We work from where we are strong. Always.

So our egoic “defensive structure” is built on our strengths, in accordance with how we experienced things as small children — often under enormous pressure from those who had power over us to “give ourselves up” and conform — at the expense of our integrity.

So don’t look at your “self-defeating patterns” as something perverse. You created them from your genius, and you survived. Stop fighting those patterns and explore them for the talents they contain. You may very-well find that what seems to be your worst pattern turns out to contain your greatest assets when the task of “purification” has progressed. So don’t despair.

Look less at the outward behavior and more at the underlying qualities and capacities in the pattern. Everything is in essence divine and originates in Divine Impulse. However-distorted, it can not be any other way.

There might be a hypervigilance for a certain thing in the environment, or perhaps an unwillingness to compromise something in yourself, or perhaps you’re guarding something very tender for which there historically wasn’t acceptance in the people around you.

All of what you find, when consciously engaged, can be tremendous assets in your life now.

In other words, turn it on its head; look at how it was *right* at one time, and what need it was answering — and how that may still be the case in some way.

The most difficult patterns we face were actually solutions to earlier problems. Our egos aren’t going to give them up until there’s something better to put in their place.

That “something better” can come from several directions. One direction is consciously engaging the pattern instead of judging/fighting it, and keenly observing how it works: what triggers it, what your psychodynamic process is, and deliberately acting it out so that it will disclose its intention & mechanics. In this, you’ll also regain control of the pattern and can choose or not-choose it.

Another is to do the work of expanding your felt-identity — and that’s a key phrase — so that the sensation of “you” becomes larger and larger, encompassing not only that of you which is body & mind, but which is transcendent and self-subsisting outside of time & space and which is actually existentiating the local-spacetime ‘you’ at every moment. This is the task and purpose of authentic spiritual practice, and your so-called “self-defeating pattern” will just collapse when your felt-sense of identity makes it irrelevant.

As a lived life is messy, so the spiritual path is messy. It’s not a straight line of beautiful harmonious unfoldment… it’s a mud-wrestle with our inner demons and a shedding-and-grieving of everything in our life that doesn’t support naked, undefended authenticity.

You might — or might NOT — become a higher-functioning person. You might — or might NOT — become more materially prosperous.
You might — or might NOT — find your soul-mate.

The spiritual path is not about any of these things, and the lure of them is not signposts to your further progress but billboards for spiritual tourist-traps that will waste precious time and resources if you follow them.

But what you WILL find, if your intention is to uncover/unfold the truth of your real being, is a self-knowledge that is a direct link to God and a happiness that can never be taken from you, because it is not contingent on anything except itself. Its very nature is Love.

From a friend’s Facebook post:

How can you be ready for the next level of growth? You simply cannot….because like any growth it’s new & you cannot be fully ready for whats new!

We can’t know what we don’t know — and the real knowledge does not come from books or stuff we hear at workshops, but from the kind of direct experience that changes our felt-sense of identity and reality.

Like you can’t “not see” the vase between the profiles or the profiles framing the vase once you see them, the real knowledge is something you can’t not-know about yourself after it finally graces you — and grace is gratuitous, so you can’t engineer or cause this awakening, no matter how profound the affirmations on your fridge door.

So we absolutely must learn to sail the boat of our awakening by doing the practices and practicing the attitudes of the awakened ones… we have to hoist the sail or nothing happens, but the currents are what they are and the wind is going to be what it’s going to be, and we can’t control those things, we can only surrender to them.

(I’m going to rewrite this soon… it does not flow the way I want. But the basic ideas are here.)

The message from the “Cult of Positivity” is that if we’re having negative emotions/thoughts/experiences, then we’re attracting them by some misuse of mind power. The implication is that something is wrong with us … and that we should instead “think positive” and “raise our vibration” to attract only good things like abundance and soul-mates and unending bliss.

Horsepucky. That notion is the “Hallmark Cards’ of spirituality, and life does not actually work that way — certainly not for those on a path of transformation.

The notion that negative emotions/thoughts/experiences are to be avoided, or are unspiritual, or are a symptom of “low vibration,” is patently false. One has only to read of the lives of the great mystics and illumined ones to realize that they suffered greatly, both before and after their awakening.

Experiencing “negativity” is not only unavoidable on the spiritual path — it’s a totally necessary part of the transformational alchemy. It doesn’t mean that your practice isn’t working… on the contrary, you may dig through a great deal of mud before digging deeply enough to reach the “Water of Life.”

However, an avoidance of negativity may, in fact, block your spiritual unfoldment. The nature of life itself is to expand and contract. One observes many spiritual seekers who are stunting their spiritual growth through an unworkable effort to sustain an elevated state and thereby never taking the next step into a fuller incarnation or embodiment that would lead to a fuller capacity to remain inwardly fluid and in touch with the inherent freedom of the soul, offering us the best use of this precious human life.

We must keep in mind that oaks grow strong in contrary winds, and diamonds are made under enormous pressure. The finest steels are forged by being hammered, folded-over, and hammered again many times before being heated almost white-hot, quenched, cooled, and polished into the finest swords.

And God/The Universe is not a vending machine. “Raising your vibration” is not necessarily going to be rewarded with life always getting easier. However, if you are truly awakening, your capacity to encompass life will increase noticeably and you will become a true “source” for others and the world.

Random stuff happens; while there are certainly “self-fulfilling prophecies” that we can trace to specific identifiable behaviors, there is also a great deal in life that we neither create nor attract. If there were not randomness, there would be neither free will nor creativity, and without those, there is no evolution of consciousness. A period of chaos is fundamental to change and transformation.

Struggle is how our nascent potential is actually manifested and embodied. 3-D reality entails time and it entails mass; it takes energy — work — to create the accommodation for our potentials to manifest in life. It does not happen magically or because we are thinking the right thoughts or doing the right rituals. Those things can help, but for the truly great things to be birthed, great effort — and stretching — is required.

There is great freedom inside the indeterminacy of what looks on the surface to be chaos. Positivity can be a very subtle egoic trap that actually blocks our unfoldment because we won’t allow the indeterminacy of the transition and are trying to “live an image” of “spirituality” or of ourselves instead of allowing the fresh-and-authentic — but essentially uncontrollable — emerge organically. Ironically, it’s the aliveness of this emergence that we actually crave and are trying to contrive through a forced positivity.

We won’t give up control, to not put too fine a point on it. Most of the positivity crap is just our ego looking to stay in control and build a fence around our experience. This continues to sell books, seminars, and sessions with your life coach because, while being superficially plausible, it does not actually work and we keep churning the same-old, same-old.

The notion that we can steer life away from pain and chaos by maintaining “positivity” is very attractive to the wounded ego that is just looking to feel better, but it is really a counterfeit, feckless positivity if we have not developed the capacity — the trust, the will and the strength — to stare our Shadow in the face and shine the light of awareness and compassion into its dark corners.

I know that some people put great stock in “channeled” material and there is a great deal of support for the Cult of Positivity in the stuff received from dis-embodied/non-embodied entities. The problem is that there is no way to verify that the entity is what s/he says s/he is. The capacity to channel does not mean that the channel is an evolved being, either, and the channeled material is limited and shaped by the channel’s own mind and understanding. Further — and more to the point — the channeled entity is not living your life. YOU are, and it is up to YOU to develop your relationship with your own inner guidance and will-power in a way that supports your divine autonomy and inner support for the transformation that is before you.

But there are kernels of truth inside the nonsense…..

One is that when we become contracted through fear and anger, we limit our availability to the Universe to bring us what we actually do need. It’s also true that most of our fearful/angry thought/emotion states do not produce anything except more of the same. So it behooves us to discipline our heartminds (the Sufis speak of training the ego instead of killing it) to just not take thought/attitude pathways that experience shows have no “product.”

The other kernel is that some of us self-selected before incarnation to Awaken in a spiritual sense. So anything that doesn’t support that unfoldment/deepening has to go, and some of what was untenable in our lives has significant inertia or “parasitic drag” (like barnacles on the hull of our ship of journey). It just takes time to clear that stuff because some of it goes down to a cellular or sub-cellular level and the body itself has to adjust and respond to a new inner direction.

When a caterpillar pupates, its innards become soup and then re-form from something designed to handle rough material to something that assimilates nectar as nourishment. The “soup” phase is a necessary process for both butterflies and humans. We spend as much time in soup phase as we need, in accordance/alignment with a wisdom that the mind can’t fathom but which is absolutely trustworthy.

So the third kernel of truth in the Cult of Positivity crap is that we can avoid the tendency of the ego to become identified with the pain and melodrama of the soup phase by doing what supports hope and supports faith-in-the-process. Sometimes it is simply an act of conscious, deliberate intention to stay focused on hope and faith when everything seems to be falling apart, but the effort is always rewarded with a greater sense of ease, spaciousness, and fluidity.

Here’s the deal: Don’t judge your experience… neither grasp nor avoid…just allow the fluidity of your process. THAT is the way to spend the most time in spaciousness and open-hearted joy, and to make the best-possible use of those periods of pain.

Caffeine musings:

Many of us spiritual types hold compassion as a deep personal value — and that’s as it should be. But I see a lot of us trying for “compassion” as the default response to life’s exigencies without first having truly faced our fear and our anger.

True compassion rests on *detachment* AND *power*. You can’t attain detachment without first having faced and conquered your fear, or you will be using a veneer of detachment to push your fear away; that approach is exhausting and will make you ill. You can’t engage your power without having faced and conquered your anger, or your power will be false and brittle.

“Getting better” is not the same thing as having done the work. Forgive me, but “getting better” is not even doing the work. You’ve either done that work, or you haven’t. The most sincere subscription to spiritual ideals is NOT the same as the embodied fruits of your transormational alchemy, which is an authentic and genuine spiritual accomplishment — and the proof is in your daily life of work and relationships. If you’re still doing things the way you did them ten or twenty years ago except with a coat of spiritual paint to dress it up, if your felt-identity is the same as it was five years ago, you haven’t done the work.

If you have done the work, your life has been transformed and it’s visible to everyone (except for the friends who left you because they needed you to be fearful or angry).

I am grateful to Peet’s “Garuda Blend” for this riff.

A friend writes:

There are no rules.
Love is a mystery.

Sometimes it happens that we find someone very-well-matched and we spend the rest of our lives with them. Sometimes we partner with someone very-well-matched and then our lives take different directions, yet we remain lifelong friends and continue to grow from the relationship (as happened in my marriage).

There are no rules.
Love is a mystery.

Often what happens is that we look for love in the wrong places and attempt to partner with someone for the wrong reasons — meaning, it was our egos driving the dynamics. These egoic reasons can take many forms: Lust, status, the person fits our mental checklist for a partner, family/peer-group pressure, loneliness… Then life can become very difficult, and it may suck the life out of both people to stay together.

“Wrong reasons” is not some external, moral judgment… it means “unsustainable except at great cost to our sense of wholness.”

What happens VERY often in the West is that the woman gets with the man and expects him to change — and he doesn’t. He gets with her expecting that she’ll never change — and she does.

So, yes, it is only the love-relationship with God — or, if you will, “our deepest and most authentic substance” — that is constant. It’s constant because it existed before we incarnated, it will exist after we quit the physical dimension — and it is the very substance of our existence itself.

When the heart opens, we perceive this relationship as living inside our human love relationships, whether in a marriage or in deep friendships. Then the ego gradually ceases its clinging and its sounding the alarms of our survival instincts when we hit the inevitable human-level speed-bumps of life and relationship.

There are no rules — except “be kind to yourself and others.”
Love is a mystery.
We do our best.

If you have to ask what Jazz is,
you’ll never understand it.
—Louis Armstrong

You might have heard of “sufis.” Perhaps you have heard the terms “Whirling Dervish,” or “Sufi Dancing.” Perhaps you know that Rumi, the 13^th-Century Persian mystic who has been the best-selling poet in America for the last thirty years, was a “sufi.” Maybe you looked up “sufi” in the dictionary and found “Islamic mystic” — which doesn’t actually help much.  So what’s a “sufi,” really? What is “sufism?”

It’s a reasonable question, but nearly as hard to pin down as “jazz.” One of the problems is that the bulk of what’s been written aca­demically about something called “sufism” was written by outside observers with a lot of preconceptions and who are often promoting their own ideological biases under the guise of “expertise.”  On the other hand are Muslim ideologues with an agenda of promoting Islam, who insist that Sufi practice is only legitimate in the context of personal Islamic religious practice.

To make it worse, as many actual Sufis you ask, as many answers you’ll get, since the shape of the Sufi work is adapted to the culture in which it is practiced.

So let’s start with the word “Sufism.” The “-ism” part is an unfortunate linguistic convention; it implies a doctrine or dogma where in fact there is none. It also implies a fixed or recognizable form, and there is none of that, either historically or in the present day. The Sufis themselves do not call their work “Sufism,” except as a conversational expediency. Their own name for it is Taṣawwūf, which means, more or less, “The Way of the Sufi.”

“Belief,” in the sense of “subscription to a premise,” is totally foreign to the nature of the Sufi “way.” So there is nothing you have to accept or do first to set out on the Sufi path; you don’t even have to believe in God. If you believe in yourself, even just a little tiny bit, that’s enough. To quote Hazrat Inayat Khan, the first Sufi teacher in the West: “The Sufi is free from belief and disbelief, and yet gives every liberty to others to have their own opinion.”

He continues: “Strictly speaking, Sufism is neither a religion nor a philosophy; it is neither theism nor atheism, but stands between the two and fills the gap. Among religious people, Sufis are viewed as ‘free-thinkers,’ while among intellectual philosophers they are considered religious, because they make use of subtler principles to elevate the soul than can be followed by material logic. If ever it could be called a religion, it would only be as a religion of love, harmony, and beauty. If it be called a philosophy, it is beyond that because a Sufi kindles the fire of devotion while keeping eyes open to reason and logic.” To the atheist, the Sufi will say, “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in, either.”

So if it’s not a religion or a philosophy, if there are no beliefs — what are Sufis about, anyway?

The aim of Sufi practice is the embodied development of latent human potentials under divine guidance — with or without the vehicle of a religion or theology. These potentials are present in everyone: We all possess the capacity for deep love, deep fulfillment, deep self-confidence, fear­lessness, and deep joy as our immanent inner wealth. The path of the Sufi is the path of the heart — the Path of Love — and it is a path of direct personal experience. As the Sufis say, “The one who tastes, knows.” So uncovering the nature of the spiritual heart and of “divine guidance” is an ongoing, deepening discovery of oneself through one’s own experience. What emerges through the Sufi inquiry is truly authentic to oneself, not something adopted from someone else.

The proposition that one does not need an external yardstick, doctrine, or rulebook is really spooky to those who need conformity and who have lost their internal moral compass. But that is, indeed, the way of true inner freedom.

If your knowledge of fire has become certainty by words alone,
then seek to be cooked by the fire itself.
Don’t abide in borrowed certainty.
There is no real certainty until you burn;
if you wish for this, sit down in the fire.
— Rumi, Mathnawi II:860–861
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski

In this, love is both the fuel and the vehicle, and one begins to experience the all-pervading nature of love, not just in personal relationships but as a kind of subtle geometry underlying, supporting, and evolving the whole of reality. It is love that has the unique power of beckoning us forth out of our felt-sense of smallness and limitation into the boundlessness, grandeur, and deep fulfillment of our real selves.

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
—Henry Miller

And when love becomes one’s pole-star by which to navigate the ocean of life, one always acts in integrity.

“Sufism” isn’t actually “learned.” It’s just what’s there when you unlearn everything that is false about yourself.

What distinguishes the Sufis from other inner-work schools is this emphasis on the heart as the locus of the integration and refinement of the totality of our being. So what is often termed the “ego” in spiritual parlance is not considered to be a “problem” that we are somehow “wrong” or unspiritual for having and must therefore “fix:” If love is indeed all-pervading, there can be nothing truly separate from love, including our messy egos. An epigram often attributed to Rumi says, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Our daily life is the laboratory and classroom of our self-discovery, our every exper­ience offering us the choice of stale banality or a further step into our unconditioned, inherent wisdom and magnificence. The Sufi lives a full, balanced human life even while touching transcendence — so every experience, every emotion, every relationship, every triumph and disaster is given to us, by the movement of evolution of the whole Universe, to help us on our journey into our own greater possibilities.

The role of the Sufi teacher is in all ways to support this movement, and help the student avoid the worst of the pitfalls and dead-end side trips that, when traveling new territory, can seem very inviting at the time. There are spiritual practices that accelerate and deepen the unfoldment, and the teacher is the physician who prescribes the remedy. The Sufi teacher is not the deified guru or “Perfect Master” of other traditions, but in keeping with the focus on the heart, is one who has been the route ahead and has returned to walk beside the seeker as a friend and companion on the immense, timeless caravan of souls on which all, without exception, are returning to Wholeness.

I recently came across this, in Googling the history of Sufis and coffee (which the Yemeni Sufis invented). I hope you find it fun and useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjvX0o9uibk

If you would like a bit of historical background on “Universal Sufism” in the West, go here.

If you want a totally non-intellectual view of the “way” of the Sufi, go here.

Calligraphy ‘Ishq Allah, “God is Love,” by the author.
This is an article submitted in condensed form to Catalyst Magazine (http://www.catalystmagazine.net) in May 2013, a teaser for a teaching I gave in Salt Lake City in June 2013.

All of This:
it is preparation for walking in the world
as Light.
You have been found now,
and the running of many lifetimes
is over.
So as each layer of dust
is wiped clean from the surface,
the You
you have known
must disperse.

Let this Light become
your Speech & your Silence.

Let the grief
that has lived you
pass away.

Let the people
who love You
Love Themselves.

Let the Earth shake,
the Stars burn,
the Skies break
when You do:

as painful as this part is,
You were meant to know your Light.

—Em Claire, poet

Trust is a huge issue for most of us, and some of us have an easier time of it than others, according to our life experiences and the attitudes we nurture. Many of us test things over and over, and any other way seems too-great a great risk. We trust our mistrust because we think it keeps us safe. We think it creates predictable and controllable structure.

This strategy doesn’t actually keep us safe at all… it just makes our world small enough that the mind can continue to try to control it — and “protects” us instead from more and more of our aliveness.

To unfold spiritually, or just to live life with integrity, we have to embrace uncertainty — and we have to trust love more than we trust our fear. As long as we are enmeshed in the identities of the past, we may hang onto our reasons for not trusting — or we may trust provisionally until trust is broken; it doesn’t matter, because we will still be impaled on the horns of the polarities of trust/not-trusting. Like being on a see-saw, there is no forward progress, only up-and-down movement.

There is just no resolution of this at that level, regardless of the affirmations pasted to our bathroom mirror, how often we are validated by others or by a psychological or spiritual teaching. As long as we are working at this level, we remain in the decades-long “getting better” and not really claiming our divine inheritance.

There is that of us in our depth which is pure and joyful by its very nature, completely untouched by the traumas and insults of the past. It is covered-over by our identity with the past, and by its continual recycling in the present by our attempts to protect ourselves from further pain.

The only resolution to its issues is a seeing-through the trance, the density, of our accustomed identity, a reconnecting to that of our being which is already-and-has-always-been whole, from which we are somehow separated by life experience. The real spiritual teaching is that which brings us to the portal of that shift. Anything else may be interesting to the mind and inspiring to the emotions, but if it does not uproot our felt-sense of “myself,” real transformation is not possible.

This seeing-through is not something we can will to happen. It is an act of Grace, and Grace is by nature gratuitous. However, we can increase the likelihood of Grace striking by being diligent with our spiritual practice, by hanging with people who already have this trust, by practicing forgiveness and compassion (for ourselves at least as much as for others), and by being willing to enter into the ambiguity and lack of control that a real shift in spiritual progress always entails.

From a Facebook page:

Dear Human: You’ve got it all wrong. You didn’t come here to master unconditional love. That is where you came from and where you return. You came here to learn personal love. Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty love. Crazy love. Broken love. Whole love. Infused with divinity. Lived through the grace of stumbling. Demonstrated through the beauty of… messing up. Often. You didn’t come here to be perfect. You already are. You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous. And then to rise again into remembering.

I totally love this piece, in the way it embraces and celebrates Divine Limitation as a real and beautiful part of Spirit Embodied.

AND I am living into how the tension between unconditional love and messy human love, and the gradual in-forming of unconditional love to the limited human love, is evolving me/us.