Receiving
Letting Life All the Way In
There are places in this world that
reach down deep inside of you and
touch your soul.
Maybe it’s the land itself that
reconnects you
to the sacred within.
Or the beauty
or the peacefulness
or the long vistas
or the intimacy
of its nurturing spaces.
Maybe it’s the people,
or the lack of people.
Perhaps it’s an ancient tree
or a venerable temple.
Or a river, a lake, or the sea.
Or maybe it’s the history held there—
events that shifted the arc
of your life or your country
or even the world.
There’s something about this place
that brings you alive in ways that
don’t happen anywhere else.
You receive something there
that no other place gives you
in quite the same way.
And when you arrive there,
your spirit comes home.
Life has taken me to many such places—sacred places that each in its own way offered holy, life-giving encounters. Chances are you have your own list. Maybe you were only there once, perhaps many times. Maybe you are even blessed to live in such a place.
For me, Chautauqua has been the holy ground I’ve returned to for decades. The last few summers here have carried me across deeper thresholds of learning, compassion, tenderness, love, loss, healing, inspiration—thresholds to richer and more profound connection with what, these days, I simply call Mystery. You might call it Universe or Source or God or Love. It’s not about the name; it’s about the encounter. Chautauqua is the sacred ground that keeps inviting me into deeper relationship with Mystery, with life, with the world, and my place in it.
Weeks before traveling here, I was already anticipating invitations that might find me and the journeys they could take me on. And then anticipation yielded to arrival two and a half weeks ago.
It’s one thing to arrive in a place physically.
It’s quite another to arrive spiritually and emotionally.
To arrive deep in your soul.
Arriving in your soul takes time, breath, stillness. Especially when the energy in the place where you have arrived carries its own unique depth and intensity. And when that place reaches down into your soul to remind you who you are. Touching feelings and aspects of self that, for whatever reasons, haven’t been so easily accessible until you got here. And then the deeper parts of your being send out a search party to find the stray parts of you that haven’t yet fully arrived.
It takes time to land deeply. To open layer upon layer of your being so that you might receive what has been patiently, and sometimes impatiently, waiting for you. Waiting to deepen your sense of self, of life, of wonder, of disappointment, of loss, of celebration. And your sense of Love as the ultimate glue that holds it all together.
Landing and opening in this kind of place will change you.
It might even transform you.
The last few days, I’ve been remembering coming to Chautauqua to grieve in the days immediately following the death of my father in 2010 and the laying to rest of my mother in 2021, nearly a year after her death during COVID when “in person” gatherings were prohibited. My grief was not devastating; both my parents had long declines, so I had already been grieving long before they left this world. Yet it was still tender and deep and real. And some parts of grieving the loss of my mother had felt delayed, waiting for the final closure of burial.
I came straight away to Chautauqua because this place was sacred to all of us. And I sensed that my parents’ spirits would know to find me here. Indeed, both of them did. And I received healing and blessing in the visceral reassurance that their profound love would continue flowing from the other side as it always had when they were physically alive.
Years later, I’m still receiving that love. And in a multitude of ways, especially when I’m here, I keep receiving reminders of where I came from and who I have become. Because of my parents and my heritage, because of this place, and because of all that life has brought me.
Within the first few days of my arrival here this summer, I began sensing a greater openness within myself to receive. And to accept what comes, trusting that its gifts will be revealed.
Yet as my soul continues to land here, I’m recognizing more deeply that receiving has sometimes been more of an intellectual process within me than a deep heart and soul process. I don’t always let life all the way in. Chautauqua both softens and strengthens my presence, opening me to more fully receive. It holds me so that I might enter more deeply into encounters with life as they unfold. This place doesn’t require definitive conclusions or answers. It only asks me to stay present with what is unfolding long enough for deeper layers to be revealed.
So, the first big invitation of the summer: to notice more fully whether I’m standing outside what is happening as an observer or opening to receive what has come to find me through the situation at hand.
The easy and the hard,
the joyous and the challenging,
the gains and the losses.
To let life all the way in.
Invitations
Visit The Center for Transformational Presence website
Listen to free recorded Meditations for Changing Times led by Alan. More than 60 guided meditations. Choose the title that speaks to you and listen. Available for free anytime.
Explore Alan’s Books
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Alan, your descriptions of your experiences at Chautauqua are powerful. They pull us into experiencing even everyday life with new eyes. Thank you for reshaping my attitude toward what I might often call my upcoming day of "just the usual."
This is so beautiful Alan, thank you