In Part One of this series, we began to explore vulnerability as a path, and to look at what it takes to feel safely vulnerable. My meditations on vulnerability began during a conversation with a student named Roberta.
Growing up, I thought that the capacity for spirituality was a rare and special gift, like musical genius or natural charm. I knew only one person who seemed to have it: my parents’ friend Ned, an Irish poet who regularly went off to meditate with the Trappists and volunteer at the Catholic Worker’s soup kitchen on New York’s lower east side. People like Ned, I thought, had been born with an ability to experience the mystical underpinnings of things, to feel oneness with others, to be nice all the time.
To find your way to true openness of heart, you need to pass through the forest of vulnerability. How do you explore your own vulnerability while still holding appropriate boundaries?
by Sally Kempton In my late 20s, as a recovering existentialist in the midst of a life-crisis, I came across he Bhagavad Gita, and read for the first time Krishna’s wordson dharma. You probably remember the situation: the warrior-prince Arjuna, paralyzed by confusion at the prospect of having to kill his kinsmen in a war, begs his [...]
Prayer, as anyone who does it regularly knows, is a path in and of itself. What we saw last week is that the great prayer masters didn’t really care how you pray. The main thing is that you feel connected when you’re praying. Prayer, if you remember to do it, will kindle your sense of the sacred, the sense of being held or taken care of by the universe.
I pray because it’s the most direct practice I know for communicating intimately with the divine.
Change is good. Better yet, change is possible. Here are a few strategies for busting out of painful, negative grooves. When I was in my 20s and taking my first tentative steps along the inner path, I spent a few months working with a Jungian analyst.
I’d always thought of courage as synonomous with what hard-boiled novelists used to call ‘guts.’ In other words, I’d assumed that if you were unafraid of physical harm, you were basically, unafraid. Talking to him, I realized three things. First, that courage and fearlessness are not the same—in fact, without fear, we wouldn’t need courage. Courage implies moving through fear.
Internal busyness may be a stress-addicted way of life, or it may become the opportunity to practice karma yoga. The paradox of busyness is a bit like the paradox of stress. On the one hand, human beings are built to be busy.
What do you do when the same sorts of difficult interpersonal situations keep showing up in your life? Chalk it up to karma? Find ways to resolve them through discussion or even pre-emptive action? Or take the truly challenging view – the view held by Jungians and many spiritual teachers–that these people are reflecting your own disowned, or shadow tendencies? In other words, does dealing with difficult people have to begin with finding out what you might need to work on in yourself?
Twenty-five years ago, inspired by Gandhi’s autobiography, My Experiments with Truth, I decided to practice absolute truthfulness for one week. I lasted less than two days. On the third day, a man I was trying to impress asked me if I’d read Thoreau, and I heard myself saying, “Yes,” despite the fact that I hadn’t. A few minutes later, I forced myself to confess the lie. Truth is, that wasn’t so hard. What turned out to be harder was looking at why I’d lied. It was deeply humiliating to my ego to recognize that I had such an attachment to looking smart that I couldn’t admit not having read the book. And once I’d started looking into the motive for that lie, it started a whole process of inquiry that actually hasn’t stopped since.
by Sally Kempton The wish-fulfilling tree is a mythical flowering shrub, which in Hindu mythology is said to grow in heaven. When you sit underneath it, the story goes, it blesses you so that all your wishes come true. I like to read that story as a metaphor. The wish-fulfilling tree is consciousness itself. [...]
Meditation makes you more self-aware. That’s one of its biggest gifts, even though we don’t always like what we see. When meditation is really working, it has a way of showing you unknown parts of yourself—pockets of your psyche that are beautiful and sublime, but also parts of yourself that are not so tasty.
Leading Spiritual Teacher Sally Kempton introduces Dr. Marc Gafni
Sally Kempton began her public career as a leading second wave feminist and journalist. She later became a student of an Indian Yoga Lineage where she was a student and then a leading Swami and teacher for thirty years.
Welcome to Integral Church: First Fridays!
Next First Friday: February 10th at 7 pm
Integral Church is an enactment of Integral consciousness, initiated by Dr. Marc on New Years weekend 2010. In Integral Church, we engage a passionate and integrated spiritual practice that is emergent from the best of the world's spiritual traditions. Each First Friday has a theme. The themes deepen in each new cycle.
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