Uradiance

    God has given me a practice, the beginning and end of every path. Rest the mind in the heart, breath scattering stars. God has given me a discipline. Receive just what the moment brings, want nothing more, learning to say, 'Enough,' the one-word prayer of ineffable gratitude. Here is a secret. It's not what God gives me each moment that makes me rich, it is this prayer. * A poem from 'Strangers & Pilgrims'

  The broken heart is not "broken."  Breaking is its nature.  Nothing needs mending.  Just dissolve the thought,  "I have a broken heart,"  in a breath of silence. This is the healing that has  always already happened.  Do you call the flower a broken bud?  Do you call the gushing spring  a gash in the earth? Or the door  to the wine cellar, emptiness?  The wine is love. Descend.  Give your wound a new name.

                        Contrary to popular theology, God isn't very interested in our suffering, or in our stories of trauma and victimhood. We invest so much energy in these stories, yet they keep telling themselves more insistently, without healing or resolution. Why? Because what we focus on just grows louder in our life. The truth is, there are wondrous souls who carry more pain than you or I will ever know, but they don't preach or whine about it. Their eyes gleam with Presence. Their bodies radiate forgiveness. Their hearts gleam with courage. And for every traumatic event in the world, there are 10,000 acts of kindness, of gentleness, which the media will never record. The Divine attention is not attracted to our suffering, but to the humbled courage of a loving heart. God listens when we sing, not when we complain. Mother Mary enfolds us in her lap. And Christ pours out beams of joy, healing grace, ecstatic energ...

The Biblical book of Revelation tells us that a “new heaven and a new earth” will be created. This actually refers to your awakened mind and the transmuted energy of your body. The very quality of your awareness will be clarity, light, and joy. Little thinking will be required, as most problems will be solved by your intuition, on the subtlest level of feeling. The alchemy of your perception will transform the earth around you into a new state of matter: the state of Glory. You will have a glorified body, but you won't need to die and go to heaven to embody it. You create the Resurrection body now by raising the vibrations of your energy to a higher frequency. This is the purpose of art, music, chant, breath-work, service, and meditation. But it is essential to stop paying so much attention to your trauma and your outrage. What we focus on only increases in our life. Investing energy in our trauma does not heal it. Focusing on anger only feeds its fire. To begin releasing ...

Everything in this world is a message from that one. And where is that world with its  towhee  song, first scent of lilac, slow wise pulse of ancient stones? Deep inside your chest. That is where the wings  of a hummingbird churn this blinding sunbeam into billions of love atoms. Where you breathe in forests, meadows, mountains, clouds, the desolation of Gaza, the playground littered with Fentanyl and infected needles. And you breathe out the friendship  of the Beloved. Is this not your duty? To create a new earth from the flames that pour from your wounded heart? Image: wallpaper from Stockcake

    You are not lost. I am not lost. We are right here. Each of us exactly where we need to be in order to wake up. Here, in the stillpoint at the center of chaos. Or did you want to go back to sleep for a hundred more lifetimes? No, here is the only place where awakening happens. Here is the "holy place" which Jesus spoke of.* Here is the centerpoint of the Cross where all the opposites converge - heaven and hell, pain and beauty, male and female, past and future. You cannot awaken at a Yoga retreat on a tropical island, or on a seventh dimensional world with the ascended masters, because that is not Where You Are Right Now. And you cannot understand this chaos with your intellect, your politics, your endless conspiracy theories. "Figuring it out" is not why you were born on this planet of opposites. You were born to practice a much deeper alchemy: to discover that this confusion is not who You are. Deeply truly witnessing the chaos releases you from ...

  You make honey  by doing even less than nothing.  When you act, no one honors  your tranquility,  the part of you that  merely listens to the silence  inside silence, where  the music of creation comes from.  Your grace is the fragrance of wu wei,  the pollen of emptiness.    You prune away thinking and drop concentration in with the compost.  If you make the slightest effort, it all becomes philosophy.  So you sink into the furrow beneath your breastbone and use this breath the way your ancestor used  her hand-carved hoe. Sap condenses on your forehead whether you breathe in or out. The lightning in your spine hums more softly than orchids.  With no names but the bee-mad  sound of invisible wings, your pistil and stamen bend to kiss without the slightest breeze.  Only souls that buzz understand this. They have sweet  sticky feet like yours. The shameless way you glut your...

The radiance glowing from your chest contains more energy and intelligence than all the AI data centers technocrats could ever build. Rest there. Return to the kingdom of your heart. Real intelligence is never artificial. It is You. The survival of humanity depends on whether or not you have the courage to take your sovereignty back.   Image: by Rashani Réa from the book of poems and mandalas we created together. LINK 

Nothing is pure that has not fallen. Be an apple petal on a stream, a pale seed in the mother-brown furrow, a spark of the iron hammer on the lock of the prison door. Be lamb's blood on the lintel, and the silent footstep of a slave escaping in haste at night. If you cannot stay for one hour, stay for one moment and be whole. Nothing crushed in these green shadows fails to rise. Be the glut of a rain drop on the mouth of a lily, the starry wine that pours into the hollow grail of this body. Breathe Christ through your broken places.

Burn marks on this fragment of ancient scroll indicate that much  of it was destroyed by fire before it could be hidden in a jar of honey.         "No need to ascend. Just keep falling into Grace. You need a new name for the heart.  Call it the wound  at the center of the world.  A new name for love. Call it the courage to breathe,  to breathe through the wound.  Savor this inhalation, it is the Holy Spirit,  your anointing. Here on earth, taste each photon of flesh as infinite light: this is my Resurrection. Welcome all into the radiance that shines from your chest: this is my Kingdom. Crucify my otherness, glorify me as your Self.  What is suffering? To cling  to the ever-perishing outward form. Be risen from the tomb of the past into the garden of this moment. When Magdalene reaches out her hand, let her touch you. Bathed in dawn, don't wash off the smell of loam and roses. I taught th...

  The love of Christ does not heal the wounded heart. The love of Christ is the wound. Stay open, stay open... Strike the flint of grief against your ancient rage stone. Let that spark start an inferno of love. When opposites kiss at the center of the cross, resurrection happens. The enigma where time begins, where time ends, where Jesus meets Magdalene in a garden of blood-stained flowers.   I know you are a light worker. Now be a shadow worker. Transmute dark energy into fire. Glory be the color of silence, womb of song, last terrible note of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. The sweet binaural dissonance of pain and beauty is never merely one, yet not-two, not-two...   The veil of the temple is rent by a Mystery unknowable to conceptual thought. Only by surrender to the sound of the final dissonance is the Mystery known, the tremor of B Natural in the agony of C Minor, high frequency oscillation of life and death, bu...

Being human is not enough. One must become a human Being. Impeccable in your practice, polish the heart with your breath until it glistens like a self-luminous pearl, the pearl I AM.  It is because we have forgotten to practice the art of Being that we have fallen into black vs. white, left  vs. right, Israeli vs. Palestinian, believer vs. non-believer. Your homeland is not in the East Bank or the West Bank. Your homeland is not Russia or Ukraine, North of the border or South. Your homeland is the heart.  Quite literally, this pulsing organ, in its wilderness of nerves, its vast electrical field that encircles all other hearts on earth, and beyond, here is your Om and your valley and your mountaintop. Here I Am. When you dwell in this homeland, you love your neighbor as your self, because your neighbor Is your self.  Each of us is the unique diamond hologram of one I Am. We are a temple with eight billion windows. But we all have the same sky, and it is ins...

           "Savor every inch of breath in your body." ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar One inhalation is incalculable abundance. This breath is an influx of wonder that whispers more revelation that the Bible, the Qur'an, or the Vedas. In fact, this breath is the source of all scriptures. Every inspired text, every prophecy, springs from the stillness where this breath is born, and to which it returns. Here, in your chest. To delight in this breath is the end of war. To delight in this breath is the end of consumption and craving. When I savor this breath, my needs are few. When my needs are few, I exploit no one. I walk softly over the earth, tasting every step in the present moment, the green spirit in the moss, the murmur of a tree frog. Walking this way, I am free. In a very spontaneous way, I can live simply, sustainably, without trying, without preaching, without a political party. Wherever I stand is holy ground. I remove my shoes. I do not take this...

"Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood." ~ C.S. Lewis Image: The gash in Christ's side, from the Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg, circa 1349. This is one of several Medieval manuscripts portraying Christ's wound as a vagina, revealing the feminine power in his fully human nature, the Holy Spirit as birth mother. In this wound we are born. Unlike fundamentalists who read scripture literally to use it as a bludgeon, or atheists who read scripture literally to reject it as absurd, Christian artists and mystics contemplate the mythic symbols of the Easter story as portals to the collective unconscious, where the cross of Christ is the archetype of the Center. In the cross, opposites converge. And only where opposites converge is truth revealed, because here the archetypes have no other choice but to incarnate in the flesh. The ...

There's a secret in this madness. Everything is breath. A toadstool is Spirit-blown like glass. This mossy stone must be  the supreme Being because it exists. The wing of a housefly reveals a thousand verses of scripture, but you need to look. The fur on a golden shelter dog is infested with celestial messengers. Your next inhalation, the intimate name of Lady Wisdom, Sophia, whose whisper only lovers know. How does Mount Fuji float on a cloud? How do a billion stars rest in your open palm like a black moth? It happens through the science of miracles. The sun and planets in free-fall, caught and held by some colossal stillness. Be a pilgrim, then you'll understand the secret in this madness. Let the radiance of your destination illuminate your starting place before you take the first step. Let the space between the beginning and the end be a single exhalation of grace. What stands in your way is seeking. Everyth...

Rest the mind in the heart, until the path disappears. We meet here, in this brokenness, where all our pronouns dissolve into Thou.  A journey from the mind to the heart may be twelve inches, or twelve thousand light-years. You decide.