... and if you're in the greater Montreal area, join me for a special meditation evening on January 1st to Welcome the New Year: CLICK HERE to find out more.
Wishing you all joyful and peaceful holy-days, wherever you are! May you find love and sacredness in all that they are. And may the New Year sparkle with all sorts of wonder-full things!
... and if you're in the greater Montreal area, join me for a special meditation evening on January 1st to Welcome the New Year: CLICK HERE to find out more.
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Life has been quite interesting over the last few weeks. It had been very easy and light-filled in the period leading up to and including the online retreat that I had organized in early November (find out more about it HERE or read the blog post below this one). Everything flowed, and there was a joyful sense of trust in Life and the way it unfolded perfectly from one moment, one day, one week, to the next. All I did was to enjoy being in that flow and to move with it. How much more wonderful could it get? And then … there always seems to be an And Then. That’s Life’s play, what is called ‘leela’ in the ancient Indian teachings. So here is my And Then: Dear all,
I've been working hard in the last few days (hard, yes, but without straining or pushing myself) to help this new online retreat come to life fully. I'm even learning how to do basic graphic design, like the above banner for the facebook event page! It's amazing how things just unfold from one day to the next. There is a sense inside of an ongoing movement that keeps generating all sorts of activity, a sense of being in a flow that's much larger than me. It's joyful, even as it is also work, especially when it comes to settling so many details all at the same time. There are certain themes that just seem to be part of our lives. And even if they move into the background for a while and we think we're done with them, they'll show up again and again. They're like red threads, guiding threads: asking, and sometimes even compelling, us to pay attention. Meditation, love, and healing are three such themes for me. And they came up to announce as themes for the meditation evenings that I'll be offering every other week in Montreal starting in September. I always trust what comes intuitively like that, and often I'll find out as I go along exactly what that means and how it will play out. So how do these three fit together? Here is some summer news: I'm so enjoying being back to this beautiful lake close to my home. Plunging into the water and swimming to the other end of the lake and back is one of the most amazing summer joys in my life. Such gratitude for the nature all around me, and for this lake that is such a gift all year round, but so abundantly so in the summer! After having written the last blog post, Intuition Revisited, I knew I wasn't quite done yet with the topic. There was this phrase that kept coming to mind: intuition is the voice of the heart. I hadn't been able to integrate it with the flow of the text, so I decided to write another post about the connection between the heart and intuition. Here it goes. In the earlier blog, I focused on the contrast between the survival mode, which is ultimately driven by fear, and trusting the flow of Life, with intuition being an integral part of the ‘trust mode’. But how and where do we find trust in our psyche? When we rest in trust, where do we in fact rest? Trust cannot reside in the mind, as the mind will always find reasons to doubt whatever we think we know and can trust. Intuition is usually understood to be a mental ability: it is defined as ‘comprehension without effort of reasoning’ (Webster’s), or as ‘immediate insight’ (Oxford English Dictionary). As such, it is associated with the receptive and symbolic mode of the right brain, as opposed to the logical, reasoning, thinking mode of the left brain. I have taught intuition in this neutral, mind-based way for over a decade. Looking at it like this is definitely useful, as it helps us understand how intuition functions by comparison with the ‘thinking’ mode that is most people’s way of using their minds. Once we get what the intuitive mode is like – essentially, knowing things without having thought about them – we’re able to identify it more easily and develop our use of it. As we’re moving into December we’re entering into the darkest part of the year. The winter equinox, which marks the official beginning of winter, is also the longest night of the year and the shortest day. It’s one thing to know this; it’s another to experience it. The mind does not feel: it does not suffer with the cold and the lack of energy that the darkness brings, nor does it delight in the warmth and radiance of the sunlight. It’s our bodies that sense these differences, and our hearts and souls that respond to their deeper meaning. |
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