Dream dreams before you begin projects

What do YOU really want out of life?

To answer this question we will focus in on the following:

1) The human DREAM of  happiness and intimate relationships that love creates and sustains

2) Our dream has become DORMANT because more superficial ones demand so much of our time, energy and resources.

3) A difficult CHOICE confronts us if we are to AROUSE and REALISE our dream..

4) This involves developing our potential to BE LOVED and to LOVE for it is this that makes and maintains our relationships and and the happiness we find in them. “It is Care that makes and sustains us”. (Greek proverb)

The human DREAM of HAPPINESS
found in the intimate RELATIONSHIPS
that LOVE makes and maintains

A dream common to all and unique to each
When we ask what people down through the centuries have thought about human life and what they valued most in it we find an answer in the writings of Joseph Campbell. He spent a lifetime studying the stories people have been telling from the beginning and continue to tell today in novels and films. What he found was that all our stories are about an inner journey we go on in search of three things. These are the intimate relationships and happiness that love draws us into. This is the human dream that is innate to each of us and is always seeking fulfilment no matter how much we neglect it. Hilaire Belloc in his poem Dedicatory Ode speaks of this dream as the only thing in life that is ‘worth the wear of winning’.

From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.

It is about the love central to this dream that Raymond Carver writes in his poem Late Fragment. He sees this love as what his life has been essentially about.

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

In the film City Slickers three men go off for a fortnight to help bring a herd of cattle from New Mexico to Colorado. In the following scene they reflect back on their lives, on the good and on the bad times. Notice how prominent their dream of love, relationships and happiness is in what the recall. To watch the scene on YouTube, go to

The dream innate to all things

Deep within you is written your own song;
sing it with all your heart

‘I have a dream a song to sing’
When I play the Abba song I Have A Dream for groups it arouses a huge response. I think this is not just because it is a catching tune sung by a great group but it is more that the words of the song arouse something very profound in people. This is epitomised in the word dream and how it resonates and brings to the surface something we spend our lives journeying towards. If you want to listen to the song and to see what it arouses in you, go to

This website is built around this idea that what we most want out of life centres on a dream that is innate to us as it is to all things  For example, the dream in the tiny acorn is what guides it as it grows, slowly and surely, until it reaches fulfilment as a majestic oak tree. It is awesome to think that each stage of its growth is guided by something that is in the acorn from which it grew. We might call what was in the acorn a plan, a design or a dream that is built into it and even though the tree’s growth is influenced by circumstances like storms, each stage of its development is shaped by the dream in it seeking fulfilment.

The dream is INNATE in all of us and yet UNIQUE to each

It develops CONSISTENTLY and thus has a STORY of how it grew

It has unrelenting ENERGY urging our dream towards FULFILMENT

A dream that is hidden deep within
Like everything else in creation we too have a built-in dream that urges us to live life to the full and realise all the potential that is ours as human beings. We get our first experience of our dream of the close relationships and happiness that love draws us towards in the home and contentment that out parents’ love creates and sustains for us. A very distinctive feature of our human dream is that it will not, like that in the oak tree, be automatically realised. As adults we become responsible for becoming aware of and for realising what our parents gave us our first experience of.

In practice, being responsible for our dream involves our being willing to provide the time, energy and resources required if we are to realise it. This is a difficult task because our preoccupation with more superficial dreams means that our essential one becomes dormant. The following story is a commentary on this mysterious experience of how unaware we are of our dream and of how hidden something so important for our happiness has become.

I don’t know who I really am

Once upon a time when the gods were so new that they had no names, they were envious of human beings. These humans were still so new that the clay from which they had been made was still wet and damp. Since they claimed that they were divine in some ways the gods were not happy about this so one night they stole the divine fire hidden in them.

They wanted to hide it where people would never find it. But that was not so easy for if they hid it anywhere on earth, man with his inquisitive mind would be sure to find it. If they kept it among themselves, man might one day climb all the way to the sky to find it. When the gods were in discussion, the wisest of them said, “I know what I’ll do. Give it to me”. He then closed his hand around the tiny unstable light, which was man’s stolen godhead. And when the great hand opened again, the light was gone. “Everything is going to be safe,” said the wisest of the gods. “I have hidden it where man will never dream of looking for it. I have hidden it inside of man himself”.

If the human dream is to be fulfilled, we must:

BECOMA AWARE of and

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR realising it

otherwise it becomes DORMANT

In the film Shirley Valentine we have a portrait of a woman reflecting on the consequences of allowing her dream to remain dormant. To see it on YouTube, go to

How this dream has gone DORMANT 
because more superficial ones
have been given centre stage

The true self lies dormant

The reason why the dream is so hidden from view is that we live at a time when our outer world of work and earning a living dominates and pushes the inner one aside so that we are no longer conscious of it. In other words, the outer, material world of Science, Economics and the consumer culture demand so much of our time, energy and resources that our inner world of relationships has to make do with what is left over. As Wordsworth said, referring to the effect that the demands of the Industrial Revolution had on peoples’ lives, ”Getting and spending we lay waste our powers”. Similarly today consumerism trivialises life and “lays waste” our potential to be fully human.

In this clip from the film, Up In The Air we hear someone say that in the world of work relationships are “an escape” from reality or from “the ultimate seduction”. To see it, go to

It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction. Pablo Picasso

Waking our dream or our sense of what is ultimately important
Stephen Covey in his book The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People tells us in practical terms how this culture of “getting and spending lays waste our powers” seduces us today.  He says that in his work with groups he begins by asking people to identify one thing that, if they did it, would make a big difference in their lives. He says that they know what they need to do. Then he asks them to notice whether what they have chosen is belonging to the category of things that are urgent or things that are important. He explains that urgent things come from outside pressures or from peoples’ expectations while important things come from inside us, from our own convictions of what is of most value to us. Covey finds that almost without exception the things people write down that would make a tremendous difference in their lives are important but not urgent.

As he discusses this with them they notice that the reason they don’t do the important things is that they are not urgent or pressing. He concludes,

“Unfortunately, most people are addicted to the urgent. In fact, if they are not being driven by the urgent, they feel guilty. They feel as if something is wrong”.

Taking time to dream dreams and see visions

In The7 Habits of Highly Effective Families Covey is convinced that the “most successful executives focus on importance, and less effective executives focus on urgency. Sometimes the urgent is also important, but much of the time it is not. Clearly, to focus on what is truly important is far more effective than to focus on what is merely urgent. It’s true in all walks of life – including the family. Of course, parents are going to have to deal with crises and with putting out fires that are both important and urgent. But when they proactively choose to spend more time on things that are truly important but not necessarily urgent, it reduces the crises and the fires”. In the film Up In The Air we witness a man, who has just lost his job, being challenged to marry what is urgent and what is important and so follow his dream. To view the scene on YouTube, go to

What is important and what is urgent
The interplay of deep and superficial dreams

Caught in the swirl of many desires

Sometimes Nick is a little uneasy about the work he does, for he notices that when he buys people’s deep dream, something dies within them. What soothes his misgivings, however, is that most people are only too willing to do business with him. They obviously find their deep dream too difficult to maintain and are glad to be freed from its demands.

To listen to Leonard Cohen’s song about Joan of Arc’s struggle to follow the dream her inner voice told her to and not give way to more superficial ones go to

The essential human tragedy
When we allow the more superficial dreams we build around our career, for example, to dominate our day we tend to neglect the deeper one of the love and the relationships that make us human. Meeting the expectations of our outer world of work demands so much of our time, energy and our resourcefulness that there is often little left over for anything else. If we allow this imbalance between our outer and inner worlds to continue for much of our lives we become very impoverished in a way described in the following quotation.

The essential sadness of our human family is that very few of us ever reach the realisation of our full potential. I accept the estimate of the theoreticians that the average person accomplishes only 10% of his potential. … He is only 10% open to his emotions, to tenderness, to wonder and awe. His mind embraces only a small part of the thoughts, reflections and understanding of which he is capable. His heart is only 10% alive with love. He will die without having really lived or really loved. To me this is the most frightening of all possibilities. John Powell: A Reason To Live A Reason To Die

The ultimate remedy: A return to what is central

… to our lives as children, lovers and friends

John Powell believes that the reason for this human impoverishment is our failure to be true to two sides of ourselves or to cultivate two kinds of love that act as a foundation for all others. The first of these loves accepts the reality that as human beings we are essentially limited and often wayward. The second love appreciates how gifted and good we are in spite of the weakness and waywardness we live with.

… as children
We all have a huge amount of experience of how important was the presence or absence of these two loves in the family we grew up in. We are probably more aware of the importance of these two loves in providing a healthy atmosphere for our own children to find happiness in. Added to these two loves of acceptance and appreciation are those of the concern we have for our children and the personal love which gives them a sense of worth that is unique to each one. Though our human experience of these four aspects of love may be limited or deficient at times they form the foundation on which rests all our relationships and happiness.

… as lovers
When we fall in love we are drawn into a mutual sharing of the loves we learnt from our parents. The passionate nature of this love acts as a catalyst that changes us from self-centred adolescents into other-centred adults. However, if our falling in love is to find fulfilment in the ultimate love we call friendship, we must find a way to make it last and to deepen it.

… and as friends
Because of this accumulated experience of love and the wisdom we have drawn from it the ancient Greek story about Care finds an echo in us all. It highlights the fact that it is Care or love, more than anything else, that makes and sustains human life.. This is evidenced by the fact that “What is love?” is the question most often asked of Google. There is no other topic that is of more interest to people for, more than anything else, it brings human life to fulfilment.

In the film About Schmidt there are two scenes that illustrate the role of acceptance and of appreciation in our lives. To watch the first of these in which he is forced to come to terms with or accept the poverty of his life go to. Then to see how in this context he is invited to appreciate the huge difference he has made in the life of an African child called Ndugu go to  Then in the light of this read the quotation below.

It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual
than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.
Dag Hammarskjold

Care makes and sustains us

Care was crossing a river one day when she took some soft mud and shaped it into a human being. She wanted to give this her own name but Earth also laid claim to this privilege because it was of her that the human being was formed. Care then asked Jupiter who was passing by to give her creation a spirit. This he gladly agreed to do but then he too wanted it called after him.

  They decided to ask Saturn to be arbiter and he gave the following decision which seemed a wise one. Jupiter had given it spirit, so he would receive that back when death came. Since earth had contributed the body, she should receive that back too when death came. However, since care had formed this humus or human being, it would be in her keeping as long as it lived. Further, it would be called Man or `homo’ since it was formed of humus or Earth.

In this Age of Authenticity we live in, the Beatles gave fresh expression to the reality that All You Need Is Love. To listen to this rousing call to face this reality, go to.

The CHOICE that confronts us
if we are to AROUSE and REALISE our dream
or basic human potential

Taking the road less travelled

What Care as the personification of love ‘makes and sustains’ is the human dream of happiness that we find in our relationships with family and friends. The realisation of this human dream is not just a private matter for it confronts us with what a four year study done in the European Union calls “the essential crisis” we face today. This in their view is “the disconnect between religion and the dominant culture”. In other words in the last five centuries a deep chasm has opened up between two world views or between two ways of seeing the world and what in it is of value. Which we decide to make a priority is what concerns W B Yeats in his poem, The Choice.

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

Choosing between “the perfection of the life, or of the work”
The two world views represented in the poem by the ‘perfection of the life, or of the work’ bid for our allegiance and thus for the bulk of our time, energy and resourcefulness. The first of these world views can be summarised in the following way.

The network of relationships Care draws us into

One of these world views makes a priority of the basic human quest for love and relationships as well as for the happiness we find there. We get our first experience of this deep human dream within the family we are born into where the love of our parents forms a home and the happiness we find there. When we leave home and form a family of our own we have a dream for our children and it is that our love for them will provide a home in which they will be happy. When humanity reappraises the value of this love we will ‘have discovered fire for the second time’.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world humanity will have discovered fire. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

All are cogs in the machine

The other world view, while it may admit in theory that love, relationships and happiness are a priority, has in practice made the world of work and wealth, of career and prosperity its priority. We see the truth of this in the time, energy and resourcefulness that is devoted to the outer world of what we do for a living so that there is little left for our inner world of love and relationships. This world view born of Science, Economics and Consumerism has over the last five centuries become the dominant culture. As such it sidelines and belittles our inner world which has to make do with the leftovers. Because our outer world is so dominant it sends the inner one to sleep.

“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.” Eric Fromm: The Art of Loving

For a fuller description of these two world views that bid for our allegiance today go to: http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=31678 There is also an introduction to it in The Quiet Revolution in the menu My Books on this website.

In the film, Tuesdays with Morrie we are told a story of two people who represent the two cultures we live with today. One of the two, called Morrie Schwartz has been a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University for many years and the other, called Mitch, was one of his students.  When Mitch graduated he was too busy to keep in contact with his professor who had become a friend.

Almost twenty years later, Mitch is now a sports newscaster and writer. He and his wife are part of America’s fast lane, doing well and frenetically striving for yet more. Then he watches Nightline one night and he sees Ted Koppel interviewing Morrie. Mitch is taken aback to discover that Morrie is dying and so he determines to visit him. Thus begins a series of intimate conversations during which we witness the two cultures that Morrie and Mitch represent being compared in a very powerful way. If you wish to see the final scene of the film on YouTube, go to.

Facing the basic choice of adult life

Will I have the sky for my limits or not?

The vital nature of the choice that faces each of us between these two world views is symbolised in the following story.

The Sky`s The Limit
There was once a poultry farmer who was given a present of an eagle`s egg. He decided to experiment with it so he put it among some eggs a hen was hatching out. In due course it emerged with the other chicks and grew up with these. Even though it was never quite the same as them it adapted itself to their ways and always thought of itself, and acted, as one of them. So it spent its time with the other chickens within the strict confines of the barnyard.

One day when it was about a year old its eye was caught by the inspiring sight of an eagle in full flight and something stirred within it. However, its gaze was soon brought back to earth, by a cock telling it to stop star-gazing and to get on with the job.

Now, there are two endings to the story. One has the young eagle putting its head back down as it had been told to do and continuing for the rest of its days within the very limited world of the barnyard. The other ending is, that the young eagle inspired by the vision in the sky, stretched its wings and took off. From then on it was no longer confined to the barnyard but had the sky for its limits.

Having the skies for your limit

In the story, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull written by Richard Bach we have a powerful portrayal of our need to have the sky for our limits as well as to remain part of a group. To listen to Richard Harris narrate the story, even how it begins, go to

The call to dream, to have the sky for our limits
In one of her short stories the Irish writer Mary Lavin wrote about Brother Boniface. As an old monk he recalled how as a very young lad he had discovered the stars but that in the struggle to make a living he tended to lose sight of them. Hence he realised he had to move beyond making a living to dream, to be enraptured by simple things, for otherwise in keeping his mind on what he was doing he forgot the sky above. He recalled that his father, to prevent him idling had sent him to deliver messages from their shop to the monastery and though it was not very exciting it gave him a chance to dream. Then she writes:

`As he cycled home his sadness deepened for it seemed to him that whether you cobbled or whether you hammered, whether you weighed up rice on a scales or led a colt round and round in a ring, or whether you stood at evening in a field opening or closing your hand to let fall a shower of seeds, you had to keep your eyes upon what you were doing, and soon you forgot that there was a sky overhead and earth underfoot, and that flowers blew and even that birds sang’.

@ Developing our potential to be loved and to love 
for it is this that the happiness
we find in our relationships depends on.

“It is Care that makes and sustains us”

Nothing but realising our deepest dream will ultimately satisfy us
In his poem, What Then? W B Yeats expresses his conviction that we all have an inner voice that reminds us of our deepest longings. This voice persists no matter how much we neglect these deep desires in our pursuit of more superficial ones. Yeats personifies these deep longings as Plato’s ghost urging us to seek our human ideal. This voice points out how inadequate is most of what we achieve in life to satisfy our ultimate thirst for the happiness that can be found in the ordinary love and relationships of each day.

What Then?
His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;

“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”
Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,

Friends that have been friends indeed;
“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”
All his happier dreams came true –
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,

Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”
“The work is done,” grown old he thought,

‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought’;
But louder sang that ghost, “What then?”
W B Yeats

If we are to let our desire for human fulfilment or the voice of Plato’s ghost have its say, we need to face the basic challenge of adult life. This is to take responsibility for realising the dream of love, relationships and happiness innate to every human being. Of these three elements of our dream, love is the one that creates and sustains the other two and so taking responsibility for learning how to develop it will now be the main focus of our interest.

Rowing against the current
In seeking to make love central to life we will be rowing against the current of today’s dominant culture for even though the art of loving is the greatest of all the arts it is in practice the most neglected. If we are to make love and the inner world of relationships a priority, there are four realities we must face.

 Four facts about love 
we must face
if we are to explore it successfully

1) Today’s dominant culture sees something other than love as central
The first of these realities is highlighted by a scene from the film, Dead Poets Society. In it Mr Keating who teaches English in a prestigious school in New England invites his class out into the school quadrangle. There he gets three of them to stroll around in front of the others. Having done so for a short while they fall in behind each other and start marching to the time beat out by the rest of the class. Mr Keating, seeking to help them understand why this occurred says,

We have all a great need for acceptance but you must trust that your own beliefs are unique even though others may say they are odd or unpopular, even though the herd may go, “That’s bad!” Robert Frost said,

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by
and that has made all the difference.

If you want to watch this scene on YouTube, go to.

A pathway into the quiet

Since Science, Economics and their offspring Consumerism have been at work for centuries convincing us that only what is measurable, in material and monetary terms, is real, the inner world of love and relationships has been belittled, downgraded and sidelined. What goes on in this inner world is seen as a private matter and too idealistic and subjective to compete for the best of the day’s time and energy. In spite of knowing in our heart that family and friends are what really matter we would feel uneasy about being asked to be as resourceful in the way we love and relate as we are about our work and making a good living. Therefore, it is most likely that we will bring these prejudices to what follows and they will make us doubt the importance of trusting our own wisdom. We will easily slip into questioning its realism and relevance.

If you wish to watch a relevant clip from the film, Dead Poets Society in which we are asked about the things we live for, whether it be our work or “beauty, romance love”, go to.

Human love is limited or has its boundaries

2) Facing the fact that human love is of its nature limited
In focussing on love as the one thing beyond all others that makes and maintains us as human beings it is crucial to recognise the fact that human love is of its nature limited. If this limitation is allowed to preoccupy us, as it tends to, we are in danger of missing much of what is life-giving in our daily experience. This is like the way our attention can be so dominated by a small spot on a white sheet of paper that we lose touch with all but this spot. For example, if our parents did not appreciate us in the way we would have wanted them to, this can obscure the many ways they did love us in a life-giving way. We need to take account of the fact that because10% or so of the love we receive or give is deficient it can easily fixate us so that we do not recognise or relish the 90% of love that is on offer. In the light of this it is crucial that we learn to accept the fact that human love is of its nature limited and that we make mistakes in the way we relate. If we do not accept these deficiencies, they tend to preoccupy us so that we do not pay enough attention to the 90% of ourselves and others that we need to appreciate.

To listen to how painfully limited love can be, listen to Joe Cocker singing Don’t You Love Me Anymore? go to.

Love’s illusions

3) In todays cultural environment the word love brings a number of illusions with it.
a) Love is seen mainly in physical and emotional terms and this obscures a much deeper dimension of love we have in the convictions of another’s goodness and beauty.

b) Another illusion emerges when the glimpses we regularly get of the ordinary integrity, goodness and beauty of another person remain dormant because we have not learned to notice these and therefore rarely express our appreciation of them.

c) Then there is the illusion we buy into when we expect the one who loves us to satisfy our immense hunger for love. This is an unfair burden to lay on another human being whose capacity to love us is by its nature limited as well as prone to make mistakes.

d) There is the illusion too that occurs when we repress or fail to cultivate the sensate and emotional requirements of love as it matures.

e) We may also suffer from the illusion that love is largely a man-woman affair. In all our relationships we need to be loved and to love with our whole person or with our whole body, heart and mind. Love comes as much through courtesy and feelings as it does through the glimpses we are given of others and the convictions we have come to about them. It is only in times of crisis that our convictions about what another person means to us emerges from the shadows.

How some of these illusions are portrayed in the film, Another Woman
In one of Woody Allen’s films called Another Woman we have the unfold­ing of the story of a woman’s attitude to her passion, her feelings and her sexuality. As the story has something important to say about some illusions love is prone to we are looking at here and about another aspect of love we will look at next, it would be worthwhile dwelling with the story as a background to the clip from this film given below.

At the beginning of the sto­ry we meet her as a successful lecturer in phi­losophy. She is very intellec­tual and con­trolled. She appears to be devoid of passion and shows little feeling, apart from being embar­rassed when her friends talk openly about their sex life. It is when she tries to move further into her intellec­tual ivory tower in getting away to write a book that her world of reserve is taken apart.

As she begins her book, she overhears a young woman in an adjoining apartment talking to her therapist. She is drawn into their conversa­tion, as she finds it echoes her own experience. We watch her as she re-lives the memories that are aroused in her by what is happening next door. She gradually realises how sti­fling her feelings, for the sake of intellectual pursuits, has led her to a loss of intimacy and authentic relation­ships.

Through going back to the memory of someone who had fallen in love with her, she learns to believe again in the possibilities in her own life of feeling and passion. As a result she experiences a sense of peace for the first time in many years, and she finds that the cre­ativ­ity to write her book is released. In this clip from the film we see how she is caught between the love of two men who relate to her in very different ways and how at this stage of the story she settles for what is safe. To look at the clip on YouTube, go to

Four levels of human experience

4) Love is an experience of sense and soul, of feelings and heartfelt convictions
The most effective way to explore these different kinds of love we are familiar with is not through the mind alone but by engaging our whole person. To do this we must approach our experience through the four levels at which we normally love and relate.

We begin at a sensate level by remembering an experience of love and then at an intuitive level we need to put words on what the experience says to us or on the glimpses of love it gives us. These glimpses will invite us at a feeling level to notice and put words on how we relish or resist what the event we recall is saying to us. Finally, if we are to benefit fully from what our experience reveals to us, we need to dwell with or savour it. In this way the love we have glimpsed and been moved by gets a chance to take root in our mind and heart and so becomes a conviction.

Because this conviction or belief in the love we have received engages our whole person: body, spirit, heart and mind it gives us an interior knowledge rather than just an exterior, intellectual one. By getting in touch with these convictions about what is true and of value that we have accumulated during our life we arouse the unique wisdom we each possess. This intimate knowledge of being loved is the most valuable and life-giving experience available to us; it is the Care that makes and sustains us.

It is wise to return to those places
Where we have been touched
In ways beyond mind’s scrutiny.
There we capture glimpses
that nourish our wisdom
Written in the body for the soul to read.

In the song Can’t Keep It In sung by Cat Stevens we experience the power of love to involve our whole person in the way we love and relate. To listen to it on YouTube, go to.

We explore the education in love that life is
in the following five exercises

Love as the pulsing heart of all our experience

The following outline of the exercises that follow seeks to provide you with an overview of how we will explore how love is the mainspring of human life. It is what inspires the dream of close relationships and of the happiness that human life is essentially about.

• The first exercise focuses on outlining your story for it is on this that all the other exercises will work.
• The second exercise explores the significant people in your life or those who by the various ways they loved you influenced the direction your life has taken.
• In the third exercise you are invited to explore a number of very specific kinds of love you are familiar with. Your objective is to notice and name, as well as to savour and assimilate the loves you have encountered as you journeyed through your life.
• In the fourth exercise we will examine a way of working with your experience so that you get your whole person involved in becoming aware and making your own of the love you have received and given in life.
• The fifth exercise invites you to explore the wisdom you have learned from these exercises.  In them you have sought to arouse your dormant experience of love and of the dream of intimacy and happiness it generates.

In David Ford’s Song For The Road he sings about a love that is at the core of his life. He envisages himself on a journey into this love which he chooses beyond all else. To listen to the song, go to:

Reaching for what is at the centre

THE CONTENTS

The following is a list of the exercises that the basic five listed above will be broken down into. You will notice that exercises 3, 4 and 5 have a number of exercises associated with them and these are indented and named Exercise 3.1, 3.2 for example.

Below is a list of the nineteen exercises you are invited to do. Some of the basic exercises outlined above have more more than one

EXERCISE 1] Stepping Stones. Go to it

EXERCISE 2] Significant People. Go to it

$EXERCISE 3] Nine kinds of love. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.1] Love as ACCEPTANCE. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.2] Keep your eye on the doughnut. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.3] Love as APPRECIATION. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.4] Counting our blessings. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.5] Provident love or concern. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.6] A concern that is sensitive etc. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.7] Love that is personal. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.8] Love that is passionate about life. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.9] Love that lasts or is permanent. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.10] Profound love. Go to it

EXERCISE 3:11] Friendship. Go to it

EXERCISE 3.12] Love as joyful. Go to it

EXERCISE 4] Four levels at which we love and relate. Go to it

EXERCISE 4 1] Working towards the conviction that we are loved

EXERCISE 4 2] The conviction that we are loved

EXERCISE 5] Harvesting your life’s wisdom. Go to it

EXERCISE 5.1] Arousing your inner wisdom. Go to it

EXERCISE 5.2] The dream at the centre. Go to it

EXERCISE 5.3] All can put us in touch with our dream and its wisdom. Go to it

Exercise 1: Stepping stones

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” 
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Listening to the music of what happens

One day the Irish mythic warrior Fionn was resting for a while when he and his companions were out hunting. A question arose about what was the most beautiful music in the world. Oisin said it was the cuckoo calling while Oscar said that in his opinion it was the ring of a spear on a shield. Other companions said that the finest sound was the belling of a stag, the baying of hounds heard in the distance, the song of a lark, the laughter of a gleeful girl or the whisper of a moved one. When they eventually turned to Fionn and said, “Tell us chief what you think” he answered, “The music of what happens, that is the finest music in the world”

I think the story is saying something to us about the fact that there there is no knowledge more valuable and that we resonate with more than that which awaits discovery in the events of our own story. From it we have drawn the convictions about what for each of us is true and worthwhile, the personal wisdom that gives meaning and value to everything.  The deepest reason why what happens in our own story is music to our ears is that it speaks to us of the happiness we find in love and relationships.

We each have a huge amount of personal experience and a wisdom we have drawn from it. As a result there is a lot of what goes on around us that harmonises with our wisdom and is the music of what happens. We accumulate this wisdom on a journey we all go on in search of things such as love, intimacy and happiness. These are things everyone longs for as they are part of a dream that is innate to us as human beings. We haven’t got to make up our minds whether we want something like happiness or not as it is at the heart of what we desire.

The wisdom of experience written on our faces

However, this dream of happiness is pushed from the centre of the stage by more superficial dreams, for example, of success in our career or of prosperity. Consequently, our deep dream of what we really want becomes dormant. To arouse it again we need to look at the events of our lives for it is there we will find the music of what has happened to us in life. This music is like a harmony we have experienced in the way we see and feel about our lives. The difficulties we experience in journeying back into our story is the mix of of good and bad, of pleasure and pain as well as the negative feelings it stirs up that we must deal with if we are to get at the huge amount of positive experience that is there.

There is a very interesting account of how someone works with her story in this way in Cheryl Strayed’s book called, Wild. In it she describes a journey she made walking alone the 1800 kilometres of the Pacific Crest Trail. It turned out to be a profound journey into the events and people who loved her in limited but very real ways. If you wish to watch an interview she gave about her experiences on this outer and inner journey, go to:

We have learned this wisdom from people like your parents and from the cultural environment in which we have grown up. But the most important part of this wisdom, that which makes all the rest tangible, colourful and real, is our personal experience. This is like the axle on which all else turns; it gives the rest of our experience its most authentic meaning and value.

Unfortunately, we do not avail of this wisdom that resides in our personal experience because doing so is difficult. It is to provide a step by step approach to discovering this wisdom that we begin by telling our own story in the following way:

1) Divide your life into 5-10 periods

2) With a word or phrase name one or more significant events in each of these periods.

3) Relive one of these events at a time and sketch briefly what happened.

4) Notice places where you are moved by what you recall.

The road you have travelled

In a poem Ruth Bidgood wrote called Roads she voices a number of What ifs? about how things might have worked if I had chosen another way instead of the one I actually took. She concludes that

For nowhere but this here and now
Is my true destination….

And all the steps of my life
Have brought me home.
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Exercise 2: Significant people

Our first taste of what love is like

Each friend represents a world in us,
a world possibly not born until they arrive,
and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. Anais Nin

In this exercise we will focus in on people who have played an important role in our lives and are thus what we will call significant or important people in our story. We will gauge their importance by their love for us since it is this love or Care that more than anything else has made and sustained us in life. “It is Care that makes and sustains us”.

These people like our parents, people we fall in love with and our friends are the ones who have given us an impression of what love is like, they have defined love for us and moved us towards the belief that we are loved. The most significant people in our lives are those who have given us the deepest impression of what love is like; these are the people who have given us a glimpse of the love that is the most creative force in the world.

Give them an impression of who I am
A young peasant lad was summoned by a great king to come and see him. When he arrived at the palace, the king said to him, “My kingdom is so large that I cannot meet all my people and touch their lives as I would want to. My wish is that you would give them an impression of who I am.”

As symbols of the new role he was to play, the king gave the youth a sceptre, a robe and a crown. Now, since he did not know the king, the poor lad was very confused about what he was being sent to do. He was too awe-struck to ask the king what he meant, so he went to consult a wise man. He was told by him to go back to his little farm and just  be himself.

As time went on, more and more people came to visit him for they found in him a sympathetic ear and a compassionate heart. Gradually he realised that this was what the great king had sent him to do. This was the way he was to give people an impression of what the Great King was like.

We get a flavour of how someone deals with this mix of experiences and feelings in an interview Colin Firth gave on the part he played in the film When Did You Last See Your Father. If you would like to hear it on YouTube, go to:

No two are the same

For the love of the significant people to be truly effective it is not sufficient that we think about or analyse it. We need to tell the story of people’s love, remembering an incident when their love struck us, noticing how we feel as we recall what was said to us. Very often their love is not spoken in words as much as in what they do for us.

“Enlightenment is not an idea but the way someone looks at you.” Henri de Lubac

Some of these glimpses of love people give us have become convictions but because these are not attended to they become dormant. So what we are doing here when we remember an experience of being loved is arousing these convictions for it is in keeping these  convictions that we are loved alive that we find life and happiness.

The many faces of love

 What is love but a face, instantly recognisable in a sea of faces? A spotlight rather than a panning shot, which is a matter of numbers, of crowd scenes. Malcolm Muggeridge

The Exercise
Going back to your story that you outlined in the first exercise make a list of the people who in their love for you influenced your life. Choose one of these people and notice what it is about him or her that you now find  particularly attractive.

Select an incident from your memory of this person and
– Tell the story of what happened
– Try to put words on the way this person loved and related with you.
– Notice if this person’s style of relating is attractive for you.
– Dwell with any feeling that the memory of all of this stirs up in you.

It is assumed that each person we know well has a distinctive style of loving and relating so it is important to see can we name it.  Becoming aware of this attractiveness or beauty of lives that often appear ordinary or mundane is important for it is here more than in nature or in works of art that true beauty resides.

One kind of beauty wanes to make way for another

$ Go to contents

EXERCISE 3:
Introduction: Nine kinds of love

How love branches out as it matures

If you wish to get a sense of 9 different kinds of people and of the ways they love and relate, go to:

Nine kinds of love we are familiar with
We get our first taste of love, and of the home and happiness it creates, from our parents. Their love takes the form of  acceptance, appreciation, concern and of how they acknowledge our personal worth. When we leave home we become responsible for maintaining these loves our parents gave us a gift of. When we fall in love we enter a new age of what we might call passionate love in which we learn to give and receive the love we have received from our parents. If we can make this passionate love last so that it becomes permanent and if we can deepen or make it more profound then passionate love will find its true fulfilment in friendship and in the joyful love central to it.

There are three ages we pass through in the development of these nine kinds of love. There is an age  of affection when the foundation of love is laid, an age of passionate love when we move from adolescent to adult love and an age of friendship in which love reaches fulfilment.

The age of affection

when the foundation of love is laid in
acceptance, appreciation, concern and personal love.

The age of passionate love

acts as the Catalyst that moves us from self-centred adolescence to other-centred adulthood when we centre our affection on another person.

The age of friendship

when passionate love deepens and is made to last it finds fulfilment in friendship

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EXERCISE 3.1: Acceptance

My own soul let me have more pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
G M Hopkins

The great gift that the love of acceptance gives us is illustrated in the following story. It highlights the reality that if we learn to live comfortably with our own limitations and failures this frees us up to notice and appreciate all that is good and even beautiful in ourselves and others. If we allow ourselves to become fixated with how shabby our lives can appear to be at times we will miss the sublime side of life and its wonder.

The Master’s Touch
The old battered violin, that was left with the auctioneer, seemed hardly worth asking people to bid for. This seemed to be borne out when it came under the hammer; nobody seemed to be interested. Just before it would have been knocked down for a mere pittance, an old man wal­ked from the back of the room, took up the violin and began to play it. People stood awestruck at what the touch of the master’s hand could draw from what seemed useless; how its vast potential could be uncovered by him.

In his book, A Reason To Live A Reason To Die, John Powell asks himself how is it that, in the opinion of most psychologists, people are only 10% alive. After long consideration he came up with the conclusion that it is because they will not face two realities: that they are poor and that they are rich. In this exercise we seek to learn how to live with our poor or limited and wayward side of ourselves and others or how we can befriend this poor side by accepting it. This poor self emerges from the reality that by nature we are limited but also wayward in our culpable neglect of our relationships. Because of this the love we receive and give is deficient in many ways. For example, as children we may not have been accepted by one of our parents and and this leaves us wounded unless as adults we learn how to heal this wound.

We are often alerted to this wound by the presence of negative feelings such as anger, guilt or anxiety. These are aroused because our sense of worth is being questioned by peoples’ failure to accept us. To heal these wounds we need to learn to accept that human love is limited so that the deficiencies in the way some people love us do not obscure the fact that most of the significant people in our lives live comfortably with our limitations. So while a fraction of the love we receive and give is defective we must not allow this to get out of proportion. We can do this by cultivating the memory of those whose acceptance has nourished us.

For the exercise, focus on an experience of failing to accept some area of human limitation or waywardness, for example, when you let resentment build up in a way that damages your relationships with someone. Relive this experience, noticing and recording how you tend to let certain feelings like anxiety, fear, resentment, guilt or anger build up until they damage your relationships with yourself and those close to you. Spend some quiet time with yourself and rather than judging yourself and feeling bad about such happenings see can you befriend, accept and be at home or at peace with this experience of your weak and wayward self.

The following words of Neil Diamond’s song emphasise the effectiveness of singing the blues.

Song sung blue, everybody knows one
Song sung blue, every garden grows one
Me and you are subject to
The blues now and then
But when you take the blues
And make a song
You sing ’em out again
You sing ’em out again.

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 EXERCISE 3.2:
Keeping your eye on the doughnut

The Correction Model of Growth
The 10% bad outweighs the 90% good

As you travel through life, my brother or sister
Whatever be your goal
Keep your eye on the doughnut
And not upon the hole.

This exercise continues to focus on the love that accepts our own deficiencies and those of others so that we live at peace with them. Most of us fail to do this because we suffer from  the negative influence of a correction model of growth as opposed to an affirmation one. The correction model urges us to improve by focusing on what is deficient about ourselves and this often leads to our being fixated with the 10% of ourselves and others that is limited and defective. As a result, we neglect or fail to appreciate the 90% of ourselves and others that is positive. Consequently, we live with the distorted vision or illusion of a limited and negative image of self and with the negative feelings that often accompany such a distorted image.

What do YOU see?

As an exercise relive an experience of someone in whose presence your shortcomings are rarely adverted to. Remember what happened; what someone did or said that made you feel accepted. Put your own words on what you feel this person is saying to you in this experience and dwell with the words by repeating them so that you savour what is being said to you. Dwell too with the feelings that listening to this arouses, assuming that part of you will relish what is said to you but that another part will resist it..

Accepting acceptance
Recall some shortcoming, limitation or failure in the way you relate that diminishes or bothers you. After articulating this and how you feel about it for some time, imagine that you are alone with someone whom you can share it with. Tell this person about what is bothering you and let yourself be listened to in a way that makes you feel accepted  Next, let this person put what troubles you into perspective by allowing him or her to appreciate and admire how good most of your life is. Finally, let this person admire how you struggle with your shortcomings.

You are often at your best where you feel you are at your worst
for it is where you struggle with life most heroically

We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
Carl Jung
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EXERCISE 3.3:
Appreciation

 
Seeing the  beauty of the rose not that it is off-centre

” It is a law, as certain as the law of gravity, that he who is understood and loved will grow as a person, he who is estranged will die in his cell of solitary confinement.” John Powell

In the previous two exercises we looked at how we can learn to accept the 10% of ourselves that is limited. In the exercise that follows we seek to learn how to appreciate the 90% of ourselves that is good and even great. Facing the two sides of ourselves in this way will lead to a much more positive and affirming attitude to life.

Since we see ourselves in other peoples’ eyes we need to cultivate the capacity we have to notice and name experiences of their appreciation so that we may learn to believe in what they are saying to us. The alternative is that we allow our preoccupation with our limitations and mistakes to colour the way we see ourselves and feed the negative image that most of us have of ourselves. What is more, this distorted image or illusion about ourselves generates a lot of negative feeling, such as guilt, frustration and anxiety.

We see ourselves in others’ eyes

For the exercise ponder your experience of people who loved you with this love of appreciation. Re-live one of these experiences of someone whose appreciation was life-giving for you. Go over what was said and done to taste and savour what was said in reality or in effect. Let the person involved say these words to you a number of times and then tell him or her how you feel about this.

Fantasy before the Father
Sit quietly for some time with  a ‘wisdom figure’ in your life, with someone who is sensitive to where you are and treats you with deference. Talk to this person about your life, about what you feel positive or what you feel negative about. Then listen to how he or she appreciates how you deal with your experience and maybe how some area of your life is singled out for special praise. After giving yourself time to take this in say how you feel about it. If you both relish and resist what is said to you say your feelings about both of them in turn.

Getting the balance right
There is a great art of balancing the love which accepts our weakness and waywardness and that which appreciates how gifted and graced we are. It is this art that finds expression in Rembrandt’s  painting of the prodigal son. Go to contents

EXERCISE 3.4:
Counting our blessings

 
Is life a sustenance diet or a banquet?

Earth’s crammed with Heaven
And every common bush afire with God.
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 What appeals about these lines is the belief they express that joy is not confined to somewhere apart from where we spend most of our day. It can be found in all things, even the most simple, earth is ‘crammed with heaven’ if we would but open our eyes.

Happiness is when the ordinary is enough

 The Great Land Is Here
The story addresses our tendency to mistakenly believe that it is not in the here and now or in the simple everyday things that we will find our happiness.

 There was once a famous count who lived in a great castle filled with books. He was reputed to be one of the wisest men in the world. One day when he was out walking he came across a little boy playing on the seashore, the little fellow was trying to fill a hole in the sand with sea water. The count did not think this made sense as the water kept disappearing into the sand. After talking with the child for some time the count began to realise that it did make sense in the world the child lived in, a place called the Great Land.

 This stirred the count’s curiosity and he asked how he might get to this Great Land. The little boy pointed to the blank page of a book that lay beside him. The count felt very foolish but he asked the book how he might get to the Great Land. To his surprise he was told to learn to laugh and then when he had mastered this to learn to play, to dance and to cry. However, having mastered all of these he still had not reached the Great Land.

 One day when he had almost given up hope of getting what he wanted he saw some children playing and decided to join them. It was then, sharing in their uncomplicated world of play, learning to enjoy the simplest things of life that he realized the Great Land is here.

There is a world beyond your imagination beneath your feet

 A very practical, tangible and effective way of experiencing the love of appreciation is to develop our awareness of the gifts, goodness and blessings we have received. When someone gives us a gift it is a sign that often is more important for us than the gift itself. When someone writes to us there is a lot more said to us than is expressed in the content of the letter. In other words, someone went to a lot of trouble to write and send the letter and is thus saying “I thought of you’ or ‘you are on my mind’ or ‘It is good you are around”. So people say a lot more about how much they appreciate us by what they do for us or by simple gestures than they do by words. By preparing all the meals each day for her children a mother shows her appreciation of them or how much they mean to her. The problem we have is not that we are not appreciated but that we pass by unnoticed all the signs we are given of it.

For the exercise make a list of very simple things or experiences that you enjoy each day. Notice what a marvellous gift sunlight is. Take one gift and let it reveal some significant events in the story of its relationship with you. These events will probably give rise to images, feelings and desires. Note these down and stay with anything that strikes you as important to let it become more real for you.

For a fantasy take something like your eyesight and get a sense of how valuable it is in your life. Now imagine you have been told you will soon be without this. Enter a fantasy where you envisage what life will be like without it. When you are finished note how you see this gift with a new sense of appreciation and the gratitude you feel for what you may normally take for granted.

In No Strange Land
The angels keep their ancient places –
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry – and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
(Francis Thompson)
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EXERCISE 3.5:
Concern – Provident Love

Folk want a lot of loving every minute –
The sympathy of others and their smile!
Till life’s end, from the moment they begin it,
Folks need a lot of loving all the while.
Strickland Gillilan

As well as our experience of those who accept and appreciate all we already are, there are those who are concerned for all we yet might be. These are the people who like parents, family and friends care for us, look out for us, provide for us, are concerned for our welfare. They want the best for us in that they are sensitive and responsive to what we are willing to attain but also to what we are ripe for.

The Messiah is among you
There was once a monastery that had gone into decline and inhabited by a band of dispirited monks. In the wood adjoining the monastery lived a Rabbi whose prayerful presence in the wood sustained the monks. One day the abbot decided to visit the rabbi to benefit from his advice. There in the rabbi’s little hut with the book of the scriptures open on the table the abbot began to cry. When the abbot had cried his eyes out for the first time in his life, the rabbi bowed his head and said, `You and your brothers are serving God with heavy hearts. You have come seeking a teaching and it is this, the Messiah is among you’.

On returning the abbot gathered his community and told them what the rabbi had said, that one of them was the messiah and that it was never to be spoken of again. In time a change came over the monastery with each monk treating his brother with great reverence as well as with great humanity. People were again attracted to the monastery as a place where they could meet God. The rabbi had long since died but the monks were still sustained by his abiding presence in the woods and all around the monastery.

 As an exercise get a feel for this love of concern by remembering some of the people who loved or love you in this way. Next, enter into the sensate details of an experience you have had of this kind of love and after noticing and dwelling with what was said and done notice and put words on what this person said to you. Since most of the love we receive in life is glimpsed more in what people do than say, we need to put words on and listen to what in effect people say to us. Notice and say how you feel about what is said to you. Finally, notice the attractiveness or style with which concern was shown to you by this person.

Enter a fantasy in which you go to consult a wise person about certain guilt feelings you have about not being concerned enough for others. Instead of helping you to find out what more you need to do for people this person gets you to enumerate all the ways you show concern for others from the time you get up in the morning till you go to bed at night. On your way home savour the concerned person you are and express how this makes you feel about yourself.

To teach a person who is not ripe is waste of words while not to teach a person who is ripe is waste of a person. (An Indian proverb) God to contents

EXERCISE 3.6:
A Concern that is sensitive, respectful and deferential

 I’m His Wife
There was this pair who were giving a party. The wife was asked by someone how her husband was after his recent illness. She said that he was not so well. This puzzled the enquirer as he had appeared to him to be in the best of spirits when he greeted him on arrival at the party. So he asked him again about how he felt only to be assured that even though he felt well when he first greeted him, he now felt unwell. Later he asked the hostess how she knew her husband was unwell and she smiled and said, “I’m his wife”.

 We all experience the tension there is between two versions of concern or provident love. In one of these versions, people who are concerned for us tend to impose what they see as best for us (Outer Authority), while in the other version people are sensitive and respect our unique needs and leave us free or even encourage us to do what we think is best (Inner Authority). We need both as it is wise to listen to the wisdom of the ages or to traditional wisdom. There is a Zambian proverb that encapsulates our need of an outer authority when it says, “The man who did not listen to the elders built his house without a door”. But as people grow up and develop their own wisdom we need to respect and defer to the inner authority that this is an expression of. The concern that is sensitive to, that respects and defers to the personal wisdom each of us acquires in life believes in the saying “Deep within you is written your own song, sing it with all your heart”

The exercise involves being with someone in your life who cares for you in a way that is sensitive and that respects your inner authority or wisdom. Relive an incident in which this person listened to you sensitively and respectfully rather than being too ready with advice. Savour this experience and say to this person how his/her care for you makes you feel. A conversation might emerge from this, one that may need only one thing to be said, savoured and responded to.

The still small voice is very ordinary and unobtrusive as it speaks out of our depths about what we are now ripe for. (Elijah heard the voice of God as a still small voice within him 1 Kings 19:11-12)

For the fantasy exercise, imagine yourself sitting with the Holy Spirit as one who has that feminine gift of being sensitive to where you are in life and to where you are ready to move. Listen to her saying this to you in any way you imagine she would and after listening to and savouring her words, tell her how you feel about this. Go to contents

EXERCISE 3.7:
Personal love

The sun beats a path to your door

Nuala O’Faolain called her autobiography “Are You Somebody?”. She got this title from an experience she had in a supermarket. One day while she was out shopping she noticed three young women with trolleys passing her a number of times, each time they would have a good look at her and then pass on. The third time they passed they asked her, “Are you somebody?” They had obviously seen her of the television and wanted to find out was she the well known person they thought her to be. On reflection she realised that this was the question she had been asking herself all through her life and that it was thus a good title for her autobiography.

The constant question

What kind is personal love
When we enter a room where there are a lot of people we hope to find someone who recognises us or for whom we are significant. You ask yourself, Am I somebody here? We have a deep need to be acknowledged as important, to have our unique worth recognised, to be called by name. All these experiences reveal our need for personal love or to be acknowledged as being significant, as having a unique worth and a unique destiny. This is something our parents give us as we always remain special for them.

For the exercise, choose a significant person in your life, someone for whom you know you are significant. Choose an incident in which this became clear for you and relive it, noticing what was said and what happened. Let the glimpse of yourself as acknowledged by this person emerge and find expression in a word or phrase. Note too what you find attractive about this person’s style of relating with you. Choose words that would express what is being said to you in effect by this person and then let him or her say these words to you a number of times until you have had a chance to savour them. Next sit with any feeling aroused by what has been said to you, remembering that you will most likely relish and resist this.

For your prayerful fantasy at the end of the exercise be in a quiet place and relish the solitude, the stillness or the silence of the place for a while. Then let yourself become aware of “the still small voice of the Holy Spirit” speaking to you with great sensitivity and respect for where you are on your journey just now, for the unique person you are and always have been. Finally let the Spirit say your name as an expression of the unique relationship she wants to have with you.

Flowers in the most unexpected places

 Not Love Perhaps
This is not Love, perhaps,
Love that lays down its life,
that many waters cannot quench,
nor the floods drown,
But something written in lighter ink,
said in a lower tone, something,
perhaps, especially our own.
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EXERCISE 3.8:
Passionate love

 “You have to make a decision”

This is the love that Dr Janis found in his own life and what he wanted for his daughter in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin:

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because that is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion,… That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

The catalyst
Passionate love is often associated with falling in love with another person. It is commonly believed to be short lived, that it is soon burned off by the hardships of ordinary living. The passionate love we are looking at here has the following characteristics that can remain operative in any of our relationships throughout our lives: It has an intensity about it and focusses our whole self on some person, on children, on an ideal, on work, etc. It transforms us by taking us out of self preoccupation and it is often enthusiastic and joyful. There is a strong element of passionate love in many of our relationships.

Confronting us with a commitment

The lesser gods are decorous
And with a meek petition wait;
But love comes, fixing his own hour,
And hammers at the gate.

For the exercise be with a person for whom you know you mean a lot and in whose presence you experience some or all of the characteristics of passionate love. Choose an incident in which you experienced this kind of love and after recalling what happened dwell with the love you experienced and also dwell with its attractiveness. Put words on what is said to you in effect as you relive the experience and let the person say these to you a few times. (It is important to let what is said to you be as adventurous, as imaginative and as personal as you can make it.) Next, spend time noticing how you feel about what you hear said to you, the way you welcome it and the way you resist it.

 For the fantasy imagine yourself in a quiet place. Savour its stillness and solitude. Then allow yourself to be joined by someone who has played a central role in your life. Notice and talk about how your whole person centres on this other or how he or she has influenced your life. Talk about how you feel for this person.

‘Tis the set of a soul that decides its goal
Passionate love when it subsides calls for a decision if we are to maintain it and remain in love:

Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate
As we voyage along through life.
‘Tis the set of a soul that decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife.
It is not just as we take it
This mystical world of ours;
Life’s field will yield as we make it
A harvest of thorns or of flowers.
Goethe

The passionate life
Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything. Pedro Arrupe S J
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EXERCISE 3.9:
Permanent love

An Israeli folk-tale reads like this:

There once lived a widower with only one daughter. Though they were very poor, they lived happily together. The father loved his daughter very much, and his daughter would say, ‘My father is the one that I love most in the world”.One day this girl fell in love with a man. She loved him deeply and told him, “You are the one I love most in the world.” The man did not believe her and told her to remove her father’s heart to prove her love for him.

The girl considered this matter for a long time. One night, she took a knife and plunged it into her father’s chest. She took out his heart and ran as fast as she could to offer it to her lover.In her haste, the girl tripped and fell in the darkness. Her father’s heart cried out immediately, ‘My child, are you hurt?”

The following lines from one os Shakespeare’s sonnets is read at a marriage ceremony. Read them and ask yourself why do the couple choose them.

                                     Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

What kind is the love that lasts?
We all want love to last but we may find that, as C S Lewis says, “passionate love can be the most impermanent of loves”. Making it last has a lot to do with learning to strike a balance between accepting the 10% of ourselves and others that is limited and sinful and appreciating the 90% that is gifted and graced. We have also to learn to make this balanced view a conviction and not just something we glimpse and feel strongly about from time to time. It is only what we believe in about ourselves and others that will see us through the hard times when rows and other adverse circumstances tend to make us see and feel about ourselves and others in a less favourable light.

For the exercise dwell with an experience in which you became aware of the importance for you of making a relationship last. It might have been at a wedding when you realised how much you wanted it to last or it might have been when you heard of of people who were married splitting up. Notice the feelings that reliving this experience arouses and then notice what these feelings are saying about the way you see and value this love that lasts and endures.

 For a fantasy exercise return to a relationship which has stood the test of time. Notice how you have reached a healthy balance between accepting each other’s weaknesses and appreciating each others strengths. After dwelling with your convictions about this person talk to him or her about how you now see and especially about how you feel about your relationship.

“A friend in need”, my neighbour said to me,
“A friend indeed is what I mean to be;
In time of trouble I will come to you,
And in the hour of need you’ll find me true”.

I thought a bit, and took him by the hand:
“My friend”, said I, “you do not understand
The inner meaning of that simple rhyme;
A friend is what the heart needs all the time”.
Henry van Dyke
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EXERCISE 3.10:
Profound Love

There is as much below as there is above

Taking possession of the jewel
There was once a man who came across a cave on his journey and being curious he entered it. There he discovered what was to be the inspiration of his life in the form of a priceless jewel. However, all he could do was gaze at it for it was in the keeping of a ferocious beast. As he gazed at it his whole being was engaged and when eventually he left the cave he felt that all else in life from then on would be insignificant by comparison.

But he got on with life, married and reared a family and then when his life’s work was done he said, “Before I die, I must again glimpse the jewel that has been the inspiration of my life”. So he set out and made his way back to the cave where he again found the jewel. But now the monster guarding it had grown so small that he was able to take the jewel away with him.

As he made his way back home he gradually realised what it all meant. The jewel symbolised something profound and beautiful he had spent his life taking possession of. This process was so gradual that it was only on reflection that he realised how profoundly his life had changed. With the poet he had grown in awareness that he had become the “immortal diamond”:

The immortal diamond our life becomes

The meaning of profound love
The diamond symbolises the dream we spend our life seeking to realise. It is a dream essentially of the love that makes and sustains our relationships and the joy we experience in them. When we fall in love we want it to last but we also hope that with time it will deepen.

To understand how this happens we need to realise how love leads us down through four levels at which we love and relate. On the surface level we experience the love people have for us through the things people do for us and we do for them. We experience love at a deeper and more affective level when we learn to notice and express the feelings like gratitude for what is done for us. From what people do and say we glimpse at a deeper level still different facets of their love for us and ours for them. If we appropriate these glimpses, we move down to the deepest level at which we are loved and love when we learn to believe in the love we have for people and they have for us. This is the most profound experience of love.

As an exercise dwell with an incident in which you became aware of your own conviction that someone loved you. As you recall the circumstances in which you came to this conviction, notice what was said to you that led to this conviction and let this be said to you again. Remember the words may have been said in effect by something this person did. Dwell with these words for some time to let them sink in and then express how you feel about being loved at this most profound level.

For a fantasy, be in a quiet place and taste the sense of stillness, silence or solitude it offers you. In this atmosphere remember a time in your life which was a turning point for you, maybe, when you moved into a deeper level than you had been at before. Let the person who was with you at the time or with whom you would like to share the experience join you. Talk to this person about what you realised as a result of the experience and how talking about it makes you feel.

Friendship’s shared vision

Friendship
I love you not only for what you are,
but for what I am when I am with you.
I love you not only for what you have made
of yourself, but for what you are making of me.
I love you because you have done more than
any creed could have done to make me good,
and more than any fate could have done to make me happy.
You have done it without a touch,
without a word, without a sign.
You have done it by being yourself. Perhaps it is
what being a friend means, after all.
Author unknown
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EXERCISE 3.11:
Friendship

Love finds its fulfilment in friendship

Re-awakening a Dream of Intimacy
A married pair begin to realize that they are drifting apart. They are, to all appearances, happily married and get on well together. They themselves, however, know that this is superficial, that they are avoiding the deeper issues that are asking to be dealt with. They both lead very busy lives, so that they do not spend much time together, and when they do, they keep well away from the reasons for their drifting apart.

 Eventually, they decide to do something about their situation and so they go off on a holiday together. They feel threatened by the prospect of being alone with each other, and of not having the means to escape this shared solitude. However, they really want to become closer, and so they spend a lot of time together. Some of the time they just enjoy themselves, but they also make the effort to talk over, in an honest way, what has been going on between them. At times this is painful, but they stay with it.

 Before the holiday ends they feel that they have touched again what brought them together in the first place. They are touched in particular by the reality that they are still together even though they struggle to accept each other’s limitations. These have often loomed so large that they have obscured the things they would need to appreciate about each other, attractive qualities that they found when they first met and that have since bloomed unnoticed. They have a fresh awareness of their concern that they would each find fulfilment in the delicate balance there is between their acceptance, appreciation and concern for each other. They also realize that they will have to make space in the future to continue what they began on their holiday. They will have to keep in touch with their deep dream of friendship and how they can realise it in their ongoing conversations.

‘‘ A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
(Aristotle’s idea of friendship)

The nature of friendship
Friendship consists in a mutual sharing and is proportionate to how much of ourselves we share. This sharing can be at a number of levels but its basic essential is something that underlies all that we share whether this is superficial or of something much closer to our hearts. Therefore, a friend is someone in whose presence we feel we are important as a person, in that our limitations are accepted, our goodness is appreciated and our happiness is the object of our mutual concern.

In the school of life
many branches of knowledge are taught.
But the only philosophy
that amounts to anything after all,
is just the secret of making friends
Henry van Dyke

As an exercise, dwell with someone whom you look on as a friend. Notice and name 1) how you are significant for each other, 2) how you accept each other’s weakness and waywardness, 3) how you appreciate each other’s strengths or giftedness and 4) how your concern for each other manifests itself. Choose a friend and tell the story of how one or more of these four qualities of a friend was revealed to you.

By way of a fantasy, be with a friend in a place where you can be alone together. Sit in silence for a while and then listen and talk to each other about one or more of the following: 1) The way the friend is physically present in the courtesy or style with which he/she relates, 2) The kinds of good feeling that surrounds your friend, that he or she is optimistic, joyful, grateful etc, 3) The way you accept, appreciate, are concerned for and find each other a significant person you enjoy being with, and 4) A conviction you have come to about your friend. Whichever you take of these suggestions, leave a little time to share your feelings at the end.

Talking out what may become a wall between us

Love and Friendship
Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?

The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air;
Yet wait till winter comes again,
And who will call the wild-briar fair?

Then, scorn the silly rose-wreath now,
And deck thee with the holly’s sheen,
That, when December blights thy brow,
He still may leave thy garland green.
Emily Bronte
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EXERCISE 3.12:
Joyful Love

Happiness reigns when the ordinary is enough

A mind content with what is 
Lord Vishnu grew tired of a man’s restless desires and petitions, so he asked him to choose three things that might bring him contentment and ease. The first request the man made was for his wife’s death but he heard so much praise of her at the funeral that his second request was to have her back again. He was so anxious about his final request to get it just right that he decided to leave it to Vishnu himself. He was then granted a mind content with what is.

Love creates and sustains an environment characterised by joy. This joyful love is a major part of our own dream and of that which we have for those we love. This aspect of love is what parents give us our first taste of in the home and happiness their love provides. This contentment, joy or happiness always accompanies love and is experienced most profoundly when we become convinced that we are loved.

 The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves – say rather, loved in spite of ourselves. Victor Hugo

Hands reaching out for the happiness we crave

An exercise 
Choose someone in whose company you experience the kind of loving and relating that is joyful. Then choose an incident in which you experienced the atmosphere of joy this person can create. Notice what happened, what was said and done for some time before becoming aware of any feelings that it arouses. Finally, see can you put words on the glimpse of joyful love you got that moved you. Before finishing the exercise notice what aspect of joyful love you ‘tasted’ and whether you found that you liked it and perhaps found it beautiful.

‘I want you to be happy’
Karl Rahner, one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century, tells of the time when his mother was dying. When she knew she was about to she told him that the next time he would come she would like something special for what she knew would be his last visit. He was to bring a bottle of wine and two glasses. When they were sitting enjoying the wine together she said that her dying wish for him was that he would be a joyful person all his remaining days.

A fantasy 
As a fantasy, be in a quiet place for a while tasting what you see and hear there. Let a friend join you and listen to him as he says to you what Karl Rahner’s mother said to him in the incident above. Work out a number of versions of how he might express his wish for your happiness, joy or peace, how he would want it to be constant and complete. Choose one of these wordings you have devised and let Jesus say this to you a number of times, pausing to notice how you feel and then say how you feel to him.

Places that inspire “large and melodious thoughts”

From Song of the Open Road
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh to me,
the sunlight expands my blood?
Why, when they leave me, do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?
Why are there trees I never walk under, but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
(I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees, and always drop fruit as I pass.)
Walt Whitman

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EXERCISE 4.1
Working towards the conviction
that we are loved

Soaking in mam and dad’s affirming gaze

We have been looking at the significant events of our story and at the people whose love has made and sustained us throughout our life. We have also aroused our experience of different aspects of their love we are familiar with. In this and in the next exercise we will look at a way of believing in the huge range of love we have thus far experienced in our life. It is on this belief or conviction that we are loved that our happiness depends.

The supreme happiness in life comes from the conviction that we are loved. Victor Hugo

This conviction or belief that we are loved is not just an intellectual one or the one that W B Yeats was so wary of when he wrote.

God guard us from the thoughts men think
In the mind alone.
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in the marrow bone.
W B Yeats

If the conviction that we are loved is to become part of what we experience in our bones we must get our whole person involved in attaining it. This way of experiencing love begins  at a sensate level when we recall a significant event, then we are invited to notice where the story moves us at a feeling level for this indicates that the story is saying something to us at an intuitive level. Some of these intuitive glimpses of love we have experienced have become convictions that determine the habitual way we see and feel about love.

One very effective way of doing this is by keeping alive the memories of those who loved us. This involves going back to events that moved us because from them we got glimpses of ourselves as loved that we identify with because they arouse convictions of being loved that tend otherwise to remain dormant.

The journey into our life-giving convictions

I you wish to take a more inclusive look at these four levels at which we love and relate, go to:

How arousing these life-giving convictions that we are loved in a way that involves our whole person is described for us by Rollo May in his book Love and Will. He says that they arise initially from the attitude of a parent which gives the child a sense of worth. As the child grows this sense of significance or worth is reinforced by the acceptance, appreciation and concern of people inside and outside the family. As we mature May believes that we keep within our memories, to refer to in difficult times, the images of those people who have believed in us.  He then concludes:

When I was in college I found the experience of having some adult believe in me crucially important, and at times thereafter in my life when I was faced with crucially important decisions, I found myself casting about to fasten upon one of these persons. It was not that he or she would, in my memory, tell me what to do. It was rather that at such a time it was important for my own psychological security to find somebody who believed in me.

Our first taste of the love that makes and sustains us

In this exercise we will focus on the four levels at which we love and relate most effectively. We will use the following fantasy to do this:

 I have been invited to a party given by my family and friends to celebrate a very significant event in my life. During the celebration a number of people speak to the gathering about what I mean to them. Among these might be a parent, a sibling, someone I work with, my husband or wife, one of my children, a close friend or two.

Begin by listening to and noting down what one (or more) of these significant people in your life say to you. Note too how they present this in, for example, an affective, humorous, insightful, sincere or believable way.

Then listen to one thing this person said to you and put words on a glimpse of yourself this person gave you.

Next, notice how you feel about this glimpse of yourself you are given. These feelings may be ambivalent in that you may resist as well as relish what was said to you. Say these feelings and give yourself time to resonate with them.

 Finally, dwell with one thing said to you that you identify with since it comes out of a conviction about yourself that has been dormant and is now aroused and ready to be owned. Owning these convictions of what is true and worthwhile about us is so important that the next exercise will be devoted to a way of learning to believe in ourselves.

Levels at which we love and relate

EXERCISE 4.2
THE CONVICTION THAT WE ARE LOVED

Who and what you choose to believe in will shape your life

Man alone of all the creatures of the earth can change his own pattern. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. [William James]

The main reason why we are moved by what people say to us is that they arouse and put us in touch with dormant convictions we have developed about our lovableness. These convictions we have developed because people who are significant for us repeatedly accepted, appreciated, were concerned for us. They they thus gave us a sense of our worth or significance or of who we were for them. Because we spend a lot of our day in a work situation in which much of our worth is got from our meeting peoples’ expectations our deeper sense of worth is eroded or becomes dormant.

If we are to be happy we must maintain our conviction that we are loved and the resulting sense of our significance or worth. As children we are given a gift of our parents’ love which, even though it was limited at times, gave us a sense of our importance for them. However, as adults we become responsible for maintaining the conviction that we are loved in an environment in which this is often questioned. We will know this happens when our peace is disturbed by our personal worth being questioned by what others say and do. These circumstances ask us who do we ultimately believe in. This is the question Rapunzel is asked In the following story.

Who and what do you believe?
There was once this little girl called Rapunzel who was very beautiful. She was captured by a witch, who knew that if she wanted to hold on to the little girl, she had to convince her that she was ugly. If she knew she was beautiful, she would go off with one of the young men who came to consult the witch. If on the other hand, she was convinced she was ugly, she would be afraid of being seen by them, and would therefore hide when they were around. So the witch gradually convinced Rapunzel that she was ugly and she hid for fear of being seen when anyone came to the witch’s house.

One day when she was combing her hair in her room, she became conscious of someone looking at her through the window. Instinctively she looked up. It was then that she saw, in the eyes of the young man gazing at her through the window, that she was beautiful. Gradually, as she learned to believe this, her fear was replaced by joy. She set off on the long journey of freeing herself from the deadening influence of the witch in order to accept the life and happiness which the young man’s love made available to her.

Choosing which vision of ourselves we believe in

We have a strong tendency to believe the witch and to accept her very deadening illusion about ourselves.  Even though our deficiencies are only a small fraction of who we are, we tend to see this side of ourselves as much bigger than it is. The signs of our limitations tend, like a dark spot on a sheet of white paper, to capture our attention. The negative side of ourselves can dominate what we see and obscure the vision of ourselves which those who love us would have us believe in.

Just as Rapunzel saw her goodness reflected back to her in the young man’s eyes so we are asked to keep returning to the memory of those who have loved us and to the convictions of our true worth or significance they can still give us. Arousing these convictions and making our own of them is one of the most difficult tasks life asks us to do but it is the key to a fuller and happier life. Its difficulty consists in a change of mind and heart about ourselves, a change in the way we see and feel about ourselves. The following image may help us understand the problem we have with making this change as well as how we might go about doing this.

The box in each person’s head
There is a box in our head and we allow into it only the kinds of love we are comfortable with. The walls of this box have thickened and hardened over the years according as we have become set in our ways of seeing love and our lovableness. The result is that if the love we are offered will not fit into the box, we reject it as unrealistic and continue to live with a very limited sense of being lovable.

The best way of expanding the box so that we can take in more of the love available to us is through learning the art of conversation. This involves learning to listen and respond to the love we receive in life. By making time to repeatedly listen to the love of someone for whom we are significant and savouring how this makes us feel we can gradually learn to believe in or to make our own of the ‘Care that makes and sustains us’. In this sense, as William James said our lives are in our own hands and we can shape our destiny by the attitudes we adopt.

In the following exercise you are asked to look at the way you have come to your convictions about yourself. We will approach these convictions not through ‘the mind alone’ but through an imaginary event and the glimpses you get of yourself as well as the feelings these glimpses arouse.

The Exercise
Before you begin this exercise, choose someone whose love means a lot to you and select an experience of his or her love that you would like to accept or believe in. After you have quietened yourself dwell with your experience of this person’s love, remembering what was said and done and especially what in effect you heard this person say to you and how you feel about this. After putting words on what in effect was said to you, let them be said to you in a personal way. Dwell with these words, repeating them to yourself in order to savour and own any way you were moved by them. Thus you can inch your way towards believing in a small piece of the love this person offers you.

Fantasy Exercise
Be in a quiet place and taste the stillness for some time. Let a friend join you and together talk about the love you dwelt with in the exercise above. Say what you realised about love from remembering this person and describe for your friend how you feel as you describe this love. Let your friend respond in an affirming way to what you have revealed and give yourself time to take this in. You might conclude by listening to the song Believe In Me sung by Dan Fogelberg on YouTube. Go to

Believe in Me
If I could only do one thing,
Then I would try to write and sing,
A song that ends your questioning,
And makes you believe in me,
And makes you believe in me;
Oh, you can believe in me.

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EXERCISE 5:
Drawing on our underground stream of inner wisdom

A wisdom life inscribes on our whole person:
body and soul, mind and heart

Our stream of inner wisdom
Over our lifespan, the convictions we each have come to about what is true and about what is important form in each person what we might call a stream of inner wisdom. It is a stream that flows from one end of life to the other, all the time growing in breadth and depth. It is a stream of inner wisdom in the sense that what is central to it is the love, relationships and happiness that make up our dream. This inner wisdom is not an intellectual one but a body of convictions about what is true and what is important that each of us has drawn from our day to day experiences. It is a down to earth wisdom that gives meaning and value to all else in life.

Unfortunately for a number of reasons we have allowed this wisdom to become dormant. Consequently, it lies underground in the sense that it runs well below the surface of life, largely because we do not pay much attention to it or make much use of it. We may be reluctant to return to our story, where we find our life’s wisdom, because we fear to arouse the ghosts of the past and judge it better to leave sleeping dogs lie. Another reason why our inner wisdom is dormant is that we are so preoccupied with our outer, material world. Becoming aware and owning this immense resource we each have within our grasp is the aim of all the exercises we have done so far. In them we have sought to make full use of the rich store of experience we each have accumulated over the years.

To listen to someone speak about a very prolonged and profound study that was done on the wisdom people learn from life, go to:

The river of our personal experience runs deep

We can see from the exercises we have done so far how rich our personal experience is and how broad and deep is the wisdom we have learned from it. For example,

 In Exercise 1 we  outlined and got a feel for the main events of our story.
In Exercise 2 we recalled the significant people in our story and how remembering the style with which they loved and related has influenced how we see love and value it.
In Exercise 3 we looked at 9 kinds of love we are familiar with and how these develop during the three ages we pass through in life: as children, as lovers and as friends.
In Exercise 4 we developed a way of reading our story, not by thinking about it but by noticing what happened and then naming or putting words on what a significant event in our story is saying to us and how we feel about this. We saw too how what we have learned from our experience has become the body of convictions that give our lives meaning and importance.
In Exercise 5 we will explore the personal synthesis or inner wisdom we have accumulated. This is drawn from our lifelong experience of our innate dream of love and the relationships and happiness it attracts us into. As adults we are responsible for maintaining this dream our parents gave us our initial taste for in the happiness of the home their love provided us with. This dream built into us gives all our experience, the people, things and circumstances we come across each day, their basic meaning and importance; it forms the core of our wisdom.

Folk need a lot of loving in the morning;
The day is all before, with cares beset –
The cares we know, and they that give no warning;
For love is God’s own antidote for fret.

Folk need a heap of loving at the noontime –
In the battle lull, the moment snatched from strife
Halfway between the waking and the croon time,
While bickering and worriment are rife.

Folk hunger so for loving at the nighttime,
When wearily they take them home to rest –
At slumber song and turning-out-the-light time –
Of all the times for loving, that’s the best.

Folk want a lot of loving every minute –
The sympathy of others and their smile!
Till life’s end, from the moment they begin it,
Folks need a lot of loving all the while.
Strickland Gillilan

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EXERCISE 5.1:
Arousing our inner wisdom
as our most valuable resource

All roads converge on the place where we dream

 The Stork: Seeing the big picture
A man, who lived by a pond, was awakened one night by the sound of running water. He went out into the snow-covered ground and headed for the pond, but in the darkness, running up and down, back and forth, guided only by the noise, he stumbled and fell repeatedly. At last, he found a leak in the dike, from which water was flowing noisily. He set to work plugging the leak and only when he had finished went back to bed. The next morning, looking out of the window, he saw with surprise that his footprints had traced the figure of a stork in the snow.

Getting an overview of your life
In this exercise we want to get an overview of the pattern or design that has been traced out in our life as we searched for what is most important for each of us. This is the one thing which shapes all our experience because it is what we value most or find most attractive. It is the centre we must keep returning to for it is this that orders our life like the magnet does in creating and maintaining its magnetic field.

So in this exercise are each asking ourselves, What is this one thing that is at the centre of my life and that all else centres around and takes its meaning and value from? In answering this question we need to be aware that we are heavily influenced by a world view and way of valuing everything that permeates the environment in which we live today. Its dream is ‘the good life’ understood in material terms and it makes the world of work and wealth central to its way of seeing life and what is important. It also tends to sideline the world of love and relationships seeing it as somewhat unreal or irrelevant, as a private or subjective matter in a more functional and hard-headed outer world intent on careers, work and wealth.

.
The ripples of  experience emanating from the centre

This exercise seeks to work out the relative importance, as we each see it, of the different areas of our experience so that we move towards finding our centre or what is most important in life. This is the centre around which everything circulates and finds its rightful place because it has become a priority for you.

Exercise a) What we fill our days with
Make a list of the main areas of your experience or of what you spend time with each day or over a longer period of a week, a month or a year. Try to get a sense of how these different areas of your experience are related to each other You might compare the different parts of your experience to the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle where the challenge is to find how they all fit together to form the picture on the front of the jigsaw box. Here, however, we haven’t the picture on the box to work from as that is something that will only gradually emerge as we see the relationship of the different parts of our experience as they become a coherent whole.

Exercise b) Getting a sense of their relative importance
When you have listed what fills your day move on to get a sense of the relative importance of the pieces of your experience by drawing three concentric circles that fill a page. Then work out the relative importance of the different experiences that fill your day by putting the most important ones closer to the centre of the page and the less important ones closer to the periphery. Then take the different items you have placed in the centre circle and consider is there one that you value most and around which your life centres.

For a fantasy exercise you might imagine yourself being interviewed on TV or radio. How would you prepare if the interview is to be about your own story or your personal journey; what would you want to talk about? If there were 3-5 aspects of your life you were asked before the interview you would like to talk about, what would these be and outline what you would want to say about them.

How all is drawn in around what’s central

Seeing  the grand design
In his Autobiography St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote of an experience he had on the banks of the Cardoner river. He saw this experience as the most important one in his whole life because it pulled together all his previous experience and it provided a framework in which “he understood and knew many things”., He wrote of this experience, speaking of himself in the third person: “he sat down for a little while with his face to the river—Cardoner—which was running deep. While he was seated there, the eyes of his understanding began to be opened; though he did not see any vision, he understood and knew many things, both spiritual things and matters of faith and learning, and this was with so great an enlightenment that everything seemed new to him. It was as if he were a new man with a new intellect.” Go to contents

EXERCISE 5.2:
At the centre is the dream
innate to us

Is there a design being worked out in life or is it all loose ends?

I remember an incident which took place when I was working in Africa. I was attending an assembly at which a new man was taking over as leader of a big group of people who were involved in a wide variety of activities. It was a time of change and the people there were not sure where they were going as a group. So they were asking this new man for some clarification of the direction in which they were meant to be moving.

In an effort to explain where he stood the leader took as an illustration the miniature tapestries which his mother used to make. He explained how she used to weave a design with various colours of wool onto a piece of strong gauze. When she was finished there was a very colourful design woven onto one side of the gauze. On the other side, however, there was a mass of disorganised loose ends.

Then in answer to their question he said that he had honestly to admit that all he could see as he took over his new job was a mass of loose ends. He concluded by saying that he was sure that if they all worked together with him they might gradually come to see something of the other side with its distinct design.

This reverse side of the tapestry is what life seems to be like when what happens to us appears to be a series of unconnected events with no apparent pattern or design to them. There is, however, plenty of help available to us in discerning this design. For example, in a book like The Hero With A Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell reveals to us what is central to the stories we humans have been telling from the beginning of time. Having spent a lifetime studying and writing about these stories he was told he came to the conclusion that they are all about a journey, one we go on in search of our dream of love, relationships and happiness.

I have added a fourth element to the three that Campbell says we never cease to dream of. This is one we might only become aware of later in life when we reflect on how a very significant person influenced us by the attractiveness of his or her style of loving. For there is a style or subtle beauty about the way most people love and relate that, when we take the trouble to notice and savour it, is very moving in that it makes them intensely attractive. It is the memory of the beauty of his mother’s sensitivity that led Patrick Kavanagh to write these very moving lines:

You will know I am coming though I send no word
For you were lover who could tell
A man’s thoughts – my thoughts – though I hid them –
Through you I knew Woman and did not fear her spell

From a jumble of notes we create our unique song

Life’s essential journey
Because our dream is innate it will never cease, no matter how much we neglect it, to be central to what we value most in life. Our dream does, however, tend through our neglect to become dormant unless we take the trouble to arouse and then take responsibility for  realising it. This is what we have been striving to do in the exercises so far. Through them we have become aware of how our dream of love and relationships and the beauty and happiness we have found in them have developed during the three ages we have passed through as  children, lovers and  friends.

In the exercise you are invited to notice how in practice your dream is realised in your life. To do this recall someone whose love has had a big influence on you.

Choose an incident in which you experienced this person’s love in a way that moved you. Dwell with what happened.
See can you name the kind of love you experienced and the way it was said to you in words or in what this person did.
Dwell with the style with which this love was expressed.
Dwell too with the happiness the memory of being loved in this way arouses in you.
Finally, sit in some quiet place so that you have time to listen and talk to each other.

The order that love draws all into

For the fantasy exercise 
Recall a story told in fiction or in a film and after noticing what happened write a very brief outline of it. Then notice how the different elements of the dream emerged from the story:

Notice how the theme of love between the leading characters in the story develops.
Then focus on how they become more intimate or how their relationship becomes closer.
Notice too how the element of happiness develops as their enjoyment of being together develops.
Finally, notice the element of the dream we call beauty and how it emerges in the story.  For example, does it emerge for you:

– in the style with which the a person in the story relates,
– in the good feeling that dominates the environment in which this person lives,
– or it may be a glimpse this person gives you of one of the nine loves we looked at in Exercise 3. Do you find it portrayed in a particularly attractive way in the story.

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EXERCISE 5.3
Everything can put us in touch
with our dream and its wisdom

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Alfred Tennyson

Part of the malaise we suffer from today in our consumer culture is that we are bored with ordinary living; we no longer have time to notice such things as the “flower in the crannied wall”. Rather than seeking ways of escaping from the ordinary we need to get in touch again with the happiness that is on offer when the ordinary is sufficient. For the ordinary to satisfy our appetite for a full life we need to get in touch with how nourishing the ordinary of everyday can be. Doing this involves developing our ability to find the deeper significance of all things. We will have to do this in an environment in which the significance and value of all things is reckoned largely in material and economic terms.

Are you battery of solar powered?
Our problem of being able to find what sustains us only in a place apart from the ordinary is illustrated by the example of the battery-powered delivery van. For this van to function properly it has to be taken off the road for its batteries to be charged up. All the time it is out on the road the batteries are being run down so that at the end of the day it has lost all its energy and will have to be recharged at a power point.

What we need is to develop a van with a solar cell. This gets its energy from sunlight and is being charged up all the time it is on its rounds.

Like this solar van, we have a built-in capacity, to be charged up or nourished by much of what we come across each day. We need to develop this capacity and find the supply of love and the dream it inspires that is on offer all along the way we travel in an ordinary day.

An illustration of how this might work out in practice can be found in Jack Dominian’s book, Cycles of Affirmation. In it he says that if a girl has loving parents, they live on in her for the rest of her life. Her parents have built into her a big body of love and so all kinds of day to day experiences can put her in touch with this love. In a similar way, very ordinary experiences can trigger off our experience of the love and its dream that has built up in us over the years.

One way of looking at our daily experience that helps us to remain in touch with its deeper significance and worth  is to see everything as a gift. For example, if you receive an email, the fact that someone thought of you and took the time to write it is often more important than the information in the email. All things if seen as gifts can put us in touch with the love of the giver and can maintain an intimate environment characterised by joy, appreciation and gratitude. In the exercise to follow we will look at how our life is permeated by three kinds of gifts and thus by the love and by the dream they engenders.

Gratitude

1] Our personal gifts are those we receive in the course of our lifetime. For example, there are the significant people of our story and how their love and way of relating has given us life and happiness. For this part of the exercise you could return to one of the significant people you dwelt with in Exercise 2. Recall how this person contributed to the realisation of your dream by giving you a taste of the love and of the intimacy and happiness it led to.

2] Our natural gifts like eyesight, hearing, light, food, sleep, health etc can be a source of wonder, joy and gratitude if we take the time to appreciate them. For this part of the exercise list some of these natural gifts that mean most to you and dwell with your gratitude for one of them. You could do a fantasy with any of these gifts and spend time imagining what life would be like without it.

3] Finally, there are the gifts that are ours because we are spirit as well as body. This spirit side of us has a dream that was built into us as human beings. As we have seen this is a dream of love, the beauty of which draws us into the relationships in which we find life’s  main happiness. For this part of the exercise you might reflect on how someone in your life gave you a taste of your dream in his or her way of loving and relating with you. Notice their style of relating and how it attracted you, Notice too the joy you found in their presence. Finally, say to this person how you feel about him or her and listen to any response there is to what you say. In the words of the poet Mary Oliver:

just pay attention. then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks. and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

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