We’ve all had the experience of returning to a spiritual book and understanding the words in a new way. We’ve also had the experience of reading a passage that directly speaks to something in our Being. These connections are especially validating when they come from ancient traditions .You can find passages from any scripture that…
Our unveiled gaze receives and reflects the brightness of God until we are gradually turned into the image that we reflect -2 Corinthians 3:18 One of our country’s most insightful social commentators once remarked that as a society we’ve all gotten away from the “true meaning of Christmas—”the birth of Santa.” Homer Simpson, in his…
I see politics as a black cauldron where the brightness of our collective hopes and dreams gets churned with the darkness of fear and paranoia from our collective shadow resulting in an acrid stew of opinion, allegiance, reactivity and drama. So it was with some consternation that Sharon and I recently attended two political meetings…
When thinking drops off as a touchstone – then speaks Clarity, and I worship it” from “The Radiant Dark Before Dawn” By Sharon Gilbert To me, holding a possibility of “not knowing” is fundamental to our whole-being realization path. As we move into living from the core of our being, from the awareness of who we…
The New Year has brought to the forefront more clearly than ever before the limitations of perceiving with just the mind, of interpreting reality primarily through a default system of belief and opinion. As we are bombarded with data bolstering ideological positions from all sides, the need to transcend the digital world and integrate a more…
It is often said in Trillium Awakening circles that our individual shadow work serves both personal and collective healing. This is because the conditioning (and trauma) that caused us to protect and hide our authenticity came through our primary caregivers who, in turn, were deeply conditioned by their families and culture. This conditioning goes back…
In the Trillium Awakening path, greenlighting is the practice of allowing ourselves to be exactly as we are in the moment. Another way of saying it is “being with what is.” This practice sounds so simple – and it is – and yet we generally spend much of our waking hours resisting what is, both…
The current socio-political climate in the US, and much of the world, is such that we all have work to do to understand our relationship to differences in personal identity. Doing awakening work today requires us to lean in to how we embody our lived experience. In the Trillium Path, we awaken as embodied consciousness,…
It’s been a deep journey of grief for me since George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis on May 25. You might wonder why this is newsworthy, the feelings of a white woman of late life, product of privilege, in the face of global unrest about the systemic anti-Black culture of the US….
What does it take to embody and express love in our actions? Many spiritual paths talk about acting in a loving and kind way, and it’s a worthy ideal…but how do we make it real? Especially in these challenging times! Industrialized culture, deeply disconnected from body and soul, values reason and believes in control. But…
Awakened activism is a natural outcome of maturation and involves a deepening and widening beyond self and group identifications into something broader. It goes hand-in-hand with coming to know the self as much larger than a single identity, and acting accordingly.” ~~ Dr Leticia Nieto, author of Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment Would you like to…
“If only we could just get along. If only we could just be one happy, human family.” It’s a good dream, a valid dream, and one worth investing heart and soul into. And us White people want to believe that including people of color will get us there. But it won’t. Inclusion isn’t enough. Let’s…
WHAT IS THE SHADOW?Shadow is a term psychologist Carl Jung used to describe the unconscious dimension of our psyche which our conscious self – our ego – denies or is unable to access. Hidden in our shadow are aspects of ourselves that were unacceptable as a child, and which we dissociated from in order to survive and…
In the Trillium Awakening path, we tend to talk about mutuality in terms of an exchange between two people – an exchange of deep authenticity. “Being in mutuality” generally implies a willingness to encounter each other vulnerably, with presence and respect, even when things get rough (or perhaps especially then). We can, however, widen the…