Thoughts
Our living bodies have an active warmth. When we die our bodies become cold as they have lost the intention to warm. Between life and death, what enters our bodies we warm to our temperature. Each breath we take we permeate with our warmth before we exhale. In breathing, the substance we are taking in is “itself”, but once within our being, we impress something of ourselves into it. This something is our warmth. This also happens to all we touch. As we press against surfaces, we warm them up. Our bodies bear the intention to warm, not just to be warm.
Intimacy occurs when we feel the warmth of another and they feel our warmth. Think of the brush of warmed breath and warm skin. We experience active warmth coming from deep within others and they experience it coming from deep within us.
Pause your reading for a moment and simply imagine this sweet warm feeling of intimacy.
When I sit on a chair that was recently occupied by another, the chair bears their warmth. Always I am aware that I am feeling something of the other, even if they are a stranger that I did not catch a glimpse of. Of course, I leave my warmth where I sit to be felt by another.
I also want my hands that reach out to touch another to be warm. I want to give warmth, not need warmth. Yet, nothing feels better than a warm hug and warm words when some experience has left me chilled, unable to experience my own warmth.
Our souls warm what they breathe in. A new thought or feeling enters with one temperature and when we permeate with our interest, we warm it and change its temperature.
We feel heartwarmed noticing the warmth living in the way another speaks a phrase, sips her tea or scratches his head. Part of grief is the missing of the way a loved one warmed a thought, a feeling or a deed - the way they warmed the world.
I spent twenty minutes a few days ago gazing at Raphael’s Alba Madonna in the National Gallery in Washington. Raphael’s painting warms my soul. He warmed the world with this painting. Our great artists breathe in our earthly world and great spiritual realities and warm them with their souls and give them back to the world with their extraordinary genius. And this warmth remains forever.
1
On this Second Holy Night feel your intention to warm and how you experience this intention living in others.
2
A few questions to warm up with your contemplation and exploration:
What new ideas did you breathe in this year and how did you warm them with your own genius?
What great works of art have warmed your soul this year or over your lifetime?
3
Are you aware of your ability to kill/chill an idea, a desire or an effort to produce, create or manifest? (We human beings have the gift/curse of opposition.)
What lights your spiritual fires and keeps the warmth of enthusiasm living in your thinking, your feeling and your willing?
4
I breathed in the question, “What is the inner intention to warm about?” and I have warmed it with my soul. Now it is your turn.
Imagine your soul as a sun bring warming the past, the present and the future. You might want to make a list of how your inner sun warms all it receives.
5
Please warm us up with your warm thoughts and feelings about warmth. Write a comment for us to read.
When you wrote about sitting on a chair that another had sat on - it reminded me of being at a conference with the Dalai Lama in India -- he was the speaker during the morning, and after he left the room with his attendants, the MC asked me to come up and do the closing prayer before lunch. He gestured me to the chair His Holiness had been sitting on, and as I sat down I felt a distinct warmth & a zipping of energy move through my body!!
ReplyDeleteI dreamt last night of an abandoned baby nobody wanted to hold because if she was left she grew quiet and gave up on crying for attention.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded that warmth hurts initially on cold limbs and wounded hearts. How to unfreeze gently, kindly? Like blowing ever so softly on kindling?
When i think of warmth i do get a image in my mind of the house of Picasso in the South of France. Walking in the sunshine with my friend Donal I felt the warmth of being in the circle of somebody who made great paintings and was a great man. Being together with someone i do not see anymore is special because i can feel his warmth everyday. I now i do not cry about that because he is in my heart forever.
ReplyDeleteMerry inner x-mas.
Linde
Warmth.
ReplyDeleteI hold my guitar trying to sing with it Jeff Buckley's song - "Hallelujah". It is a beautifull song that fills me with warmth. As i try to sing it i find my voice, body and soul in battle. In battle as i want to surrender to the song, surrender to the voice, surrender to the soul, while at the same time not willing to give up the control. At the same time supervising the process of surrendering. It brings forth a image. I see myself on a plate that i hold as a waiter. On the plate is me. My soul, my heart, my body. I offer the plate to everybody in the room. You may take which ever piece you please or just appreciate the plate. I take down my shield and stand before you naked, ready to share our love, ready to share our pain. Ready to endure the forks, to enjoy the bites flavoured with juicy lips, to be bathed in wine so my soul may nourish. Ready for a meeting, ready for dispair, ready for death, ready for birth.
Warmth.
Merry Christmass.
Ivan
Walk with Two Suns (for winter solstice)
ReplyDeleteIn the dark mid-winter you must walk with two suns. Kindle the flame of your internal heat. Set your chakras spinning, let the kundalina rise. Be drunk with joy.
And should you wake shivering in your cold castle, cry out to the gods of earth, fire, and flowers. Demand solar powers. Be drunk with dreams.
You are the bloom reaching for warmth. You are a land fecund with fruit. Be drunk with light.
Carnal and sacred in your flesh, blood, and bone....entrain to the rhythm of the eternal return. Be drunk with hope.
Blanket yourself in hot, holy tears. Wrap yourself in perfumes and spice. Be drunk with love.
Walk with two suns.
may my inner sun
ReplyDeletewarm my thoughts
warm my feelings
warm my ideas
warm my dreams
may my outer sun
warm my intention
warm my words
warm my actions
warm my touch
may these two suns meet
mingle and illuminate
softening, easing
extinguishing uncertainty
replacing chill
with abundant love
for past, present, future
Dear Friends,
ReplyDeleteAs always, I am off today for three days of silent retreat at Prince of Peace Benedictine Abbey. I am not able to spend the full 12 days with you, but am taking The Inner Christmas booklet and first two reflections with me. I am embraced there by the warmth of the friendship and prayers of the monks.
Peace and blessings, Rachel
When I think of warmth I think of the people in India and their warmth eye's smille and their warmth sharing of what they hardly have for themselves, but yet they make it be enough for all of us. The least they have materially, the more warmth they have to share. It remindes me of Jesus' miracle of the breath and the fish.
ReplyDeleteAll the warmth comes from pure love.
I was once asked to tend farm animals while my landlord was away. One of the tasks was to collect the chicken eggs. I was quite horrified when I had to collect the first egg as I felt I was stealing something precious from the hen. As she left the nest and I bent down and picked up the egg....it was warm....and that warmth shot up my arms into my heart as this truly was mother's/Mother's warmth that animates all in the body.My experience became a never forgotten gift which I share with you. Warmest wishes for you all in this very moment.
ReplyDeleteWarmth is in every cuddle you give your children and receive from them. The purest kind of love, the most wonderful feeling of having provided another human being with your own warmth and now feeling it back. The paramount profoundness of warmth.
ReplyDeleteForgoten fire, almost estinguished, an ember needs just a breath of air. Fire dances quickly.
ReplyDeleteWarm regards to all from Croatia
"In the Depth of Winter, I finally learned, that within me there lay an invincible summer." Albert Camus
ReplyDeleteLearning that we have the ability to give warmth, and use our inner sun to warm an expierience is pure joy! I have forgotten, or perhaps never learned of these concepts, and I find them delightful, authentic, whole, and I'm enjoying the journey!
Peace & Love
I was keenly aware of how warm my father's body was -- even many hours after he stopped breathing and his heart let go of its beat. Even his hands were still warm when I left his bedside -- the last one to say her last goodnight. I think he wanted me to know that he was still "alive", even though he had withdrawn his consciousness. And he continues to show me how thin the membrane is between physical and spiritual. Thank you, Dad, for all your gorgeous warmth. There was no place so safe in this world as in the warmth of your arms. I love you...
ReplyDeleteI found the connection to art so interesting. It is true, when I have been painting I find that I am open and warm, receptive of others and able to share my warmth more easily. Engaging in artistic activity of any kind opens my heart to other, allows me to be giving and receptive at the same time. Conversely when I am withdrawn into my intellect, the warmth leaves my limbs, I am less able to connect with people, to warm them and to receive warmth in turn. This is why the creative process is so important for me.
ReplyDeleteOur bodies blessed with warm life, senses, movement, speech...
ReplyDeleteEvery gesture a mudra, energy rippling out (butterfly's wings to tempests) our fingers, arms and bodies sending waves out and beyond;
each glance the darshan blessing of seeing and being seen;
every word a decree coming into form.
Behold the Sun at midnight! Our internal Logos, the creator we are as part of Creator of All.
Warmth and light in cold darkness,
Judith Honey Iam
I wake up, the house is cold. Outside, stars twinkle above the sparkling landscape frosted well-below freezing. I touch a little button and it's warm, that's that. Now, onto the spiritual meanings of warmth...
ReplyDeleteThe utter miracle of a central furnace and a convoluted web of natural gas pipelines and vast electricity grids allows me my early morning reverie.
But spiritual insight eludes; I'm hung up on the biological facts of this mid-winter night, and my profound helplessness to create my own warmth by any means other than participation in this massive obfuscation called thermostat tapping.
This system and my collusion penetrates my reflections. For now, the bills are paid, the juice is flowing, my daughter sleeps cozily. Yet for a great growing many, this is no longer so. And I can clearly see more than a few ways it might not always be so for me.
So last year I bought a wood stove, couple hundred bucks, big cast iron deal. It's still in its box, under some tarps. It won't be installed in my current rental, perhaps the next, if that doesn't have one already.
But no matter what happens, I will always be able to put some wood in that box and keep my family warm on some future night like this.
And it might be the best Christmas present I've ever given myself, because just the thought of it makes me warm all over.
We were doing the post Christmas retail thing yesterday. There was a golden retriever in the aisle with his owners and they said, he is friendly, go ahead. I scratched his head and he was so warm and soft-- then he leaned his warm head and shoulder against my leg and my blood pressure went down immediately! The owners said yep, he's a leaner. I am a parent and I have so many other sources of warming, but some times I struggle to be warmed-- as if my inner flame is just out. That dog embodied WARM. What an unexpected gift, right there in the midst of all that anxiety, artificial light, and consumer frenzy! I walked away from that short encounter feeling very blessed.
ReplyDelete"In many traditions the blacksmith’s craft is given a symbolic significance. But what I find particularly interesting are the correspondences to be found between that craft and certain processes of the inner life.
ReplyDeleteWhen a blacksmith wants to work a piece of iron, he begins by heating it, and then he beats it into shape. Until the piece of iron has been heated, you can beat it all you like, it will resist or even break. This phenomenon shows it is only through warmth, through love – the warmth of the heart – that beings can be truly educated. All those who rely too heavily on the mind to the detriment of the values of the heart still need to be educated, and they have to endure the fire of suffering as part of that education. They wonder why they feel they are being burnt and beaten… Well, it’s heaven that is heating them and beating them; by putting them through such trials, it is seeking to give them a divine form."
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
Dear Friends,
ReplyDeleteAt the Abbey the floors radiate the heat into the rooms. There was a wonderful chill in the air at night and what a joy to awaken in the morning to that warm floor.
The works of art that have most warmed my soul are the illuminated manuscripts and Books of Hours, like illustrated jounals of their times. And drawings, the practice pieces and preparatory work for the major paintings. I love their simplicity, observing the artist finding her way.
Tonight I have four intentions in front of me. Perhaps two a day until I catch up??