Life after spiritual bypassing and spiritual correctness is the beginning of authentic spirituality. No fireworks, no applause, no need to advertise ourselves as someone spiritual. No grandiosity, no fake humility. Over time, our increasing familiarity with the inner dynamics of spiritual bypassing helps us understand what we have been avoiding and why. Instead of being at war with our weaknesses, we bring them into our heart. Thus intimacy rather than transcendence becomes our path. Conscious alignment with the Real becomes not our goal but our ground. Our focus on what might be will yield to a focus on the here-and-now as hope for the future is replaced by lucid faith, a radical trust in life and its inherent ever-unfolding mystery. No matter how much knowledge we have, we keep opening to the Mystery, allowing revelation to be more central than heady explanation. And as we become more and more open spiritually, our individuality deepens and blooms……Robert Augustus Masters
what does it mean to be with our most profound unfolding?…..can we sense the playfulness, the spiraling into acts of love that define us? listen and come home…
Deep listening is more than hearing with our ears, but taking in what is revealed in any given moment with our body, our being, our heart…..Susan McHenry
experiencing all that we are…..
If the purpose and gift of love is to awaken and reawaken what is dormant within us, then when awake it is our responsibility to stay awake and keep the gift alive. We do this by deep listening. Not toward a goal or even toward a noble ambition but as a way of life, staring devoted to listening with our heart- more than once, to everything. The faster we spin or are spun, the more we are thrown to the top where we grow mental and heady. When we slow or are slowed, things settle lower- in the heart, in the gut. As the Hawaiian elder Puanani Burgess says, ‘Your gut is where your best thinking happens. For it is in the na’au (the gut) that we bring the mind, heart and emotions and intuitions and experiences together.’ Deep listening mixes the grit of our humanness with the dust of the stars, retrieving in the exchange an indestructible and life-giving connection. Connecting to that living essence or Source is experiencing God through all the doorways life has to offer. The practice of connecting to the Source of all is participating in the world’s soul. This is the aim of deep listening…..Mark Nepo
