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The Divine Feminine
As I near the end of my Spiritual Direction training, the last module pertained to the Divine Feminine. Below is the Reflective Expression I wrote: Studying the Divine Feminine certainly gave me a lot to ponder, and its not the first time I’ve explored the topic. As I’m prone to do, I brought the concepts into myself, examined my tendencies, and its clear I live far more often in the masculine than the feminine … I, like so many of us in Western culture, am dictated by clocks and tasks, and I’ve always been a go-getter professionally. But what I realized in my illness is that I was more of a human doing than a human being; I treated my life as a project instead of a life. I no longer want to live from that space. Slowly, I’m teaching myself how to live…
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The Spring Within You
I’d like to meditatively reflect on something I read from the Center for Action’s Daily Meditations earlier this morning: “Jesus’ most wonderful metaphor for [the] inner experience of grace is “a spring within you.” This spring is not outside us, it’s within us, and it’s bubbling up unto eternal life. Spiritual knowing and spiritual cognition are always really re-cognition. It’s the realization that what we already know is true at some deep level. We’ve had an intuition or a suspicion that we might just be a beloved child of God, but we often think that it’s too good to imagine. Heaven is already given, and the gift is already handed over. To the woman at the well, Jesus says very directly, “If you but knew the gift of God … you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10). Jesus is…
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Wrestling with Complexity
Everything is layered and complex. God didn’t intend for so many things to be happening that are happening right now … the deeply ailing earth, the sex trafficking, the crime, the wars in Israel and Ukraine, the obesity and drug epidemics in America, the loudness and divisiveness of the world … but these things and more are happening nonetheless. I regularly lean into the truth that my beloved teacher, James Finley, speaks often, ‘God protects us from nothing yet sustains us in all things.’ The question is: what is my work in the world regarding the madness I see (and deeply feel) every day? Yesterday I read a Facebook post that read “God save us” related to the Productive Rights Amendment, Issue 1, passing in Ohio. I read another that read “Good day for ladies and bodily autonomy.” I feel both deeply. The issue…
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Gazing
Lately I’ve been pondering my inner life and exploring various ways of being, specifically contemplative ways of being as it’s such a beautiful way of life. Interestingly, the yoga path is also a contemplative path, with its emphasis on embodiment, unity (of heart, mind, body and spirit), and conscious awareness. Life is pretty amazing, when you think about it. I couldn’t have planned it the way it’s worked out. All praise to God for leading me down the roads I needed to travel to become more of who I’m supposed to be. But I digress, back to the topic at hand … as we move into the cooler months of the year, it’s pretty typical for me to go deeper inward. While we are who we are, we also have great choice in the ways we live our lives. It’s easy to go through…
