How does your soul nourish itself?
Published: Thu, 03/11/10
Dear ,
In March we recollect the message of the Third Holy Night, the Intention to Nourish. Read it below. Work with the questions. Develop your consciousness around soul nourishment. It's Lent now and the time to attend to the temptations of our lives. In the Lenten Mystery, the devil tempts Jesus Christ to change stones to bread. Inner maturity is knowing the difference between the stones in your life and the bread. Stones will never nourish.
There are still a few openings for The Inner Life biography program that begins on this Saturday, March 13. To register for The Inner Life, just go to www.store.lynnjericho.com or call me at 646-797-9669
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR NAME?
The Inner Life group that gathered on Tuesday for class #1 of 9 seem quite excited after 90 minutes. We talked about something that is with us all of our lives that we rarely speak about in a personal way. Each participant shared their names, first, last, middle, nicknames, etc and spoke about the personal meaning of their names and their relationship to them. The feelings ran the gamut from "I love my name!" to "I've never been at peace with my name."
I've always loved my first name, "Lynn" which is Welsh for lake or waterfall. My last name is another story, neither my maiden name, Hewitt, or my married name, Schloss, were appealing to me as sounds or meaning. After my divorce, I started to dream about a new name, my name.
I chose Jericho when I was 47 and it will be my last name till I die. When I decided to change my last name I realized I wanted a name that represented my deed, my work. I did not want a name that was mine through blood or marriage. I wanted a name that rang true to my "I." Jericho is about the breaking down of walls. I do break down walls - walls of wounds, of lies, of pretense, of resistance. I go after walls that have stood past their time, that hold individuals back. Walls that once protected and now confine. Choosing my name at midlife was a very important step in expressing and feeling "I am!"
So our last biography question is "What's in your name?" Do you like it? Does it have meaning for you? If your "I" was going to name you, what would that name be? I also want to encourage you to ask you closest friend about their name. You probably know just about everything about her or him, but what do you know about his or her name? Send me an email about your name.
If you want to tear down some of the walls that keep you in or keep you out and need some support, call me for a consultation. Visit www.lynnjericho.com.
INNER EASTER
This is the midpoint of Lent. Inner Easter, a powerful mood/time for your soul, will dawn in your consciousness soon. I will be giving four teleseminars on the soul's experience of Inner Easter:
Maundy Thursday imagines the Last Supper and the Gethsemane experience within our modern souls,
Good Friday confronts the thoughts and feelings of Inner Crucifixion,
Holy Saturday brings suggestions on the harrowing of Inner Hell and
Easter Sunday rings with the joyful sounding of Inner Resurrection.
I will share all the information on these calls in two weeks. Meanwhile, let your heart enter into the anticipation of Easter. How does Easter come alive in your soul? What are your Easter questions? Share your Inner Easter thoughts with me.
Warmth and Blessings,
Lynn
December 27th, The Third Holy Night - The Intention to Nourish
[Note: please consider the thoughts, perhaps re-reading and visualizing a few times. Then do as many of the exploration steps as you have time for.]Thoughts
We breathe.
We warm all that enters us.
We nourish ourselves from the substances that live outside us.
Notice how with each intention the deed becomes more willful, more complex, and more self-ful. We engage more actively.
To nourish ourselves we interact with what is "not self" in such a way that it becomes "self." To nourish our own lives, we take the life out of other living beings, out of plants and out of animals. We must chew, dissolve, swallow, digest and destroy. We cannot live without taking life. This is the sacred and mysterious paradox of life.
However, there are two exceptions: milk and honey, gifts of the feminine, and both are intensely sweet. Milk comes from the fertilized feminine and honey from the infertile feminine. Breastmilk sours quickly and exists to nourish innocent new life. Honey, which is not safe for babies, stays sweet forever and nourishes with energy for our mature, wise creative forces during the cold, bleak winter. What meanings do we find here for the land of milk and honey.
Another thought to inspire our Holy Night contemplation: the Latin root of nourish is nutire which means "to suckle." Suckling is the nourishing relationship between mother and child. In order to suckle the infant must create a vacuum. A newborn knows how to create a vacuum allowing the nourishing of its life with life. This suckling capacity is lost as we leave the breast ( It is very different from simple sucking.)
How does our soul mirror these images of nourishing our physical life?
What enters your soul space to nourish you, needs you break it down, devour and destroy it till, utterly dissolved, it flows into your being and becomes your own inner substance? The act of taking life, of nourishing, demands from you a courage for death and evokes in you a gratitude for life. The inner intention to nourish requires your soul to mourn and to celebrate.
With each inner intention we find deeper mysteries to challenge our consciousness, to manifest the inner fulness of being human - self-knowledge. It is much easier to simply, unconsciously interact with the death/life aspects of nourishing. To bring consciousness to the intention to nourish we must include in our thoughts the intention to kill and mourn, to resurrect and to celebrate.
But we must also recognize the presence of the milk and honey nourishment of our souls. Even our daily lives are filled with milk and honey, if we just notice. Each day we find moments when we are newborn and able to suckle at the breast of living thoughts. We, also, find moments when we need the sweetening energy of soul honey to allow us to face the bitter cold winds of life's lessons or the manifest our own creative gestures.
In between the milk and honey, we nourish our souls through this killing of the life outside us to create life within us.
During the Holy Nights, our relationship with the spiritual world nourishes with spiritual milk and spiritual honey. No killing is needed. Just the need to suckle and the need to suffer. We must feel spiritual hunger pains - the vacuum of our innocence and the pain of our wisdom. For the Twelve Holy Nights we nourish ourselves with the pure milk and honey of the Spirit and then so nourished we begin the New Year of our earthly life.
[Writing this message has been a very intense experience for me. I imagine it is equally intense for you to read it. I wonder what the next nine messages will demand of us and offer us. In spite of the intensity, they are a sweet feast at this sweet time of year.]
On this Third Holy Night contemplate what nourishes your soul from the world around you.
1
How do you forage in the world for inner nourishment? What nourishes your thinking? your feeling? your willing?
2
Are you comfortable with this truth about nourishing requiring killing? How does this occur in soul nourishment?
3
What gives your soul indigestion? How do you cool the burning heat of your soul's efforts to kill what is too tough, too toxic, too false to be made soft, safe, and true?
4
Do you know when you have nourished your soul enough? Too much nourishment can overwhelm your forces for soul activity, just like overeating our delicious Christmas feasts puts us to sleep.
Or do you never find the food to nourish your soul like the little matchgirl of the fairytale?
5
For these Inner Christmas messages to nourish you, you must suck the life from them and make them your own. Otherwise you are just looking at them as if they are beautiful candy in a glass display case. You may know the candy is sweet, you may imagine its sweetness, but you will not taste the sweetness nor take in the nutrients.
I write these messages for you to find nourishment for your inner life during the Twelve Holy Nights. My dream is that you will kill them.
What do you offer to the soul of another and to the soul of the world as willing sacrifice? We all come with this capacity, this destiny to become soul food for others.