Love's confusing joy...

 For you my dears...

Love’s Confusing Joy

If you want what visible reality

can give, you are an employee.

 

If you want the unseen world,

you are not living with your truth.

 

Both wishes are foolish,

but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting

that what you really want is

love’s confusing joy.

 

-        ~  Rumi

How to cope with Covid loneliness, isolation and sorrow...

I've been thinking about you all over the past few days since I spoke to you on Wednesday in my radio show.  Here's the link in case you missed it this week...

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/closeupradio/2021/01/27/close-up-radio-spotlights-catherine-duclos-of-wild-serenity-life-coaching

I know how much you are all suffering during this time of Covid, in the isolation. the loneliness, the sorrow and grief you feel.  PLEASE PLEASE know that you are never alone!  I am here to walk by your side through the difficult and overwhelming times we are facing right now!  Know that you can make it through, no matter what challenges you face...you are strong, you are resilient, you are beautiful and radiant and YOU CAN DO THIS!!

If you would like to come talk with me to set up a FREE 30-MINUTE CONSULTATION, please click on this link to schedule that with me.  

https://www.wildserenitylifecoaching.com/schedule-appointment

I will work with you no matter whether you can afford my services!  We will work something out, please be assured of that!

Remember this:

"Suffering is a bond through which we all touch each other"

YOU ARE STRONG and YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL!!

LOVE ALWAYS,

Catherine

Comfortable Insistence...an original from me...

 

comfortable insistence

rides the wild normal

waves of brilliant turbulence.

 

difference. likeness.

resistance.  surrender.

always more hunting.

 

eyes wide open

closed against rejection

seeking sheltering skies.

 

seamless public acceptance

transforms landscapes

of wounded minds

 

behind oppressive facades

recognition unfurls

lush beauty and

dissolves the binding darkness.

Welcome to Wild Serenity Confessions....

 WELCOME TO CONFESSIONS...

I hope you made it here from my website!  If you did, WELCOME, WELCOME, WELCOME!!  I hope that you were able to listen to the international radio show through Closeup Television/Radio show!  If not, here's the link:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/closeupradio/2021/01/27/close-up-radio-spotlights-catherine-duclos-of-wild-serenity-life-coaching

So what can I say to you except that I am soooo excited that you've made it here!  That means that you are TOTALLY COMMITTED TO YOUR OWN LIFE!! And there's nothing more amazing and more beautiful than YOU wanting to change your life!!

I am HERE!  How can I best serve you?  Please schedule a FREE 30-MINUTE CONSULTATION on the website...I want to meet you with all my heart...

Here are some gorgeous thoughts for you to sit with until tomorrow....who is your anam cara?

From Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom, by John O'Donohue

All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul.  You are here to realize and honor these possibilities.  When love comes into your life, unrecognized dimensions of your destiny awaken and blossom and grow.  Possibility is the secret heart of time.  On its outer surface time is vulnerable to transience.  Regardless of its sadness or beauty, each day empties and vanishes.  In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration.  Time minds possibility and makes sure that nothing is lost or forgotten.  That which seems to pass away on the surface of time is in fact transfigured and housed in the tabernacle of memory.  Possibility is the secret heart of creativity.  Martin Heidegger speaks about the "ontological priority" of possibility.  At the deepest level of being, possibility is both mother and transfigured destination of what we call events and facts.  This quiet and secret world of the eternal is the soul.  Love is the nature of the soul.  When we love and allow ourselves to be loved, we begin more and more to inhabit the kingdom of the eternal.  Fear changes into courage, emptiness becomes plenitude, and distance becomes intimacy. Love is our deepest nature, and consciously or unconsciously, each of us searches for love.  We often choose such false ways to satisfy this deep hunger.  An excessive concentration on our work, achievements, or spiritual quest can actually lead us away from the presence of love.

The Umbra Nihili

In a vast universe that often seems sinister and unaware of us, we need the presence and shelter of love to transfigure our loneliness.  This cosmic loneliness is the root of all inner loneliness.  All of our life, everything we do, think, and feel is surrounded by nothingness.  Hence we become afraid so easily.  The fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart says that all of human life stands under the shadow of nothingness, the umbra nihili.  Nevertheless, love is the sister of the soul.  Love is the deepest language and presence of the soul.  In and through the warmth and creativity of love, the soul shelters us from the bleakness of that nothingness.  We cannot fill up our emptiness with objects, possessions, or people.  We have to go deeper into that emptiness; then we will find beneath nothingness the flame of love waiting to warm us.

The Anam Cara

In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship.  One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam cara.  Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend.  So anam cara in the Celtic world was the "soul friend."  In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara.  It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life.  With the anam cara you could share your innermost self, your mind and your heart.  This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging.  When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality, and category.  You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the "friend of your soul."  The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul.  There is no cage for the soul.  The soul is a divine light that flows into you and into your Other.  This art of belonging awakened and fostered a deep and special companionship.  In his Conferences, John Cassian says this bond between friends is indissoluble:  "This, I say, is what is broken by no chances, what no interval of time or space can sever or destroy, and what even death itself cannot part."

In everyone's life, there is great need for an anam cara, a soul friend.  In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension.  The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious.   Where you are understood, you are at home.  Understanding nourishes belonging.  When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul.  This recognition is described in a beautiful line from Pablo Neruda:  "You are like nobody since I love you."  This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person.  Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person's individuality and soul.  Love alone is literate in the world of origin; it can decipher identity and destiny."

"A friend is different from an acquaintance.  Friendship is a deeper and more sacred connection.  Shakespeare has a beautiful phrase for this:  "The friends thou hast and their attention tried, grapple them to your soul with hoops of steel."  So a friend is incredibly precious.  A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you."

"Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention.  Friendship is always an act of recognition.  This metaphor of friendship can be grounded in the clay nature of the human body.  When you find the friend you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together.  It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, your friend's clay and your clay lay side by side.  Then in the turning of the seasons, your one clay divided and separated.  You began to rise as distinct clay forms, each housing a different individuality and destiny.  Without even knowing it, your secret memory mourned your loss of each other.  While your clay selves wandered for thousands of years through the universe, your longing for each other never faded.  This metaphor helps to explain how in the moment of friendship two souls suddenly recognize each other.  It could be a meeting on the street, or at a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is the flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow.  There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing.  Love opens the door of ancient recognition.  You enter.  You come home to each other at last.  As Euripedes said, "Two friends, one soul."

In the classical tradition, this is wonderfully expressed in the Symposium, Plato's magical dialogue on the nature of love.  Plato adverts to the myth that humans in the beginning were not single individuals.  Each person was two selves in one.  Then they became separated; consequently, you spend your life looking for your other half.  When you find and discover each other, it is through this act of profound recognition.  In friendship, an ancient circle closes.  That which is ancient between you will mind you, shelter you, and hold you together.  When two people fall in love, each comes in out of the loneliness of exile, home to the one house of belonging....each recognizes the other as the one in whom their heart could be at home."

"One of the deepest longings of the human soul is the longing to be seen.  In an ancient myth Narcissus looks into the pool, sees his own face, and becomes obsessed with it.  Unfortunately, there is no mirror in the world where you can catch a glimpse of your soul.  You cannot even see your own body completely.  If you look behind you, the front of your body is out of view.  You can never be fully visually present to your self.  The one you love, your anam cara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul.  The honesty and clarity of true friendship also brings out the real contour of your spirit.  It is beautiful to have such a presence in your life."

Love,

Catherine xoxo

The paradox of prosperity

From A Whole New Mind, Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink (p.35)

"The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven't budged.  That's why more people - liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it - are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning.  As Columbia University's Andrew Delbanco puts it, 'The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.'"

Beer, Sex, Shopping, Chocolate, God

From the Chapter, “Beer, Sex, Shopping, Chocolate, God” in Saints and Madmen, How Pioneering Psychiatrists Are Creating a New Science of the Soul by Russell Shorto

Andre Papineau, a Catholic priest from Milwaukee, has a perspective on the confluence of psychology and spirituality:

One of the tenets of a psychospiritual perspective is that spirituality, striving for something beyond the confines of ordinary individual consciousness, is natural to us all.  If the socially sanctioned paths to it – religions – are cut off or overgrown or otherwise useless, we find others.  Madness is one alternate route.  But there may be others.   There may be paths that are not authorized by any known church or temple, and that also don’t fit the definition of serious mental illness.  These are the paths that crisscross the terrain of ordinary life, the ways that all of us, every day, try to break free.

Addiction is one of Papineau’s favorite topics.  Addiction, in his mind, is an intriguing, ornately carved, though tragically short flight on the staircase of psychospiritual transcendence.  For an old-fashioned drunk, sitting of an afternoon in a dark, stale-smelling bar, Papineau will tell you, “God is in the beer.”  You might think that by this he means that the alcoholic worships his drink, and you would be right.  But he means it truly, not ironically.  Alcoholics are initiates into the Mystery, as true a group of seekers as those in seminary or yeshiva.  This is not, Papineau admits, a politically correct observation, but he believes it is a compelling one.

His starting point for this insight, which he developed over years of working with people who are struggling with the modest tortures of life, was Jung, who expressed to Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, his belief that “craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.”  (William James too insisted that the “drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness.”)  The Jungian Self, the center of the psyche, the part of the individual that seeks union with the infinite, tries to achieve this union by projecting its internal striving outward, onto an object.  In the case of an alcoholic, the object is drink.

To this psychological perspective Papineau adds a religious layer, borrowed from the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner.  Rahner talked about what he called the transcendental horizon:  the visible edge of wholeness and infinity toward which the soul continually journeys but never truly reaches.  This horizon is the farthest, highest, and truest home of all our longings.  It is the oxygen from which every human act of love and knowledge takes its breath.

Put simplistically, a psychological view locates the ultimate goal and source of this longing – the Self -  inside the person, while some theological views call it God and place it on the outside.  But in overcoming the dualistic split between body and mind/soul, one transcends the split between earth and heaven.  If you come to see all reality as one, then religion and psychology merge, or at least significantly blend into one another.  Psychological problems become spiritual problems, and are susceptible to spiritual solutions.

This awareness is not Papineau’s alone.  In varying degrees one might say it is shared by all psyche-spirit practitioners.  Paul Duckro considers that a woman with an eating disorder may be acting out a spiritual hunger; Tomas Agosin sees a patient falling in love with him as a projection of her Self, her “God-within,” onto him.  These interpretations come from the doctors’ seeing body, mind, and soul as all of one substance, or on one continuum.

But Andre Papineau goes a bit further.  What he is getting at in talking about addictions is, in part, the psychospiritual core of Alcoholics Anonymous.  You have sought spiritual fulfilment, but in the wrong place; now put yourself directly in God’s hands.  But, according to Papineau, the twelve-step programs highlight only part of the truth.  The darker reality is that the alcoholic, drink in hand, is on a spiritual path – as is a heroin addict, a crackhead, even a chainsmoker.  The spiritual component isn’t the thing itself but the longing.  In the reaching out for the object of mystery, the self vanishes; you become an arrow.  “The point is that we are all drawn toward the transcendent, the Other,” he said.  “And that is, inevitably, an impossible goal to achieve.  We reach out for It, capital I...but find that what we have grabbed is an  it – a lowercase thing.  So we supercharge this thing, this mere object.  We invest it with transcendent energy.”

Alcohol is one of the many objects that we supercharge.  Addiction is the clinical term for a particular pitch this universal striving may take.  Addictions, delights, interests, obsessions, preoccupations, tics, and hobbies:  all are escapes from the self to the Self, all are roads to the transcendent horizon.  It can be sought in beer, chocolate, cigarettes, gambling, shoes, antiques, old coins, garden gnomes, lacquer boxes, model trains, porcelain vases, elephant earrings, heirloom seeds, or baseball cards.  It can be sought in overeating or dieting, in orgasms or old movies.  Practically anything can trip the lock on the self and send it on the path of transcendence.  One needn’t be clinically addicted for it to happen – a DSM diagnosis is not a prerequisite to entering the psychospiritual sphere.  Having a passion or hobby will do.  Curiosity and arousal are just fine.  To a genuine religious sensibility, everything is spiritual.

One difficulty with this view is that according to traditional psychology (and common sense) developing an intense passion for gambling or sex or vodka or chocolate is not a good at all but a defense, a weakness, an escape from reality.  How can such strivings be that and also genuine spiritual endeavors?  Perhaps because we live in the here and now:  a spiritual journey may be a journey of psychological growth, but if it comes at the expense of ordinary concerns – of family, work, physical health – it is flawed, for in its passionate reaching it forgets what is right in front of us, which at best is at least half of what it means to be human.

In Andre Papineau’s widened psychospiritual sensibility, the healthiest of strivings are, at least in part of the way, indistinguishable from the vices and obsessions.  To have, rear, and love children, to bond with friends and community, to give oneself, to live and die well:  these are psychospiritual strivings, journeys toward the horizon.  Love is the quintessential road to that horizon.  Losing yourself in the mystery of another is the definition of love; head-over-heels is a state of intoxication.  “In love,” Papineau said, “you reach out for that transcendent horizon, and find it embodied in another person.  But in supercharging this other, you place an impossible burden of expectation on the person.  Eventually you realize the person isn’t the All.  You become disillusioned.”

This is where things get interesting.  Depression too is a psychospiritual condition.  Disillusionment, Papineau believes, whether with a lover, a drug, or life, is “a form of liberation.”  The Latin root of illusion is ludere, to play.  If all of our striving, transcendence-seeking activities – love affairs, pastimes, business ambitions – are destined to come up short of the ultimate, they are illusive, but this fact does not mean that we should not reach outward (the only other choice is to reach inward – to sink into narcissism), but that we should keep the element of play alive in them.  Play can be a serious thing, but it also has an aspect of lightness.  We should proceed, but stay light on our feet. 

Rumi

THINKING AND THE HEART'S MYSTICAL WAY

A peaceful face twists with the poisonous nail of thinking.

A golden spade sinks into

a pile of dung.  Suppose you loosen an intellectual knot.

The sack is empty.  You've grown

old trying to untie such tightenings, so loosen a few more,

why knot!  There is a big one

fastened at your throat, the problem of whether you're in

harmony with that which has

no definition.  Solve that!  You examine substance and

accidents.  You waste

your life making subject and verb agree.  You edit hearsay.

You study artifacts and think

you know the maker, so proud of having figured the derivation.

Like a scientist you collect

data and put facts together to come to some conclusion.

Mystics arrive at what they

know differently: they lay a head upon a person's chest

and drift into the answer.

Thinking gives off smoke to prove the existence of fire. A

mystic sits inside the burning.

There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination

loves to watch.  But it's

a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight.  Stay

here at the flame's core.

                                                                       -Rumi