White-Hot Heart Currents

[From Saniel: I sent this to a friend who sent an audio of a traditional chant to the Guru on “Guru Purnima,” July 7, the traditional “full moon of the Guru” celebration day in India. The friend, also a client/student, had written that he wanted to honor Linda and me on that day, and had also, since he is “his own guru,” spent the day playing the chant over and over to himself. I’ve edited it a bit for publication on the blog.]

Only now listened all the way thru…that was Krishnadas, yes? Beautiful.

Thank you so much for sending it.

(more…)

Tuesday July 13–Finally getting around to learning how to use the blog after so many months with it sitting here…ah well. Embarrassingly easy; many thanks to Greg Aurand for helping me out.

I’ve written up a more complete version of my “Achilles Plexus” essay that’s posted elsewhere on the blog. One of my friends and fellow Waking Down in Mutuality teachers thinks it’s as important as our whole discussion of “hypermasculine dharmas.” I agree. More on that later, but in general, I feel one of the most pressing issues of our time is for us spiritual teachers, leaders, and “evolutionary vanguard” practitioners to soberly assess just how governed we ourselves still are by archaic dynamics that will tend to sabotage everything we are otherwise diligently putting in place.

Well, this doesn’t say much yet. But now that I know the how-to’s, I’ll be back a lot. I actually love keeping journals and this one will probably be as much fun for me as my previous ones. I hope you like it too.

PS, I’m soon adding another section of the blog called “Honest Swing Golf.” Decided recently that “I am no longer willing to let changing the world prevent me from my golf game.” Question prompted by the comment of a friend (damn good golfer): Does golf mimic life?…

“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.