Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things. (Thich Nhat Hanh gems, instagram.com)

As a deep lifelong Buddhist practitioner Thich Nhat Hanh speaks his simple truth with clarity and compassion. In our western culture of rugged individualism most of us find instructions to “go home” disorienting to say the least. To a mystic, the instructions are orienting. While it is true that we are all mystics (and I hear this often now), it is not true that we are all practicing or even aware of that inner-ability.

We are afraid of what we don’t know. Even the spacious home-base of a mystic becomes a fearful experience. This points to a thorny conundrum in our spiritual evolution of mystic embodiment. It goes something like this: as we don’t know ourselves in spaciousness, we are afraid of it and avoid it at all costs. Constant social media distraction begins to feel like a safer home then the one Thich Nhat Hanh encourages us to go back to. Jesus also told us to “go home” by reminding us (in the language of his time) that “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) when the Pharisees asked him when the Kingdom of God would come.

The strong message among all mystics is that we are missing the mark in our search for meaning by looking outside of ourselves. We wait for outer-sceince to lead the way while remaining ignorant of our inner-home. A soul-home where everything we ever wanted is met unconditionally in a beauty and grace far beyond our wildest imagination. A beauty that takes our breath away. A grace that makes us weep in sorrow and joy because our heart finds the soft welcoming of home.

In the west, and increasingly in the east, we are knowing ourselves through a separation between the world out there and me. From this separation we grow a life-is-happening-to-me, rather than through-and-with-me. Without the inner listening capacity of the mystic, we know ourselves only through concepts and structures external to ourselves. We often wait for “outer-science” to prove what “inner-science” knows intuitively. We have become very comfortable — even insistent — that the truest reality is outside of ourselves.

Relentlessly seeking on the outside through our consumerism, our constant travel, and even our habits of war: we know ourselves through possession of something outside ourselves. The tragic nature of our external seeking is that we are consuming the body or vessel of our own mystical nature and true home. We have forgotten who we are and our journey to our true inner-home has become mired in confusion and darkness.

We need a more spacious container; either through a group or through our own inner spaciousness. In silence we encounter places of rest that are beyond the everyday-self of our lives. It is the most gloriously refreshing encounter one can have. We know life and ourselves differently in this timeless reunion. Its beauty and wonder can literally take our breath away.

A vertical resource allows us to be vulnerable in life and yet held firmly within a landscape of greater possibility. No matter how grim the world looks, a vertical listening within the heart walks with us. We are never alone. The naked vulnerability within our vertical connection resembles a kitten being held by the back of the neck by its mother. Our nervous system relaxes when life reveals its true nature as “perfectly imperfect” (Tao te Ching translation, Stephen Mitchell).

A vertically-resourced nervous system is also the first commandment of the three monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In biblical language the name given to vertical resourcing is “God” and we are instructed to love “that” with everything we have — mind, heart, body, soul. In each of these traditions it is the mystics who embodied this commandment through their surrendered inner-listening and ecstatic praise. Mystics are not distracted by hierarchical power-structure outside of themselves in order to “achieve” spiritual status in the world. They are listening to their inner and outer world as one movement. They simply belong to both and are grateful for the opportunity to be here.

The Tao and monotheism’s primary instruction point towards an unwavering inner-trust and a willingness to let go of the known. Not for the faint of heart, listening to the timeless vertical-flow living within our own body, heart, and mind is a radical departure from our conditioned inner-operating system: vertical transmission transports us into a spacious inner-landscape that softens contact with the trauma living within our body, heart and mind. Ironically, a vertically resourced relationship heals us from that which we were “intent on healing” and even from the very concept of “fixing.” Surrendered listening transforms life into a landscape of divine belonging where an unconditional inclusion of our hurt places allows them to find rest. 

As our suffering finds its place in life we come to understand it as part of the process of life discovering itself. We are the kitten being held by the great mother as we learn to trust that our personal, ancestral and collective traumas are not separate from the path of our soul’s embodiment and the evolution of life. Vertical resourcing is a digestive-aid that converts trauma into embodied wisdom and compassion. As this process occurs in the ICM workshops, I frequently find myself humbled by the simple realization that I am here to walk with life and learn from life—however much I may stumble in that walk.

In order to digest and transmute the grid-lock of human trauma we are now facing, the next phase of our human evolution necessitates intimate encounters with our innate vertical resource. Here, we can rest in a quantum field of unconditional intelligence where insight, depth, and compassion inform our personal, ancestral, and collective landscapes. With his timeless quote, Rumi continues to invite us there: “out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

Kabbalah, Beyond the Self:  Discovering God Within the Struggle

The following two sentences were written by Arthur Green, one of todayʼs most respected teachers of Jewish mysticism, in his book EHYEN: A Kabbalah For Tomorrow.

“This God knows us because our struggle to integrate love and judgment is not ours alone, but the reflection of a cosmic struggle. The inner structure of our psychic life is the hidden structure of the universe; it is because of this that we can come to know God by the path of inward contemplation and true self-knowledge.”

Far from a mere intellectual grasp of the meaning, Greenʼs words threw a wrench into the workings of my mind and I experienced a moment of spontaneous insight into Godʼs completeness within the fragments of my own life. A shocking harmony reverberated between my heart and mind (love and judgement, Gedullah and Gevurah) and an inner stillness enveloped me. It seemed as though my whole being woke up with the bold truth of Greenʼs statement.

If our human struggles are the very ground and means through which we can find God and through which God can find us, then our psychological struggle ceases when we know God. We begin to see with the eyes of our heart into the non physical or transcendental realm of Kabbalah and the mystical traditions. Green succeeds in cutting through centuries of mistaken cultural and religious identities that regularly obscure our immediate relationship with God. He awakens us to the reality that we are God, and that through our struggles, we are held in a sacred covenant within that reality — irrevocably and completely.

Experiences of “reality beyond the self” have been a regular “intrusion” into my ordinary consciousness. It has been an ongoing challenge to know how to skillfully incorporate these experiences into the ordinary consciousness of my everyday life. Ordinary consciousness is just that — ordinary. As such, it includes the cultural and familial conditioning that fosters the “us and them” mentality of differentiation. The centrality of “me” eventually leads to clear definitions of “us” and “them.” Over time, this can easily lead to a personal identity that relates to other “identities.” Our skills of differentiation and judgement are quickly supported and validated within the culture. If we relate to God in this way, as an “identity” outside of self, as many religions do, then we inevitably distance ourselves from God. God is limited to a mental concept rather than a lived experience in the mystical sense that Green speaks of.

The following experiences, although varied through different ages, have all contributed to my overwhelming acknowledgement of communion with another reality and/or another way of being in the world. All of these experiences have involved struggle in one way or another and they have vastly expanded my self-knowledge beyond my ordinary understanding. At times the physicality and directness of my experiences have been frightening because the “ordinary I” is simply not featured.

Over the years, I have frequently had the sense that I am being guided and taught through a deeper understanding then I had reason to have. Often in a rather formless way, I could feel the Truth within my body as a sort deep calling. I have therefore found it reassuring when various teachings validated my undeveloped understanding. Kabbalah is one such teaching.

Rabbi Laura Kaplan describes Kabbalah in one sentence: “Everything in this world and every other points beyond itself.” (2) I hear these words with a good measure of relief because the burden of a conflicted “self,” reinforced by a well developed judge, is incapable of pointing anywhere but to itself. In the crowded quarters of personal struggle there is little room for movement beyond a personal pre-understanding. (For a complete reading of this 2008 paper, please visit https://lauramadsen.ca/papers/ and scroll down!)

… Awareness of light …

… awakens and expands our point of contact with life. It also carries the frightening potential to liberate us from habits of who we think we are. If we are willing, light holds immense potential for updating individual, ancestral, and collective shadow.

Shadow remains frozen without light’s touch; but when seen and felt, shadow melts into a fertilizing presence of new possibilities. When informed by light, our bodies, hearts, and minds literally become pollinators of new life. Through our enlightened contact we seed and nourish new growth. Light touching shadow is a series of life-changing events as we participate in the mysterious process of life waking up to itself!

Light enters soul, heart and mind through the mystery of spaciousness and inner-listening. Traditional Silence practice took us beyond shadow by removing us from life; but light courageously turned towards shadow allows life to awaken from within our bodies, minds, and hearts. Our life-purpose begins to embody us through a series of mysterious synchronicities. We become sacred activists as we work with life as it is, and life in turn, works through us.

Embodying light evokes a power with life, not over or above life. It touches life where it is without trying to fix it. During last Saturday’s Inner Constellation Mobile (ICM) it was through participant’s precise seeing and feeling of shadow that light entered the constellation and allowed more movement.

Light touching shadow is built upon an inner-trust or knowing that life is good. Shadow cannot be present for shadow because there is not enough spaciousness in shadow and fear overwhelms us. Mystical light (within spaciousness, listening, & soul) is a refined resource for touching shadow structures (within culture, ancestors, and the human condition).

Our lack of felt contact with shadow can leave us feeling that life is happening to us, rather than through us. We may feel more like a victim than a participant. Learning to include shadow is therefore a vital resource for evolving from a sense of victim to participant. We find our fulfilment through participation. As Meister Eckhart said, the mystery of God is what turns base metal into gold. 

Inner-listening is a quiet revolution of contemplation and meditation that births a new world from the inside out. With light touching the base-metal of shadow, shadow becomes life’s golden ally. No longer opposites, but on the same embodied path, we begin walking shadow back into the light.

In closing I will share a mystical moment I had while struggling to write about the recent ICM. After several days, I awoke to three phrases mysteriously humming through my nervous system: 

1. I see because I am seen.
2. I know my place because I am known.
3. I love because I am loved.

Time stopped within a deepening stillness as I contemplated: I see with seeing … (breathe) … I know with knowing … (breathe) … I love with love … (breathe) … Light was seeing/knowing/loving itself through me while gently disentangling me from my struggle.

When inner-light is embodied (experienced in our body) conditioned structures recede. I could not write about light without light infusing my mind and heart. For a blessed moment I experienced the intimate fullness of being seen, known, and loved through the grace of “light touching shadow.”

T-shirt Art — Keira Madsen at vaedderstudio.com

Within the Inner Constellation Mobile (ICM), there is a Field Intelligence that can be perceived, witnessed, and felt. The most trustworthy way to attune to this intelligence is through our bodies. Why? Because our bodies are innocent in the simple direct way that they store information. There is a witnessing presence within the ICM container that allows the innocent hurt places to emerge in such a way that invites a deeper contact with our soul’s impulse. The invitation and the challenge are miraculously woven together as the beauty of our spiritual embodiment.

Our bodies are like listening to children before they have learned to layer over and identify with the habits of their family and culture. The language of innocence-speaking is simple, direct, and fresh—and often wise beyond the years of that body. In this open transparent state our bodies have an organic resonance with what is true: whether that be my unintegrated 3 year old fear, my grandfather’s depression, or the legacy of my culture’s unintegrated burdens.

However, our innocent contact with life only surfaces where there is a sense of safety that allows habitual defences or numbness to lay down their arms, rest, and begin to thaw. If our healing modalities are not connected with deeply embodied truth, we are prone to bandaid-solutions and wishful thinking. In other words, without embodying the truth of our wounding, there is no reconciliation. 

Deep work always includes past and present, the ancestors and the collective, because the intelligence of our bodies is all of that. Our body is nothing less than the pulse of life living itself into a gazillion different forms. We may have become frozen in particle and forgotten our wholesome belonging; but if we slow down to feel and witness, we begin to understand that our wounding and our innocence are partners in the path of reconciliation. The pain we have resisted—sometimes for lifetimes within our lineage and collective—becomes the precise medicine for our soul’s embodiment.

When a small group of people are committed to standing together in the fire of that medicine, we become one-life-healing. In so doing, we shake the roots of our known universe that is currently built upon habits of fear and division. Within the Universal Heart there is spiritual blessing that allows us to be with the wounded innocent of life. This deep medicine restores the division between our soul and our body and allows life to begin walking us home.

Elizabeth (Bette) Hicks (née Dobson)
(beloved mother, died August 31/23 at 101 years of age)

Being with my sweet and well-loved mother as she passed was a heart-opening mystical gift that I never anticipated. As with any mystical thinning-of the-veil, I will be integrating its heart-opening (and shattering) affect for a long while. As the woman I knew as “Mom” gracefully transitioned upward out of her body, my heart recognized the eternal grace of our embodiment. The air was electric with a timeless love in which I could also feel/hear the welcoming song of our ancestors. Tears of gratitude continue as I write this.

The mysterious veil between birth and death thinned as I found myself feeling joy for Mom’s arrival and moments later sobbing at her departure. The macro and the micro co-existed and neither were wrong. We are reminded of a similar death cycle in the Fall Equinox as summer’s bloom disappears and fall leaves  begin to fall. As part of nature, our bodies carry a death-wisdom and — although this may sound strange — our bodies thrive on this deep connection to embodied truth.

I understand our embodiment as a part of the living truth that our soul carries — a generational record-keeping of light and shadow that is individual, collective, and ancestral. If our spiritual practice includes turning towards the light and the darkened wounds of our embodiment, then our bodies begin to serve as the spiritual ground of our practice. The alchemy of spirit into matter begins as our lives and spiritual practice walk with increasing synchronicity and harmony.

The crisis of our time reflects how we have failed to walk spirit and matter together. While we can name this division in several ways — feminine/masculine, right brain/left brain, heart/head —  restoration begins when we begin to reclaim our inner-relationship with our soul and walk that spacious presence back into our life. Whatever our station in life, this blessed walk has 360 degree benefits. 

The benefits are wide and deep because spacious presence cultivates a living conversation between spirit and matter where light enters our awareness organically and in the right timing. As we learn to trust in a movement beyond our own contingency plans, we also open to the light’s deep-listening … and then … we just see what happens because we trust life. 

Healing has an inherent rhythm and flow. As our nervous system learns to relax and trust this flow, an unconditional and uplifting sense of well-being may surface. Soul’s light informs the body through a nature-attuned intelligence that respects life’s inherent rhythms and cycles: “(1) For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: (2) A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up … (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)

As our bodies learn to trust in a Silence beyond time, we learn to embody life in new and surprising ways. No longer revolving solely around ongoing patterns of wounding, we experience occasional inner-glimpses of the expanded nature of the Universal Heart.

When we give space for inner-learning, the miracle of timeless healing begins. What has been disconnected, abandoned, and made numb comes to life as presence, beauty, and trust. As we practice with like-hearted/minded others, we begin to understand that our spiritual nature and our embodiment are not two: and that our body is a unique and “perfectly imperfect”* vessel for the sacred ground of our embodiment.

The 6-month zoom-hosted Universal Heart series (October 2023 to March 2024); free zoom-hosted Universal Heart Quarterlies (Wednesdays Sept. 20 & Dec. 20); and the recently introduced in-person Nature-informed Silence Practice Days (Saturdays Sept. 30 & Dec. 23) are all designed for the blessing of our embodied remembrance — that life is sacred and we are here to walk that generous reality into our everyday lives. 

* A Tao phrase

Summer and Winter solstice form the cyclical flow of nature in connection with itself. Within this energetic symbiosis, one part exists in relation to the other: Summer as a reflection of a fruit-bearing movement and Winter as a reflection of the depth of unformed Silence. Each exists in connection to the mysterious whole of life.

In the same way, the energies of equinox seasons could be described as transition bridges—Spring calling us into the world as in the fullness of summer’s blooming, and Fall calling us into depth as the timeless spaciousness of the unformed. For this reason, tuning in to our body’s nature-cycles can be a strong spiritual resource: we discover our short time on earth as form in deep connection to inner depth and Silence. With a visceral experience of life’s innate wholeness, we begin to trust enough to let go into an unknowable, yet thrilling intelligence that courses through our nervous system. As spiritual bodies, we are the living bridge between form and formlessness.

While healing our individuated selves has been a useful focus in western psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, I believe we are being called into a collective blossoming as a species—a call to know our form within an expanded relational consciousness. In whatever way that calling is initiated in us, it will begin to deepen our embodied sense of depth, wisdom, and compassion. We begin to know ourselves within the unconditional and timeless spiritual dimension.

As a vast intelligence opens within us, it brings the shocking realization that we are the living incarnation of an imperfect ancestral bloom and the unformed stillness of depth. Our life radically changes when we understand life as a process of evolutionary inclusion from both dimensions. From an embodied spiritual perspective, inclusion is an unconditional relationship to form—however imperfect that appears. What we perceive to be imperfect in ourselves or others is here to expand the relational capacity of our hearts.

So… we learn to breathe, pause, and listen to (feel) our body as the imperfect form that harbours variations of numbness, fear, and judgement. We actually rob ourselves of our authentic form when we exclude our imperfections. We create an inhospitable world when we refuse to connect with the unintegrated fear and pain of our ancestors and the collective. We have been born into a world where the violating nature of our disconnection is either normalized through numbness or pushed against as attempts to “fix what is wrong.” Either way, we lose a relational connection with the imperfect process of our human blooming (evolution). 

Remembering our depth through inner-stillness allows depth to become a resource in our lives—a bubbling up of deep nourishment for Summer’s blooming. As we  restore our connection to our depth, we naturally become a restorative agent for humanity. In bowing to the evolutionary process we liberate an organic blossoming in our lives. The abundant energy of summer is a living connection to depth becoming manifest: an inner timelessness becoming soil for an outer blooming.

On Wednesday, June 21 we will explore where and how depth is blooming in our lives: how our relationships, consumer choices, felt connections with nature, or relationship to ourselves is informed by both unexamined conditioning and Soul’s purpose or calling.

Spring in the northern hemisphere could be compared to the earth giving birth. As earth’s kin, we might even experience Spring as a sense of revival, a waking up to the bold imperative of creation that moves within our bodies. This is the same power that pushes cement out of the way if it has to, or grows trees precariously rooted in a rock face. As any woman knows who has given birth naturally, the process is deeply engaged, powerful, and uncompromising in its direction. Spring is definitely not a wallflower.

Nature is a force of immeasurable intelligence and capacity. Nowhere do we see this more than in the Spring as branches that look dead begin to come to life. Our human collective however, has become like wallflowers on the side-lines of life. We seek our belonging in pre-determined ways from outside of ourselves. It is a confused and confusing phenomenon. Teilhard de Chardin reminds us that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, not a human body that has a soul. The latter creates wallflowers, while the former aligns with the power of surging Spring life.

Spiritual embodiment is a flow of connected intelligence that is beyond our control. When the truth of life flows in our neural pathways as raw emotions we are informed by life holistically. While living in the world of time, we have a simultaneous experience of timelessness. Throughout much of human history, our ability to separate life from how it really is has allowed us to carry on under huge duress. We have learned to survive this way as a species, but it has also set us adrift from embodied wisdom— the wisdom of life as it is. 

Being set adrift from ourselves and life-as-it-is leads to a tendency to experience life as something that happens to us. We become wallflowers looking the part rather than embodying life as part of creation. Spring is life dressed in full regalia—proud, regal, and uncompromising. If she could speak, and we could listen, her rousing pep talk might go like this: “Away with your fine ideas of how I should be. Come out and play with me in your naked vulnerability, your authenticity—give your humanness to me as you are— your pain, joy, rage, fierce love, tender love, numb, hopelessness, shyness etc.— just be real so we can dance.” 

Spring percolating within our nervous system is the mystic’s heart in full voice and the gestated depth of winter’s stillness appearing in the world. Spring is an unconditional celebration of  “now” where body, soul, heart, and mind are danced into one unified song. Gratefully we surrender “ideas” of life for a more fluid and alive relationship with life. Living life from the sidelines just doesn’t make sense anymore.

In five years of facilitating the Inner Constellation Mobile, I have concluded two things: firstly, this is the hardest work we will ever do (few do); and secondly, the simple beauty of this work is life’s best-kept secret (from ourselves). We have forgotten that life is meant to be a wild ride designed to wake us up. Are we not being reconfigured, re-wired, and transformed at an astonishing rate through our current challenges? Old ways are crumbling as subtle capacities begin to emerge from the rubble. 

Is this not a reason to allow the exiled and wounded parts of our collective to enter into the Spring festivities? Their unconscious soil provides rich nourishment for birthing the hope, wisdom, laughter, and love of humanity. Let’s find our place in the ground that grows the impossible just as trees find their roots in a rock face. Spring is not a time to be a wallflower. It is time to live everything we have ever dreamed of by leaning into everything we never imagined we could. Together in our courage, we celebrate the beauty of Spring as she sings us back into life from the sidelines.