Reveal Love...don't chase It

There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality.”

- Ramana Maharshi

Not accepting this paradox is the cause of much of our suffering, as we are forever chasing horizons, forever searching for some secret of life other than where we are.

---

“There is the search that chases life and the search that reveals life.”

Still the impulse to search is natural and human. We are born with a thirst for love and truth and meaning. But the deeper forms of search have no destination. At these deeper levels, we search more like fish who keep swimming because if they don’t keep water moving through their gills, they will die. Astonishingly, It doesn’t matter where they go, just that they go. For creatures living in the deep, this endless search is a way of being.

As spirits in bodies living on Earth, we swim through the rivers of time and experience, and the heart is our gill.

- Mark Nepo

---

The search that reveals life is different than the search for gold, or an image of love, or an image of God. The storyteller Margo McLoughlin says, “I know my practice is slipping when I don’t feel wonder or awe.” This is a good way to discern if we’ve drifted from the search that reveals life-where-we-are to the search which assumes that what matters is always somewhere else. When these deep teachers remain absent too long, we must renew the deeper practice of searching without searching, of seeking with no destination. We must relax and open the gill of the heart.

---

When we are involved in the the pursuit of happiness, we assume that joy in an emotion. We imagine that joy is a state other than what we are currently experiencing - a state in which we feel exceedingly happy all the time.

Joy may be expressed physically, mentally, and emotionally, but it is not an emotion. Joy is a relationship we have with our emotional body in which we allow ourselves to feel all emotional states moving through our field of experience. It is a conscious communion with the vibrational. Joy takes us into The Kingdom of Life, where all is constantly created anew.

Michael Brown, “Inner Alchemy”

---

In the stillness of the morning I hear the whispers

calling me to expand

to release this illusion that I call “My life”.

And in those lucid moments of awakening

when my mind is not active enough to filter this voice

I feel the fullness and the vibration of

Love.

Joy.

Truth.

I Am Life.

I Am One.

I Am Divine.

There is no separation.

- Patti Wardlaw

Hold Nothing Back

---

We are now ready to explore the third and final friendship - our friendship with each other. Mark Nepo says, that there are three intertwined and inseparable friends that we need to stay connected to if we want to live an awakened life - three friendships that we must listen our way into a: our friendship with everything larger than us (the work of being), our friendship with our experiences (the work of being human) and our friendship with each other (the work of love).

---

“In order to live in this world, you have to be truly and completely in love.”
- Rumi

There is a love which itself has the power to free the human heart. Many remarkable people live in testament to this love, even though they are held in jail cells and prisons, or suffer the harsh conditions imposed by poverty, racism, adversity, war, and occupation. The truth of this love is that, if we can be uprooted from our daily preoccupations and taken by direct experience into its presence, then a profound transformation is possible. Whoever arrives at this place looks at the world differently. The distinctions on the surface no longer exist. Here it is possible to suspend our certainties and touch something greater: the Spirit within us.

- Richard Rohr

---

How I LOVE people. I love how we root and bloom, how we twine around each other and reach for the light, how as far as we grow in the dark of the Earth is as far as we stand in the world. How being human, we are always charged with the vibrancy of a larger presence. How the complexity of our humanity mirrors this larger presence.

In truth, we mirror everything living as we climb and stumble our way up the mountain to the cliff of yes.

I recognize each person I come across because I am each on any given day. What matters is whether I shun those who bear my flaws or help them up; whether I turn away when this larger presence seems too strong or keep my birth-eyes open; whether I find a way to meet what is incomprehensible and somehow draw strength from it.

What matters is if we can make it to the cliff of yes and shout our secrets to the sky till Heaven is the song we choose to sing on Earth.

This raises a central question: What is the proper use of our will? How useful is it to insist that we can will things to happen, if we are seeds growing into roots and shoots breaking ground? What if will is how we give our all to that growth? What if will is the sacred gritty act of holding nothing back?

Perhaps this is the work of love: to hold nothing back. Brother David Steindl-Rast reminds us that I believe means I give my heart to this. Perhaps, despite our lists of dos and don’ts, belief is less about the assumptions or conclusions we enshrine as principles and more about our devotion to engage and listen to life.

Of course we don’t stay rooted in one place. And so, a paradox and challenge for every spirit born to Earth is how to inhabit a thoroughness of being wherever life takes us. This leads to a life of compassion, of being with other living things in a way that lets them grow. This too is the work of love.

Long ago, a disciple of Confuscius, Zi Gon, asked, “Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?” The master replied, “How about shu (reciprocity)? Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.”

This is another form of holding nothing back and giving your heart to another. This is one of the earliest voicings of the golden rule.

All of us are roots and shoots in the human garden. As far as we root in the earth is as far as we sprout in the world. Each of us destined to find our particular path to the light, so much depending on whether we choke each other or not along the way.

- Mark Nepo

---

Discernment

“A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction
is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please,
or worse, to avoid trouble…”
– Mahatma Gandhi

---

Discernment is one of those words that has its own innate intelligence and power. At its root, it means to separate and distinguish….but this definition barely scratches the surface of what it means to discern.

It was Pamela Wilson who first taught me the real meaning of discernment and she did so, not by defining it or speaking about it, but by gifting me with a visceral feeling of it. It is a feeling and a knowing that comes from the depths of the stomach and carries the strength of forty elephants.

---

Let’s hear what a few of the “experts” have to say on discernment:

Discern means to detect with the senses.

Discern can be easily learnt by associating it with word concern, as the second half of both the words .i.e. cern is the same, hence giving both the words same sound to some extent. Further, if you have a concern to discern someone’s motives for someone else’s good then you have learnt the word with quite an ease.

- wordpandit.com

---

Discernment is not the same as decision making. Reaching a decision can be straightforward: we consider our goals and options; maybe we list the pros and cons of each possible choice; and then we choose the action that meets our goal most effectively. Discernment, on the other hand, is about listening and responding to that place within us where our deepest desires align with God’s desire. As discerning people, we sift through our impulses, motives, and options to discover which ones lead us closer to divine love and compassion for ourselves and other people and which ones lead us further away.

- Richard Rohr

---

Judgement says “this is good, that is bad”, “I am right, they are wrong”, “I am awakened, they are not”, and so on, ad infinitum. It separates and divides, and it is the origin of all conflict and violence.

Discernment simply knows what hurts and what doesn’t, and moves intelligently and spontaneously to resolve things without resorting to violence or name-calling, and without the need to be told what is right and what is wrong.

Where does discernment end and judgement begin? That is the fascinating exploration for all of us.

- Jeff Foster

---

Discerning Right Action

Everyone has a dark acre between their days and the Source, not dark as in evil or forbidding, but dark in the way that the canopy of a forest filters out light. Crossing this acre is knowing who you are.

Another way to speak of this crossing is what the Hindus call parting the veil of illusion. In hinduism, Maya is the goddess of illusion. The word maya means illusion. It is believed that anything added to reality, to the truth of things as they are, is illusion. This veiling power of illusion creates the ignorance of the individual self that thinks it is separate from the rest of life.

We can look at the world through the veils of illusion, with all its possessiveness and isolation, as the prevailing story of conflict across time. And we can look at the interrelated unity of all life that waits beneath our illusions as the perennial, transforming story of spirit and love.

If we think of illusion as a persistent fog, what do we do when we encounter fog?

The first thing is to stand still till we can get our bearings. We try then to discern if the fog is temporary or something we have to live with. If permanent, do we live with it or live somewhere else?

The pilgrimage of living with things as they are, changing what is, or starting over is at the heart of humility and a Beginner’s Mind. When the fog of illusion is localized, the practice of serenity outwaits the clouds , while the practice of love and compassion burns off the fog. But when the fog is a cloud in our eye, or mind, or heart, then we must remake how we see, how we think, and how we feel. We must be born anew through a process of self-transformation. This has never been something that can be taught. We can only believe in an unclouded life and keep each other company along the foggy way.

- Mark Nepo

---

Parting the Veils

So many clouds

between me and you.

So much smoke

between me and the answer

of what I’m to do.

Decisions to make.

Opinions to sort.

Actions to take.

Wanting clarity, wanting ease.

Yet, the harder I try

the heavier the fog.

And then I laugh, once again

at my attempts to “right” my way to the other side

at my unwillingness to simply stand in the fog

and let it permeate all my senses

without judgement, without an agenda.

I finally surrender

and see the illusion for what it is

and from a very different Source than before

I am able, in this moment,

to discern right action.

- Patti Wardlaw

The Smoky Mirror

Three thousand years ago, there was a human just like you and me who lived near a city surrounded by mountains. The human was studying to become a medicine man, to learn the knowledge of his ancestors, but he didn’t completely agree with everything he was learning. In his heart, he felt there must be something more.

One day, as he slept in a cave, he dreamed that he saw his own body sleeping. He came out of the cave on the night of a new moon. The sky was clear, and he could see millions of stars. Then something happened inside of him that transformed his life forever. He looked at his hands, he felt his body, and he heard his own voice say, “I am made of light; I am made of stars.”

He looked at the stars again, and he realized that it’s not the stars that create light, but rather light that creates the stars. “Everything is made of light,” he said, “and the space in-between isn’t empty.” And he knew that everything that exists is one living being, and that light is the messenger of life, because it is alive and contains all information.

Then he realized that although he was made of stars, he was not those stars. “I am in-between the stars,” he thought. So he called the stars the tonal and the light between the stars the nagual, and he knew that what created the harmony and space between the two is Life or Intent. Without life, the tonal and the nagual could not exist. Life is the force of the absolute, the supreme, the Creator who creates everything.

This is what he discovered: Everything in existence is a manifestation of the one living being we call God. Everything is God. And he came to the conclusion that human perception is merely light perceiving light. He also saw that matter is a mirror – everything is a mirror that reflects light and creates images of that light – and the world of illusion, the Dream, is just like smoke which doesn’t allow us to see what we really are. “The real us is pure love, pure light, “ he said.

This realization changed his life. Once he knew what he really was, he looked around at other humans and the rest of nature, and he was amazed at what he saw. He saw himself in everything – in every human, in every animal, in every tree, in the water, in the rain, in the clouds, in the earth. And he saw that Life mixed the tonal and the nagual in different ways to create billions of manifestations of Life.

In those few moments he comprehended everything. He was very excited, and his heart was filled with peace. He could hardly wait to tell his people what he had discovered. But there were no words to explain it. He tried to tell the others, but they could not understand. They could see that he had changed, that something beautiful was radiating from his eyes and his voice. They noticed that he no longer had judgement about anything or anyone. He was no longer like anyone else.

He could understand everyone very well, but no one could understand him. They believed that he was an incarnation of God, and he smiled when he heard this and he said, “It is true. I am God. But you are also God. We are the same, you and I. We are images of light. We are God.” But still the people didn’t understand him.

He had discovered that he was a mirror for the rest of the people, a mirror in which he could see himself. “Everyone is a mirror, “ he said. He saw himself in everyone, but nobody saw him as themself.

And he realized that everyone was dreaming, but without awareness, without knowing what they really are. They couldn’t see him as themselves because there was a wall of fog or smoke between the mirrors. And that wall of fog was made by the interpretation of images of light – the Dream of humans.

Then he knew that he would soon forget all that he had learned. He wanted to remember all the visions that he had had, so he decided to call himself the Smoky Mirror so that he would always know that matter is a mirror and the smoke in-between is what keeps us from knowing what we are. He said, “I am the Smokey Mirror, because I am looking at myself in all of you, but we don’t recognize each other because of the smoke in-between us. That smoke is the Dream, the mirror is you, the dreamer.”

- Don Miguel Ruiz, “The Four Agreements”

---

Walking With our Weariness

---

The role of spiritual practice is basically to exhaust the seeker. If the practice does what it’s supposed to do, it exhausts our energy for seeking, and then reality has a chance to present itself.
- Adyashanti

---

Being human, we are constantly broken apart by experience. to reconcile our humanness means we are ever learning how to accept our suffering and restore our Wholeness. We are often distracted into thinking we can solidify ourselves against being broken or that we can sidestep suffering. Both are impossible. We are fated by this incarnation to come apart and to be put back together. It is the opening and closing along the way that holds the secrets, and there is no other way to that wisdom than to be fully human and to accept where that leads.
- Mark Nepo

Experience for humans can be what erosion is for the elements. Try as we do to fight it, we are worn to our beauty, a season at a time. - Mark Nepo

Sooner or later we are shown that life is one ongoing conversation. And none of what matters reveals itself unless we stop to listen. When you feel you can’t listen any more, listen some more. When you feel you can’t take any more, let more in. When you feel you can’t give any more, let one more thing go. All of this is the work of being human, from which none of us are exempt.

This is a good time to ask:
What do you do when you’re weary?
What do you do when beauty is close and you feel numb?
How firm is your trust in life these days? If wavering, how can you restore that trust?
Are your connecting points to life dislodged?
Are you being moved along or are you being opened up?
Are you letting fresh experience enter and combine, or are you obsessed with sorting and analyzing what comes your way?
Are you able to listen and receive, or are you observing and manipulating? We all do both.

- Mark Nepo

---

How then do we reach for the light and stand in the light? In the face of life’s vast, impenetrable power, how do we not vanish? How do we not let existence crush us? How do we live in the open together? How do we - today, now, in every breath - try, by being real, to find our membership in the cosmic and global community that is greater than any one self?

I suggest that we don’t achieve or arrive at these states, but that we keep enlivening the presence of our soul by staying in relationship with ourselves, each other, and the Whole.

- Mark Nepo

---

Exhausted

Weary

Dreary

Teary

“Fight these states”, they say, “don’t let them in”

Lighten Up!

Toughen Up!

Rise Up!

Can you imagine telling

the clouds not to release their rain,

the night not to shadow the earth,

the rock to resist being worn into sand?

Yet this is what we repeatedly tell ourselves

and the telling, in itself, is

Exhausting.

Will we ever become exhausted enough to

stop fighting,

stop trying,

and stop seeking?

So exhausted that we simply collapse into the embrace of stillness

and we Rest

And we See

And we Hear

The Truth?

We are Enough.

- Patti Wardlaw

Living Our Way Into Knowing

In Japanese mythology, the crane becomes immortal at the age of two thousand, when it is done being a crane. And the tortoise becomes immortal at the age of ten thousand when it starts being a wave.

So perhaps the experience is to wear us free of our names.

Perhaps, underneath all the distinctions we can imagine - all spiritual paths are one.

Perhaps all our ambitions and desires are like different cups dipping in the same well at center. And every name - every praise and blame - is such a cup, each holding the same sweet water.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter what carries us to and from that well but only that we drink.

Could experience be for humans what erosion is for the elements? Is the purpose of experience, over a lifetime, to carry us to what matters and then wear us away till we become part of the sweet water the next generation drinks?

If this is so, then what is the work of being human?

There is no tangible answer, any more than we can ask fire why it burns? But like a crane flying steadily till its wings disappear or a tortoise swimming mightily till its shell wears away, we can live our way into knowing.

- Mark Nepo

---

This week, we begin exploring what Mark Nepo calls “the work of being human” or "listening into a friendship with our life of experience”, or “opening ourselves to the wisdom of life on Earth.”

Deep Silence, Deep Speech and Deep Questioning

One of our favourite teachers, Pema Chodron speaks about how the Buddhist teaching of the Heart Sutra, appeared. The sanskirt title of the Heart Sutra (sutra means thread or string) is translated as the “The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom" and the sutra states that "Form is empty, emptiness is form." Pema tells the story of how during the teaching of the Heart Sutra, Buddha didn’t say a word. He went into a deep state of meditation and let the bodhissattva of compassion, also known as Kuan-Yin, express his experience on behalf of Buddha. Then one of the principal disciples of Budddha, a monk named Shariputra, began to question Kuan-Yin who, in turn, was inspired by the questions and was able to access an even deeper understanding of what Buddha was conveying through his silence.

In essence, the parable of how the Heart Sutra appears suggests that deep silence, deep speech and deep questioning lead us to a depth of heart that lives below illusion. Our daily practice (in the work of being human) involves living below illusion in the wondrous and gritty nature of things-as-they-are, by listening, translating and questioning our experience.

- Mar Nepo (paraphrased)

Deep Listening
We listen deeply by listening to the Source through immersion, absorption, and presence. We begin by allowing ourselves to sink into the depth of whatever moment we are in.

Deep Speaking
We speak deeply by listening with heart to the Source, no matter who or what conveys it, and translating that presence into meaningful speech. We begin by accepting and working with what we hear. We so filter what we hear through what we believe that we limit what we take in to only what is familiar. Speaking deeply has something to do with letting things pass through our heart as they are.

Deep Questioning
We question deeply by listening to what is offered and surfacing its meaning and usefulness through further questioning and honest dialogue. Think of a deep question as a door that opens between you and what you experience, not as a veiled way to criticize or take things apart, or as a strategy to bide some time till we can pursue our own agenda. What can you ask that will open that door? What can you ask that will let you enter what has been opened? A sign of a a good question is that the questioner is more alive for having asked it.

- Mark Nepo (paraphrased)

---

Part of the mystery of Oneness is that, like the sun, its light is everywhere and yet we need to grow toward that Oneness to know its light. To open our experience, we need to enliven our deep listener, deep speaker, and deep questioner. These skills are as essential as walking, breathing, and eating.
- Mark Nepo

---

Which part of you - your deep listener, your deep speaker, or your deep questioner - is the most experienced and which needs more of your attention?

---

Help me resist the urge

to dispute whether things

are true or false

which is like

arguing whether

it is day or night.

It is always

one or the other

somewhere in the world.

Together, we can penetrate

a higher truth which

like the sun is always

being conveyed.

- Mark Nepo

Becoming A Conduit of Grace

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

When we can meet life with an open heart, receiving becomes indistinguishable from giving and we become conduits of grace.
- Mark Nepo

---

Returning to what matters involves setting aside our preconceptions and opinions so we can listen to life directly. Living this directly opens us to the spiritual gravity that pulls us to the common center of all living things.

It is the pull to center that asks us to lean into all we don’t know. Leaning into life is the work of intuition, the chance to discover the learnings we are born with, the way a seed discovers the flower it will become.

The work of being is to listen deeply, to experience the one living sense that connects all things….the Source of all, the connection that holds the history of presence and wisdom.

- Mark Nepo

---

Life waits full-born in the moments of our lives. How we meet and listen to these moments unfolds the path of our own transformation.

So the task now is to slow down enough and be present enough to enter each moment that calls.

How we recognize and see a moment can give us insight. This is valuable by itself.

To relate to and feel a moment can strengthen our heart through compassion and humility. This too is valuable by itself.

But when we can enter a moment, the world touches us with its unwavering illumination. Listening at such an intimate and complete level allows us the privilege of being permanently touched by what we encounter. When we can treat what comes our way not as an object but as a meeting with the living, then deep listening evokes a devotion that says, Stay in relationship with everything.

- Mark Nepo

---

If the purpose and gift of love is to awaken and rewaken what is dormant within us (our soul), then when awake it is our responsibility to stay awake and keep the gift alive. We do this by deep listening. Not toward a goal or even toward a noble ambition but as a way of life, staying devoted to listening with our heart - more than once, to everything.

Deep listening requires letting go of our internal argument with the world. Before we can truly listen, we must exhaust ourselves of our assumptions. In truth, if we are to ever glimpse the world outside the stubborn certainty of our minds, we have to put down our ready answer to everything. This necessitates an inner discipline.

Every time we speak, we have to discern: are we speaking honestly or just barking from our wall into all we are afraid of? And every time we receive, are we actually hearing the truth of another or are we preparing the next argument like a brick to strengthen our wall?

When we listen deeply, we stumble beautifully into the spaces between our sufferings. This is why we dare to listen, so we might drop together into the truth that holds us all.

This is how we become conduits of Grace.

- Mark Nepo (paraphrased)

---

One Living Sense

The urge to describe it is so strong,

yet all words fall short.

The longing to paint it is intense,

yet even the brightest colours pale in comparison to its felt vibrancy.

It is found in each moment that I dare to fully enter,

the space between giving and receiving.

I gasp as I fall into it,

and rediscover that the void I fear

is fuller than the mind could ever imagine.

- Patti Wardlaw

The Heart Is The Needle that Intuits True North

“There’s an art to reading and trusting the heart and mind.
Our mind maps out the directions, while our heart is the needle that intuits true north.”
- Mark Nepo

---

We are now on week four of our eleven week journey through our autumn session. Each week we uncover another dimension of listening. Listening, as we have learned has infinite dimensions and there are infinite ways to listen, infinite ways to walk along the path…the path that has no end.

In the words of Mark Nepo…

LISTENING IS THE DOORWAY TO EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

We awaken our hearts through the reverence of listening our way into lifelong friendships with everything larger than us (this is the work of being), with our life of experience (this is the work of being human) , and with each other (this is the work of love).

As we continue to explore the work of being we are now ready to reveal and develop the gift we are each endowed with - the ability to think and feel and sense our way into all that we don’t know…the art of intuition!

---

Intuition is an art of discovery. To intuit means to look upon, to instruct from within, to understand or learn by instinct. And instinct refers to a learning we are born with. So intuition is the very personal way we listen to the Universe in order to discover and rediscover the learnings we are born with.

As such, intuition is a deep form of listening that when trusted can return us to the common, irrepressible element at the center of all life and to the Oneness of things that surround us, both of which are at the heart of resilience.

- Mark Nepo

---

“Intuition is the voice of the nonphysical world.”
- Gary Zukav

Multi-sensory perception and intuition are the same thing, but multi-sensory perception is a more accurate name. Most people think that intuition is a hunch that occurs now and then, but it is more that. It is a very sophisticated system that allows you to know more than you can with your five senses. As we become more and more intuitive—and we all are—we encounter different kinds of experiences. 

There is no single way to experience intuition. It is different for everyone.

Some people have hunches. Some get ideas. Some people hear music, and others see pictures. Some people get sensations, others hear words. None is the correct, or the only, way. 

You can find your way by paying attention to what is happening inside of you. This is the biggest difference between five-sensory perception and multi-sensory perception: The five senses require you to pay attention to what is outside of you. Intuition requires that you pay attention to what is happening within. 

- Gary Zukav, Soul Stories

---

Silencing the Tiger

Because the mind is a hungry tiger that can never be satisfied, that which is timeless swims in and out of our hands, bringing us forward into places we wouldn’t go. So listening to what we’re not yet aware of involves silencing the tiger and keeping our hands open so we can feel when something timeless moves through us.

This can be difficult, for sitting quietly with our hands open in the middle of the day is suspect in our age. We can be misperceived as lazy or incompetent or not quite tethered to reality.

But silencing the tiger in our mind and staying open is what keeps us connected to a deeper reality. By this, I mean a depth beneath all circumstances in which we experience a sense of meaning that doesn’t change, the way gravity doesn’t change though what it impacts changes constantly.

Like inhaling and exhaling, the ways we silence our noise and open our heart are forms of deep listening that must be engaged if we are to survive.

- Mark Nepo

---

So how do we lean in and listen to all that is not us, to all that is calling, to the particular angel waiting to guide us more thoroughly into who we are born to be? While we can share insights, only you can discover this for yourself.

At every turn in every day we are presented with angels in a thousand guises, each calling us to follow their song. There is no right or wrong way to go, and only your heart can find the appointments you are born to keep. It’s hard to take this risk, but meeting each uncertainty with an open heart will lead us to an authentic tomorrow.

- Mark Nepo

---

“It seems that intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.”
- Mark Nepo

---

---

Tuning Into the World

“Spirituality is the tuning of the inner person with the great mysteries and secrets that are around us.”
- U Thant

The great Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel, suggests that the reward for such inner tuning is a sense of peace, and that by finding and inhabiting our place in the ever-changing universe, we strengthen the fabric of life itself:

By being what we are…by attuning our own yearning to the lonely holiness in this world, we will aid humanity more than any particular service we may render.

Herschel implies that the world is not complete until fitted with our yearning, that just as the Earth would be barren without trees, plants, vegetables and flowers, the holiness of the world, waiting just below the surface, will stay barren without the spirited growth of our dreams, creativity, generosity and love.

It seems that the first destiny of being here is to root our being in the world, that the world needs this as much as we need each other.

- Mark Nepo

---

When fully here, we touch what is before us - life-force to life-force, essence to essence. When asleep or numb or moving too fast, we only touch surface to surface. And without the glow of life-force, that glow of essence, things just get in the way.

At the deepest level, the most essential level, listening entails a constant effort to feel that moment where everything touches everything else. It seems that the feel of truth and meaning waits below the surface, and it’s the heart of listening that allows the life-force in all things to touch us.

Stay devoted to moving beyond the literal fact of things. For waiting under the surface, like an inner sun, the life-force or heartbeat of the Universe will reveal itself and connect us to the sheer power of what is vital in life.

- Mark Nepo

---

“It’s our ability to listen that saves us from the sheer fact of things.”
- Mark Nepo

---

This fundamental listening invokes a commitment to keep what is true before us. Such listening opens us to the never-ending art of tuning our inner person to the mysteries that surround us. We do this through the work of honouring what we experience, with honouring every bit of life we encounter.

- Mark Nepo

---

I HONOUR YOU

At the deepest level, when I say I honour you, this means that, when I become conscious or aware of you, I make a commitment to keep that truth visible from that moment forward. To honour you means that what I’ve learned about you becomes part of our geography. It means that what has become visible and true will not become invisible again.

---

I HONOUR MYSELF

To honour myself, then means that, as I grow, I will not ignore or hide the parts of my soul and humanness that become more present in me and the world. To honour myself means that I make a commitment to keep the truth of who I am visible; that I will not let the truth of my being become invisible again. Or if it does, I will stay devoted to retrieving it.

---

I HONOUR GOD

To honour God means that we vow to keep all that we become aware of in view; that we will not pretend to be ignorant of things we know to be true or holy. And if we forget or get distracted or derailed, we will stay devoted to retrieving the ever-present sense of the sacred.

---

Near the end of his life, the legendary physicist Sr Isaac Newton, known more for his understanding of gravity than for the deep quality of his ability to honour life, declared with joy and humility:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Let us continue our walk along the sea.

---

The Heart Knows

All of us are musicians

whether we have been trained to read music or not.

All of us are musicians through the virtue of being born

like the petals opening on the rose

or the robin making her nest

we humans, too, know how to listen to the impulse of life

to attune our instrument to that of the orchestra.

Our hearts know.

And our journey, as humans,

is to remember.

- Patti Wardlaw

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.”

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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

---

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

- Mark Nepo

---

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”

---

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”.

---

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

---

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

- Rumi

---

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

---

See as Grace Sees

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

---

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”:

---

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

---

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

---

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

- Deepak Chopra

---

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

---

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

- Deepak Chopra

---

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

- Oprah Winfrey

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

---

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

---

Relating with Gratitude

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

- Oprah Winfrey

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---

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

---

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

---

---

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

---

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.”

---

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.

---

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

---

“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

---

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”

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---

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…

---

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

---

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.

---

---

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

---

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

---

“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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---

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)!

---

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

---

The Energy of Gratitude

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

---

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

---

“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

---

“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

---

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

---

“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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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

---

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).

---

“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

---

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

---

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

---

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!

---

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”

---

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.”

---

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

---

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”

---

… 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.

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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

---

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.

---

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

---

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

---

Embracing A Beginner's Mind

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

---

“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.”

---

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

- Deepak Chopra

---

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”

---

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”

---

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

---