Create an Inner Sanctuary

To begin, set aside time to sit quietly every morning in peaceful contemplation for as long as you can with your journal beside you. This may be familiar if you have meditated before; any centering practice you are used to will work to quiet the mind and prepare the inner field. The Emergence Process is not a substitute for any basic practices you are already doing, but rather an extension or deepening of them.

I strongly advocate cultivating an inner receptivity, an inner listening and attunement to the signals of the Essential Self. These intuitions are the way the deeper self informs us and guides us.

Your own Essential Self, as you access it through your meditation and writing in the Inner Sanctuary, will offer you guidance, inspirations, and practices as well. That guidance, when added to the guidance we are giving you here, will create for you a unique manual for the Emergence of the Universal Human you are now becoming.

Focus attention on the Essential Self

In your silent time, recall as much as you can the guidance or inspiration you’ve already been in touch with—the actual feeling tone of your intuitive experience—and also any qualities you remember about this evolutionary impulse that has motivated your process of transformation. You may recall those earlier experiences. Remember how warm and safe you felt. Feel the intimacy and compare it to the feeling of anxiety and compulsiveness that can characterize local self.

If you ask for the Essential Self to come into your consciousness, it will signal you in some way or another, not necessarily as mine does, and not necessarily in written words. It may happen in flashes, insights, images, or hunches. Watch for synchronicity to show up in your life… When you ask your Essential Self to communicate more clearly, it will—one way or the other. Expect the unexpected, and anticipate the new!

Journal

To begin with, as in all the steps that follow, create and place yourself in your Inner Sanctuary. For your first journal exercise, write and describe from memory any key experiences or insights inspired by your Essential Self. This will help you get acquainted with the Essential Self by bringing it to your conscious attention.

What did the voice or inspired thoughts tell you? What did it feel like? Describe any messages or insights that you have received, any qualities you have noted that characterize the inner guide.

Once you have done this, try this exercise: Write a letter addressed to “Dearly Beloved,” or whatever name you choose for your Essential Self. Describe your current situation as precisely as you can, the good and the apparently difficult. Ask the most important questions you may have, as clearly as you can; then release all thought, have no preconceptions. Develop the habit of a poised mind, like a sailboat on a calm sea waiting for the wind.

Our purpose here is precise. It is to establish direct contact with the inner voice, the still, small voice expressing as your Essential Self. Start writing any sentence as the inner voice, and see what unfolds. Do not edit, judge, or correct anything. If nothing comes, that is fine. Continue to be still.

If you have been hearing an inner voice and writing in your journal before, this process will be relatively easy. If you have not yet tried this, simply follow the steps with no expectations. Find your own way to connect to your inner guide. In may be through other paths than words, like a felt-sense or deep intuition. This much I know for sure: Whatever happens will be helpful. Everyone has within a deeper, wiser, all-knowing self.

Questions for Reflection

When have you felt you were your best possible self, your Essential Self?

Describe any experiences you have had of your Essential Self, any messages, or guidance that you have received.

How do you best connect with your Higher or Essential Self. Is it through hearing an inner voice, or some other way of accessing it.

What does it feel like to be your full potential self?

What are the special qualities of your Essential Self?

Ed and I went out and bought our Christmas tree today.                                                    Buying a tree is a ritual.  There are many to choose from, small ones, medium ones, big ones, big, big ones.  As usual, I come up with the wacky idea of letting the tree choose us.  So I asked, “OK trees, give us a sign, let us know which one of you wants to come home with us”.  its so cold out, my face is burning, so this can’t take too long. We pick one out and hold it up to check it out,  nope, too lop sided.  Ed picks out another one… no branches on a whole big section.  After about 5 minutes of this, we pick find one, turn it around in circles and it looks just right…not perfect (trees are imperfect, like us)… but its the ONE, our tree and its just beautiful! Now home to string the lights on it!

As we approach the winter solstice, the shortest day or longest night, depending on how you look at it, we have an instinctual need to decorate our homes with lights,  light candles,and even bon fires. In ancient days, they didn’t know for sure the sun light would return.  I’m reading a book called “Emergence” by Barbara Marx Hubbard.
What I’m getting is that we, the human species is giving birth to ourselves.  To a new kind of human… a lighter human, the next stage in our evolution.  What does this mean and what does it have to do with buying a Christmas tree?  We are celebrating the light of the world.  Jesus was an avatar.  One who came to teach that we are all light beings.
He taught us how to Lighten Up!

We know that we are a part of the whole and everything we do effects everything and eveyone else around us.  We are after all energy, light, and love.  We are shifting from ego to essence.  From our heads to our hearts.

I’ve been having  conversations lately with people about what this means and what they think is happening.  Many are suffering, frightened and lost. They are
off center.  If one has no vision, no framework for the shift that is taking place, it can be overwhelming and disorienting.  My experience of it is that old structures that no longer serve are disintegrating right before our eyes.  This is a good thing, but not easy.
What will replace these structures, institutions?  I have a vision of a world where we can enjoy life.  Where what we enjoy doing is what we are rewarded for and how we make our living.  We create sustainable, life affirming communities.  It is my nature to focus on the spiritual, and the metaphysical.  So, although there are changes on all levels… financial, government, medical, education, media, the arts and so forth,  I’m mostly interested in what is happening in our inner worlds.

“The coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital and physical existence of man, but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal of humanity and attempt to effect it in themselves, to lead others to it, and to make it the recognized goal of the race.  In proportion as they succeed and to the degree to which
they carry this evolution, the yet unrealized potentiality which they represent will become an actual possibility of the future”
~Sri Aurobindo

“There is emerging from out of the mist of myth, religious and scientific, a new thought, so new, so ancient.  This thought is that the transcendent God of History indwells in each of us as us.  Our relation to all avatars is that of younger siblings, sisters and brothers who are awakening at last to the awesome and exhilarating  truth, the final fact of the ultimate covenant.  We are the heirs, the operative expressions of divinity itself, now!

~ Sidney Thomas Lanier

During this holy season of many of the worlds spiritual traditions,  what is being born in you?  Can we imagine Christ being born through us?  The Creative force that we are made of is always streaming through our bodies, minds and souls demanding that we become the light beings that we are.  All we need to do is surrender to it.

Dear friends,                                              

Welcome to November, the month of colorful leaves, pumpkin pie, colder weather, shorter days and our American Thanksgiving Holiday and… my birthday!  For Thanksgiving this year, I’m planning to be with my family on Staten Island. My son Jack will be there for his first Thanksgiving home from the Peace Corps.  We’re planning a trip up to “the City”… that would be Manhattan, on black Friday… but not to shop… but  to visit the Native American Indian museum in lower Manhattan. After all,  this holiday is to commemorate  the first meetings of the first settlers with the Natives who lived here.
How I wish we still honored them.  I’ve been wondering lately why all of our Native peoples are on reservations.  It’s like the old Apartheid system of South Africa, only nobody talks about it.  I have been learning from and studying with Native Peoples of the Americas and beyond for many years and they hold the truths that we need in these times we are living in.  After that,  we’ll head up to Occupy Wall Street which is easy to get to from Staten Island.  Speaking of…

Whats New with the Conscious Evolution Revolution?                    

I recently completed a training to be an Agent of conscious Evolution with  Barbara Marx Hubbard and the Shift Network.  Barbara just wrote a letter to the Occupy Movement titled Occupy Wall Street… Evolve the World!
She says:
“Existing structures are all top down: corporations, organized religions, nation states, the US presidency, etc., all designed to win, dominate and control each other and those within them. Liberal democracy was a great advance over monarchy, yet as a system it is failing us everywhere.  It’s not so much bad people as inadequate structures and systems.  We are facing a whole system breakdown.  We need a whole system breakthrough.  The Occupy movement is right at the threshold of discovering a new way through this top down system(that is working for the few at the expense of the majority) it is planting seed of the evolution of democracy itself, a democracy that expresses the hopes and aspirations of the people, for the common good. 
Not win/lose
Not based on demands although they are powerful
Not fundamaentally a protest movement, but the people speaking truth to power.
IT IS A CREATIVE MOVEMENT: A Creative Evolution.”

The time is now!                                              

The Conscious Evolution Foundation
http://www.barbaramarxhubbard.com

The Pachamama Alliance 
www.pachamama.org.
 
Pachamama means earth mother.  While I was in Peru working with the Shamans we prayed to Pachamama and asked what she needs at this time.
She needs for all human beings to wake up.  We have a window of 4 years to turn around the destructive path that we’re on and to create a sustainable future.
I know it can happen.  But it will take each one of us.
The Pachamama Alliance is doing seminars all over the world to help people understand the urgency and the need to turn things around…. especially consciousness.

In joy and peace,

Lin

Welcome to my new blog.
It is my intention to communicate with you about Conscious Evolution.
This is about the changes we are undergoing right now individually and collectively.
CE is an awareness that we are at choice.  We are powerful beings and can choose at any given moment our own actions, words, and intentions.
I have been on a spiritual path for thirty some years and will distill some of the best technologies in the field for self understanding and knowing. We are living in times of crisis and chaos and breakdown… but also the most exciting time in the history of the human race. For the first time in human history, we have the awareness of our own effect on our environment.  We are at choice… not just corks bobbing haphazardly around in the ocean,
but we can choose our future.  Each one of us makes up the whole and so each one of us had a part to play in the unfolding of the future of the planet.

While nner clarity is the primary focus of my life coaching work with women, intentional action is usually the next step. Once you have inner knowing, it becomes important for your outer world to match your inner truth. Anything less begins to feel like a self-betrayal.

But taking action can be difficult. You might be frozen by fear, stuck in old patterns and habits or lose your certainty once it becomes time to actually do something about it.

Don’t worry, you are not alone! This is not your problem, this is a human problem. And the solution is close. As a matter of fact, it is right there in your heart. So, don’t get lost in your fear mind when it comes time to take steps towards your truth. Slow down and listen carefully. The clarity already knows the exact right action to take.

I use mindfulness in client sessions because it allows us to do just that: pay careful attention to the inner voice and see the obstacles more clearly.

If you would like to get sweet short burst of clarity in your in-box a couple of times per month, you can subscribe here  (put in a link)

Lin Murphy, MA, CPCC
Certified Life Coach
One Roof Holistic Health Center
269-3333
www.LinMurphy.com

“Tell me what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver

Summer’s not officially here until  the Solstice on June 21,  but by the warm weather we’ve been having, it sure feels like summer. Summer brings family fun, picnics, swimming, and …
Road trips!!!!  Speaking of road trips,

I recently returned from Montpelier, Vermont where I attended a gathering of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers.  I am still in the earthy glow of their powerful presence. They live inside me and I can ask for council.
The Grandmothers were brought together by a common vision set in motion by the Center for Sacred Studies in 2004.  Their first meeting was in the Catskills, in the same place that was my spiritual home for 15 years.
I attended the very first gathering with my daughter, Zoeann.
The council is an alliance of indigenous  grandmothers from all corners of the earth, speaking with a united voice for peace and unity.  They are potent advocates for women’s leadership, social justice, and environmental health and they are so cool!  They teach through storytelling, prayer and fire ceremony.  I learn a lot being around them.
They are witty, funny and they don’t follow the rules.  I returned home with a renewed commitment to my work  empowering women to be their full selves and to be a voice for the earth and all of its creatures.

Here is their mission statement:

We represent a global alliance of prayer, education and healing for our Mother Earth, all Her inhabitants, all the children, and for the next seven generations to come.

We are deeply concerned with the unprecedented destruction of our Mother Earth and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. We believe the teachings of our ancestors will light our way through an uncertain future.

We look to further our vision through the realization of projects that protect our diverse cultures: lands, medicines, language and ceremonial ways of prayer and through projects that educate and nurture our children

Upcoming Event

Summer Solstice Celebration with Lin Murphy
Honor Father SUN on Fathers day AND Mother Earth
Community/ Ceremony/  Fun
Men, espeically welcome to this one.
Bring your fathers, brothers and sons.

Sunday, June 19, 2011
5-6 pm.;  Fire Ceremony
(Please arrive shortly before 5pm so we can open sacred space)
If you come late, you are welcome to participate from the outer circle.

Pot luck supper to follow
Still Point Retreat Center
For directions:  www.stillpointretreatcenter.com
587-4967

We celebrate the longest day, the full light,  with drumming,
chant, and a fire ceremony.
Open to ALL; children and families welcome.
bring a nourishing dish to share for the potluck supper
cost: donation to Still Point

“Tell me what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver