Self & Soul

03/06/2025

A beautiful film and resource! A deep SoulWork of coming into relationship with all life.

Join The Eternal Song film premiere and 7-Day Gathering with Indigenous Voices to connect with ancestral wisdom and healing.

19/05/2025

Support for female self!

For years, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was the medically approved way to alleviate menopausal symptoms (ranging from hot flushes to brain fog) and reduce the risk of heart disease, Alzheimer's, and osteoporosis. But when a large study by the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) announce...

27/04/2025

Embody & Dream Divine Protection & Resistance: In answer to the cry of the day this summer we explore the theme of Divine Protection & Resistance. Through SoulWork befriend and help the parts of you that learned old protective strategies to relax and grow. We will call in the divine qualities of protection and nourishment through mantra/waziaf Ya Mani – Ya Muquit! As we heal our inner life we can face the challenges of our world with clarity and courage. Mondays on Zoom 8:30-9:45am – May 19, June 2, 16, 30, Jul 28, Aug 11, 25 + Sat, July 12th in person & Zoom 10am-12:30pm; all times PDT.

For more information and how to register https://www.selfsoul.org/events/embody-dream/

06/04/2025

"When you step out of this world, you withdraw, and think you are alone, with yourself, but the East says: "you forget the old one that is dwelling in your heart, and sees everything." Then, alone, you come to the critical point, to your personal unconscious. Extraverts, and all the people who are identified with their persona, hate to be alone, because they begin to see themselves. Our society is always the worst: when we are alone with ourselves things get very disagreeable." CG Jung

01/04/2025

"Inside of all particles is a little tiny string that vibrates, sort of like a string on the violin with vibrate… At the heart of matter is music. At the heart of matter are vibrating, filaments, vibrating through their sound, matter and energy, maybe even space and time into existence. So there's a real fundamental way in which musical metaphor is really brush right up against cutting edge ideas in physics." Brian Greene

Please enjoy this 3-minute preview of the Wheel of Awareness & Neuroscience class. Visit https://www.selfsoul.org/events/wheel-awareness/ to unlock the full ...

10/03/2025

“The person who is anchored in an inner connection to the Divine is rooted in a source so powerful that it protects him or her from being swept away by mass consciousness of any kind. If he or she has an experience of the numinous, no other person, no other movement or teaching, can ever take that experience away. The inner transcendent experience grounds a person in her own truth and protects her from persuasions of the mass.” Healing the Wounded God -Jeffrey Raff. Image Robby Donaghey

05/03/2025

A long read by Pir Elias Amidon but worth it!
There’s a nervousness loose in the world these days — I think we can all sense it. When I went for a walk recently with my teenage grandson, he told me he and his friends are feeling it — they’re troubled and nervous about the future — the world feels to them on the brink of disaster.
“There’re so many threats!” he almost shouted. “Climate change! Antarctica’s melting! fires, floods, Trump and all the right-wing politics, billionaires taking over, the poor getting poorer, plastics in the oceans, in our bodies, pandemics, the AI monster running things, it all feels like too much…” He trailed off, and then mumbled, “I don’t know what to do.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, “it’s like the rudder’s broken, civilization’s drifting off course, we’re heading into the rocks.”
“Do you see any hope?” he asked — a question that breaks your heart when you hear it from a 16-year-old.
We walked on for a bit, and then I said, “In The Book of Flashes there’s a little aphorism that goes like this:
Hard times are coming. Do something beautiful.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“Well, it means just what you say — hard times are coming — for many they’re already here — but there is something we can do. We can do something beautiful.”
“What’s that? Sounds wimpy.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “You know, I’ve had a lifetime of activism, and talking and writing about ways people can live more peaceably and lightly on the earth, and that simple phrase sums it all up for me: Do something beautiful.
“But I think to find out what it really means, you have to — at least this is what I believe — you have to go all the way back to find out who you are, or better to say, what you are.
“See if you can follow me here. When you look very deeply and honestly into yourself, past your name and personality, past your thoughts and emotions, past all the changeable things that you experience, you come to one undeniable fact: You are aware.”
We stopped walking for a moment. He was trying to feel that.
“Everything else that you are,” I said, “all the talk and fun and worries and great experiences you have, that all comes and goes, but your simple, plain awareness doesn’t. It’s pure and clear and right here. It can’t be seen, you can’t hold it in your hand, but it’s plain as day. It’s what you are, prior to your changing experiences and ideas of yourself.”
“Okay,” he said. “I kind of get that, but what’s that got to do with do something beautiful?”
“That’s the awesome part,” I said, “though not many people can see it. This clear, open awareness that you are is loving.It is loving awareness. You are loving awareness. If you want to know this for yourself, you have to go very slow and not get caught up in what your thoughts say about it.
“The easiest way I’ve found to see the truth of this, at least to begin with, is just to pretend for a moment that it’s true. For example, you might turn your attention now, if you can, to awareness itself. You’re aware, right? So notice how you feel toward your awareness. I mean, do you love being aware?”
“I guess so,” he said. “I never thought of it before.”
“Do you feel kindly toward your awareness? Just pretend you are. Are you grateful for it?”
“Well, sure.”
“That’s the trace of loving awareness. To put it another way, loving awareness is the natural open-heartedness of your presence.” We stopped walking again.
“See if you can drop down into just being present, just here, now, without following any ideas about who you are as a person, or what reality is, or what’s good and bad. See if you can sense your simple presence and its natural open-heartedness. That open-heartedness is loving awareness.
“To help you out,” I said, “you might bring to mind an animal or a person or some place you love. You don’t have to think about the reasons why you love that animal or person or place, just notice the lovingness you feel. It’s natural. It takes no effort. Can you sense that?”
“Yes,” he said, “Actually I can. When I think of my dog, I just love her. It’s beautiful.”
“And that’s what ‘do something beautiful’ means,” I said. “It’s when you let the natural loving awareness that you are touch the world. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It’s just a simple thing — to be present and open-hearted, and to touch the world that way, to see it that way, and to embrace it that way.”
“But what about Trump and climate change and the hard times that are coming?” he asked. “How can I love all that?”
“That’s the hard one,” I said. “You might think of it this way: one of the names of loving awareness is compassion.Compassion means holding the pain of the whole situation — Trump and his suffering as a kid and the suffering he causes now, and the broken rudder of the world, and the fear people feel and the selfishness that arises from that, the dying whales, all of it, holding all the pain and hurt in your open heart.”
“That sounds impossible,” he said. “Maybe the Pope could do that, or Jesus, but not me.”
“But you do it already,” I said. “For example, when you look at your parents — you love them, but you know they’re not perfect. They’ve made mistakes, they’ve hurt you sometimes or hurt other people. But your loving compassion surrounds them nevertheless, even though they’re not perfect. That’s doing something beautiful.
“Or you might turn your attention to yourself. Do you ever judge yourself, think that you’re not such a good person, that you’re not as good as others?”
“Oh sure,” he said.
“Okay. So see if you can hold yourself with compassion for a moment, compassion for even that feeling you have of not being good enough. You know life hasn’t always been easy for you. You’ve suffered, felt lonely, felt misunderstood, felt unloved. Hold all of that in your loving awareness. Hold yourself in compassion. Can you do that?”
“A little.”
“Well, that “little” is you doing something beautiful. It’s loving. It’s you holding yourself with an open, compassionate heart. If you keep practicing this move — and you can do it throughout your day with yourself and with whatever you experience, even with kids you see in school who you don’t like — you’ll see you can really experience them for a moment with your open, compassionate heart, knowing that they too have suffered and struggled. Doing this doesn’t take effort, but it does take being present and not judging. It takes being open-hearted.
“Anyway, that’s how I see it,” I said, “that’s how I understand what it means to do something beautiful. Hard times are here, and if we’re ever going to fix the world’s broken rudder, I think it has to start like this with each of us doing this beautiful thing, loving the world this openly in all the little ways we can, moment to moment. Does that make sense?”
He didn’t answer. He was looking up into the trees, wondering if this could be true.

18/02/2025

Image Robby Donaghey - Dwelling in the three worlds the inner world, our outer world and the cosmic dimension of our beings can allow us to hold our center in troubling times. These words came today from a Sufi list serve and I thought I would share them with you. Blessings, Raphael

"One who expects to change the world will be disappointed; one must change one’s view. When this is done, then tolerance will come, forgiveness will come, and there will be nothing one cannot bear."�– Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Commentary by Murshid Samuel L. Lewis (Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti): "Change of view does not mean simply to accept another person’s view. Particular view is the standpoint of the nufs; accepting another’s idea is to fall under the sway of nufs, in this case the nufs of another. The Sufi point of view is to perceive God’s position, and when one can view life from the universal aspect as God sees it, it will include all points of view. This brings tolerance naturally, not as a moral, not as a discipline, but as the very part and portion of life. Then one will tolerate and forgive because one will not only see the other’s viewpoint, one will know how and why the other came to that conclusion and will not separate the ideas from the whole life’s experience of another. This is tolerance with wisdom and understanding."

07/02/2025

CELEBATE COMMUNITY!

Those Years-Adrienne Rich
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I

02/02/2025

The Wheel of Awareness meditation is one way to connect with the Anima Mundi or World Soul Pir Elias writes about in the following https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-S2uk63xEH_NYwtz4sdGXlsS6xBMOKQs

Anima Mundi by Pir Elias Amidon
My hand moves this pen, leaving black ink on white paper. My room is cold on a winter morning, my stocking feet cool on the floor, this gray shawl warm on my shoulders. These are the signs of the world, the things in their particulars: hand, pen, ink, paper, shawl, shoulders. Even the movement of my hand, the coolness of the floor, the warmth of the shawl are “things,” so to speak, appearing as part of the presence of the world — appearing, appearing.
What magic! In this enigmatic universe with its star-clusters and nebulae and trillions of galaxies — what is it that has cared so much to bring about “hand, pen, ink, paper, shawl, shoulders?” What are these things? Why movement? coolness? warmth? What unspeakable, unknowable holiness dreamed them into being?
And then, that so-perplexing question: in what do they appear? In me? What is this “me” that is recipient of all these signs? I look, and look again, and whatever it might be, I come up empty-handed. “Unfindability inquiry” it’s called, an ancient form of inquiry found in all mystical traditions. My so-familiar “me” is… unfindable!
And yet, the particulars of the world keep appearing. If there’s no findable “me” to which they appear, then what’s happening? Hand, pen, ink, paper, shawl, shoulders, movement, coolness, warmth — how is it that they show up?
This kind of radical “nondual” inquiry usually leads at first to bewilderment — overturning the throne of the first-person singular — and then, if we’re lucky, to an astounding intuition or realization of an always-already-here, impersonal, unconditioned, all-pervading “presence-awareness” — a sort of background/foreground Awareness that’s everywhere, that’s not some kind of talent produced by my body, but a fundamental presence of Awareness that is the ground of all being and that’s as transparent as space. While there’s no “self” in it — it’s ungraspable, unsayable, and unconditioned — it is at the same time infinitely generous, the host of all that appears, which is why it is so often called love, love that's inseparable from the entire universe of conditions and things. If we are blessed with a glimpse of this numinous reality we realize with a joyous, relieving shock that our so-familiar “me” is nothing other than this all-pervading present-moment Awareness — a shock that propels us into realizing that we are free! naturally free within a “Great Belonging” that is already so.
It's a wonderful grace to glimpse this, even for a few moments at a time. It’s free medicine. It has the power to ease our infatuation with our problems, anxieties, and self-stories. Of course, they come back, but when they do they have a little less grip on our lives, and we begin to live more freely and lovingly.
But there’s a trap here. After the shocking intuition of our identity with this empty, open, all-pervading, loving awareness — once that recognition is no longer in-the-moment and it becomes a memory — our minds reify it as a kind of mysterious bliss “over there” that we now know about, a transcendent reality separate from this one, a place that we long to get back to but that has little to do with our everyday lives or any of the “things of the world.” In this way, what was recognized as the all-pervading ground, the “nondual basis of being,” becomes one element of a polarity — now there’s nonduality and duality, the transcendent and the imminent, heaven and earth, nirvana and samsara, the One and the many, contentless pure awareness and the “things of the world.” That’s the trap.
To avoid this trap we might try taking a closer look at the “things of the world” — hand, pen, ink, paper, shawl, shoulders, movement, coolness, warmth, looking to see where and how they “arise” in awareness. Are they pre-existing matter and energy-events waiting for awareness to notice them? Is there a “seam” between them and the awareness that is aware of them? Or is something else happening altogether?
I wonder — could it be that the “things of the world” are arising from the very nature of all-pervading Awareness, and that simultaneously, Awareness is arising from that very arising of the things? That the two are not separate? That they are one, sacred, simultaneous, event?
I know this is sounding terribly abstract, and in a way it doesn’t matter if we understand the ontology and relation of “things” and “awareness.” What does matter, I think, is that we look again at the things themselves, these endless appearances as they appear, and recognize that these “things” are just as numinous, holy, and wondrous in their appearance as is pure Awareness itself. These two — the “things” and “Awareness” — are not two!
When I’ve been lucky enough to see this, even for a moment, I get the feeling that the “things of the world” are ensouled with an alive presence, even in their transience. What’s more, it’s as if (and this may sound like a leap to you), it’s as if they are prescient with something, they want to tell us something — “the things of the world” have a gift. Perhaps we can get a hint of this by confessing that we too are among them, we too are of the “things of the world,” we arise in Awareness every bit as much as tree, or stone, or tower. Do we not have a gift too, along with all appearances? What is it we are prescient with? What does our “thingness” have to tell?
The ancients spoke of anima mundi, the soul of the world, and recognized that all things, all appearances, are expressions of this world soul. My sense is that the unity of “things” and “Awareness” that we’ve been contemplating, is exactly what they meant by anima mundi — that everything we perceive, and perceiving itself, is ensouled in some grand, generous, fecund mystery, the anima mundi.
Of course, we know full well that many things and appearances are unwholesome and life-denying, and we have every reason to question if they can be included in the “holy,” or “numinous.” Yes, they partake of the same mystery of arising as does perfume or a baby, but their affect is toxic and not wholesome. Perhaps what they have to tell us is this very affect of theirs — their unwholesomeness — so that we know the difference.
However that is, let us imagine for a moment that we are indeed embedded within, and arise from, the anima mundi. Hand, pen, ink, paper, shawl, shoulders, our thoughts, our feelings, our spirits — these “things of the world,” arising within the anima mundi, are ensouled with that anima and hold a promise. What is the promise of a tree? A table? A pottery jar? What is the promise of a human being?
Could it be that we’ve got reality wrong? That the “things of the world” are not dead matter that we can manipulate as we wish without losing our souls, and theirs?
I believe that when we realize the anima of “things,” their ensoulment and gift to us, we re-sacralize our world and bring it to life. And as we ourselves are indelible with this same anima — the numinous simultaneity of Awareness and Appearance — we naturally care. We care for the shape of the jar, the promise of the tree, the gift of the table. We listen to what they have to tell us, and they listen back! Then our lives are no longer a matter of making our way through belligerent and inanimate things, forcing them to obey our will. Instead we have the awesome responsibility to care with them, to bring forth their promise and ours, which may turn out to simply be the gift of beauty, this mysterious gift from the source we share with every blessed thing.

Learn about and practice the Wheel of Awareness, a profoundly healing contemplative practice developed by Dr. Dan Seigel through an understanding of neurosci...

22/01/2025

Connecting with deeper dimensions of our being or the infinite can lead to more effective actions addressing the suffering of our world!