The Seven Steps of Inner Neutrality

Published: Thu, 12/02/21

December 3, 2021

Dearest Friends,

If you haven't yet decided to give yourself the Inner Christmas Journey, I thought I would share with you one of the steps from Inner Advent, the 7 steps for developing the Neutrality or Equanimity for recollecting, reflecting, and releasing your year. I hope you find this resonating with your soul and you join the journey.

Neutrality and Inner Advent

Define neutrality for yourself. What does it mean to be neutral? What does it feel like to be neutral? Here are some thoughts to consider. Neutralʼs etymology is from Latin neuter ʻneither,ʼ from ne- ʻnotʼ + uter ʻeither.ʼ It implies no desire, no agenda, no attitude, no prejudice, no conditions.

Arthur Zajonc, former president of the Mind and Life Institute, professor emeritus of physics at Amherst University and teacher of meditation, lists seven steps in contemplation:

Calm yourself.
Clear yourself.
Quiet yourself.
Direct your attention.
Sustain your attention.
Open up.
Let things reveal themselves.

These seven admonitions all lead to neutrality. Not a passive neutrality of not caring, this is an active, enlivened, creative neutrality and prepares your soul to form an Imagination of itself - your inner life.

Here are my thoughts on these seven steps:

To calm yourself is to bring your attention to your bodily agitations. Where are your bodily sensations stirred up and swirling around? Sometimes just repeating, slowly and tenderly, the word “calm” out loud can still the agitations. Imagine your heart speaking “calm.” Imagine your stomach speaking, your throat, your nose, your pelvis, and so forth. When you are calm, you can feel Imaginations.

To clear yourself is to release all that you see that keeps you from seeing what is true. Most of what you “see” in your soul are distorting and distracting smudges, shadows and scratches. You donʼt want to look at the reflections of old thoughts, or the mirror images of old desires, fulfilled or not. You need to wipe away fears, doubts, losses, judgments, fantasies and assumptions. You want to see through to whatever is true. Imagine each exhale is a wiping away gesture, a windshield wiper, clearing the glass.

To quiet yourself is to find the still and silent void within. The world is never silent, but deep in your being there is the creative void where nothing has a voice, nothing sounds or resounds. There is nothing to listen to, not even a heartbeat. You have that silence within your soul, search it out just the way you seek the source of a sound in the outer world. You will find it.

When you are calm, clear and quiet, you will then have no trouble directing your attention. Imagine no agitations, no sights, no sounds grabbing at your attention. You are free to focus on what you choose.

Once you have chosen your object for your attention, in this case your inner year, you can direct your attention to it and sustain it for as long as necessary.

Directing and sustaining are functions of your will. With direction, your will moves your attention. Sustaining your will stills your attention. Movement is more about the will in space - the locus of your attention. Stillness is more about the will in time - the duration of your attention. If you have difficulty with either direction or sustaining, you might want to explore your feelings about space and time. Success in managing your attention is a function of practice, patience and perseverance.

Pay attention to what happens that breaks your attention. A subtle or dramatic stirring in your body? A faint or glaring memory picture? A whimper or roar of old emotions? Donʼt fight it. Be neutral.

Neutrality comes before openness. You cannot be open if you have a side or position you are leaning on or toward. The moment you lose the neutral posture, you are closing off something. Your most open posture is your most upright stance. No leaning.

Openness is without boundaries and without shadows. Light emanates from within the object. It doesnʼt shine on it. The Sun does not shine on itself and there is no end to its light. When your soul is open, nothing is dark or cold or threatening. All is worthy of attention.

Finally, because you are neutral, the Imagination behind the object of your attention reveals itself in lasting epiphanies of insight, self-love, and new energies. Moral enthusiasm and spiritual nourishment surges through your soul. Glorious truths appear on your inner horizon. Heavenly hosts begin to sing in your bones. Freedom becomes your focus. Divine inspiration pays attention to you. You open to your potential and your I am appears.

That is the grand and dramatic description. More likely is a quiet ah-ha. A growing sense that something within you is more real, more mature, more manifest. You feel a bit more authority and a bit more authenticity. Doubt and uncertainty fade. You manage life with a little more grace, ease and centeredness. You find yourself living in new and different ways. Your relationships unfold with more beauty, more truth, less emotion, deeper feeling. You enjoy questioning yourself and decide to look at yourself and life from other perspectives. You get the picture!

Enroll in the Inner Christmas Journey here.

With loving warmth,

Lynn

(You are receiving this email because you signed up for the Inner Christmas or Imagine Self mailing list.)

PS: The cost of the Inner Christmas Journey is $97 USD. If you want to participate but cannot afford $97 USD, please email me and let me know what you can afford.

Enroll in The Inner Christmas Journey here.

When I discovered Lynn's Holy Nights messages, over a decade ago, I felt as though some part of my seeking call was met with resonant reply. Eventually, I felt called to enter into the Inner Advent journey, where I engaged deeply with my actual, living, sacred, year. This is not the refuge of ancient thoughts, lectures or invocations from a guru but rather my engagement with my individual life. Each of the past seven years since then has been an ever deepening reckoning with my inner inaccuracies, my hardened concepts and habits into no less than a conscious metamorphosis of my soul. This growing capacity to welcome myself supports my love of truth and also my love and compassion for all beings. Lynn's brilliance is her ability to call forth self knowledge. I am profoundly grateful for her own ever deepening which allows my practice to become richer, subtler and more intricate each year.

Jane Reed

Some Key Elements for the Inner Christmas Journey

Throughout the Inner Christmas Journey, I will be hosting live Zoom gatherings to nurture our humanity through conversations and sharing. Conversations to nurture our humanity and time to share our individual experiences, questions, and insights of self-awareness.

There will be a zoom gathering each week during Advent. I plan on bringing new insights around the archetypal differences in humanity that shape our individuality such as the four temperaments. How does your primary temperament impact how you approach Inner Advent, the Holy Nights, and Inner Epiphany? So much to nurture and evolve together.

The Theme for the Messages

The theme for this year’s Messages is the Twelve Reckonings of Your Soul. When we reckon, we value, we form imaginations, we make choices. Why did the Spiritual World give us the capacity to reckon? When we bring our twelve variations of soul reckoning to the Threshold, the Spiritual World of Beings can enthuse our reckonings with wisdom.

I will be hosting live zoom conversations on the 3^rd, 6^th, 9^th, and 12^th Holy Night.

More live zoom conversations will happen during Inner Epiphany.

And then, as a Bonus, I will be offering a three-part zoom workshop after the Holy Nights to support you in Imagining Your New Year. We’ll work on our guiding principles for 2022. We will contemplate our goals, our projects, our tasks. We will distinguish between our thoughts, our feelings , and our will. We will look at our fears and our doubts. We will each write our own verse to remind us of our destiny and our intentions.

I am here to be of service, to guide and support you in finding your truth, revealing your beauty, and manifesting your goodness, not with grandiose ideals or demanding oughts, but with new questions to brings to the gods, to share with your friends, to strengthen your inner life. There is no perfection required in the Inner Christmas Journey. It is about what is right for you.

You don't need to follow every step of the process. You do not need to attend every zoom call. As I said in the first email/video, we must lift the veils of expectations, doubts, and self-judgments. The Spiritual World loves each of us as we are and as we are becoming.

Enroll in The Inner Christmas Journey here.