December 29th, The Fifth Holy Night - The Intention to Maintain

[Note: please consider the thoughts, perhaps re-reading and visualizing a few times. Then do as many of the exploration steps as you have time for.]

  Thoughts 

Our bodies are always working to maintain life and well-being. A maintained life is a stable and secure life. Life is maintained by four processes: protection, repair, purification, and replacement. If the intention to maintain is successful, life is constant.

To protect life we have our immune system. This system recognizes and kills all life-threatening invaders and protects the environment while killing the enemies.

A complex set of interactions occur to repair any damage to any part of our bodies and restore wholeness and health.

We keep our bodies pure through various cleansing and detoxifying activities.

Our bodies are made up of cells, trillions of cells.  They all die in intervals and they all are replaced with identical cells.

All four of these maintaining activities keep things the same. Our functions and our appearances remain constant and normal.

As an inner intention, maintaining gives us inner security, a peace of mind, a certainty that we will continue to exist.  It allows us to feel sane.

We sense we can uphold our inner reality in the face of our enemies, heal our inner wounds and disturbances, keep our inner experiences pure and bright, and replace all that we lose in the course of our difficult lives.

Because we maintain our inner life, we are able to continue to feel like ourselves.  We keep own individual experience of being inwardly “normal,” whatever that may be.

The inner intention to maintain is the most boring of our seven intentions for knowing. It is the least adventurous when all is well. It is the “behind the scenes” intention. Few of us pay attention to it until the drama arrives. Then we struggle and bring all our attention to maintaining.

On the Fifth Holy Night, we need to bring our attention to our intention and ability to maintain.  For some of us maintaining is rarely thought about.  But for many maintaining a stable, secure, constant sense of self is a struggle as our souls live in chronic stress or chronic neglect. We are fragile, uncertain or inflexible. Or we are ignorant of the soul’s ways to repair and restore, to replace, to clean and purify, to resist and protect our sense perceptions, our thinking, our feeling and our willing. 

I did not have an education in how to maintain my inner life as I was growing up. I learned inner survival skills, but little in the way of maintaining a thriving inner life. As an adult I have spent much time acquiring an education in the art, science and religion of personal soul maintenance.

The Holy Nights are a wonderful time to reflect on your education in soul maintenance as the guiding interest of the spiritual world is so present. You will find just a brief and simple reflection will alter the quality of your inner intention to maintain.


 Of course, attention to the celebration of the Holy Nights is soul maintenance. They are the time of the most intense soul maintenance of the year.  Acknowledge yourself for the extraordinary will living in your soul to undertake this inner activity.

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How did you maintain your soul life over the last year?

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How did you protect your inner life from invading “enemies.”

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How did you recognize and repair any damage to your sense perceptions, your thinking function, your feeling function, your will function? 

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Did you clean up and detoxify your inner life?

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Did you replace any parts of your inner life that had lost meaning, purpose or significance?

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How do you intend to maintain your soul life over the coming year?

(This year, to support your inner intention to maintain, I will be resending the Inner Christmas meditations monthly.  On the first of each month (except January) you will receive an email with a link to a message.)