You noticed the noise — the sound that never quite stopped, so you never quite had to feel what was underneath it — and you let it settle. Not into silence. Into quiet. Your soul was never meant to be nourished by silence. It was meant to be nourished by quiet.

You noticed the verdict, too — the crown you thought you needed, the halo you thought you had to earn — and you began to let that go as well. You are learning to stop asking whether you are good enough, and simply be who you are, in this moment, unscored.

Now there is a third release.

Still the reflex to brace, so you can live from the soft core of equanimity. There is a stillness between the thought and the action, the experience and the reaction, even between the thought and the next thought. It gives the thought meaning and the action purpose. It allows response to override reaction.

Most of us don’t live in that stillness. We live in a brace of expectations, threats, or urgencies.

You know the word as a verb — to brace, the flinch before impact, the tightening that happens faster than thought and skims the surface of experience.

But a brace is also a noun. A device that holds something rigid so it cannot move the way it was made to move.

Somewhere along the way, the flinch stopped being occasional. It became structure. You started wearing it the way a broken limb wears a splint — so long, so constantly, that it began to feel like bone. This is what equanimity releases. Not a single reaction. A permanent one, worn so long it forgot it was ever removable. You have met this brace before, in other clothes.

You met it as noise — the sound that never quite stops, so you never quite have to feel what’s underneath it.

You met it in the pageant and the pew — the bracing for a verdict, the flinch that runs ahead of every judgment before it even arrives.

Equanimity meets it at the root. Not the noise. Not the verdict. The reflex itself, and the rigidity it hardened into. To release the brace is not to become numb; it is to be quietly and unconditionally alive.

It has no fear. It doesn’t flinch ahead of what’s coming. It embraces without bracing.

It has no delight, either. It doesn’t grab at what it liked, and try to hold the shape of it forever.

It simply stays soft enough to move — the way a limb moves, once the splint finally comes off. This softness is not weakness. It takes more to stay unbraced than it does to flinch.

Three things have been released now, one at a time.

The noise, into quiet. The verdict, into nonjudgment. The brace, into stillness.

Each release cleared something the one before it couldn’t reach. The noise had to quiet before you could hear the verdict underneath it. The verdict had to soften before you could feel the brace holding it in place. And now, with the brace finally releasing, something opens that none of the first two could open on its own.

Quiet enough to hear. Unjudged enough to look. Still enough to receive.

This is the ground wonder, reverence, and devotion have been waiting for — not achievements to work toward, but what simply becomes possible once nothing is left bracing against them. Wonder can finally ask a question without needing to defend against the answer. It doesn’t rush toward explaining what it meets. It stays in not-yet-knowing, because not-yet-knowing is no longer a threat.

Reverence can finally stay close to what it hasn’t decided how to defend against — another person, an old memory, a part of yourself you stopped looking at. It doesn’t need the other thing to become familiar first. It simply stays.

Devotion can finally give without calculating the return. A brace never stops calculating; it is always counting the cost of what it opens itself to. Without it, giving becomes what it was always meant to be — free of the transaction. The world does not only want your calm. It needs what only an unbraced soul can offer it — reverence for what is other, wonder at what it cannot yet explain, devotion that isn’t secretly a transaction.

These are not private comforts. They are what a bracing world has almost forgotten is possible. The Sanctuary is quiet. It offers no verdict. It is a place to relax and just be.

And in that space, without noise, and nothing to defend against, equanimity is simply what is left — alive, unforced, the mood your whole being breathes in.

A mood of quiet, of love, of the soft center — this changes how we breathe, and lets us be still enough to wonder, to revere, and to devote. This stillness, held consciously, is the mood of the Sanctuary itself.

You’re welcome there

.

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The Ideals

I grew up wanting to be crowned Miss America. Every September, I’d sit in front of the TV and judge, compare, and dream.

I wanted to stand in that particular spotlight, in that particular kind of gown, and hear my name called at the end. I wanted to win the crown of that pageant. I wanted to be favorably judged — for my appearance, my talent, my social grace. A panel would look at me, and if I had done it right, they would crown me.

I also wanted to be judged a saint.

Not out loud. Not in those words. But I wanted God to look at my inner life — my rituals, my obedience, my willingness to sacrifice for others — and find me good. I wanted a second kind of crown. A quieter one, a halo. But a crown, nevertheless.

Two judging panels seeing me on two stages. One judged the outside of me, one judged the inside. Each panel held the power to define me with a verdict regarding my performance on the stage. My life felt lived on the pageant or the pew.

The Pageant and the Pew

The pageant is any place where you are being watched and scored. It doesn’t have to be a literal contest. It’s the room, the kitchen, the office, the bedroom, where your body, your talent, your charm are all being measured against a standard someone else set, and your worth depends on how well you meet it.

The pew is quieter, and it feels holier, so it’s harder to see. It’s the place where your inner life is what’s on trial — your devotion, your patience, your capacity to give yourself away without complaint. The pew doesn’t ask you to be beautiful. It asks you to be good. But it is still asking you to perform for a verdict. It has just moved the stage inside.

A Verdict?

Neither one is technically a verdict. A pageant ends in a crowning, not a ruling. Sainthood is a canonization, a crown of righteousness — a decree, not a legal finding. But I’m going to keep calling it a verdict here, because that’s how it lands in the body: final, the way a verdict is final. Public, the way a verdict is announced to a room. Life-altering, the way a verdict changes who you are allowed to be from that moment on. The word isn’t accurate. The feeling is.

And both verdicts, when they come back in your favor, hand you the same object.

The pageant has its iconography and doesn’t hide it: a crown, a sash, a wave to the crowd.

The pew’s iconography is quieter, but it’s no less literal. A halo. Not jewels — a ring of light, painted above the head in every icon of every saint who did it right. The sainted self doesn’t get a sash. She gets a circle of light drawn by someone else, often generations later, judging that her devotion, her suffering, her hidden inner obedience were sufficient after all.

A crown and a halo are the same gesture. Something is placed above a person’s head, by someone other than her, to mark that the verdict came back in her favor. The pageant crowns the visible self. The pew — or the long, slow judgment that follows it — haloes the sainted self, the hidden one, the one whose worth was supposed to be invisible, known only to God, and yet still needed a symbol. Even the most private, most spiritual judgment wants its crown in the end.

The Trap

Both are asking the same question: did I do this right enough to be loved?

And both will answer you. That’s the trap. They are built to answer. A pageant crowns someone. A pew, in its way, tells you where you rank in devotion, in sacrifice, in how well you disappeared yourself for others. There is always a verdict coming, and you can always almost reach it, and that almost is what keeps you standing there, still trying.

The Shadows

But being measured casts three shadows, and they are darker than the verdict itself.

The first is that you learn how to judge. You cannot spend years being scored on your appearance or your goodness without absorbing the scale itself — without it becoming the instrument you now carry everywhere, and turn on everyone. You start reading other women’s faces, bodies, devotion, sacrifice, the way you were taught to read your own. Not because you’re unkind. Because it’s the only fluency you were given. The pageant and the pew don’t just judge you — they deputize you.

The second is that you learn to live in competition. If worth is being ranked, then someone else’s beauty, someone else’s goodness, is information about your own position. Another woman’s crown becomes a small subtraction from yours. Another woman’s sacrifice becomes a silent rebuke of your own. You didn’t choose to see her that way. The stage taught you to.

The third is that you become obsessed with self-improvement, because you never quite feel like you are enough. If the verdict is always pending, there is always another rehearsal to run, another discipline to take up, another version of yourself to produce for the next round of scoring. This can look like devotion. It can look like ambition, or piety, or simply being a person who is always working on herself. But underneath it is the same quiet dread: that you have not yet done enough to earn the crown or the halo, and so you cannot stop. Improvement stops being a choice and becomes a compulsion — not toward growth, but away from the fear of being found lacking.

This is, I think, the deepest cost of the pageant and the pew — not what they do to you, but what they turn you into toward everyone else standing there beside you, and toward yourself.

The Truth

Here is what I have slowly come to know, in three parts: self, spirit, and success.

“Self” doesn’t live on a stage or in a pew. It doesn’t depend on the approval or disapproval of an audience, a god, or even your own soul’s mirror — the private, most exacting judge of all, the one who scores you when no one else is watching. Selfhood is not a verdict. It is what’s underneath all the verdicts, waiting.

“Spirit” is not a judge. Direct experience of spirit reveals that gods are not judges. You are never a loser in the realm of the spirit. There is no panel there, no tribunal, no ranking of who prayed hardest or suffered best. That was never spirit’s language. It was the pew’s, borrowed and mistaken for spirit’s own.

“Success” is not a competition about achieving ideals, avoiding failures, or conforming to expectations. Success does not need a crown. It doesn’t require a sash, a title, a ranking against anyone else in the room. Whatever your success actually is, it cannot be compared or judged.

Trust

I know this is true. And I also know how scary it is to get off the stage. To stand up from the pew.

Because if no one is scoring you, there’s a moment — just one moment — where you don’t know who you are. The panel gave you a shape. The pew gave you a role. Step away from both and you are, for a moment, unnamed. Unranked. Unheld.

That takes courage. Getting up takes trust — trust that you are still someone without the score, that you don’t dissolve the second the judging stops. That is not a small thing to ask of yourself, and I don’t think it happens all at once. I think it happens by inches, by seasons, the way most real changes in a soul happen.

Which is part of why I wanted to bring you back to something I wrote in my last post about quiet.

The Quiet

I described a kind of quiet that arrives without announcement — not a dramatic ending, just a soft dimming of noise. A pause. A slowing. The sense that something in you is no longer trying to take in more, but is ready to release.

I think that quiet is the opposite of the pageant and the pew.

The pageant and the pew are noise. Not always loud noise (the pew’s noise can be very soft, very devout, very well-mannered — but noise all the same), because a verdict is always being calculated somewhere close by. There is no real quiet on a stage. There is no real quiet in a pew that is asking you to earn your place in it.

The quiet I wrote about doesn’t ask anything of you. It doesn’t want your talent or your obedience. It isn’t waiting to score your exhale. It’s the sound of a life with no judging panel in the room.

If you’ve ever slowed down while reading something and felt, without being able to say why, that you had finally been let off the hook — that’s the quiet I mean. And if some part of you is tired of waiting for a verdict, from a stage or a pew or your own soul’s mirror, I think that quiet is where you get to practice, in small doses, what it might feel like to simply be seen without being judged.

You don’t have to get off the stage all at once. You don’t have to stand up from the pew today. But you can, for a few minutes, sit in a place where nothing is asking to be scored.

The place is the Sanctuary

and you are welcome there.

There are times in the year — and in a life — when something begins to quiet down.

Not in a dramatic way.
Not as a clear ending.
Just… a soft dimming of the noise.

The soul has seasons, too.
And this quiet often arrives without announcement.

You may feel it in your body before you understand it.

A kind of pause.
A slowing.
As if something in you is no longer trying to take in more…

but is ready to release.

What once felt certain becomes less so.
What once moved quickly begins to ease its pace.

And there can be a quiet uncertainty here —
a questioning,
a searching,

and alongside it, something softer…
a small opening.

This is often the moment we try to fix.

To find answers.

To take something in.

To push ourselves forward again.

But there is another way to meet this season.

Not by reaching for more—
but by allowing yourself to exhale slowly and deeply.

To let the noise leave your system.
To not replace it right away.

There is a particular kind of quiet that comes before something begins.

Before the next inhale.

Not the quiet of absence —
but the quiet of comforting and gathering.

You may not have language for what is forming.
You may not yet see where it leads.

But something in you knows how to be here.

For now, that is enough.

Nothing is being asked of you.

You don’t need to name this.
You don’t need to move it forward.

You can simply be here—
breathing out what you no longer need to carry.

If you want to stay here a little longer, I’ve written a quieter, more private reflection for paid subscribers — a place to sit with this without needing to move too quickly.

You’re welcome there.

If you find yourself slowing down as you read, then you’re meeting me in the right place.

With love from The Sanctuary,

Lynn

P.S. You may notice this note feels a little different than what I’ve written before.

Coming from the Sanctuary, the notes will be simpler. Closer to lived experience, and less about explanation.

I’ll share more about The Sanctuary soon.

The Mystery of Belonging

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I realized I should have titled it the Challenge of Belonging as, like me, most had difficulties with the need and reality of belonging to any group.

Everyone related to a particular slide and found transformative understanding of the challenges and experiences of belonging.

Here is the link to the video: and you just need to click the button.

Contemplate Belonging

After watching the video, come back to this post and apply WORKING WITH ONE SLIDE.

The content of the video is complex because each of us is complex. I have a simple suggestion for dealing with this complexity: ONE SLIDE.

Working with ONE SLIDE

With every webinar or course module, I offer slides carrying the core content. What you do with them next is where the real work happens.

None of my offers are quick fixes. They ask for questioning, reflection, contemplation — a curating of the content until…

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Tomorrow, Sunday, June 28th at 3:00 PM Eastern, I’m hosting a live webinar on one of the most quietly urgent questions of our time: What does it mean to belong — to yourself, to others, to spirit, to your times?

This isn’t a workshop on connection skills or social anxiety. It’s a genuine inquiry into belonging as a mystery of human consciousness — why we join, why we leave, what it costs us, and what it opens in us.

If you’ve ever felt more outsider than insider — or loved someone who has — I think this conversation will give you something you didn’t know you were looking for.

Free for paid subscribers. Sliding scale ($12–$36) for free subscribers. Everyone who registers gets the replay.

I’ll see you Sunday.

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Here is the outline of the webinar:

the etymology of Belonging…It will change your understanding of all the words that begin with be-!

what degree of proximity do you seek in order to validate and intensify fitting in

• naming and direction

• enlivening, nurturing, cultivation

• protection and privilege

self, spirit, success

• thinking, feeling, willing about complexity, variation, dynamics of

• how angels, archangels, and archai shape belonging

• well-being, relationship, contribution, inner development.

The Wise Joy and the Wise Suffering of proximity and fitting in. Worthiness and value.

reasons/benefits

• validation and identity

• being and becoming

• inclusion and exclusion

• openness and boundaries

four shadows of belonging both material and spiritual

• attachment

• adoption

• adaption

• attraction

reasons for not belonging

• freedom

• love

• wisdom

From belonging to beholding to becoming

receiving and giving

• mercy

• grace,

• love

I hope to see you on Sunday, June 28, at 3 PM Eastern

Register Here

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Birth requires separation and leaving so we can grow and become. Yet we also grow and become through connecting and remaining. This is one of the core complicating ironies of being human: how do we belong to ourselves and belong with others? Why do we join and why do we disconnect?

This Sunday, June 28th at 3:00 PM Eastern, I’m offering a live webinar: The Mystery of Belonging.

Wanting to belong, needing to belong—it is a human necessity and a deep intrinsic desire. It is so deep that we rarely ask questions about the experience unless belonging has become painful.

What do we learn about being human if we look at belonging as a mystery, as a path of initiation? What do we learn about our own thinking, feeling, and willing—and about our personal sovereignty regarding truth, beauty, and goodness?

We are living in times that exaggerate and condemn differences and divisions. Why? This mystery of belonging is the theme of one of the big summer films: Disclosure Day. And earlier this year, the film Project Hail Mary profoundly addressed belonging.

I’ve been doing intensive spiritual and personal research on belonging recently. While I have researched relationship for decades and looked at the forms of belonging and not belonging forever, driven by my own personal dilemmas and those of my clients, family, and friends and all the movies I have watched and books I have read, I never before focused on the root meaning, purpose, and complexity of belonging as a mystery of human consciousness.

Every day, I am learning more. I am finding a deeper understanding of what it means to belong to self, to others, to spirit, to nature, and to our times.

My intention with this webinar is to share some key elements about belonging, giving you enough of a sense of these mysteries to inspire and support your own questioning.

Choosing to belong, to doubt belonging, and to leave a relationship, a group, or a system of beliefs can be scary and confusing. How do we make these choices?

This is the mystery of not belonging. Is it karma? Is it destiny? Or is it Michaelic freedom?

Personally, I’ve always been more of an outsider than an insider. My karma and destiny could only unfold through the suffering of not belonging… at least, not belonging for long. But I always thought this meant I was a social failure. I wasn’t.

If you have ever suffered with being an outsider, or are close to someone who is, this webinar will give you a new framework for understanding and a new compassion for those who walk outside the gates.

Belonging can mean you are both an insider and an outsider. After all, if you are an anthroposophist, you don’t really belong to the mainstream. It is definitely an outsider path, with an outsider language. We see the same with Waldorf education, or alternative medicine. The early Christians were outsiders. Even the Old Testament Commandments and the New Testament Beatitudes are fundamentally about belonging and not belonging.

I am so looking forward to sharing my thoughts and opening the conversation to your insights and questions. There is a wise joy in working with these belonging mysteries: the more we choose to belong to ourselves, the more we truly belong with others.

The webinar is free to paid subscribers, but you must register. If you are a free subscriber, you are welcome to join on a sliding scale from $12 to $36—the amount is entirely up to you. I promise you will find the content and the conversation priceless. Yes, the webinar will be recorded, and everyone who registers will have access to the replay.

I look forward to meeting you in the sanctuary of this conversation this Sunday, July 28th, at 3:00 PM Eastern.

See you there.

Register Here

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Bees make the best tribes. If only our tribes became hives. We need to understand our tribal identities and let them go if we are to know the sweetness of universal honey. But let’s pay attention, bees are born branded with their black and gold colors. That's how we recognize them. Bees perceive fellow hive members from their “nest perfume.”

This weekend, the NY Knicks won the NBA Championship, and New Yorkers became a very happy tribe. This great article in the New York Times describes the branding and unifying of the NY Soul. I am not big on sports, but reading this wildly enthusiastic article made me a very temporary member of the tribe based on the sheer emotional energy of the win.

I’ve been watching videos of the East-West Divan Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Symphonies. Orchestras are tribes and there are tribes within the tribe (the strings, the horns, the woodwinds, etc) The East-West Divan Orchestra members are multicultural (including Israelis and Palestinians). They are a tribe the overcome differences to make musical harmony.

Worth Considering:

We all belong to tribes. Yet rarely do we actually consider and name our own tribal belongings.

Each tribe has its gods, rituals, languages, beliefs, and members. Each belonging has a duration and a reason.

In the ancient past, we belonged to only one tribe. Survival depended on it — there was no “outside” to retreat to, no alternative identity waiting in reserve. But the human hunger for the evolution of consciousness drove us outward, toward other tribes, toward adopting and adapting new ways. We became, slowly, capable of holding more than one belonging at once.

Today, our tribes don’t keep us alive. They tell us who we are. In a strange inversion, we now go looking for tribes the way we once went looking for food and shelter — not because we’ll die without them, but because without them we feel we don’t fully exist. A tribe, in this sense, becomes a brand for the soul: a set of symbols, language, and loyalties that announces this is who I am before a word is spoken.

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I was born deeply wondering and wandering.

What I have always wanted is simple to name and hard to live: to expand, to get clear, to forgive, and to love. Not romantic love or dutiful love—but love as celebration, love as devotion, love as the active choice to see another person fully and hold their becoming with care.

What I have discovered, strangely, is that every genuine step toward those things feels like coming home to myself—and at the same time makes me more open to being strange, different, and outside the easy categories. I am, at heart, an outsider. Which means I am genuinely open to otherness. I want to hear your longings. I want to think new thoughts alongside you. I want to offer moments of equanimity in the middle of the confusion.

This is why I write here.

Below are reflections on the two tribes that taught me how to do all of this—how to expand, get clear, forgive, and love. One tribe is intimate. The other is cosmic. Both changed everything.

The Question

A friend asked me recently, with genuine curiosity rather than small talk: “Lynn, what has most shaped the way you understand yourself, connect with spirit, and live successfully?”

Seventy-eight years is a long time to look back across. But the answer didn’t take long. Not one path—two. And what strikes me now, looking back, is that both were tribes before they were anything else. Each has its language, its rituals, its way of telling you who you are. Each gave me something I could not have found alone. And each, in its own way, was preparing me for inner thresholds, I didn’t yet know I needed to cross. Most deeply, they both felt like a homecoming, not to others, to myself.

I didn’t choose these tribes so much as arrive at them. They were, I understand now, destinies.

And both came to me because I loved others. The first was love for my husband. The second was love for my children.

The First Tribe

The first tribe found me when I was twenty-four. I married a man in recovery, and for the next seven years, I sat in AA and Al-Anon rooms week after week. I want to be precise about what those rooms gave me, because it wasn’t what you might expect.

It wasn’t warmth, exactly—though there was warmth. It was precision about the human condition. In those rooms, nobody performs. The academic credential, the spiritual vocabulary, the carefully constructed persona—none of it survives contact with someone who has lost everything and is telling the truth about it. The tribe of recovery has a fierce, particular god: honesty. Its ritual is the spoken confession of experience, strength, and hope in a room of witnesses. Its gift is the self, stripped down to what it actually is and that the door is always open, there is no rejection.

And it offered a map for the crossing: the Twelve Steps. This is a threshold from addiction to sobriety, from the isolated, defended self to the honest, humble one—and it cannot be crossed alone. Every step requires the presence of other human beings: the group and the sponsor. The witnessing is not incidental. The witnessing is the love.

The Second Tribe

The second tribe came through my children. When Thea and Luc were small, I became a pioneer parent at a startup Waldorf School, and through that thoroughly practical, maternal act, I stumbled into Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy.

Where the rooms had taken me down—into the particular, the confessional, the irreducibly personal—Anthroposophy took me out and up. This tribe’s god is Wisdom. Its ritual is conscious thinking raised to the scale of the cosmos. It offered a spiritual science of the whole human being: biography as sacred architecture, evolution as lived reality, the individual self summoned by the universe and accountable to it. It didn’t console the ego. It is called the higher self to think at a different altitude altogether.

Anthroposophy offers many maps for the crossing of thresholds, but they focus not on personal transformation, but on cosmic realities. Here are two that I found most powerful: The Twelve Holy Nights of the year offer a path from ordinary earthly consciousness to direct experience of Spirit. The Twelve Points of View offer a path from personal opinion to resonant, universal Truth.

Different, but the Same

I won’t pretend these two destinies always sit comfortably together. But I have never been able to ignore the quiet symmetry at their core. Both organized paths to transformation. Both understood that transformation requires a threshold—a genuine before and after. And both, at their heart, are archetypal paths that invite the individual to undertake the journey in their own way, at their own pace, in their own time.

What they share is even more remarkable than their symmetry: both offer a tribal belonging grounded not in dogma or doctrine, but in self-knowledge, direct experience of Spirit, and the possibility of genuinely successful living. Together they have taught me that the soul needs both the intimate and the infinite—and that the crossing, whichever threshold you are standing before, is always and ultimately your own.

Your Struggling and Your Seeking

When people seek me out for spiritual mentoring, this is what I bring—not as dogma, not as a system to adopt, but as compassionate possibility. I weave elements from these two streams together to help make creative sense of your struggling and your seeking.

The intimate and the infinite are not opposites to be chosen between. They are the two poles of a living human soul. Held together, they offer something that neither can offer alone: genuine understanding and the conditions for real transformation.

Upcoming for Paid Subscribers

This month, I am going deep into the question of tribes themselves—what they give us, what they cost us, and what becomes possible when we finally see them clearly. I’ll include a worksheet. That deep dive is waiting for paid subscribers in the post next week.

And later this month, I am holding a live webinar: The Mysteries of Belonging—an intimate exploration of all the ways we experience belonging and not belonging.

Paid subscribers join for free. Everyone else is warmly welcome for $36. I’ll be sending the link soon.

Both are worth your time and attention.

Become a Paid Subscriber

Now I’d love to hear from you in the comments or a DM: And if this touched something true for you, please pass it along to someone who is asking the same questions.

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With the imagination of the void becoming the grail and the inspiration for releasing the altars of external worship, we can now ready our souls for the Upper Room Gathering.

For centuries, we looked for sanctuaries prepared for us. In our spiritual infancy, perhaps our angel swept the floors of our inner world, granting us unearned peace. But today, we must step into true spiritual adulthood.

The Three Deeds of Readiness for Pentecost

The Upper Room is the place for the gathering of many souls. Each soul with spiritual sovereignty clears, cleanses, and prepares for entry.

Each of us is responsible for our own preparation. No one else can do this for us.

We alone are responsible for the void becoming a grail.

We alone can turn away from the temptations to depend on external forces.

We alone can prepare our souls to give and receive unlimited and unlimiting love.

The Three Deeds of Pentecostal Readiness.

Clearing reveals the grail when we cast away all t…

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To step out of the Sunday School pews and into the trackless wilderness is to watch the scaffolding of your universe collapse. It is a profound and terrifying disorientation. Recognize this as your own inner experience reflecting the experience of Christ descending from the World of Spirit into earthly existence and needing 40 days in the Wilderness.

When we transition from a spiritual life sustained by an external, historically bracketed Deity to one anchored in the individual I-consciousness, we are not just changing our minds—we are turning the cosmos outside in.

And that process hurts. It breeds a specific, quiet agony: the discomfort and doubt of Self as Spirit.

The greatest trick of spiritual dependency is the comfort of a master. When divinity is safely localized in history, in a book, or in the clouds, we are granted a cosmic hall pass. We can praise it, petition it, and blame it when things go wrong. But when the Ascension flips the script—dem…

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We often rush past the cloud of Ascension to get to the “fire” of Pentecost or linger at the “miracle” of the empty tomb.

Perhaps we ignore this moment because it is the most demanding of all—it is the ultimate spiritual graduation. It marks the moment the human soul’s “training wheels” were removed, and I-consciousness began to breathe on its own.

To look directly at the Ascension is to face the mirror of our own evolution. It is the signal that the era of being “led” has ended and the era of Spiritual Sovereignty has begun.

The Divine retreated into the clouds not to abandon us, but to empower the “I AM” to awaken within the human heart.

We avoid the void because it asks us to stop being worshippers of the sacred and start being the living source of …

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Most of you know the Twelve Holy Nights — that sacred, vertical descent of Spirit meeting us in winter’s darkness. It is beautiful and familiar.

But the Twelve Holy Days between Ascension and Pentecost are their counterpart, and without them, your spiritual year is half-finished.

The Holy Nights are about receiving. The Holy Days are about becoming. The world feels polarized right now because we have forgotten how to be the light for one another — we only know how to wait for it.

The Inner Path to Pentecost is the moment we stop looking at the heavens and start looking into the eyes of the person in front of us to find the Divine there.

A Gift for Everyone

Beginning tomorrow, Thursday May 14 (Ascension Day), I’m opening the first three days of this path to my entire list:

• Day 1: The Void where only the “I” can live

• Day 2: Vanquishing dependency and claiming I-Responsibility

• Day 3: The Upper Room Preparation

After Day 3, the full pat…

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It moves. It asks. It begins to look for a path.

If my last email stirred something in you, a living question about Pentecost, a quiet recognition of the second breath of the Inner Year, a longing to understand what the Divine Love we breathe out might actually feel like from the inside, then I have something to share with you.

I have been designing and shaping an inner path to make sense of these stirrings.

Twenty-two years of sharing the Inner Christmas Messages during the Holy Nights of Winter have prepared me to offer these Inner Pentecost Messages during the Holy Days of Spring.

I hope you will join me.

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That particular quality of waking, the kind where something has clearly been thinking through you while you slept, where the first conscious breath arrives already full — you probably know it. It doesn’t happen every day. When it does, you learn to be still and let it speak before the ordinary world rushes in.

What arrived was Pentecost.

Pentecost is perhaps the most mysterious of all the Judeo-Christian holy days. Not the most dramatic — that would be Easter. Not the most tender — that would be Christmas. But the most mysterious, yes. The one most of us quietly set aside because we were never quite given the key to it.

Let me offer you one.

In the ancient Hebrew festival of Shavuot, celebrated 50 days after Passover, humanity gave thanks for the firstfruits of the harvest — the miraculous fact that we can cultivate the earth and receive life back from it. It is a gesture of deep gratitude for our place in the natural world.

Pentecos…

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Every day, our souls encounter the three core inquiries of existence:

• Who am I? (How do I design my Unique Selfhood),

• Is there a divine purpose? (How do I have Direct Experience of Spirit), and

• What is true, beautiful, and good? (How do I shape a Successful Incarnation).

Treat my posts as inspiration, a breathing space, for these Living Questions. I invite you to explore the suggested multiple perspectives for Making Sense of the questions, not finding answers, through contemplation, journaling, and conversation until you reach Wise Joy. This joy is your springboard—a moment of deep recognition that provides the generative bounce for what comes next.

As you engage, remember: give yourself full permission to make this process your own. Use these tools in the way that best serves your spirit.

Go slow and deep!

Making Sense of Relationships

In this post, I want to name and describe four key elements in all our adult relationships. They shift the focus from the

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As a paid subscriber or a member of Gathering of Selves, you have free access to my monthly webinars.

Each webinar is a deep dive into making sense of a great mystery in three living questions of being human: Selfhood and the meaning of I AM, Direct Experience of Spirit beyond belief and faith, and the meaning and purpose of incarnation.

Big Questions! but they are always there. And it is not about having answers or being good.

In this webinar, I share new, powerful ways of understanding fasting, vanquishing, and surrendering not as a story about Christ, but as the intimate ways we experience these three deeds in our souls.

It’s not what you were taught in Sunday School!

Webinar Link

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I hope you are still contemplating registering for “Making Sense of Inner Easter”.

Register for Tomorrow

Register for Sunday

Our Dark Times

Our times are so dark, so threatening, and so without morality, it’s hard to think or feel about fasting, vanquishing, or surrendering or anything about Holy Week.

About six weeks ago, my living Lent/Easter questions dialed in on our times and these three Christ-deeds. You know me, as always, I dove deep. I spent about an hour or more each day, often in the middle of the night, circling these deeds, building as many perspectives as I could. Spiritual beings kept surprising me with chocolate-covered “downloads” of new insights.

I want to share them with you.

Christ as the Model

I look at Christ as the model for the divine incarnatin…

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Disclosure: Since most of my subscribers are women, I had AI change the Sun from male to female. I found the gender change, a deep wake-up full of inner questions. I have always seen images of the sun as either masculine or neutral. This is William Blake’s “East Gate of the Sun”. The original version is at the bottom of the post.

We spend much of our lives treating our deepest discomforts as errors to be corrected or walls to be scaled. We’ve been taught to bypass the “dark” feelings of anxiety, fear, and terror with the hope of a miracle or the comfort of worship. But if we wish to move from the suppression of our potential to the realization of the “I AM,” we must change our perspective.

These feelings are not obstacles; they are opportunities for incarnation. When we face them consciously, they act as a refining process, transmuting our internal shadows into a state of powerful, conscious expression.

From Anxiety to the Clarity of Truth

Anxiety is often nothing more than unprocessed t…

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