Before I share with you some inspired thoughts on Inner Annunciation, I want to remind you about the Inner Lent program.  

Inner Lent offers perspectives, insights, guides, and encouragement for recognizing, facing down, overcoming the three great temptations of your life using the New Testament story as a model. 

Don't be tempted to let this surprising and inspiring guide for your inner development slip by...learn more and register. 

A Festival Imagination

The Mood of the Annunciation

 2014

I had a woman client who asked me if it was possible to be both strong and soft. What a wonderful question about the mysteries of the feminine.

I told her to think of a curve. A straight line has a rigidity that feels fragile to me unless it is connected to other straight lines as in a square.  A curve seems to me to be able to dance alone with what comes because it can be fluid like a strong wave or a soft ripple. It's a curving line that forms the symbol of infinity...not a straight line.

Hearing my client's question, the curve that appeared in my imagination was the curving gesture of the Virgin in the many paintings of the Annunciation. It is a curve of surrender, not submission.  In my lexicon, when surrendering we sustain our own consciousness, filled with creative and loving thought, feeling and will. I surrender to be of elegant service. Submitting in my language is the the turning over of one's soul, to be dominated and reduced. When I submit, I lose myself.

In my soul, I find both wisdom and innocence in the gesture of surrender which awakens the image of the Virgin Sophia for me.  The Virgin Sophia, the two curves of surrender, the Vescia Pisces.   I cannot imagine the mother of God not being both innocent and wise even at the Annunciation.

Today, March 25th is the Feast of the Annunciation, I invite you to explore the strength and softness of surrender as it lives in the form and function of the womb. 

i have been pregnant twice. I surrendered my womb to the new life of another. It was an experience of grace and blessedness. My surrendering womb needed to be both strong and soft to nurture what was growing into life within my being.  (And to surrender my soul to the deed of mothering I had to be both innocent and wise.)

If I were to think of strength it would be the womb and it's capacity to receive, grow, support, contain, and release.  And the womb's power to contract and push is breath-taking.

Yet, the womb is supple, flexible, responsive, tender, embracing, forgiving and soft. 

Strength and softness live in the invitation of the curving womb.  I can imagine each of my senses as a womb eager to conceive a new sensation and birth new perspective on the world, myself, you. Or my thinking opening to a new thought that will grow into a living, truth-bearing imagination.  It is all surrender. It is with a curving gesture in my innocent and wise soul that I surrender to living truth, or beauty, or goodness.

In the mood of the Annunciation, surrender to new life today, tomorrow, now, forever. Know your strength and your softness. Be blessed and full of grace. Be innocent and wise. Curve!

Suggested Exercises

Write in your journal about your own thoughts and experiences of surrender...of strength and softness, innocence and wisdom. Maybe write a poem.

If you paint or sketch, sink into images of the vescia pisces and feel the two curves creating the entry to conception of the new and the necessary. I just did a search for images of vescia pisces and found these sketches which give an example of exploring the two curves: http://janeadamsart.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/3-vesica-pisces.jpg

And here are links to previous posts I've written in the mood of Annunciation.

http://imagineself.com/2011/03/feeling-blessed-and-full-of-grace-2/

http://imagineself.com/2013/03/what-do-you-bear-within/

About Festival Imaginations: I look to the New Testament and the Christian Festivals, for models and imaginations, inspiration and wisdom, secrets and strategies for the universal mystery and personal challenge of finding, knowing and becoming self as a divine being incarnating into a human being. I do not rely on the New Testament for external doctrine or definition of belief. If I am to give myself a religious label or category or orientation, I am an Esoteric Christian who does not see my personal experience of Christianity as related to a  "religion" or "church." Learn more.

From the beginning of experiencing your work, I have been and continue to be, astounded by your ability to organize this spiritual content with inner process. 

Andrea Martone - Core Imaginations participant, biodynamic farmer, bookkeeper, Pilates instructor, Durango, CO

INNER LENT 

a FESTIVAL IMAGINATIONS course

If you would like guidance in finding your self-aware answers, I have put together a course called Inner Lent that brings deepening perspectives, insights and possibilities to inspire your own imagination of your experience of the wilderness and solitude, your challenges with addictive patterns, your challenges with your ungrounded fantasies and your challenges with judgments frozen in time. I take the New Testament images and make them intimate and meaningful for your modern, embodied soul. The wisdom is universal, far beyond church dogma, and the application is truly personal.

The experience of Inner Lent can occur any day of the year and last for 40 minutes or 40 years.  Inner Lent is about your changing, evolving, developing relationship with yourself in the vast and lonely wilderness of modern existence.  You do not need to perfect the Inner Lent experience.  You can play with it.  This year you may want to focus on your addictive temptations.  Next year you may want to devote you inner attention to your experience of the wilderness.  Or you may want to just explore the whole imagination and get a sense of all the possibilities, knowing next year for Inner Lent it will be your ability to choose your focus.  

This year I am making the Inner Lent course available as individual lessons or as a complete package.  The single lessons cost  $15.00 each.  You will receive a link to the Lesson page with the downloadable audio, the slide presentation and a set of seven exercises to work with. The complete course is available for $47. 

Learn more and REGISTER for INNER LENT here.

Inner Lent, like all the Imagine Self Inner Festivals, is not about sin and redemption or being a good Christian. It is about the great commandment, "Oh, Human Soul, know thyself!" This is a commandment for all human souls, beyond religious beliefs.  I find the central festivals of the Christian Calendar quite universal in their ability to guide us to this task of imagining self as an earthly and divine being and the great mystery of becoming fully human.

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CORE IMAGINATIONS

 an Imagine Self curriculum

CORE IMAGINATIONS is a curriculum designed to support you in developing a profound, powerful, and compassionate image of yourself as a human being.  It will truly provide you with a sense of self that is whole, free, and manifest in all you think, feel, and do. It will guide you to a new imagination of yourself that will heal your wounds, liberate your sense of self, and empower your self-expression.  

CORE IMAGINATIONS consists of 37 lessons (audios, slide presentation, exercises and community support) that will be yours for the rest of your life.  The curriculum is not a curriculum in an academic sense, rather it is a series of maps to find yourself, mirrors to know yourself, and methods to become yourself you can use over the rest of your lifetime.  The content and exercises will be sources for self-compassion and self-imagination that bring together in creative relationship all that has shaped your sense of self and all that will allow you to break free of the limitations to being the fullness of self that lives in your core imagination of being. human and becoming I.

Learn more about this incredibly important course and REGISTER here.

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