a short passage from a rather long essay hat some of you may have seen recently. Written by Charles Eisenstein, a teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. This essay addresses some of the many conspiracy theories circulating about COVID-19. It is complex and is not for the faint of heart. Charles doesn’t skirt around some of the tough issues and questions. He ends with a powerful invitation - one which resonates deeply with me and I wish to share it with you.

If you are interested in reading the whole essay you can do so at: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/

As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.

Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? 

What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.

The COVID-19 phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.

Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation? The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”

This terrain can be changed by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.

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On Grace…

“Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace.”

- Mark Nepo

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Here I stand, upon the earth

at this time.

I cannot fully explain what I feel,

or how I know what I know,

Yet I know, that I chose to be here

on this Earth

at this time.

And my purpose is simple

To choose Love.

To spread Love.

Always.

No matter what.

Together we unite to create a New Earth.

- Patti Wardlaw

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Embracing A Beginner's Mind

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
– Albert Einstein

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“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.”
- Zen master Shunrya Suzuki

In her teachings, Pema Chodron suggests we approach everything with the mind of a beginner or what is known in Zen Buddhism as “Shoshin”.

A beginner’s mind refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner would.

Jon Kabat Zinn says: “an open, beginner’s mind allows us to be receptive to new possibilities and prevents us from getting stuck in the rut of our own expertise. No moment is the same as any other - each one is unique and contains unique possibilities.”

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“Instead of thinking out of the box, get rid of the box.”

- Deepak Chopra

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THE PRACTICE OF “DON’T KNOW MIND”

Use this practice to bring wisdom to a situation of inner or outer conflict.  Initially begin by sitting.  Later you can practice in social situations.

Sit quietly and easily, focusing on your breath or body. When you feel settled, bring to mind a time ten years ahead. Recognize that you don’t know what will happen then. Feel the not knowing and relax with it.  Think of the earth spinning through space with hundreds of thousands of people being born and dying every day.  Where does each life come from? How did it start? There are so many things we don’t know. Feel the truth of don’t know mind, relax and become comfortable with it.Now, bring to mind a conflict, inner or outer.  Be aware of all the thoughts and opinions you have about how it should be, about how they should be.  Now recognize that you don’t really know.  Maybe the wrong thing will lead to something better. You don’t know.Consider how would it be to approach yourself, the situation, the other people with don’t know mind.  Feel it. Don’t know. Not sure.  No fixed opinion. Allow yourself to want to understand anew. Approach it with don’t know mind. With openness.  How does don’t know mind affect the situation?  Does it improve it, make it wiser, easier? More relaxed?Practice don’t know mind until you are comfortable resting in uncertainty, until you can do your best and laugh and say “Don’t know.” 

-Jack Kornfield, ” “The Wise Heart”

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On Grace…

“Grace is an act of transformation, making an ordinary moment into something extraordinary. And nowhere is that more visible than when we fall and the veils of composure drop away. But must they? Whether we’re talking about a physical stumble or some event that brings us to our knees emotionally, grace can help us meet life as it comes with ease, equanimity and courage.”

- Sarah L. Kaufman, “The Art of Grace”

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Our Closing Meditation:

Meet Me Here
- by Adyashanti

Join me here Now

where there are no points of view

slip under good and bad

right and wrong

worthy and unworthy

sinner and saint

Meet me here

where everything is unframed

before understanding

and not understanding

Meet me here

where silence roars

where stillness is dancing

where the eternal is living and dying

Meet me here

where you are not you

where you are It

and It is unspeakable

Meet me here where all points of view

merge into a single point

that then disappear

Meet me here

before there ever was something

before there ever was nothing

Meet me here

where everything speaks of this

where everything has

always spoken this

where nothing is ever lost or found

Meet me here

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Holding the Rawness of Vulnerability in our Heart

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy and creativity. It is the source of hope, accountability and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper or meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”
- Brene Brown

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To Hold the Rawness of Vulnerability is to “Not Resist What Is”

For the past four years I have been sharing the practice of Qigong and, more importantly, the teachings of unconditional presence. Like many of you, I began this journey as a method to still my own personal anxiety and to improve my wellness. Somewhere along the way, I felt a connection to a higher power and an absolute knowing that my primary purpose was to maintain an open portal to this connection - which I find easy to do when I’m practicing or teaching Qigong and which I find more difficult to do in my daily life. Knowing I am not alone in this challenge, I am continuously drawn to share teachings that nurture the shared aspects of our humanity and to draw up on the strength of one another to enhance our ability to courageously connect again and again and again.

And throughout this journey, I have had the niggling feeling that there is a sense of urgency to this “awakening business”. Like so many, I have felt that humanity is facing a critical threshold of evolution and a calling for a global awakening of the heart.

And now it seems as if this threshold has arrived! Today, we find ourselves living through an precedented time, an era that will go down in history as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amongst the many things I am noticing is the outpouring of inspiration on the internet. It seems as if permission has been granted for vulnerability to be spoken of and for the message of love over fear to (finally) be unabashedly spread. It appears that the stripping away of our world “as we know it” is also stripping away the guardedness so many of us have held around our hearts.

Below is one of such message - though I don’t know of this author, her words struck a deep chord in me…

“When we truly embrace the truth that we are all going to die, that life is a profound gift and each breath is a privilege — every moment becomes infinitely precious.”
-Azrya Cohen Bequer

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Embracing What IS

“One definition of the ego that I particularly like is “that which resists what is”. Ego struggles against reality, against the open-endedness and natural movement of life. It is very uncomfortable with vulnerability and ambiguity, with not being quite sure how to pin things down. The ego wants resolution, wants to control impermanence, wants something secure and certain to hold to. It freezes what is actually fluid, it grasps at what is in motion, it tries to escape the beautiful truth of the fully alive nature of everything.

The alternative to this struggle is to train in holding the rawness of vulnerability in our heart.

When we’re resisting or trying to escape from “what is,” there is usually some kind of physical sign - a tightening or contraction somewhere in the body. When you notice this sign of resistance, see if you can stick with the raw feeling of discomfort just for a moment, just long enough for your nervous system to start getting used to it. Through this practice we can eventually accustom our nervous system to relaxing with the truth, to relaxing with the impermanent, uncontrollable nature of things. We can slowly increase our ability to expand rather than contract, to let go rather than cling.”

-Pema Chodron, “Welcoming the Unwelcome”

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The essence of what Pema is saying is beautifully captured by Trungpa Rinpoche’s words:

“The wisdom teachings tell us not to reject anything about ourselves and embrace all aspects as the same. Gold is the same as dust. The lotus is part of the mud.”
- Trungpa Rinpoche

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I now remind you of a powerful and practical method for embracing vulnerability and awakening the heart:

THE PRACTICE OF TONGLEN “SENDING AND TAKING”

Tonglen practice is a Tibetan Buddhist method for overcoming our fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our hearts. By having the courage to face the pain of others and breathe it in, the Tonglen practice awakens the compassion that is inherent in all of us. Tonglen is difficult to do because it reverses the usual pattern of avoiding suffering and of turning away from our pain and, especially, the pain of others. Tonglen dissolves the layers of self-protection or walls we’ve built around our hearts…it dissolves the fixation and clinging of ego. It is a deep and courageous practice of being deeply present with pain, which is the only way to dissolve it.

The practice is as follows:*

When anything is painful or undesirable, breathe it in.

In other words, don’t resist it.

You surrender to yourself, you acknowledge who you are, you honour yourself.

As unwanted feelings and emotions arise, you actually breathe them in and connect with what all humans feel.

You breathe in for yourself, in the sense that pain is a personal and real experience, but simultaneously there’s no doubt that you’re developing your kinship with all beings. If you can know it in yourself, you can know it in everyone. This practice cuts through culture, economic status, intelligence, race, religion.

Then connect with what for you is a sense of delight - connect with what for you is inspiring, opening, relieving, and relaxing. Start with your feeling of connecting, your feeling of delight, your feeling of connecting with a bigger perspective, your feeling of relief and relaxation. And breathe this out.

When you breathe it it out, you give it away, you send it out to everyone else. By doing so you awaken our connection to all beings. We awaken the collective heart.

* This particular explanation comes from pages 85-86 of Pema’s book: “Comfortable with Uncertainty, 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion”

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A word from Pema about her first experience with Tonglen:

“After I did Tonglen for the first time, I was amazed to see how I had been subtly using sitting meditation to try to avoid being hurt, to try to avoid depression, discouragement, or bad feelings of any kind. Unknown to myself, I had secretly hoped that if I did the practice I wouldn’t have to feel any pain anymore. When we do tonglen, we invite the pain in. Tonglen takes courage to do, and interestingly enough, it also gives us a lot of courage, because we let it penetrate our armour. It’s a practice that allows us to feel less burdened and less cramped, a practice that shows us how to live without conditions.

Negativity and resentment occur because we’re trying to cover over the soft spot of bodhichitta (the awakened heart). In fact, its because we are tender and deeply touched that we do all this shielding. It’s because we have this genuine heart of sadness to begin with that we even start shielding. In tonglen practice we become willing to begin to expose this most tender part of ourselves.”

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“DOUBLE DOWN ON LOVE”

Inspired by one of Brene Brown’s blogs: https://brenebrown.com/blog/2019/10/09/doubling-down-on-love/ I have put together a small playlist on Spotify called Double Down On Love, I would LOVE for you to add to this playlist and see what we can create together!

Click here to hear the entire playlist and click below for individual songs!

Sleepless by Jann Arden
Crowded Table by The Highwomen
Let My Love Open the Door by Pete Townsend
Rainbow by Kacey Musgraves

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On Grace…

“What matters, in good times as well as bad, are people and community. It has taken a terrible virus to at least remind us of this eternal truth. Surely, there is grace in that.”

- Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, March 17, 2020

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Our Closing Meditation:

Prayer of the Lotus Nectar

Beloved Kuan Yin, help me realize the connection to myself and to Life that I need to be able to live my highest vibrational life, where I am well, replenished, joyful and connected to the endless flow of divine energy and life force in our Universe. Please bring me clear guidance about how to best cultivate chi now, how to be open to receive the Nectar of the Lotus, the life force and love of the Divine Mother, for my highest good, so be it. Om Mani Padme Hum. 

“Om Mani Padme Hum”
This is a powerful heart opening mantra.

It means ’the opening of the jewel in the lotus,’ or ‘may the heart awaken with divine compassion and may I know myself to be an awakened being of light’.  

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Step Into Who You Truly Are...Step Into the Truth of Our Interconnectedness

“Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also the Source of all life out of which it came.”

-Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

“Physicists have discovered that the apparent solidity of matter is an illusion created by our senses. This includes the physical body, which we perceive and think of as form, but 99.99% of which is actually empty space. This is how vast the space is between the atoms compared to their size, and there is as much space again within each atom. The physical body is no more than a misperception of who you are. In many ways, it is a microcosmic version of outer space.

To give you an idea of how vast the space is between celestial bodies, consider this: Light traveling at a constant speed of 300,000 kilometres per second takes just over one second to travel between the earth and the moon; light from the sun takes about eight minutes to reach the earth. Light from our nearest neighbour in space, a star called Proxima Centauri, which is the star that is closest to our own sun, travels for 4.5 years before it reaches the earth. This is how vast the space is that surrounds us. And then there is the intergalactic space, whose vastness defies all comprehension. Light from the galaxy closest to our own, the Andromeda Galaxy, takes 2.4 million years to reach us. Isn’t it amazing that your body is just as spacious as the universe?

So your physical body, which is form, reveals itself as essentially formless when you go deeper into it. It becomes a doorway into inner space. Although inner space has no form, it is intensely alive. That “empty space” is life in its fullness, the unmanifested Source out which all manifestation flows. The traditional word for that Source is God.”

- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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“Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

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I imagine it is easy to agree with the above passages, especially when you are hearing them within the calming influence of our circle. I also imagine that in this context it is even fairly easy for you to say that , YES, we are truly interconnected!

But I also imagine that it is much less easy for you (as it is for me) to feel this interconnectedness once you leave the sanctuary of our gatherings and you come face to face with the “reality” (aka: the uncomfortable, unacceptable, and highly undesirable aspects of humanity).

At the risk of sounding overly trite, I believe that it is more important than ever for us to choose love over fear and to turn towards our interconnectedness rather than turning away.

But how do we do this?

Enter Pema’s practical wisdom….

The way to not lose heart is to realize how everything we do matters.

- Pema Chodron, “Welcoming The Unwelcome”

“Every time we catch ourselves polarizing with our thoughts, words, or actions, and every time we do something to close that gap, we’re injecting a little bodhichitta into our usual patterns. We’re deepening our appreciation for our interconnectedness with all others. We’re empowering healing, rather than standing in its way. And because of this interconnectedness, when we change our own patterns, we help change the patterns of our culture as a whole.”

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“There is a practice I like called “Just like me.” You go to a public place and sit there and look around. Traffic jams are very good for this. You zero in on one person and say to yourself things such as “Just like me, this person doesn’t want to feel uncomfortable. Just like me, this person loses it sometimes. Just like me, this person doesn’t want to be disliked. Just like me, this person wants to have friends and intimacy.”

“Like many tiny drops filling a bucket with water, it takes a lot of people like me holding a grudge against others to create a polarized society. I really don’t want to be one of those drops.”
- Pema Chodron, “Welcoming the Unwelcome”

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In closing I would like to share a quote with you from Ramana Maharshi and I would like to share it with you using a technique that in yoga is called “Vipasyana: and in Christianity is called “Lectio Divina”. I invite you to close your eyes and listen deeply as I repeat the following sentence several times. Just allow yourself to feel the vibration of the words as they land deeply within.

“Say or think “I am”, and add nothing to it. Be aware of the stillness that follows the “I am”.
Sense your presence. It is the spacious womb of all creation, all form.” 
― Ramana Maharshi

On Grace…

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“When I can stand in mystery (not knowing and not needing to know and being dazzled by such freedom), when I don’t need to split, to hate, to dismiss, to compartmentalize what I cannot explain or understand, when I can radically accept that “I am what I am what I am,” then I am beginning to stand in divine freedom.”

 - Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr

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Our Closing Prayer

AN INVITATION TO CONNECT

Invocation:

As a member of the human race, through my own free will and for the greatest good, I call upon all beings that resonate with the quality of unconditional love and wish to assist humanity and Earth to evolve on the path of divine love. I ask for the unconditionally loving ascended masters that serve Christ consciousness to be the gateway through which permission is confirmed for these beings to enter Earth’s field and assist humanity according to divine will, grace, and love. May all beings be happy and free. So be it.

- Oracle card #19 from the Lightworker Oracle by Alana Fairchild

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Stepping Into Who You Truly Are

We begin our journey towards freedom from the ego and from the pain-body when we step into our True Selves.

Who are you?

”When asked this question, many people will quickly tell you who they are: their name, their occupation, their personal history, the shape or state of their body, and whatever else they identify with. Others may appear to be more evolved because they think of themselves as an immortal soul or divine spirit. But do they really know themselves, or have they just added some spiritual-sounding concepts to the content of their mind? Knowing yourself goes far deeper than the adoption of a set of ideas or beliefs. Spiritual ideas and beliefs may at best be helpful pointers, but in themselves they rarely have the power to dislodge the more firmly established core concepts of who you think you are, which are part of the conditioning of the human mind.

Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.

In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form.”

- Eckhart Tolle

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I am not the perishable body, but the eternal Self.

- Ramana Maharshi

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To know our True Selves is to breathe the consciousness of Presence into every moment and is the crux of all the teachings that I have shared and will continue to share. As you will discover, awakening to our True Selves is a continuous unfoldment and one in which we are well served with reminders and support.

I would now like to re-share my favourite parable with you. This powerful parable of The Two Birds was introduced to me by my beloved yoga teacher, Michelle. The metaphor of the two birds and the depth of the invitation has had a lasting impact on me. For those who received this before, I hope that, like me, it is a tale that you would benefit from hearing a thousand times over!

In “The Two Birds” Mooji brilliantly captures the essence of what it means to befriend our egos and our pain-bodies and into an awareness of our True Self.

THE TWO BIRDS
by Mooji

Some time ago, I saw a picture depicting a parable from the Bhagavad Gita. It showed two birds in a tree, and one of them was building a nest. This one is flying off collecting things, arranging the twigs—it’s active, doing many things.

Above this bird, on another branch, is a second bird. It looks identical to the first bird, but it’s not building anything. It is just observing. It’s not building a self-image out of its perceiving, and it’s not deeply interested in any aspect of what it sees. Its perceiving is happening quite spontaneously without effort or judgment. There’s a silence there, that feeling of Being without thought. Just looking.

This is a beautiful portrait of who we are.

These two birds are connected. The first bird represents our dynamic being, the self that is engaged in the world, in future and past, in growing. It is the aspect that is living life with the sense of my family, my children, my work, and so on. The second bird represents that conscious witnessing within us. It is the ability to observe life taking place and activities unfolding, but it is not actually doing anything. It is still within the same body, but it is not manipulating. It is not saying, “I hope this, and I fear that.” No, it is very still. It is simply there, and its seeing is panoramic. It sees not only the first bird, but also the wind in the trees, the sky—everything is observed with a kind of neutrality.

Initially the first bird is very identified with building the nest. It may not even be aware of the second bird. But as soon as it is able to be quiet, it becomes aware of the second bird, which is actually itself at a deeper inner level. When the first bird’s mind is synchronized with the second bird, the activities become much more gracious. There is a sense of a unity, a oneness. In that harmony, the work may still happen but without obsession, without fear, without the sense of needing to control things. It is simply happening because life compels this activity to happen. It is as though another power is helping the actions to take place.

The second bird represents the change of perspective from the mode of the person to the state of presence. When we are involved in the activities of life so deeply that it seems that the daily routine is all there is, then we are like this first bird, the nest builder, oblivious to our second bird position.

Come to the second bird position, to the one who is observing, and you will discover that the one who is busy building a life will slowly become more transparent, leaving only the functioning itself. The activities are happening anyway, beautifully, but the sense of doer-ship—which is the ego sense—will fade away. Activities are just happening; our self-image as a person is just happening, but our true Self is not a happening.

In fact, the TRUE SELF is a third position, which is not a bird, but the space within which both birds are arising and seen.

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“The more you are willing to just let the world be something you’re aware of, the more it will let you be who you are – the awareness, the Self, the Soul.”
- Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul

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As you become present and thereby total in what you do, your actions become charged with spiritual power. At first there may be no noticeable changes in what you do - only the how changes. Your primary purpose is now to enable consciousness to flow into what you do. The secondary purpose is whatever you want to achieve through the doing.”

- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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On Grace…

I want nothing of you.

This means you can trust me.

Please do what I say.

Bow your head to the river of Consciousness.

Flowing rapids will sweep you clean.

Be swallowed whole by the Mystery.

Be thrown into love.

Drink the pure light of Self revealing Truth.

Why stay in the storm of the mind when you are blessed by Grace?

- from “Whispers of Grace” a poetry collection by Shani

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Our Closing Prayer

Dear Grace,

Please walk with me today.

Please whisper divine wisdom in my ears,
Please reveal magic to my eyes,
Please touch my skin with life’s vibrant energy.

Divine Grace, I am open to unconditional love and I allow this love to:

Infuse my thoughts,
Prepare my words, and
Animate my movement.

Through my own free will, so be it.

- Patti Wardlaw

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Freedom from the Pain-Body

“The next step in human evolution is not inevitable, but for the first time in the history of our planet, it can be a conscious choice.“

-Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”“

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“The beginning of freedom from the pain-body lies first of all in the realization that you have a pain-body. Then, more important, in your ability to stay present enough, alert enough, to notice the pain-body in yourself as a heavy influx of negative emotion when it becomes active. When it is recognized, it can no longer pretend to be you and live and renew itself through you.

It is your conscious Presence that breaks the identification with the pain-body. When you don’t identify with it, it can no longer control your thinking and so cannot renew itself anymore by feeding on your thoughts. The pain-body in most cases does not dissolve immediately, but once you have severed the link between it and your thinking, the pain-body begins to lose energy.

The energy that was trapped in the pain-body then changes its vibrational frequency and is transmuted into Presence. In this way, the pain-body becomes fuel for consciousness. This is why many of the wisest, most enlightened men and women on our planet once had a heavy pain-body.”

- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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Pema and her teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinphoche says that the way to arouse bodhichitta (the awakened heart ) is to “begin with a broken heart”. This is very similar to Eckhart’s teachings of shining presence unto our pain-body.

“We touch in with bodhichitta by simply allowing ourselves to experience our own raw feelings, without getting sucked into our thoughts and stories about them.
When I’m embarrassed, when I feel like a loser, when I feel that something is fundamentally wrong with me, bodhichitta is present in those emotions. When I’ve made a big mistake, when I’ve failed to do what I set out to do, when I feel the sting of having let everyone down - at such times I have the option of tapping into the awakened heart of bodhichitta. If I really connect with my jealousy, anger or my prejudice, I find myself standing in the shoes of humanity. From this place, the longing to wake up to alleviate the suffering of the world comes naturally.”

-Pema Chodron, “Welcoming the Unwelcome”

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Techniques for freeing ourselves from the pain-body, aka “welcoming the unwelcome”:

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L.E.S.R.

Pronounced like “Laser”, L.E.S.R. stands for “locate, embrace, stop, remain” and is a practice developed by Richard Reach.
Whenever you feel yourself getting worked up or having any unpleasant, uncomfortable, or stuck feelings, follow these four steps:

1. LOCATE it. Where in the body is the grasping, contracted sensation?

2. EMBRACE that feeling, that sensation, that contraction. Send unconditional warmth to the sensation. Rather than rejecting it, move towards it with your heart.

3. STOP the storyline. Let go, interrupt, or look directly at the thoughts and stories. Go beneath or behind the thoughts to contact the underlying sense of being hooked. The goal is not to stop thinking altogether (that’s impossible) but to connect with the raw feeling of being hooked and then to interrupt the storyline over and over again.

4. REMAIN. Stay present with the feeling, keep going until it shifts. Just remain with the feeling with kindness and warmth, leaning in as much as you can.

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F.E.A.R.

This is very similar to LESR and is a technique to cultivate unconditional friendship for yourself. Whenever you are feeling embarrassed, uncomfortable, unwanted follow these four steps:

1. FIND it in your body

2. EMBRACE it

3. ALLOW thoughts about it to dissolve, abide with the feeling until it shifts

4. REMEMBER or recall all the other people in the world who are feeling what you are feeling

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TONGLEN

Tonglen practice is a Tibetan Buddhist method for overcoming our fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our hearts. By having the courage to face the pain of others and breathe it in, the Tonglen practice awakens the compassion that is inherent in all of us. Tonglen is difficult to do because it reverses the usual pattern of avoiding suffering and of turning away from our pain and, especially, the pain of others. Tonglen dissolves the layers of self-protection or walls we’ve built around our hearts…it dissolves the fixation and clinging of ego. It is a deep and courageous practice of being deeply present with pain, which is the only way to dissolve it.

The practice is a follows:

When facing pain, either our personal pain or the pain of others, we feel a connection to the millions of other people who are feeling just like us.

Contact what we are feeling and breathe it in, take it in for all of us.
As we breathe out, we send relief to all of us.

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If you are invested in security and certainty, you are on the wrong planet.”
- Pema Chodron

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On Grace…

“Even within the seemingly most unacceptable and painful situation is concealed a deeper good, and within every disaster is contained the seed of grace.”

-Eckhart Tolle

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Our Closing Prayer

Dear Grace,

Please walk with me today.

Please whisper divine wisdom in my ears,
Please reveal magic to my eyes,
Please touch my skin with life’s vibrant energy.

Divine Grace, I am open to unconditional love and I allow this love to:

Infuse my thoughts,
Prepare my words, and
Animate my movement.

Through my own free will, so be it.

- Patti Wardlaw

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Understanding and Recognizing the "Pain-Body"

“In order to disentangle, you have to first see where you are entangled”
- Trungpa Rinpoche

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“The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body. This energy field of old but still very-much-alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain-body.”
- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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As far as I am aware, the term “pain-body” is unique to the teachings of Eckhart Tolle. Emotional pain is, of course, a widely researched and analyzed concept, yet few theories describe it as a living entity or energy field, as Eckhart does. Millions of readers have had life changing experiences after learning how to become aware of how this energy field operates. I personally believe that Eckhart Tolle’s teachings on the pain-body are his most significant contribution.

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EMOTIONS

Could there be a more nuanced, or misunderstood word in our English language than the word “emotion”? Fear, Sadness, Anger, Jealousy, Happiness, Love, Joy - we all know how these emotions feel, yet very few of us have a clear sense of what emotions mean from an energetic perspective.

The Latin derivative for the word emotion, 'emotere', literally means energy in motion. In itself, emotional energy is neutral. It is the feeling sensation and physiological reaction that makes a specific emotion positive or negative.

Emotions are the body’s reaction to the voice in your head…

“The physical organism, your body, has its own intelligence, as does the organism of every other life-form. This intelligence gives rise to instinctive reactions of the organism to any threat or challenge. It produces responses in animals that appear to be akin to human emotions: anger, fear, pleasure.

The fundamental difference between an instinctive response and an emotion is this: An instinctive response is the body’s direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body’s response to a thought.

Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It responds to every thought as though it were a reality. It doesn’t know it is just a thought. To the body, a worrisome, fearful thought means “I am in danger”, and it responds accordingly. There is a buildup of energy, but since the danger is only a mental fiction, the energy has no outlet. Part of it is fed back to the mind and generates even more anxious thought. The rest of the energy turns toxic and interferes with the harmonious functions of the body.”

- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

This understanding of emotions is supported by Qigong theory. In Qigong it is widely understood that we are emotionally balanced when all of our different energies are moving and flowing together with full integration and balance. It is also understood that the primary cause or disrupting force of this energetic flow is stressful or negative thinking.

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“Emotion itself is not unhappiness.
Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.”
-Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

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THE PAIN BODY

We can now begin to understand how the energetic field that Eckhart calls the pain-body comes into existence.

"Because of the human tendency to perpetuate old emotion, almost everyone carries in his or her energy field an accumulation of old emotional pain.

The awakening of a pain body can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship, and so on. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy.”

The pain-body is not just individual in nature. It also partakes of the pain suffered by countless of humans throughout the history of humanity. This pain still lives in the collective psyche of humanity and is being added to on a daily basis.”

-Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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What Eckhart Tolle calls the Pain-Body may also be described as:

pain consciousness
suffering
blocked Qi
carrying of past pain
negative energy
a dark entity
a semi-autonomous energy-form
a dormant volcano
a heavy cloud
Shenpa*
Vasana*
Samskara*
Karma*

*Sanskrit terms (from Hinduism and Buddhism):
Vasana: past impression in the mind that influences our behavior
Samskara: the mental impressions left by all thoughts, actions and intents that an individual has ever experienced
Shenpa: a hooked feeling or a surge of emotion that often stems from past or present experiences that have a negative “feeling tone” associated with it and when not acknowledged pulls us back into our habitual patterns of anger, conflict and closing down.
Karma: the residual from past lives that we are born with

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As an energy field, the pain-body is attracted to and feeds off of energy that vibrates at a similar frequency. Hence, it thrives on negative thinking and drama - it is addicted to unhappiness. Herein lies the key to breaking free of the vicious cycle of the pain body!

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“These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.”
- Rumi

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“…feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are.”
– Pema Chödrön

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It is very important that you know that the pain-body is not YOU. Recognition of this is key to breaking the shame, blame and guilt cycle induced by cycles of pain-body flare ups. Because it is only our thoughts that keep them alive, we have the power to free ourselves from the remnants of emotional pain that lives inside us!

The pain-body cannot survive in the power of pure presence and unconditional friendship towards oneself. This realization is true forgiveness!

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“There’s no end to the number of fresh starts you get. There’s no fixed “you” doomed to stay in the same rut forever. Nothing that happens in our lives is more fixed or solid than a passing memory.”
- Pema Chodron, “Welcoming the Unwelcome”

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“We are a species who has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen.

The duck’s lesson is this: FLAP YOUR WINGS - which translates as “let go of your story” - and return to the only place of power: the present moment.”

- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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On Grace…

“Grace can be seen as intervention of the universal intelligence, Being, that creates freedom from the trap of the ego’s complete unconsciousness. It is the gift of a glimpse of the Truth that is unexplainable, unearned, and cannot be attained by doing something.”

- Brendon Lumgair, “A New Earth in a Nutshell”

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Our Closing Meditation:

Prayer of the Lotus Nectar

Beloved Kuan Yin, help me realize the connection to myself and to Life that I need to be able to live my highest vibrational life, where I am well, replenished, joyful and connected to the endless flow of divine energy and life force in our Universe. Please bring me clear guidance about how to best cultivate chi now, how to be open to receive the Nectar of the Lotus, the life force and love of the Divine Mother, for my highest good, so be it. Om Mani Padme Hum. 

“Om Mani Padme Hum”
This is a powerful heart opening mantra.

It means ’the opening of the jewel in the lotus,’ or ‘may the heart awaken with divine compassion and may I know myself to be an awakened being of light’.  

Freeing Yourself from the Story of You - Embracing the Ego

“It's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and—without even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.”
- Pema Chodron

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The Ego

The word ego originates in 19th century Latin. Directly translated, “ego” means “I” in Latin. In psychology and Western theories, the ego forms our self-concept and is an essential part of our human cognitive function.

In spiritual teachings the ego is the aspect of the human mind that is identified with the external image we have of ourselves and believes that image is who (and all) we are.

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“The ego is an optical illusion of consciousness.”
- Albert Einsten

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“The ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of "I, a sense of self.”
- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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“The ego is the feeling of separateness, the sense of duality, or the idea of being distinct and different from others. It is the false perception of oneself as a separate being or a limited being. Since it exists in all of us as individual consciousness, it is a universal feeling.”
- The Bhagavad Gita

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“The ego is a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment.”
- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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“Ego could be defined as whatever covers up basic goodness. From an experiential point of view, what is ego covering up? It's covering up our experience of just being here, just fully being where we are, so that we can relate with the immediacy of our experience.”
-Pema Chodron

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“Ego says, "Once everything falls into place, I'll feel peace". Spirit says, "Find your peace, and then everything will fall into place".
-Marianne Williamson

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“Lifetime after lifetime, I’ve been born and been given a name, and lifetime after lifetime I’ve identified completely with that persona. It dawned on me what a waste that has been. What a waste to keep getting tricked in the same way.”
-Pema Chodron “Welcoming the Unwelcome”

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OTHER WORDS FOR “EGO”…

False Identity
Identification with Form
The Voice in your Head
Illusory Self
Phantom Self
Forgetfulness of Being
The Unobserved Mind
The Conditioned Mind
Unchallenged Agreements

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HOW TO RECOGNIZE THE EGO

Notice when you experience a tightness or contracted feeling when you say: I”, “me”, “my”, “mine”, “I want”, “I need”.

Become aware of the voice in your head - notice when you are completely identified with the voice in your head, when you believe all the thoughts and content.

Notice tendencies or desires to make yourself right and others wrong.

Notice when you take things personally.

Notice when you make assumptions and stories about someone else or a situation.

Notice when you complain, find fault, feel resentful or are very reactive to a situation.

Notice your attachment to things, objects and possessions - all the things you label as “mine”. Do certain things induce a feeling of importance? Do you feel angry or resentful or less than if someone has more than you or you lose something. Notice when you want “more” but getting more does not satisfy you.

Notice if you believe that something that happened in the past is the reason you can’t be at peace today.

Notice if you believe that you something is happening now that should not be happening, and it is preventing me from being at peace.

Notice if you find yourself saying or believing that once (fill in the blank) happens, you will be at peace.

Become aware of your relationship with the body. Do you feel that what you call “my body” is who you are? Is your sense of self worth dependant on how your physical body looks and functions?

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BEFRIENDING THE PRESENT MOMENT - RELAXING THE EGO

“Our journey toward living without ego is to learn how to let go, relax, take a chance, wait and see, and never sum ourselves up.”
- Pema Chodron

Though the Buddhists talk about achieving an ego-less state and Eckhart Tolle speaks of dissolving the ego, it is very important to not mis-interpret their message.

The ego is not the enemy.

Viewing the ego as an enemy and the unconscious actions that follow as a weakness or fault only serves to strengthen the ego, that is to say the sense of separation. Eckhart says, “the ego needs resistance to survive”, so fighting the ego or trying to get rid of it actually strengthens it, often by creating a new false identity of being an “enlightened being”, for example. This is a spiritual trap that many people fall into and one that we are wise to be aware of.

“The idea that we need to get rid of ego is a mis-understanding, one that many people - even experienced Buddhist practitioners - share. The notion that we need to get rid of something within ourselves is a setup for intensifying our inner struggle. It can only inflame our tendency to be unfriendly to ourselves.
- Pema Chodron

Presence relaxes the ego.

We are not aiming to terminate the ego, rather we are aiming to relax the ego. Free from the grips of an identified mind, we are able to maintain our sense of being, our sense of inhabiting a body - we are able to perform functions and roles without losing ourselves in them.

“Instead of getting rid of ego, the idea is to become very conscious of ego and how it works. Ego manifests in all the countless ways we resist what is. It shows its face in all our solid views, opinions, and fixed ideas. It is present in the ways we identify ourselves such as ‘weak’, ‘strong’, ‘broken’, ‘wise’, ‘competent’, ‘unworthy’, and so on.” The heart of the practice is to notice all of this and rest in the middle of it all, not trying to fix or alter anything. This is the path of non-rejection.”
- Pema Chodron, “Welcoming the Unwelcome”

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“It all starts with the present moment, and your relationship with the present moment. Friend or enemy? The present moment is inseparable from life, so you are really deciding what kind of relationship you want to have with life. Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend, it is up to you to make the first move: Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative. One decision changes your entire reality. But that one decision you have to make again and again and again - until it comes natural to live in such a way.”
- Eckhart Tolle

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“I don’t want to waste another lifetime taking this current, very fleeting, very fragile persona so seriously.”
- Pema Chodron

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On Grace…

“You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform someone else. All you can do is create space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.”

- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

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Our Closing Prayer

“Be totally empty,
embrace the tranquility of peace.
Watch the workings of all creation,
observe how endings become beginnings.”

All creatures in the universe
return to the point where they began.
Returning to the source is tranquility
meaning submitting to what is and what is to be.””

— "The Tao Te Ching", by Lao Tse

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“Om Mani Padme Hum”
This is a powerful heart opening mantra.

It means ’the opening of the jewel in the lotus,’ or ‘may the heart awaken with divine compassion and may I know myself to be an awakened being of light’.  

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You are Needed

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“You are required right now. There is an amazing shift in consciousness occurring, and you are needed. Consciousness is silently inviting you into your bigness”

- Pamela Wilson

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Pamela’s words resonate deeply with and yet it is not easy to explain what she means. Perhaps this is also your experience? You may be asking, “what exactly is consciousness?”

According to Eckhart Tolle, this question cannot be answered and “the moment you answer it, you have falsified it, made it into another object.”

“ Consciousness, the traditional word for which is spirit, cannot be known in the normal sense of the word, and seeking it is futile.

Although you cannot know consciousness, you can become conscious of it as yourself. You can sense it directly in any situation, no matter where you are. You can sense it here and now as your very Presence. It is the underlying I Am, the underlying background to every experience, thought, feeling.

- Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now”

Feeling a union with consciousness as a felt sensation is the ultimate goal of our time together, and is, as Eckhart suggests, the primary purpose of our lives. Yet, how does one attain this illusive state if not guided by words?

Fortunately, while fully disclosing the limitations, Eckhart does offer more words on this subject:

“Consciousness is the luminous space in which the world arises and subsides. That space is the life that I Am. It is timeless and eternal. Consciousness can also be called:

God
Spirit
Eternal
Source
Formlessness
Space
Stillness
Silence
The Unmanifested “

So, though we can never really know consciousness, we can experience our union with it.

We enter into this union every time we experience sacred silence. As Friar Richard Rohr says: “Silence has a life of its own. It is not just that which is around words and underneath images and events. It is a being in itself to which we can relate and become intimately familiar. When we connect with silence as a living, primordial presence, we can then see all other things—and experience them deeply—inside that container. Silence is not just an absence, but a primal presence.”

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Fr. Lucien Kemble

I had a great uncle who, I believe, experienced this primal presence, this union with consciousness.

My Great Uncle, Father Lucien Kemble (1922-1999) was a dedicated Franciscan Friar. Though I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with my “Uncle Bert” he left a lasting impression on me. He had a warm heart and practical and grounded wisdom.

In addition to teaching, preaching and helping people, he loved to gaze at the stars and was an active and well respected member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada - he even discovered a cluster of stars which became known as Kemble’s Cascade!

“Asked if the sheer immensity of the universe made him feel insignificant, Fr. Lucian replied: “Au contraire. I am as big as that which I contemplate.”

- Brian Brennan, Calgary Herald, March 5, 1999

“Kemble’s Cascade”

What I believe my Uncle meant by this statement, is the same thing Pamela means when she says that ‘consciousness is silently inviting you into your bigness’. They are both pointing to the Truth that, though apparently contained in a limited form we call our bodies, our true essence is as vast as the Universe that we perceive.

The key to awakening, and thereby ending suffering, is to to unite with Consciousness (or God, Spirit, the Eternal, Source, Formlessness, Space, Stillness, Silence…feel free to substitute with the word you feel the most resonance with). Only then can we dis-identify from our limited sense of “I” and our destructive ego.

And the only way to experience this union is to listen to the silence, that is, to become fully present (over the next few weeks we will discuss methods for becoming present and aware of the ego).

We intuitively feel this union when we are in nature. Nature teaches us how to find our way home, to listen to the silence and remember our union with it.

“Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.”

- Eckhart Tolle, “Stillness Speaks”

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“When you are alert and contemplate a flower, crystal, or a bird without naming it mentally, it becomes a window into the formless. There is an inner opening, however slight, into the realm of spirit. This is why these three “en-lightened” forms have played such an important part in the evolution of human consciousness since ancient times; why, for example, the jewel in the lotus flower is a central symbol of Buddhism and a white bird, the dove, signifies the Holy Spirit in Christianity. They have been preparing the ground for a more profound shift in the planetary consciousness that is destined to take place in the human species. This is the spiritual awakening that we are beginning to witness now.

Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection?”

-Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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“Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness?” Eckhart Tolle asked this question back in 2005 and I, along with the millions of others who were moved by his teachings, answered with a resounding “YES, we are ready”!

Fifteen years later, so many of us on the planet are this “YES” with much more intensity than ever before!

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“Awakening and staying awake is the shared purpose of every human being. This evolutionary step is our inner purpose and is the most important thing that can happen to and through a human being. Then what we do in the world, our outer purpose, is revealed to us and lived out through us. Harmonious actions, relationships, communities, and business practices set the foundation for balanced, sustainable, and abundant economic & government systems. The awakened state of consciousness is the New Heaven. Being and doing in that state are the foundation of the New Earth.”

- From “A New Earth in a Nutshell”, a commentary written by Brendon Lumgair (and shared with his permission)

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What Eckhart calls the “New Heaven” can be likened to what the Mahayana Buddhists call bodhichitta. In Sanskrit, bodhi means “awake” and chitta means “heart” or “mind”, so bodhichitta means the awakened heart. The Buddhists believe that a commitment to bodhichitta is the only way to affect change here on earth.

“We are at at time when old systems and ideas are being questioned and falling apart, and there is great opportunity for something fresh to emerge. I have no idea what that will look like and no preconceptions about how things should turn out, but I do have a strong sense that the time we live in is a fertile ground for training in being open-minded and open-hearted. If we can learn to hold this falling apart-ness without polarizing and without becoming fundamentalists, then whatever we do today will have a positive effect on the future.”

- Pema Chodron “Welcoming the Unwelcome”

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A paradox of our times seems to be that we, as a society, are both ripe for awakening and simultaneously presented with a plethora of obstacles preventing this very awakening. On one hand, we have unprecedented access to teachings, we are free to practice without fear of persecution, and there is a growing awareness of and a desire for a shift in consciousness. On the other hand, many of these same forces that are enabling a spreading of consciousness (internet, social media, email)are also distracting and preventing us from achieving the only thing that really matters, the only thing that can actually awaken us - our connection with stillness!

In her audio book “Walking the Walk”, Pema Chodron says, “our society is habitually used to being unconscious rather than being conscious and that there seems to more and more cultural support for unconsciousness, that is to say more and more cultural support to become distracted and disengaged from the present moment.”

In “A New Earth”, Eckhart Tolle refers to the power of television to pull us out of presence and to feed our unconscious pain bodies. At the time of his writing, social media, a force much more powerful than television was not even in existence!

We need a return to presence and a return to grace! And as Pema says:

“Our only shot at accomplishing this is by first attaining enlightenment ourselves. Along the way, we can take one step at a time, doing our best to keep our longing and commitment going during the ups and downs of our lives.”

We begin with ourselves…we listen….and we remember!

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On Grace…

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent on things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.”
-Eckhart Tolle

“Grace can lie in a smooth, well coordinate motion, or in a humble and tolerant attitude. More often than not, the two go hand in hand. The people who move well will tend to be folks you want to be around. Their ease comes from being comfortable in their own skin, and that’s what we’re drawn to - not to technique or practiced perfection, but to what smooth physicality conveys about a person’s nature. Grace has nothing to do with looks or sophistication, and everything to do with compassion and courage.”

- Sarah L. Kaufman, “The Art of Grace”

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Our Closing Meditation:

Prayer of the Lotus Nectar

Beloved Kuan Yin, help me realize the connection to myself and to Life that I need to be able to live my highest vibrational life, where I am well, replenished, joyful and connected to the endless flow of divine energy and life force in our Universe. Please bring me clear guidance about how to best cultivate chi now, how to be open to receive the Nectar of the Lotus, the life force and love of the Divine Mother, for my highest good, so be it. Om Mani Padme Hum. 

“Om Mani Padme Hum”
This is a powerful heart opening mantra.

It means ’the opening of the jewel in the lotus,’ or ‘may the heart awaken with divine compassion and may I know myself to be an awakened being of light’.  

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Whispers from Grace

“Welcome, Welcome”

My beloved mentor, Pamela Wilson begins each Satsang (sacred gathering) by saying the word “welcome” two times…followed by a little bow of her head.

I invite you to pause for a moment and really listen as I say “welcome, welcome”. I invite you to open your heart to receive and feel the intention - more than a greeting, this is an invitation to open the heart and to receive.

Welcome to this circle.

Welcome to this space.

Welcome to this time.

May our time together be sacred and purposeful.

May we create an authentic and safe environment for each of us to rest in the heart and listen to the stillness.

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“Listen. Can you hear the voice of wisdom whispering in the silence?”

- Shani

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The following passage captures perfectly what it means to listen to the stillness (or silence) and captures perfectly the intention for our time together:

Sacred Silence
- By Richard Rohr, The Centre for Contemplation and Action

Most of us who live in a capitalist culture, where everything is about competing and comparing, will find contemplation extremely counterintuitive. How do we grasp something as empty, as harmless, as seemingly fruitless as the practice of silence?

Silence needs to be understood in a larger way than simply a lack of audible noise. Whenever emptiness—what seems like empty space or absence of sound—becomes its own kind of fullness with its own kind of sweet voice, we have just experienced sacred silence.

When religious folks limit their focus in prayer to external technique and formula, the soul remains largely untouched and unchanged. Too much emphasis on what I call “social prayer” or wordy prayer feeds our egos and gives us far too much to argue about. How can we truly pray when we are preoccupied with formula and perfection of technique?

If we can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then when we speak, our words will be calmer and well-chosen. Our thoughts will be non-judgmental. Our actions will have greater integrity and impact.

When we recognize something as beautiful, that knowledge partly emerges from the silence around it. It may be why we are quiet in art galleries and symphony halls.

As one author I read years ago said, silence is the net below the tightrope walker. We are walking, trying to find the right words to explain our experience and the right actions to match our values. Silence is that safety net that allows us to fall; it admits, as poets often do, that no words or deeds will ever be perfectly right or sufficient. A regular practice of contemplation helps us trust that silence will uphold us, receive our mistakes, and give us the courage to learn and grow.

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As Richard Rohr so beautifully expresses, at the heart of all spiritual traditions is the recognition that we are One with all of life - that there is no separation. 

My goal for this session is for you to know this Truth as a felt sensation in the body rather than as an illusive mental concept.

Over the course of our twelve weeks together, the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and Pema Chodron will be reinforced by the ancient practice of Qigong. “Qi” means life force energy and “Gong” means the flow of or practice of; so Qigong means the practice of flowing life force energy. Though this simple definition is accurate, it fails to fully capture the essence and mystery of Qigong. Qigong is much more than following a series of prescribed movements, it is a practice of DEEP PRESENCE…and this is why I chose to dive deep into the practice of presence for this session.

We will spend the first several weeks focused on Eckhart Tolle’s teachings (mostly from his book “A New Earth”, but also touching on his first book, “The Power of Now”). We will then naturally transition to a discussion of Pema Chodron’s book, “Welcoming the Unwelcome, Wholehearted Living for a Brokenhearted World”. Pema’s wisdom will beautifully support and reinforce Eckhart Tolle’s teachings of presence and grace by providing timely, relevant and practical “how to’s”.

Together let us embrace the art of listening to the silence…
and hearing the wisdom that transcends all words!

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“When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thoughts. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say identified with. That disentanglement is what this book is all about.”
- Eckhart Tolle, “A New Earth”

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During our twelve weeks together, we will be exploring the heart of Eckhart Tolle’s teachings. Like many others in the western world, “The Power of Now” (1997) and “A New Earth” (2005), were my first foray into what is often referred to as new age spirituality (even though Eckhart himself refrains from calling it this…as do I). Eckhart Tolle’s teachings went mainstream in 2008 when Oprah Winfrey discovered “A New Earth” and asked Eckhart to join her in offering a free online course. This course was one of the first of its kind and over half a million people from all around the world signed up (I was one of them).

Eckhart Tolle has often been credited for bringing present moment awareness into mainstream thinking. As we will discover presence is and always has been at the heart of all spiritual teachings, including the practice of Qigong.

“Opening yourself to the emerging consciousness and bringing its light into this world is the primary purpose of your life.”

-A New Earth

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Pema Chodron, an American born Buddhist nun, is a gifted communicator and teacher. She is a resident teacher at Gambo Abbey Monastery in Nova Scotia and the author of many best selling books including: “The Wisdom of No Escape”, “Start Where You Are”, “When Things Fall Apart”, “The Places that Scare You”, “No Time to Lose”, “Practicing Peace in Times of War”, Smile at Fear”.

“Whether distraction and aggression proliferate globally or peacefulness and harmony grow stronger depends on how we as citizens feel about ourselves.”

- Welcoming the Unwelcome, Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World.

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Bringing it all together:

In recent sessions, we discovered the power of The Five Agreements (by don Miguel Ruiz) and of the Ho’oponopono Forgiveness Ritual

The Five Agreements:

In his teachings, don Miguel Ruiz helps us to break our self-limiting agreements and replace them with agreements that bring us personal freedom, happiness and love:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally
3. Don’t Make Assumptions
4. Always Do Your Best
5. Be Skeptical, But Learn to Listen

The Ho’oponopono Forgiveness Ritual

This ancient Hawaiin forgiveness ritual proceeds from an understanding of the unity of everything in the world, which is true even though we feel ourselves to be separate. Because everything influences everything else, we contribute to harmony if we discover our share in disharmony and enter instead into the healing process of directing the following four sentences to a person or situation (can be spoken or said silently):

I am sorry
Please forgive me
I love you
Thank you

As we learned (and will continue learning), the Five Agreements and the Ho’oponopono Forgiveness Ritual offer profound wisdom and practical tools. At the heart of both of these teachings, and, in fact, all spiritual traditions, is the recognition that we are all connected to the One-Life energy that creates and sustains us, and that separation or “me-ness” is an illusion created by the mind.

As you can see all of the teachings weave together into one beautiful and continuous tapestry! Through our time together, you will be reminded of the practical wisdom of the Five Agreements and the Ho’oponopono Forgiveness Ritual and you will discover how Qigong is the perfect practice of integrating this timeless wisdom into the body to enhance your health and wellbeing!

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On Grace…

“Grace is the constant love that animates, permeates and balances everything and everyone. When we bring awareness and gratitude to Grace, it awakens balances, and resolves even the unresolvable.”

- Pamela Wilson

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“We need a return to grace. We are all fighting hard battles, and we need all the help we can get. Yet we’ve lost sight of grace, which for so long was an essential, treasured quality, and which ought to be at the heart of how we interact, how we inhabit our bodies and the world around us. Life in the twenty-first century is often rushed, clumsy, and frustrating. We’re distracted and we let the door slam on the person behind us, we trip over curbs as we’re texting, we’re running late, we fail to notice. Our bent postures show us the unfeeling habits we’ve fallen into. We’ve given into gravity. We’ve forgotten how to move through life with grace.”*
- Excerpt from “The Art of Grace” by Sarah L. Kaufmann

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* We are here to remember - welcome to our journey! 💗

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Our Closing Mediation:

Prayer of the Lotus Nector
Beloved Kuan Yin, help me realize the connection to myself and to Life that I need to be able to live my highest vibrational life, where I am well, replenished, joyful and connected to the endless flow of divine energy and life force in our Universe. Please bring me clear guidance about how to best cultivate chi now, how to be open to receive the Nectar of the Lotus, the life force and love of the Divine Mother, for my highest good, so be it. Om Mani Padme Hum. 

“Om Mani Padme Hum”
This is a powerful heart opening mantra.

It means ’the opening of the jewel in the lotus,’ or ‘may the heart awaken with divine compassion and may I know myself to be an awakened being of light’.  

EASTERN GODDESS OF COMPASSION KUAN YIN

Kuan Yin takes multiple forms, to meet the needs of all beings. She is gentle but like any feminine being she will assume a more ferocious form if necessary in order to protect what she loves. She takes masculine forms when that will best serve her higher loving purpose, bringing through much needed sacred masculine energies of tenderness, strength, courage and protection, as well as the divine feminine energies that nourish our souls.

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