December 26th, The Second Holy Night - The Intention to Warm

[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 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.

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On this Second Holy Night feel your intention to warm and how you experience this intention living in others.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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Please warm us up with your warm thoughts and feelings about warmth.  Write a comment for us to read.

December 25th, The First Holy Night - The Intention: To Breathe

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

Thought 


 How many breaths do you take each day? The archetypal breathing rhythm for a human being is 25,920 breaths each day! 25,920 inhales. 25,920 exhales. Our life begins with an inhale and ends with an exhale. From the first inhale to the last exhale, our breathing is continuous. And we don’t give this breathing a thought and it never tires us.

On this first Holy Night I am asking you to think about your inner breathing - the breathing of your soul.  Your soul breathes.  It inhales. It exhales. What is the intention living in each soul breath?

Ideally, our souls breathe truth, beauty and goodness. Ideally, our soul breathing is a steady even rhythm supporting our evolving individuality and humanity.  Ideally, our breaths would be either innocent or wise.

But in reality, we often breath half-truths and lies, distortions and corruptions, and harm and evils. In reality, our soul breathing is often too quick and too frequent, or too slow and infrequent.  In reality, our breaths often lack innocence or wisdom.

Our souls are continuously breathing all that is around us from all our sense perceptions, the deeds we witness, the ideas we meet, the moods and energies we feel, the hearts and souls of those near to us, always moving from inhale to exhale and another inhale.

Like our physical breathing, our soul breathing can be shallow or deep. How deeply into our souls do we want to take in the world, the thought, the mood or the deed? How does the soul hold its breath?

This past week I attended a concert of the "Messiah" at Carnegie Hall.  It was "breathtaking." I found parts of it so beautifully performed that my soul could barely breathe it in!

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Tonight, explore your soul’s intention to breathe. With compassion and self-attention, seek the needs of your breathing soul.  Reflect on the year you have just lived and consider the one you are about to start living.

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What did you inhale? What did you take into your inner life? What do you want to inhale over the next twelve months? 
What do you need to exhale? Are you sensitive to the need to exhale what fills your soul? 
Do you hold your breath?
Do you realize that another inhale will fill you soul again? 
What experiences of the year were breathtaking? 


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Celebrate the truth, the beauty and the goodness you welcomed into your soul.
Forgive and redeem the shadow breaths.
Feel the confidence of the continuous rhythm of your soul breath.

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Do a drawing of your soul’s breathing. Or write a poem.  You might also get up and dance your soul’s breathing. Express your innocent soul’s breathing and then see what changes if you express your soul’s wise breathing.  Is there a difference?  Be playful. Become a newborn on Christmas night.

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Please post a comment sharing how and what you realized about your soul’s breathing, it will inspire others.

The Theme - Inner Intentions

The Meaning of “Inner”

Let’s begin with inner.  Inner refers to the inmost life of the individual, the sense of self least shaped and affected by the outer forces of family, traditions, culture, and times. A place where you are free of the challenges of your biology and the prejudices of your biography.  Inner is the place where you find yourself free to be your truest self.

Each year during the Twelve Holy Nights the path to your individual inmost being is easiest to find and follow.  Between December 25 and January 6, an inner star, a personal sun, a sun being, lights your way and guides you into yourself, to your inmost self. 

In your inmost self, you touch, you discover, you connect with your truest thoughts, your most harmonious feelings and the goodness living in your will to act. 

When you reach the inmost place of self you come to know the greatest mystery of the inner experience: you are suddenly capable of the most powerful outer gestures. Going in leads you out as a portal lies at the core of your inner life, the threshold between what you strive for and what you manifest.

Designed by your truest thoughts and visible to your most harmonious feelings, this portal is the entry to your destiny. Your will filled with goodness opens the portal and carries you across its threshold. You stand in the portal and cross the threshold as the true, beautiful and good expression of your individuality, a spiritual being seeking to fulfill your destiny in the material world and an earthly being expressing your ineffable and eternal spiritual essence.

The Meaning of “Intention”

Intention is an imagination of a purposeful course of action.  By intending, we gather our will forces in service of a potential result, ideally a desired, ultimately good result.

The inner intentions I write about over Twelve Holy Nights are universal intentions that form our individuality. They live in all of us as the processes by which we become uniquely ourselves. The degree that we are able to imbue these intentions with adequate will forces supported by right thinking and right feeling brings all our other intentions into the world as full expressions of our individuality and our humanity.

These intentions create right knowledge and right relationship. I don’t say “right” with arrogance or righteousness or fundamentalism. "Right" indicates the knowledge and the relationship are living in freedom and flowing with love.

The Twelve Intentions

The first seven intentions come to our creative knowing and describe the processes through which we experience what lives outside us, how the experience dwells within us and finally how we evolve the experience into something the moves out of us.  With each message I am certain you will find a clearer understanding of yourself.  You will find a new freedom for your creative and fulfilling future.

The final five intentions will explore how we love. These five shape our relationship to all things. 

Knowledge and relationship, freedom and love connect with the beginning and end of the Twelve Holy Nights - the Nativity and the Epiphany.  You can find within the creative knowledge and the loving relationship the full gesture of your innocence and of your wisdom.  You express your individuality and your humanity in dynamic and exquisite balance. You are absolutely you in the moment.