Winnicott wrote a great deal about the importance of the holding environment for psychological development. When doing individual or group work with a therapist or spiritual teacher, the holding environment is a major concern.
Issues of basic trust are a concern for individuals involved in deep psychological or spiritual work. The holding environment needs to be safe enough to venture out, but risky enough to push our developmental envelope or edge. If there is no risk, is there ever expansion or going beyond the familiar and known?
At first, one needs more trust in the other (teacher, therapist). As personal work deepens, trust in the process or one’s self becomes more foreground than trust in the other.
In the 40 years I’ve been on the journey, I’ve seen holding environments that ranged from the self-serving, to the sublime, to the truly inspiring.
These images represent the following sentence taken from the home page of www.ahalmaas.com -
The Diamond Approach is a path of wisdom, an approach to the investigation of Reality and a method of working on oneself that leads to human maturity and liberation.
It’s been quite a while since i was memed, but today Resonant Engima tagged me.
Here is the meme guide:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.
When you say, ‘What’s the most important prayer in Judaism?’ it’s Ana Adonai hoshiya na -‘Please God help us.’ It’s like Kyrie Eleison – ‘Lord have mercy.’ Reb Zalman’s explanation struck a very personal chord for me (Joan Borysenko).
Compare that to this (the other book close at hand – ProBlogger):
5th sentence:
One of my favorite monetization strategies is that anything that alows you to charge a subscription rather than a one-time payment.
Next 3 sentences:
Make a sale but get paid over and over. It’s the gym membership model. Some blogs do this with private forums, others with online training courses.
In reading A. Decker’s profile, we see the list of favorite movies is: King Kong(both), O Brother Where Art Thou?, Brick, Crouching Tiger…(Ang Lee-Chinese-not dubbed English).
When I think of fakeness and being fake, the first thing that pops to mind is insincerity followed closely by inauthentic and not real.
In the normal world, fakeness is often used to describe someone who seems too caught up in image and superficial living, someone who is not being straight with others – not necessarily a liar, but more of a “spin person.”
Fake people feel empty or hollow and fakeness seems to impact our hearts with a sense of disappoinment or loss.
The greater issue with fakeness is that the ego itself is fake – 100%. The ego identity is a fake self, so it can’t be anything other than fake regardless of all the striving to be real.
Most of our lives are lived from a place of fakeness – what we take to be real in ourselves is mostly based on the fake – ignorance, misundertanding, false ideas and beliefs, wishes, hopes and dreams. There is a drive deep within us that longs for the real, for authenticity, but that drive is being co-opted by something fake trying to improve itself for others’ approval.
It’s a real conundrum – how can a person, identified with their fake self, become real and authentic? What kind of alchemy can transform fakeness into the real?
Ipseity according to the dictionary is: selfhood; individual identity, individuality. [from L. ipse, self, himself]
The absolute is both my nature and my identity. Is the nature of the soul and her very identity. It constitutes her manifestations but it is also her depth and deepest essence. Alternatively, we can say the absolute is our true self, our objectively actual self. But it is also the nature of the soul. That is why we like to refer to the absolute as ipseity, for the word ipseity means both nature and self. To recognize the absolute as ipseity is a profound experience, for it is the self-realization of this dimension of true nature. A. H. Almaas
Breathe into Being
The Sufis say that existence came about because the Divine ‘Himselfness’ (Arabic: Huwiyyah, often translated as ‘Ipseity’ in scholarly works) breathed the Breath of Compassion, Nafs ar-Rahman, on the possibilities (Arabic: ayan-i-thabitah) that were latent in Himself.
Be that as it may, the human soul is referred to in the Qur’an and elsewhere as a breath, nafs. (Interestingly, the word for spirit - ruh - also means ‘wind’). God moulds Adam with his two ‘hands’ and breathes into him His Spirit. And that part of us that is not moulded ‘clay’ (our materiality) is the nafs, the breath, our soul.
According to some Sufi sources, there are seven gradations of the human nafs, ranging from the habitual, unreconstructed self of people who have done no ‘work’ on themeselves (the so-called ‘commanding self’, ‘Nafs al-ammarah’, which is really nothing but fragments of conditioning) through to the ‘completed self’, Nafs al-kamilan. – from James
What would the Buddha say about ipseity? Is there self-identity in the absolute nature of the everything/anything
Timelessness is NOW. Timelessness includes no time and all time. It is the moment that is always now.
The ordinary meaning of being in the now usually means pay attention to what is happening in this moment of time and space. It is usually directed at the content of one’s experience.
Most of us probably had parents who harangued us at times to pay attention, to be here now. But those moments probably did not contain the sense of timelessnes – being beyond time. In fact, they most likely bound us more to the sense of time.
Mystics and saints talk of timelessness, of how being in the now or the present moment transcends time. What’s interesting is that being in the now, in the timeless state, does not stop the dynamic movement of the universe or the phenomena of time. Things continue to happen in time and space, but one’s experience is more fundamental than time.
Timelessness includes time. Time is of timelessness. Time and events are happening within timelessness, from timelessness.
Many people, in fact, probably most of us, have experiences of timelessness, but we rarely stop to explore the experience in the moment – to really get curious about what is happening. If we do, our conditioning will automatically engage the linear mind in the exploration which brings us back into the realm of time.
To explore timelessness, we need to be able to observe and perceive with awareness and presence without thinking, without engaging the content in a conceptual manner. This means engaging in a direct phenomenological exploration – what is happening right now without interpretation from the past.
What gives us our sense of identity? Some of the components of our sense of identity include:
Personal History
Body Image
Familiar Sensations
Thought Patterns
Patterns of Reactivity
Name
Beyond the basic need for a sense of control, we are deeply driven by our sense of identity, of who we are. ‘I’ is a capital letter, denoting the importance we place on our sense of individual self. As Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Many social theories are to do with creating or preserving our sense of identity. – Changing Minds
Of coures there is always the number of cards, accounts, bills, mail, and the like that are connected to our identity.
But is all of this, in part or total, who we really are? What is our fundamental identity and how does that sense of identity differ from our day-to-day sense of identity?
One of the most significant characteristics of the soul is that it can identify with the content of experience. It can take any impression, for example self-image, and make itself believe that that impression is itself. It can also take a part of the psychological structure and believe it to be the whole of itself. Identifying with an impression or the content of experience makes the self believe that it has an identity, and through this identity it then recognizes itself. Our personal history, constituted by our memories, comprises the basic content of our usual identity. This identification with the personal history provides a feeling of self-recognition, a sense of identity, or a sense of self. So in experiencing itself through the veil of memories, the soul not only loses sight of its primordial purity – its Essence – but also identifies itself through and with this veil of personal history. – A.H. Almaas
Questioning the self or identitiy is a basic practice or koan in Buddhism – Who Am I?
The reified mind operates in the world on self-images and the conceptional. The true artist is able to step into another dimension to produce a true self-portrait.
We’ve defined the Soul’s Compass as an intelligence located in the heart that’s capable of perceiving and responding to the good. In Hebrew there’s a concept called yetzer ha-tov – the urge to good. Sometimes yetzer -ha-tov is imagined sitting on one shoulder, and yetzer ha-ra’ – the evil urge – on the other. We grow in wisdom through our attempts to inquire into, and ultimately transcend the tension of those opposite impulses. The function of the evil urge is to clarify the good, the true, and the beautiful by motivating us to orient to the visible fruits of Spirit in our choices.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, was the Catholic dean of discernment. In the late 15th century, when he was born, discernment was indeed centered on distinguishing good from evil in the classical theological sense of whether a thought came from God or the devil. In the theology of Ignatius, which reflected the thinking of the time, the devil was thought to be a crafty creature intent on leading us astray who was separate from our own more primitive, instinctive desires and inclinations. But regardless of where the “evil urge” originates – most likely from our own inborn nature and conditioning – we can easily distinguish it from the action of our higher nature by the inner state it produces, which Ignatius described as desolation in contrast to consolation.
– Consolation is a feeling of inner warmth, of being loved by and loving the Creator. A state of interior joy, consolation is characterized by a quiet mind and an open heart. One feels inspired, confident, courageous… held and supported by unseen but beneficent forces.
– Desolation is a state of interior disturbance that Ignatius called “darkness of the soul.” Sadness, sloth, and separateness from God are its hallmarks. Today’s common maladies of burnout, depression, despondency, addiction and hopelessness are all symptoms of desolation.
This is fine example of how authors Joan Borysenko and Gordon Dveirin bring wisdom from the past and from differing traditions to their open-ended inquiry into spiritual guidance. Your Soul’s Compass is a great blend of insight from the past and present into the question – What is Spiritual Guidance?
How much holding do you need in your environment?
How do you respond to 
The ordinary meaning of being in the now usually means pay attention to what is happening in this moment of 
What gives us our 
