We've heard much in our time about transcendence. As Matthew Fox says, worship has become worsh-up, which was appropriate when we thought the earth was flat and heaven was above. But which leads to a kind of splitting of spirit from matter, the sacred from the ordinary. Even the word religion means at its root--to re-bind, to bind back--as if something has come unbound. And, indeed, I think it clearly has--light from dark, mind from body, masculine from feminine.

So I'd like to explore first how things seem to have come un-bound, and then how we can move toward reconnection, toward 'both/and', in a way that is not 'up there' somewhere in the abstract, nor a product of working harder or faster, but is more about listening to what is and acting on what we know. And I'd like to dedicate this talk, and the gift of your attention, to the good of all beings.

Today, although we are so technologically advanced that we can communicate with people on the other side of the globe by e-mail and send satellites to distant planets, many in our midst are suffering more than ever before with addictions, eating disorders, depression, panic attacks, loneliness, and an unnamed sense of disease. For the last 5,000 years, our culture has valued rational thinking over intuitive hunches, a stiff upper lip over tears, doing over being, and having a plan rather than, God forbid, "not knowing." The result of this bias is an imbalance that is threatening our very survival.

The women and men I see in my practice, from 20 to 75, are longing for deeper meaning. Many of the children I know are on Ritalin and marked with a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder. Think about those words for a moment--a deficit in attention, something out of order.

The troubled friends of my 16-year-old daughter have abortions, are addicted at 12 and 13 to alcohol and drugs, are piercing their bodies, getting tattoos, or starving themselves. Several have even died trying to get what they need--one while sniffing butane in a shed with candles lit; another rollerblading across the turnpike in the dark, at night. These are not inner city kids living in a world we can distance ourselves from. They are not just another horror story on the evening news. They are the children of people like you and me.

I read in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer that this country now has the highest rate of child suicide in the industrialized world--the third most common cause of death among adolescents. What are our kids trying to tell us? One could say that suicide is an attempt to get reconnected with our origins. And body piercing and tattooing have been described by some as an ecstatic experience. It seems there is some energy or original state of being these kids are desperately trying to get reconnected to.

Consider how far from her original self little JonBenet Ramsey was encouraged to grow. She is a tragic symbol for what has happened to the feminine in our time--dressed up, made up, sexualized, packaged, paraded, objectified and exploited.

Women are particularly affected by this disconnection from their authentic selves. They grow up with a sense of not being good enough, both inside and out, and in this country spend billions of dollars to make themselves different. The number of women using cosmetic surgery to alter their bodies has increased 61% over the last decade. One California study showed that, by the time girls were in the 4th grade, 80% of them were already dieting. Eating disorders (which are almost nonexistent in third world countries) have become increasingly common among women in the West over the past 20 years--and no wonder, when only 1 in 40,000 women meets the requirements of a model's size and shape. Psychologically, there isn't a woman I know who doesn't struggle with a hidden sense of personal inadequacy. And perhaps the most telling statistic of all is that the most frequently performed major surgery in the U.S. is the hysterectomy.

Women can't help but internalize the devaluing of the feminine, but men are deeply wounded by it as well. They have to repress their sensitivity, hold back their tears, and put the bottom line above the human. My husband works as a consultant to corporate executives, and he returns at the end of the day with his heart broken by the pain men are in from the aggression towards them-selves and each other, and the disconnection from all that is organic, alive, and real.

Not surprisingly, this disconnection has shown up at the root of the second leading cause of death in this country--cancer. Research indicates that it is a failure in the flow of information between cells that induces cancer, a barrier to communication that causes cells to begin to grow out of order.

There is potential violence in being disconnected. I came across a news clipping the other day about a man who attempted to push his blind daughter in front of a bus so he could collect her life insurance. And look what we are doing to our earth, the source of our very breath. We have a kind of "skyscraper mentality." When you're at the top of a skyscraper you can look down on others below and they look like ants. You are at a distance from them, so you can do whatever you like to them. But when you're at eye level, you have to make contact and feel the consequences of what you're doing. When you're at eye level, you can see tears in the other's eyes.

I've heard that in Polynesian cultures, when a child is hyper or upset, the people bring him to the oldest, largest woman in the village. She takes the child under her arm and keeps him close to her big, warm body for the day. And guess what happens? The child is calmed by her rhythms and her strong presence. He gets grounded and re-ordered by the maternal matrix--matter/mother (both words have the same root)--and he settles into his own body again.

Similarly, I was touched by the story of a young man I know who has been suffering from a sleep disorder, and is only able to stay awake for 5 hours a day. For years, his doctors have tried to treat him with every test and drug they could think of, with no success. And you know what is finally helping him? Breathing exercises--the natural rhythms of his own breath.

This December we had a ritual celebration for my daughter's 16th birthday. Thirty-five people of all ages sat in a circle for close to two hours lighting candles and sharing their memories and blessings for her safe passage into adulthood. It was a beautiful and sacred experience. But the thing that absolutely astounded to me was how content the children were during the whole two hours. Boys and girls from 6 to 17 sat riveted to what one might have thought would be boring for them. As I marveled at this later, a friend reminded me that children were always included in Native American talking circles, which could go on indefinitely. How often do we slow down together and enter into deep truthfulness, eye-to-eye presence and communication? How often do our kids experience their parents in this meaningfully connected way?

There is something healing and necessary for us in being in touch with the natural rhythms of life--the earth, the seasons, the rhythms of the cosmos, and our human life passages. Women have the special advantage of being directly connected to these rhythms through their own bodies, but it is the feminine in all of us that can attune to this connection. One statistic that points to the life-sustaining quality of the feminine is the fact that after losing their wives, widowers are unusually susceptible to dying within a year.

Our ancestors recognized this life-giving quality. Their earliest intuition was that the earth itself was feminine. Research from every continent shows that from the years 30,000 to 3,000 BC humans imagined the Source of all life in the image of the Goddess. This means that every one of us have ancestors who revered the Goddess. She was the birthgiver, and the earth was her body. All life came from her and returned to her at death to be reborn. The cycles of the seasons were her rhythms, and her nature, constant change. All life was sacred, and the pleasures of being alive, her sacraments. As Sam Keen points out, "when pleasure is high, violence is low. And vice versa." Thus, some 30,000 miniature sculptures of the Goddess and a rich array of symbols from nature have been found at these sites, but no spears, swords or weapons of destruction.

Throughout time, images of the Sacred Feminine have persisted in the spiritual traditions of humanity. When the temples of the Goddess were destroyed, Christian churches dedicated to Mary were built on the same ground. The Gothic cathedrals were called collectively "Our Ladies" or "Palaces of the Queen of Heaven." In the Gnostic gospels we find numerous references to Sofia, Lady Wisdom. In Buddhism, there is Quan Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, The Great Bliss Queen. In Judaism, the Shekhinah. And one of my generic favorites, Grandmother God.

Although we know on some level that the divine is beyond gender, as humans we need accessible images we can relate to. Mar-ion Woodman says, "The images we assimilate are as important to our well-being as the food we eat." There is a story about a little boy who is frightened during a terrible thunderstorm. "Don't worry son," his father assures him, "God will protect you." The little boy looks up and says, "Yes, Daddy, I know that, but I need someone with skin on!"

We need personal images we can take into our being to draw comfort from and grow towards. Images of the Divine Feminine re-mind us that all life is sacred, and we are not separate from it; that our bodies are of Her body, and it is Her life-force that flows in our veins.

Ironically, it is the new sciences today that are bearing out this vision of reality humans intuited 30,000 years ago--that there is in all life an inherent orderliness that can be trusted, which does not, as we have imagined, need us to control it. This order is created and recreated not through external domination, but through fluctuation and change, unexpected disruption and newness. Practically every spiritual tradition has said this in so many words. In the scriptures, "Behold. I make all things new." In pagan traditions, "She changes everything She touches."

But we are not taught to live in relationship to chaos or uncertainty. We live instead as if we have to be God and keep things in their place. We perch at a distance from our body, our feelings and the natural world, trying desperately to keep things from decaying, spinning out of their orbit, or dying. How much fear underlies this worldview! How much emptiness, how little room for being in process.

Quantum theory is revealing a very different world--a world of "interconnectedness, of a deep order that we are only beginning to sense." Not a world in which things are in their place, but one in which they are swept up in a "constant weaving of relationships [and] energies that merge and change." We are even discovering that there is order in what appears to be total disorder. Chaos theory shows that "if we look at a system long enough, it always demonstrates its inherent orderliness."

Clearly, things are not as they seem. We used to assume we did our thinking in the mind, that the mind was located in the brain, and that it gave orders to its container, the body. Now we know that all of our organs produce the same chemicals as the brain makes when we think. If that is true, then where in the body is the mind? The answer is that the mind is in every single cell of our being! Remember that the next time you just have a "gut sense" about something. This is the knowing we are talked out of trusting.

We used to think that matter was dead and spirit was alive. Now we know that matter can manifest as particles or as waves. That is, matter's total identity includes the potential for both forms--particles and waves--a kind of unity expressed as diversity. In other words, matter is the densest form of spirit, and spirit is the lightest form of matter.

Likewise, we as individuals can be particle in our separate skins or wave in community. Science reveals that every "molecule knows in some way what the other molecules will do at the same time, over relatively macroscopic distances--that is, they communicate." And you wonder how it happens that you were just thinking of someone, and then they call you, or a letter arrives in the mail from them. The fact that two electrons can influence each other across time and space, no matter how great the distance between them could explain why prayer significantly improves medical outcome for cardiac patients, and how medical intuitives can diagnose and heal at a distance.

In actuality, the unity state of consciousness is a natural state. Studies have shown (by attaching electrodes to people's temples for a few days) that "mystical experience is measurable; it occurs daily. Yet, when asked, these people often have not registered...it consciously. Researchers theorize that 'unity' is an experience the ego cannot comprehend and so it hits 'erase' and we snap back to ordinary attention, not realizing time has been lost, that we've been...in connection with the Sacred."

The truth is that we have sources of energy both within us and all around us--in our connections to our bodies, to nature, and to each other-- that we are not accessing. We are, as the title of a country song by Kathy Mattea says, "Standing Knee-Deep in a River (Dying of Thirst)-- dying because we've been talked out of our natural knowing, enculturated away from the non-linear, the fuzzy, the messy, and the darker parts of ourselves, which we hide.

I have had several experiences with clients in the last few weeks that I want to share with you today because I think they demonstrate what happens when we open up and turn towards that which is immanent (from the Latin immanere, meaning "in or near.")

I was working with a 40-year-old woman who has gone back to school. She was diagnosed, as a child, with a learning disability, and now that she has to write papers for school, she was finding herself unable to put her perceptions into words, and feeling like there was something wrong with her because she couldn't fit her experience into the mold her teachers require. As we worked, she identified two parts of herself--the poetry part and the linear part. The poetry part started describing her experience of a recent trip to the Grand Canyon: "I saw the wonder of everything," she said, "the flow of every cell of every living creature. I just wanted to sing and dance, but I didn't. I was too embarrassed." I asked the linear part how it felt hearing this. It said, "I want to know more." So I suggested it use its linear skills to ask her questions. "What got you so excited," it said, "what specifically did you see, the colors, the smells, the sounds?" The poetry part began to cry. "There's so much feeling through all my senses," she said, "it gets trapped." And she was overcome by emotion. I suggested she let her feeling express itself through her body, as her instincts had prompted her to do at the time. And through tears and layers of embarrassment, she got up and began to let the beauty she was feeling move through her body, her arms, and her voice. As I watched, tears ran down my face. It was one the most beautiful expressions of human sensitivity I had ever witnessed.

By listening deeply to the truth of her experience, she had found inside herself not a disability at all, but a jewel. She had learned that both parts of herself were needed and valuable. The child in her felt liberated and restored to her own unique way of expressing herself. Afterwards, she was buoyant and full of joy.

Dr. Christiane Northrup tells us that when we obsess about something, we tie up energy, our life-energy leaks out away from our body, and our vital cellular processes become depleted. "When you find these areas in your body," she says, "you must call your spirit back."

Another woman I work with came in exhausted one day, and wondering whether she wanted to continue in her profession. She had just received notice of a lawsuit against her by a former client. She was feeling the responsibility of having someone else's well-being in her hands, and doubting her ability to handle it. As she tuned into her body, she uncovered a kind of self-hatred that said things like "You're not good enough. You're going to hurt someone. You should get out of this business." She cried deeply as she listened, and felt helpless. She asked the self-hatred why it was there and what it needed. It said it was trying to protect her, and that it was angry at her for not standing up for herself when confronted with these accusations! She realized that in fact she did need to be more assertive. That she was quite competent in her field, with good values, good intentions, and the willingness to learn from her mistakes if she had made them. Once she had listened to it in this way, the self-hatred told her it didn't like being so mean, that it wanted to be forgiven and become a supporter of hers instead. She went through a deep self-forgiveness process and took responsibility for advocating for herself, as it had suggested.

And then her face lightened, and she said, "I just felt the Beloved inside taking me by the hand. I had dropped the hand. I'd stopped trusting it was there. I went back to 'I'm not good enough, my humanness isn't good enough, I'm bad, I don't deserve to live,' instead of back to 'I am good, I am enough, I am loved.'" In the Talmud, one of the names for God means "enough." And then she felt the love flow through her whole being, and out to everyone involved in the lawsuit, her lawyers and even the woman who had brought it. She had called her spirit back.

It came to me that she was not doing this work just for her personal self; that this is the work we are all doing as humans--going into our own darkness, into our self-hatred, the sense that our humanness isn't good enough. Everyone of us who has the courage to do it makes it a tiny bit easier for the rest of us. And, as she discovered, when we do, we come to the Beloved. Carl Jung said, "Do not be afraid of the unconscious. The Holy Spirit lives there."

But we can't do this work alone. We need each other. We need to take refuge in the Sangha, as the Buddhists say--to take refuge in community, in each other, in the arms of the Beloved wherever we find it. Those of you who have experienced a serious illness or death in the family know how important those who care become at times like that. How every card, every call means so much.

Sometimes, when we are open to it or when we step out on the edge, it seems as though our whole universe is calling out to us. Margaret Wheatley explains, "If the capacity to...communicate defines a system as conscious, then the world is rich in consciousness, extending to include even those things we have classified as inanimate." A new client of mine came to my home office for her first session, nervous and in much pain. And as she was walking across my front porch, the wind chimes sounded. "There was no wind," she said, "it was the strangest thing! I felt like they were talking directly to me. I'll never forget it. It broke me wide open."

I had a humorous taste of this a few weeks ago when I had shared my own pain with a group of my colleagues at our Center, and let them know I needed their help. It was a breakthrough for me, and shifted me out of a period of feeling anxious and disconnected. As I drove away from the meeting, I was thinking about this talk, and when I looked up, I found myself sitting behind a car with a bumper sticker that read "Goddess Babe." I thought, now there is the synthesis of ancient and modern times! At moments like these, I know that the Divine has a great sense of humor.

We need to let ourselves be broken open, so we can return to the authority of the eternal in us. When we're open in this way, we contact what Gandhi called our "soul force." And, inevitably, we are supported. A miraculous example of this is what the Russian mothers did in the war in Grozny several years ago. It was a war they felt was wrong, and so they traveled to Grozny, and went right into enemy territory to find their sons and bring them home. Even more remarkable is the fact the enemy soldiers gave the mothers food and shelter for as long as they were there. Who could have predicted this? Who knew?

When, however, we are not open or clear or connected, when we don't know what to do, we may need to shift our perception slightly to 'get under the spout' so to speak. As the old saying goes: "If God feels far away, guess who moved?" So I would like to give you some tangible ways of getting connected. Through a slight shift in awareness, we can come home to ourselves without checking another task off our 'to-do' list, saving more money, or figuring anything else out. In the words of Kabir:

You believe there is some place
where your soul will be less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.
Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you will find a solid place for your feet...
Don't go off somewhere else!
Just throw off all thoughts of imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.

We can begin by slowing down and paying deep attention in the present moment. As Simone Weil said, 'attention is prayer.' So let us pay attention first to what is right under our noses--the breath---in practically every spiritual tradition, breath is at the center--spirit, pneuma, ruach, wind. A powerful symbol as well as a living presence, the breath is always with us, even when we forget it. It has a life of its own. It brings in oxygen to our cells and carries out toxins from our body. It expands and contracts, in balance. When we hold our breath, we get stuck. When our breathing is shallow, we get afraid.

Take a deep breath right now and see where in your body you feel the breath moving. Feel it filling the back of your lungs, expanding the space inside for you to be. Many of us live from the neck up. We are taught not to breathe deeply, because what hap-pens when we do is that we begin to feel what we really feel, instead of what we think we should feel. We get in touch with the fact that we are vulnerable, and life is precious.

Now put your hand on your heart for a moment. Just bring all your senses to the heart and let them rest there. Feel your blood bringing to the lungs everything that wants to be released. And breathe it out--releasing the lie that you don't matter. With each breath, new life comes in and pulses back out to every cell of the body, including the bone marrow from which a vital part of your immune system comes. Let yourself feel this renewal, the body for-giving itself.

And then move your hand down to your belly and see if you can feel the breath in it. Let the belly soften. This is a different message than we usually get, with all our ab machines and tummy tucks, but this is where we carry our 'guts,' and our gut knowing. And if we tense it up all the time, we get cut off from that knowing. As Confucius said, "Beware, the man who laughs and his belly doesn't jiggle. That is a dangerous man!" The Buddha is often depicted with a fat belly, the Goddess has a huge belly carrying new life. Steven and Ondrea Levine teach a simple spiritual practice called "Soft Belly," bringing awareness to the tension that keeps returning there, and allowing it to soften, making room inside for all of it. The griefs of a lifetime float in soft belly--our umbilical cord back to our origins, held in the strong, round bowl of pelvis.

Now feel your bones. According to Angeles Arriens, indigenous people say you don't have to worry about a thing if you just stay connected to the four bones in the body: Our back bone, feel yours now. Our courage. The wish bone. Our connection to our dreams. The funny bone, our sense of humor. And the hollow little bone. We need to be like a hollow little bone, letting life flow through us, rather than trying to control it.

And finally breathe down into your legs and feet. Healer Rosalyn Bruyere says, "I never pray unless I know where my feet are." There are energies available to us from the earth. When we don't recognize this we get cut off at the ankles from our Source. So feel your feet against the ground, and sink your roots down from the bottoms of your feet and the base of your spine, down into the ancient earth. Feel the vitality there. And then, with every breath, let that energy flow up into your feet, legs and body, the spinal fluid rising up your spine, washing up over the top of your head, opening it like a flower to Father Sky, and then flowing back down again to complete the circuit--allowing heaven and earth to come together in you. Now sense in your whole being what it is like to be connected in this way.

Breath, heart, belly, bones, feet--this is our incarnation--the sacred River of energy that is always available. Not just an empty vessel for spirit--it is spirit in its densest, most immanent form. All we have to do is turn our attention towards it and let our-selves be bouyed up by it, and eternity makes its home in our heart.

Now, visualize in your mind's eye someone who is close to you. Realize for a moment that this person was tiny once, and helpless. Know that this person suffers, as you do. Feels afraid, at times, just like you. Has dignity and gifts, as you do. Be aware that the same pulse flows in their veins as in your own. And that it will stop some day in both of you...

This pulse we share is the heartbeat of the Great Mother, flowing through us all, invisibly sustaining and connecting us more deeply than we can ever know. From this inner connection, let us breathe together, that is, con-spire, to call to those who have gone before us, our ancestors, and to the kingdom/queendom of souls who are waiting to be asked for their help. Let us ask:

that our feet be steadied on our truest path,
that we learn to treat ourselves and each other as the Be-loved,
that we may drink from the River in the ordinary moments of our days,
and, in the words of Mary Oliver,
"know again our place in the family of things."