I have been professionally offering sacred conversations for 18 years now. I’ve been able to assist and witness many individuals as they discover, navigate, and integrate their life experiences, their sufferings, their agonizing questions, their truth-telling, their complexity, their need to love and be loved, their need for spiritual meaning and practical living and much more.

Of the many individuals that have come to me for these conversations, I can now see three central needs motivating their desires.

But first I want to express my deep and unending gratitude to all my clients, students and friends who shared these sacred conversations with me. You have inspired me with your courage, your struggles, your love, your openness. Thank you.

I hope these posts take you closer to yourself and the sweet and profound harmony that lives in the heart of your heart.

THE THREE MOTIVES

There are three motives in seeking a sacred conversation:

Fix me! Your need to fix something in yourself that feels incomplete, broken, out of balance, confused, unhealthy and to find well-being, wholeness and harmony in your sense of self as inner reality and/or your sense of self in the world.

Teach me! your need to learn how to make meaning of the complex mysteries of life, consciousness, relationship, being human, and to develop the right ways to engage, respond, understand, and take action. Your desire to learn how to recognize, regulate, integrate and evolve. Your need to acquire new perspectives, insights and skills.

Wake me! Your need to be creatively and actively self-expressive, to feel self-compassion, to see into the mystery of your selfhood and live from the seat of your own resources of wisdom, love and power.

WAYS OF SACRED CONVERSING

READING

What books and authors do you turn to for fixing, learning, self-transformation? These are conversations with wise individuals who you will never personally know.

PRAYER, MEDITATION, JOURNALING

Consider the prayer, meditation and journaling you do to find ways to address your inner needs to be “fixed,” to be taught, to be awakened. These are sacred conversations with God, the Cosmos and your higher self.

LIVING CONVERSATIONS

Living conversations can be with a friend or a professional. This form of sacred conversation is so powerful because questions are asked and responded to in the moment. There is real creative and intimate exchange.

In a sacred living conversation four essential elements or moods develop:

• vulnerability without powerlessness
• transparency without exposure
• reciprocity of attention without expectation
• reverence for differences without comparison
• recognition of circumstances in the moment, the past and the future.

There are three more elements that arise and bless sacred conversation: laughter, tears and celebration.

THE TWO FEARS

There are two fears that may keep you from a sacred conversation:

The fear of being seen as weak, needy and resourceless. A victim. Shame.
The fear of being judged bad, unworthy and unredeemable. A perpetrator. Guilt.

In a sacred conversation there is no judgment and no disgust. There is discernment arising out of reverence, empathy, and compassion. The conversation takes place in a spiritual, yet, grounded, context where you are seen and heard as loved and loving, evolved and evolving, valued and significant.

DEEPENING YOUR UNDERSTANDING AND ENGAGEMENT

Over the next few posts I will be exploring these three types of sacred conversation and asking you some questions to help you discern what you are seeking from your sacred conversations.

Please share your thoughts and questions.