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blessed words by John O’Donohue
Tag Archives: intimacy
dear, dear heart
Asking contracted energy what it needs is a lovely way of acknowledging its presence and becoming intimate with it. Everything that is not at rest wants to be acknowledged, to be received and bathed in gentleness and benevolence.
~ Pema Mags Deane
If you haven’t read Pema Mags’ last blog post yet, please do yourself a sweet favor: As Energy Comes Home
Then have a look at this beautiful little film Heart on a String inspired by Michael Leunig’s work. Your heart will love you for it!
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Michael Leunig’s website
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the fallacy of finding oneself
Have you been sucked into the lie that what you really ARE is something you need to find, or discover, or recover? And then heal or train or perfect? It’s commonly touted by earnest souls with a course, program, book or DVD to sell.
I was an eager member of their audience in my dreamtime march toward betterment. It was all good fun and perhaps helped shape the ‘me’-ing being into a more accomplished/productive/compliant ‘person.’ But none of it led me to my ‘true’ self. It just created different versions of the wee-me that was a totally addicted seeker.
Meanwhile, the Self I was seeking simply watched, utterly unaffected. One day I stopped being busy with the me-ing long enough to cast a glance over my shoulder, metaphorically-speaking. And there IT was. Already perfect, already total, already all I had hoped to know and to be.
The shock of it! Of realizing one had fallen for the fallacy of separation when no such estrangement could ever be possible for one second…
The sweetness of the relief! Of knowing that nothing could ever be done to bring one closer to – or take one away from – this intimacy…
The joy of it! Of knowing that the wild creative awake Beingness that one longed for is here, and always has been:
doing Life ITs own way and calling ITself “ME”
– billions, trillions, of versions of IT,
all called “ME”!
~ miriam louisa
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without thought the body simply disappears
At the same time that there is the life and experience of being Vonna (this particular body); at the same time there is no Vonna to be found. There is no boundary between inside and outside. Sounds, even sites, are “in here” as much as thoughts and feelings are “in here.” In direct experience, without ideas superimposed of inside and outside, in direct experience, there are no walls on which to be on either side of; it’s all a seamless whole, all of it…
I don’t think big explanations and descriptions help toward the experience of absolute intimacy and knowing directly the inseparability of awareness and phenomena.
To either seek an out of body experience or to revel in one seems pointless at best, and imaginary only, just as an in the body experience is imaginary. The body is a concept only, it’s made of thought.
Without thought telling us where and what and who the body is or “belongs to” there is no body at all! Without the benefit of memory (thought) you couldn’t know anything about “your body.” How old is it? What size is it? What is its gender? Without thought the body is only random sensations without an actual outline. Without thought to hold it together the body simply disappears.
~ Vonna Smith
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Extract from a post to The Way of Light group
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on freedom, suffering and intimacy
What’s the most life-changing thing I’ve encountered this year? No contest. It’s the in-your-face gut-gripping truth about freedom.
We are taught to associate freedom with something: freedom from…, or freedom to… But freedom stands free of this or that or from or to. Freedom is its own omnipresence, and it is as free at the beginning as at the end – if there were beginnings and ends to be found.
Freedom, for me, has been a long fishing line that has trawled deep and gathered up a submerged shoal of stuff I’d never have imagined would be of remote interest to it. It has fished up pain – both personal and global. It has fished up lostness, failure, grief, contrition, alienation, futility, sadness and depression. It has fished up fear. It has brought all these precious human qualities to the surface to be acknowledged, fully felt and wept over. It has held my pen as I scribbled its dictation, and kept its ruthless gaze focused as my eyes inundated. (Tears! A lifetime’s quota in a year: where were they all stashed away?) It has broken my heart again and again and yet again as I groped for some kind of relatedness that might make me feel known and needed by family and friends. It has showed no mercy, while lovingly embracing my every tiny surrender.
Freedom is simply beyond comprehension. It liberates every known corner of consciousness and every unimaginable one as well. Freedom is a place where there are no life-buoys, no search and rescue teams, no hand-holds, no paths or maps, no cozy cults or religious refuges to retreat within. It is a place beyond time. Imagine that! You can’t. Me either.
No wonder we invest everything we have in serious avoidance of freedom.
So, ok, it’s been a challenging year or three, but going backwards isn’t an option. It’s a one-way tide: destination unknown. But here’s the bonus: freedom has made suffering history. And that’s what has utterly amazed me this year. Suffering is an extinct notion.
Suffering is needing – demanding – that ‘my’ experience of livingness be other than what-it-is.
Freedom is uncensored, unedited and unqualified intimacy with everything, just-as-it-is.
Warts and wondrousness and all.
~ miriam louisa
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here is what I am
tree ferns, open armed
shrouded in thick mistiness rolling in
from the South Pacific
bejeweled spider-web mandala
(bemused spider sheltering under
dripping eaves)
breadcrumbs scattered on glistening deck;
shy thrushes dropping in for breakfast
gleaming flax proudly pointing their ebony flower-laden bracts
skyward; fat Tuis feasting
explosions of agapanthus blue, and white,
on long strong stalks
panels of pieces-in-progress strewn
around the polished Rimu floor
tongues of fire dancing in the little wood stove
keeping the air moisture-free
so paintings can dry
crackle and creak of chimney stack
slow staccato on roof-tile
melting diamonds on window-pane
oboe breathing forth from
magic music box …
what else can I say?
there is nothing that I is not
yet I is nothing and nowhere to be found
– miriam louisa
from longing to belonging
Of late I’ve been marveling at the profound depth and breadth of this uncensored, unresisted, unfiltered experience of livingness. I’ve written about the immense sorrow and the exalted joyfulness and everything in between. It’s been both wondrous and humbling to realize how I managed, for decades, to make sure the door to unlimited livingness was kept safely chain-locked. Only manageable peeks allowed! Equilibrium must be maintained – no messy wetness around the eyelashes eh?
Well that’s all herstory now, as the scribblings here and elsewhere have made explicit. So it was only fitting that I would find myself – this past week – on retreat with a teacher whose immense and compassionate wisdom encompasses the limitless interbeing of life. And whose passion is the sharing of that wisdom.
Falling into this gracious and immeasurable Awareness and knowing it as ‘I’ is a big enough shock. Realizing that this inescapable un-locatable … whateveritis … melts one into seamless intimacy with the movement of Life in its inconceivable creative unfolding is the aftershock that keeps coming and coming and coming like an unstoppable orgasm.
Tarchin Hearn is wise to this. I think he’s a shaman disguised as a very non-sectarian Buddhist. He would chuckle and grin widely. I could write much about my week with him; how he helped me ‘adjust’ to this intimacy, how he opened up fresh vistas of wonderment and refreshed that soft fragile childlike curiosity that had been sidelined over the last difficult decade. But today I just want to offer you a taste of his gentle eco-poetry.
– ml
Going for refuge is ‘longing.’
Being refuge is ‘belonging.’
Everything mirroring, echoing, and creatively responding.
This mysterious temple of knowing.
This paramecium, this bacteria, this person,
this family, this forest, this butterfly,
each a temple of uniqueness,
mutually longing for
and belonging in
every other temple of longing and belonging.
Ocean currents of temple-ing
floating in sensual warmth of never ending
consummation and freshness.– Tarchin Hearn
http://www.greendharmatreasury.org/
this unlit light 