Sacred return

When your emotional world is on ablaze and you are looping in the claustrophobia of ruminative thought, pause and return attention into your body, into the senses. It can be hot, sticky, and suffocating inside the loop, where thoughts are triggering feelings which hook you into more thinking which give rise to disturbing impulses, all of which reflect the burning of your historical, core vulnerabilities.

Before we know it we are stuck in habitual consciousness, in the circulation of old, embedded pathways, longing for the encoding of fresh, spontaneous, creative circuitry. But it only takes one moment to return to curious attention, shifting awareness out of the swirling narrative and into the life that is moving through you.

The voices are not wrong or bad or unspiritual or “illusion,” but are operating within a confused, charged mass and spiraling of unworkable energy. You can return and listen at a later time, once the fire is cooled, for they too carry information and intelligence. You can dialogue with them, ask why they have come and what they need, and come to terms with them in your own way.

In this, you offer rest for the guests of the psyche and surround them with warmth. While it may appear that they have come to attack and take you down, they only wish to be allowed back home, to take their rightful place in the ecology of the heart. They represent aspects and figures and fellow travelers who have become lost in a lonely forest and despite their wrathful appearance seek the light of your awareness.

They have something to contribute but can only do so in a clouded and chaotic state until met and washed with love.

The offering of this sanctuary is what allows relationship to take place, the arising of a field of safety, empathy, and attunement where the entirety of what you are is permitted to make the great sacred return.

Photo by Kristendawn/ Vancouver

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster

Holding and being held

The image of “holding” is such a majestic one as it evokes not only early personal experience, but also archetypal material which expresses this same psychic patterning throughout culture and time, and the ways we human beings have found solace in “being held” by transpersonal figures, energies, and by the natural world itself.

Some are familiar with the concept of a “holding environment” as elucidated by the late British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, a warm and poetic description of a relational configuration rooted in empathic attunement and right-brain to right-brain resonance.

As the matrix of secure attachment, it provides the rich, creative terrain from which we can explore reality, resting and playing in unstructured states of being. From this ground of safety and creativity, we journey out of the familiar, encounter and experiment with the not-yet-known, and stay embodied to the full range of human feeling and experience.

Any effective holding environment is made up of adequate qualities of both contact and space, the weaving of these allowing for an experiential navigation of that evocative middle territory where there is intimacy without fusion, closeness without engulfing, tenderness without impinging.

Without good contact and without the space in which our natural being can unfold, we lose touch with the mystery. When we are held in this way, we can rest, explore, take risks, and open into the sacred. A supportive holding environment provides the soil in which a little baby’s brain, heart, and nervous system can differentiate, grow, and come alive. What a miracle. Real magic.

And from this ground and scaffolding of unstructured rest and exploration, we realize that no matter what is going on in our inner our outer world, how lost or confused we are, or how much emotional material we’re being asked to tend to, that we are always being held, by something vast, which we can return to as our true refuge, especially in difficult times.

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster

Allowing an old dream to dissolve

While at times we may feel inspired about the vision for a new way of being, some surrender is required to shepherd the forthcoming birth, a willingness to allow our lives as we have known them to reorganize and an old dream to dissolve.

At a deep level, we know that we cannot simply place the new on top of the old, but must allow what has come before to be incinerated in the fires of love and transmuted, where the remaining raw material can be crafted into new life.

These contradictions can burn at times as they wash away the known, leaving us raw and uncertain. At times, we find hope, trust, courage, and confidence, while at other times these fellow travelers are nowhere to be found, somehow out of reach. They have been replaced by other companions, those carrying the burning, the longing, and our essential broken-openness.

While it is tempting to conclude that the latter are evidence of some failure or that we've done the path wrong or haven't surrendered enough, as always things are not as they appear. The return message has come, as it always will, but rarely in the form we expect.

Such is the way of the heart.

Photo by Bess Hamiti

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster