Musings

As a student of Kairos Center for Change, I was excited about participating in this retreat. This approach of combining the ACTT Naturally practice of natural horsemanship with Kairos’s contemplative practice was intriguing.

Through the teachings of Dr. Rachel and Valerie, I learned how to find that peaceful, noiseless center within. There is an instantaneous response when you are one with these gentle giants…a mirror to your soul. I have continued to gain the tools necessary to find my voice and energy within me to face those challenging times and to appreciate the peaceful ones.

I am so grateful and blessed to have had this experience. I cannot thank Kairos Center for Change and ACTT Naturally enough!! When is the next retreat?

Marge, Retired Teacher

If love and life itself constitutes the totality (dark and light) of the divine feminine and consciousness itself constitutes the totality of divine masculinity, conscious femininity is the marriage of the two where the rapture of being alive is first conceived and creativity and wisdom is birthed, our capacity to own our responsibilities finds a container, and our choices become conscious, steadied, and brave.  The forces of prosperity and decline, honor and disgrace, praise and censure, and pleasure and suffering lose their quality of permanent struggle and annihilating strength along with their powers of identification, gratification, despair, and infatuation. Proclivities toward their infinite snares and pathways leading toward spiritual death or hardening heart are severed, rendering them obvious, painfully lifeless, boring, and trite.  Energy is made available to seek life-affirming change.

Our need to be seen, come into or awaken to “being” through consciousness, is the spiritual ground of seeking this divine marriage.  When the mirrors of achievement and accumulation seem to have apexed, failing to reward or abate an ache that only poets know how to relate, the call toward the spiritual bridal chamber is happening.  The orientation toward revealing and persuading yourself and society of your personal worth is gradually withdrawn and redirected toward the search within for your essence, for the only mirror that can reveal self-understanding, generative love, and equanimity.  Messages from society will sway and block attention from discipline of  inner work with convincing arguments built on your own unconscious doubts and fears, promoting greater dependencies on social networks  either through indifference, blatant disregard, or misidentification of the call as “sickness”, “bad”,  “wrong” or “less than”.  The “opposing call” is to return back to identifying with the ordinary features of your life, ordering myopic attitudes and blind obedience toward traditional social roles and expectations, and attaching to sensate pleasures or dictates for comfort.  Sweet escapes are offered and multiplied by the myriad addictions at our disposal (familiar habits, sex, food, intoxicants, affirmation, competition, power, glory, material wealth, social media, film binging, etc.), serving only to annihilate or sedate ego consciousness for unconscious forces to rampage through your house.

Joseph Campbell, in Hero With A Thousand Faces,  goes to the ancient roots of modern understanding of the unconscious, delivered in visions and dreams from the depths:  Myth.   He explicates the patterns in his Monomyth, laying out the stages of the hero’s journey to awakening, explaining myth as “spontaneous productions of the psyche, each bearing within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source” designed to guide  us through the labyrinth, provide the “skein of linen thread” to anyone with a  “curiously disinterested…hero-heart….that is gentle, kind”. He connects us to the arch of our own mythos through dream symbols and helps us discover “secret openings” to the mysteries that lie within.

Somewhere within the void of not understanding lies a seed of knowing that which is not “I” — not “my” identity, not “my” story.  At times it may intrigue, excite or even overwhelm.  Other times, it may be missed altogether or perhaps overlaid by what we do understand, thus distorting the information and lending to a true misunderstanding.  This is the beginning of an illusion of sorts, a blind path in the Daedalus labyrinth.   What happens when we are fortunate enough to be aware and wait longer, without asserting meaning and write it down so it registers in the mind and lies suspended?

Daily, we traverse the unconscious ocean in the dark, facing the winds and variant precipitation, often with faulty navigational equipment.  The lighthouses in our life come in endless form, guiding us through the night for safe passage.  Of course, the creatures of the deep may capsize our ship at any moment, if we are lucky, regardless of the best circumstances.  In an instant, we are propelled high into the sky or pulled deep into the core.  There is a momentary awareness of the need for mercy concurrent with a surrender to the forces in charge.  The capsized ego must rest and rebuild toward a new horizon that can only be revealed in the light of surrender.  The seed of mercy awakens, ready to be planted in the world.

No words.

The unconscious is a “trickster,” the ultimate illusionist, navigating the demands of our inner and outer worlds, negotiating our strengths and limitations to impact our perception, our understanding, our choices.  Most of what we consciously know is sourced and bent from the shadows, casting figures in the “out there” of our world … representing unwanted vulnerability, contradictions, secrets, and fears…. the unknown.  Kept in the darkness or “out there,” we become the Sisyphean boulder, death itself, lost in futility and affliction without a will of our own, an aim outside of the command “repeat.” If we are lucky, we fall with adequate accessible consciousness in our surroundings and….wake up.

If you will, take a moment to really listen to the lyrics within the rhythm of Cohen’s music, his pitch, his tone …

Seemed the better way
When first I heard him speak
Now it’s much too late
To turn the other cheek

Sounded like the truth
Seemed the better way
Sounded like the truth
But it’s not the truth today

I wonder what it was
I wonder what it meant
First he touched on love
Then he touched on death

Sounded like the truth
Seemed the better way
Sounded like the truth
But it’s not the truth today

I better hold my tongue
I better take my place
Lift this glass of blood
Try to say the grace

Seemed the better way
When first I heard him speak
But now…

Cohen is inviting us….into the darkness, the unconscious.

A mass projection (illusion) is a presumption that we are already conscious, able to hold love, death, their opposites and all that is in between, all that is life.  We largely presume we are awake with free will, know what we are doing and where we are going.  When we actively check this presumption against the data it fails, over and over, across method and time.  The projection, nevertheless, thrives in personal and mass moral relativism and certainty, primal processes which find objectivity offensive, false, incomprehensible, wrong.  At times we may catch shimmering reflections of the boulder against our cheek, the summit, or perhaps experience the thunderous sound of the descent of our boulder to where we began a million times before.  Mirrors (people, memories, systems, facts), however, reflecting back too much unwanted truth are too often dismissed, thrown away or shattered …  out of necessity, until the tools are acquired.

The work of objectivity involves the stuff of patience, the capacity to suspend certainty while holding the tension of opposing energies.  We are not born with such a capacity, nor can we learn it by intellect alone through a book or academic study.  Our attention is easily redirected or confused, our pride wounded, our views narrowed by ignorance, our senses full or maxed out, our paradigm fused to the consciousness of our family of origin.  The basic and essential need for safety and control are well maintained by routine and habit that support what we know and keep at bay what we do not want to know.  The practice of building equanimity in the face of uncertainty, adversity, and change is the alternative path.

The song “It Seemed the Better Way” is from Cohen’s album You Want It Darker.  It goes against our grain to “want it darker,” like the solution to Chinese handcuffs.  It goes against our instincts that we gain life from loss, failure, sacrifice, and confrontations with our mortality.  Together and alone, each teaches us about surrender and grows our patience, understanding, humility, truthfulness, courage, and compassion.

Into the darkness…we find the questions…we break open to true light, love, and life.

Conscious femininity is our unique feminine essence observed.  In men and women, she both lies in waiting and seeks our full attention.  Across language, culture, and time, she speaks to us through symbols, myth, music, parables, and the poetics of word, body, and nature.  She is the source of engaged presence, relatedness,  spaciousness, love, and truth.

There are points in our lives where we might feel her call us to go deeper, to know her more intimately.  For most, she is easy to ignore amidst the wall of clamour or numbing in our lives.  For some, she is closer to consciousness and carries an urgency to be known, to be heard, to be held in reverence.  An experience of affliction, often described as “feeling stuck” or “broken,” is her signature invitation to open ourselves to a deeper dimension, to learn a method for accessing and knowing our symbolic lives and spiritual needs with intention, to coming toward realizing free will.  The invitation may take the form of boredom, loss of energy, loss of a sustainable creative vision, aimlessness, indecisiveness, hopelessness, helplessness, anxiety, powerlessness, or disillusionment.  The invitation calls us into knowing ourselves, our illusions, our gifts, our capacity for self-restraint and real self-direction with accountability.   Every hero/heroine declines the invitation numerous times with the proclamation that he/she is not fit for the task.  The call, nevertheless, persists and grows stronger.  From this experience, a spiritual or contemplative practice for restoration and renewal is revealed and sustainable.

Conscious femininity pre-exists our imagination and certainly all that we believe to be free will.  She lies within, in all of us, seeking to be…engaged, to enliven our being.  Until we consciously seek her out through an organized practice, relate to her, and learn her language of the heart, our relationship with her and all that she reveals remains weak, unstable, and undecipherable.  She maintains a subordinate position and is experienced as mysteriously and frustratingly elusive, if not unreal or foregone.  Efforts to imitate or identify with her are empty and futile.  She is not an identity, an achievement, or something we can possess or control.

Knowing ourselves requires knowing her — with heart, mind, and body.  She is the part of us that knows what we really want, the part of us that asks deep unifying questions that unbind us from our illusions.  She shows what lies beyond the mask of our ego, the habits of our conditioning. She gifts us with impressions that excite new understandings, new questions, and new trajectories.  She is life itself.

Intentional observing gives way to a special kind of remembering.  This remembering is an opening penetrated with reverence or exhausted surrender.  It rushes in like an unexpected wave…  transforming, protecting, and guiding the surfer through the pipeline of her life to the shore where she begins again, invigorated with all the possibilities that lie in waiting.  No, she is not reminiscing.  No, she is not revisiting a timeline of events.  She is remembering something that is essentially and uniquely her yet she has never known: the third.

Kairos is a space within Chronos time. It lies between the tics of the clock. It is circular, not linear. It is an experience, not an outcome. It cannot be measured. It cannot be controlled. It can only be entered. Kairos is the space of the Transpersonal, intangible…. the space where the soul gives birth… to awareness, to Truth, to Life. This space is Holy. It is not ours. This space is Holy, without desire. Beyond desire. This Holy Space without desire is the breath of God. Inside the breath of God we can be still from all reaching, stretching, longing, trying, pushing, predicting, analyzing, wishing, craving, pulling, wanting, clinging, thinking, reacting. Outside. Outside. Outside……..Fear. Inside Imagination. Inside Potential. Inside Love. Inside Life. Kairos-centered coaching is an invitation to women from all backgrounds and faiths into a safe contemplative space that provides them with an opportunity to observe and listen for sacred moments, Kairos moments, in their lives. The ability to listen for Kairos moments is the way for finding our authentic centers and building purpose-driven lives.