Month: March 2013

What is awakening? The Wake Up Festival presenters respond…

Last August, in the beautiful Rocky Mountains, over 800 people gathered together to explore the nature of spiritual awakening, and the mysteries of opening the human heart. Shot on location during our first annual Wake Up Festival, the following video features 16 of our dear presenters and collaborators sharing what awakening means to them.

We invite you to join in the dialogue, as we have come to see that there are seven billion unique perspectives and doorways into awakening – one for each human soul. So, please, let us hear your voice, and your heart. What is spiritual awakening for you?

It’s okay to be broken

In our own ways, each of us hears that most sacred call – to return home, to come to know ourselves at the deepest levels, and to somehow allow this precious life to be organized around love. We have also come to see that to respond to this call requires everything we have (and more); we are asked to step all the way into the unknown, taking the risk that love always requires. We sense that there is no way to make this journey without the breaking open of our tender, vulnerable hearts, in response to this blessed world.

We want so badly to figure this life out, to resolve the sticky, gooey, messiness of the heart, and to control the movement of love. We know we can do it, we can hold it all together, we can remain strong, we can find a way to not completely shatter in response the tenderness of this life as it is. But in one moment out of time, we’re flooded with a certain kind of grace, and it becomes so clear: It’s okay to fall apart, to let love take this life apart, and to reassemble it as the master architect that it is. There is no need to push this back any longer, for you were never together to begin with. What you are is love itself, which can never be contained, limited, resolved or pinned down. Love is never “together,” but is always moving within the unknown, as a raging fire seeding this world with its ever-purifying flames. Fall apart and resist the temptation to put yourself back together again – and see what is forever and into eternity untouched by concepts of “together” and “apart.”

There are lovers content with longing. I'm not one of them. ~ Rumi

It’s okay to be broken, for in your brokenness love can then pour through the cracks of your being by way of the most luminous light. As you open in this way, you watch in awe as that same intelligence and creativity which birthed the stars moves through your body, making use of your entire sensory system to seed this world with its essence. Through all the ways you touch and deeply listen to another, wanting so sweetly to come to know how they organize their experience and how they make meaning of their lives, through the kind words that you speak and presence that you offer them – and even (especially) through all of your broken-open places – this life comes to be revealed as something much different than you originally thought. It is seen, finally, for what it is – a grace-field; and what you are is a unique, alive, unrepeatable expression of this field, a transparent vessel for love to move in this world.

 

Embracing vulnerability… with Brené Brown

Brené Brown

Brené Brown

“You cannot access empathy if you’re not willing to be vulnerable.” What a rich and provocative statement from our friend and Sounds True author Brené Brown. There is such a deeply-rooted pull to move toward those emotional-states that we identify as “positive” or “light” or “spiritual” – along with a counter move away from those “darker” or challenging and exposing emotions such as vulnerability, sadness, and grief. But, as Brené reminds us, vulnerability is the ground of all of the so-called positive emotional states, including those of love, joy, and belonging.

When we can allow ourselves to be naked, exposed, to be profoundly touched by whatever appears, we can meet this life – and the sweet, beautiful heart of another – in the most precious way. It is in this turning into the immediacy of our experience, in a truly embodied way, that we come to discover the many fruits of this sacred world. There are times, of course, when doing so is not easy, when it takes everything we have (and more), and feels completely counter-instinctual. But somehow, by some mysterious grace, we learn to stay with what is there, knowing that it has something very precious to show us about ourselves, and about the true nature of love. 

Enjoy the following video from Brené on the gifts of embracing vulnerability…

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