White-Hot Heart Currents

Getting to know quite a number of teachers over the last couple of years, and finding so many points of resonance in our views and orientations, Linda and I feel more and more that we are part of what I am coming to call a “Global Living Lineage” of teachings, traditions, transmissions, and teachers.

In the isolated sacred cultures of the old world, at least in highly elaborated practice traditions such as those in India and Tibet, a practitioner might have a “root guru” or home school. Yet he or she might also take instruction from any number of other teachers, and even cross lines into substantially different lineage “clans.” But none of this would represent a fundamental separation from the original teacher or teaching that the seeker established a heart-link with to begin with. Or, therefore, from the whole precious stream of grace that that link had opened and kept alive for him or her.

In today’s global culture, the same is practically the case across all previous lines of traditions and teachings. I’ve long observed that people who enter the Waking Down in Mutuality work feel free–and we bless them–to explore all kinds of other schools and forms of liberating, healing, and evolutionary work. And we see people coming into our process from an enormous variety of other modalities of such work.

So it seems to me that it’s time for all of us to begin accepting that we are all now participants in and beneficiaries of a single Global Living Lineage. This grand lineage tradition includes all cultures and traditions of sacred transformational pursuit, EAst and West, indigenous and modern. And the more each particular school and lineage can recognize this and grant its participants blessing to partake of other offerings within the greater Global Living Lineage, the more each of us, whether teacher, apprentice, or seeker, will begin to relax into the recognition that everyone’s journey is unique and there is no fundamentally wrong or sinful place in the greater lineage for our heart’s prompts to take us.

Linda and I encourage all our teaching colleagues in all schools and traditions to accept this as the reality of our lives and times and come to peace with it. And when our students find themselves impelled to journey elsewhere for further growth and clarification, let us therefore bless them liberally, knowing they are never really leaving either our own hearts or the Heart of Being itself. And where and when we find ourselves so moved, let’s have the courage to act and to bless our own freedom too!

This kind of blessing, generously and openly extended, could contribute much to true peace and tolerance among all schools, traditions, teachers and lineages within the Global Living Lineage. So be it.

“The Achilles Plexus, #1.” In a session with a client not long ago I came upon a key phrase I want to develop: “The Achilles Plexus.”

It addresses one of the visions I have of the current scene that just haunts me. How much are we leaders, authors, teachers, and cutting-edge showers of the path, actually blind to our own brokenness and therefore still governed by it? A lot, I feel. And I have this deep anxiety that we’re not going to work this piece out till it’s too late. Till the slide into an evolutionary arrest or regression, with accompanying devastating breakdown of society and biosphere, is impossible to prevent.

I address this in Dawson Church and Geralyn Gendreau’s anthology, Healing Our Planet, Healing Our Selves. My essay is titled “Healing the Roots of Fundamentalism.” In it I suggest that we’re all fundamentalists—in that we’re all still far too driven by relatively unconscious rigidity, irrationality, and brokenness. And I make the point:

“This includes many of our leaders, secular and spiritual. When a leader requires others to hold him as flawless, or simply unaccountable, his flock becomes self-toxifying. The idea of a leaders’ untouchable superiority betrays brokenness in all willing participants. Such societies become like extended dysfunctional families. Their ‘children’ shoulder unbearable pressures of both their own shadowy brokenness and that of their ‘parents.’ These collectives often embody the worst attributes of what we fear as cults. However, many of them flourish not only in marginal spiritual or political communes, but also in corporate high-rises, respectable churches and synagogues, and halls of government—all over the planet.” (p. 32)

The power dynamics of this kind of toxic leadership still prevail. What’s of most urgent concern, I feel, is that they still prevail in spirituality as much as anywhere. And one of the most entrenched features of such toxic, double-messaging leadership is what I recently began calling “The Achilles Plexus.” It’s a fundamental wound in our primary personal-power zone, the solar plexus, that we unconsciously act out in nearly all our relations. And we act it out in ways that ultimately can and often do sabotage just about everything we stand for.

I’ll say more about this in my next entry.