What stones do you still think you can turn into bread? To answer you must own and release your addictive desires that cannot nourish, satisfy or fulfill you. Will you be able to let go of these and manage the anxiety that comes with self-regulation?

How many leaps off the pinnacles of great ideals do you take, assuming angels will rescue you from crashing on the stones below? These are your ungrounded fantasies of magical support that drive you to expect too much from yourself, to fail to prepare, and to wish for winning a practical, moral or spiritual lottery so you don’t have to face the gravity of your earthly limitations. Will you be able to adjust your ambitions to the solid steps of real action?

How often have you felt the power over a situation and been willing to sell your soul to have that feeling remain forever?  These are your personal prejudices and the feeling that your way prevails over all others. Will you open up your soul to an interest in the experience and needs of others?

Your Inner Temptations Program

Your Inner Temptations brings deepening perspectives, insights and possibilities to inspire your own imagination of your experience of the wilderness and solitude, your challenges and temptations with addictive patterns, with your ungrounded fantasies and with judgments frozen in time. I take the New Testament images and make them intimate and meaningful for your modern, embodied soul. The wisdom is universal and the application is truly personal and powerfully practical.

Your Inner Temptations is about your changing, evolving, and developing a relationship with yourself in the vast and lonely wilderness of modern existence with all its seductions, demands, and confusions.  Inner Lent comes to strengthen your soul every winter.   

Below are the  descriptions of each lesson (which I admit sound a little "heavy" but I promise you will find ample warmth, clarity, encouragement, and humor in each topic.) 

The complete course is available for $67.  You will have access to all the lessons and any updates over the years forever.  

Lesson One -- A Strange and Lonely Place

In this lesson, I support you in connecting creatively to the many illuminating metaphors of Lent. 

In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is taken to the wilderness immediately after the Baptism. Your Inner Baptism is the awakening to a personal destiny of great purpose.  How often when your time has come for a central transition do you need the inner challenge of the wilderness to prepare you for what lies ahead?

Describing Your Inner Wilderness.

Understanding Your 40 Days

Considering the Possibility of Fasting and Getting to Know the Power of Suffering

Learning the Purpose of Temptation

Discerning the Challenges of Succumbing & Vanquishing

Discovering the Blessings of Solitude and Loneliness

Lesson Two -- Turning Stones to Bread - The Temptation of Addiction

Our souls seek safety, calmness, wakefulness, and nourishment.  When we dramatically lack in any of these four needs, we are likely to develop habits to soothe or stimulate our souls for false and temporary comfort.  Soon these habits become addictions unable to sustain inner satisfaction, nourishment or fulfillment. In this course we will be...

Recognizing Stimulating and Soothing Experiences

Distinguishing Your Endless Inner Demands and Insatiable Inner Needs  - Acknowledging Your Addictions

Imagining Enough?

Recognizing the Absence or Presence of Safety, Calmness, Wakefulness, and Nourishment

Regulating and Modulating Your Hungers and Longings

Incarnating into the Strength of the Organs & The Powers of Moral Digestion  

Not Living on Bread  Alone - Stones, Bread, and What?

Lesson Three -- Leaping Off  Pinnacles - The Temptation Fantasy

There is something so seductive about the belief that if you are truly good angels will nurture and rescue you. Maybe you call out for good luck or the quick fix or the Midas Touch, whatever its name it is about the resistance to being fully responsible and the willingness to take mature, conscious, wise and compassionate action. We are designed to be responsible and self-protective. But many of us feel we must prove ourselves to be god-like and have magical powers that can command angels.  This usually results in grandiose self-expectations and ends in the collapse on the harsh stones of anxiety, insomnia, and inner failure.

Finding Your Embodied Self and the Challenges of Incarnation

Choices at the Pinnacle and the Temptation to Leap

Spiritual Strength and Practical Earthly Experience

Understanding Fantasy

The Body's Pinnacle (This will amaze you!)

Incarnating into the Self-Regulating Activity of the Glands and Glandular Consciousness

Waking up to Your Fantasies - Of course, you have fantasies.

Grounding your Fantasies and Restoring Your Own Powers of Practicality

Lesson Four -- Ruling from the Mountaintop - The Temptation of Prejudice

When you pride yourself on being open and tolerant, it is quite a surprise to uncover the temptation of righteous prejudice is so alive in your soul. We all have perspectives, opinions and attitudes that disregard differences and deny other perspectives.  For most of us these prejudices seem little and are hidden even from ourselves. To have the Lenten courage to own your frozen thoughts, those perspectives in the moment that you want to hold forever is reaching for a freedom that will change your inner universe. 

The Temptation of Power and the Seduction of Momentary Glory

Defining Prejudice - It is such a slippery slope.

Understanding Your Nerve-Sense System and the Power of Potentization.

Considering Perception and Points of View

Recognizing Dead Memories and The Role in Your Identities and Defenses

Rumi's Field of No Prejudice and Endless Possibility

Two Bonus Lessons with the  program.

Bonus Lesson One - The Celebration and Ministering of Angels 

This is such a joyous celebration because you are now able to engage the world with all the strength of your soul.

Bonus Lesson Two - The Three Ways of Vanquishing Temptation

Essential lessons for vanquishing each temptation.

Inner Lent, like all the Imagine Self Academy Courses, is not about sin and redemption or being a good Christian. It is about the great commandment, “Oh, Human Soul, know thyself!” This is a commandment for all human souls, beyond religious beliefs.  I find the central festivals of the Christian Calendar quite universal in their ability to guide us to this task of imagining self as an earthly and divine being and the great mystery of becoming fully human.