Leading the Bull Home.

This from John Prendergast beautifully encapsulates the work of a meta psychologist and spiritual guide:

“Where is our inner knowing leading us?  It seems to me that it is leading us home – to right here – in order, as the poet suggests, to know this “place” for the first time. This place, whatever is before you in this moment, may not appear to be anything special. In fact, it will almost always look very ordinary and familiar. It is the evolutionary job of the conditioned mind to make it seem this way, since it takes less energy to categorize our experience as “known” than to really see, feel and touch what is actually here. Thinking that we know something – transforming the mysterious into the ordinary – serves biological survival. But we are here for more than mere survival and we are not puppets of the conditioned mind.

Our body is a trustworthy conduit of inner knowing – far more than the conditioned mind that is so easily seduced by ideas. It is closer to the ground from which it springs and to the pulse of life. It has a remarkable capacity for felt sensing – the whole-body sense of things, the far reach of which includes our inner truth. As our body is freed from conditioned thoughts and reactive feelings, it becomes an increasingly fine-tuned instrument for being in touch with reality.

There are multiple somatic markers of inner knowing. In this book I have focused on the four most common that have emerged during tens of thousands of my client sessions over the past three decades. These four – a relaxed groundedness, inner alignment, open-heartedness and spaciousness – have appeared repeatedly as I have both guided and followed hundreds of my clients and students during their unfolding process of self-discovery. Dozens of interviews with friends, students, colleagues and former clients confirm these observations. So does my own experience.

As we tune into our deepest nature, our body relaxes, grounds, lines up, opens up and lights up. So far this extraordinarily useful feedback has been largely overlooked. Almost nothing has been written about it. We need to both sense and decode these subtle signals if we are to benefit from them. These bodily markers are here to be seen and used as guides to more gracefully navigate life and to awaken. They are part of our birthright, available to anyone.

Awakening does not end with the discovery of our true nature as open awareness. This is only the beginning of another process. Life is also inviting us to discover the true nature of our body and, by extension, the world. There is a natural movement of open, loving awareness to saturate the densest levels of form in order to meet and free the areas of greatest confusion and suffering. This movement is at the heart of the Boddhisattva vow to work for the enlightenment of all beings. It is also found in Christian teachings on the power of redemptive love and Jewish teachings of tikkun olam (repairing the world). Loving awareness will liberate everything that it touches, if we are honest and vulnerable enough to allow it. It fosters a great intimacy.

As the body awakens, so does the world. When we discover that the core of the body is made up of empty, vibrant, and wakeful openness, we experience the world differently. The world as other dissolves and becomes intimate. As a result, our ordinary experience is suffused with a sense of the sacred. We discover what I like to call the sacred ordinary. We feel grateful for no reason.

This is a quiet knowing, rather than an ecstatic display of fireworks. While there may be moments of bliss and dramatic revelation along the way, this knowing brings an inner contentment and peace. Nothing is extraordinary and yet everything is sacred.

The Twelfth century Chinese Buddhist master Kakuan created a series of pictures based on earlier Taoist teachings that he called the “Ten Bulls.” Later they came to be known as the “Ten Ox-Herding Pictures” in Zen. They describe typical steps in the discovery of our true nature – what it is to be truly human. The final picture is entitled “In the World” and depicts a little man returning to the marketplace after his long journey of searching for and taming the bull. The inscription reads:

Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world. My clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am ever blissful. I use no magic to extend my life. Now, before me, the dead trees come alive.”

– See more at: http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/the-sacred-ordinary/#sthash.gUDSsCV7.dpuf