From my Inspiration for Life newsletter ~ From Druidy.org

[Julie]

'What does it mean to fully experience a moment - any moment? It means to directly experience what is here now without separation from it. It means opening, seeing, listening, feeling, being intimate and at one with what is...'

~ Dorothy Hunt ~

Awen

by Philip Carr-Gomm ~ Traduction ~ Dany Seignabou ~

1. Awen is chanted out loud or intoned silently within the soul, and is made up of three sounds: Ah-oo-en. The Ah sound opens you to life, evokes joy and purpose, radiates power and creativity. The oo sound expands, continues, and disseminates the energy and power you have opened to, allowing it to blossom. The enn sound completes the process, creates the boundary, the containment, and both grounds and gives birth to all that the previous two sounds have inspired and generated.  Learning how to be open to Awen is like learning how to open a window. It requires nothing more than just leaning forwards, lifting the catch, and opening the window wide. Then the wind and the sunshine, the fresh air, the rain, the birdsong that comes drifting in – all these things – do the work. And you just settle back and let go, and allow the wind to blow through you, the sunshine to flood through you. To open to Awen, all you have to do is stand your ground and get out of the way.

2. Awen sometimes seems to flow down into you – it’s as if the inspiration starts off up there, out there. But other times it seems to flow up from deep down within you, deep down from a place beyond you, deeper than you – the centre of the earth, the rock below you. The island in the sea says “I am not just a floating piece of rock and sand on this ocean. My heart, my ground, my foundation is below the surface – I am part of the earth, and only a small part of me rises up above the water line.” We are all the same, all like the island, but sometimes we think we are just the part that can be seen above the shoreline – and we feel we are floating, and disconnected from life and from other people. But if we seek the Awen, the cold bubbling spring from deep underground, the molten lava that surprises us with its power when it bursts out of the earth, then we open to our Deeper Self, and our More-Than-Self that lies at our foundation.  And we feel once again united with all humanity, all Being.

3. What if you could hear Awen, feel it, in the soles of your feet, not your brain? What if the songs of the earth could be heard between your toes, rippling up the soft arch of your feet, curling around your heels and ankles before carrying their message of joy and inspiration to the rest of your body that stands or lies upon the earth?

4. Try opening to Awen not when it’s easy, but when it’s difficult: not when you can be still and nothing is disturbing you, but when there’s chaos around you, and life is far from easy. See if you can find Awen in those moments. It’s harder, much harder, but when you do, it’s like walking through a doorway in a grimy city street to discover a secret garden that has always been there – quiet and tranquil, an oasis of calm and beauty. One way to do this, is just to tell yourself gently “Stop!” Life can be so demanding, so entrancing, that it carries us away, and we get pulled off-centre. If we tell ourselves to stop for a moment, this gives us the opportunity to stop identifying with the drama around us, and to come back to a sense of ourselves, of the innate stillness within our being. And then, sometimes, we are rewarded with Awen at precisely this moment.

5. I tend to associate Awen with water, but here are some thoughts that came to me about Awen as fire. And, after all, the Song of Amairgen does talk about ‘fire in the head’: And what of Awen in the void – in the blank spaces, the tired moments, the moments when you experience nothing but lack: lack of purpose, meaning, energy, joy? Awen then slumbers like a dragon at the back of the cave. If you dare, see if you can find the fury behind the fatigue, see if you can get to the hurt that has numbed your joy, the pain that has stifled your sense of purpose. Then perhaps you will awaken the dragon and you will cry out in anger or in pain and maybe – just maybe – the dragon’s breath of Awen will touch you with its fire!

6. There is a difference between the inspiration of Awen – that comes to us in flashes, waves, streams of clarity, insight and creativity – and the energy of Nwyfre. Nwyfre is the life-force that flows through our bodies, giving us health and vitality. Nwyfre is like the prana of yoga, or the Chi’ of the Taoists. Ideally, Nwyfre flows strongly through us at all times. Awen, however, visits us like a cool breeze, a ray of sunshine, the gift of rain, which arrives as a blessing, and then leaves us again. Constancy is not a characteristic of Awen – by its nature it comes and goes. But it is our job to encourage it to come more often – to at least try to meet it half-way.

7. Poet’s speak of ‘la ligne donnée’ – the given line. This is the line of a poem given to them by the Muse, by Spirit. It comes into their mind from somewhere apparently outside themselves, or perhaps from their subconscious. Once they have this, they can begin their poem. It is the spark, the trigger, the catalyst for their creative process. It is Awen. Whether we are poets or not, whatever our creative field, without Awen, it is hard, if not impossible, to begin. But once it is given to us, it is like being fertilised. Suddenly the world, our work, is pregnant with possibilities.

8. You can’t make the wind blow, but you can go outside when you see it blowing, and turn your face to it, and feel it sweeping over and through – blowing away sadness and tiredness – cleansing you – energising you.
You can’t make the wind blow, but you can make sure you don’t stay in stuffy rooms too long. You can go to places you know are windy. It’s the same with Awen – by its nature it comes from outside you, so you can’t control it, or switch it on whenever you want some of it. But you can make sure you place yourself in circumstances where it is more likely to visit you – out in Nature, in places of great beauty or strong energy.

9. Imagine you can hear a little voice that’s coming from under a rock, somewhere far down in your interior landscape. Move the rock carefully, and let the voice out. Who does it belong to? Some part of your soul that has been crushed for ages by the weight of your worries? A part of you that has grown to like the darkness and the pressure, and now feels as vulnerable as a new-born baby? Let it speak. Let it sing or cry, moan or yell. Then, if it feels OK for you, identify fully with this part of yourself, and feel how it feels. Then walk away from the stone, down to a small pool that is bathed in sunlight. And bathe yourself there in the water. Afterwards, lie on the earth in the sun, close your eyes, and feel the warmth and light of the sun on your body. As you do this, become aware of the heart-area in your physical body and allow this newly discovered part of you to be nourished by it. Then allow your awareness to shift to being fully conscious in your everyday self – here and now.

10. Worry is the enemy of Awen. When you worry you are like a dog chasing its tail…you go around in circles, and there’s no room for Awen to come into your awareness.

11. Awen is said to mean ‘the blessing of the gods’ as well as ‘inspiration’. Why do the gods want to bless us, why do they want to give us Awen? It must be because they love us, and want to give us their ability to create – they want us to be god-like so that we too can create beauty in the world.

12. Most times it seems that Awen comes to us when we are quiet – when we can be still enough within ourselves to open our hearts and minds and intuition to something more than just our own concerns, or the busy-ness of our own minds. But sometimes Awen needs chaos, needs the confusion, the turning upside down of notions and feelings, in order to burst in on us, like a ‘thief in the night’ – to use that extraordinary and evocative image used in the Bible to describe the way Christ can come into someone’s life.

13. Try focusing your awareness on your heart and just follow the images that occur to you. At some time you might find yourself coming to a garden. You may have to find a secret gate or doorway into this garden, or you may have to make your way through a dark forest to find it hidden beyond two streams. See if you can find this Garden of the Heart. Sometimes you might find a pool there that will refresh you with its water. Other times a fire might burning there that will fill you with energy and passion. Both can bless you with Awen.

14. It’s as if the ‘ah’ sound of Awen expresses and invokes the sun in your life, while the ‘oo’ sound expresses and calls into you the power of the moon. The ‘en’ sound connects you to the power of the Earth, and Saturn too, as the ruler of endings, completions. The final ‘en’ sound gives you the power to truly manifest your creative power in the world, because without the qualities associated with Saturn you cannot complete a task on earth. To create you have to know when to stop.

15. It is no accident that Brighid is the Goddess of Poetry and Healing. When you are fully expressing your creativity, when her Imbas, (or the Awen of her Welsh counterpart Ceridwen) is flowing through you, healing occurs. To be fully healthy, you need to allow yourself full creative expression. In chanting Awen or Imbas, and in meditating on them, you are encouraging both health and inspiration to flow into you.

16. What is the difference between intuition and Awen? Intuition is the faculty through which you receive Awen. Awen is flowing from the source, intuition is the channel.  The more you try to open to Awen, to hear its quiet voice, to detect its pure note, the more you are developing your intuition

17. Try asking the moon for Awen. Maybe Brighid, Lady of the stars, will feed you with moon-milk. Maybe Ceridwen, the Bent White One, will whisper moon-secrets to you in the night

18. The crane is a bird that can teach us about the way to find Awen. She is patience personified – she can sit for hours as motionless as a statue, gazing into the water, waiting to strike. So too, the Bard who would seek Awen must learn to wait – to have a mind that is still, yet focused – like the crane’s, and a heart that is as calm as a tranquil lake. Then, when the bright flash of Awen is seen beneath the surface, the mind can swiftly grasp it, so that it becomes food for a new day.

19. Try looking for Awen in your sleep. As you drift into the land of dreams, follow Awen as you would follow the scent of pines in the forest, the sound of the blackbird as it sings in the twilight. That’s what they meant about ‘Sleeping on a problem’. If you feel empty, dried up, lacking in inspiration, try a snooze – but a snooze with a purpose!

20. Falling in love can open you to Awen. Shifting the focus of concern away from yourself to another creates an opening in your heart and soul, and in rush thoughts and feelings you’ve never had before. You might think they are coming from the person you are in love with, and some of they may be – but others will be coming from beyond both you and them. Together the magic of your love will have opened a door and touched something greater than both of you.

21. Awen is natural – a part of Nature. So you can take any aspect of Nature and open yourself to it, just sensing it fully without judgement or even thought, and through it you can be inspired and invigorated with Awen. Take snow. Still yourself and imagine snowflakes gently falling around you. Sense that deep hush that spreads over the land when snow falls. See the snow in moonlight – sparkling and pristine. Feel the Awen reaching you – through your senses – through the vision of the beauty of the snow, through the silence it creates around you.

22. Over the last few months I’ve been posting up a series of thoughts on Awen, which is the term used to describe creative inspiration and divine blessings in Druidry. Here is the last posting in this series:
Awen is milk of the Goddess, seed of the God: divine nectar, flowing creative inspiration. It is like the Amrita of Hinduism, but a little different, like the Grace of the Christians, but a little different, like the Tao of the Taoists, but a little different. Imagine you can drink Awen – after all Gwion did. When you sip mead from a chalice in a Druid ceremony, imagine that you are drinking the Awen from Ceridwen’s cauldron.

Link to article on Order of Bards Ovates and Druids