Musings - Grow Soul Pg2

What Direction?

by sarahcledwyn|Published January 19, 2016

Sometimes folks joke with me when I tell them I am a Spiritual Director. They ask me, “What direction are you going?” I have had to develop a short elevator speech for this moment and now am well practiced at centering my body and bringing my hands to my chest.

Love Wisdom from yoga

“We go deep inside, and then out into the Mystery”, finishing with my arms outstretched. This is true. I believe the heart of the spiritual life and the heart of my work is to go deeply within my core to find my own truth and voice and then to bring it out into loving action in the world. This is what I help others do individually and in groups. The direction we go is always the same; in and out. My job is to do this work in my own life as a practice for my work with others, but it isn’t to direct people in the sense that I tell them where to go or what to do. I follow their own revelation as it moves within and beyond them. We uncover the particulars of their truth and their loving action together.

This weekend I was moved my a message delivered in my faith community of transformation in the form of a hatching chick. From the perspective of the chick, this work is quite dramatic. It is starving and pressed from all sides and desperately needs to break free of its shell. The work of hatching is tireless and messy, exhausting and difficult and then there is this whole big world on the other side of birth that is nothing at all like where we have emerged from.

I sat listening to the description of the chick and felt in myself the wild struggle in my own life to move from constriction into freedom. This reality is so present for me at this time that I was in and out of tears this week…which is exactly where I should be as I peck away at this shell, hungry and fatigued. And today, on this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, I also brought that impulse and truth in me out into the streets….shutting down the Lake Street bridge with other Black Lives Matter activists. This feels like the smallest peck to a shell that doesn’t want to crack, but it feels true and it feels honest. I know my freedom is tied to the freedom of every one of us. I need to be out in the frigid cold with others, tears streaming to remind myself that I have been, am now, deformed by the racism that permeates our lives.

This isn’t someone else’s problem. It’s my problem. And this problem is not separate at all from the ways I harm myself and others out of fear. It is the same failure of love that I try to meet in my own shadow projected out everywhere. Inner transformation is essential for outer transformation. If we expect to change the whole country it starts in my heart and your heart. This isn’t a pollyanna wish for us to be nice to each other. Love unleashed is the most powerful force there is. Take back our Love from fear and see what happens. What else could possibly inspire us to keep pecking when we are tired and delirious and desperate for freedom? The only real change will come from love. When we love one another, we will be unable to hurt one another as we do. So start now. Go in. Find your truth; find your voice. And then go out into the world with the force of Love and help the transformation birth something new.

Yes to What?

by sarahcledwyn|Published December 24, 2015

I had a discussion with a friend about the creative process and the idea that Life comes in all forms, even if at first it looks ugly or unsettling. Sometimes what we turn away from holds a profound gift that we never get to if we are unwilling to look deeply, look past appearances and see what might be there for us. The process of choosing Life is a parallel to the creative process as our engagement with Spirit can quickly move from what we thought we knew into a more complicated, wilder, more dangerous feeling arena. Holding with grief, pain and sorrow is uncomfortable. We would rather get their gifts of wisdom without actually having to touch them, feel them or hear their stories. But they don’t give their wisdom so freely. You have to be present to win. And not just in the room either. They demand our complete attention at least for a time.

This is also true of those beautiful versions of Life that we say yes to. At first it may feel easy to say yes. There is at least some enticement or attraction. But even this may feel just as terrifying as facing sorrow. The beauty too comes in inexplicable and unexpected forms. It can be profoundly disruptive. One session with my healer, we worked on the pericardium energy channel. We talked about what my pericardium might look like (This is the essential sac around the heart that keeps out infection). I imagined mine as more of a masonry wall then a flexible membrane and part of my work was to dismantle that wall and free up the beautiful and soft covering that kept my heart safe, but would allow me to feel everything pressed up against it.

This was something I could say yes to! What a beautiful and lovely vision.

And then there was the gritty work breaking up the wall; piece by piece with a heavy maul, and my bare hands, and my broken fingernails.

And then there was the terrifying prospect of feeling decades of pain I had shut out.

And then the even more terrifying prospect of feeling a new sense of ecstasy and belovedness.

This is what I was totally unprepared for. This shocking and familiar sense of belonging that I have experienced in brief transforming bursts before is beyond my ability to explain. But now…. now it was infused with a deeper, more profound love than I had ever felt or imagined. It came wrapped in a form I was totally confused by. I had no idea even how to say yes and to tell you the truth, the power of that ecstasy probably said the yes for me. It was a baffling, stumbling and clumsy yes. But worth staying engaged with, worth sitting in the middle of disbelief and anguish with, worth the risk of my life falling apart. It felt like the only Truth and the way Home. It takes that much to move completely into the process…to give yourself over in surrender to what makes no logical sense, what feels impossible, to what Spirit is moving through you. It takes everything. What is calling you to surrender? Are you brave enough to engage it and say yes?

The work- yes to life

by sarahcledwyn|Published December 21, 2015

As I wandered more fully into my work to release old pain and open myself to joy, things slowly began to shift. Over months I filled my journal, paid attention to my dreaming, walked and practiced yoga and saw my healer and my Spiritual Director. It was like tracing a line back into the shadows or down into deep waters. How far down would we go? Where would it take me? Would I be able to find my way back out? Did I really want to do this? I mean, I had lived without a full experience of joy for a long time. Was it worth the level of work that I felt was waiting here for me? Ultimately, in the wondering and the fear of this, I had to choose yes, choose life again and again and again. The only way through the dark is through. If you skip it, or run backwards and change your mind, you will never know and you will never get to the other side of this moment. And let me tell you, it’s terrifying. As a Spiritual Director myself, I can tell you that the journey of transformation has a cycle like the seasons. One must surrender to the dying in order for the new birth to come. Things must fully decay before their energy is available to grow anything new. I know this. And I know that the law of impermanence means that everything, whether coming into life or letting things go, will shift and change and be something else quite soon. Nothing lasts….not pain, nor joy. To be available to both requires a certain flow or flexibility.

I know all that. But when it’s me going through the dying, I forget as fast as anyone and think that if I walk into pain, that I might get stuck there forever. And when it’s me going through the joy, I always forget and hope it will last forever. In this case I started entering my own surrendering to death…the death of a certain way of being that kept me unavailable to joy. Except that being immersed in that process I found out that I actually wasn’t available to pain either. There was a day when I realized that this was a choice to feel everything or to feel nothing. There isn’t a filter where you get to say I’m only going to experience purely joy and sorrow and broken heartedness are a thing of the past. The more you feel the joy, the more you can feel everything else. Saying yes to this…to more life, this is risky. This opens you up, to yourself, to others, to Spirit and these relationships are almost always disruptive eventually.

I met someone who was telling me about her fiancé. She had been in an abusive relationship before because she thought she needed that kind of protection to be safe. She said that this partnership wasn’t safe, but it was fully alive. Safety is its own kind of death. For me, choosing relationships and allies who could hold some perspective for me as I went further into darkness was vital. A beacon in the confusion of walking blind, a safety line as I sank down further and further into the unknown. Small moments of connection, of love, care and concern were my fuel and my inspiration in the descent. They gave me the courage to keep saying yes. Who are the allies who give you the courage to say yes to life? What gifts have they given you? How do you express gratitude for their presence?

Black Friday- Story for All Ages
2015 Unity Church Unitarian
by sarahcledwyn|Published December 13, 2015

Once there was a body. It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was made of many different parts. There were hands and feet and a heart and a mind and there was love. The body was healthy and whole; many members, one complete being. One time the body was so content that the heart thought it would be ok if it took a short nap and it went to sleep. The mind, right away thought it knew what to do next, and it started giving orders. “Right arm,” it said, ” I don’t think you are pulling your weight around here. It told the right arm to work. It told that arm that if it didn’t work, it wasn’t really a part of the body. So the right arm got to work planting food, pulling weeds. Then the mind thought, “Left arm, I think I should be enjoying some of that hard work the right arm is doing.” So as the harvest came, the left arm would grab the food and feed it to the mouth. This went on for a little while till the right arm complained, “I am tired. I need a rest.” And, “This is not fair”. And the left arm complained, “ I am tired too from only doing one thing. I feel weak and numb.” But the mind did not listen. The right arm kept working and the left arm grabbed even more food for the mouth. Then one day something terrible happened. The right arm broke because it had worked too hard and was not allowed to rest. And the left arm which had only been reduced to one motion was so shriveled and shrunken it didn’t even look like an arm any more. The body’s arms both hurt so badly that the heart finally woke up. What a mess the heart found. The heart cried tears of sorrow and pain that its beautiful body was broken. It said, “Don’t you remember that we are all one body together?” Suddenly the mind realized what it had done. So the heart and the mind decided they needed to help the arms and the whole body heal. They started by listening, so they would best know how to help the body to heal. They listened to the right arm and listened to the left so they could understand what they needed. They asked the right arm and the left arm to listen to one another. When we re-member a broken bone, bring the pieces back together, it hurts, but it’s what needs to happen in order for the bone and the whole body to heal. Our bodies can’t be well if any part of us is broken, the whole body needs to be healed for us to be well. Can we help this body to re-member itself?

When I need to do something that hurts in order to get better, it always helps me to start from a place of love. Today with the body of our church, we may hear some hard things that wake our hearts up to the pain of our own broken places. But we need to listen the best we can if we want to change the brokenness and re-member our larger body back together. We need each other. We belong to each other. So I wonder if we can all get ready to listen. Can we start from a place of love? I’m going to ask our whole church body to help us too. If you don’t want to share a touch with your neighbor, or if you are sitting out of reach, can you put your hand on your own heart? If you want to share a touch of love, can you put your hand on your neighbor’s back. I wonder if we can imagine the hand touching us as the hand of love? Can you feel that love calling you to re-member the story of our belonging? I wonder if we can listen well enough with our hand, our hearts and our minds and our whole selves to hear a beating heart? Can you listen well enough to hear breathing, in and out? I wonder if we really really listen if we can hear the heartbeat of our whole church body today, can you hear us all breathing? I wonder if we listen even more deeply if we can hear the heartbeat of our whole city or state or country? Can you hear us all breathe together? Let’s try to keep this feeling in our hearts and bodies as we try to listen with our whole selves to the story of our broken body. Then let’s try to hold on to each other in love and belonging till we can heal together. May it be so.

Spirit Play Reflection
by sarahcledwyn|Published October 9, 2015

Joys and Sorrows

This week the moment in Spirit Play that captured me came right at the end of class. Everyone was doing their work. We had about 5 more minutes before it was time to clean up and re-gather on the rug for our closing song. An adult came in the room. I reminded him that class didn’t end for 15 min. but he was a new member who was still on summer service schedule and they had missed church. His son was lagging behind in the hallway, not quite ready to come in. Inside me two things happened. One thing was to be mindful of the interruption to class this entrance made with another grown up standing at full height and talking to me, another adult. It really does shift the dynamic of our child-centric space. I wanted to protect our space. The other thing that happened in me was a desire to be welcoming and to put aside the rules in order to be more like…well, like church. So in they came, the boy clinging to his father’s leg. Eventually the child joined us on the rug and his father left for a short time. I had promised that after class, if they had time to stay I could show them around the classroom and tell them what we do in our class. After all the other children were gone, we were waiting for his Dad to come back. I was talking to him about Spirit Play….”every week we get to sing songs and we get to share the joys and sorrows of our heart and we get to hear a story….” but I had already been interrupted. “Do you know that I lost my Mom?” he says. Everything stopped. “No I didn’t know that. That must be a very big sorrow in your heart.” His Dad came and we toured around the classroom. He shared with me that his wife had died. He expressed desire to come back. He felt that this community is what his family needs. I extended a heartfelt invitation that they are welcome here whenever they can join us. I am so glad that I could set aside the rules and open to relationship. The tears came after they left. How brave to come here, to be honest and hurting. What a gift that I could be open instead of rushing, instead of insisting on the letter of the law. I’m not always able to do that. Again, this was a moment where the authentic welcome extended to this family is the work of love. It is how we are community together. And for me, another gift for my practice. What a good model for me….to come be nurtured and fed by this community. I am one who frequently handles it on my own, handles it with my friends. If I’m honest, I don’t bring my wounds to church if I can help it. But I hope to learn how so I too have an opportunity to be met with love and welcome.

This is the Circle of our Community

by sarahcledwyn|Published January 13, 2016

This last week I taught my Spirit Play friends about the 7 Principles of Unitarian Universalism. We have not used this lesson before when I have been teaching. Church staff and I looked over the text and modified it slightly to match the bedtime prayer that we have been teaching to the families in our community. I started by telling the children that they might already know this lesson, even if they had never heard it before. Sure enough as I made my way through the Principles, one child enthusiastically reported that he DID know this lesson already.

7 Principles Beads

We went through them all at then end. “Each person is important. Be kind in all you do. We’re free to learn together. And search for what is true. All people need a voice. Build a fair and peaceful world. We care for mother earth and all who call her home.”

My friend came up to me during our work time and smiled at me and sat close. I told him that next time I did my bed time prayer, I would think about him doing the same bed time prayer and would remember that we are a community. He looked at me for a moment and then checked in. “But you won’t be at my house”, he said. I told him that was true. He would be at his house with his family and I would be at my house with my family, but we would be saying and doing the same thing as a part of our community. I told him that my thoughts and my heart would be at his house and at my house at the same time.

This conversation was heartwarming to me. The joy on this child’s face as he recognized the familiar words, the extra connection with me later in class, all of these things speak to belonging. We belong to each other as we think about and try to act on the foundations of our faith community. This is one of the sweet moments in teaching where I become inspired about the work that I am doing. It’s not just that this child experienced his belonging, but that we created it together too.

For me, I also felt my belonging. Some nights are so difficult when my own kids don’t want to do the prayers and don’t lend their full presence to our end of day ritual. Sometimes it feels like I am doing this valuable work alone. But I am not. We are a community; each of us in our own houses. We are a community that sends our hearts and thoughts out to each other. We join this community and engage in ritual to connect all the parts of ourselves and to be connected to each other. We say in the sanctuary that we hope our church will be “a place to find and keep your balance, a place where we are encouraged together to live loving lives of integrity, service and joy”. I can’t think of a much better way to get centered and balanced than to remember that I belong. I belong to myself as I seek more love and life on my own spiritual journey. I belong to the relationships I serve, honor and engage in. And I belong to the collective, the community which includes our church and the Mystery far beyond us. This is the joy and the fruit of practice.

Spirit Play Reflection- The Ordinary Birth of a Baby

by sarahcledwyn|Published December 17, 2015

Ordinary and Miraculous Baby Jesus

This last story of the year talks about the very old story of the birth of Jesus. It is introduced as an every day kind of story; the birth of a baby, both mundane and miraculous. The story asks us to look into the ordinary until we can find the truth and the magic within it. As I reflect on this fall semester, I wonder at my own journey taking this teaching role seriously as practice. The task itself is quite ordinary. I prepare by reading the story several times and reflecting on it myself. I show up early on Sunday morning to prepare the room. I sit on the rug as an invitation to those who come and immerse myself in the edge of experience when preparation meets living. It has been a learning curve for me to let that preparation play in the space of our classroom where it meets wiggly energy and curiosity and excitement that makes everyone want to talk all at one time. It is a joy for me to walk that edge where I choose to meet our children with my own openness and see what they offer back. Engaging with the parents and other teachers along these edges has proven to be just as opening and transforming. As the children chose to work with this story this week, I saw them blessing babies from the Celebration of New Lives story, I saw them curl up and rest in the book nook (it looked like a little manger to me). I saw them engage with each other and with the teachers and I swear I saw magic in the middle of our ordinary play. I trace the ordinary magic of my own transformation facilitated by my engagement with these children. My own opening to this practice has worked on me in surprising ways that has brought me to new places in my own heart and life. I see the comfort and community that has been created by and for these children as they come each week to class. I see our community being in relationship and creating connection with each other in and out of our classroom. The parish hall is suddenly full of more friendly faces wanting to meet me and be recognized and known. This is the beauty of church, a small miracle. It is within these connections that the holy can be found and through which it moves to bless our world. An ordinary thing, to deeply choose connection and relationship, a miraculous thing when that relationship invites us beyond ourselves and our small vision into greater integrity, service and joy.

Fists full of Blessings

by sarahcledwyn|Published January 12, 2016

Last week in my Spirit Play class, one of the children was working with the Celebration of New Lives story.

Blessed by Earth and Water

This has been a popular story to work with in our class. The baby dolls in the story have been amply blessed with water and dirt making some fantastically muddy babies. The blessing by beauty takes place with a rose that is gently stroked down the baby’s cheek in our church’s ritual. We have enough artificial flowers for all the children in our room and I observed this child as she held big bunches of those flowers gripped in each hand and vigorously blessed the doll she was working with. She blessed the doll so enthusiastically she literally swept it across the floor with her flower bunches. It rolled over and over being tumbled and swept away by beauty.

I wondered about this encounter with beauty. Are there ever times when I am that moved by something beautiful? Would an encounter like that be profoundly disorienting? Would I want to encounter a blessing like that? I have also lately been thinking about where in my own journey I am a little too serious and could use a little humor. Well placed humor can completely change the energy of a tense or sad situation sometimes allowing us to move through those emotions with a little more ease. So I wondered again what this kind of encounter with beauty might look and feel like. I remember as a child being in the bright sun and rolling down grassy hills. The feeling of spinning and rolling and getting faster until I either rolled to the bottom or flung my arms out wide to stop myself. I remember laughing and being dizzy and enjoying that feeling of, well, of disorientation I suppose. Not something I tend to enjoy as an adult. But I imagined that if I was the baby being swept by flowers, that the flowers may even tickle and it might be a great delight to be surrounded by the scent and softness of petals. I might find it enjoyable to be rolled along. I might laugh.

I thought about the blessings of that moment in class. I am grateful to have had the presence to observe this play without getting distracted by the mess of the earth and water blessing. I am glad I did not try to shut down the active blessing with the flowers. I could simply delight in the moment and ponder it. That’s spiritual growth for me! I also thought about those astounding blessings we receive in our lives like close friends, the kindness of another when we feel alone, the gift of self acceptance and compassion; some are so generous and profound that we hardly have words to articulate our gratitude or their importance to us. In that profound and ordinary moments where words can fail, maybe laughter is the only adequate response to our blessings.

In the beginning- there was yes

by sarahcledwyn|Published December 19, 2015

Where we might begin a story is a moving target. Did it start with a particular moment? And what moments led to that moment? How does one decide where to locate the beginning or tell the story of the journey; the arrival at the next journey? Does one start with the feeling of the new, or the small ending that gave rise to that feeling? Or is there a way to speak at all what we know or who we are as the infinite present moment that is all of existence? I suppose this is the unending quest of the seeker, to place this moment in all moments and yet, to trace the journey and it’s infinite complexity and unfolding. The beginning I am thinking of tonight is a moment that lives in this moment and brought me traveling here instead of someplace else. I was tired. It seems the past 4 years have just been that. This particular weekend, I was spent. I was past my edge and the message that I engaged in was around compassion. I felt like I was a thoughtful student of compassion. I took a small inventory and felt I had it mostly covered. And as I listened to the speaker, I noticed I was thirsty. We had been specifically instructed to take care of our physical needs…even if it meant getting up in the middle of a speaker and I sat there. I looked around and located the hospitality table. I sat there. I checked my watch. I sat there. And when break came, I went on my way to my next workshop. I didn’t get a drink.

And then there was the dream. “She comes home and finds that he has joined the military. He says he needs to take his fitness goals seriously. She is enraged and confused. Will she have to move? Will he have to go to war? Is there any way out of it?” My shoulder was clenched tight for weeks and wouldn’t release. I believe it was threatening me with military action if I couldn’t pay attention to my self compassion. Oh.

It was time. It was a moment of letting go. It was a moment of decision to choose something better and more beautiful. The yes, one of the yeses began there. Yes I hear you. Yes I will care for you. Yes, I will get a drink. I will choose life over death. But it hasn’t stopped. Since then I’ve had to make this a practice. When I said yes to that, over and over, I opened the door to a kind of fantastical chaos that is billowing through my life turning everything over. The in-breaking of Spirit is always disruptive….and profoundly alive. Yes. Yes to Life.

Spirit Play Reflection- Presence and Absence

by sarahcledwyn|Published December 6, 2015

Absence and Presence

For the first time this year I missed a scheduled Spirit Play class. I traveled over the weekend to see family and wondered how class would go in my absence. I felt very fortunate that a wonderful sub was found and felt a lot of gratitude that my spirit play friends were being held in the capable hands of others in our community. And the last few weeks of holidays and breaks meant that I have been out of the classroom for several weeks in a row. In our classroom I strive to connect with each person who comes, greeting them as they enter and engaging them in conversation. The quality of my presence is very important to me. During our peace greeting I try to make eye contact with each adult and child in our room. I want them to know that I see their beauty, hear their needs and honor their wisdom. What I am doing is trying to facilitate a relationship of love which, of course, doesn’t end when I leave the classroom. If you see me in the parish hall on Sundays chances are you may miss me as I greet one of my spirit play friends down at their eye level. This act of coming down to meet them, to listen to them and to hear them is beautiful. The children light up. An adult is interested in them. They are seen and heard in a way that shows them that I have stopped my own agenda and am present to them where they are. This fall our children had a few Sundays where they sold flowers and produce from our garden in the parish hall. One young boy was standing just in the doorway directing the influx of people to the table with their garden stand ready. I observed the adults as they walked right by without seeing him. I observed the adults who looked at this boy and nodded their head without really listening and walked right by. I did what I do with my young friends and knelt down to ask about the garden and the sale. The animated and proud answers to my questions lit up both of our hearts. It was a brief moment, but a moment of connection. It makes me think about how I am present, crouching down to meet the eyes of a child, or how I’m absent, even when I’m right there, but too distracted to stop. It also makes me wonder about how I interact with the other adults at church. I try to be present too and listen to others, but I notice that I am sometimes absent when asked to give voice to my own heart. It takes courage and vulnerability to engage in mutual presence. It can take us to unexpected places when we choose to be present and give voice to what is true and real in us and allow another to witness our words and respond in kind. This is the best of church, when we can choose to show up to each other in all the risk and delight that entails and listen each other into speech and love.