 One of my earliest memories is of me 4 or 5 years old sitting on my father’s knee while I sang along to an ABBA song “Money, money, money, must be funny, in the rich man's world.” This memory came to mind recently after a mentor encouraged me to reflect on my beliefs and conditioning around money in this life. The ABBA lyrics begin “I work all night I work all day, to pay the bills I have to pay.” Like many of you, I imagine, apart from a couple years here and there where I’ve felt more abundant, I’ve been living month to month for most of my adult life. Although earning just enough to cover the month’s bills hasn’t felt like being rich, there’s no doubt that globally speaking I’m living in the rich man’s world. Over 70% of human beings on this planet still live on less than $10 a day. And even here in California, in the richest nation on earth, anyone can see the tragic increase in numbers of extreme poor and homeless.
At the age of 20, I went to study with meditation masters in India and stayed for a year and a half on $1000 by living at street level rather than being on the tourist track. Surrounded by families living in abject poverty, I often found myself wondering if I should just take the remaining dollars out of my pocket and set one of them up with a street food cart that could provide a livelihood for them and their children. I knew I’d be fine if I ran out of money and had to leave India, while a family in poverty could have the trajectory of their lives forever changed by a simple act of kindness. And yet…it never felt true to do it. Somehow I determined it was OK for me to keep most of the money for myself to stay because I believed my spiritual training was sincere and could ultimately give back to others. I was never sure if that was clear listening on my part or just a story that helped me feel ok to do what I wanted to do. Ghandi famously once said that “the world has enough for everyone’s need but not everyone’s greed.” Evidence of this is all around: roughly 40% of all food in the US is wasted and ends up in landfills, and yet almost a billion people in the world go hungry. All around we bear witness to the impact on our planet and her creatures of a feeding frenzy of over-consumption. Viewed through the lens of social equity and the state of the earth it’s possible that many of my seemingly reasonable lifestyle choices are greedy. While I like to think I use my energy to support many benevolent pathways forward for humanity and the earth, I notice how deeply woven into the problem I am. Maybe we’re so far off course in terms of right relationship with the earth that this is true for all or most of us living a modern life, embedded as we all are in ways of being that have colossal downsides for planetary health. During my 20s I didn’t own a car, was vegetarian and then vegan, and refused to buy clothes unless they were used or organic cotton or hemp. By my mid 20s I was feeling distrustful of a flavor of disassociation and spiritual bypass I witnessed in myself and many others on the serious meditation path. Given what seemed to me to be the immediate 3D need to turn things around on this planet, I pivoted from my training and instead dedicated my energies as an activist for social justice and the earth. I was inspired by leaders like Joanna Macey who taught that “the relationship between self and world is reciprocal, it is not a matter of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the Earth, the Earth heals us. No need to wait. As we care enough to take risks, we loosen the grip of ego and begin to come home to our true nature.” Almost all of my work for over a decade was unpaid and I lived on donations from individuals and non-profits that believed in what I was doing. I barely thought about money but stayed focused on my task and somehow always seemed to have just enough. That was how it was for me until my early 30s. As long as I was showing up for life, I found that life seemed to support me, one step at a time. The thing is, when I believed I was more righteous I was often also more of an asshole. Thinking that everyone around me should do x, y or z (urgently) sometimes made me a bit of a nightmare in terms of how I showed up in human relationships. And there was a deep shadow that lived in me amidst the distress of perceiving modern humanity as having largely become a parasitic force on the earth. It amplified a wound of never being enough, never being good enough, being fundamentally wrong. That belief ended up inevitably manifesting a lot of relational distress. As I look back on those times, I see how deep my agony was, and how out of balance I was. I scoffed at the idea of having a life outside of my activism and I did the exact same thing I accused capitalism of doing, I mined and depleted my deep resources and burned myself out. At the heart of it all, I was still dealing with the impact of my early years of Christian conditioning. I remember asking someone about hell when I was about five years old and being told that the soul was like a white plate and every time you sinned it placed a black mark on it. If the plate got covered in black marks from bad deeds then you went to hell. That was a really scary thought. I was sent to an all-boys Christian boarding school in England at the age of 7, and there I attempted to make sense of the trauma of being separated from home. In the absence of anyone there to relate with about my inner world, and no-one to bring my emotional need to, I leant heavily on an internal relationship with my childish imagination of God. Some of this really seemed to help, and felt true and nourishing. Much of it was profoundly confused, conditioned as it was by patriarchal colonizer heaven-over-earth religious thinking, in which the tender animal feeling nature of our sensitivity was to be conquered and dominated, all in the name of goodness. Even at that age the martyr archetype seemed like a thing to aspire to, a vision of ultimate selflessness. I learned as best I could how to disregard my need, and I remember coaching my younger brother Tom how to do the same when he was sent to the school two years later. The headmaster called me into his office because my brother had spent most of his first week crying. “Luke could you speak to your brother please? He needs to pull himself together.” I found Tom later that day after dinner and stepped outside with him. I looked in his eyes and with all the authority of a 9 year old elder brother with two years of boarding school under my belt told him “You just can’t feel those things here.” Even now, after thirty years of therapy and indigenous medicine work, I can find myself surprised by how deep that early conditioning runs, and how much weight it still has in the psyche. How do I trust the listening place, the discernment between need and greed when there has been so much confusion around the essential worthiness of healthy need itself? This inquiry is made even more complicated by the fact that we really are living in a time where the stakes of our relationship to this question of need versus greed are indescribably high – as individuals and as a society. We live in a time when greed and the apparent freedom to do whatever we think we want is celebrated and glorified as emblematic of what it means to ‘be in our power’ or to have ‘succeeded.’ And we live in a time when more than one in four species on the earth are threatened with extinction, and animal populations worldwide have declined by 70% over the last 50 years, largely due to the excesses of human consumption. As I continue in my contemplation around money, I’m not sure that I’m supposed to have an easy answer for the distinction between need and greed, especially in these times that we are living in. I sense it’s possible that this inquiry is better held like one of the koans I was trained with by my zen teachers back in the day, an inquiry to hold close in all its discomfort, to live into, not giving into the temptation of a premature answer from the mind… an inquiry to sit with like a seed and allow to incubate in the darkness of unknowing, to sprout in its own time an organic wisdom that responds in each moment according to its need. Perhaps this is how healthy need is revealed? Not as a preconception, but as a living moment, a listening responsiveness. I wonder if we sometimes unconsciously limit our expression of power in the world until we have developed enough integrity to trust ourselves. I think I have done this in the past, including with money. It’s possible my distress about the shadow of money is part of why I have so often only managed to earn enough to keep my life afloat month to month, no matter how successful my work has been. Maybe a familiar pattern of running on fumes once a month and only just making it by the skin of my teeth financially, as uncomfortable as it has been, has actually been unconsciously attractive to me because it has helped me to feel OK about all my privilege, and facilitated some kind of uneasy truce with an inner voice of judgment. Even as I acknowledge this, however, I notice I no longer feel the draw. I find myself in a different chapter of life now than the younger man who could walk the tightrope with an empty wallet trusting that the next moment will take care of itself. It’s not that I judge the faith and trust place, that is welcome to stay. While I appreciate the beauty of the “as long as I’m doing good work then life will show up to support me” operating system I inhabited for so long, it feels like a stage of development, and no longer feels like a mature relationship with creative agency. My current life is filled with many layers of responsibilities to be in right relation to – responsibilities to land, home, family, and a community of people and visions that I’m in service to. I choose to bring through healing and beauty into this world, and I choose to do that in a way that is grounded, sustainable and impactful. This is clear to me, and it has been calling me into an evolution in my relationship with worth and resource. The shadow of money is all around, with an almost infinite variety of potential ways to be caught up in greed and perpetuate systems of oppression. But of course that’s not all that money is. Money can also be an expression of benevolent creative power aligned with discerning intelligence. Having money sustains my life force, enables me to give, and to have meaningful and deep impact in ways that matter. Having more money coming from one direction in my work enables me to offer more scholarships in another. Money can be placed in service to health, in service to earth, and in service to balance. Money can protect ways of being that need to be protected. Money can change things that need to be changed. In my experience, learning to trust myself has been a long journey, and has not come from any grand victory over my shadow, but rather from the willingness to know myself all the way through. This has included bringing trustworthy people into my reality with different perspectives to give me feedback and help me examine places I have been blind. Learning to trust myself has included exploring my cultural and personal conditioning and how it lives within me. Learning to trust myself has included a willingness to drop beneath all stories of self and look out at the world as the no-thing of pure potential, realizing myself as one essence that appears as sun and moon, trees and worms, joy and pain, temples and battlefields, realizing that I am not separate from my neighbors, from the oceans and the deserts, from the creative intelligence that moves earth and sky. Learning to trust myself has required acknowledging that any of the horror and ignorance I bear witness to on the so-called outside also lives within me as a potential expression. Whether I channel my life force toward good or ill is a moment-to-moment reckoning that calls me into deeper awareness and alignment with the living choice to be love. At a time when so much in human society and the earth is in deep peril, I choose to place all the energies of my life, including money, in service to the weaving of the good dream for our world. I believe that this choosing is an act of creation that belongs to each one of us, each moment of our lives, and the dreaming into being of a just, harmonious, loving world is our collective opportunity. I don’t believe it requires our perfection or purity for us to learn to serve and cooperate with the incoming tide of this evolutionary momentum. I believe what is required is that we open our eyes and ears, turn for direction to the wild, clear and vital, and stay close to the sincerity of our deepest heart's yearning. I believe wealth is ultimately defined by what we share. ~~Luke Anderson  Doubt your doubt.
Be kind to yourself, for all our sake. Doubt the evidence you use to prove that fear rules the day and all is lost. Doubt the voice that says you’ll never make it, never have, the voice that says you don’t belong, never did. Doubt the voice that says insanity has the power. These lies live on borrowed time. They need your daily consent to keep you captive. They need your invitation to occupy your mind and sight. They need your confusion to have you believe that you are weak and afraid. Wake up love! OK, so you’ve been fooled, just like the rest of us. You are also just as worthy as any of us, just as capable to serve the vast intelligence and infinite potential of creation, just as ready to discover this majesty as your true self, even as you are simultaneously humbled to the core. Every exhalation a chance to surrender and release. Every in breath an opportunity to open wider. Fear not, your roots will find their way to the native trust that fills every particle of our one, huge, quiet heart. Look out at the world from this place and then tell us what you see. ~Luke Anderson  When did the violence start
Who knows who knows But I know I’ve been a part The line between good and evil runs through every heart Recognize where harm it lies and listen for the path Steady as the mountain willing as the water forged inside the fire sing the circle open wider Ancestor’s swinging swords carved a river of wounds and all the love they ever shared lives now as me and you How many generations cut from the ground Trauma tangled tight amidst the strength and handed down So now we meet the tending of the grieving mending shrine slow ourselves and feel until what’s bloody turns to wine Digging vessels deeper til the golden thread is found weave this world a tapestry with belonging as our sound Steady as the mountain willing as the water forged inside the fire sing the circle open wider ~~Luke Anderson  Come closer in to the broken heart, it is love still. Come closer in to the burning fire, it is love still. Belonging means being right where we are as we're falling. Life lifts us up and breaks us apart, it is love still. Feel it all the way, let the moment have you. Stay with yourself don't turn away, Let the moment have you. Feel it all the way, let the moment have you. Be with yourself don't turn away, Let the moment have you. Come closer in to the broken heart, it is love still. Come closer in to the burning fire, it is love still. Belonging means being right where we are as we're falling. Life lifts us up and breaks us apart, it is love still. Drop deep darker down the well, we're not just here to fly include all the ones you shut outside the ones in denial and the ones who hide. Feel it all the way, let the moment have you. Stay with yourself don't turn away, Let the moment have you. Feel it all the way, let the moment have you. Be with yourself don't turn away, Let the moment have you. ~~Luke Anderson  The heart is not a fragile thing to hide away from this world. Such a cost in bracing ourselves against our experience, keeping our heads above the surface, wondering why the desert comes closer. Much safer to strip naked, break into a thousand pieces, and discover what it is that we are truly held by. Grieve well to end the drought. Water the fields of all our relations with these tears, soften the hardened arteries of empathic intelligence, and here where our rivers converge, remember our pain is shared. If you find yourself in grief’s grey wasteland, ignore the call to set up home amidst the bitterness and half measures, keep on moving toward the sword that would pierce your whole heart. Grief unresisted opens the chest, til there’s no holding back the treasure, the clarity born of what it is that truly matters. All the love we ever knew, shared, or even dreamed of, was never lost. It is right here now, overflowing, seeds to be planted in the dark soil at the center of our lives, made fertile by our willingness to honor all that we grieve, by never taking this moment for granted. ~~Luke Anderson  If life has space for this moment,
then so do you. If life has already accepted this moment, then so have you. If life is still creating anew, responding anew, then so can you. There is no gap in truth between life’s capacity and your own, fed as we are by the umbilical cord tap root stillness heart mother of all the worlds. Everything needed to love what is in front of you, behind you, all around and inside of you, is right here, freely given, exactly as and where and how and who you are. Lean in to this life with radical trust. Your precise shape is your simple purpose here. Set your sight on the invisible tip of growth’s arrow and choose alignment with the visionary streaming, real world weaving, of the one eye intelligence, awakening. Our joy in resolve, a core surrender in freedom and discipline, every cell, every faculty, willing channels for the burgeoning momentum of benevolence in all directions. ~~Luke Anderson  Unbuckle those knuckles
and open to the free fall. In the grip of what we think we know we miss the whole picture. Unburden us. We've attended so long to the madness, faithful servant to the map that held us tight. Always this moment time to choose again. The door is wide open, but it may not seem so, the loss of our familiar felt as robbery. It takes some native trust to wander blind into those hidden places, alone and friendless for a while. Don't hesitate to remove yourself from every equation. Me, me, me is too poor a bargain for the heirs to a transparent universe. Heart broken open everywhere. No need to look for ground. Relax into the release. ~~Luke Anderson  It's time. So long outside ourselves, beside ourselves, and now we’re returning, a rare few all at once, most of us like layers unraveling day by day, year by year. We leave the maps behind, trust the instinct of our star-filled mammal hearts to know exactly where and with whom we belong, lean into the primal clarity of yes to this, or no to that, or no need yet to know. Sensing what is true, discerning what is not, releasing the habits, patterns and choices that have kept us estranged. We see through the temptation to live in threat, cultivate disciplined relaxation amidst the storm lest strung too tight we miss the simple quiet that guides the way. We are willing to be in the dark, ready to meet the grief and shame of generations, and coming to terms with the anger and despair. Running away has run its course, a thousand lifetimes attracted to distraction, terrified of the core, distant, walled, apart. Our intimate intelligence now inspires and ignites a thawing of all that froze, a remembering of all that fragmented. We are sanctuaries, each and every one, like broad trees we are planted in the moist earth silence at the center of the wheel Here we welcome each and every traveler. Undefended again. Unafraid again. Imagining movement that rises in stillness, awakening wildness, discovering we never left, home always, our source, our task, and our final rest. ~~Luke Anderson  Less arrogance. More listening. If we examine the nature of the power we assert when we think we are right, what do we see? Is our power porous, interested in what we don’t know, our minds open and curious? Or are we rigid, fragile in our so-called certainty? Is our power married with heart, flexible, calm, kind? Or is it a tight shell of fear, reactive and feeling entitled to take or hurt, our voice shrill and forceful? What do we do with the social power we have access to because of our privilege, our race, our class, our gender, our talents, our circumstance? Do we share this power, invite in and uplift with it? Have we believed somewhere along the way that any of us can truly win while another loses? Are we humble in our power? not as some kind of special spiritual ego mask, but because we have learned that everything we think we know can dissolve in an instant? Are we aware that we are fools who have stumbled around in the dark for aeons, until fortunate enough to be graced with moments of wisdom, now growing tender buds of discernment, carried on the backs of those who walked before? Has our vision yet revealed to us the consequences of our own unconsciousness, our misunderstandings, all we once thought we knew? If so then we have been humbled in the awareness that our power gives birth to more of whatever state of consciousness is driving it. Unless we are rooted in love when we express our power then when we act we’ll likely be channeling harm, and there really is no outside in this world, it all comes home in the end. Perhaps we feel that we are now using our power for good. Maybe so. There are more than enough opportunities to stand up in solidarity with the earth, her creatures and her people. Let us always remember then that we live in a hall of mirrors, that any ignorance we can recognize in another has an existence inside each one of us that needs to be acknowledged and integrated if we are really interested in the healing of the whole. Let’s not throw our righteousness around like bullies because we haven’t yet learned how to be responsible for our own pain, and our own complicity in that which we seek to change. There is a transparent power that is shared with every being under the sun, a power not threatened by appearances, a power that animates this and every moment, steady as a mountain, quiet in its confidence, vast as space, limitless in its potential. This true power belongs to none of us and yet breathes life into us all. Sharing is its nature. It doesn't require our perfection or purity for us to learn to serve in this alchemy of awakened intelligence for us to learn to cooperate with the incoming tide of this evolutionary momentum. What is required is that we open our eyes and ears, turn for direction to the wild, clear and vital, and stay close to the sincerity of our deepest heart's yearning. Less arrogance. More listening. Less arrogance. More listening. ~~Luke Anderson  Warmed beside a hearth of radiant fire, the center of the wheel, the home we share with each creature under moon and sun, we notice those who glow with a joy not so shaken by up and down, a joy not set apart from grief, not found in must be must be happy or any other pretense at anyone’s expense. Sensed in their ears a lifetime of listening. Seen in their eyes what it takes to honor the vision. Heard in their voices a life filled with willing to be true. Felt in their touch a steady heart inspired to move. ~~Luke Anderson image credit:Theories of Light by Jeffrey Smith www.ascendingstorm.com  It's one thing to trust when we're flowing downstream, our hearts buoyant, choices easy, effortless cooperation in a sweet stream of synchronicity. How do we fare though when our way is steep, and we meet obstacle after obstacle, only to see the path ahead lead up a sheer mountain wall? Do we judge a path to be worthy solely when it flows with ease? How would a salmon answer that question, or a bird migrating across entire continents? There are always deeper tests of our vision, deeper tests of whatever it is we count on to guide us on our way. At times a lack of flow can indeed be an indicator to help us realize it's time to release our agenda and have the patience to allow a new pattern to unfold, a new door to open. Sometimes though, relaxing our determination and our commitment to a particular direction would amount to self-betrayal. At these times warrior lessons come thick and fast, and obstacles are not evidence of a wrong turn but an opportunity to learn about expanded capacities of courage and perseverance. If we depend on external signs of ease for guidance, at some time or another we'll end up lost, doubting ourselves when the sky grows dark and adversity comes to the fore. But all of us, every single one, are free to know what truth feels like in our bones in the silent glow of our innermost core. With this core as our rudder, we can be resolute no matter the circumstance. This is the vision, the trust in ourselves, that can lead us all the way through. This is the guide that illuminates the path worthy of our faith. ~~Luke Anderson Central Neuron by MorpheusZero  When the pressure builds
and you think you want to blame someone else, or even yourself, breathe into the burning core, your lungs willing bellows for the furnace inside. Offer into this fire all the ways you know yourself and other as victim and perpetrator, and breathe. When you open into the pure sensation, the full intensity of that which feels like it could crush you, you become space. In this honesty all stories collapse into the cauldron to feed a deeper vision. Before you have the chance to see with clarity you must first admit you have no idea what is really going on. Before you find your own innocence, you must first release your assumptions about everyone else’s guilt. So many dead bodies and tortured souls on judgement’s righteous road. What if there is no outside? How about we replace our indignant assertions with humble curiosity, claim full responsibility, each of us, for our experience, forgive the world, forgive ourselves, return to love, and then see what happens? ~~Luke Anderson 'One with Nature' by Mukesh Singh  What do you want?
More than anything, deep in the heart of your being, what do you want? If you surveyed your time on this earth from a deathbed, what would really matter to you? What are the memories that would engender the peace of nothing essential left undone, a life well lived? Never forget what is most important to you. Allow yourself for a moment to imagine a you who has held steadfast to the clarity of your vision, who has overcome all obstacles on the path, who has vanquished all doubts, composted all darkness to feed the radiant jewel of a life giving tree, your unique offering to the world. Invoke this liberated, potent, awake version of yourself. Right here. Right now. Any time you feel the fog of fragmenting voices, the hypnotic sleep of superficial agendas, any time you lose faith in yourself and your commitment or capacity, invoke the one who has already made it through to the very end. Let your every cell resonate with the frequency of victory, and know that this is no arrogance. For if you truly listen to the deepest aspiration of your heart, then what you discover is that your core desire is a note that serves an evolving harmony. Your love seeks above all to give itself fully to the world, with nothing held back. When you recognize that you, and only you, are responsible for your choices, for mastering your experience, for the life you weave, for delivering your gift, then no-one can hinder you. We are at all times surrounded, permeated, by a great intelligence. Creation moves unstoppably toward healing, the ultimate revealing of our magnificence in the beauty way. Countless allies come to the aid of all who align themselves with this light. So offer your willingness to every step, however faltering, with all the sincerity, strength, and courage you can muster. Though you might be daunted by all that would tear you down, though your willingness might seem insufficient for the task ahead, give everything you are. Your small willingness will be met by an infinite supply, and you will rise up, and we will all rise beside you. ~~Luke Anderson  There's a time in this awakening to open the chest and step without even a hint of defense toward the dark, a time when even the slightest movement to rid or to vanquish will be the very energy used against you. There's another time, however, when you'll be called to bare your fangs and claws and wield a discerning saber with ferocity, without hesitation. Summon your dignity from the center of the earth and set loose howling spirit winds to every last corner. Clear the table. When the psychic parasites try to hang on with claims that you'll be lost without them, command them without pause to the central sun to be dissolved. Return them to essence, to be born anew in kinder form. Learn the value of guardians who protect the inner sanctum from any compromise. Stand sure at the center of your mandala. Claim your throne. Declare this sacred space for the benefit of all beings in the confidence that you are a lion, whose claws are sharpened by the clarity that only love may enter here, whose fangs are forged in the annihilating fire of infinite light. Your worthiness to liberate your body and being, your place of earth and sky, comes not from any special favor or privilege. This worth, this birthright, is given freely and without end from the deepest source to every particle of creation, and all of life celebrates with you each moment you recognize your luminous self and your truest choice to live as love. ~~Luke Anderson ‘Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ by Salvador Dali  When confidence and calm
collapse, I sit here trembling like a frightened dog, and I’m unable to soothe the ache, attached as it has become to this mirror of you outside. But even here, almost overwhelmed by the sense of being a victim and beggar for love, even here, I know I must create. So in the midst of the shame, I open to a hint of light to make space for the guidance I’m barely willing to hear: “Put down the begging bowl, cast aside the push and pull of your demand, and give your love to all the ones you believed you needed it from.” “Give love, without bargain. When you give love, you are love. Be the spring, and source, and gift.” “Lay down your fascination with neglect. Lay down your hope and despair. Release us, all your mirrors, with your generosity. There is nothing to do but love.” “With all your heart, even when it feels like the most impoverished heart that ever there was, even when it feels like you need another’s love like parched earth needs rain, love. Just love.” ~~Luke Anderson Sundrenched moss-covered roots by Jeffrey Friedl  Rain falls,
and we learn to listen as the ground draws us in to moistened roots. When there are no words, no answers to all the questions, savor the quiet and rest as the empty space. Allow the out breath to have its time. Be still. Trust. New life arrives by itself. ~~Luke Anderson  Have you noticed life is making love with you? Are you now penetrated, to the very deepest reach of your being, by her breath? Are you discovering that so-called ordinary pleasures, a taste, a view, the contact as you lean your head against a wall, that all of these can be ecstasy beyond compare? Tire soon, beloved, of the endlessly disappointing story in which you wait for a special someone to free you from the imagined separation between yourself and the all. You may indeed experience a temporary release from isolation if and when you encounter another who also seeks the same, but as long as you both believe yourselves incomplete without the other, you will lose again the sacred garden before long. The hole inside that you have been so afraid of, dearest one, and taken as evidence that you need to be rescued by another, this emptiness isn’t in fact something to fill, but rather an open doorway to intimacy with the whole universe. When you find out for yourself what is at the heart of your loneliness, rather than trying to seduce another to fill it with the fantasy of a perfect embrace, you’ll discover we’ve been in union with the master lover all along. ~~Luke Anderson Passage out of the initiation chamber at Newgrange, Bru Na Boinne, Ireland  Utterly lost, we knew for sure we needed to find our way. Unable to hide from total failure, we were humble enough to receive. Allowing ourselves to be broken, we discovered the whole. Drink deep of the medicine in our darkness. Better to be unravelled by grief than holding back the tears. Better falling to your knees and clawing at the earth than cold with tight lips and sarcastic commentary. Be unafraid of the full breadth of your experience. Travel to the very end, beyond notions of what you can tolerate. Whatever you do, don’t stop halfway through the passage. Don’t settle for the minor improvements, the better shade of grey. Keep on heading toward that which fills your body with trust. Every cell in you will sing as you get closer. Your eyes clear, your heart wide, and you, free, a blazing sun, filled with the joy that comes when you find what you are here to give. ~~Luke Anderson gratitude for the visual art by Maria Rikteryte  I bow to the dark womb
where all grow, from which all receive their nourishment, and to which all return. As long as we keep chasing light out there, afraid of the dark within, we'll remain in exile, bound by myriad confusions. There is a question with the power to liberate, a question which if followed all the way through, with devotion and courage, carves a pathway home. “Who am I? To whom, or to what, is this experience occurring?” Here we find that every idea of self is an object of awareness. Discover the subject. To do so, we have to be willing to admit the entirety of our ignorance, to become intimate with all that we fear, to forgive ourselves the suffering caused by misidentification, and dissolve entirely into the void. When we realize ourselves as no-thing we meet the greatest relief. And when, as that no-thing, we look out at the world, we see ourselves everywhere, all being one at last. In this love we know that light is born in the dark, movement in the unmoving, sound in silence. Here we are free to give and include all that we are. ~~Luke Anderson prayer offering on the Ganges river, photo source unknown  The wind and branches whisper
of a grand conspiracy: everything and everyone secretly aware of the plan to wake you up, to reshape your misery in the form of endless gratitude. Be glad that you suffer when you veer off course, it’s a true kindness that helps us remember. You’ll recognize the way when you can be thankful for the pain that opens your heart, thankful for your birth and each breath that gives you this moment to love, thankful for death that reminds you to take nothing for granted, thankful for darkness that reminds you through contrast what you really want to choose, and thankful that no matter what we do or have done to us whatever lives is still made of light. ~~Luke Anderson  Who were you before your parents were born? Who are you now before you believe that thought? There is an imposter in the house. He terrified your ancestors too. With many names he feeds on your fear, is nourished by your sorry stories of better or worse, of me against you. There is a short cut, a way through this ancient suffering. Short, because there's no distance between the beginning, middle and end of this passage and who you already are. But it's a deep cut, a flaming sword that will take your head and feed it to the lions, releasing your heart to sprout new eyes that can see and ears that can hear. Die before you die. This is the miracle of life. Die before you die. This very moment, every moment, give up your fight against mortality. With every ounce of your being bring yourself completely here. Abandon your distaste of this earth and the guaranteed end of your body. You come from the stars, but every world is a true home. It is only when you meet death exactly as it is that you will know the difference between the vampire that sucks you dry, and the eternal light of the present. ~~Luke Anderson gratitude to www.freeimages-photos.com for crop circle photo  There is a song that sings to me with nectar of sweet beginnings. It honors all with ears to hear by bowing to the end of fear. I love you with an endless stream of hummingbirds with velvet wings. The stars pour down their simple grace. The moon reminds us with her face. There’s death for joy to heal our life. There's light enough for us this night. The one who weaves this dance is true, this vision offered now to you. I love you with an endless stream of hummingbirds with velvet wings. The stars pour down their simple grace. The moon reminds us with her face. ~~Luke Anderson gratitude for the artwork, thanks to egckiller  In an instant, our stories collapse into a field of infinite possibility, and all is still. We land at last in our own skin and there is nothing wrong with these tender, porous, earthy creatures. Stunned by the immensity of lifelong misperception, we are finally relieved of all that kept us apart. Here we find what it means to be truly in awe, fully alive in the heart of an open moment. We see each other as if for the first time, no gap between us, no thought believed. Remind me, brothers and sisters, when I fall asleep again, imagining I know who you are, or what is possible for us. Remind me to throw away every one of those tired filters and step across the bridge again. ~~Luke Anderson gratitude for the artwork by Alex Grey  I place my faith in seven billion Kings and Queens, seven billion whole and sovereign. Seven billion who bow to strangers and say, “there am I.” Seven billion who look at the moon and say, “there I shine.” Seven billion who look at the mountain and say, “there I sit,” who look at the forest and say, “there I grow.” Wake up kings and Queens. Rescue yourselves from the hungry ghosts of history. Discover the deeper throne. Dwell deeper home where the notion of ruling another is laughable, where mastery knows itself through humility and absolute trust in inner authority. Dwell deeper home, where the need to be seen is dissolved by willingness to see the essential in yourself and in another, where wealth is defined by what you share. When you have found that me never was who you are and the center you thought you were becomes infinite space, what then? It all becomes possible, and you’ll see what you’re made of everywhere, in every seeming thing. Be kind to us all, and allow yourself this greatness. ~~Luke Anderson gratitude for this image of persephone by Patricia Ariel http://art.patricia-ariel.com/persephone-2  When we are plunged into the underworld of our lives, whether through unexpected illness, death, trauma, relationship crisis or just a conscious intent to integrate suppressed emotion, it helps if we can be open to feeling whatever is present without condition. To be truly awake in the midst of dark emotions, we need to find the courage to open to these feelings without an agenda for them to transform into something more pleasant.
However, it’s also essential to listen carefully for the moment we move beyond being open to what is, and start to indulge our negativity, because when we do, when we collapse into the attraction to our pain, then we start generating a kind of darkness feeding frenzy in which we attract more misfortune to ourselves, and send out ripples of it in all directions. It can be challenging indeed learning to navigate this – there’s a reason why myths are full of people getting lost in the underworld, seduced by illusion, stories of heroes vigilant to leave a good trail to follow back up to the light. A while back, I was traveling through some very afraid, young, and desolate places in my inner world that had been activated by a life transition. I had no idea if these feelings would stay painfully with me for another day or a year. They had a potency that gripped me to the core throughout my days. Then, after six weeks of staying present and breathing my way through, I received a clear and urgent direction from my intuition. “Luke”, I heard, “it's been good that you've been willing to be fully with the darkness, feeling it without condition or requirement that it change. This has allowed the integration of feeling that you didn't have the capacity to be present with in the body when the original loss occurred. And now, now it's time to swim for the light, as if your very life depended on it, as if you were underwater, out of oxygen, and needing to breathe." And so I did, with all of my strength, and in an instant, I was lifted right out of my turmoil back into the clarity and peace of our natural state. Over the next months, I was directed to ground in the healing by focusing on vitality within and without, with a resolute and wholehearted attention. Here then is the dance, from light we open to the dark. Being conscious awareness within the dark we bring it all back to the light. |