Saturday, December 21, 2024

Relational healing and the shattered heart


As relational mammals with the sort of nervous system that we've been crafted with and the kind of heart that we've been provided with, the experience of abandonment and aloneness is really the greatest type of suffering we can experience.

It goes to the very core of who and what we are as beings wired to connect, to love and be loved, to hold and be held, and to rest, thrive, play, and heal in the arms of another, metaphorically and also physically, emotionally, neurophysiologically, as well as spiritually.

At times, we need another to help us to feel glued together, where two hearts, two sets of mirror neurons, and ripe relational neurocircuitries can come into linkage – one and two, two into One, the dance of Unity and Multiplicity, Oneness and Differentiation.

The activity of love in manifestation.

Upward, ascending into Unity, solar cycles; downward, descending into the alive brilliance of multiplicity, lunar embodiment and incarnation. Each an equally valid arrow in the quiver of the beloved as she unfolds herself into form, pours her body out of itself to seed the world of time and space.

No matter how much inner work we do, how healed, or transformed, or enlightened, or awakened we become, or fantasize ourselves to have become, we don't ever really transcend our relational nature. We don't rise above hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

We don't need to apologize for this or pretend it's otherwise or shame ourselves for having this relationally configured nervous system.

We don't need to apologize for the fact that we really are relationally crafted. But fall to the ground in awe at the mystery of one and two. The aching, the burning, the chaos, and the glory of the whole thing.

Friday, December 13, 2024

HOLIDAY OFFER/ PRICING: Resting Your Nervous System online course


This weekend (Friday through Sunday, December 13-15) I’ll be offering my Resting Your Nervous System online course (over 20 hours of video-based content) at a special price of $167.

In the self-guided home study course, we’ll explore the nature of an embodied, trauma-sensitive spirituality, one that integrates somatic and depth psychotherapies, relational neuroscience, and the clinical application of mindfulness and self-compassion practices.

Over 12, 90+ minute sessions, there will be exercises and guided meditations, talks from me, and responses to frequently asked questions.

Topics include – Resting Your Nervous System: Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety; Into the Heart of Trauma and the Nature of Relational Wounding: Going Slow, Staying Safe, and Honoring the Intelligence of the Body; Compassion, Hope, and the Possibility of True Healing: The Journey of Safety, Coming Home to the Body, and the Reorganization of the Nervous System; Self-Compassion, Embodied Attunement, and What Works For You: Toning and Tuning Your Unique Nervous System.

You can learn more about the course and the special pricing here:







Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Trauma and the journey home


Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through questioning and reorganizing patterns of thinking.

We can’t think our way out of trauma, attachment, and narcissistic violation.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, unmetabolized pieces of soul are held subcortically and in cellular circuitry, unreachable by thinking which is a layer removed from the fires of the alchemical body.

Instead, they seek refuge in the belly, heart, and throat, and in underground shadow storage regions. Thought is too dense to reach them here. From here, they burn and ache and long for safety and shelter, for permission to be.

Encouragement to “just get over it, it’s just your ego, just be in the present, it isn’t who you really are” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as the activity of empathic failure, aggression, and psychic violence.

It’s like a neural form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of relational wounding and implicit memory, and only contributes to the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

In addition to shattering and unendurable experience – which is painful and terrifying enough – there is a profound sense of aloneness that goes with this, the disorganizing reality of the missing Friend, and no accompaniment into the dark night. “I am alone in this.”

This is devastating to the soul.

When the lost orphans of psyche and soma come surging in a moment of activation, they express their longing to return home.

To come out of their frozen, crystallized state, and into the warmth of the inner temple.
Where they can dream a new dream, play again, and become an alive, joyful vessel through which the Divine can live and move and breathe.