Daily Wisdom: Individual Love

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From Sally Kempton’s “What is Love?”:

Individual Love

All of us, throughout our lives, constantly do what I did project onto other people and things the feelings of love that actually come from within. “It was the music,” we say. “It was Ned (or Sarah, or Jeannie). It was the surf! It was my teacher’s presence!” Yet the yogic view is that all of our experiences of human love are actually glimpses of the Great Love. (“God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,” Rumi wrote. “It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open.”) It is only when love gets filtered through the prism of the human psyche that it begins to look specific and limited. It becomes veiled by our thoughts and feelings, and we start to think that love comes and goes, that we can feel it only for certain people, or that there’s not enough love to go around. We can’t help doing this.

Our senses, mind, and ego, hardwired to give us the experience of separateness and distinction, set us up to think that love is outside us, that some people and places and things are lovable and others are not, and furthermore that love has different flavors: mother love, romantic love, love of movies, love of nature, compassionate love, sexual love, love of the cozy feeling of being under the covers at the end of a long day.

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Daily Wisdom: The Great Love

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By Sally Kempton

From “What is Love?”

Love as Absolute

Love with a capital L: That’s the Great Love, love as the source of everything, love as radical unity. At this level, love is another name for Absolute Reality, Supreme Consciousness, Brahman, God, the Tao, the Source that vast presence the Shaivite tradition sometimes calls the Heart. The yoga tradition often describes Absolute Reality as satchidananda meaning that it is pure beingness, present everywhere and in everything (sat), that it is innately conscious (chit), and that it is the essence of joy and love (ananda).

As ananda, the Great Love is woven into the fabric of the universe, which of course also puts it at the center of our own being. Most of us get glimpses of the Great Love at some time in our lives perhaps in nature, or with an intimate partner, or in the moment of bonding with our children. We remember these experiences for years afterward, often for the rest of our lives. We remember their numinosity, the feeling of deep connectedness they give us, and the fact that even when the love we feel seems inspired by someone or something in particular, it has a profoundly impersonal, universal quality. And sometimes, the Great Love hits us unveiled, as it were, and changes our lives.

It happened like that for me one November evening in 1970. I was sitting with a friend in my living room, listening to a Grateful Dead album, when without warning, an overwhelming experience of joy welled up in me. The state sprang up seemingly out of nowhere, a sensation of tenderness and ecstasy that seemed to ooze out of the walls and the air, carrying with it a sense that everything was a part of me.

This experience inspired a burning desire to get back to it and ultimately became the motive for my spiritual practice. At the time, however, I did what most of us do when we get a glimpse of unconditional tenderness: I projected my inner experience onto the person I happened to be with and decided (rather disastrously, as it turned out) that he was the love of my life and the mate of my soul.

Join Sally Kempton and Marc Gafni in one week at Esalen Institute for “Falling in Love with the Divine.”

Daily Wisdom: Noticing Your Projector Screen

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Integrity and balance are two of the fruits of doing your shadow work, says Sally Kempton in “Me and My Shadow”:

Your unconscious shadow attitudes, inescapably, become the lenses through which you look at life. Refusing to “own” a shadow tendency just makes you less conscious that it is distorting your perspective. Because inevitably, when you can’t see something in yourself, you project the quality onto someone else, either judging or admiring the quality in them.

This is just one reason why shadow work can be so revelatory, and so life changing. Just learning to recognize your shadow can transform your relationship to other people and yourself. You’ll have an easier time accepting constructive feedback once you’ve recognized that it’s your perfection-obsessed inner critic who’s beating you up, and not the person who’s trying to give you a useful critique. Even more important, when you do your shadow work, you’ll find that it can dissolve many of your negative feelings about yourself””feelings like shame and unworthiness, or the sneaking suspicion that you’re not the person you pretend to be. It also becomes easier to notice and let go of unconscious behavior patterns like being deceitful with your coworkers, blowing up at your mother, or choosing romantic partners who tend to take advantage of you. Shadow work, if you do it authentically, lets you begin to unpick the threads of your negative samskaras.

Often, people who have engaged in shadow work exhibit a high degree of balance, tolerance, and self-acceptance. They tend to have high integrity, in the sense that they don’t say one thing and do another. Their ethics are not undercut by their unconscious impulses, emotionally charged projections, or negative habit patterns.

As you, too, begin to acknowledge your disowned traits and do your shadow work, you’ll catch glimpses of what genuine inner balance feels like. For instance, when you find yourself feeling envious of a friend’s success, instead of resenting them, you will be able to use the feeling of envy to look to how you can step up to your own potential. Or you’ll no longer feel so much resistance to getting on the mat, because having seen into your inner rebel, you’ll be able to negotiate a practice schedule that is free-form enough so the rebel feels less restricted.

Sally Kempton is active in the leadership of the Center for world Spirituality and also participates in our Wisdom Council.

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Daily Wisdom: The shadow is “the person you’d rather not be”

Posted by & filed under Blog, Daily Wisdom, Hinduism, Integral Psychology, Integral Religion, Lighten up, Sally Kempton, Translineage, World Spirituality Project.

Photo: spatulated

In today’s Daily Wisdom post, spiritual teacher and writer Sally Kempton offers her perspective on shadow work, one of the five principle practices in World Spirituality (called “lighten up.”)

Jung, whose work was influenced by his reading of Eastern sources, called the shadow “the person you’d rather not be””” the opposite of your conscious personality. He coined the term “shadow” to describe qualities that some yogic scriptures categorize as the kleshas (literally, causes of suffering). These are qualities that a key yogic text, the Bhagavad Gita, rather dauntingly describes as “demonic.” In other words, all the selfish, primitive, egoic, violent, lazy, entitled, aspects of yourself.[Read more…]

Free feeling: Using emotions for liberation

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Laughter

Photo Credit: greekadman


By Sally Kempton

Practice can change your relationship to emotions, so that instead of being swamped by certain feeling states, you can hold them, contain them, see into their essence, and ultimately, use emotions in the service of your liberation.

Many years ago, I walked into the kitchen of my guru's ashram, and found him shouting at the cooks. Force- waves of anger were bouncing around the room, almost visible to the naked eye. Then, in mid sentence, he turned, saw us standing there, and smiled. The energy in his eyes went soft. ”˜How did you like the show?” he asked. Then, chuckling, he slapped the head cook playfully on the back, and walked away. The cooks giggled, and went back to work, galvanized by the energy he had injected into the afternoon.

That moment changed my understanding about emotions. The clarity and fluidity with which he had shifted from intense anger to good humor was only part of it. More interesting, I felt, was the fact that he had been using anger as a teaching tool. Was he really angry? I don't know. All I know is that he seemed able to ride the wave of his anger with perfect easiness, and let it pass without a trace.

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Meditation for Life: Awareness, Inquiry, Realignment, and Return to Self

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Shiva Meditation

By Sally Kempton

Cross-posted from Patheos.com.

Meditation makes you more self-aware. That's one of its biggest gifts, even though we don't always like what we see. When meditation is really working, it has a way of showing you unknown parts of yourself””pockets of your psyche that are beautiful and sublime, but also parts of yourself that are not so tasty. In fact, there will be periods when your life seems to bristle with situations that seem designed to reveal your most embarrassing reactive patterns and unskillful ways of coping. And I'm not even talking about big crises, just about the normal irritations of life.

Maybe you get the flu, or your back goes out, and you realize how cranky you feel when you're physically uncomfortable. Maybe you notice the impatience in your voice when you talk to your teenager. Or, as happens regularly to a friend of mine, the moment of truth can come from a co-worker asking you pointedly if you would be acting so prickly if you'd meditated today.

The gift of meditation in these situations is that you have resources that can let you shift out of these patterns””sometimes right away.

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Leading Spiritual Teacher Sally Kempton introduces Dr. Marc Gafni

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Sally Kempton began her public career as a leading second wave feminist and journalist. She later became a student of an Indian Yoga Lineage where she was a student and then a leading Swami and teacher for thirty years. About a decade ago she began teaching again under her original name of Sally Kempton. Sally is among the group of teachers in leadership roles at the Center for World Spirituality.

A World Spirituality Guide to How to Survive being Home for the Holidays, by Sally Kempton

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By Sally Kempton

Your roots are showing.

Your relatives have the power to push your buttons like no one else. But they can also illuminate your path to personal transformation.

If you think you're enlightened, go visit your family. Ram Dass, the influential American teacher of spirituality, said that back in the 1970s. For Anne, who called me recently to confess her fear of an upcoming family Christmas, this is more than an ironic quip.

Each Christmas, fifty of her family members””siblings, and step-siblings, spouses, children, grandchildren and assorted step-children””show up en masse at her father's ranch in Montana, each harboring a personal grievance, grudge or secret rivalry with at least one other family member. Ann's mother can't even say hello to Ann's sister without making a comment about her weight. Two of Ann's cousins are Scientologists, another a Christian who believes that Scientology is a cult. Even the yogis in the family disagree with one another's life choices. Ann's sister-in-law left her teacher and still blogs angrily about him. That teacher happens to be Ann's teacher, which is just one more complication in the family stew.

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Inner Revolution ~ by Sally Kempton

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Enlightenment Teachings, Evolutionary Spirituality, Free Membership, Grow up, Hinduism, Integral God, Integral Psychology, Integral Religion, Lighten up, Open up, Sally Kempton, Spirit's Next Move, Wake up, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.

Sally-Kempton-100x100

Feel like all hell is breaking loose? You might be experiencing a radical transformation that could change your life for the better.

Step by Step
These are the seven steps of radical transformation.

The Wake-Up Call
You realize that something needs to change.

Holding Uncertainty
You search for methods to help you change, explore teachings and avenues, all the while being willing to live with the insecurity of being in a process of identity-shifting.

Asking for Help
You approach teachers and mentors, and you strongly appeal to the power of grace itself.

Grace, Insight, and Awakening
Grace opens the situation, creating a breakthrough, inner shift, which may manifest as new gifts or insights.

Honeymoon
Enjoying the new situation, you live in the breakthrough. It may feel like being in love.

The Fall From Grace
You lose touch with the new gifts, experience the consequences of over-confidence, and a sense of dryness or loss of contact with your Source.

Integration
You bring insight to bear on the contractions that have caused you to lose contact with grace, you apply spiritual insights to the nitty-gritty actions of life, and you experience the ripening of your breakthroughs over time.

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Fierce Grace: The Boons of Kali ~ by Sally Kempton

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment Teachings, EoF Embodiment, Free Membership, Grow up, Hinduism, Integral God, Integral Psychology, Integral Religion, Lighten up, Open up, Sally Kempton, Show up, Spirit's Next Move, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, Translineage, Wake up, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.

(c) August 2011 By vudhikrai

(c) August 2011 by vudhikrai

“You need to find your Kali side,” I told Annie. You may know someone like Annie. She's a production manager at a local tv station, a single mom with a busy schedule, and a really nice person. She values yoga as a doorway into peace and well-being, teaches it to troubled teens, and always stresses the importance of equanimity and other yogic virtues -- non-violence, surrender, contentment, detachment.

But Annie's approach to yoga is like her approach to life: she is so conflict averse, that its hard for her even to admit that she has negative feelings. She rarely raises her voice, and she once told me that she can't remember the last time she felt anger. But at this moment, mired in a family conflict that involves missing money, elder abuse, and shady lawyers, Annie senses that her carefully cultivated tendency to seek peace over conflict is not helping her. She's called me for advice: she wants to be told how to keep a good relationship with her brother and sister, and still stop them from cheating her mother out of her property. In other words, she wants me to give her a prescription for non-violent conflict from the yogic playbook.

Instead, what pops out of my mouth is, “You need to find your Kali side.”

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Finding the Vulnerable Heart, Part Two

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment Teachings, Free Membership, Hinduism, Integral God, Integral Psychology, Integral Religion, Integral Theory, Open up, Sally Kempton, Spirit's Next Move, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, Translineage, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.

By Sally Kempton

Originally posted on Patheos.

In Part One of this series, we began to explore vulnerability as a path, and to look at what it takes to feel safely vulnerable. My meditations on vulnerability began during a conversation with a student named Roberta. Roberta had noticed that she often felt over-sensitive, too open to other people and even the pain of the world around her. In the last article, I discussed where vulnerability comes from, and the different types of vulnerability. Mainly, I tried to distinguish between the vulnerability that comes from weak boundaries, and mature vulnerability””based on real inner strength. That kind of vulnerability, what we might call radical vulnerability, is really only possible for someone who has established both strong personal boundaries, and a deep connection to her own core, the Essence, or inner Self. Here are some conclusions, along with a couple of exercises: one for creating energetic boundaries, the second for deepening your relationship with your own vulnerable self.

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Spiritual IQ: Is There Such a Thing?

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by Sally Kempton

Originally posted on Patheos.

Growing up, I thought that the capacity for spirituality was a rare and special gift, like musical genius or natural charm. I knew only one person who seemed to have it: my parents' friend Ned, an Irish poet who regularly went off to meditate with the Trappists and volunteer at the Catholic Worker's soup kitchen on New York's lower east side. People like Ned, I thought, had been born with an ability to experience the mystical underpinnings of things, to feel oneness with others, to be nice all the time. The rest of us were stuck with our basic ordinariness and selfishness, though like piano students stumbling through the scales, we could work at being spiritual, doing our best to act 'as if' we actually felt agape, spiritual love, or trying to sense a connection with the sacred.

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Finding the Vulnerable Heart, Part One

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment of Fullness, Enlightenment Teachings, EoF Embodiment, Evolutionary Spirituality, Free Membership, Hinduism, Integral Psychology, Integral Religion, Integral Theory, Open up, Sally Kempton, Spirit's Next Move, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, Translineage, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.


by Sally Kempton

Originally posted on Patheos.

Roberta approaches me during a break in an urban workshop. Retreats and workshops, she explains, leave her feeling so wide-open that she'll often find herself picking up other people's energy and moods. She'd left the workshop the night before, gone out on the street, and felt overwhelmed by the Saturday night energy of the city. Not just the cars honking and the music, but the people who passed her by, and even her own boyfriend.

I look at her””tall and blonde and thin””and asked her if in general she feels vulnerable. She burst into tears. "I want to be open," she said. "But I feel so raw!" Raw, in this case, is another word for vulnerable. And Roberta's struggle is a real one.

If you've done much yoga, meditation, or even deep psychological work, you may have felt something similar. When I was first spending time around my teacher, the energy generated in meditation would sometimes leave me feeling weepy and irritable, hypersensitive, even overwhelmed. No one had ever told me that the first (and many subsequent) stages of opening the heart could feel like exposing a wound, or like taking the lid off of a Pandora's box of old, unprocessed griefs and fears.

Nor did I realize, until years later, that fielding these feelings of vulnerability is not optional, nor even personal to me, but an actual part of the yogic process. Yoga, after all, is not an escape from life, but a way of taking yourself into life's pulsing heart. As you do that, you will inevitably meet your own vulnerability. Just as vulnerability and rawness are synonymous, so are vulnerability and openness. In other words, to find your way to true openness of heart, you need to pass through the forest of vulnerability.

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What is My Dharma?

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Entrepreneur, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment of Fullness, Enlightenment Teachings, EoF Embodiment, Eros & Ethics, Evolution of Love, Evolutionary Spirituality, Free Membership, Hinduism, Integral Psychology, Integral Religion, Integral Theory, Portal Top Right, Sally Kempton, Show up, Spirit's Next Move, Spiritually Incorrect, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, The Emergence Project, Translineage, Unique Obligation, Unique Self Embodiment, Unique Self Institute, Unique Story, Calling & Sacred Autobiography, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.

by Sally Kempton

In my late 20s, as a recovering existentialist in the midst of a life-crisis, I came across  he Bhagavad Gita, and read for the first time Krishna's wordson dharma. You probably remember the situation: the warrior-prince Arjuna, paralyzed by confusion at the prospect of having to kill his kinsmen in a war, begs his friend and teacher, Krishna, for help. Though Krishna's response touches on every essential aspect of the inner life, from how to meditate to what to expect when we die, the lines that struck me were these: "You are a warrior," Krishna tells his pupil, "your svadharma, your personal duty, is to fight. Therefore, stand up and do battle. Better your own dharma badly performed than the dharma of another done perfectly."

Is it possible to read that sentence without asking yourself the question "What is my dharma?" I felt that I'd suddenly found words for a question I'd been trying to formulate my whole life. I made my living as a writer””was that my dharma? I'd just begun serious spiritual practice””was that my dharma? I had a life-long aversion to the conventional rules of society””was that a sign that I was out of line with dharma, or simply that I followed a dharma that was uniquely mine? Was there really, as Krishna's words seemed to imply, a blueprint for right action, perhaps lodged in my DNA, that could provide my own personal path to truth? Was that the clue to the question that had confused me for most of my life, "What am I really supposed to be doing?"

Years of practice have convinced me that there is such a thing as personal dharma, and that unless we're in touch with it, we're out of touch with our real source of strength and guidance. When we are inside our dharma, spiritual growth seems to happen naturally. When we aren't, we feel stuck and stymied not just in our work and relationships, but in our inner life as well.

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Prayer for Postmoderns: Part 2

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment of Fullness, Enlightenment Teachings, Free Membership, Hinduism, Integral Religion, Integral Theory, Prayer & Chant, Sally Kempton, Spirit's Next Move, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, Translineage, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project.

Prayer, if you remember to do it, will kindle your sense of the sacred, the sense of being held or taken care of by the universe.

by Sally Kempton

Prayer, as anyone who does it regularly knows, is a path in and of itself. What we saw last week is that the great prayer masters didn't really care how you pray. The main thing is that you feel connected when you're praying. Prayer, if you remember to do it, will kindle your sense of the sacred, the sense of being held or taken care of by the universe.

Last week, we talked at length about the Asking Prayer, the prayer of petition. This week, we'll look at two other forms of prayer, and at the most inward form of prayer. Then we'll put it all together.

Prayer as Appreciation

Appreciative prayer includes every moment when we say thank you for the beauty in nature, or for the blessings in our life. It also includes every formal traditional prayer, from the Book of Psalms to the thousand names of Allah to the Rig Veda, as well as the highly creative practice of the monk Brother Lawrence, who simply spent the whole day talking to God.

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Prayer for Postmoderns: Part 1

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment of Fullness, Enlightenment Teachings, Free Membership, Integral Theory, Prayer & Chant, Sally Kempton, Spirit's Next Move, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, Translineage, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.

So why would a postmodern yogi pray? For at least three reasons: One, because prayer softens the armor around your heart, and actually helps you receive grace...

by Sally Kempton

Let's start with full disclosure: I pray for parking spaces. In fact, I pray for a lot of things. Some of my prayers could be called spiritually correct. I pray for deeper love; I pray for enlightenment; I pray for people in trouble. I pray for my actions to be of benefit to all and for an end to human suffering.

But I'll also pray for a workshop to go well or for answers to a problem I can't solve. Sometimes I pray for the fun of it, or because I feel bad about something I've done and am hoping the universe will extend forgiveness. And, when I'm circling a block in downtown San Francisco or New York City, I pray for a space to open up for me. A lot of the time, it works.

Mostly though, I pray because it's the most direct practice I know for communicating intimately with the divine. Prayer creates connection, sometimes with almost shocking immediacy, to the grace-flow of the universe. That's why the great prayer practitioners, like Rumi or Teresa of Avila, tell us that it doesn't matter what state we're in, or even what our motive is when we begin prayer””as long as we're willing to give it a go. "If you can't pray sincerely, offer your dry, hypocritical prayer," Rumi writes, "for God in his mercy accepts bad coin."

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Bust a Groove!

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment Teachings, Free Membership, Hinduism, Integral Psychology, Integral Theory, Sally Kempton, Spirit's Next Move, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, Translineage, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.

by Sally Kempton

Change is good. Better yet, change is possible. Here are a few strategies for busting out of painful, negative grooves.

When I was in my 20s and taking my first tentative steps along the inner path, I spent a few months working with a Jungian analyst. I went because I felt stuck. I had a novel to write that I couldn't seem to focus on, a boyfriend who didn't seem to love me the way I wanted to be loved, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction with myself. The most memorable thing she ever said to me was about the possibility of changing. She said it one afternoon after listening to me going on about all the things that weren't working in my life.

"You know what your real problem is?" she asked me. "You don't understand that it's possible to change."

I was shocked. "What do you mean?" I said.

"You think that the way you are now is the way you have to be. That isn't true. You can change all of it. You can change your relationships. You can change the way you do things. You can change the way you feel."

There is nothing more radical than the moment you realize that it is possible to reinvent your life. I'm not talking about superficial reinvention, like changing your grunge look for all-whites and mala beads, or even about doing something more radical, such as leaving a regular job to work for Doctors without Borders. I'm talking here about reconfiguring mental and emotional attitudes, shifting your vision of life””the kind of inner shift that turns a pessimist into someone capable of seeing the perfection in everything, that lets an angry person channel rage into creative energy, that makes us happier, more peaceful, more in touch with the love and wisdom at our core.

This sort of transformation is the crux of the inner life, the promise of yoga, of meditation, and of the various forms of inner work and self-inquiry we undertake. Yet it's essential to understand what kind of change we're really after and also to understand what that level of change requires. We don't want to limit our own possibilities by expecting too little from our practice. On the other hand, we don't want to indulge in magical thinking, or in the kind of spiritual bypass that makes us think we can simply meditate our way out of our life issues.

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Finding Your Courage

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment Teachings, Free Membership, Hinduism, Integral Psychology, Integral Religion, Integral Theory, Sally Kempton, Spirit's Next Move, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, The Emergence Project, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.

By Sally Kempton

My understanding about courage was transformed by a conversation with an ex-Special Forces guy I met in the late 1980s.

Scott (a name I've given him because I can't for the life of me remember his real one) had spent 20 years as a covert operative profiled for hyper-dangerous missions. He was a real-life version of a Nelson DeMille character--one of those guys who spent his life sneaking into Soviet embassies in places like Cambodia to steal secret papers. Then the Cold War ended, and he went home to someplace like Pennsylvania. There, he discovered that his formerly hard-drinking parents had gotten sober, joined AA, and wanted Scott to go to Al Anon, the 12-step program for relatives of alcoholics.

“What you have to realize,” he told me, “is that in all my years in the Special Forces, I'd never been physically afraid. I loved danger, and I was really good at it. Guys like me have what the Marine Corps psychologists call throwaway lives, meaning the person doesn't really care whether they live or die. But when I walked into that meeting, I was so terrified that I couldn't stay in the room.”

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Too Busy?

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Entrepreneur, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment Teachings, Free Membership, Integral Theory, Sally Kempton, Spirit's Next Move, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, The Emergence Project, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.

By Sally Kempton

I've dropped in on a yoga class with a popular teacher in Los Angeles. The room is full of slim blonde yoginis, moving like synchronized swimmers through a vinyasa series. Fifteen minutes into the sequence, the teacher calls the class together to demonstrate some subtle alignment details. Half the women in the room move forward. The rest turn on their cell phones and begin checking their messages.

Those women could have been doctors on call, or moms with young kids at home. But I suspect that they were victims, like so many people I know, of the Internal Busyness Syndrome””the breathless, stress-addicted feeling of having way too much to do and way too little time to do it. Internal Busyness, a complex of internally generated thoughts, beliefs, and bodily responses, can certainly be triggered by an especially busy day or a lot of competing demands. But unlike External Busyness, which is the more straightforward but often unavoidable state of having a lot to do, Internal Busyness doesn't go away when your tasks are done. That's why it's so insidious. External busyness””the admittedly challenging pressure that comes from juggling a demanding job, children, financial worries, health issues, and all the tasks of running your life and household””can be managed. It can even be a yogic pathway, if you know how to practice with it. Internal Busyness, however, manages you.

So when people tell me "I'm so busy I can't find time to practice," I always ask them which kind of busyness they're distressed by: the External or the Internal. One tip-off that you might be suffering from the Internal Busyness Syndrome is this: When you don't have an immediate task that has to be done, when you have a moment that could be devoted to taking a few quiet breaths or just spacing out, do you ever find yourself still spinning internally, wondering what you've forgotten to take care of? That's Internal Busyness.

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What Do You Do with Difficult People?

Posted by & filed under Articles & Essays, Blog, CIW Founders, Conscious Entrepreneur, Conscious Eros Creativity Relationships, Enlightenment Teachings, Eros & Ethics, Evolutionary Spirituality, Free Membership, Integral Psychology, Integral Religion, Integral Theory, Portal Top Right, Programs & Events, Sally Kempton, Spirit's Next Move, Spiritually Incorrect, Tantra & White Hot Yoga of the Heart, The Emergence Project, World Spirituality Practice, World Spirituality Project, Yoga.

By Sally Kempton

Fran's cottage on the Oregon coast should be the perfect meditative retreat. The only worm in her apple is Larry, her landlord, who lives on the property. Larry is an acerbic critic of just about everything””the government, the art world, drug companies, and Fran. He can't believe she's so clueless about simple practical matters. Only an idiot, he tells her, would plant petunias without putting gopher wire around them, and that's just for starters.

Yes, he'll bring her groceries from town, and help her diagnose the weird noises in her car. But he also walks into her house uninvited, and doesn't understand why she minds. After all, they're neighbors, aren't they?

It's not that Larry is a bad guy, and Fran knows him well enough to know that he's harmless. But nonetheless, she feels crowded. She doesn't want to move, yet her landlord's presence hangs over her house like a dark, critical cloud. Worst of all, his irritability magnetizes her own irritation, so she often finds herself talking to him in the same harsh tone he uses with her.

As a conscious person doing her best to follow a spiritual path, Fran feels ashamed of herself for not knowing how to deal with Larry. You might feel that way too, when difficult people show up in your life. Yet the truth is that few of us ever get through life without encountering””often in our intimate personal space””more than one person who is staggeringly difficult for us to handle. Whether it's a manipulative friend, a prickly co-worker, an absent-hearted lover””some form of relationship stress seems to be part of the package we signed up for when we enrolled ourselves in the school that is life on this planet. If we don't have a few challenging people in our lives, we're probably living on a desert island.

So, how do you deal with a situation like Fran's without moving away, being harsh or wimpy, or putting that person out of your heart? How can you explain to your friend who keeps enlisting you in service of her dramas that you don't want to be part of her latest scenario of mistrust””yet still remain friends? How do you handle the boss whose tantrums terrorize the whole office, or the co-worker who bursts into tears and accuses you of being abrupt when you're just trying to get down to business?

More to the point, what do you do when the same sorts of difficult interpersonal situations keep showing up in your life? Chalk it up to karma? Find ways to resolve them through discussion or even pre-emptive action? Or take the truly challenging view – the view held by Jungians and many spiritual teachers--that these people are reflecting your own disowned, or shadow tendencies? In other words, does dealing with difficult people have to begin with finding out what you might need to work on in yourself?

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