A man from Los Angeles has become aware of both anger and narcissistic tendencies along the path, which surprised him. He asks how to integrate shadow work when these aspects come up. Rupert suggests he notice the impulse, but not identify with the anger or the narcissism, because what he truly is, is neither angry nor narcissistic.
This clip has been taken from Rupert’s Seven Day Retreat at Home in August 2020.
How To Deal With Threatening People in Public – Jocko Willink
Requirements for Change: Awareness, Dedication, Perseverance
For real change to occur, you will always need awareness, dedication, and perseverance. How much are you really interested in these things?
Sustaining Awareness (Richard Rohr)
There is something about simply sitting still, quietly attentive to your breathing, that tends to evoke less agitated, less thought-driven modes of meditative awareness. When this shift . . . embodies a sincere desire for God, a new capacity to realize oneness with God begins to emerge. Resting in this awareness offers the least resistance to God. . . .
As our resistance to God’s quiet persistence diminishes, our experience of ourselves as other than Christ dissolves into a meditatively realized oneness with Christ. Little by little, or all at once, we come to that point of blessedness and freedom in which we can say, along with Saint Paul, “For me to live is Christ” (Philippians 1:21). . . .
.. Perhaps by trial and error, with no one to guide us, we find our own way to respond to the unconsummated longings of our awakened heart. We, in effect, discover our own personal ways to meditate. By meditation I mean, in this context, any act habitually entered into with our whole heart as a way of awakening and sustaining a more interior meditative awareness of the present moment. The meditation practice we might find ourselves gravitating toward could be
- baking bread,
- tending the roses, or
- taking long, slow walks to no place in particular.
Or we might find ourselves being interiorly drawn to
- painting or to
- reading or
- writing poetry or
- listening to certain kinds of music.
Our meditation practice may be that of being alone, truly alone, without any addictive props or escapes. Or our practice may be that of being with the person in whose presence we awakened to what is most real and vital in our life. . . . We cannot explain it, but when we give ourselves over to these simple acts, we are taken to a deeper place. We become once again more grounded and settled in a meditative awareness of the depth of the life we are living.