Tag Archives: recapitulation

A Day in a Life: Choice

October 3, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

Photo by Jan — A strange da Vinci flying machine…

The other day, as Chuck and I walked in the early morning, a strange sight greeted us. We had just arrived at a “T” intersection when to our left a commotion arose.

Out of the treetops a strange creature appeared. Squawking and flapping, it came towards us, a phoenix or some other mythical beast. On second glance it appeared to be some manmade object, whirring and clunking along in the sky, much like a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine. As it drew nearer it changed again, into a hawk with two small birds clutched in its claws, the birds flapping and shrieking wildly in an attempt to free themselves from the clutches of this, indeed, mythical beast.

As we watched, one of the birds did free itself. Somehow able to wriggle out of the grip of the sharp claws, it quickly flew off into the woods with nary a backward glance. The hawk flew over us, and though its tasty meal still struggled frantically, it seemed that its fate was sealed.

Much startled by this sight, we turned to the right and continued our walk, our thoughts and discussion turning too. We had been talking about our deepening practice as spiritual beings on a journey in this world, of constantly having to balance the magic of other worlds with the duties and needs of this world. And thus, we could not help but wonder what this sighting could possibly mean.

Our kind hearts immediately projected onto the poor little birds. And two of them! We thought in terms of loved ones. Who was at risk; who would be confronted with some terrible trauma today or in the near future? What did it signify for us, the first thing to catch our attention on this day, and so early in the morning? What did it portend in our own lives?

As we watched the hawk fly off down the road ahead of us, the siren cries of blue jays—the birds I interpret as the police force of the skies—alerted other creatures to be aware that a predator was in their midst. But there was really nothing to be concerned about, for the hawk had gotten what it wanted; its only intent now was to consume it.

My thoughts turned away from my projections and fears, for self and others, and instead began to look at the reality of what had occurred. The hawk began to lose its predatory role and take on the role of life itself, doing what it needed to survive in this world, much as we all do in our own lives, consuming and taking what we need. The two birds lost their roles as poor creatures of circumstance and instead became the choices we all make each day: the choice to live one way or another, the choice to do one thing or another, the choice to come into this world at all.

“You know,” I said to Chuck, “one bird is going to live and it looks like the other will die, but who’s to judge which one got the better deal. Do I feel sorry for the one that’s facing death? Perhaps it’s being given the opportunity to go deeper into its evolutionary experience? The very thing we seek all the time.”

As I pondered the significance of the event, I realized that we all get carried away by predators in our own lives, by our compulsions, addictions, attachments, our fears, our psychological makeup, by our very nature, and by the very energy of life that is as unstoppable as the predatory hawk simply searching for sustenance to survive. We are all both the hawk and the two birds. Often enough, we are caught unaware, taken from our perch and thrown into turmoil, forced to fight for our lives, to make a choice that will take us on a new journey. Even in the most mundane of circumstances our choices matter. As we plod along in our daily lives it becomes increasingly necessary to train our awareness to stay upon the path of growth, intent upon a life of meaning and evolution, no matter what our circumstances.

I could not judge the outcome of the event, for I saw the potential for growth in both life and death. I see the potential for growth, for going deeper into the life we are in, no matter where we end up. I cannot judge another for where they are in their life, just as I do not wish to be judged for the choices I’ve made in my own.

We all have the same choice to make: How are we going to deal with where we are now? Are we going to be the evolutionary beings we are meant to be, conserve our energy for our journey and go deeper into our experience, no matter what it is? Or are we going to succumb to the predator, our energy consumed by another, by everything from worry and fear to mental illness and disease?

As the shamans of Ancient Mexico point out, we are beings who are going to die. I see death as offering as much choice as life. As I saw what was happening to the two birds, I knew that one chose life and the other chose death, but also that both were worthy choices, both presenting evolutionary opportunities. The opportunity—and this is what we are training ourselves for as we recapitulate, and as we seek connection with our deeper spiritual selves—is to remain aware of our evolutionary potential at all times.

Recapitulation offers us the opportunity to practice the skills necessary to maintain our awareness. Each time we recapitulate we experience a little death, a loss of our perceived self, while we simultaneously regain a part of our lost energetic self. This involves remaining aware that we are in two worlds at once, both in the energy of the predator and simultaneously the victim of our circumstances, like the two birds in the claws of the hawk that flew over Chuck and I the other morning. Recapitulation is as much practice for how to live this life as it is practice for facing the moment of death from this life, two evolutionary paths of equal value and potential.

We all stand at a “T” intersection every day of our lives—we have choices to make, and those choices matter. No matter what our fate, whether we are the little bird that gets away or the little bird that goes to its death, we always have the opportunity to go deeper, or not.

Love,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: On Thin Ice

September 21, 2012 Chuck Leave a comment

The eyes of Capital peer hungrily at the melting Arctic caps, pondering what fossil treasures might lie beneath. I hear Jung’s cautionary note: Beware the slumbering gods of the deep. Never forget the awakening of Wotan, the ancient pagan god that broke through the cracking ice of Christendom and swept through the German psyche in the firestorm of Nazism, erasing centuries of civilization. Beware the thin ice that Reason rests upon at this moment in the progression of 2012.

We are reminded daily now of the hair-trigger balance of world order as an amateur internet film ignites the ire of the Middle East, as Newsweek throws brush on the fire with a provocative cover, as Netanyahu sees fit to overtly threaten Iran. Romney openly stokes the rage of the other seemingly emasculated 47%, pointing a finger at all the non-white male scapegoats. And thus, the slumbering energies of some wrathful, vindictive, punitive, licentious, greedy male god is gathering momentum and being openly invited to take full control of the American psyche.

The notion that REASON is enough to forestall a Romney coup is naive. We are dealing with a highly unstable collective psyche, a highly unstable collective race at war with itself. Romney’s frankness has merely laid completely bare the civil war within ourselves, within our world.

Is “survival of the fittest,” “best man wins,” “winner takes all,” to be our evolutionary path? Or are we an interdependent world that must take responsibility for all of its parts in order to survive and evolve?

Actually, both sides of this argument have truths to offer. Within the psyche, the ego must establish itself, must be fit and in control. Without a fit ego there is no survival; without a fit ego there is psychosis. However, an ego that cares only for its own needs and wants and interests evokes the rage and revolt of the rest of all that we are. We are also mind-body-spirit; that is, we are ego-animal-spirit. And if ego ignores or neglects the animal self, the body and all its instincts will revolt through disease, psychosomatic symptoms, rampant instinctual disorders like mass sexual abuse, etc. If ego ignores its spirit self, spirit self and spirit world will cast life into addictions, compulsions, and depression. Ego must take its rightful place in balancing the interdependent parts of the self.

Recapitulation is the ego’s willingness to reconcile with spirit and body self. In recapitulation we free our body selves, our instinctual selves, and open to the fullness of our energy spirit selves. Through recapitulation, ego evolves the fullest potential of the self, as an interdependent whole.

We must take responsibility for our individual lives as separate egos, fit and willing to take the journey into self, a self much greater than the sum of its parts, particularly that of its ego part. This is the formula for resolution, both on an individual and on a world level.

Our world rests on thin ice due to an alienated collective ego that has neglected both nature and spirit. Rebalance will happen one way or another, but if we take up the challenge and seek personal wholeness and balance, we strengthen the whole world.

The real truth that we must face is that we are all victims. Life in this world is a socialization of fragmentation that repeatedly victimizes the truth. In recapitulation, we take responsibility; we are not victims of our circumstances but our own liberators.

Only through assuming responsibility for the full truth—that of all our interdependent parts—can we advance ourselves, our species, our world, and skate off the thin ice and get back onto solid ground.

Beware! Thin ice!
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Everything Is Meaningful

September 12, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

During my recapitulation I learned that everything in my life, waking and dreaming, was supporting my recapitulation journey. I also learned that everything in my life had always been supporting my journey, though it was not until this very intense time of inner work that I was granted this knowledge in a very keen and extremely significant way, on a daily basis.

As I began to piece together how everything not only supported the inner work I was doing, but how it all seamlessly wove together pictures of my past with current situations, I saw how all of it was mirrored and supported in my nightly dreams as well. In a shamanic sense, I was training my awareness, as I went through several years in a perpetual state of heightened awareness as everything, in every moment of my life, greeted me with messages, insights, puzzles to be solved, and issues to be resolved. Since the completion of that recapitulation, I have continued to be taught by life itself, by what appears in daytime and nighttime, in awake experiences and dreaming experiences, by what my own body presents me with on a daily basis.

I know now, without a doubt, that I am guided through this life, that I have always been and always will be, that we all are. Only through offering myself the gift of innocent vision during my recapitulation, constantly asking the busy rational mind to sit by the wayside, as I turned to allowing the creativity and imagination of my adult and child self in cohesion to guide me, was I able to shift how I perceived the world and achieve this understanding. It takes some amount of daring to reject everything we’ve learned and turn inward, to turn to our child self—the defended, rejected, abandoned, frightened child self in my case—and allow the evolving adult self to show the child that, although it is all those things, it is also much, much more.

Perhaps the idea of expending the rational, the voice of reason, the voice that upholds the known and proven world, keeping us safe and comfortable, and turning toward the totally irrational, and listening to a new voice, is a crazy notion, but once the process is begun there is no going back. Once the magic begins, there is no going back to an old way of thinking, perceiving, or living. At this point, life becomes a most fascinating journey, as we accept what comes to us as meaningful, as we accept that each day and each moment in each day holds important information for us.

Once we are in it, there is no going back to the boredom of waiting for life to change or something exciting to happen to us, because we are fully aware that excitement is inherent in each moment. We are living it, painful or otherwise, and at least we can say that we will never again complain about life being boring. We just have to keep remembering the magic, remain open to it, and learn to constantly reinterpret our life and our experiences from new perspectives.

I don’t take much for granted; there is always something else behind the screen of normalcy, of convention, of the usual spin, something that is different, even magical or enchanting, and ultimately the real truth. We just have to learn how to constantly shift our thoughts away from the conventional and into the world of possibility. I trust possibility more than I trust convention, so you won’t find me believing much of anything I hear or see. I prefer to find my own answers and truths. All of this is leading me to relate an experience I had the other night, one in which I allowed my dreaming self to show me something.

It was a cool night; the sliding door in our bedroom was wide open to the brisk night air when the loud shriek of an owl startled us awake.

“An owl!” I said. “It sounds close. It must be perched on the deck outside our door.” We could hear its claws scratching against wood. It shrieked again and again.

“Why is it doing that?” Chuck wondered. “It’s hunting, shouldn’t it be quiet?”

“I don’t know, perhaps it’s calling to others, a mate or young,” I whispered. We listened to it until it grew quiet. As I drifted off to sleep I wondered why it had come.

“What does it mean?” I asked my dreaming self. Sometime later, Chuck made a sound in his sleep, waking me. I didn’t want to wake up, I’d been dreaming and I wanted to finish my dream, but the truth was that I was awake. I wondered if I could go back into my dream anyway.

I kept my eyes closed and looked into the darkness behind my lids, into the amorphous, fluid and multicolored darkness. I noticed that my left eye shut down completely and only my right was seeing. Peering sharply into the darkness behind my lid, it honed right into my dream, parting the curtains that had descended when I was startled awake a moment before.

Like a microscope, my right eye honed in on where I had left off and magically finished the dream. Fully awake I dreamed to completion. Satisfied, I opened my eyes and told Chuck what had just happened. It was then that I remembered the owl in the night and I understood the message it was bringing. It was asking me to hone the skills that I work at every day, to use the special ability of the owl to hone in on its prey with microscopic vision, even in the dark, abilities I now know I have inside me, that we all have inside of us.

“Yes,” Chuck said, “the shamans say we all have everything we need inside the human body to do everything the shamans do.”

“It’s true,” I say. “You taught me that when I was recapitulating too, as a means of keeping me focused on the inner journey, offering me some badly needed self-confidence, but really allowing me to accept my experiences as important, to not dismiss anything, but to learn how to perceive everything as meaningful.”

And that’s what I still focus on, allowing everything to be important and meaningful. All experiences are magical if we allow ourselves to experience them that way, not with ego, not by trying to be shamans, but by awakening and utilizing everything that is present in our human state, inside our bodies. The rational mind might not take offense at being pushed aside while we take a ride through our dreams at night, but it sure puts up a struggle during the day. We just have to work at assuring it that it will be okay, that it will be safe, as we let something else guide us to see a new reality, a dream reality during the day too. Our nightly dream training is showing us what we are all really capable of all the time.

Healing ourselves through deep inner work is the first part of learning just what we are capable of doing and experiencing. As we recapitulate, we are asked again and again to suspend judgment and take a look at what really happened, to not blame or attach to anything, but to let ourselves re-experience everything from a new perspective and in so doing experience just what it means when the shamans say that everything we need is inside the human body. Trusting that is the first major obstacle to leaving the rational world and the first major leap into the magical as well. Try it, in waking and/or in dreaming today; see what comes to guide you, out of your own body self, showing you the magic in your own life. Believe me there’s plenty there!

It takes trusting our inner spirit, the innocence comprised of the purity of knowing and perceiving that is ready to embrace our experiences and help us advance in this lifetime. It’s not so hard to defy convention and look at life as magical; it’s quite inspiring, fascinating to imagine that every day we are indeed being guided to learn some of the magic that resides inside all of us. I also now know that the owl’s message is to use that ability to hone my sight during the daytime too, with my eyes open. If I can hone so microscopically with my eyes closed, I should be able to do it with them open as well. That’s my next challenge.

Thanking the owls that come in the night,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Unconventional

September 7, 2012 Chuck Leave a comment

Art & photo by Jan — Is our world really solid?

How critical it is to develop habits to understand and manage the world. In fact, how critical it is to form the habit of the self. Without a routine definition of who we are we have no grounding, no solid vantage point from which to function as an independent being in the world.

Much effort is spent in childrearing, socializing children into good habits. Judgments stream in from all corners of the adult world to shape the attention and behavior of children into discreet, acceptable patterns. The shamans suggest that this socialization is sheer magic, as it bundles a world of energy into a world of solid objects via mass consensus and conditioning. Shamans don’t contest the validity of a world of solid objects; however, they do point out that that solid world is only one among many worlds that exist and that we have access to.

Throughout history, shamans, out-of-body explorers, and religious mystics have all travelled into worlds of different energetic configurations than this solid one we call home, returning with wondrous and valuable artifacts. Consider the tablets of Moses or the twelve steps of AA, artifacts from energetic contact with other worlds. These are but two examples of the boon from shamanic journeys already taken, gifts offered to a solid world out of balance and seeking guidance.

As we deepen our dance into 2012, we encounter an energetic intent established in the remote past and very much upheld in the present, promising major shift, radical shift, critical to the survival of this solid world that is currently spinning toward evolutionary advance.

Art &n photo by Jan — We must deepen our journeys into ourselves…

Don Juan Matus predicted that our very survival as a world would require that we deepen our connection to it and ourselves, going beyond its current energetic fixation—that of a world of solid objects. In other words, we must journey deeper into our energetic potential to enrich and rebalance our present world.

This is where we stand now, as we find ourselves between two polarized but parallel conventions promising to hold us together and lead us forward to safety. The true evolutionary path, however, lies in the unconventional. Only through stepping beyond the lines of the conventional—the solid, the rational—does the mystic discover what is truly necessary for evolutionary advance.

In recapitulation, we break ranks with the rational and the conventional, turning to an energetic intent that leads us through the experiences of a lifetime, stored energetically in the body or in some ethereal cloud that knows all. Recapitulation suspends the rational and leads to wholeness, to healing through daring to embark on an energetic/physical journey.

How do we access the ethereal worlds that hold the answers? We must change our habits and dare to enter the realm of the unconventional. For energy to be freed for the journey, it must be harnessed from our world of solid habits. We are a world of distinct habits, individually and collectively. All our energy is funneled into creating and upholding this world. There is no energy left to go beyond it unless we release ourselves from our habits, those that are blatantly obvious and those that we keep hidden.

If we don’t do everything we always do every day, we will free our energy and step into a different world. It’s really that simple.

Breaking the habits of the self opens the self to new possibilities. The initial encounters beyond the conventional might be truly terrifying, encounters with the shadow self, as Jung called it, where we meet the first layer of the onion that keeps hidden all that lies in the darkness of the self. Once reconciled, we are freed to journey deeper into the energetic layers of the onion, into worlds beyond the familiar that offer to teach and guide us safely through the realizations of the intent for evolutionary shift that we are currently experiencing in this year of 2012.

This journey is well underway. We are all in it, individually and collectively. The further we spin into the unconventional the shakier it gets, but the more we learn and discover, the steadier becomes the ride. Fasten your seat belts!

Evolution demands that we reconfigure our energy. The fossil fuels of yesteryear are now the death of our survival. We can no longer turn to the dinosaurs. We must learn to harness greater energetic sources, free from the heavens, be they the sun or the winds or found in the energetic depths of our inner truths. We must dare to enter the unconventional.

Breaking through,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Parentage

September 5, 2012 Jan Leave a comment

Why do we get the parents we get? Why do we get distant, abusive, cold, overbearing, intrusive, smothering or rejecting parents? Why do we cling to them, asking and needing something when clearly they have nothing to offer? What is our parentage trying to tell us about our own journey? I cannot help but ask such questions, for I am a questioner of life, of the reason for being, of the purpose of my life, and so I ask questions and seek answers that make sense in the context of my life, who I’ve been and who I might become.

Photo by Chuck — Dreaming under a blue moon…

On Friday night, the night of the full moon, a blue moon, sleeping under its glowing light, I dreamed. In my dream, I’m sitting on our deck in my usual seat. To my left, in Chuck’s usual seat, sits a young attractive woman with long dark hair. She has Chuck’s spirit and energy, yet it’s not him. Opposite me sits an older woman with long white hair, slightly plump, whom I interpret as an Earth Mother type. We seem to be talking, our feet up on a small table, three women of different ages and different temperaments. Suddenly, a golden hawk flies down to the deck. It has a long feathered tail and I see that it’s looking for a place to land. I notice that it’s tail will be crushed if it lands on the floor of the deck and I don’t think this is a good idea, and so I stretch out my bare right arm to receive it. I’m aware of the sharpness of its claws and steel my arm to accept their bite, but it lands upon my arm so lightly and gently that I feel nothing more than a gentle impression. I look at this beautiful golden hawk and wonder if it has a message for me, but I see that it’s not looking at me at all, but at the young woman with the dark hair sitting in Chuck’s seat. The older woman answers my question by nodding at the younger woman, saying out loud: “Yes, it’s come for you.” My ego accepts this truth, captivated by the fact that this hawk has come at all. As I watch, the hawk pours a steady stream of golden light, from its heart, directly into the heart of the young woman. Their eyes lock and the stream of golden energy pulses strongly between them without let up, without dimming or fluctuating. The older woman and I look upon this energetic encounter in total acceptance, in unattached awe.

Upon awakening, I’m aware that this dream is stunningly significant, though it takes me several days; several more dream experiences to work it out, at least for now. I begin to see the mandala structure in the dream set up, the four figures describing the geometrics of the mandala and the small table at our feet marking the center. My present ego self sits in my usual seat in my dream, my maternal self sits opposite me in the form of the Earth Mother. My young spirit self sits in Chuck’s seat, and the golden hawk takes up its place opposite this spirit self as I stretch out my arm and receive it into the mandala. It belongs there; I know this as soon as it descends, and so the mandala, the energy of the inner self is complete upon its arrival. There is the sense of a circle around all of this energy in my dream and indeed there is an umbrella on the deck over this seating arrangement, and so I accept it as the outer ring of my mandala. The energy inside my dream mandala is strong, contained, protected. My dreaming self presents me with the truth of my own deep inner work, my recapitulation and my continued inner work, and so I accept that I am in a strong place now.

I’m not surprised, by the way, that I envision my spirit self as a much younger me, for in all that I know and have read about, the spirit self does appear in this fashion. In my own experience of meeting Jeanne in her energy body, she too was young and vibrant, perhaps about 30 years old, the same age as I appear to be in this dream. Accounts by many others confirm this, that our evolved spirit selves are young, attractive, and vibrant. This point alone may offer enough incentive to take the inner journey, for meeting that spirit self is quite a rewarding endeavor.

But what does it all mean? The maternal self gives the answer, though my ego self pipes up wondering if it’s come for the self that constantly seeks specialness, but as soon as the Earth Mother tells the young spirit self that it’s come for her, I accept her knowing, for she is right. The mother archetype does her job, and by her unattached acceptance of this fact of her own existence as a giver of life and energy, I too can accept my ego’s role in balance with that truth. It’s time for these two extraverted selves to step back now. All focus and all energy must go to the evolution of the spirit self. It’s time, Jan, this dream tells me, to put all of your attention into your spirit’s continuing journey. As soon as I reach this interpretation of the dream, after I have sifted through many other meanings, arbitrary and significant alike, I know it’s the right one.

How can I take this deeper inner journey when I have so many outer commitments? Is my dream asking me to forego motherhood, to forego my ego, and concentrate only on my spirit’s journey? Is the golden hawk asking me to abandon all outer life for some amorphous and uncertain inner life? In essence, yes, it’s asking me to do all of these things. It’s asking me to continue a deepening practice, to stay on the inner path. It’s asking me to examine the roles I have played in the world, since birth, and to question where I am with them now.

Am I ready to take this life’s journey to the next level? Am I done with certain aspects of self, of neediness and desire for something from others? Am I done with projecting my spirit onto others, onto Chuck for instance, as I first see this spirit self sitting in his chair? Can I take ownership more fully now, accepting this spirit self as fully my own? Can I take the ever-deepening inner journey without attachment to the myriad old selves who have thus far accompanied me on my journey? Can I turn to my spirit as the maternal self does and totally give the golden hawk’s gift to this inner self?

Peter Matthiessen, in his book The Snow Leopard, asks himself similar questions when he’s asked why he’s taking a dangerous trek across the Himalayas. He wonders at his reasons for leaving behind his young motherless children, for risking his life at every step on the slippery ice-covered paths, under threat of avalanche, blizzards, starvation even. Why would he do such a thing? He can find no reasonable answer to give his questioner, for to say that he’s doing it to deepen his inner journey does not sound reasonable enough. How could anyone find such an answer acceptable? And so he simply replies that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he’s taking a journey of such risk, a journey that may leave him stranded or dead, his children orphans, but he cannot refuse it either.

Such is the strength of the inner spirit in all of us. Once awakened it carries an energy that will not be pushed aside by a request for reasonableness. Reason does not come into the equation. And so, I come to my topic of parentage and a return to the questions I pose at the beginning of this blog, for these questions are key to taking an inner journey.

Our parentage, who our parents were and what they did or did not do, to or for us, are key to taking the inner journey. In the beginning, the inward path leads us back to confronting these parents. In every part of our being we must decide where they have taken up residence. We must ask them to leave, as we gradually clear a path to our true selves. We must face the neglect and the love alike that came from them, the poor child self left to fend for itself, alone in the world, or the child self smothered by too much well-intentioned goodness. We must face the fact that perhaps we got the parents we needed to catapult us into the life we have and that the circumstances of our birth are the secret to our inner work.

As a parent, I must face that my own children got me as a parent. They got all that I had to offer and all I could not offer, all that I carried and all I could not carry, and they too must question what it means to have gotten such a person for their mother. If parenting was not part of this life, it does not matter, for the questions are the same for our inner child as for our children in the outer world. Our inner child must ask similar questions, why we got this body, this ego, this journey? In order to leave the inner parents behind and become our true selves we must all ask ourselves: What does it mean for me that I am in this life? For me.

In staying attached to our parentage, in blaming and wanting more and more from them, we end up digging ourselves into a pit of sorrow and regret, perhaps far deeper than the pit our parentage landed us in to begin with. Perhaps in our groveling we hear words of wisdom and are able to pull our heads up and look around at life without parentage as the most rewarding of gifts. Or perhaps the golden hawk visits us many times but we are so smothered in our own excrement that we do not see or hear its missives. It takes a long time to extricate ourselves from our pasts, from our parentage, from having to fulfill the desires of others and the expectations of a reasonable world.

At the same time, in fully living the life we have landed in we learn how to hone our spirit, how to contain it, how to express our creative self in one form or another so that it does not overwhelm us or take us so far afield that we are not able to retrieve it in one lifetime. If the creative spirit is allowed free reign, it can destroy us, as surely as an avalanche in the Himalayas. But, in trekking through life with awareness of our surroundings, with inner questioning and inner focus balanced by outward expression, we offer ourselves the steadiness to forge across even the most treacherous of mountain peaks.

I am a creative being, as we all are, and though I once used my creativity outwardly, in artistic expression, for I could not hold it within, now I use it inwardly. And in so doing I find that my outward expression, my creative output once so admired and abundant, has no need to repeat itself in the world. My creative energy now finds abundant outlet within.

And so, the inner journey continues to offer the greatest rewards, for I have found nothing better in this life for answering all the questions I might ask of myself and others. I have learned that in looking inward for my answers rather than outward, peace and contentment eventually come, the golden hawk finally arrives. In learning to let go of expectations of others—parents, partners, children, even our pets—in taking back our projections and owning them for ourselves, in honing our creativity for inner work, we nurture our inner child to enjoyment of maturity and a fulfilled life.

Most humble thanks for being there and taking the trek.
Love,
Jan

Riverwalker Press