In Yoke

I let go my desire for security and survival. I let go my desire for esteem and affection. I let go my desire for power and control. I let go my desire to change the situation. As I walk this journey, in Christ, and seek to yield more and more of my will to His will, I find this unvarying litany returns to my consciousness on a regular basis. This is one of the ways he is teaching me to apply his life to my life, to envelop my life with the qualities of His Life. The “paradox of letting go” is a sacred alchemy. It seems that all the sinfulness and impurity in my life comes from my striving for power/control, esteem/affection, security/survival. I must decrease, while he must increase. This is true wisdom-the journey’s joy, the journey’s energies, are to come from His abundance, not from my own will’s striving. “Not my will but Thine be done”, and “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” These are Yeshua’s prayers, and indeed, I pray, are...

“There is an underlying attitude that cripples and blinds each of us. It can be so pervasive that we do not often question it. This attitude is a perversion of the natural order created by our loneliness and insecurity, by the illusion of separateness, by ignorance. The problem, in a way, is quite simple: we think of ourselves too often and in the wrong way . The result is self importance (or its’ opposite, self hatred), and greed.” As I share the long and sometimes sordid story of my own autobiography, I do so from a “Spiritual lessons” point of view, keeping this aforementioned premise in mind. I can really relate to this…because for a great portion of my life- I have thought of myself too often and in the wrong way . I have been studying the enneagram as a way of self revelation and understanding for the purposes of transformation by the Spirit of Yahweh, through Jesus Christ(YESHUA-His Aramaic name). As an Enneagram three, who is seeking redemption from my natural b...

If we had to seek for virtue outside of ourselves, that would assuredly be difficult; but as it is within us, it suffices to avoid bad thoughts and to keep our souls turned towards the Lord. -Philokalia From my teacher: To remake ourselves, we don't have to bring goodness,love, fearlessness, and the like from without and force them into our hearts somehow. They are already present in us, deep in our consciousness. If we work to remove the impediments that have built up over many years of conditioning, to dislodge the old resentments and fears and selfish desires, our life will become like a fountain of living waters, as it was meant to be. An old fountain may be clogged so that not much water can get through. But with a lot of cleaning, you can get the water to start playing again. Then grass and flowers will grow around it, and birds will come there to have their bath. Just so, love can flow from us as from a living fountain, and those we live and work with will come to us to be r...

Each of us sees the Unseen in proportion to the clarity of our heart, and that depends upon how much we have polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more - more Unseen forms become manifest. -Jalaluddin Rumi As your meditation deepens, there will still be occasions when you get upset, but you will be able to watch what goes on in the lab of your mind. It's like getting into a glass-bottomed boat, where you venture out onto the ocean and watch all the deep-sea creatures lurking beneath the surface: resentment sharks, stingrays of greed, scurrying schools of fear. You slowly gain a certain amount of detachment from your mind, so you can observe what is going on, collect data, and then set things right. Some of the chronic problems that millions of people suffer from today might be solved by gaining a little detachment from their minds and emotions, so they can stand back a little when the mind is agitated and see the ways in which it makes mountains out of mole...

Being born again implies that what one’s life has been in the past is not alive anymore. In my experience--being born again has required a process of daily renewal and transformation, from the putting off the old and putting on the new. This is perhaps a lifelong process, of continuous falling down and getting back up again. Regrettably my story is quite sordid and disgraceful…and I feel very stupid and embarrassed when I recount all the things I have put my wife and family through, due to my own pridefulness, ungratefulness, self absorption and impulsive behavior. Over the years it seems that the Spirit has systematically peeled layer after layer of falsehood off my essential true self, enabling me to gradually cease living a lie and to face the honest truth about my own weaknesses. For many years I sought to compensate for these weaknesses and insecurities through attitudes of pride, arrogance, insensitivity, sarcasm and a lack of compassion for those around me. My poor judgment and ...