Tag: trust

Love contemplative

Self-contemplative love

Love, when it is in a reflective or contemplative mode, is able to stand back from and distance itself from entanglement with the imperatives of earning a living, from the 9 to 5 day-to-day race against time and from all the external urgencies of other people’s making.

Contemplative love can see just the person, the beauty and the light of the soul that first animated it. Love in self-contemplation has the space and time to concentrate on the protection and the nurture of the longer term relationship of the heart with the person…

This is the jewel-like and miraculous nacre, which slowly accretes on the beautiful pearl of trusted relationship with the passage of time.

It is composed of shared tendernesses and the physical tokens of affection from and towards myself over the much longer time scale than the jittery “9 to 5”.

May you drink in sweetness from reflection on and gratitude for what you already have, which I see as the long-wave state, and be ever so glad of it.

And may you ride out with studied, confident, patient acceptance, the ups and downs of what I call the shortwave ripples, so that longwave love can continue, seeing and seen, to be generously shared.

And may love seeded grow ever strong in your heart

~ Love is present E v e r yN o w

꧁༺ Here❤️to🧡stay💛 ༻꧂
Love Contemplative, so what’s it all about?

Here I attend to self-love, made possible by simple self-examination, which awaits discovery a fraction below the surface of reality.

A vision of self-love is awaiting discovery in us each and every one.

Love in self-contemplation removes conditional thinking, and helps peel away superfluous attachments which present as obstacles to clean understanding of the consummate beauty of living in this place and time we call the world.

Above all, love of self, once it is made visible, has the quality of gentleness, soft acceptance, calm relaxation, peace without propulsion. It is a sort of perpetual motion. I imagine a beatific smile which brings the sense of unending safety. No fears, no doubts, only an abiding and unshakable joy.

Think of the half-crazed teenager, lovelorn, overwhelmed by the presence of those delicious ‘butterflies in the tummy’.

Here is where love of self and love bestowed on an object of love can blend together, rather in the way the attention of a person who is in love is fully occupied by the sensation of love and understands there is nothing to differentiate between the heart of loving and the object of love.

This state of aiery bliss is desirable. It is not a prerequisite to peace.

If I know at some level of understanding that I can offer love to others because I can offer love to myself, then the capability necessary for welcoming in love, the most pure grace of all, can suddenly become visible, available, even to the point of being recognised as my inner nature from the beginning of time

Life that is more heart♡centric?

Not invisible indivisible

How to have life that is more heart-centric?

A friend may answer the question like this, “By being more present – for others – and in the course of this, for myself.”

I say a life more heart-centered in the terms described, “for others”, may derive from an imposed, expected, socially acceptable requirement.

I didn’t seek to live my life from the heart. It happened that my heart was revealed to me, in a sudden and shocking way. This was mediated through the extraordinarily powerful joining of prolonged eye-contact one-to-one, during wordless partnering in Biodanza.

I was briefly invited to share with another person our most sacred innermost spaces where the heart dwells. This can elicit a response in both people. I saw the shining integrity (non-judgemental, undifferentiated wholeness) in the soul of another. I saw the purity of the shine which the soul emits.

During those same shared moments, I felt my identity melt away. It became airy, then transparent. I felt dizzy, as when there is a sudden absence of old familiar coordinates to rely on. I teared up, because what I was seeing clear as daylight for the first time were these fine human characteristics. Integrity, honesty, and trust.

The greatest of these is trust. So much of the foundations, scaffolding and structures of functional society and of the wholesome individual are based on trust. Where there is trust, hope, growth and love can flourish.

I felt the avalanche of an emotion which was not love for another person. It was non-attached love. Love not disembodied at all, but grounded, real, rooted deeply and from time immemorial. I did not fully recognise it at that time (early 2013).

What I later grasped was that I had touched into, or received, a taste of the original life-force which keeps my life alive and guards both itself and myself with the power that comes from the place where I was born, and to which you, I and we all are returning, yes, each at our own pace, but as one human Tribe of sentient beings.

It has a well-known effect, this shared time of eye-gazing. Only it so happens that I was at a threshold when my heart, which I had been cloaking from even my own view for 66 years, shone reflected back to me from the heart of another. I was not “blown away”. I was literally blown open.

Firstly, I’m lucky that this awakening occured at all. Many may live and end life without this sort of revelation of the one-ness of all existence. This vision of one-ness is too powerful to frame in words. It is to be experienced, to be lived. It’s like electric current present in a copper wire. I know it’s there. Once my hand touches the wire, the shock through my body transmutes my knowledge into pure experience.

Secondly, my heart remained and remains open. My personal impression is that a heart opened can never fully close again. Some may arrive in a space which is heart-centric, abide there for a while, and then in some way or other they deny, discount or disregard their experience, simply because they lack sufficient first-hand knowledge of the life of the living heart of life.

I am incredibly lucky on two counts.

After all, when living is and always has been plain sailing from day to day, what useful purpose can be served, disturbing the expectation of the routine, by placing a hand on a live wire? I thought I knew what ecstacy is. It is like a cause and effect, isn’t it? And when the cause is absent, ecstacy vanishes.

My ecstatic experience of being alive does not depend on an external cause. For a long, long time I had been seeking to understand what causes ecstatic experience. I made strenuous and continual efforts to get under the skin, to get into the mind, to attempt to MELD with the living aliveness I see is present in every other life form around me. This process of enquiry resolves itself by reforming itself into a process of self-enquiry.

How is it possible that I am both alive and life is living me?

I am alive and life is living through me as well as in me. This is sufficient cause to be swirling, pulsing with the ecstacy of life lived all of the time, day and night, in fullest possible awareness.

I am alive and not dead. This alone warrants lusty songs of gratitude. Yes, I am grateful I am not dead!

My heart is beating. It is beating like every heart that is, was, and will be. This force that keeps the beat from embryo to this very moment is not mine alone. Mine is a share of the same life force whose origins are traceable along the whole route through scientific investigation (and common sense) to the Big Bang

From Breath to Love

From Breath to Love – A guided meditation

TUESDAY 25th SEPTEMBER was the monthly Breathwork session “From Breath to Love – Conscious Breathing Circle” held by Karolina Mikulicz here in our home town.

When I arrived, I was the only one attending! So we agreed to have a 1-2-1 session.

After what happened to me in the last fortnight, I was in a state of high sensitivity and receptivity. I may share in another piece of writing, when I feel to gather the story together. It’s enough to say I had begun to make preparations in the last few days in the light of reasonable cause to believe the days of my life were numbered. It transpires that I am in no such danger. This is relief that I compare to being hit by a ton of bricks.
Karolina is, to me, wise far beyond her young years. Knowing how she has assimilated the healthy therapeutic effects of her own daily Breathwork practice over many years, I have come to have complete confidence in her skills as guide and facilitator. We always reach deep when we work together.
So, to be brief, (a tricky skill for me!) an obscuring chunk of cliff face fell away… almost all resistance due to fear melted away as if under high intensity radiation.
In the course of this evening’s guided Breathwork I found my core being, I call it: my unchanging awareness. I found my unfractionated identity, I see it as a white transparency with no material substance yet having the form of a swan’s body and whose being is available in maximal energy to enfold with arms, protect without limit or condition, to imbue me with life-power while not at all concealing or covering me.
In 1977, I had come face-to-face with this core essence of my being with the common descriptor being a white-hot kernel. The image of a light concentrated into white heat had arrived then. During my awakening in 2013, and ever since, up till today, the vision of awareness of my own heart has been of an orange-gold glow in my heart space.
In summer 1977, I entered a period of pain and incomprehension, and an involuntary process began. One by one, layers of self identity fell away from me. I felt with great alarm that I was soon to lose my sanity. At length all that was left of this 31 year old man, of his certainty and his received assumptions about himself was reduced to a white-hot molten pool resting immobile at the bottom of a huge immovable crucible.
Today’s “Real”isation arrived as a direct effect of having been able to release all vestiges of fear of trying and seeking by walking in the bravery of trust and innocent belief in the total support of the earth under me and the clean oxygen I fill my lungs with.
Something changed tonight.
There was no upheaval and certainly no pain. Pain comes only as an equal and opposite reaction to resistance. Abandon of resistance and its replacement with the gentleness of compassion and a childlike humility is what characterised the session this time. Karolina threw at me unanswerable questions. She stayed, guided and was by my side. I responded from my truth.
Later, at the end, we talked. This is how I tried to make clear what had changed inside during the latter part of our working session. A sacred chant that I remember I had sung before, and whose Sanskrit words I had learned, had been playing in the background. I was not the listener with this music in my ears. The music was playing me and my hearing was the music playing. The music was playing in me. I was conscious of not being the listener. I had no involvement in the joining of the music with my hearing.
A blending took place that I was fully aware of as it happened. I have entered a fusion between my core original self and the sensory experience of the material World around me.
Here I can not go all the way with words to describe this. I was totally receptive to the music while not needing to make any conscious effort at distinguishing it as musical sounds to which I was paying attention. The effect was of music happening in the way my blood happens to circulate in my body. The music was involuntarily musical in me. This utterly new experience was welcome and most lovely. I felt with all my senses and all my awareness the freshness of it.
With this clearing, whatever happens next, my lack of fear of my own death has received a big boost.
Karolina suggested I write up about this session. My thanks to Karolina takes the form of this short description.

A simple time traveller

*I am a time traveller*

Crises shake me awake, so that I have little choice but to pay attention and attempt to understand the storms, conflicts and extremes of opposing emotion that roil and boil inside me.
I know that the stirrings in me which crises cause are like clear waters suddenly made muddy. I know the transparent calm where all was clear and simple to see is gone.
The plateau of my heart’s ease, where grass is green, and no wind ruffles, is a gift to be accepted.
The calm of uneventful days is like the sun that shines on a jet plane – I am to trust revolutions of power beyond my understanding and voluntary control are churning, burning, and keeping me safe on the inside.
I accept the days of ‘nothing doing’ in the same way I down the first drink of cool water in the morning. I absorb bright colourless refreshment certain it will reach into my darkest roots.
But I also know to stand back from insisting to myself that I must thrash out sense and meaning out of turbulent emotions. Death inside, or at the very least continuing ignorance, is the reward for panicky reactions where I am drawn in to fruitless fights with my own shadows.
I know that the swirl of sediment that now blinds my view of where I am going is composed of mysterious particles.
These are the smashed up, mashed up micro fragments of old certainties!
They are more valuable than gold dust, more alive than my own breath, because, unlike mud which petrifies into rock on settling, I know will recrystalise into brand new beauty.
My road was secure. But now it is blazing into a lava flow. My tears explode where they fall!

My old road will rearrange and recrystallise to recreate – like resolidified titanium – my new spiritual bones.

I know I will give myself the gift of time, waiting in faith and trust. I am 100% calm, because I have confidence that the primordial roots of my origins are active, though I have not the least intimation of their motion, intention or direction.
This is how trees await Spring, how birds the Sunrise, and it is how “old earth is new earth in the dark seed’s eye”.
I will have stood aside and observed the swirls of pain in my chest. I will have felt them retch up my throat. I will have committed to memory the dried tears I see on my own face.
And, at the end of all of this, I will see walking towards me, with the magical mutual smiles of recognition spreading over both our faces, myself and I, as we fall into an embrace for the first time.
~ Love is present E v e r yN o w

The Biodanza effect. Do I dare to hope?

The Biodanza effect. Do I dare to hope?
For those who regularly practice Biodanza – and I am one of some few hundred thousand every week in dozens of different countries – there is a sense of coming home attaching to the word Mindfulness.
From way back, when I began to reflect on the big questions, up to today, I will almost daily catapult my mind into the Now by reference to the notion of my own death. It is a cleansing act which sharpens my gratitude and my wonder for being me being alive in this moment – right here now.
It’s with my regular practice of Biodanza that I am becoming accustomed to the practice – not only the idea – of living my daily life more and more ‘in the Moment’.
That’s to say I am going about the business of my days without tripping up over selfconscious self-referential thoughts. Less and less do I feel the need to question my motives, still less do I bother to direct my thoughts in at myself, where there’s a treadmill for thoughts with nothing better to do than trudge round and around.
What takes my mind away from mental closed circuits today is my gratitude for the pleasures of inclusive warm comradeship I feel from my fellow Biodancers.
Yes, I might still be lonely in my days and nights, but my friends in the Dance of Life have reflected my natural inner joy back to me from their integrity and respect and unconditional trust.
In Biodanza, something as simple as feeling joyful can be revealed as depending on nobody around me. I can see that the joy in the eyes of a partner in the dance spells out happiness all by itself. His or her joy doesn’t depend on me. It arises between us in the shared act of dance. We recognise it is our naked flame of humanity which each has made possible to reveal to the other in the unguarded intimacy of our moments of communion.
Biodanza to me is a spritual reawakening and a growth in potential of the whole person through wordless self expressive freestyle movement, mediated through music, under expert guidance and in the companionship of others whose integrity and trust is strong, explicit and bonding.
I have not dared to hope that Biodanza will always continue to reveal more subtleties of innerscape, more outward expanses of conscious joy, more awareness of the same upward spiralling awakening in those all around me.
I had not dared to hope until I asked Natasha, who has some eight years’ Biodanza. She says it’s perfectly clear that the beneficial effect goes on getting higher, deeper, broader both on the inside and out, and it will never end.
I’m reminded of the illusion of those lonely parallel tracks. In the experience of Busy-busy living, when I think I am alone on the path, I blink, look around and see others on parallel paths. As we face the horizon, all our different divergent paths converge, merge and blaze together in a revitalising sunrise. Or sunset.
Glory glory!

🤍HEALING WATERS OF COMPASSION🤍

🤍Healing waters of compassion🤍

2013 the ‘Year of my Life’

The self I call “I” is a flat calm transparent surface. It is a most natural boundary between water and air.

Both air and water are clear and almost colourless. The air goes up out of sight and the water deeply down.

The surface is without ripple or feature. It extends outward without horizon.

It is silent bliss.

Today more than before in my whole life, my state is open and aware and quiet. In this state I can ride and stay in balance during the time I am presented in the here and now with thoughts, feelings, distractions, discomfort, pain.

It is through my recent journeys of heart awakening that I can fully access healing.

I have come to a resolution of previously unrecognised redundant defences, constructed in childhood. My new-found expanding awareness of myself opens doors to present joyfulness, and to a new appreciation of the sanctity of the gift of life being lived and experienced more and more and yet more abundantly.

Together with self-awareness, I increasingly open my eyes and value the gift of life I see in the lives of others.

To stay truly alive, I absolutely need air, food, water. I have to do the necessary work, if I am to act on my craving for the value of the sweet shelter afforded me from compassionate non-judgemental companionship of others.

In this state, I no longer need to feel secreted away fearful inside a safe place of my own making. It feels like for the first time, I am capable of experiencing the entirety of the richly textured reality of here and now.

I want to shout and shine with gratitude and wonder at simply being vital and alive. And more surprising still, with all this wonderment I find I am fearless and brave, because love is the light that leads me on my journey.

Intense love quenches every last residue of fear. The awareness of such love is self sustaining. It feels like perpetual motion eternally safe!

We are all capable of healing.

It’s about trusting love to come into the closest contact inside my most personal sacred space, and knowing that there, in that serene yet spectacularly huge place of peace, I can heal.

When I completely allow this trust of knowing into my vision of life, when I let trust be the number one in my decision-making, I can begin to heal. We all of us can begin to heal

~ Love is present EveryNow