Instability and disruption can be passed through with contemplative stillness.

True feeling is based in sensation; it doesn’t start from your story.

Humility is the point of connection and stability – eg. full prostration. You can’t be knocked off balance when you are flat out on the floor.

Psalms are a full emotional colour palette. When you chant the Psalms you learn not to identify with individual emotions which are passing.

Jacob Boehme:

Here, now, is the right place for you to wrestle before the Divine face.
If you stand firm, if you do not bend, you will see and perceive great wonders.
You will discover how Christ will storm the hell in you and will break your beasts.

This is not capitulation, but a willingness to wrestle in the Presence. This is not self-calming.

“if you stand firm” – sounds like the opposite of surrender, but means to stand firm in your own being. Stand firm on the vertical axis. The opposite is to flee. The paradox of standing firm is that you can’t stand firm unless you are surrendered to a higher possibility, a higher intelligence.

“if you do not bend” – if you don’t cave to the false self programs but hold your atmosphere within. Trust that something will kick in.  

“Christ will storm the hell in you and break your beasts” – it is not us who do the work. It is Christ who does the work. Our task is to stay present to the struggle.

Don’t develop a defeatist attitude towards your shadow. Have the courage to work with it. Trust in Boehme’s formula. There is something that calls us back.

The Universe is for us; it is solid.

Making sun in ourselves = working with positivity.  

Creating moon in ourselves is confronting shadow stuff and innate laziness, what Keating called the “false self system.” Consciousness left alone will always tend to revert to the mechanical lower state. This is the material we use for transformation – lead turned into gold.

Let yourself fall into a negative state. Then engage out of it with a powerful U-turn. Use the raw material for transformation. Be frustrated and see what happens. Don’t repress it but let it shift.

The Welcoming Practice reconstructs Boehme’s instructions, carrying letting go into daily life.  It is a making moon practice:

1. focus and sink in – become aware of upset as sensation. What’s going on in your body? Become non-judgmentally aware of upset. This assures that we don’t go into spiritual by-passing. Also invites three-brained awareness. Can’t navigate surging emotions with the intellect. If you re-orient around sensation things will shift.

2. welcome – name what you are welcoming. Welcome the feeling/sensation not the thing itself. Welcome what is on your plate. Cancer is not what is on your plate; fear is what is on your plate. You are not welcoming negative external circumstances but the sensation of disruption; this is “standing firm.” Move into undivided presence where you are no longer the victim of external circumstances.

3. letting go – don’t get here too quickly. Let go of your desire to change the situation. Let go of your desire to make changing the situation your bottom line. Change your internal situation and let the external situation take care of itself. Equanimity does not come as a result of outer circumstances aligning themselves according to your desire.

We let go of our desire:

                        for security and survival
                        for esteem and affection
                        for power and control
                        even to change the situation

See that we do not have to change the external situation.

Making moon is the alchemy of transformation, releasing the counter-entropic radial energy. Teilhard – the release of radial energy causes something to shift internally.

Give up any idea that the egoic self can bring any lasting happiness.