Love – Soul Journeys

Who stole my joy?

It’s there within you, you’ve just lost track of it.

Of course you didn’t lose it on purpose. One day, one hour, one minute at a time, you let someone or something tell you to hide or mute or push down what matters to you. It’s still there, beneath it all.

It’s not that you never have problems, challenges, anger, sadness, or fear, we all do. It’s just that you’ve allowed yourself to sacrifice what matters, to get through, to get along, to look good, to get someone to Ike you, accept you. Let face it, you’ve sacrificed, joy, peace, accomplishment, kindness, love, harmony…

If you’re tired and need to be recharged, look no further. If you want to keep slugging it out, hoping joy will emerge, miraculously, maybe you’re the exception.

Finding real joy, deep joy, requires your full commitment and courage. You have to be willing to risk the status quo to find the kind of joy you’re looking for. There’s a lot of difficult, uncharted inner landscape before you.

If you’ve been waiting to begin… ask yourself, why not today? If not today, when you’ve mustered enough courage to risk losing what you’ve become comfortable with, I stand ready to journey with you.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When the student is really ready, the teacher will disappear. – Lao Tzu

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Humility, suffering and heaven.

Can anyone take away our suffering? Has anybody seen our collective humility? In the gospels there are several renditions of the rich young ruler story who approaches Jesus and asks what he might do to “inherit the kingdom of heaven”. The answer is simple but it becomes complex because we don’t like what it says to us.

Our wealth, our power, our position, our prestige and our health often get in the way of our deeper sense and experience of God’s presence in our lives, experiences and hearts, here and now.

The rich young ruler was told, the one thing you lack… “to sell all you have and give to the poor, and you shall find treasure in heaven. Come follow me.” Before we run ahead to the story’s conclusion, let’s take a pause and think in our own lives why Jesus might be giving this advice? Is it to shame those of us with means? To simply help the poor? I might suggest that it is so that both the rich and the poor will know the Love of God. A theological two-for!

As you know in your head, the math works out. The problem is that fear, sadness, jealousy, loneliness, and anger keep showing up within you and thus you need to try NOT to feel or sense those things. How can it be that you have so much and yet you are suffering inside?

Suffering is universal. If you could “buy” your way out of it, someone would have figured out how to already, and could charge a lot for it.

Your ability to be able to be okay with inner suffering (being okay with suffering is another way of describing peace) is proportional to the amount of “wealth” you perceive yourself to have in relationship to others. The more you’ve got, the harder it is to accept all the internal stuff going on with you that you don’t want to be. Certainly, you say, “if I just had more resources, or purchased this or traveled there or got this job, or that thing, or this position, then certainly I would no longer suffer inside.”

Stop kidding yourself.

“But I’ve worked so hard to achieve, to make, to save, to succeed…” you say. “All so I can avoid suffering! And you say I CAN’T avoid suffering?”

Silence ….

If you’re feeling sad, angry, scared, stupid, misled, self-righteous, etc. at this point in the blog, stay with that feeling you don’t want for 1 minute. Or 2 if you’re feeling really brave.

Further silence if you dare …

“When the young man heard this, he went away sad because he had great wealth.” – Matthew 19:22

Point made… still had his great wealth and still suffering. If you’re finding yourself with an abundance and are still suffering, you are in good company.

Looking forward to hearing about your thoughts, feelings and experiences.

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Are you stuffed with “junk food”?

I’ve heard some people say they have no sense of the Divine within. Some tell me they never hear God speak to them. Some say they have no sense of God’s presence. Some rail against the church or someone who they think has led them away from God or from Love. If for whatever reason you don’t sense, feel, know God’s loving presence, start with knowing it is here, now, even if you don’t recognize it. Ask to see or experience.

Focus on a moment in the last 24 hours when you glimpsed something or someone that gave you a glimpse of the Divine within yourself. Now focus on that rather than waiting for your own version of the “parting of the Red Sea” or the getting “knocked off your horse” that you’ve been awaiting.

If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.
John Piper, A Hunger For God

So push yourself away from the drama- filled, over-indulged, keeping up with the neighbors, intellectualizing God into a box, never satisfied, table of the world so you can see God & God’s love in the places you’ve been trying to consume, control or use rather than appreciate.

God’s love, always here, always available, for everyone. Yes, everyone. Simply stop and ask to see.

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Don’t you know, you are the church?

So, I’m going to rant a bit as Paul did in his letter to the Corinthians “Don’t you know!…” yes he said Don’t you know, “Don’t you know know your bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” The Spirit is in you! Yes, there, in y.o.u., the whole time, without question, received from God, need I go on?

I can almost hear Paul saying, “What about – your bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit, do you not understand?” It may come as a shock for you but it does begin to help you understand how you will never be late for church again, ever! You will be eternally on time!

This Holy Spirit “inside us” thing is highlighted by Jesus in Luke 17 when he is asked by some religious folks, so where is this “Kingdom of God” you keep talking about? And he says, “you can look far and wide, you can go searching, out there… (but don’t be fooled – okay, he didn’t really say this but it’s fun to think he might have), the Kingdom of God is… within you.” In some translations, it says, in your midst. In Aramaic, it basically means right here, in you, and around you, right now!

So, the next time anyone tries to point you to a place of worship and they’re not pointing at you, or themselves, you might want to help them with their directions.

Love is here, why wait, stop seeking and be here now.

Namaste!

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How is what you notice guiding you?

The other day I was talking to a friend about spiritual guidance and they asked about a situation some close friends were in and what did I think was going on in their situation?

I paused for a moment and then began explaining how spiritual guidance might best approach his question.

I told my friend that his noticing the situation and bringing it up in conversation with me was a sure sign of the Divine’s guidance within him. I shared that although we often put up barriers or misconstrue Love’s emergence, it is just such situations like the one he described that point to something deeper within him, something he might want to explore.

“Life is set up to bring up what has been bound up, so it can open up to be freed up, so you can show up for life.”
― Mary O’Malley

I like the directness of Mary’s quote. Whatever is arising for us is a pointer to something deep within. What is arising may be cloaked with whatever we see and project outward but with some attention placed on it for a few minutes we can often discover what it is that is emerging within.

If you’re having trouble accessing the deeper truth that may be emerging, there are a number of practices that can help. If you’re a head centered person, try a form of Lectio Divina, if a heart centered person, try a heart focused meditation and of you’re a body (gut) centered person, try a breathing practice where you move breath and awareness around your body.

Here for you as needed. – marv@souljrnys.com