Sacred Orderings

It is late Friday night...Labor Day weekend...I open a book given to me by my dear friend Patriciafaye today..."The Enlightened Heart" and find one of my favorite prayers written by Beloved Hildegard (1098-1179):

Holy Spirit,
Giving life to all life
Moving all creatures
Root of all things
Washing them clean
Wiping out their mistakes
Healing their wounds
You are our true life
Luminous, wonderful
Awakening the heart
from its ancient sleep.

Amen Hildegard! A beautiful summation to my week, a reminder that all is in sacred order even when evidence in the 3-D may appear contrary to that truth. The Holy Spirit, Source of All Life, is always giving life to ALL life and infusing and informing all life, all experiences, all relationships, all breakthroughs and breakdowns...all is being and all can be used for Good and to embody more God in our lives. Whether an experience or an event serves my greater healing, emergence and awakening depends on my decision to surrender to what is constantly, continuously and consistently available...God's saving grace and holy salve for my awakening heart.

I started this day in a courtroom, listening to the judge address the court...handing down the verdict...five counts...2 guilty, 3 not guilty...watching "Jane" crumble as the judge spoke to her lack of credibility due to her past and watching her rise again from the ashes like the Phoenix as the day went on and together we soaked up the Holy Spirit..."washing them clean and healing their wounds" -- a beautiful example and expression of "when two or more are gathered in my name, I AM in the midst of them." All of this occurred at good ol' Shari's restaurant over a basket of fries, ranch dressing and about 5 iced teas and diet cokes. Moment after moment as the Beloved in me joined with the Beloved in her...we released further and further into the arms of God and all worry and concern faded into the joy of being together ~ alive, courageous and committed to giving rise to the passionate and ferociously loving voice and posture of the Sacred Feminine. I bow down and kiss the ground of this sacred curriculum...this life curriculum so perfectly ordered for the both of us this week. The Presence in Action...Compassion in Action...Urban Mysticism.

I ended my day at a park gathering with 3 other ministers...a beautiful sanctuary in the outdoors held by mountains and trees...a far cry from the grey carpet and walls and fluorescent lights of the courtroom. We gathered in preparation for one of our sister's ordination that will occur on September 23rd...the Fall Equinox...I am honored to stand in and as the Presence and to be a vessel for the Holy Spirit in this Sacrament. We prayed together, laughed and fell into the truth that what calls each of us...every single one of us...is the Mystery...and none of us know, day to day, what the Divine will serve up for our personal life curriculum and sacred ordering. All we can do is, as JohnnyBoat says, BE HERE NOW...and serve each moment, each experience with as much beauty and love and joy and truth ~ with as much wild abandon ~ as our sweet Souls can muster!

I am still learning...I am still here...I am an ecstatic heart awakening and I am a soul dilating.
I am here, I am One, I am Love...We are here, We are One, We are Love.
We are in this Sacred Mystery Together...Ameyn.

May your dreams be sweet and divinely intoxicating!
Anakha

The Morning After

I awoke this morning with a new awareness of the dance of the mystical and the real...the sacred and the active. I heard the universal call that has been issued -- we are being called to dance the True Dance...to listen to the music of our bodies as sanctuaries of authenticity and to move to the rhythms of our Souls. As I look back on my experience at ecstatic dance last night I see how easy it would have been to dance someone else's dance to try to be in joy or in primacy or in rapture...how alluring the call to disregard the truth of my experience to be in someone else's can be. How can we stay in the Honest-to-God Truth of our Souls and source our movements, our decisions, our communications moment to moment from that Sacred Source of "WHATISNESS"?

This is the path of Ahimsa...of nonviolence that Yeshua has been speaking to me about since the onset of my 40 day advance and it requires that I/we develop a discipline of listening and of slowing the pace to my/our native beat (which, in my opinion is at least half the speed most of travel these days). This is what it means to move at the pace of guidance. To slow the adrenaline rushing pace of fear and frenzy to the endorphomatic wave of love and truth.

Last night was a new experience for me...the internal music of my body, my heart, my soul was what I danced to...even when the beat grew strong I stood and swayed my belly to the left and right in a very slow lullabye. To the eyes of a bystander they may have thought I was deaf or didn't understand the "point" of the dance. For me it was a dance of integrity...it was not big, it was not lyrical or poetic, it was not sexy or sensual...but it was real and true and in integrity with the swirl of the poles dancing inside me. And in that dance I was able to observe my compulsion to fuse with one or the other -- mystical or maddening, sacred or profane, present or disassociated, beautiful or ugly, powerful or weak, agressive or submissive and I made a new choice. I sat in the inbetween...in the swirl of it all...I became to present to the range of experiences, feelings, thoughts and sensations inside of me. This is progress for me...to be fully present in the inbetween, in the whatisness and to dance that dance with its inate beauty and tenderness.

I am aware of how freeing and simultaneously vulnerable it is to write like this...with a naked heart, revealing my naked experience...and this becomes the practice of the ecstatic heart...to be created each moment anew as I sit fully present in the inbetween.

In the beauty and the nakedness of the ecstatic heart,

Anakha

Numbing the Sacred Heart

Where am I? Some semblance of me is sitting here in front of my laptop at 9:44 p.m. on the first day of the correctional officer's trial...my body is here...my mind is sort of here...but where did my heart and spirit go? On hiatus I suppose...took one look at the courtroom and heard the conversations surrounding it and decided to get the hell out of dodge! I don't blame them...although my body and mind are somewhat contentious now after being left behind.

The only real and true thing I did today was pray with "Jane" before the trial in a little room at the courthouse full of chairs that said "broken" on them. Broken...yes, broken hearted, broken down, broken apart, broken open, broken. Tears streamed down my face as I prayed with her...affirming that Yeshua was with us...that we are always connected to the True Vine, I was fully present in that prayer and then...hiatus...

My heartbreak happens when the Truth I know is such a far cry, such a huge distance from what I see and experience in the real. My heartbreak happens when I feel tenderness and compassion for the officer who looks like the walking dead...disconnected from her own I AM-ness, lost in the darkness. How can this be...how can this happen? I become rattled, disoriented, confused and then the leaving starts moment to moment the numbness comes to cover the despair, the disorientation, the confusion. I become someone unknown to myself. And as I watch I come to know her story as my story...the leaving of Self...the seperation to avoid the pain.

I tried to find my heart and spirit in the ecstatic dance gathering tonight...the best I could do was to be present within my disconnection...to find my breath, to fill my belly, to see my feet, to watch others in their joy and encourage them in my silent prayer. I wanted to shake it off...all the sadness, fear, despair, numbness and outrage...and even that was not happening. I needed to feel it all...to see my response...to see how I numb my own ecstatic heart by not wanting to feel disrupted, discouraged, disoriented by what I experience in the world.

I numb my heart by becoming a robotic machine moving from one thing to put in my mouth to another...from one thing to do to another...trying to find the antidote...some external miracle cure. And then, through the Grace of God, I stop...I see and I watch and I breath and I sit down to write and in my writing I make this offering...this little prayer.

Yeshua, My Beloved
Help Me to Stay Awake
Help Me to Feel
Help Me to Love, Radically and Redemptively
This World and all of its Brokenness
This Human Community and its Forgetfullness
My Own Heart and its Tenderness
Help Me to Keep Your Vision Alive in My Heart
Help Me to Behold Your Christic Salve, Your Radical Love
Bring Your Wholeness and Blessed Oneness to Us All
Through Your Wildly Sacred and Thoroughly Uniting
Lover's Heart...Ameyn.

I love you all...
Blessed Night,
Anakha

Kombucha and Yeshua

Here I go...my foray into blogging...somehow after my Kundalini yoga practice this morning, I found myself opening a bottle of Kombucha (citrus) and setting up this blog. I am not even sure why...although most of my actions and decisions of late come from a place beyond knowing and understanding...sometimes it feels as if I am bumbling along, yet all the while I am being lifted, inspired and heavenly guided by the Presence of the Divine Heart...the Living Christ...the Embodied Yeshua. Ho...hum...things are humming and buzzing in the world and the world of my awakened body this a.m. My heart feels a faint sadness...a dizzying grief that is dancing across the face of the world these days. One of my teachers, Andrew Harvey, says we are in a collective depression...a numbness to ourselves, one another and the despair of the world. How can I wake up today...how can I live the joy in my heart and also hold compassion for our collective Dark Night...it is a constant dance of becoming real, becoming true...That is my quest right now...in each moment to find the joy...to express the love and to source all actions, all expressions from the Truth that resides in my belly, in my pelvis, in the root and in the sky...the Truth that when revealed will contribute to the healing of the world and the emergence of our collective and most ecstatic heart. Live with me through this dance....love with me through this creation...hold with me through this letting go...let go...let go...let go. This is the way of the Ecstatic Heart...abandonment to the Scared Heart, adoration of Christic Love and allowance of the Holy Spirit to guide and order all of our holy interactions. Tetey Yeshua...Come into our lives, Infuse us with Your Grace, Your Elixir, Your Love! Ameyn!