Customer Favorites

Is What You Seek Actually Already Here?

 

As we let go into the current of truth, it gains momentum, and an increasingly intimate inner dialogue unfolds between our conditioned mind and our unconditioned nature. If you want to cooperate with this process (which I assume you do), it is important to honestly examine your motives.

 

MEDITATIVE INQUIRY

What Do You Really Want?

 

Find a quiet, comfortable place where you won’t be disturbed, close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths. Let your attention settle down and in, resting in the heart area. When you are ready, ask yourself: “What is it that I really want?” Let the question go. Don’t go to your mind for an answer. Just wait, listen, sense, and feel. The response may come first as a sensation or as an image before it becomes a word. Or it may come first as a word or phrase.

 

Whatever comes, check for inner resonance. Does it ring true for you? Something usually lights up, enlivens, releases, or opens up in the body if you have touched an important inner truth.

 

***

 

It is crucial to be honest with yourself. Usually we have mixed motives. I certainly did. Even as I was highly interested in discovering what is true, I was also looking for approval from others and wanting to survive. Social acceptance and physical safety are fundamental, closely intertwined desires, and we often need to play them out until we see through them. This usually takes time.  

 

If you believe that your happiness depends upon finding the right partner or career, or upon accumulating wealth or power, you may need to explore these options in order to discover their limitations. Conceptual insight—knowing that happiness does not depend upon circumstances—is rarely enough. Your life experience is a vital curriculum, and there will be a number of opportunities to experience its fierce grace.

 

You may be able to speed up this process by asking yourself what you imagine you will gain if you acquire the objects or meet the goals you are seeking. As a thought experiment, complete some of the following sentences that resonate for you:  

 

If I find the right partner, I will feel _________.

 

If I have children or grandchildren, I will experience _________.

 

If I have enough good friends or belong to the right community, I will feel _________.

 

If I have the right job or career, I will be _________.

 

If I have enough money and own a home and nice car, I will be _________.

 

If I have better health, I will _________.

 

If I eat enough delicious food, have great sex, travel to enough interesting and exotic places, and work hard enough, I will finally _________.

 

If I am at the right place at the right time in the future, I will _________.

 

If I discover my soul’s purpose, I will _________.

 

Then ask yourself: 

 

Is it true that what I seek is not already here?

 

If you let your heart wisdom answer, this last question can be a mindbender. The strategic mind will be stunned. If you trust your heart’s answer and act on it, you will master life’s curriculum much more quickly, avoiding some of its remedial dead ends.

 

As intention clarifies, attention focuses.  

 

Of course, we can gain some degree of transient satisfaction if the above if-then statements are fulfilled, but there will always be an underlying sense of dissatisfaction until the Deep Heart is consciously recognized. My teacher Jean Klein often observed that “the object never fulfills its promise.” Certainly not for long. Have you noticed that once we attain an object or reach a goal, the hunt is soon on again? Although part of us enjoys the drama of the chase, it is the respite from the search that we most want—the true homecoming.

 

Once we discover an underlying wholeness in the depths of our being, the relationship to desire changes. We are much less attached to getting what we want and much more grateful for what we have. It is a path of natural contentment rather than willful renunciation. An inner sense of fullness arises that is increasingly independent of circumstances, and we feel happy for no particular reason.  

 

Journey into the depths of your own heart with Dr. John J. Prendergast’s guide, The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence.

John J. Prendergast, PhD, is a spiritual teacher, author, psychotherapist, and retired adjunct professor of psychology who now offers residential and online retreats. For more, please visit listeningfromsilence.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buy your copy of The Deep Heart at your favorite bookseller!

Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound

 

 

The Sacred Art Of Taking A Bath

 

When I tell my students that one of the most magical things they can do is take a bath, I rarely have to say anything more, for we intuitively know that the time we take to shower and bathe is time touched by wild magic, and the space in which we do so is space imbued with the scent of the sacred.

 

Make Your Bath Sacred


Consider your own bathing rituals right here and right now. Begin with the fundamental question, “What needs to be washed away, removed, released?” And then, “What kind of bathing appeals to you the most?” A brisk shower or a slow bath? If you use products like bubbles, soap, bath salts, or body scrubs, why did you select them? Do you love to bathe in the privacy of your own home, or do you feel most connected to your remembered magic when you immerse yourself into a wildly running river, the cresting waves of a great ocean, or the green depths of a limestone spring? What elements need to be in place to change your bathing experience from one that is merely practical and about physically cleaning yourself to one that is also extraordinary and capable of washing away deeper marks and struggles?

 

Where do you feel dry?

Just as the land where we live contains water, our soul soil also holds swift rivers, vast oceans, and deep springs. These interior waters are the places understood to hold the human capacity for deep feeling and emotion, creativity, love and compassion, vitality and nourishment. And just like bodies of water in the surrounding world, our interior waters can be dammed up, walled off, covered over, and blocked in a variety of ways. These waters can also be polluted. Sometimes this is done by others or is a result of the toxic aspects of the culture at large, and sometimes we do it to ourselves without realizing it. Having set up house in multiple arid lands, I can tell you from firsthand experience that the presence or the absence water in our surrounding world presses us to ask hard questions about our internal waters. Consider where your life feels dry, uninspired, lacking creativity, fecundity, and fertility? Where are the places that have become too tough and hard and not nearly tender enough? Where has your soul soil been in drought for year upon year, so that all you can find there is dry dust and cracks in the ground? Where is the spark of life lacking or completely absent? 

 

Where do you feel in the flow?

After considering what makes you feel dried up and devitalized, consider the opposite. What calls up your life and creativity? What makes you feel like your inner landscape is well irrigated and flowing with wide rivers or caressed by ocean waves? What are the ways that you best clean up the hurt places in your life? What are the medicines that help you heal most readily and completely? Our work here calls us to an awareness of the places that feel broken, the parts of life and the stories, beliefs, and habits that devitalize us from the inside out. Working with water in an intentional manner can also highlight these places, for we become acutely aware of where precisely there is lack. It is natural to feel that there is not enough water in the whole world to slake the deepest soul thirst and soothe the most parched places of our hearts. It is true: there is not enough water in the world to quench that thirst. But there is enough water in each of us. When you live in a desert, as I have for most of my life, you come to know this as fact. There is good water, strong and flowing, usually many miles beneath the surface, and when the thunderclouds come in and the wind begins to blow just so, the sheer rocks themselves begin to usher forth rivers and streams, and the well that springs up from the deepest self carries on its waves life-bestowing and life-affirming blessings.

 

Don’t have time for a full sacred bath every day? Try these stepping stones instead!

Make moon water. Fill up a clear glass jar with water and leave the top of it open. Set it outside under a full moon. Drink it down the next morning and note the texture, taste, and feel of the water as you do. Notice too how your body feels after drinking it.

 

Create a sacred spray. Get a spray bottle, fill it with water, add a few drops of your favorite essential oils, and use this quick version of sacred water to spritz yourself and your home, as you like.

 

Give yourself a footbath. Fill a basin with warm water, and add a teaspoon of baking soda, some lemon and lime slices, and any essential oils you like. After soaking your feet, pick out an oil or lotion to anoint your feet. Cleansing and anointing the feet is an ancient practice that honors one of the most sensitive (and taken for granted) parts of our bodies.  

 

This is an excerpt from Making Magic: Weaving Together the Everyday and the Extraordinary by Briana Henderson Saussy.

 

Download a free Making Magic journal here.

Briana Saussy is a teacher, spiritual counselor, and founder of the Sacred Arts Academy, where she teaches tarot, ceremony, alchemy, and other sacred arts for everyday life. She lives in San Antonio, Texas. For more, visit brianasaussy.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buy your copy of Making Magic at your favorite bookseller!

Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound

 

 

The Mystery of Thanksgiving

We are quite sure that tomorrow will come, that the most sacred breath will be there, that grace will take shape as the sun falling into the ocean, as the moon in the sky, and as the crystals in the newly fallen snow. That the particles of love will continue to configure as the precious deer that we run into on our morning walk. It is so easy to take for granted that we will be given one more opportunity to touch and hold another, and fill them with our love.

But another part of us knows it is so fragile here, so precarious, so extraordinary – that something is happening that is so very precious, rare, and outrageous – and that it will not be here for much longer. Recognizing this, let us give thanks on this new day by doing whatever we can to help others, by being willing to burn for love, never apologizing for our uniqueness, sensitivity, and vulnerability.

At the end of this life – which is sure to come much, much sooner than we’d like – it is quite unlikely we’ll be asking if we accomplished the tasks on our to-do lists, if we completed some mythical spiritual journey, perfected ourselves, played it safe, or achieved all of our goals. Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?

Did I pause each day to behold the movement of grace as it has unfolded in each and every radiant here and now moment? Did I look with awe into the miracle sunset and the glory of the stars and give my raw beating heart to this world? Did I risk everything to know the preciousness of what is truly happening here? Was I willing to feel more, care so deeply, let everyone matter, and be utterly devastated at even the possibility of one more sunrise? Was I willing to fall in love, to truly fall in love?

Did I spend my time here in this star of love wisely, with my heart open and available, knowing it could be broken in any moment? Did I dance with the beloved around the moon, wander with her into the desert and into the darkness, play with her in the depths of the oceans, and give everything for just one glimpse of the mysteries of separation and union?

I hope I make it all the way through this sweetest of ever thanksgiving days, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.

deer3

Photographer unknown

Unconditioned Awareness and the Challenges of Everyday...

Friends, many of you commented that you really enjoyed the online video dialogue we recently offered with Peter Fenner and Jeff Foster, moderated by Sounds True founder Tami Simon.

Many of the world’s great wisdom traditions speak of the “natural” state, one of unconditioned awareness where we meet reality directly as it is. What is this experience of unconditioned awareness and how is it related to healing and transformation? Is it some sort of resting place? Is it something we can cultivate through spiritual practice or in some other way? And most importantly, how does the experience of unconditioned awareness shift the way we relate with difficulties in our lives, challenges around intimacy and relationships, our work in the world, and the way we experience feelings and emotions?

I hope you enjoy the dialogue and that you find it meaningful and useful in your life.

Great Doubt, Great Confidence, Great Courage

Tami Simon speaks with Stephen Batchelor a former monk in the Tibetan and Koran Zen traditions with a humanistic, non-dogmatic approach to Buddhism. He is the author of the new book Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, and the Sounds True audio learning program Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening. Stephen speaks about the importance of doubt in spiritual practice, lessons from the historical life of the Buddha, and how he is exploring the Buddha’s teachings in a post-modern world. (61 minutes)

Andrew Newberg: God and the Brain

In this week’s episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College, and adjunct assistant professor in the department of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Tami asks Dr. Newberg about some of the new findings in the emerging field of neurotheology, which studies the links between faith, neurobiology, and the mysteries of the psyche. What changes take place in the brain of people who meditate or pray? What happens when we die? How does faith influence both our brain chemistry and the overall quality of our lives? Join Tami Simon and Dr. Andrew Newberg for a fascinating discussion of these questions and more. (63 minutes)

>
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap