In the Christian Calendar of worship, we are two weeks into the Season of Lent. But in our souls, Inner Lent comes whenever...every day, every hour. 

Someone who had contacted me two weeks ago about wanting to register for A Strange and Lonely Place, just responded that it was too late to begin working with Inner Lent so she would wait until next year.  Is that true? Is it too late? 

Oh, how I wish I only had to deal with all the imaginations of Lent for seven weeks a year.

Institutionalized Christianity wants us to remember the 40 days of fasting in the wilderness and the three temptations of Christ with docile obedience as an act of worship just for the seven weeks before Easter, but I have taken these New Testament events and shaped them into an intimate wisdom for living every moment.  

It is never too late to awaken in your soul a Lenten Consciousness, to strengthen your sense of self for enduring your personal suffering or facing your personal temptations. 

You can use the following paragraphs as prompts for contemplating and writing about your own Inner Lent experience.  If you want more guidance and to go deeper, consider enrolling in the Imagine Self Academy courses mentioned below. These courses are downloadable and you can have them as a resource for any time you find yourself in your inner wilderness or facing a temptation you want to vanquish. 

Let me set the scene, the context for the Inner Lent self-awareness. 

A Feeling for Your Purpose

You have sense of self and you know this self has a contribution to make. You are not exactly clear what that contribution is but you know it is something that gives all the ordinary bits of your life purpose. Or maybe right now you do know that for the time being your purpose is to be your child's mother, to be a partner in a challenging relationship, to collaborate with a group of people to make a difference, to face a life-threatening illness, to master an art or a sport or the most challenging and complex purpose of all, to know yourself. Whatever your sense of purpose, it is a commitment and a devotion that belongs to you and no one else.

A Strange and Lonely Place

Suddenly, in your soul, you find yourself alone and in a strange lonely place.  You are in an inner wilderness of no comfort. 

How many times have you been in this wilderness? Often I find myself in this lonely place when I wake up at 3AM with thoughts of all I must do, not just to pay my bills and keep my house clean, but to make the contribution I showed up on earth to make.  At 3AM, I am all alone and without comfort and then I start to doubt. Or in the middle of the day, when I have just finished an audio for the latest course and I am haunted with the voice that tells me its not good enough and in a flash I am in my inner wilderness all alone and feeling unbearable discomfort knowing the Tempter will appear in a moment. 

Deprivation, danger and isolation ... you have your own personal experiences and feelings of each of these.  Just making a simple list of them can be strengthening.

The Tempter and the Temptations

Let me tell you a secret, since I began working with the mysteries of Inner Lent eight years ago, I have grown to love these visits from the Tempter. Initially, when I find myself in the wilderness, I despair, but then I realize the strangeness is not new and aloneness allows me to know myself.    The Tempter soon arrives and I know the routine...I am presented with the same three temptations every time and I get to look into myself and see if I have succumbed or vanquished.  Will I do it differently this time?

What I see is always a combination.  I've succumbed in ways and vanquished in ways.  I don't know when it happened but the visits with the Tempter stopped being a time of guilt, shame and self-hatred, and became a time of self-awareness, self-transcendence and self-compassion. Each visit I get wiser, humbler, and more humanly me.   

The Tempting Questions

So here are the tempting questions my friend the Tempter places in my soul:

What stones do you still think you can turn into bread? To answer I must own and release my addictive desires that cannot nourish, satisfy or fulfill me. Will I be able to let go of these and manage the anxiety that comes with self-regulation?

How many leaps off the pinnacles of great ideals do you take, assuming angels will rescue you from crashing on the stones below? These are my ungrounded fantasies of magical support that drive me to expect too much from myself, to fail to prepare, and to wish for winning a practical, moral or spiritual lottery so I don't have to face the gravity of my earthly limitations. Will I be able to adjust my ambitions to the solid steps of real action?

How often have you felt the power over a situation and been willing to sell your soul to have that feeling remain forever?  These are my personal prejudices and the feeling that my way prevails over all others. Will I open up my soul to an interest in the experience and needs of others?

The Inner Lent Program Just for You

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.  

THE IMAGINE SELF ACADEMY

There are two Inner Lent courses in the Imagine Self Academy:

A Strange and Lonely Place -- a 45 minute audio and 7 powerful writing prompts offer you a deep imagination of the inner purpose of 40 days in the wilderness. Learn more.

Your Inner Temptations -- 4 audio lessons, 2 bonus lessons, valuable materials and many prompts for journaling.  This course includes A Strange and Lonely Place and an audio on each of the three temptations providing new understanding. The two bonus lessons offer audios that look at the ministering of angels and the 3 ways to vanquish temptation. All content is downloadable. Learn more.

Inner Lent, like all the Imagine Self Holy Imaginations, 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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Although the Holy Imagination courses are designed to be taken in the order of the Christian Festivals, they may be taken in any order and at any time of the year. The order and timing is about your very own inner year!

THE IMAGINE SELF ACADEMY

We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. 

Pico della Mirandola Oration on the Dignity of Man 1486

THE HOLY IMAGINATIONS WINTER COURSES

SIGN UP FOR

YOUR INNER EPIPHANIES

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE.

Begin the year or your next step with powerful and tender epiphanies about your individual soul. Experience epiphanies that are practical, nourishing, enlivening, creative, and empowering. They support the flourishing of your destiny.

In the Christian Year Epiphany is the feast of three major moments in the life of Jesus Christ:  The Arrival of the three Kings bearing their gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold: the Baptism in the River Jordan, and the Wedding at Cana and the miracle of turning water to wine. These events are the three essential and inspired beginnings of a destiny that would change human consciousness. I also offer insights into the gifts of the Shepherds and the meaning of the epiphany that takes place in the Temple when the young Jesus begins teaching from an extraordinary wisdom.

Your Inner Epiphanies takes you into your soul’s own particular resonance with these archetypal events.  You look into your core self and discover the Christ epiphanies within in small, intimate, meaningful ways. You trust your existence will bring great value to the future. 

The course is self-study so you can work with the content at your own pace.

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE.

If you need a scholarship or a payment plan, email me.

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SIGN UP FOR

YOUR INNER TEMPTATIONS

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE.

Your Inner Temptations brings deepening perspectives, insights and possibilities to inspire your own imagination of your experience of the wilderness and solitude, your challenges and temptations with addictive patterns, with your ungrounded fantasies and with judgments frozen in time. You experience the New Testament images of Lent and make them intimate and meaningful for your modern, embodied soul. The wisdom is universal and the application is truly personal and powerfully practical.

Your Inner Temptations is about your changing, evolving, and developing a relationship with yourself in the vast and lonely wilderness of modern existence with all its seductions, demands, and confusions.  Inner Lent comes to strengthen your soul every winter.  

The course is self-study so you can work with the content at your own pace.

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE.

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If you need a scholarship or a payment plan, email me.

If you would like to give this life-changing course to a recent high school or college grad, email me.

If you have questions, feedback or want to say hello...email me.

Through the maps, mirrors, methods and meditations offered by Imagine Self, you develop the capacities to define, examine and imagine yourself from many significantly healing, liberating and empowering perspectives. 

When you imagine yourself you are seeing yourself as powerfully evolving into a self more aligned with your truth, more revealing of your beauty, more capable of manifesting your goodness. 

Let my blogposts inspire your self-imaginations. Enroll in the Imagine Self Academy to understand who you are, to cultivate your possibilities and purpose, to explore your depths and shadows, and to awaken inner freedom.

Engage me for sacred conversations to support your sense of self as you

• Experience the transformations and the turning points in your life.
• Navigate the rough waters and fierce tides of personal breakthroughs.
• Face dilemmas in your relationships, work life, health, creative expression and spiritual path.

Let me be with you as a spiritual friend, mentor and coach to hold you as you

• Free your soul from the limiting matrices of your childhood, central relationships, cultural narratives, assumptions and expectations.
• Develop spiritual, moral, economic and foundational self-reliance, competence, confidence, authenticity, creativity and maturity.
• Manage your energies and resources with a productive flow between expansion and contraction, between release and restoration.
• Celebrate your existence. Resolve your karma. Fulfill your destiny.

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Let’s talk about what you are seeking and how I can help. 

Every time I speak with you, my world makes sense.  I move from child to woman. I am so grateful.                 Lilia M.

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