Kundalini Splendor

Tears

                Kathmandu April 2015

The clear round vase on the table
filled with water holds the world
upside down and magnified, reflecting
the chair-back, the shimmering birch
beyond the window. Deeper

into the woods, shadows
shield the mystery of what sleeps there
having roamed the night as we
turned toward and away and toward
and dreamed our separate dreams,
while the Kathmandu restaurant

whose narrow stone steps I climbed
tumbled into a world turned
upside down in a street no longer recognizable,
turned out of itself the way mayhem
casts out meaning –

this pot where the cook melted ghee
beside the splintered back
of a patron’s chair, this blue scarf
fluttering from the rubble as prayer flags
fluttered above the entrance. The stairs

speak to each other, mystified
by their new arrangement – the first step
grating against the eighth, the ninth
under the fourth, the third beside the fifth.
If this were music, their confusion might
convey the longing for harmony
lost inside the dissonance of chaos,
the moans and cries of the mortal world
with its icy rivers turned to salt.

- Elizabeth Carothers Herron

Elizabeth Carothers Herron suggests that if you wish to contribute to the fund for Nepal,
you can contact the following  www.seva.org  Seva is an organization that has been active in doing helping work in Nepal (and elsewhere) for many, many years.

For Presence

Awaken to the mystery of being here
and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.

Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon.

Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to
follow its path.

Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity.

May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.

May anxiety never linger about you.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of
soul.

Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek
no attention.

Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven
around the heart of wonder.

~ John O'Donohue ~

(To Bless the Space Between Us)

Dancing Gods

(for Andrew)

Never trust a god who doesn't dance.
                          Alain Danilou

Who are the dancing gods?

What is the name of those
who come to us and enter us
and make us splendid?

How is it
that they come so far
to be so close?

How is it that they
wish to claim us
and we wish to be
claimed,
ourselves
an altar of love?

When will they carry us
 to the dancing ground
of the many nameless ones,
the great ones who ever
sing and dance together?

What will we do
if they should leave?

Dorothy Walters
April 27, 2015

The Damnedest Finest Ruins



Put me somewhere west of East Street where there's nothin' left but dust,

Where the lads are all a hustlin' and where everything's gone bust,

Where the buildin's that are standin' sort of blink and blindly stare

At the damndest finest ruins ever gazed on anywhere.


Bully ruins - bricks and wall - through the night I've heard you call

Sort of sorry for each other cause you had to burn and fall.

From the Ferries to Van Ness you're a God-forsaken mess,

But the damndest finest ruins - nothin' more or nothin' less.


The strangers who come rubberin' and a huntin' souvenirs,

The fools they try to tell us it will take a million years

Before we can get started, so why don't we come and live

And build our homes and factories upon land they've got to give.


"Got to give"! why, on my soul, I would rather bore a hole

And live right in the ashes than even move to Oakland's mole,

If they'd all give me my pick of their buildin's proud and slick

In the damndest finest ruins still I'd rather be a brick!

- L. W. Harris
(After the San Francisco earthquake April 18, 1906)

Many Faces

I have many faces.
       I speak in many tongues.

No one has seen me
       or heard my voice.

Yet I am everywhere,
       for I am all that is.

I flow through your body
          like scent, perfume of a garden
                    kissed by sweet rain.                              

My music resonates
          through your flesh,
                  sound made by invisible fingers
                                            stroking a special instrument.

Do not deny me.

           I am you.

Dorothy Walters
April 19, 2015

Terry Patton is one of the wisest and most articulate spokespersons for the current shift of consciousness now underway.  This presentation (free) will, I am sure, be well worth listening to.  We are lucky to live in a time when such events are so readily available to us all.  Google Terry Patton, then add Surrendering to Spirit and Incarnating Your Soul for more info.


Dear Dorothy,

I’m writing to invite you to a free online seminar I’ll be teaching on Saturday, April 25th, called:

‘Surrendering to Spirit and Incarnating Your Soul: 
An Integral Vision for Becoming a True Evolutionary’ 



Some of us are feeling called to be the change we want to see in the world, to become a real force for healthy conscious evolution.

But what does it take to become a true integral “evolutionary?” To not only wake up, but to become higher consciousness in action? To go beyond ego and yet to contribute your own special gifts?

I believe it takes a life of practice, a journey of surrendering to the deeper, often unnoticed, currents of life and consciousness so that you become the embodiment of your soul and of evolution itself.

You literally become the head, heart and hands of Spirit, so that evolution is always happening through you to answer the challenges of your life and of the greater world—and in the particular ways that only you, right here, right now, can.

Part of my ongoing exploration of what I call “Integral Soul Work” has been working with dissonance and paradox. Spiritual practice awakens us from the surface levels of experience to the conscious Mystery of Existence.

Soul work takes us on a highly personal, deep inward journey, allowing our most authentic singular character to take over our lives, letting the inauthentic and superficial aspects of us fall away.

That's why both spirituality and soul work are associated with “going deep inside” and enacting an inner alchemical transformation of our consciousness.

The dissonance comes from the fact that it’s “game time” on the planet; our world is speeding up, and our global crises are becoming more urgent and complex.  Some people think we’ve arrived at a time where the inward-focus of spirituality and soul work have become a luxury we cannot afford.

But my immersion in spiritual practice and soul work, anchored in integral theory, has shown me that it is exactly the opposite: it is by awakening to awareness and attuning to the voice of our soul that we can actually become effective change-agents.

We can honor the fact that our soul is on a journey AND so is our shared world. And the two journeys are interdependent. Effective, sustained, wise activism requires full-spectrum soulful awakened activists.

This implies two kinds of mystical practice. Radical awakening as consciousness liberates us from false identities and divisions, liberating awareness.

That’s primary, but it won’t help us answer personal questions, like Where should I move? Who should I marry? What house should I buy? or What is my life purpose?

To answer these hugely consequential questions we need to tune in to our highest relative intuition.

We need to contact a deeper source of knowing. Our hearts need to be able to discern the voice of our soul, and cultivating that relationship is a profound journey.

Integral Soul Work integrates these two forms of mysticism in a practical way that you can cultivate to actually live your life’s true purpose.

This is profoundly self-actualizing and personally gratifying, but it’s even more important for the sake of our world. Our crises are calling us to be the change we want to see in the world.

In the special online event, I’ll be sharing about how to practice with soul and spirit to achieve this depth of surrender and embodiment:

Join me at No Charge for
‘Surrendering to Spirit and Incarnating Your Soul:
An Integral Vision for Becoming a True Evolutionary’

An integral vision is indispensable for anchoring this kind of authentic evolutionary consciousness, enabling you to see the full spectrum of the outer and inner cosmos, and to inhabit all the dimensions of your own being and understand clearly how you are related to others and the world—shadow and light, heart and soul, interior and exterior, masculine and feminine.

You can come to stand at the heart where all the polarities intersect as the dazzling fabric of conscious awareness that is synchronizing and aligning so that you can be a channel through which grace can pour into this world.

I hope for this seminar to be an intimate, immersive experience. I’ll offer my findings of over four decades of advanced mystical, intellectual and embodied investigation into the higher reaches of the spiritual path and the deepest truths of what it means to be a true evolutionary.

You’ll walk away with a practical understanding of living a truly evolutionary life—every day.

In the course of this session, I will share with you…
How your soul’s daemon is the archetypal “strange attractor” of your deeper character

The emerging shape of your integrated soul-and-spirit practice journey

A rationale for integral ritual and ceremony

The powers, or “siddhis” that can emerge from profound sustained integral practice

A vision for understanding the holographic nature of an evolutionary practice of conscious participation in our full-spectrum psychophysical reality
Please join me for this illuminating hour where you can chart your course for becoming the embodied soul of an authentic spiritual evolutionary.

Join Me on 25th at No Charge

To our evolution and our soul life,

Terry

P.S. When you register for this online event at no charge, you’ll receive a link to download the recording afterwards, so I urge you to register even you’re unable to make it to the  event.

Join Me for ‘Surrendering to Spirit and Incarnating Your Soul: An Integral Vision for Becoming a True Evolutionary’ at No Charge

A Spiritual Oasis

It happened today.  I was given a recommendation for a small deli and cafe nearby.  My friend and I went to try it out––the moment we walked in, we encountered indescribably beautiful odors (usually, I smell very little, but these were special).  On the wall, someone had written a poem by Rumi.  Books by Rumi and other mystics were on the table next to us for patrons to read.

The owner came over and introduced himself.  Soon he was reciting Rumi in Farsi (Rumi's own language).  He had a beautiful voice, and I felt as though we were listening to Rumi himself.

Soon he gave us some Persian tea.  I seemed to fall into trance state, as if I had had a bit too much wine.  I understood why Sufi poetry loves to employ the metaphor of wine and drunkenness to express what happens with divine poetry.  I had drunk holy nectar, and it was working real magic on me.

This, I thought, must be like the early tea houses on the old Silk Road.  These were way stations on the path, places where travelers might relax and enjoy some poetry and music along the way.

I have never encountered such a transcendent atmosphere in a commercial establishment.  I felt as though I had tasted a bit of paradise.

How the world needs this to refresh our souls, I thought.

The food (soup and sandwich) were delicious, by the way.  Indeed, I'll be back for sure.

We left and re-entered the familiar world.  Soon the sweet state of consciousness left.  We had traveled to another world, a different era, where events conspired to carry us into a different world.  For a moment, we had tasted true beauty.

Seymour, An Introduction

This beautiful documentary tracing the life of Seymour Bernstein, a New York City piano teacher now in his eighties, is a profoundly moving revelation of the life of this truly authentic being.

Seymour left his career as a budding and gifted concert pianist for a life of teaching when  he realized that a life on stage was far too demanding and indeed consuming for one of his sensitivity and vulnerability.  He gave up all desire for fame and fortune to become one of the most beloved and creative piano teachers of our time.

Seymour lives simply in the one room New York City apartment he has occupied for over 50 years.  There he painstakingly and lovingly offers instruction to a variety of students, while he himself continues to practice and compose.  His emphasis includes more than mere technique, though he maintains a high standard for his pupils.  Yeats spoke of the need to "make your soul," and this is what Seymour has done.  He wants music that comes from the heart rather than as a display of technical mastery.

Often, the scenes of Seymour at his piano are seen against a background of pedestrians  walking like shadows past his garden level windows.  These shots remind us of  references to "those who pass by" without noticing the treasures strewn along their way.  There is also a slight echo of Eliot's reference to those passing over London Bridge when he says, "I had not known that death had undone so many."  And for me, Plato's myth of the cave also comes to mind, though the correspondence is not exact.

Clearly the suggestion in these images is that the many are so busy following their "worldly" pursuits that they have virtually sacrificed what is best within themselves through striving for shoddy or false goals.

Seymour truly loves music.  For him, the resonant tones of a perfect Steinway lead into a type of ecstatic union with what many call the "divine realms."  He himself says that his own fingers have touched the sky.

To view the intimate details of his solitary life is to witness the daily occupations of a profound and authentic human being.  He tells us of the pitfalls of fame––and reminds us that those who have risen high on the ladder of public success may be private failures as far as their personal lives are concerns.

In today's world, where many sacrifice their own humanity in their frantic search for "success" in the world's terms, this film is an essential reminder that "soul making" is much more essential than "career making," and that one example such as this can show us what it means to be an authentic human.

For me, one of the attractions of this film is that dear Andrew Harvey is included as one of the interviewers in a brief sequence.  I know that Andrew himself is a dedicated lover of music, one who resonates deeply with it as that which can connect us with other realms.  And in the film, Andrew makes a stunning revelation––that he himself once heard the "music of the spheres."   Though there are many historical references to this phenomenon, there are virtually no reports of humans who actually have experienced these celestial tones.  Andrew, of course, is a deep mystic, and thus he is capable of capable of achieving heights of ecstasy through sound that we others may have to wait for until we leave earth and enter the higher regions of sound and silence.  But it is reassuring to know that the "music of the spheres" is a reality, not a myth.

Stones
(for all who make the pilgrimage overland to Petra, ancient city in Jordan, carved from stone)

No one knows
how many
have made this journey
before us.

Thousands, maybe,
Arabs, Muslims,
Jews.

Some say even Abraham
in his wanderings
passed this way,
across the deserts,
through the rocky cleavage
that became the city of stone.

How beautiful they were,
carved from legendary
forms
of Greek facades,
Roman sculpted fronts.

Columns, portals,
whole civic rooms
hewed from sand,
stolen from
the mountain side.

We were awed to think
we now were journeyers
to this ancient
now forsaken place,
wanderers seeking
to reconnect,
to feel what it was like
to dwell amidst such energies,
such craft of these ancient
ones,
now awakened
and speaking to us
once again,
whispering secrets
in our ears.

Dorothy Walters
April 16, 2015

** Elizabeth Spires: "Zen Sonnet"


It was April and we were reading the book about Zen
you were writing your Zen poems and we were talking

about the moment we were in and I was thinking thoughts
that were not Zen: how I know too much too little to teach you

and then I stepped back from each thought and watched it
disappear a horse without a rider over a sharp-edged horizon.

Spring was a pale shade of yellow a green that kept deepening
there was desire and there was a sense of unfolding and I thought

how we can do anything there is no need for an excess of feeling
we can walk through the door that was made for entering and exiting

abandoning the poems that were never ours though we wrote them
to the one who walks into this room when we are gone.

So let us go out into the world and wander a little
beggars with empty bowls in straw hats grass sandals.

The Call


I have heard it all my life,
A voice calling a name I recognized as my own.
Sometimes it comes as a soft-bellied whisper.
Sometimes it holds an edge of urgency.

But always it says: Wake up, my love. You are walking asleep.
There’s no safety in that!
Remember what you are, and let a deeper knowing
color the shape of your humanness.

There is nowhere to go. What you are looking for is right here.
Open the fist clenched in wanting and see what you already hold in your hand.
There is no waiting for something to happen,
no point in the future to get to.

All you have ever longed for is here in this moment, right now.
You are wearing yourself out with all this searching.
Come home and rest.
How much longer can you live like this?

Your hungry spirit is gaunt, your heart stumbles. All this trying.
Give it up!
Let yourself be one of the God-mad,
faithful only to the Beauty you are.

Let the Lover pull you to your feet and hold you close,
dancing even when fear urges you to sit this one out.
Remember, there is one word you are here to say with your whole being.
When it finds you, give your life to it. Don’t be tight-lipped and stingy.

Spend yourself completely on the saying,
Be one word in this great love poem we are writing together.

- Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Caravans

Exploring with Michael
includes falling into
psychic crevices so deep,
we lose our bearings.

Which way is up,
which way down,
which way back?

The rocking motion
of the caravan cradles
our vulnerable hearts
our aging bodies,
as we journey relentlessly
towards the Light.

Note: Michael is a gifted spiritual teacher who helps others explore the hidden recesses of themselves in order to become whole and move ahead on their own journeys into self knowledge.

Easter, 2015

We are the ones
who saw it happen.

We watched as the tyrants
ascended,
the mothers struggled
to find bread
for the young.

We heard the cries,
smelled the odors
rising from the ovens.
Felt the flesh hanging
from the bones.
Our fathers went forth
to save the world
and returned as skeletons,
corpses, memories.
Finally, victory,
the new beginning.

Years passed,
things changed once more.

The better world
became the playground
for the few,
those who clawed their way
onto an ever narrowing
niche,
as the rest of us watched
and wondered what to do,
while their jets, their sleek autos,
their mammoth houses grew and
covered the earth.

Dreams gone to smoke,
lost ones in the streets,
the smell of things and rampant greed
always hanging in the air.

Dorothy Walters
April 5, 2015

Note: I debated whether or not to post this poem.  I realize that many come to this site looking for inspiration and affirmation.  But the truth is that what is happening to our society at this time is a spiritual issue.  Greed and avarice seem to reign supreme.
Our only hope is to hold close to one another, to maintain our own inner agendas and thus become a meaningful participant in the spiritual renaissance that is occurring simultaneously with obvious moral decay.  And of course, we must remain active in our communities, supporting those causes which will, together, stem the tide that is trying to take over democracy in favor of capitalism run amuck.

The Skeptics

We were the skeptics,
the ones who knew
that nothing exists
beyond our knowing,
our certitude that what we saw
was what there was,
no need to go
beyond the edges
of our thought,
our need to be right.

Then one day
we were struck down
by Presence arriving
in a whirling cloud
of light,
a wind tearing
our clothes away,
our skin was now suffused with gold,
and we no longer remembered
what it was we knew.

Dorothy Walters
April 7, 2015

NOTE: THIS PRESENTATION WILL BE REBROADCAST  AS FOLLOWS:



If you weren't able to join the session or if you want to experience their wisdom again, you can participate in a free encore event on Saturday, April 4 at 10:00am Pacific. 

Here are your call-in details for the exclusive (free) event this Saturday: 

Listen in on our free webcast at 
http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=67989063  
You can also join us by phone: 
Dial +1-425-440-5100  
and enter the PIN 498523#

DON'T MISS IT.  IT IS A RARE OPPORTUNITY TO HEAR TWO OUTSTANDING SPIRITUAL TEACHERS SHARE THEIR PRECIOUS INSIGHTS WITH US! 





Dear Ones,
Yesterday I listened to one of the most brilliant, wise and exciting presentations I have every heard on anything.  Andrew Harvey and Sally Kempton have teamed up for a six-months webinar on Shift Network--the free introductory lecture Wednesday night offered an overview of this course: http://theshiftnetwork.com/EvolutionaryGoddess––and what a view it was!

How can I adequately described the overall impact of this presentation?  Here we have two great spiritual teachers who combine wisdom, experience, background, and deep understanding of our current world crisis as well as ways to survive it.  Sally comes from a long background of spiritual involvement, including many years in an ashram (Muktananda, who emphasized Kundalini) and has subsequently explored in depth the many goddesses East and West.  Andrew has delved into virtually all of the spiritual traditions with the result that he feels that the divine feminine lies at the heart of each.  These two agree that only by combining both the feminine and masculine elements within ourselves will we as individuals and the world at large survive our present crisis.

Frankly, I am a bit giddy from imbibing such clear headed insights and such profound wisdom from two such teachers.  Such words as inspired, illuminating, stunning, or brilliant are too limited to describe this event.  I am deeply grateful to have been able to hear it.

And they were not shy about mentioning Kundalini itself and noting that bliss was the hallmark of illumination.  They made me recall with regret the early days of my own awakening when I mentioned bliss to the movement teacher and was informed that "If you are lucky, you will get over this," and told by another established Taoist scholar, "No, the texts mention nothing such as you describe."

Sally and Andrew also agree that bliss must then be transformed into action to serve the world in its present crisis.

I will let you know if this presentation becomes available for replay or as text.