Kundalini Splendor

(For the earlier segments of this essay, see the entries for May 4 and May 25.)


What is the most effective way to meet your soul?

I wrote ENTERING THE CASTLE for precisely this reason, as a guide to
meet your soul. The soul is a
force that cannot be described; it must be experienced. Imagine that a
newly married woman asked a
mother, "But describe what childbirth is like and then tell me what
it's like to love your
children, because I have to know exactly what that's like before I
have a child so I know for sure
if I really want to have a child." Could a mother really find the
right words? When I ask that
question in a lecture, mothers laugh out loud because they know that
unless a woman experiences
being a mother, she can never know what it is like to love a child. She
has to meet that child
directly. The same is true for the soul. You have to enter your Castle,
beginning with crossing
your drawbridge and taking up the exploration of each of the seven
mansions. The journey, I will
admit, is not easy. In fact, it is extremely rigorous. Each mansion has
many rooms, as I describe
in my book. And that's where you begin.

How do Teresa of Avila's Seven Mansions of prayer relate to the human
energy system and the seven
chakras that you have described in ANATOMY OF THE SPIRIT?

The soul is built on a template of seven levels of power, and that is
what St. Teresa's vision of
the soul also embraced. Her division of the lower and upper mansions is
similar to the seven
chakras, in that the lower three mansions are the "worker-bee"
mansions and the upper mansions are
devoted to more mystical awakenings. Aside from that, there are no more
direct comparisons.

As we enter our personal Castles, what will some of our most profound
challenges be? And what will
be some of our greatest rewards?

How typical to ask for the rewards before you even begin the journey.
As for the challenges, the
greatest challenge will be to defeat the power of your need to have God
be a force of logic and
reason in your life. The greatest challenge you will ever face is to
confront your fear of being
humiliated and come to understand the power of being humble, and to
allow that power to lead you
finally to surrender your life to God's direction for you. It's so
ironic to me that most people
assume that in surrendering to God, their lives will become miserable
and not wonderful. That's
just incredible. They have no idea that their lives will, in fact,
become extraordinary. They
cannot see that they have been living in a prison, held captive by a
fear of being humiliated and
the need for others' approval most of the days of their lives. The
most profound challenge will be
to get over the grip the earth has on you. In the language of the
Buddha, free yourself from these
endless illusions. St. Teresa calls them your reptiles. That freedom is
your reward.

St. Teresa’s instructions in the Seventh Mansion are to serve the
divine through serving others.
How can we use prayer and channeling grace to be of service in the
world?

People have no idea how powerful prayer really is. After people have
tried everything else in
terms of medical interventions, for example, they often say, "Well,
all we can do now is pray." If
they really understood prayer, they would begin medical procedures with
a prayer and then do
whatever they can medically. St. Teresa wrote The Interior Castle as a
guide of illumination to
God through prayer, through learning how to rely on the ever-increasing
depth of inner dialogue
with your soul and God as the means to discover your profound capacity
to become a channel for
grace in this world. Grace comes in many forms: illuminated thought, a
moment of authority,
abundant compassion and courage, the capacity to heal and comfort
another, visionary creativity.
Grace has many, many forms and grace is meant to be shared, to be
distributed to others constantly
and under the radar, in silence, invisibly. That's the role of a
mystic out of a monastery - to
become a channel for grace in this world invisibly, to form circles of
grace that gather for the
sake of sharing their capacity to nurture each other in their spiritual
lives, to share their
gifts of illumination, to channel grace at a distance in order to heal
others and this earth, and
to bring forth new creative thought. This is a great calling and I know
many, many people are
emerging as mystics out of monasteries. Many are coming to study with
me at CMED, because people
need support as they venture into their souls/Castles. Even St. Teresa
said that one should not go
into the soul alone. You need soul companions. And the groups that bond
as a result are profoundly
bonded to each other because they come to know each other through
prayer and a devotion to bring
the best of themselves to each other and to the world. I feel very
blessed to be doing this work
and I am so grateful to all of these students, so very grateful. And
most of all, I am grateful to
St. Teresa.

(from Carolyn Myss' Newsletter)