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Wake Up or Bust!

Sounds True — August 13, 2014

As I write this blog post we’re days away from the 2014 Wake Up Festival, and I’m thinking about all of the things I have to do before heading up to Estes Park for four days of camping and “WUFing” as we like to call it. But I’m also thinking about what my intentions are and why I am excited to be fortunate enough to be able to attend. Having experienced the last two Wake Up Festivals, I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the unique energy field that is created by all of the participants. You can feel it the second you get out of your car on the grounds of the YMCA. It’s as if the coming together of several hundred people with the shared intention of becoming more conscious, present, and authentic generates the perfect environment in which such aspirations can become reality. It’s powerful and infectious. And it needs to be if it’s going to fuel changes that continue long after the conclusion of the Wake Up Festival. After all, it’s one thing to spend a week practicing with others but another matter to live what we learn when we return to our everyday lives.

So as I deal with the details of packing and travel and so on, I hope that I’m able to remember why I’m going in the first place, to go with the flow once I get up there without attachment to programs and agendas, and to stay present with the beautiful people and surroundings. And if I’m lucky, the energy of transformation that all of us create will indeed support positive developments for each of us as we move toward the end of another year.

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An outpouring of love stories

Sounds True — June 8, 2014

Perhaps love is not something you need to seek any longer. That it is not something you will finally get more of one day, just as soon as you pray enough, meditate in the right way, forgive better, accept more deeply, finally ‘let it all go’, rest as the ‘witness,’ stay in the ‘now’, and become a perfect spiritual person.

Friend, you will never find more love, for love is what you are. It is what your organs, your nervous system, and the cells of your heart are crafted of. It is forming as your arms when you hold another, as your words when you speak kindness, and as your tongue as you taste the honey-nectar of the beloved as it arrives by way of your sweet lover.

Allow yourself to receive the benediction of pure presence, for it is your birthright. It is wired inside you and longing to erupt from your totally out of control heart. For when it does, an avalanche of grace is unleashed, sending love stories, wild music, and sweet poetry into the stars and supernovas, seeding the galaxies with your unique light.

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Holding Your Experience

Sounds True — March 22, 2014

Will you make a commitment to no longer abandon yourself and your present experience? That no matter what thought, feeling, emotion, or sensation arises, you will offer it a home within you, setting aside the conclusion that it is a mistake, a problem which must be fixed, or evidence that something is wrong with you?

Begin with a sacred pause, touching whatever is there, and state your intention to stay close. Offer a heartfelt “yes” to your experience and allow it to be exactly as it is, cutting into the momentum of billions of lifetimes of turning from the orphaned ones knocking on the door of your heart. Call off the war with yourself, and see that arguing with reality will only ever lead to suffering for yourself and others.

From this ground of seeing and allowing, you could then enter into the most radical act of all: to meet whatever arises in your experience with what Rumi calls a mighty kindness. While it seems so simple, it is in fact a revolution in practice. Open your heart to your rage, your shame, your despair, and your sadness, gently holding and cradling it as you would a sweet little baby, unconditionally receiving it as a raging expression of reality exactly as it is. See that it, too, is path—come only to awaken one of the qualities of love within you.

It is through this wild kindness that you may finally see just how much space there is around your experience, how whatever appears—while very vivid, colorful, energetic, and even disturbing—is luminously transparent, and not nearly as solid as it seems. It is in and through your intimacy with your embodied, present experience that it will self-liberate, without any effort on your part, into the pristine, primordial awareness and love that you are.

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You are free to be who and what you are now

Sounds True — December 7, 2013

The fear of being abandoned. The terror of being lonely forever. The anxiety of being utterly dependent upon another.

The panic of unbearable vulnerability and exposure. The dread of the looming death of yourself and everyone around you.

These are the great fears that come as you wake, as you fall asleep, and as you dream through this life.

In your willingness to take a risk, to feel everything, to truly allow another to matter, and to expose yourself to an eternal sort of heartbreak, you come face to face with the most devastating fear that you’ve ever known, but have never been able to articulate: that you are loved.

For when you are truly loved, when you are entirely seen, when you are fully held, it is the end of your world as you know it. Things will never be the same. You will never again be able to pretend that you are other than precious and whole as you are. The implications of this are dizzying if you let them all the way in.

It is so exhilarating to be seen and held in this way, but it is also terrifying as you are fully naked now, utterly raw, and achingly wide open. Even the breeze as it passes you feels as if it might be too much, for it goes right through your skin to touch your heart. A sunrise, the longing of a little baby, the autumn leaves, looking into the eyes of your lover – you may never be protected again. The particles of love are interpenetrating your entire sensory world and you are just not sure your heart and nervous system can take it.

You are free to be who and what you are now – no longer tied to a past you thought you wanted, no longer bound by the limited, willing to risk it all for love, and free to be the fearless wildness that you are.

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Your heart is love’s tavern

Sounds True — August 24, 2013

There is a brief moment when you imagined that your sorrow was working against you. For an instant there was the sense that your sadness, your despair, and your loneliness were obstacles on the path. But love is a shape-shifter. She will take any form she must to unlock a secret place within you.

Even in the center of your fear, right in the heart of your anxiety, weaved into the fabric of your most scary places there is a raging intelligence, a firestorm of pure creativity. Love is awakening those parts of you that have drifted asleep. This is not a journey into some transcendent, detached, and safe place, but into the heart of a wild, untamed groundlessness. You will feel so much more than you ever felt, care so much more than you ever thought possible, yet you will know nothing. Love will even convince you of her absence if that is how she must reach you.

It may seem like an ordinary Saturday, but what is happening here is far from ordinary. Stop. Breathe. Lay your hands on your sacred body. Touch the earth and feel the aliveness and the rare opportunity that has been given here. It will not last long, friends, for love will be calling you home soon. Every person you meet, each feeling that surges within you, every emotion that comes knocking at the door of your heart, every form that appears – love is sending its messengers to you, one by one.

Your body is love’s temple, your heart is its tavern, your eyes are its windows, your words of kindness are its voice, the way you sweetly touch another are its hands – for it is only through you that love can explode into this world.

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Enter the Mystery

Sounds True — October 31, 2013

Once upon a time there was no time
Only the circling of suns and moons and stars
Across the infinite namelessness

Do you remember?

Breathe deeply and look back with me
Far, far away to the earth’s first dawn
Where we stood together in awe at so much beauty

Can you see it?

When our only purpose was to be
When the present moment was the path
When life whispered in our ears the secrets of the universe
and we knew how to listen

Truly I tell you this day is no different
Originality renews itself in every falling snowflake
Walk then with me into this mystery
Shimmering with answers to questions we need not ask

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Wake Up or Bust!

An outpouring of love stories

Holding Your Experience

You are free to be who and what you are now

Your heart is love’s tavern

Enter the Mystery

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