Finding Inner Courage (7CDs)

Conari Books, San Francisco, CA, February 2011
and as an audiobook from from Simon & Schuster, March 2011

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AUDIO DESCRIPTION

The word courage comes from the Latin, cor, which literally means heart. The original use of the word courage means to stand by one’s core. This is a striking concept that reinforces the belief found in almost all traditions that living from the Center is what enables us to face whatever life has to offer. This audiobook is an exploration into how to find our way to our core, to stand by our core, and to then sustain the practice of living from our core—to live out of our courage. To encourage means to impart strength and confidence, to inspire and hearten. So, the question unfolds: How do we encourage ourselves, each other, and the world? And just what does it mean to live a life of encouragement?

If to find our way to our core is to face the lion, then to stand by our core is to be the lion. And to sustain the practice of living from our core—to live out of our courage—is to find our way in the world by tracking inner courage and where it lives. These notions frame the journey of this audiobook.

The courage we all admire, where ordinary people summon unexpected strength to run into burning buildings or to stand up to tyrants, whether an abusive father or an abusive leader, this inspiring and mysterious impulse to rise to a dangerous situation, which Hemingway referred to as grace under pressure, grows from another kind of courage—inner courage. By inner courage, I mean the ground of quiet braveries from which the more visible braveries sprout. These are the ways of living and being that make bravery possible in the first place; not just as an event, but as an approach to life, as a way of life. This audiobook is devoted to exploring those quiet braveries, in an effort to understand not only what constitutes courage in its deepest sense, but what is the soil in which it is seeded, watered, cared for, and grown.

Thinking about courage in this way opens us to an array of small and constant efforts that no one ever sees, but which have changed the world: the courage to face ourselves, each other, and the unknown, the courage to see, to feel, to accept, to heal, to be. Efforts of this nature often go unnoticed and unrecognized. Like the courage to break life-draining patterns and let the story of our lives unfold, to stand by one’s core, and to persevere through the doorway of nothing into the realm of everything. Like the courage to choose aliveness over woundedness, to remember what matters when we forget, and to build on the past instead of hiding in it. Like the courage to choose compassion over judgment and love over fear, to withstand the tension of opposites, and to give up what no longer works in order to stay close to what is sacred.

These subtle yet essential states, and more, make up the elements of living, and so, it serves us well to explore how they grow singly and together. This is an education I never had in school, but which life has been shouting for as long as I can remember. This is an education of what matters.

I confess that I enter this looking to uncover and sustain my own courage. I confess that the part of me that is a poet is in awe, busy retrieving the aspects of the mystery that we are privileged to, while the part of me that is a philosopher is busy talking about what I find, always trying to understand what is retrieved. And the part of me that is a cancer survivor is always eager to turn mystery and understanding into food, to make use of it.

I have come to believe that we can only learn about and discover the capacity and meaning of our courage in the context of our struggles, in how we face and inhabit the challenges life presents to us. In this, courage is an applied art of spirit. It is not something we can manipulate, but only live into. Recovering the Source and living it out in the world, alone and together, is a lifelong devotion. One that we must, ultimately, inhabit alone, but one which we must enliven together.