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Intuition Travels on Love

Tami Simon speaks with Sharon Franquemont, an intuition expert who has taught individuals, couples, and organizations how to channel their intuitive gifts, and helped establish the first graduate program in intuition at John F. Kennedy University. With Sounds True, Sharon has created several audio programs, including You Already Know What to Do and Intuition: Your Electric Self. In this episode, Tami talks with Sharon about the nature of intuitive knowing and how it relates to the ground of being, why intuition is now being taken so seriously in the field of nursing, how to work with intuition when you’re suffering from an illness, and Sharon’s advice for cultivating radical intuition. (52 minutes)

The light within the darkness

In speaking with a friend this morning, I was reminded of the great bias in our culture toward the light and away from the darkness. When we meet with a friend who is depressed, introverted, shut down, or otherwise not beaming and joyful, we become quite convinced, quite quickly, that something is wrong. We scramble to put them back together, to remind them of all the gifts in their life, to let them know everything will be better soon. Of course this is natural. But much of this also arises out of our own discomfort and anxiety around the darkness, and all that is unresolved within us. Perhaps as little ones it was not safe to feel these feelings, not to mention express them.

It is possible the kindest thing we can offer to our precious friend is to sit in the darkness with them, so that they know that we are fully here with them; we do not need to remove them from the darkness, we do not need them to “heal,” “transform,” be happy or awaken – we will love them as they are. We resist the temptation to project our unlived life upon them.

Love is the totality, it is whole, it is raging and alive in the darkness, shining brightly in its own way. Within this darkness, this sadness, this grief, this existential aloneness is something very real, breaking through the dream of partiality. There is a richness here, something is happening, but what that is does not support conventional egoic process; nor does it support our cultural fantasy of a life of invulnerability. Here, everything is alive, everything is path, everything is God. God is not only the joy and sweetness, but comes at times as Kali to reorder your world. We can hold hands with our friend and look at Kali together and finally see what she has to say.

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There is no “there” there

Of course, like most people with even a rudimentary exposure to spiritual teachings, I have heard that the only moment is the present moment. I thought I understood this. But I have to tell myself the truth: I might understand this theoretically and even deeply in certain moments of heightened aliveness, but all of me doesn’t live this way. I know this because I have just uprooted a portion of my being that has been orienting toward a future “Promised Land”, a promised land that turns out is totally fictitious (I even have a new motto, “There is no promised land”).

Here’s how I discovered this: We have a new leadership team at ST and some part of me has believed that this new team was like “heavenly super stars” or a basketball team destined to win the championship and set all types of new world records in the process. And the fact is we do have a powerful new team that will bring the company forward in all kinds of new ways. But this new team is made up of HUMANS not heaven-dwellers. And there is no end to difficult business challenges and the complexities of human dynamics.

There are people in my mediation community who often take an attitude “don’t you know nothing ever really works out?”  And I have had a response inside that goes something like, “that is such a negative attitude….maybe it doesn’t work out for you because you are so negative in the first place.” But I think I understand now what is being pointed to in a statement like “nothing ever really works out” — not that wonderful things don’t happen but that our fantasies of some perfect future are just that – fantasies.

I was sharing all of this with my partner Julie before we were going to sleep the other night, sitting up in bed together on our new bright turquoise silk sheets. And I said “There is no promised land”. And she said to me “The promised land is right here.” And at that moment, our eyes met and the space of the room opened up, and it felt like we were melting into eternity. The edges of Julie’s body started dissolving into the space of the room and she looked like a deity to me, sitting on a bed of turquoise silk with pink and gold curtains behind her. And I knew she was right about the promised land, that if it exists at all, it is only because it is right here, relaxing into the beauty, brightness and space of the moment.

So now I am asking myself these types of questions: When I build up some vision of a promised land, why am I doing this? What ego need am I trying to have met by this or that fantasy? What is it about the present moment that I just can’t bear such that I need to create a vision of some idealized future? Why do I continue to invest in “there” when there is no “there” there?

I remember listening to Thich Nhat Hanh teach walking meditation. He offered the teaching that with each footstep touching the ground we could say silently to ourselves “I have arrived.” He pointed out how most people are always rushing ahead to some future moment, and he said, let’s look at this logically, the future moment you are rushing to will eventually be your grave. What’s the big hurry?

And what amazes me about the dharma is how endlessly deep it is (I heard Thich Nhat Hanh teach on this almost two decades ago and I thought “arriving in the present moment” was something I understood). I feel humbled (from the root word “humus” or earth) to have a fantasy bubble popped in such an obvious way, and to be returned to the earth, arriving right here in the groundless space of this moment, in the only promised land there is.

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Meditation as Loving Life

Tami Simon speaks with Lorin Roche, a renowned meditation teacher who teaches an approach called Instinctive Meditation. Lorin is the author of several popular books, including Meditation Made Easy and the forthcoming book The Radiance Sutras from Sounds True. He has also created the Sounds True audio learning program Meditation for Yoga Lovers. In this episode, Tami speaks with Lorin about the “posture” of welcoming all experience, ways that we can allow the body to teach the mind, and his radical understanding of desire, which plays a key part in his teaching on how we can create an individual approach to our spiritual practice. (68 minutes)

A wildness that wishes to be resurrected through you

Love is inviting you in every moment to undress, to remove your clothing and stand naked in this world. But to accept this invitation you must leave the known. You must set aside your hopes and fears, your quest for safety, and your fantasies of awakening and resolution. And allow love to dismantle you. You will never find ground, security, certainty, or surety in the fires of love, but there is something much more majestic being offered. There are billions of unique cells which have assembled to form your one, untamed heart. It is not a resting place you are after but for a wildness to be resurrected through you.

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Free guide to meditation

When creating the (free) With Insight Guide to Meditation for Sounds True, I wanted to include a short quote for the front page, to summarize at least one way of approaching the meditative journey. When I came across the following description by my friend Shinzen Young, I knew I had found the right one. Nicely said, brother Shinzen:

“The ultimate expression of meditation comes when we can feel all the pains of the world, experience them with mindfulness and equanimity so they dissolve into energy, and then recolor that energy and radiate it out as unconditional love, moment by moment, through every pore of our being.”

Access all of the With Insight Guides here.

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