7 Guiding Questions for the Journey

Like "romancing" a multifaceted diamond, these 7 questions are like facets of each movement on the Journey.  Pausing to consider each will help you bring clarity to where you are on the path and what might sustain you at this place along the way. 

1.  What is the question that lives in your mind and heart here?
2.  What is your "posture" or sense of embodied presence at this place and time?
3.  How would you describe the conversations your are having?
4.  What language are you using to describe this place on the way?
5.  What are the "beliefs" that have your attention?  How do these beliefs serve you and the world?
6.  What resistances or "road blocks" do your perceive at this juncture?
7.  What practices can sustain you now while at the same time help open the way to the next step?

​What is Essential?

What is the heart of the matter for you,
the thing that pumps blood 
through the collection of cells called your body?

What is the possibility that enters
your mind upon waking that
sets the course for the livingness of the day?

What is the commitment that breathes
life into your lungs so you can
rise up through suffocating banality?

What passion stirs warm ashes
of your longing into fire
that lights up your eyes?

What is the path that will lead you 
through corpses of walking dead 
toward the one and only source of
your one and only life?
​(TLC)

 We hold these questions, or ones like it, close to our heart.   When we ask them, something deep inside us begins to wake up.  The part that has fallen asleep is stirred, and we find ourselves leaning forward in anticipation of a great adventure.  We have noticed these essential questions, albeit in a variety of expressions, lie beneath and before many more surface inquiries.  

When we pause long enough for the humming noise of ordinary thoughts and everyday distractions to fade into the background, persistent questions of meaning, purpose, time and eternity wait for our compassionate attention.  When lost in the swirl of living, we avoid such inquiry.  We put in peril, or at least delay, the possibility of waking up to the wildly precious gift of life.  

We're guessing that the very fact you’re reading this  means you too have a desire to awaken the latent potential of your one essential life.  To live into questions stirred up by the currents of deep desire, responding to their invitation to transformation, is at the heart of the Journey.  To discover and live the fullness of your life is the quest of the spiritual sojourner.

​SOMETIMES
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories
who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
~ David Whyte ~