Personal Development through Mystical Poetry
One of the unique aspects of this blog and its related website is its focus on personal development and beyond through the use of poetry. This is the use of mystical poetry to invite the experience of living the “wild and precious life.” It is the invitation to meet again the one who has loved you all your life and the one who knows you by heart. The one who invites you to feast on your life.
Ben Okri, Booker Prize-winning author of The Famished Land writes in A Way of Being Free,
The inklings of poets are the forgotten adventures of God.
It is the intention of this writer and Irish storyteller through this blog and related website that such inklings are not simply forgotten. It is my intention that this invitation from mystical poetry be a way of remembrance of the grace and beauty that is your essence. The intention is to provide a way to overcome the primary cause of suffering in this world of form. This primary cause stems from the individual and collective idea of separateness. This is the idea that we are human beings living lives separately from the Creation that is the movement of One Being.
Creation speaks to poets and artists. This makes them different but this is not to be confused with making them better than you. Their words are invitations to personal development and beyond. They invite you to the adventure of living as the divine paradox they know you to be. This is especially true of mystical poets who have at some stage been graced a glimpse of what is beyond this limitation of living in time and space. It is a glorious limitation for all that.
The language of poetry is the language of the heart. In this blog you are not asked to consider the structure of poetry. You are invited to learn how poetry can instruct you in being courageous enough, focused enough and committed enough to become the one who takes the journey of the Hero and lives from the power and grace of their one precious life for the highest good of all. Living the Hero’s Journey means being willing to live the revelation you are here to be and to surrender your will to Love’s purpose as it is intended to manifest through you.
Let me illustrate how poetry can invite a life life of purpose and spiritual direction. Here is an extract from a poem I recently discovered in poetry anthology entitled The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvellous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart
and the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
from Last Night by Antonio Machado
translated by Robert Bly
The metaphor of Last Night is about our old life, which is a life of dreams and especially the nightmare that causes suffering. This is the suffering of the separate sense of self. This sense of the separate self in a very real sense is a marvellous error. It is the process in this dimension of time and space that awakens us to the sacred unity that is Love.
In this poem the poet is sleeping and dreaming. This is the sleep of the ego self dreaming of its separate existence from the one Self. Yet it is never truly sleeping. The heart is always awake to some degree. If this were not so then the body could not live. No matter how distant one feels from the All One, the All One is never distant from its creation and is forever creating for the joy of creating. This is the activity of making sweet honey from what is the experience of opposites. This is the work of aligning and healing the 2nd and 3rd chakras. It is the process of unifying what we identify as our old failures.
The beehive in the heart is the place of the 4th chakra, the heart chakra. This is where one begins to transcend, but not feel apart from the personality. It is where one begins to feel integral and the energy of the personality and the energy of the divine begin to make sweet honey. This is then made available to feed the parched mouths of those who are living in this world as busy bees but who are unable to taste the sweetness of their lives.
The work of the Way of the Chakras is the work of making sweet honey out of our old failures. At higher levels of consciousness we alchemise those old leaden failures, those old judgements, those old conflicting opposites within us, into a form of gold called honey. Writers, and others who work in the sphere of personal development, very often invite such alchemy. However, for this writer and storyteller, it is the mystical poets who occupy a very special place in his heart. These are the real honey makers of the world. These are the mystical poets who can invite you to live with life purpose and passion within the space of five short lines. They take me, and I invite them to take you, into the magic of what the poet Rumi calls The Heart House.
Take some lines from a poem and learn them by heart. This doesn’t simply mean learn them by rote. Rote learning was the way that I was taught poetry as a young man and the way in which I was turned off poetry until much later. This is the way that poetry is still being taught in local schools here in Ireland. Poetry is the language of the heart. It is the invitation to align the lower chakras with the higher chakras. It particularly aligns the 4th chakra – the heart chakra – with the 5th chakra – the throat chakra. This then gives you the ability to speak your joy and your truth. You are then able to articulate into form your hearts vision.
Intend that you become a golden bee. Not simply a worker bee who is always busy. The symbol of gold in storytelling is always an invitation to the golden child within you which is the revelation of your sacred unity with the divine. It is the realisation beyond the marvellous error of separateness. This sacred unity begins in earnest when you begin to realise that you have a beehive in your heart. You begin to feel that you are living in a promised land flowing with milk and honey. This is a land that exists, not in the outer world but within. The paradox is that this honey is made from the processing of all your old failures.
Personal development is not just about you. it is more about your inviting the unity of the personal and the impersonal. When this begins within you then you become the golden bee you are here to be. If you are looking for a sense of spiritual direction then you can feel a sense of safety by inviting those golden bees called mystic poets to come and pour honey into your dry mouth. This is the mouth that is dry because it lives in the desert of the separate sense of self and rarely, if ever, gets to drink from the living waters of true well being. These mystical poets come from all traditions and none. Let me conclude this blog post with a reading from one of my dearest soul friends who is constantly feeding me golden honey from the great Heart House.
Mystical poetry invites you to awaken at dawn for another day of loving and living the “wild and precious life.” Let it be so.
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mystical poetry
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