O Mensageiro Church of the Holy Light of the Queen
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Dear Community,
Due to the corona virus pandemic, the regular church works schedule is postponed until further notice.
Church tithing members who are fardado/as and fardado/as who are local regulars at the church can participate in upcoming virtual works on April 15 and April 30. Firmados/as in a household with a fardado/a may also participate. Click the link below to register for the virtual work, and to receive further instructions including arrangements for picking up the Santo Daime. Non-tithing participants are asked to contribute if they are receiving the Holy Daime.
We ask for tithing members to please continue your monthly contributions during this unusual time, as the church continues to have monthly expenses and there is a significant cost for obtaining the precious Santo Daime. We plan to resume Church works when it is safe and we need to support the Church now so it will be there for us when the emergency state is lifted. Please send your tithe or contribution to : CHLQ, PO Box 911, Ashland, OR 97520. We also accept PayPal donations to the address chlqcomm@gmail.com under "friends and family" with a note for what the donation is for.
15 Wednesday - 6:30pm Zoom
30 Thursday - 6:30pm Zoom
Thank you!
Sincerely, CHLQ Board
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| | | A Message from Jane Seligson |
| "Dear All,
This is an odd time for all of us. The Zoom works are not, obviously, the same as church. We are used to coming together in person and now we are alone at home or with one other person. We each have to put our effort into creating and holding the space. We have to be able to hold the center of our work, something that can present a challenge. If we want to sing, we have to know the hymns. This makes it a time of possibility and of practice. Let's study the hymns; the golden threads that link us to the astral and secure us here on earth. When we return to our salão, our singing will be more strong and unified because of our study. If you need to learn Oração or the Cruzerinho, go to hinos do Santo Daime and study. You are already familiar with these bookends to the works and it is amazing to firm the hymns.
We will be together again and these days, maybe months, are good practice for how to re-enter our salão. Let's take advantage of this time to be able to come back together having studied and learned more of what it means to follow this path of the Santo Daime.
We are also being presented with a perfect opportunity to put the holy cruzeiro in our bodies - we connect vertically heaven to earth, receiving light through our crown and grounding that light through our body into the earth. Then we extend ourselves horizontally through our hearts to our loved ones, our brothers and sisters, and then from the space of compassion to the world. We become an anchor of calm and faith. From this place we enter our work. Imagine if we take advantage of this so that when we return to church, we are all beacons of light.
Before the work - clean your house. Wash the floors, dust your altar, smudge with windows open to clear the energy. Be sure to put fresh water on your altar. Have flowers or herbs or leaves to remind us of the new growth within ourselves that we are invoking. Use a fresh candle.
When the work is done, clean and smudge again. You are turning, for these moments, your home into a temple. Care for it with attention and love."
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| | Essays by Jonathan Goldman |
| Some Thoughts On What’s Happening Part 1
"In Chinese Medicine, which has been addressing the human condition for 5,000 years, it is understood that all illness operates on many levels, just as do we humans. Each organ and system in our bodies gets ill in characteristic ways, and in the process of the working through of the illness, those many levels are also worked. We carry physical, etheric, emotional, mental, and spiritual energies in an interacting arrangement in our vehicle. For instance, the lungs are part of what the Chinese call the Metal Element. What I want to point out here, for the purpose of shedding some light on our present situation on earth, is that the emotion associated with the Metal Element, with the lungs, is grief. The lungs process grief and are made ill by an overloading of grief and an unresolved build-up of grief.
And the corona virus affects the lungs. Sometimes with deadly results.
What can we make of this, without making it up?
Most of the time, we who do healing work look at illness on an individual basis. A person presents themselves to us needing relief, healing, counsel, comfort. But this illness is worldwide, simultaneously affecting (so far) hundreds of thousands of people, with the potential, depending on what we do in the face of it, to affect many millions. There are very smart, dedicated people working tirelessly to come up with medical solutions. And social, communal solutions are being instituted as well. It is interesting to note that the emotional level is being left to individuals to deal with on their own. What is it that is coming up in so many people as we are forced to stop our outward dispersal and avoidance of feelings by stopping our outwardly focused, over-busy lives?
I submit to you that a large portion of the material coming up for many people is grief. It is for me. Grief is something we habitually avoid by restricting and overloading our lungs. This can be done in various ways. We can restrict our breathing, making it shallow. One way this is accomplished is by sitting and staring at a screen for hours, like I’m doing now. We forget to breathe, and our focus is completely outside ourselves, our energy crammed into our heads. We wouldn’t know a feeling except for frustration if it crawled up and bit us. We can also stress our lungs by over breathing, by strenuous exercise that makes the lungs work so hard and fast that they don’t have space to feel. There are then the obvious lung cover-uppers: cigarettes, marijuana, alcohol (processed by the lungs), overeating (pulling energy and blood away from the lungs for constant digestion). We also cover up the grief by giving primacy to anger, exacerbating anxiety, and indulging fear.
What about the griefs, big and small, that you haven’t acknowledged and have run over, pushed aside, and denied? The heartbreaks, the betrayals, the disappointments, the forsaken hopes. Is that stuffed pocket of grief zipped into a corner of your lungs making you more vulnerable to a virus that wants to take up residence in them? The Chinese and Indian doctors I studied with, and my 44 years of doing healing work, would say yes.
But what about collective grief? What about the grief of the millions of refugees, driven from their homes by war and violence and dire poverty? What about the families stuck in horrific conditions at the borders of the United States, of Greece, Turkey, of Africa? What about all the people whose dreams for themselves and their children and their families and friends and communities have failed to be realized? I submit to you, because I know it’s true, that the grief, fear, and despair of those people is not confined to them. It is in the collective lungs, the etheric breath of the world. It flies around this planet, looking for open lungs to inhabit, to be processed, as is the design of the human body and consciousness, for the collective healing of all humanity. Because, although most of us in the so-called first world have designed our systems of living to avoid feeling the reality of our connectivity, that connectivity is nevertheless there, underlying our busyness, shopping, traveling, computing, and addictions. We share an energetic as well as a material atmosphere. And since we have built our social, political, and economic systems to perpetuate the lie of separation, of “those poor people, I’m so glad it’s them and not me”, the truth is being put in our faces, or rather our lungs, by a virus that has brought our systemic distractions to a grinding halt.
The truth is that we all know, because we feel it, sense it, intuit it, what the actual human and earthly conditions are. We lament what is happening without actually allowing ourselves to feel it, because we assume that there is nothing we can do.
The virus is calling it out of all of us. For most people the grief is a feeling that is pushing to be released. For some of us it is and will be real, true, immediate grief of the loss of those who the virus will claim as it sweeps through the planet.
What can we do, even as we are obeying the call to stay in our place and await the passing of the wave? How about, for a start, since you’re inside anyway for a time, sit quietly in your house and breathe consciously for a little while. Turn your phone, your computer, your tv, your mind off for a few minutes. Sit in a place with no external distractions. (For parents of young kids, that might be a closet or your car.) Put your awareness and your focus in the center of your chest, in your heart center. That center encompasses your lungs. By focusing your breath there, you are giving your lungs permission to relax, expand and begin to discharge whatever they are carrying. You are automatically raising the vibrational rate of those organs. And as you breathe, feel. Even cry if you need to. To some of you reading this, the invitation to cry is just an acknowledgment of what you do anyway. To some others, it’s a foreign concept. You’re learning a new language. Be patient but determined. The reward of freedom, health, and the breaking of emotional and energetic isolation is supremely worth the discomfort, strangeness and even embarrassment of learning how to cry.
The biological purpose of grief is to clean the past, to make space for something new to happen. In this case for you personally and for humanity in general, because grief is riding on the wave of the virus that is flowing over the earth. Double healing, just by doing what you were designed to do; breathe. And by breathing deeply and consciously, by clearing the crust of repressed grief from your lungs, you will maximize your lungs’ ability to fight off whatever might want to invade them. Triple benefit.
We have lived our lives, many of us, in desperately maintained expansion. We don’t allow the natural contraction side of the in-and-out, breathing nature of life. Now we have no choice. Our organism has been forced into conditions that allow it to do what it has needed to do for years; contract, go inward.
My strong advice; stop fighting it. Follow this externally mandated forcing of the natural movement inward. It may seem in the middle of the contraction that it’s never going to end, that you will be a squeezed prune forever. You won’t.
Of course, if you actually do what I’m suggesting, your mind will scream at you that you are becoming depressed, or dysfunctional, or miserable, or otherwise useless and hopeless. Not so. In fact, by acknowledging, feeling and allowing for the processing of some grief, you are freeing yourself to see new possibilities; for you and for the whole. As long as we are holding the past in our bodies, which is simply what unprocessed grief is, there is no space for new ideas, feelings, health, and inspirations to come front and center. Allowing the grief to be present doesn’t imply anything but that you are allowing the grief to be present. It’s not a commentary on your worth. Although, because feelings of worthiness are another level of the lungs’ array, by allowing your lungs to breathe, your feelings of self-worth will in fact increase.
Tomorrow- Another level of the mystery."
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| | Some Thoughts On What’s Happening Part 2
"So, what’s up with all this anger? Of course, we are all looking for positivity; to be calm, open-hearted, compassionate. (I’m going to teach you literally how to do all that in a near-future post.) But at the same time, there are pops, bursts, occasional tsunamis, of irritation, frustration, misdirected anger that blow up in our bodies, rattling us and leaving us spent, and curious at best. Unless I’ve created a mess by letting the explosion rip. Then regret, repentance, and repair are in order. As I hopefully shake it off like a dog that’s just come out of the water, I’m stunned at the fire that’s blown through me. Last night, my wife, Jane, went into a most impressive rant about many things. Everything she said, as usual, was right on, clear, insightful, true. And it was fueled by a fire of anger that was way more than normal. We laughed, but it got me thinking.
Of course, we’re presently severely restricted in our activities, deprived of what we have held up as the symbols of our freedom. That restriction can feel like someone put a straitjacket on us. Choosing where we go, when we go, what we do when we get there is what we are used to and what we have come to expect. What about going to that restaurant? What about the gym? What about just going out for a walk? What about leaving for the job at 7 am and getting home at 7pm? What about sitting on the subway or in traffic? That’s freedom, dammit. Now we’re in our house-box with people who are in their own state of restriction. Of course, friction is inevitable. The conflicts growing out of close quarters give us a chance to learn about our relationships, what we have ignored in our outward focus. And we get to learn new strategies for resolving conflicts, bringing calm to the volatility, inner and outer. All of that falls into a category of making lemonade out of the lemons that fall on your head as you walk through the suddenly windy orchard.
More seriously, and in some increasing number of cases tragically, many people are not only homebound, but have lost their jobs. And more will do so. The temporary alleviation of the hardship that so many are facing is in the hands- those hands exhibiting a very wide range of capability- of government and social agencies, and the more reliable, charitable hearts of family members, neighbors and people of good will and faith. How far the organized structures will fall, how completely will be the necessity of rebuilding, how complete the opportunity for new ways of being social and doing the necessary business of communal life, is yet to be determined. No one knows how far this will go, and no one knows what its outcome will be. Which leads me to my main point of this little essay.
I have found it most useful in my life to look at reality from as many angles as I can; to embody as many of the blind men feeling the elephant as my present state of evolution will allow. Each training, teacher, and each arena I’ve operated in has expanded and deepened my view of myself, my own life, humanity, our world, and what is within and beyond all that. I have come to see both the micro level of my own process, psyche, path, life decisions, health, relationships, challenges, and glories, which can easily fall into narcissism and then eventually boredom with the chronic examination of my own navel. I also have come to see the expanded macro levels of humanity in general, the world we’ve made and the planet we inhabit, on to the stars and cosmos. Which can pull me away from living my blessed, sometimes complicated and painful life in the here and now. And then there are the spiritual levels of all that, and beyond all that, which can provide context and comfort, or disconnection and bypassing. As my fundamental prayer to live through my heart (the answer, as it turns out, to all my questions) has been step-by-step realized, the ability to hold all those levels in a shifting kaleidoscope of harmonious colors, one color coming to dominate in a moment and then receding in the face of a new understanding or necessity, has become second nature. I’m able, at my best, to be grounded and expanded at the same time, functional and non-attached simultaneously. It’s proving most useful in this moment we are inhabiting.
So, let’s accept that the anger and its partner confusion are real. (In fact, anger is a natural and most useful, necessary, and blessed energy when it is used for growth and transformation.) They are in my body and my family, in my people and my world. What helps me in this moment is to expand my view, to be able to hold the emotions I’m feeling and sensing in context, so I’m working with them, not having to swim like crazy to keep my head above the emotional water with its flapping mental fish.
One of those windows into reality, one I referred to yesterday, is Chinese Medicine. I like it because, when understood at its roots, it sees the world in both the micro and macro levels. Also, when practiced well it can be very useful medicine.
Anger is the emotional level, the fuel and the challenge, the expression and the overflow, of the Wood Element. The organs associated with that element are the Liver and Gallbladder. For those who are unfamiliar with the inner intimacies of your anatomy, those organs are on the right side of your abdomen, the liver right under your ribs, the gall bladder below that, above your waist. They have lots of physical functions, but the Chinese understood that the physical organ is only one level of the function of the element. The physical job of the organs includes things like filtering blood, helping you digest proteins and fats, and detoxing poisons (that includes all drugs alcohol, marijuana, sugar…). You know that right sided headache you get when you’re stressed out? Gall Bladder. Or the one behind your eyes and at the back of your neck? Same. You know when your eyes stop focusing and burn when you’ve looked at screens for hours? Liver. When you can’t get to sleep or wake up at 2 am and lie there awake, your mind thinking about what you have to do until you want to rip your brain out and become a zombie? Liver. That ability to multi-task and work unceasingly, that turns into burnout? Your liver doing its job under the whip of your will, and then finally throwing up its hands. That big meal full of fat and meat, drowned in alcohol, that results in you competing with the dog for who is going to drive people out of the living room covering their noses fastest? Your liver and gallbladder looking at each other and saying, Are you kidding me?
Chinese Medicine describes the essential job of the Liver as planning on every level of the person. The Gallbladder is seen as the decision maker, the one who takes the plans that the Liver creates and sorts out which one will do the needed job-physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, life- and then the Heart gets all the other functions to agree to the program. When those functions are given a reasonable pace to operate at, when they are provided with both activity and rest, when they are nurtured with foods and activities that both strengthen and clean them, they will serve you until your time is up. And they will make your final days be smooth and relatively easy.
The Liver and Gall Bladder are about doing, making, heading forward into an anticipated future.
What I want to emphasize here, to hopefully help you see your, and our, situation a bit more fully, is about the helpless anger that is generated when the forward-moving energy that those organs generate is stopped in its tracks; when the plans you’ve made and the decisions you want to be free to make are taken out of your hands and brought to an abrupt, future-thrown-into-total-doubt stop.
Like now. For you, me, and the whole world.
The temptation in the face of these thoroughly thwarted plans is to try and keep the pace going; to impose the busyness and pace of the no- longer- real plans on our new temporary reality. The scheduling of endless online hours. The cleaning your house (maybe overdue) until you wear the cleaning rags to shreds. To watch TV past the time when its entertaining until it’s numbing. And then maybe to pace.
We have lived in a paradigm that associates forward movement with virtue and rest and contemplation with wasted time and a wasted life. The result is, before the virus brought us to our collective knees, our collective Wood Element was seriously out of whack already. The evidence was all around us. Massive consumption of drugs of all kinds. Enormous numbers of illnesses coming from bad nutrition, negative thoughts, repressed emotions, and lost hope (another quality of the liver). Conflict on every level of social interaction.
And of course, because we humans are amazing as well as crazy, in the midst of all that, many people have been praying, visualizing, examining, dreaming, and actualizing new ways of being.
So here we are, being forced into the opportunity to experiment with doing our lives from another impulse; from the impulse to harmony, rather than that of headlong manifestation at all costs and consequences.
Up until now, the Liver and Gallbladder have obeyed your command to make you an unceasing driving force for burned out accomplishment. Now they can institute a plan for harmony and health and a balanced life, if you tell them to.
Here’s my suggestion. I’m making it to myself as well as you. Let’s take the powers of the Wood Element and apply them to where we are now. Let’s each of us make a plan for our days., not be unconscious in trying to hold on to what no longer is real. Let’s give into what is. What then are you going to do with your hours? Make a plan and try it out for a few days. You can change it. It’s your plan. Make it in conference with your family. But let’s start from an underlying premise that we are seeking harmony; harmony of action and rest; harmony of outward and inward time; harmony of fun and serious pursuits. Meditation and being in nature as much as circumstances allow. Distraction and contemplation. Communication and silence. Devices and just being with myself.
And all of that accompanied by breathing consciously, adding to that consciousness the directing of some gentle energy to your poor exhausted liver and gall bladder. Asking them to tell your intuition what they need to recover and serve you in this moment of uncertainty and possibility. And let’s embrace the anger, the aspect of it that is the relentless urge to growth, to renewal; the unstoppable reaching for new possibilities, the perpetual hope, the revelation of new visions that the springtime-which is the season associated with the Wood element- represents. But let’s see the toxic, tainted frustration for what it is; the over wrought anger that would perpetuate conflict and condemnation even in the midst of common challenge, because it just needs something to spill on. Let’s give that to the earth, to the sun, moon, and stars, not to our families and no longer to the thought-sea that has clogged the energetic atmosphere of our planet for too long.
The future is not ended, it’s opened."
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CHLQ Board Meetings
2nd Monday of every month CHLQ Board Meetings will now be taking place over Zoom conference call. I
Next Meeting: April 13th
The meetings are welcome for anyone who feels called to respectfully sit in. If you are interested please let us know at chlqcomm@gmail.com
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We are celebrating the lives of..... |
| | Happy Birthday! "God walks with you everyday, guiding you and supporting you. All you have to dois to open your heart and let him in! May this birthday bring you more blessings from God."
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