What is the meaning of Lent for your soul?
In the cycle of the Inner Year, the first quarter of the year is spent working with your relationship to yourself:
Inner Epiphany celebrates and deepens your sense of the purpose living in your existence.
Imagining Your Contribution addresses the evolving needs and expressions of that purpose.
Then comes Inner Lent, the time of facing the possibility that you may be tempted to forego your purpose for more immediate and seductive powers and pleasures.
365 days a year, I succumb to little temptations. Don’t you?
There is always some voice urging me to turn a stone to bread, leap off some high perch trusting the angels to rescue me before I crash on the ground, and the great temptation to be right, to know it all. And I succumb…dumb!
A stone is not bread and never satisfies my appetite.
Angels come to my side when I walk firmly on the ground, but laugh at my ridiculous attempts to magically fly through the day or the deed. The sound of angels laughing at my foolishness is an absolutely cringing sensation.
And being right, has nothing to do with being alive and in the moment. The sense of being right relates to a past and very dead moment. Being right has no lasting power. If I arrogantly attach my life to a story of the past, time, the world and real joy pass me by.
Inner Lent is the time when my inner learning, my self-knowledge, focuses on my relationship to temptation.
Won’t you join me?
Inner Lent, like all of the Inner Year programs, offers archetypal imaginations and questions that guide and support you in your very unique and ,just right for you and only you” awakening and understanding of your soul’s unfolding.
I’ve made a recording of some thoughts on the first questions of Inner Lent. I look at the landscape of inner isolation and the experience of inner fasting. I describe why Inner Lent is connected, not to Inner Easter, but to the experience of Inner Baptism.
As I write this, I keep struggling with the third temptation. I keep wanting to rerecord and make my thoughts perfect, so right that I would stand in glory above the world. Yuk, yuk, yuk!!
Listen to my imperfect thoughts. In spite of their imperfection you may find encouragement and inspiration for you own Inner Lent.
Click here to listen…
Then consider engaging in a deeper look at your relationship to each of the three temptations and their appearance in the modern soul (that’s our souls) as addiction, fantasy and prejudice. This is the Inner Lent program of three webinars and a bunch of great materials.
You can click here to go to my “store” to register for the Inner Lent program. (I’ll be sending out at least one more email next week sharing more about the content of the webinar and how you might find real value in it.)
One reason to signup – to keep you focused on your Inner Lent, as our daily lives are so filled with temptations that distract us from the work of self-knowledge and our inner development. It is so sad to let these rich inner seasonal possibilities slip by. Yes, we can work on our addictions, fantasies and prejudices at any time of the year, but we do so without the support of the cosmos. Now is the time when the cosmic design where the human soul finds alignment with divine intention and the course of the sun and the greatest amount of light shines down on these inner questions.
