Because Your Life is a Journey
Fresh servings to keep your inner life nourished.
In Service and Support of Meaningful, Vital Living.
In Service and Support of Meaningful, Vital Living.
Each month we craft for you a fresh set of resources and put them at your fingertips. This month, we have a newly released guided meditation, an Essential Conversation with Richard Blanco…
As you’ll see below, we’ve put together a full webpage of materials that our team pulls together to keep you engaged, animated, and on track with your current Journey.
Your support of our subscription offering will help us to make it through to the summer, when we can provide in-person programs once again.
Thank you for being such an essential part of our Hero’s Journey community of travelers. Enjoy this month’s offering!!
February, 2021
As the dark, cold days of February settle in – during times that feel wearisome, and when overwhelm seems always close by – we want you to help you find the time and space needed to settle back more deeply into yourself, and embrace the season we are in.
Here are some offerings in support of personal wintering, upliftment, and perennial renewal…
LISTEN TO A POEM
THE WINTER OF LISTENING
A poem by David Whyte, from his classic book of poetry, The House of Belonging.
Reading by Michael Mervosh.
INTRODUCTION
Our ability to ‘be here now’, by staying present and paying attention to what is unfolding, and to do this well enough in order to live through the disruption of such a chaotic and disturbing time in our world, is one way to ‘be an essential worker’.
By cultivating the ability to be present, we can better withstand the depths of a prolonged and unsettling uncertainty as we continue to endure a massive, global health threat, and a highly polarized, tense, and ever-escalating socio-political climate.
As we navigate this unknown territory, and find our most authentic response that can be a contribution, we can establish ‘islands of sanity’, becoming more capable of equanimity towards others who live so different from ourselves.
This will be how we can contribute to the restoration of the world around us, as greater complexity inevitably emerges at some point from chaos and uncertainty. It is up to us – to bear a dynamic tension in the days ahead, sustaining ourselves through winter’s enfolding silence.
Together, let’s look toward the winter that still awaits us, and to the adventures that are born from the ordeals we live through.
REFLECT – 15 minutes
Embracing the Silent Stillness of February’s Winter
Set aside 15 minutes to sit with the following questions. Let them bring forth from you fresh awareness of the elemental presence of winter.
- What did you have to face this year that you’ve never had to face before? What came out of these confrontations with the more threatening aspects of facing the unknown?
- What essential conversation or encounter happened for you this year? Who were they with – what awareness or energy lingers for you from these engagements? What is vital to keep in mind? What lives on?
- LISTEN TO GEORGE WINSTON’S PEACEFUL PIANO ELEGY, “WINTER“
PRACTICE EMBODIED PRESENCE
A Guided Meditation
Enlivening & Shifting Your Energy
A 22-minute meditation for separating yourself out from the sameness of your routines, and gradually shifting and increasing your energy through pranayama breath work Join Hero’s Journey® Foundation founder and teacher Michael Mervosh in facing uncertainty with an enlivened presence for the Journey ahead today.
“What is not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we are unable to live.
As we know now more than ever before about the kinds of lives it is possible to live – and affluence has allowed more people than ever before to think of their lives in terms of choices and options – we are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have in ourselves to be or do.
Once the next life – the better life, the fuller life – has to be in this one, we have a considerable task on our hands.”
READ – Is The Unlived Life Worth Examining?
MISSING OUT: In Praise Of the Unlived Life
This is a good time to read out familiar challenges and struggles we have with being human from a fresh and interesting perspective.
“In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation,” Alain de Botton wrote in his meditation on Nietzsche and why a fulfilling life requires difficulty.
Adam Phillips examines the paradoxical relationship between frustration and satisfaction, exploring how our unlived lives illuminate the priorities, values, and desires undergirding the lives we do live.
Read a Review of Missing Out.
LISTEN
A Relevant Podcast for Staying the Course: ‘Facing Our Feelings’
A one hour deep dive into the issue of ‘avoidance vs. encounter’, with the analysts from This Jungian Life. Listen to how this threshold point reflects and represents for us the challenge of Facing Our Feelings, something which is essential for facing the necessity of our current ordeals.
Jung famously said, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering”. It is the avoidance of facing our ordeals that creates the psychological disturbance in our minds, which ends up embedded in the psyche. We have to face our feelings.
Jung also said, “Our emotions happen to us; affect occurs at the point at which our adaptation is weakest and at the same time exposes the reason for its weakness.” So what is calling for encounter instead of avoidance, displacement or somatization?
Have a listen.
WATCH
An Intimate & Essential Conversation With Poet Richard Blanco
As a historic presidential inaugural poet, public speaker, teacher and memoirist, he continues to travel the world, inviting audiences to reconnect to the heart of the human experience and all of its beautiful diversity.
Through the power of his words and presence, Blanco taps into our unspoken dreams, hopes and frustrations. He poignantly captures the human spirit and condition in all of its complexities, opening up our minds, and encouraging us to see beyond our differences to share in the universal experience of our humanity.
What he does exceptionally well is the way he speaks his poetry. He transmits something ineffable and essential, something that his words carry forth that comes from something real and exquisitely attentive within him. Be an active witness to an Essential Conversation. You will want to have a few words with him.
LISTEN – 40 minutes
Mary Oliver Reading
From “A Thousand Mornings”
Listen to Mary Oliver read her own poetry. This is an extra treat, to feel this American treasure animate her own words with the life force of her own distinct personality and essence.
The following poem is among the poems she transmits with her wit and passion,
I Go Down to the Shore
by Mary Oliver
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
A Feel Good Story
A recent headline from the New York Times by Sarah Mervosh. A nursing home where vaccinations have finished offers a glimpse at what the other side of the pandemic might look like.
SOUL – A Pixar Movie
Everyone has a soul. Joe Gardner is about to find his.
A delightful and creative romp through the afterlife and The Great Before, “Soul” is the kind of movie that has you wanting to cherish the life you have, and it makes you want to live it more fully, every single day, ideally with lots of laughs along the way.
Take a break from the weariness of the pandemic and winter weather to enjoy a creative and touching story.
Read & Reflect
Beyond Your Own Life: Build The Great Arch Of Unimagined Bridges
– An Essay by Michael Mervosh-
Once we give ourselves over an embodied sense of living the adventure by facing an ordeal, doors begin to open for us that lead us into the realm of living myths – where metaphors, psychic representations and ambiguity rule the terrain, and our more simplistic, black and white thinking falls away, being of no use.
By allowing an ordeal to unfold itself before us, a worthy adventure can take place. Then we approach our own interior spaces themselves as symbolic representations – as dark forests, wide-open desert plains, vast mountain ranges, deep ocean waters or dark underground caves.
We need access to a kind of creative generativity, found in a mythic imagination, to enter the realms daring new possibility, which is the essence of a hero’s journey.
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In Service and Support of Meaningful, Vital Living.