Month: January 2022

The wonderful Emergence Magazine has published these ten love letters to the earth by Thich Naht Hahn who died last week on the 22nd of January.

It seemed a beautiful and fitting way to honor his legacy so I am passing that link on to all of you beloveds:

https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/ten-love-letters-to-the-earth/

I was just blessed to spend two days in a webinar by Mirabai Starr on Theresa of Avila. We dove deep together with 60 or so other souls into the words and poetry of this amazing saint who, through her work, carries us into the crystal palace of our innermost longings. I can’t recommend highly enough Mirabai’s books on the subject. Per her suggestion, I’d recommend beginning with “Saint Theresa of Avila – Passionate Mystic.”

On today’s Instagram posting, Mirabai (assisted by Willow) offered this blessing that struck me with such resonance I felt I had to share it.

“It’s not as if falling in love with the Divine rescues us from the travails of the human condition. Our partners betray us sometimes and our dead remain dead. It’s that keeping the heart open, even in hell, makes space for the Beloved. It is in the darkest nights of our souls, when all we know is that we know nothing, that the presence of the sacred may quietly well up, mingling with our pain and connecting us to a love that will never die.”

~ Mirabai Starr – from her most recent and profound book “Wild Mercy.”

One of my favorite and most treasured practices from my Sufi Tradition is called “The Four Surrenders.” A link to the full practice is included below.

Lately, I have been feeling a deep sense of unraveling and re-assessment of everything I “know” – all of the stories that make up the life I walk through.

It all started with an intense and vivid dream in which I was walking with friends, one of whom was indigenous, in a large garden or arboretum. As we walked we found signposts identifying different aspects of the garden but they were full of colonialist stories that simply didn’t reflect the reality of the land and its ancient stories. So at each place, we stopped and put up arrows pointing in many different directions.

As I sat with this dream in meditation and consultation with beloved friends and teachers, I understood this was a view of my inner garden. And a calling to consider all of the stories I thought were real and the many different ways they might now be able to evolve.

But my ego put up quite a fight when I started this work. Fear of loss and being abandoned and alone all rose up in my heart as I considered letting go of all those stories.

I sat one afternoon in my sit spot near a lovely creek and was reminded of what it does so exquisitely and beautifully – surrender and flow.

I began the four surrenders practice. Briefly, either using the breath or prostrations (or both), that entails letting go of all that is standing in the way of being in the now; then letting go of all your identities, the small self, the labels you assign to yourself (e.g, teacher, father, social justice worker…); then surrendering the need to KNOW anything, and finally surrendering into the arms of the Divine.

As I sat in this practice in the presence of the manuscript of Nature that demonstrated perfectly what I needed to remember, with the guidance of the creeks flow, I fell into a fifth surrender – letting go of even the lap of the Divine and accepting that none of it is real. That there is NOTHING there.

From that place of emptiness, each breath became a new blessing, each moment a new opportunity to open to a new story. A new story, granted by grace, that at that moment was the story that lifted up the whole creation in beauty and harmony and love. But with no attachment, because in the next breath – all five surrenders happened again and everything was emptiness.

The Sufi poem by Shabistari (that is also a Dance of Universal Peace) circles and splashes in my heart:

Go sweep out the chambers of your heart
Make it ready, make it ready
To be the dwelling of the beloved.

When you depart, love will enter
In you, void of yourself
God will display [their] beauty.

So, as the light begins its return for us in the Northern hemisphere of this heartbreakingly beautiful and magnificent and wounded planet, as the clock of our invented time tells us a new year has begun, as we are blessed with noticing our stories and making new choices – I offer this fifth surrender with love to all of my beloveds. May we all find hope, love, joy, community, and resilience in the face of the many challenges that stand before us.

Link to The Four Surrenders Practice

The breath practice below began the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Conspire conference this year and seems a good way to begin this new year.

As Richard Rohr noted in his earlier blogs this week, “If we trust the universal pattern, the wisdom of all times and all places, including the creation and evolution of the cosmos itself, we know that an ending is also the place for a new beginning. Death promises a new kind of life.”

And,
“Jesus came to teach us the way of wisdom. He brought us a message that offers to liberate us from both the lies of the world and the lies lodged in ourselves.”

Please enjoy this breath practice:

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Breathe with Us

As the 2021 Daily Meditations draw to a close and we enter the new year, we invite you to pray with the CAC staff and community with the words used to open our seventh and final CONSPIRE conference this past September:

In a world of fault lines and fractures,
we stand in a place where opposites come together,
awaiting the birth of what is to come.

If you are doubting, welcome.
If you are healing, welcome.
If you are angry at injustice, welcome.

We await a new genesis,
one more beginning in a series of starts,
trailing backwards in time to the very first day.

If you are afraid, welcome.
If you are joyful, welcome.
If you are longing to belong, welcome.

God’s generous rhythm of life, death, resurrection,
moving in and through all things,
the very breath and source of the cosmos itself.

Our pathways converge and continue,
each one of us a catalyst for loving action.
We, a community of saints. 
Conspire.
Breathe with us.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

“Me, Us, the World: Living Inside God’s Great Story,” CONSPIRE 2021 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2021), video.