Rare is the spiritual teacher who teaches from love. Rarer still is the one who teaches the subtle art of how to love.

A steadfast guideline for a contemplative life is never to be driven by my tyrannical “to do” list. 

A life-altering realization! When loving, thinking ceases. 

Love and Forgiveness are interchangeable forces, and neither can be forced. 

Life blossoms when I finally give myself completely to what I love–without a hint of apology or excuse. Why has it taken me 65 years to wrap my arms around this truth?

This morning I woke up and turned a corner to realize that in Serving the Master, I make a room in my own heart where the Master sits.  

This paper was a beautiful piece of surrender … until I wrote on it. 

You are my teacher she said with transparent simplicity. 
All I know with any clarity, I thought, is when I am facing in a Godly direction and when I am not. Does that qualify me as a teacher? 

There are thoughts that lift me up and thoughts that pull me down. In a wave of quiet solitude I realize that I am neither. 

Holy Silence is the great thief. A millisecond of surrender to her, robs me of my tidy identity. 

I am so busy wrestling with God that sometimes I forget to do the dishes. 

It seems to me that God laughs a lot. But I so often miss the jokes. 

God’s humour invites me into Loving, but I take myself too seriously to engage for long. 

Surrendering carries the sweet scent of profound Gratitude. (At your feet I am nothing, emptied.)

This current path of correction, although part of the whole, is painfully unfolding. 

At this time in human history, it is crucial that our relationship with God/Source is one of embodied Knowledge rather than belief in ideas.

The Awakened Moment is already here. It’s just that we haven’t arrived — quite yet.

When the Stillness of the Heart awakens within this body, life naturally blossoms in meaning, purpose, and connection.

Relating to discomfort ever more slowly and precisely is a path of Healing and Beauty.

An Inner Constellation opens a spacious field where the holy relationship between human and divine is felt and witnessed.

Life is the Perfect Storm for your Soul’s maturation.

A grounded available Heart is where living heaven on earth becomes a possibility.

The challenge of any Crisis is to allow it to penetrate the essential core of our heart – which is nothing less than a deep & timeless connection to Life.

The simple willingness to listen to uncharted dimensions of the heart grounds the nervous system in a timeless belonging.

Discernment cultivates an authentic spiritual practice, eventually becoming the container for boundless depths of compassion.

Crisis is not bad or wrong. It is simply a signpost.

The “me” that forgives is not the same “me that is trying to forgive.”

Engaging with inner-stillness is like a deep-tissue massage of the inner-landscape. It rearranges everything into a more coherent Flow.

When I have Connection I Don’t need Control

There are many reason not to practice stillness, and we are usually better off if we make friends with them.

It is not that inner-stillness offers security, so much as an abundance that infuses fear.

One of our greatest freedoms is experiencing our humanness within the gracious Heart of Inner-stillness and Silence.

A generous beauty flows through this body-mind when my God-conversation is louder than the world’s noise.

The dawn of humility comes with the wild and spacious realization that I don’t have a clue Who I am.

Silence Practice: Engaging the manifest world with increasing commitment and not getting lost there.

Inner-sight is crystalline when marinated in forgiveness.

The Stillness of the Heart awakens spontaneously with the realization that I can Be Present for Everything and control Nothing.

Truth, and the Love it bears, requires a refined and discerning vessel.

There are those who talk about Spirit/God, and those who are animated by It. They are speaking different languages.

Deep Meditation is the experience of dissolving  as Beauty is born.

Within the stillness, I realize that my whole life has been a preparation for this one precious moment.

He turned to thank me after the group was finished, and His Face Shone like the Sun throughout the Ages. His facial features receded in a “golden” glow as my Heart and Body melted into a simple Namaste.

The inherent Beauty of Silence lies within a deep listening that opens the heart to fresh experiences of the same (outer) practice again and again.

When my commitments serve my deepest/highest priority, life becomes essential.

We like to “think we know,” rather than simply “Knowing”: one is ownership, the other deep humility.

Something deep within me smiles when I take the time to write these lines. I think I will continue….

There is a warm glow of fire burning in my chest. I can warm my hands on it. These hand’s habits of manipulation, separation, and division are gradually thawing in the penetrating warmth of this eternal heart-flame. 

Insight comes like a lightening bolt through my habits of consciousness.

Practice groups have an energetic field that ignites personal and collective evolutionary potential. What groups in your life help you come alive?

Returning to Source or God is not what I ever imagined it would be, because the I that imagined disappears the closer I get. It is more relaxing than any massage I have ever received!

When we begin to trust the depth of our own integrity in God, so much confusion recedes. There are Laws we now listen to that are not separate from who we are. Revolutionary. And yet so effortless.

Because I am born of mystery’s Grace, I have an eternal responsibility to serve her.

The heart of Silence and stillness lives within a an electric energy-current emerging from the unseen Depths of our Being.

The old world has built bridges founded upon collective trauma. The new world is birthing bridges founded upon a collaborative future.

The beginning of actually “living” a Sacred Path is the end of any particular one … but like the Fairytale, we seem to have to kiss a lot of frog-paths first.

We return again and again to inner-stillness, to out of obligation, but because of the fullness discovered there.

I learn so much when I just sit still here in the backyard. My mind’s eye sees the masquerading lies of all the different identity- coats I’ve worn. They appear shockingly thin and ghost-like.

When I am willing to really look — to be with what is underneath the busy surface of my habits — Real Life starrs back at me. In that fierce gaze I am always startled by the naked transparency I Am.

Silence practice allows a deep relaxation of the nervous system that nourishes and transforms naturally.

Being our “brother’s keeper,” in any real sense, comes only with the recognition that we are not separate from our brother.

“Make straight the Way of The Lord” is a rigorous practice. It demands that we pay attention to all the sins/defilements/errors that our habits of ignorance have caused.

A student will often go deeper or wider than the teacher, because the teacher is the foundation or soil for the students growth. That is why a teacher must remain humble.

Our life Takes Flight when we relax into the humbling experience of being held in the perennial mystery. 

I don’t think an authentic spiritual practice can be selfish because the “Me” that I am remembering is the same You that you appear to have forgotten. 

I am learning that challenging thought habits directly is rather useless. Their deep trenches require simmering again and again in a higher/deeper/more expansive intelligence. Relief overwhelms me as a more substantial landscape reveals itself. 

The “good news” and the “bad news” is that we learn who we are through looking at our reflection in the eyes of the other.

When I am surrounded by ignorance within and without, the only option is to bow so low that “I” disappear.

From within the full realization of our imperfections & limitations, lie emerging recognitions of God.

When my heart is relaxed and open, I discover a quality of mind that is profoundly curious about Life. For one who tries so hard to know, this is a profound relief!

At best, religious ideologies can provide a benchmark that sanctions the possibility for internal spiritual experience, but ideology will never take the place of direct experience.

There is a sound that lingers within the depths of Silence, the mere whisper of which is profoundly healing for the Soul.

A theistic philosophy, when informed by direct experience, leverages us from habits of self-centredness. We are released into a soundless, timeless, proclamation of cosmic holism.

We must learn to “see” through the heart – eyes of direct  experience. Only then will our habits of estrangement become apparent because we are released from a struggle that was never ours.

When held within the discerning vessel of Still Awareness, Truth and Love are One.

The whole world is praying. I saw it so clearly while doing Yoga this morning while looking at a flower. As the mind expanded, I “saw” the reason for my resistance to Christian prayer. When the whole world is praying, where does the prayer of the separate individual belong? 

Everything I have every wanted for is so freely given when I am still. Tears well up in my eyes. This seems to be a result of my overflowing heart.

From within the full embrace of our imperfections & limitations, lie emerging recognitions of God.

I am sitting here writing AND I am in a deep state of meditation. I find it curious to observe the compulsive thought that I must listen to the daily meditation course I have been doing. It is like trying to interject a form-habit into that which is already formless and free. I quietly note how utterly insane my mind can be.

Within the stillness I realize that my whole life has been a preparation for receiving this one precious moment.

There is a large force that seems to be coming from my “third eye” and the whole forehead. Life is SO direct from this place, so powerful, that I feel I could do damage. I turn my attention to this thought. How can that which is older than time, deeper than wisdom be harmful? Only my fear holds it so. In this moment I realize that I am not afraid. What a rare occurrence.

Our beautiful planet suffers because we have collectively disconnected from ourselves and each other.

What is it that I am trying to prove in my habits of relationship? It is something like: “because only one of us can be the most beautiful/ cleverest/ most wise/strongest/ best athlete, we must use all of our available energy to compete. It seems to be the game we have all agreed to, however unconsciously. Either way, win or lose, this communication habit/style camouflages our individual beauty and robs our lives of meaning. When seen clearly, dropping this competitive life-sucking game as quickly and immediately as awareness allows is the only sane recourse.

When the Eyes of our Heart
are Opened,
We See that everything near and far is
absolutely and irrevocably,
in Our Service…
then,
waves of Love come crashing in,
plundering, splitting and devouring
all that we…
thought we were.

I can always tell
when Truth enters my consciousness…
my eyes water.
It is the beginning stages…
of softening
my hardened heart.
Its brittle battle goes on —
right/wrong, mine/yours,
entrenched in do or die.
Yes, the tears come.
Like soft and steady background music…
my eyes sometimes Hear.

“My Father blesses you,” He said with Raised Hand. The eyes of habit saw a deranged old man, but my heart was pierced forever … with a thousand Arrows of Love. Strictly speaking, God enjoys us Thoroughly. It is a pity we don’t reciprocate.

Culture is confusing because
most of us are sheep,
following and bleating the trends
of our time.
The whirling winds
of unconsciousness,
run rampant on the surface,
until, if we’re lucky … we are tripped …
into the Depth of God’s Blessing.

What a relief
to be off
that ride … the world revolving around me.

Rehashing yesterday’s
reactions…
Is like feeding
on a dumpster diet,
while slowly sinking.

We can’t really fly
(metaphorically speaking!),
until we relax …
in the humbling recognition
that we are held here by mystery alone.