I’ve been thinking alot recently about the process of commitment: the taking of vows that form a compass for  living.

I spent a couple of years under a Zen teacher and have ever since then harboured a fascination for the process of the taking of precepts in Zen practice.

The Ten Grave Precepts

1. Affirm life; Do not kill
2. Be giving; Do not steal
3. Honor the body; Do not misuse sexuality
4. Manifest truth; Do not lie
5. Proceed clearly; Do not cloud the mind
6. See the perfection; Do not speak of others
   errors and faults
7. Realize self and other as one; Do not elevate the self and blame others
8. Give generously; Do not be withholding
9. Actualize harmony; Do not be angry
10. Experience the intimacy of things; Do not
    defile the Three Treasures

The Red Cedar Zen community write that “the root of all Buddhist practice is sila or ethical conduct”.  They suggest a  process of deepening into the meaning of each of the precepts. Each precepts is taken on, one at a time. They suggest you read relevant commentaries and  “spend about a month considering how that precept plays out in your life, actively process the experience by speaking with a dharma friend or teacher, journalling or writing a letter, repeat the process with the other nine prohibitory precepts.”

So, having started the task of polishing my ethical practice mirror to illuminate my own commitments to life,  I intend to take up the precepts and work through them over time, to see what they mean to me.

I’ve been reading Judith Pickering’s  wonderful book “Being In Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love”.

I’ve been long interested in our ‘heroic task’ as humans, that is, how we come to understand who we are. My own relationship, alongside Dr Pickering’s very sage guidance, been clearly illuminated for me that fundamental to the task of understanding our self, is the task of understand our self-in-relationship. When you start, as I do, mired in the “malignant dowries” of personal history, its an truly arduous, painful task, but it seems without doubt, to be one of the most absolute import.

“The heroic task of the real fairytale is to overcome the phantasies, internal demons, monsters and witches of our perverse imagination.  Becoming who we are may be a relational activity.  Yet such transformations in love are obstructed by the ways we unwittingly conscript each other to play allotted roles in falsely stereotypic and unconscious psychological scenarios.  These scenes create an entangled web of projections obscuring the real situation and preventing authentic intimacy from flourishing. Such scenes involve an interpenetration of unconscious defensive, projective and traumatic material, the malignant dowries that each person brings to the new relationship.

True love may be possible, but it as difficult as it is rare. Its path does not always run smoothly, but goes off course with alarming regularity.  Its achievement is never once and for all, requires continual renewal, and is dependent upon how well any two lovers can understand, work through and disentangle the webs of mutual projections and false imputations imposed upon each other…

The word ‘pathos’ etymologically means sorrow and suffering. Love’s pathologies give rise to the sense of dis-ease and discontent in our relationships.  We do not feel at ease with each other or ourselves. In love we suffer daily irritations, not getting what we want, getting what we don’t want.  We miss the bull’s eye of true love through misinterpretations, mistimings and mismatches.  We suffer the discomforts of being on the receiving end of unwelcome feelings towards us, and the pain of having our feelings and desires not met in the way we want.  Discontent might itself be a disease.

As the Buddha, the Stoics, Augustine, Spnioza, Schopenhauer, Freud and Klein and many others have understood, from the perspective of egocentricity we feel craving for that which brings us pleasure, and antipathy for that which brings pain.  It is this egoic core that is the real enemy of true love.  Destructiveness in relationships can border on the psychopathic, fuelled by unconscious projections, envy, hostility, blaming, shaming, denigrating, demonizing or retaliation…

The sense of security, continuity and trust afforded by a mutually made commitment to journey together in a partnership can allow such a relationship to function as a space in which partners may further their psychological development, re-encounter and rework areas of developmental arrest and come to know and integrate the different parts of themselves more fully…

In committed and fulfilling adult relationships it is not so much about each partner providing a sense of security and containment for the other, but the creation of a psychological atmosphere of safety and refuge, a container, around both partners. Empathy and mind-mindedness, or the ability to see others as subjects in their own right with thoughts and feelings of their own, are also vital components of creating a secure base in close relationships.  When couples have a sense of connection they hold the relationship and the well-being of its members in mind continually.  One might call this ‘relationship-mindedness’.

[Couples in therapy often present with] unprocessed primitive anxieties which have never been worked through. Bion called such primitive bits, ‘beta elements’.  These are untransformed emotional experiences and sensory impressions of a very raw and inchoate form.

The mindless repetition and compulsive nature of many marital rows are symptomatic of the activation of interlocking systems of mutual projections of beta elements or undigested traumatic material.  Each partner has been triggered into their respective unconscious complexes and is swamped by unconscious anxieties, memories of fear, hurt and misunderstanding.  Each urgently attempts to lodge unprocessed beta material into the other in order to rid themselves of its incoherent, chaotic and anxiety-ridden nature.

The therapeutic space as a ‘borrowed container’, as well as the therapist’s capacity and willingness to stand such unprocessed material – to ponder it, experience its re-renactments, digest and reflect on it – enables the couple to feel some reassurance that it is not so unspeakably loathsome and dreadful, it can be thought about.  This enables the couple to introject a capacity to contain difficult material and gradually metabolise and modify it into alpha elements…

This transformation creates a link between preconceptions and new information from the world of others.  This gives rise to further elaborations in the process of thinking, leading to the formulation of intuition, insight and finally coherent theory-making.  All this arises gradually and thoughtfully out of a situation which began as utter confusion.  It is this capacity, however psychologically hard-won, which enables a couple to dismantle their co-constructed prisons of projections…

The therapists capacity to perceive and receive the tangles mass of material, tolerating not knowing, while seeking with every fibre of his or her being to understand, is itself part of the containing function couples are seeking.  This affords the couple the possibility of realizing that their terrible anxieties, lack of coherence and confusion might perhaps after all be something that has the possibility of clarity. To jump to a hasty conclusion or make a premature and simplistic interpretation curtails this process…

Alpha function refers here to the therapist’s capacity to sit with an incoherent mass of chaotically loaded, primitive emotional material (beta elements) emanating from both partners and creating a toxic mutually projective confusion. This is related to negative capability, the capacity to observe a mass of confusing emotional material without jumping to a hasty conclusion, to tolerate not knowing while seeking to know. This containment is modelled to the couple… Frustration and the capacity to sit with it, rather than act out primitive emotional states, generate a capacity for thoughtful consideration.   This transmutes the material under consideration into alpha elements.  Then gradually dream thoughts, dreams, myths, fantasies and narratives emerge out of a cultural unconscious.  These gradually lead to preconceptions and first inklings of what is going on.  Further seminal discussions between the analytic trio (mating of ideas) lead to conception, concept and thence theory, in fact to organised thinking… the ability to gestate such a process, to deepen one’s understanding, without jumping to premature action, leads to the ability to construct preliminary hypotheses, notation, attention, inquiry and thence to mindful, considered action and the final revelation (uncovering) of truth.  All put together, publication, as in a well-thought articulation of the emotional situation may result.  The process involves: observation, containment, reflection, incorporation, comparison, analysis, mating with other ideas, conception, gestation, and final expression of a well-thought and well-timed interpretation…

Love’s therapeutic depends on increasing our capacity to entertain, like a holy guest, presentiments of truth behind the projections and fabrications.  It is to take up an ‘as if’ stance, reception to a niggling doubt that we probably have failed to properly understand a situation, that our perception is clouded, and to factor this into our interactions and reflections.  We can then ponder, be curious and receptive to new insights that may dawn as tentative hypothesis, entertained as such.  It is the language of uncertainty coupled with enquiry, wanting to discover the truth as through a glass darkly.  We increase our psychic capacity to contain and psychically metabolise what was uncontainable: primitive anxieties, dreads, fears of falling to bits, fears of death and destruction. We begin to intuit faint glimmerings of the real person under all our obscurations….

If relational work in couple therapy can be envisioned as a process of aletheia, aiming to uncover the real situation and person behind the mass misconstructions, there is a bewildering array of ways that we misapprehended each other. Projections, identifications, mutual projective identifications, extractive introjections, miscommunications, misinterpretations, fixed ideas, illusions, delusions, idealizations, denigrations, constellations of internal object relations and impositions of relational templates all create an inter-personal mire of Maya, of illusion…

The more we can become aware of our particular unconscious complexes and object relations and how they overlay our perceptions of each other and interfere with our love lives, the more we can factor them in to our healthy scepticism about the veracity of our emotional reactions to others.  We gradually learn to identify and see through such templates and projections.  It might be like seeing through glasses that we know are scratched, dirty or rose-coloured or have distorted lenses, but it has the advantage of loosening the fixity of projective perception.  This requires arduous psychological work such as in an analysis, at the end of which we hopefully find ourselves less under the sway of such endogamous forces or have some insight into what might be going on beneath the surface.  At the very least we are able to ask ourselves difficult questions concerning the hidden factors governing our choices and perceptions.”

(from Chapters  5- 7)

As a corollary, a great quote from psychologist Heinz Kohut on love and acceptance (from How To Be An Adult in Relationships);

“The more secure a person is regarding his (sic)  own acceptability, the more certain his sense of who he is, and the more safely internalised his system of values, the more self confidently and effectively will he be able to offer his love … without undue feelings of rejection and humiliation.”

“all shall be well

and all shall be well

and all manner of things shall be well”

I keep returning to Julian of Norwich’s beautiful saying.

When I remember it, I turn it over, and rub away at it like a prayer bead.

But I realised today that despite its deep attraction for me, I have never looked at it in context.

Julian of Norwich was a cloistered anchoress in the 1300’s who left a set of texts that have been called the Showings, or Revelations of Divine Love which are the details of and commentaries upon her visions.

When contemplating Julian’s phrase I was drawn to the idea of disease and medicine. For all things, including suffering to be well, suffering too must be  considered medicine. And it recalled for me Yumen’s koan: “Medicine and disease cure each other. The entire earth is medicine. What is the self?”

Holding her revelation inside Christian theology,  Julian poses wellness as a different sort of paradox.  Michael Gore writes that,

“At the heart of the revelations received by Julian are her insights into the nature of sin. Even sin, Julian sees, serves a purpose in the plan of the Lord. She discerns only part of the fullness of the purpose of sin; the other portion will remain closed until the end of the age….

Nothing is more reprehensible than sin. As Julian sees it, sin:

is so vile and so much to be hated that it can be compared with no pain which is not itself sin. And no more cruel hell than sin was revealed to me, for a loving soul hates no pain but sin; for everything is good except sin, and nothing is evil except sin.

Brant Pelphrey points out that Julian viewed sin as a lack, or failure, of a person’s basic humanity. Sin is unnatural and harms both ourselves and other human beings. Sin acts as a kind of madness that cripples human nature, leading to anxiety and despair, which Julian identifies as the most significant illnesses brought into the world by sin. So the Lord showed her nothing good in sin. Sin causes all the pain and suffering that the human family endures and is the ground of all the sufferings of Christ. Julian, deeply moved by what she saw concerning the nature of sin, ponders, “I often wondered why, through the great prescient wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not prevented.” This is, certainly, the greatest mystery of the human condition. If God is who God is claimed to be, why then was sin allowed? Why did God not foresee the falling away, and if the Fall was foreseen, why then did God allow it to happen? Jesus responds, telling Julian, “Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.” At the core of Julian’s vision lies this paradox: sin is foul and evil, and yet necessary; and the pain and suffering brought about by sin will all be made right….

Sin is necessary, but for those who love God, sin has no final shame: “And God showed that sin will be no shame, but honour to man….” For each sin, according to Julian, there exists a corresponding pain. But suffering endured because of sin results, finally, in a corresponding joy and reward given by God to those who suffer. Sin ultimately loses its power to wound or destroy those who suffer its pain because of the reward given for enduring the suffering. Jantzen explains this in the following manner:

Julian is clear that the rewards will be so great that we will actually be glad we suffered. Just as Jesus rejoiced in his suffering, because it resulted in that which he greatly desired…. All the joys of heaven cannot justify previous pain and suffering unless those joys are in some way a direct result of the suffering, not just compensating rewards, but as intrinsically impossible without the pain.”

(Michael Gore : Sin will be no shame)

While Julian’s Christian theology is a little alien to me, Julian’s sense of sin as a lack, or failure, of a person’s basic humanity, as unnatural and harmful to self and others, “as a kind of madness.. leading to anxiety and despair”, which is “the most significant illness” in the world; and yet, a necessary suffering, I find somewhat compelling.

If sin can be seen, in an intertextual religious sense, (and this is how I see it) as separation from our recognition of, and being, our true Self; if this horror at our ignorance and the harm it causes, of our Self estrangement, of “life as suffering” is the state we “wake” to (as  humans first of all exist, then encounter themselves, to paraphrase Sartre) ; then this sin is inevitable.

And yet, to quote the Buddha, there is a path out  …

“all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”

Visit to Katagiri Roshi

Diane Di Prima

MARY DALY: OBITUARY

“Radical lesbian feminist theologian Mary Daly died at age 81 on January 3rd. .. She held separate doctorate degrees in English, philosophy, and religion and was widely published. Her books include The Church and the Second Sex, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, and Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy…

Mary E. Hunt, co-founder and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER), announced Daly’s death in a bulletin from the Feminist Studies in Religion bulletin and said, “Her contributions to feminist theology, philosophy, and theory were many, unique, and if I may say so, world-changing. She created intellectual space; she set the bar high. Even those who disagreed with her are in her debt for the challenges she offered…She always advised women to throw our lives as far as they would go. I can say without fear of exaggeration that she lived that way herself.”

According to the National Catholic Reporter, Daly once wrote, “There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so.” (read the full obituary here)

In honour of her passing  I’m sharing a section from my PhD (below) which charts the evolution of her feminist theology:

Mary Daly : Reweaving the Journey

Mary Daly began her scholarly exploration in the discourse of classical Catholic theology. Her experience as a woman within the confines of this tradition provoked her to launch a fervent, feminist post-Christian attack on sexism in the Church and society at large in her books The Church and The Second Sex (1968) and Beyond God the Father (1973) (Stuckey 1998, 77). She wrote that “if God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling his people, then it is the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan … that society be male dominated. Within this context, a mystification of roles takes place: The husband dominating his wife represents God ‘himself’”  (Daly in Christ 1979, 275). While her work recognised the women’s movement as ontological, her early impulses were to revolutionise the Church. While recognising that He needed to be rethought and re-worded in this early phase Daly still felt the need to ‘save’ God, as the  ground of being and core spiritual essence (Daly 1992, 222: also Campbell 2000, 175). Her response was ‘God the Verb’. In the process of “leaving the patriarchal space-time of God the Father” women might participate in God the Verb a “form-destroying, form-creating, transforming power that makes all things new” (Daly in Stuckey 1998, 77).

Daly’s early work was significantly responsive to the progressive theology of Paul Tillich. Tillich posed ‘Being-itself’ (a metaphor for God) as a response to the “universal ‘human’ existential dilemma” of non-being (Scheider 2000, 59). For Tillich, ‘New Being’ appeared in the figure of Jesus Christ as the reality and possibility of “reconciliation and reunion, of creativity, meaning and hope” (Schneider 2000, 59-60). Daly recapitulated ‘Being-itself’ to the specifics of woman’s confrontation with the dilemma of patriarchy:  ‘Women’s Be-ing’, ‘New Be-ing’ and ultimately ‘Metabeing’ were infused with “an evolutionary understanding of the nature of the immanent and the transcendent” (Schneider 2000, 68). ‘Women’s Be-ing’ was manifest in the “unfolding of woman-consciousness”. This consciousness was created through the confrontation with, and journey beyond, patriarchal space, and as such Daly recognised the feminist journey itself as “an intimation of the endless unfolding of God” (Daly in Campbell 2000, 175).

In Beyond God the Father Daly identified women’s marginalisation from the power of symbols and naming as the root of their oppression.  Women, she boldly declared have “had the power of naming stolen from us” (Daly 1973, 8). Gyn/Ecology marked Daly’s philosophic movement into radical feminist separatism. Performing a classic rejectionist inversion, Daly completely rejected men and all male imagery for God, “reversing its reversals” (Daly 1993, 326) and heralded female-only imagery as life affirming for women (Stuckey 1998, 77). She set out to reclaim the power of naming by re-“spinning” language (Daly 1992, 322).

Mary Daly’s work has been one of the most significant demonstrations of the ethic of feminist mythopoesis.  Mythopoesis (the artistic reimagining or revision of mythology) has been one of the most significant strategic responses to the constraints of the male symbolic. One frequently used mythopoetic strategy has been to deconstruct a myth in which woman has been excluded and to reconstruct it in a way that gives voice to a female figure from the corpus who was previously “silent, objectified or inaudible”(Purkiss 1992, 445: see also, Ostriker 1986, 316). Daly’s mythopoetic strategy has been to consciously deconstruct the barriers between philosophy, theology and the mythic, and to redefine symbolic spiritual language with woman positioned as the primary subject (Daly 1992, 323-4).

With “phallocentric reality” maintained by the western religious construct Daly proposed that a reversal of the religious symbolic contained the potential to create an upheaval that would shift the very base of Western thought (Caputi in Larrington 1992, 425), causing “the world to ‘split open’” (Caputi 2001, 20). Through the “restoration and reinvention” of language, women might “once more name and own their elemental, magical powers”(Raphael 1996, 60).

Daly’s practice of symbolic transformation was purposefully designed to “open up levels of reality otherwise closed”, to “unlock dimensions and elements of our souls” (Caputi in Larrington 1992, 428). In this she utilises what Campbell described as the “energy-evoking and –directing” principle of symbolic affect (Campbell 1972, 219). Symbolic affect is defined as coming into being and existing independently of language, speaking directly to the feeling system and manifesting itself “with a viscerally felt integrity” that is “not addressed first to the brain” “(Cates 1995, 1). Campbell writes that an affective symbol “hits one where it counts …[and] immediately elicits a response … There is some kind of throb of resonance within … like the answer of a musical string to another equally tuned … when the vital symbols of any given social group evoke in all its members responses of this kind, a sort of magical accord unites them as one spiritual organism” (Campbell 1972, 89). This is Daly’s desire, to affectively unite women and evoke transformative change: “not only [in] the self, but also [in] the world” (Caputi in Larrington 1992, 428).

It is not an easy task. Daly names herself a Pirate on a mission to reclaim “the Treasure Trove of symbols and myths that have been stolen and reversed by the theological thieves” (Daly 1992, 325). The negotiation of this complex maze of symbol and imagery is itself “the journey of women becoming” (Daly in Morris 1998, 27).

The Journey has been described as a “central axis” of Daly’s philosophy (Campbell 2000, 174). In ‘Women’s Be-Dazzling Journey’ the call is for women to awaken from their stuckness in patriarchal space.  It is the patriarchal threshold of gender roles and rules that she must cross and her journey is an ongoing process of questioning this conventional cultural space in which she finds herself (Campbell 2000, 166). This enquiry and her bold response enables her ‘Be/Leaving’, her increasing realisation and her ‘Be-coming’; all of which deepens her ability to participate in “ever Unfolding Be-ing” (Daly 1992, 3).

I met  Alexandra Jaye in Bali last year.

She’s a vibrant woman who really has her finger on the pulse of healthy living, and she is also the partner of Philosopher Notes’ Brian Johnson, and so notably informed by his work.

She has a program for women starting in January that looks like a great way to dig into focused integral living

Rock Your Goddess Life Online Program

A 12 Week Program (12 sessions)

Would you like to…

* Look and feel fabulous (yay!:)
* Love your body
* Explore new foods & ways of eating
* Love & appreciate your life
* Connect to your true essence
* Feel vibrant, energetic & awesome
* Create & manifest beautiful visions for your future
* Learn how to nourish your body, mind & spirit
* Live your truths and be YOU fully
* Be Inspired, Empowered, & Laugh a lot

If Yes: It’s Time To Rock Your Goddess Life!!

This class meets weekly for twelve weeks and will be a combination of lecture, group discussion and fun projects & exercises. The focus will be on self love, food, spirituality, self care, wellness, relationships, movement, fun & play, meditation, and whatever else flows through!

It will be a journey into bio-individuality, where we will find ways of being, eating, and living that support your true essence to shine! Essentially…Rock Your Goddess Life in your own style!

It will be a fun group setting, and we will support each other in implementing gradual changes week by week that will contribute to  long-term health, joy, yumminess, love and radiance!

Plus: You’ll get one-on-one time with me!

Here’s what you’ll get:

* 12 group sessions (weekly: 75 min. calls)
* 3 One-on-one appointments with me (40 minutes each)
* E-mail support for your questions
* Fun Inspiring and Uplifting videos
* Meditations & Visualizations
* Awesome handouts & worksheets
* Quick & Easy Recipes
* Access to Live Interviews I do for MyGoddessLife.com Podcast
* Lots of Goddess tools to rock your Goddess Life
* A buddy for extra lovin’ & support

Dates: Mondays at 5:30 pm – 6:45 pm PST (Group Conference Call)

Starts: January 18th, 2010

Not sure you can commit to every call? No problem! The intention is to have everyone’s Goddess energy on the call but if you happen to miss a call or three, no worries as there will be recordings of all the calls for you to download!

Program Investment: $99 (paypal or check)

alexandra at mygoddesslife.com

As this year draws festively to a close, renewal and resilience are themes that have been on my mind ….

Starhawk’s post reflecting on the Solstice and passing  year reflects these too..

“…the message of Solstice is this:  hope does not come once into the world and fulfill itself.  Hope and light must constantly be reborn, over and over again.  They wax and wane, and must be renewed.

That renewal, that birthing, requires labor.  Labor means work, commitment, perseverance through that time when it seems you just can’t push any more.  The cervix dilates slowly, pang by pang.  The child begins to emerge, is drawn back, pushed forward another increment.

We are the laboring Mother, we are the spark of light.  New possibilities kick and squirm within us.  No, it’s not easy to bring them forth, but we are strong, and we are made for this work.  Bear down…breathe…push.  This morning the sun rises;  each day a new world is born.”

Starhawk

read the whole blog

By Jaya Ashmore from Open Dharma

One of the Open Centre themes that most fascinates me is Leadership as service: or courage as humility and expression, embodiment of Dharma, the Sanskrit kalyaan… A curious kink with the new version of the website in June brought out a small example of this leading edge, leadership that serves the good of all. After we launched the new website a retreatant emailed to alert us that she could not access any of the new features. Since I have 884 unread emails in my inbox, I simply (and promptly, for once) thanked the person for the “heads up” and forwarded the email to Ernest, our web wizard. Ernest assured us both that there was no problem “from his side,” but within a week I forwarded emails from the same frustrated person to Ernest.

Ernest says he sighed to himself, “This is not my responsibility; but okay, let’s see what we can do.” This is the moment (not so glorious after all) where we turn our life over to a calling greater than the call of payment, position, or approval. (What if we could feel as “responsible” for spiritual callings—without the heaviness or “should”—as we do for our career “vocation” and other roles we have accepted from society?) When we let ourselves respond—be responsible—to something other than our “job description,” we allow joy a deep hold on our cells. This joy consecrates all it touches. This joy allows the necessary, the longed-for–the fully satisfying dedication of all we have and are–back to life itself. This is where time and the timeless meet. By the way, Ernest’s free response—in addition to helping a new friend see the fresh website—taught us a small trick that may be of use. Someone else had viewed the old version of www.opendharma.org on the same public computer that our retreatant/friend used in an internet shop in Dharamsala. The computer remembered the old link and, to save time, directed our friend to the stored version of the website. To access the new site, one has to delete the prompt that appears as one types in a web address. And start fresh.

We often use our power of remembering in the same way as the computer—to “save time” or to protect ourselves. We filter our lives through our heads. To uncover our ability to respond freshly, we use different kinds of remembering wisely. Four kinds of remembering.

1) Memory based on past experience can save time, but can obviously block us from seeing what has changed, and what we could not perceive previously. If we have a tendency to ignore certain things—someone else’s trickiness or our own—we can let past burns remind us to slow down and get off of automatic pilot.

2) Slowing down can help us learn to find a big enough perspective to take our own experience into account, so that we can really learn from our past. Then we are not just trying to remember, but also starting to gather and embody wisdom.

Wendell Berry writes about the importance of continuity in farming, and we can apply his wisdom to life. We can understand the “farm” as the responsibilities of our life—the opportunities for response in our life, a life so fully spiritual that there is no need to call it spiritual. Berry values “a remembered history of own mistakes and the remedies of those mistakes.” We will know from experience, “not just…what is… technologically possible” on the farm, but also what actually works, what we can do and what we can not do on the farm.* I love Berry’s call to join in on the love affair between the limited and the limitless: he says that with time we will understand the ways in which we and the farm, “empower and limit one another.” We can give up the habit of assuming that limitations limit us in any ultimate way. We can have enough confidence to look into, feel intimately, and work creatively with limitations like our insecurity, loneliness, anger, grief, and fear; our broken nose and heart; our noisy apartment and mind; our fat belly and thin patience; our lacks and our surpluses. We can sometimes accept the limitations of our lives with less resentment, envy, shame, and self-pity. We notice that the beauty of uniqueness lies in limitation, and we start to look less for the shelter of imitation or approval. We start to respond to our own unique way. As we gradually get our toes into the earth of our actual lives, with its seeming limitations, we uncover other kinds of remembering.

3) More and more often we hear life calling and we spontaneously respond. We re-member; we give ourselves back to our spiritual core. The specifics (the limitations) of this here and this now offer just the right opening for us to fall through, just the right encouragement for our spiritual eyes to open. And then we can actually experience that those seemingly solid obstacles—the chair, the anger—are not fixed, stuck, or dead. They need not be limited to our ideas based on past experience of them. In this dimension, they are fully alive. They are not limiting in the way we assumed. There is room for creative response.

www.opendarma.org

I’ve had great respect for Bill Moyers ever since I watched him interview Joseph Campbell for the fantastic “Power of Myth” series.

Today, I found this great video of him interviewing Tibetan nun Pema Chodron, one of my very favourite spiritual teachers.

Then, digging around a little deeper on the net, found a great archive of his ‘Journal’ videos on PBS.

I can’t wait to watch them!

resonance from the very lovely blog Uncomplicatedly

“I turn, as I often do, to Simone Weil. One fragment in her notebooks goes like this: “Possible loves — are for fools — the wise have — impossible loves.” Weil has a gift for making counterintuitive statements that are strangely compelling, forcing you to change your habits of thinking, and this line is no exception. Two kinds of impossible loves come to mind first: those that are prevented by circumstances, and those that are unrequited. Weil is perhaps trying to tell us that these unrealizable loves are valuable because they ask us to make a change, to either break free from those repressive circumstances or to try to improve ourselves to be worthy of our beloved. Possible loves require no such change, and therefore do not help us grow. .. But there is a third kind of “impossible love” that Weil might be referring to: not the love that is denied us, but the love that we — impossibly — receive. If you can remember that everyone who loves you is a miracle, and if you work every day towards deserving that love, then I don’t think it matters whether you love fifty people or just one person over the course of your lifetime. Love can always change you for the better if you let it.”