2023 Intentions
When you give birth to that which is within yourself, what you bring forth will save you.
Yesterday I was crying on the bathroom floor again. How many bathroom floors have I cried on? What is it about the cold tile that perfectly mirrors my god-forsaken inner state? Nothing is lonelier or more existential than a bathroom floor.
I was crying out of confusion and longing and the plain truth that I’ve walked the earth 33 years and still have very little clarity about why we’re spinning through limitless space toward inevitable annihilation. Shortly before, I was in the kitchen picking apart my own purposelessness. “What am I supposed to DO though? Where/how do I invest my energy?” And the night before that, in front of the fire… “I’m having an experience for months now of nothing happening.”
Andrew found me, beside the toilet, and - in a moment of embodying God - pulled me out of the mire of my inner desolation. “You already know what to do. You’ve already received the chapters for the book and the topics for the workshops,” referring to downloads that came through in the two months prior.
“Pass,” I thought.
For all the longing and praying and inner-working, when a Word finally dropped in my ego would not receive it. What if I consent and it transforms me? What if it goes great? What if everyone loves it and tells all their friends? Then my stories about being small and useless and trite will no longer apply. Then I will have to face my inherent greatness, then I might have to enjoy myself, then I may feel, god forbid, fulfilled.
Do you know that this Substack account has existed for over a year? And the compulsion to write it for much, much longer. I am the only thing stopping myself.
It me.
So instead of continuing to wallow in my natural melancholic state of acute enneagram fourness, I’ve decided to conduct an experiment for the next year. For my own accountability, I am recording the components of that experiment here:
Write a weekly newsletter on Wisdom themes
Create Instagram content based on 1:1 client notes + newsletter material
Teach a monthly workshop on Spiritual Development, related to newsletter themes
Record and organize my mystical experiences into a book outline
Please understand how intensely uncomfortable it makes my personality to express these intentions. Perhaps there have been other points in linear time where I’ve felt more confident, more assured, more resourced. Perhaps to you it seems rather simple or obvious that I might set these intentions or seek these expressions. Seasons right?
As I overcome my own self-doubt and fear and deep conditioning to offer myself in greater service, I cling to the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. You’ve likely heard it before.
Yeshua says,
When you give birth to that which is within yourself, what you bring forth will save you. If you possess nothing within, that absence will destroy you.
“To connect with the deeper force within—the genuine power of Life and Love itself streaming from the Source—is the goal. There is a holy longing inside each of us to give birth to this truer Self, to discover its inner fire, and to give way to its force. Losing access to the higher ‘qualities of heaven’ means we are unable to respond creatively to the challenging nature of our sojourn in space and time. Without intergrating and embodying these higher, missing qualities (wisdom, compassion, love, charity, patience, flexibility, confidence, strength, trust, and generosity), the egoic self simply implodes from the force of external pressure. One must have access to a countervailing pressure and the force from Above.”
—Lynn Baumen, In Trouble and Wonder
May it be so with each of us.
