Here’s to the “withered branch!”

Dear Soul-Sibling,

My spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, has returned from a year sabbatical.

Receiving his first email felt relevant and deeply familiar, like returning home.

I thought you'd like to savor his words:

“Winter has come to the Sierra Nevada Mountain range where I live, bringing with it snow, cold temperatures, and the unadorned beauty of nature shedding its spring and summer blooms and returning to its winter roots. The aspen trees in the canyon are bare now, having lost all of their yellow and golden fall leaves weeks ago, and the pines in the high country are heavy with glittering cotton candy snow, clutching to the branches and outstretched pine needles. The bears have all gone into hibernation by now, and the deer are quietly making their way down from the high meadows and streams to lower slopes in search of food. And as I shoveled a few feet of newly fallen snow from the steps leading to the front door, I was pulled into the spirit of nature’s winter return all around me.

Each one of us is as much a part of nature and the natural world as hibernating bears, deer on the move, or a cold winter storm moving in over the horizon. And yet even though we insulate ourselves from so many of the ways of nature, we ourselves are nature, and we reflect, in our consciousness, the same rhythms and patterns as the natural world all around us. If you are paying attention, you can feel the pattern of return and restoration during these winter months. You can also feel the natural movement of falling away and surrender that happens each and every winter, as the leaves fall from the trees and the blooms relinquish their petals to the forest floor to become nutrients for the re-emergence of new blooms in the spring. We are of course conditioned to look at new and pretty things, but all of life’s beauty arises from the primordial ground beyond all names and forms. If nothing falls away, there will be no room or energy for the new, the transformational, the life-giving renewal of spirit deep in the heart of everything.

This new year, I will be returning to teaching after a year-long sabbatical. My sabbatical has been a year of continuous return, of withering down to the essential. There is an old Zen saying that goes, “on the withered branch, a flower blooms.” Like all things Zen, great insight is conveyed in the most simple and natural forms of expression and with the minimum of explanation. We all like beautiful flowers, but conveniently dismiss the withered branches from which they arise and express.

The western mind is allured and attached to all things spring and summer, but the roots of wisdom and insight are forged in the withering and return of winter. The sun gods of various religions have always been popular throughout history; they are the charismatic superstars of mythology. But every sun god arises from the primordial ground, where, as Meister Eckhart said, “distinction never gazed.” Winter is itself a metaphor for “where distinction never gazed.” But winter is more than a metaphor, it is a material living expression of life’s return. Winter is the process of life casting off what is no longer essential or life-sustaining, renewing itself by a return to the essential, the core, the root of all that we are.

By joining with the natural movement of winter, and allowing the return of our consciousness to its roots in the primordial, the essential, the unconscious ground of all being, we not only awaken but we also nurture the dynamic and creative aspect of spirit by plunging it into its silent source. A source that can be realized but never turned into the known. So, let us embrace the wintertime of spirituality, and the great return to the essential, and to a mind that is not stuck in its own imagined knowing, thereby always being open to reality as reality.”

I have so much to be grateful for and made a New Year's Revolution—I'm not starting my new year until the first day of Spring (Monday, March 20, 2023).

In the meantime I will begin-again and explore different aspects of my inner rhythm

Please be gentle, gentle with yourself and the propensity to spiral in mid-January with Winter's edge.

If you return to the essential in your life, what does this look and feel like?

Do not fear the Winter, because I'm opening a four week wise-circle starting in mid-February to guide us into the Spring (together).

I'll be in touch with all the cozy details.

Hit reply if you want me to add your name to the waitlist.

Yours Bluely,

Alexander