“When we arrive at the dark pit of despair, we have reached the low point in the spiritual journey….Despair is the grave from which we may be born again.”    Sam Keen

“The longest journey is the journey inward, for he who has chosen his destiny has started upon his quest for the source of his being.” Dag Hammarsjkold

“When fog prevents a small-boat sailor from seeing the buoy marking the course he wants, he turns his boat rapidly in small circles, knowing that the waves he makes will rock the buoy in the vicinity. Then he stops, listens and repeats the procedure until he hears the buoy clang. By making waves, he finds where his course lies…Often the price of finding these guides is a willingness to take a few risks, to “make a few waves”. A boat that stays in the harbor never encounters danger—but is also never gets anywhere.”     Richard Armstrong

Dark Night of Our Soul Links:

1.  Definition of dark night of the soul-Wikipedia

2.  Saint John of the Cross wrote Dark Night of the Soul. it is available at Google Books.

From Google Books-

“There comes to all souls, at least once in life, a severe test. It is known as the Dark Night of the Soul. It is when we are beleaguered by darkness: spiritual and mental and where no hope seems to be near and everything we try to do is thwarted. It is where the soul is forced to persist and enter into the glorious Golden Dawn of Illumination and kinship with God, or relax into the dull slumber of a mediocre physical existence. You cannot avoid it. If this test hasn’t already come in your life-it will. How you deal with it is as important as life itself. This book, written by a high initiate, St. John, will be your counsel and guide.”

3.  The Dark Night and clinical depression

4.  Dark Night of the Soul–The Mystic. org

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When I got up and walked outside, everything was different—trees, cars, the street—I saw everything with new eyes. It took me much searching to find out what had happened to me. In a book by William James entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), I found that I had had a radical conversion.

Did I answer a calling? I don’t know what happened to me except I knew that God had given me that compassion and love that I felt that day. I know that someone with an experience is never at the mercy of someone with an argument.

From that day until today, I have tried to accept the guidance that God gives me and it has been the most amazing journey. I don’t believe that God does more for me now than He did before that day. The difference is that I now can see the daily miracles. “Once I was blind and now I see.”

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GotQuestions.org has a great post about recognizing the voice of God. For me, when I’m sure it is God’s guidance leading me, one of the factors with the solution is that everything is worked out and not by me. Because it is hard for me to remember to keep myself in a positive direction, I have typed out a cheat sheet of things to remember when God’s guidance doesn’t seem to be prevalent.

Whosoever.org reminds us to first check our own motives. Is God silent or are we holding on to a particular outcome that may not be the right answer for us?

From Whatsoever.org:

“Patience is a virtue. How many times in our lifetime have we heard this said? Yet, I will be the first to admit that patience is a hard trait for me to use easily. That is when I must rely on other areas (faith and belief) in order to remain strong. The Father hears all and will answer. My faith convinces me of that.”

“In addition to faith in the Father, I believe we must have the peace of mind and openness of heart to continue our daily routines, blessing and thanking Him for all the things that have been accomplished in our lives. No matter what may be left unanswered for the moment, there are hundreds, no – thousands, of things to be thankful for. Our mere existence, the sight and sound of those squirrels having faith and bounding from tree to tree, our health, our hearts, our families and friends who enrich our lives so. So, the next time you are left wondering if God is listening remember this short story of faith. Also remember that our Father has blessed us with many things – as surely as he will bless us again, and just as surely as he will answer our prayers.”

From Letting Go–Finding Hope through Al-Anon: “Spiritual Awakenings-The hard way”:

“From my own experience I have to endure some pretty major pain before I become humble and learn from my own mistakes. When I get to the other side I think “really God” couldn’t you just send me a note or an instruction book. Do we have to do this every time?”

“Instead I have to get to the point where I don’t care about anything. I am at zero an empty vessel waiting to be filled. It is the ultimate letting go where you have no answers or for me at this point not even any questions.”

“I feel bad for the minister and his family but we all have to work things out for ourselves. Nobody can rescue anyone. You might postpone the inevitable pain that someone must go through bur life usually catches up with you.”

“Postponing the pain inevitably postpones the spiritual awakening waiting on the other side.”

One of the main things that I remind myself is that God is a God of peace. If I am anxious or upset, I won’t be able to hear God’s whispering or His quiet urgings. Also, as Verla Gillmor suggests, this may be a period when God has taken His hands off our “bike” so that we can learn to ride with less guidance. Verla suggests that we receive four opportunities during these periods: (1) solitude, (2) surrender, (3) scripture memorization, and (4) authenticity and community.

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The Power of Temptation  

The Space Without

Facing Bankruptcy

Reward Yourself in the Moment

The Secret to Being Insanely Creative

Touched by the Energy of Enthusiasm

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I don’t do book reviews. Instead, I give the book title, the author, the ISBN number and a link to Amazon to buy it. I also include excerpts from the book chosen so that a reader can decide if this book is a good match for him/her.

All of the books in the Changemaker Library are at Books to Help You Become Stress Free.

Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life

Gregg Levoy

ISBN 0-609-80370-0

Amazon link

From the introduction:

“In many traditions, calls—in the form of sounds—precede prayer, rites of initation, spiritual healings, and major life events. The purpose of calls is to summon adherents away from their daily grinds to a new level of awareness, into a sacred frame of mind, into communication with that which is bigger than themselves. The calls may come from bull-roarers, trumpets, rattles, wooden clackers, songs, and bells.”

(Calls may also be “still messages and/or thoughts, songs, etc.)

“Primarily this force announces the need for change, and the response for which calls is an awakening of some kind. A call is only a monologue. A return call, a response, creates a dialogue. Our own unfolding requires that we be in constant dialogue with whatever is calling us. The call and one’s reponse to it are also a central metaphor for the spiritual life.”

“They may be calls to do something (become self-employed, go back to school, leave or start a relationship, move to the country, change careers, have a child) or calls to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving, less fearful). They may be calls toward something or away from something; calls to change something, review our commitment to it, or come back to it in anentirely new way; calls toward whatever we’ve dared and double-dared ourselves to do for as long as we can remember.”

“Saying yes to the calls tend to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows that your life won’t make sense without.”

“We find that we must act on this imperative despite temptations—to back down and run for cover—that will divide even the most grimly resolve against themselves. We must persist with the sort of hope about which playwright and former Czechoslavakian president Vaclav Havel spoke when he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

The main body of the book is divided into 5 sections:

1) Part 1 The call to attention

2) Part 2 Receiving calls

3) Part 3 Invoking calls

4) Part 4 Saying no to calls

5) Part 5 Saying yes to calls

An excerpt from Saying Yes to Calls:

“Much of the pain associated with callings comes from avoiding them, from not surrendering to them. However much sacrifice may be involved, much of the pain we feel in surrendering to callings actually comes from our anticipation of the pain and not from the actual capitulation. Once we do surrender, we often feel a sense of great relief, and just as often we are bewildered about why we didn’t do it years ago.”

“We mistakenly equate surrender with defeat and sacrifice with annihilation. We bring to our renunciations the same oanic and anxiety—“Oh God, I can’t give that up”—that we often bring to our deliberations about intimacy, the fears of beng devoured and overpowered, of giving our lives away. Granted, parts of us are broken into smithereens in the process of following our calls and experience real compromise and real suffering, but this is not defeat any more than a flower suffers defeat by going to seed. Futhermore, say theologian Frederich Buechner, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarely fill a cup.”

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Many of Bill Wilson’s (the co-founder of AA) early influences were by people who believed spirituality to be the foundation. Two of those people were Carl Jung and William James. I have included the thoughts of these two men below.

William James is considered the founder of psychology.

These articles about William James and AA show the influence James had on helping to mold the early addiction recovery ideas that Bill Wilson had.

The Religious Roots of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps

William James and Alcoholics Anonymous

History of Alcoholics Anonymous

Big Book Theology: “We Agnostics” and William James

The  Varieties of Religious Experience

Bill Wilson’s Letter to Dr. Carl Jung, Jan. 23, 1961

Spirituality as a cure for alcoholism–the following three paragraphs are included from Wikipedia and contain other links in the article:

“Jung recommended spirituality as a cure for alcoholism and he is considered to have had an indirect role in establishing Alcoholics Anonymous.^[57] Jung once treated an American patient (Rowland Hazard III), suffering from chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that occasionally such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics where all else had failed.”

“Rowland took Jung’s advice seriously and set about seeking a personal spiritual experience. He returned home to the United States and joined a Christian evangelical Re-Armament movement known as the Oxford Group. He also told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience. One of the alcoholics he brought into the Oxford Group was Ebby Thacher, a long-time friend and drinking buddy of Bill Wilson, later co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Thacher told Wilson about the Oxford Group, and through them Wilson became aware of Hazard’s experience with Jung. The influence of Jung thus indirectly found its way into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original twelve-step program, and from there into the whole twelve-step recovery movement, although AA as a whole is not Jungian and Jung had no role in the formation of that approach or the twelve steps.”

“The above claims are documented in the letters of Jung and Bill W., excerpts of which can be found in Pass It On, published by Alcoholics Anonymous.^[58] Although the detail of this story is disputed by some historians, Jung himself made reference to its substance — including the Oxford Group participation of the individual in question — in a talk that was issued privately in 1954 as a transcript from shorthand taken by an attender (Jung reportedly approved the transcript), later recorded in Volume 18 of his Collected Works, The Symbolic Life (“For instance, when a member of the Oxford Group comes to me in order to get treatment, I say, ‘You are in the Oxford Group; so long as you are there, you settle your affair with the Oxford Group. I can’t do it better than Jesus.’” Jung goes on to state that he has seen similar cures among Roman Catholics.^[59])”

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I will be using excerpts from several sites. Today’s site I have read for years as it is a place for those of us who have had spiritual experiences to be able to read about each other’s experience.

Spiritual Experiences & Spiritualityis your source for spiritual, religious and mystical experiences, the study of spirituality, religion, enlightenment and teachers.

We are interested in stories from readers like you, if you have experienced any kind of inner awakening, personal development, growth or if you had a life transforming realization, an experience of transcendence, an inspiring story or if you have a gift on matters of spirituality, please submit it! If you want to have your own profile page, please sign up, it’s free!

It is also a powerful community for sharing with others.

Today’s selection is “The Darkness Was Crushing Me”:

“After having a deep conversation about Christianity with my boyfriend I found myself alone downstairs doing work because I had a deadline today and had a lot of work to do. But I was quite upset because he was asking me these questions and I feel like I’ve missed out on something everyone should be able to learn and decide about because I didn’t know about sinning, I feel like I’ve got no chance of being righteous I have sinned so much already… I recently had a couple of piercings too and now this has happened. I kind of feel like they are burdens for my sins.”

“About 20 past 3 I turned everything off and went to go upstairs. As soon as everything went pitch black I suddenly felt freezing cold. I felt a tremendous pressure around me and inside me. I was so shocked, I stood there for about 10 minutes just too scared to move, but then I just thought get to my room and turn on a light. It was so horrible I felt like a million things were staring at me and following me up the stairs. I ran into my room and threw the door to shut it and it stopped, leaving a tiny gap which my cat ran through all big and angry looking. So I just sat on my bed for about 20 minutes feeling the pressure. It was kind of like the darkness was crushing me, so I prayed.”

“I’ve never really been taught about Christianity but it felt like the right thing to do, and suddenly I felt warm like I’d just got out a bath the pressure went and I suddenly could not keep my eyes open.”

“I need to know what happened to me, and can you please tell me when you began to believe? Or is everyone unsure to some extent? All I know is I want to believe and I have asked for signs but I have nothing.”

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As we shift our feelings and thoughts to positive from negative, we become aware of the power that we feel inside. We are becoming aware of our soul. The soul is bigger that just our mind. It includes our dreams, our feelings as well as our thoughts.

I don’t think that we can try to attain the awakening of our soul in any other way than by choosing to put ourselves in the presence of the God of our understanding. Many centuries ago, a wonderful monk lived and wrote “Practice in the Presence of God”. He taught me, centuries later, that all I had to do was practice presenting myself to my God. I didn’t have to do anything else but put myself in a place where the God of my understanding could communicate with me.

Prayer is when I communicate with my God and meditation is the practice of listening to God. Although I have tried many times to maintain the principles of meditation to my life, I have never been able to do meditation in the traditional way of going to one place and commencing to meditate.

Instead I set aside time several times a day to “check in” with Him. When I present myself to God for His answers, I come in a spirit of peace and quiet. I rarely “hear” anything. Instead I sense directions or guidance from Him. If my direction is God’s will for my life, the going will be easy. If I am trying to force something to happen, I will become stressed about it.

The difficulty is in getting out of God’s way. If I think that I know exactly the direction of God’s guidance, I have learned that it is probably my ego answering me. Another way that I use to understand God’s direction is when I really want His direction to be a certain way, then I resolve to not do anything to make anything happen. This is especially hard when all that maybe needed is a phone call. If I don’t receive some kind of guidance, I realize that the answer may not be no, but rather may be later. This letting go releases great energy and feelings of belonging. “Let go and let God.”

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mckaysavage

When I feel that God hasn’t answered my prayers and/or desires, I know that I may just not be ready for the answers at this time. So I have a list of other things to do to get out of His Way and/or to spend the waiting time in peace.

Having faith in God has rarely been a problem for these 30 years that I’ve been surrendering myself on a daily basis. Even the two years that I suffered from clinical depression, I never once felt that God was punishing me or had deserted me. I knew that I just had to be patient and continue to surrender.

Do I believe that God waited two years to tell me that I needed to see a psychiatrist? No, I believe He answers prayer immediately. But I was 10 years sober from alcohol and had learned in AA that drugs were a crutch. Eventually I did go to the doctor. (Actually I worked in a psychiatric hospital as a marketing specialist, so I told one of the doctors there that I needed to see him ASAP).

The waiting for the answer is the hardest teaching of the dedicated spiritual journey. I know that the waiting is like being a trapeze artist. When I let go of one bar and before I catch the next bar, there is a void. That void is where I am when I am waiting. During this time, I practice removing myself from fear and anxiety.

Having faith in myself to hear the answers has been a slow lesson to learn. I tend to forget that He created me in His image. I also have a battle sometimes to accept that I deserve all of God’s blessings.

Being the oldest child in a home dominated by alcoholism, I learned to not ask for anything and, worse, I taught myself to not expect much. I have shut out so many of God’s blessings by thinking I didn’t deserve them.  I started working at 12 making potholders for sale and did a lot of business. Then through high school, I worked every evening in a drug store. Working hard made me feel better about myself. I believe that these experiences made me stronger. The biggest problem for children in this type of home situation is the shame of feeling as if the home situation is only happening to him/her.

1. Spirit Rock In the San Francisco area, Spirit Rock (http://www.spiritrock.org/) publlishes the complete schedule of all of its resources. Transportation is provided to the site from volunteer drivers if a worshiper needs transportation. One of the founders of Spirit Rock, Jack Kornfield, explains what mindfulness means to him in this article.  Continuing education credits for trained professionals is offered a t Spirit Rock in collaboration with ISP, Institute for Spirituality and Psychology. Spirit Rock offers residental retreats, daylong programs, beginning classes, weekly classes, a diversity progam, a family program, a teen program, and a mindulness yoga and meditation training program.

2.Shambhala Mountain Center is a pristine 600 acre meditation retreat center located . The center offers beginning meditation, a yoga retreat, contempative arts as well as retreat and renewal weekends. The 2007/08 schedule is available online and includes sections in Buddhism, meditation, yoga and retreat. The  schedule offers: (1) tame your mind, learn to meditate through the introductory course or the Shambhala trasining series; (2) stretch your body and mind at one of the yoga retreats experiencing OM, Ashtanga, Hatha and Anusara yoga; (3) delve into Buddhist teachings with highly regarded dharma teachers; (4) deepen your practice and transform your life in monthlong summer or winter Dathun Meditation Retreats; (5) access the healing potential of body, mind, and community, (6) explore th powerful practices of ancient traditions ; and (7) demystify and prepare yourself for the untimate letting go. The Shambhala Retreat also offers conference and group retreats and rentals. It is located two hours from the Denver International Airport in the colorado Rockies.

3. Journey of the Spirit lists spiritual retreats, journeys and women’s retreats. It provides the following links:

 Zion National Park–Day of the Dead (Mexico)–Mayan Riviera–Teothihuacan, Mexico–Angkor Wat, Cambodia–Baja Mexico–Tepoztlan, Mexico–Patagonia–Egypt–Cartagena, Columbia–Costa Rica–Israel

4. Find the Divine has over 1700 retreat center and 900 conference centers. It organizes the resources as: (1) retreat centers for individuals and groups; (2) conference centers and retreat centers for groups; (3) retreats, events and workshops; (4) retreat leaders and spiritual guides; (5) retreat and confrtrncr centerds for sale; and retreat general information.

It has links for the following states/countries:

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky

Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Mexico
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota

Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
Washington DC
West Virginia
Wyoming
Wisconsin

Retreat Centers in Canada
Retreat Centers in Costa Rica
Retreat Centers in Belize
Retreat Centers in Mexico  

Email me at changemaker.kathy@gmail.com if you would like other retreats to be added.