Note: Please go to the blog to read the comments (and to post your own). The comments really enrich the experience. The poems are so beautiful.  Thank you. You can also read this message and all the previous ones on the blog.  http://www.innerchristmas2010.blogspot.com

 

With the conscious feeling of spiritual forces intimately flowing into your heart from behind and up through your feet from below, you can find a new strength for becoming free from patterns and identities living out of the past and the wishes and hopes living into the future.

As our inner life develops, we can begin to modulate our contradictory desires to remain the same and to become different. Or the contradictory desires to hold on or let go.  Or to know how to have a good laugh and a good cry over the same thing. Or to love and hate the same person.

The first step is to dive into the dilemma of ambivalence or valuing opposites and holding opposing values. I love the Holy Nights and I love the challenge of writing the messages but there is also the feeling that I wish I could just forget them and not have to struggle with the messages. Each year I get more comfortable with embracing the ambivalence - I am growing this soul capacity.

We all face ambivalence in many areas of our lives. (Intimate relationships, anyone?) What are your ambivalent feelings around the Holy Nights and the Inner Christmas messages?  Do you want to work with the questions? Or do you just want to ignore them? Ambivalence usually keeps us in the lower realms of pain or pleasure and profit or loss. It's that little  word "or." Spiritual development is not the overcoming of ambivalence. It is the self-compassionate embrace of ambivalence which leads us to the morally awake presence of  joy and suffering. Notice "and."  

Once we find a more spiritually mature relationship to ambivalence, we can then modulate our desires.  We can vary the frequency, the intensity and the duration of our hungers and our satisfactions. We don't feel greed or the need to avoid. We can bear inner growing pains calmly. We can persevere in our inner development.

The Holy Nights offer us the two portals of innocence and wisdom. Innocence is free of ambivalence and desire. Wisdom is the result of our struggles with both.

Feeling the spirit behind you and beneath you, move toward wisdom.

In your soul's Holy Night, observe your struggles.  Forgive your ambivalences and play with the frequency, intensity and duration of your desires.  Wonder first, then focus, then name.  

With desires, how often can you imagine having a desire fulfilled (a hundred times in a day or once in your lifetime); how intensely can you imagine experiencing your desire being fulfilled (as if you could die from the intensity or as if you were lightly brushed by an angel's wing); and how long could you endure the experience (forever, years, months, days, hours, the blink of your eye). Play with your wicked desires and your saintly ones.  

With ambivalence, imagine light without shadow? What could you see? Would it seem significant? If love did not need to overcome hate, would it be love?

If the Holy Nights, didn't ask us difficult questions, would they be holy?  Think of the Babe in the manger and how he grew to carry the ambivalence and desires of the world and we only need to embrace and modulate our own.