The new path is beginning to appear

When you are triggered and have become overwhelmed – when the emotions and somatic eruption has taken you outside your window of tolerance – it is likely your core narrative is nearby. What do you believe about yourself? About relationships? About why you have come here? About whether it is safe to take a risk or to lead with your vulnerability?

This material, the template through which you have engaged the mystery until now, is close and nearby. It is circling around you, not to harm or work against you, but as a harbinger of integration. It is longing to be re-written, re-imagined, and re-dreamed with new vision.

In a moment of constellation and of flooding, infuse the environment with sacred pause. Using your breath and the open spaciousness of your awareness, make a journey inside the emotions, the sensations, and into the old stories that are now longing to be updated with revelation.

Enter into relationship with the narrative and ask it to reveal itself: why it has come, how it is trying to protect you, and what it needs from you now. Practice intimacy without fusing. Embody the sacred middle. Hold it near and honor it for all it has done for you, but with an empowered, fiery compassion, let it know that it is time for an update. And that it will be love that is downloading the upgrade.

And then, with capacities you did not have as the narrative was formed, you can begin the journey of encoding new circuitry, of laying down a new pathway. With presence, kindness, and the wisdom you have gathered, you can update the narrative and weave a new story, one that is more current, integrated, accurate, and whole.

Together, with the seen and unseen allies gathering by your side, you can make meaning of the fear, the anxiety, the depression, and the way your life has unfolded until now. Something is being asked of you and the new path is beginning to appear. Stay close. 

Ask another to bear witness with you, as this reorganization is an immense undertaking of courage. Find a therapist, a lover, a friend, a teacher, a tree, a bird, a dog, a mountain, the sky, the sun, or the moon. Allow them to hold you as you open, and see now what is most true.

Art by Josh Adamski

The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now 

New book – The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – to be released in April

A humble lover of the mystery

The surging of hope and hopelessness, joy and flatness, anxiety and rest. The shakiness and uncertainty in your belly. The tightness in your throat. The raw breaking inside your heart.

The sense that a miracle is here, just beyond the veil, but how to reach it? How to fully show up and participate here, and be fully alive? What is truly being asked of you?

All the techniques, the teachings, the things to manifest, the new beliefs to take on, the worn-out ideas about who you are and why you’ve come here, about where the true source of meaning and peace will come. The questions that once had answers… only a tenderness remains, with no sign of resolution. Only a burning where the questions once existed.

An old vision seems to be dissolving, but what will it be replaced with? There is no life without the willingness to fully participate in the shattering and the death of an ancient dream. No life without embodiment to the vulnerability as it surges in its eternal forms within you. Perhaps it was never resolution you were after, but pure surging life.

As we open our hearts on this new day, in awe at the gift that has been given… as we gaze up into the lunar holding, into the mountains, the muddy earth, into the eyes of those around us… today was never going to be the day when we figured it out, got all our questions answered, or resolved the unprecedented activity of love. It is just too creative for all that. What you are is too wild for that.

Today may not be the day for answers, but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question. To fall to the ground as a humble lover of the mystery.

The heartbreak found here is not a mistake or error that needs to be corrected. It does not need to be shifted into something else, for it is pure and complete on its own. It is not a project that needs to be solved, but a portal to step through at the threshold of the sacred world.

This longing, this burning, this uncertainty… these are your only scriptures now.

The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now 

New book – The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – to be released in April

An open meadow of awareness

As young children, we did not have the capacity to discern between feeling bad and being bad. In the little one, I feel bad equals I am bad. Observe how this leftover association continues to color the landscape. When you feel sad, depressed, anxious, or ill, what meaning is automatically associated with these experiences? What judgments, shaming, or interpretations do you unconsciously add onto the raw embodied experience?

Pull back slightly and enter into relationship with the feelings. Provide a home in which they can unfold, dance, and communicate essence. Separate a bit, but not so much that you disembody. Stay close, but don’t lose perspective. There is so much space around your experience. Touch the space, the emotion, and the sensations all at once. Practice intimacy while not fusing. This is a holy art that you can learn.

You are the warm, open meadow of awareness in which all feelings come into being, dance for a bit, only to dissolve back into the vast ground from which they came. Find the sacred middle and rest there, between the ancient pathways of denial and fusion. It is in this crucible in which the great process of metabolization by love will unfold.

Listen carefully for the invitation – early in the morning, late at night, as you wander through the day, as you take the risk of heartbreak and mingle your awareness with a sunrise or with the moon in her fullness. Come closer. Open into. Breathe with.

The new way is alive and rippling. The pathways are revealing flexibility and their longing to be reorganized. Soothe the fire with presence and healing compassion. Renew your vow to no longer abandon what is moving within, to no longer pathologize your sensitivity, vulnerability, and the full-spectrum nature of what you are.

There is guidance emerging, taking whatever form it must to reach you: an old feeling, a charged emotion, an eruption of somatic aliveness. What you are is a field of wisdom, though it is a wisdom not perceivable by ordinary means. Open into what is appearing now and behold the creativity that you are. Hold it within your heart and provide illumined passage for the revelation.

Photo by Evgeniia Litovchenko

The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now 

New book – The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – to be released in April