A hidden offering

In a moment of activation, the familiar companions appear: our core vulnerabilities, limiting beliefs, achy emotions, and shakiness in the nervous system.

There is intelligence in the tender but we must slow down, breathe, and provide safe passage. To infuse the rawness with curiosity, space, and compassion, so the wisdom can unfold.

Sadness has something to show us that joy could never provide. Inside aloneness is a hidden offering that can never be found in connection.

Hopelessness, when entered, reveals meaning that hope is unable to disclose. Rage, when respected and tended with care, unlocks a secret door.

While the trance that there is something wrong with us is sticky and seductive, it can be broken through befriending, holding, and listening. We are conditioned to find a problem where there is an invitation.

Place your hands on your heart. Attune to the aliveness of the inner body. Follow the breath back into essence.

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

My next two events: 

The Great Befriending: A Five-Day Journey of Self-Love, Deep Rest, and Coming Alive (with Jeff Foster), September 21-26 in Loveland, Colorado 

Stay tuned for details regarding a five-day winter retreat January 23-28 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado

The safety and regulation of Now

In a moment of activation, the emissaries arrive. A great meeting is being assembled.

When you find yourself overwhelmed by habitual, ruminative thinking; when the repetitive thoughts and feelings are cascading and looping; when you are caught in the trance of disembodiment and self-abandonment... just stop.

With the power and presence of the warrior’s sword of compassion, cut the storyline. No, not this time. This time I choose differently.

Slow way down and feel your feet on the ground. Breathe deeply into your lower belly and activate your senses. See what is around you with clear vision, enter into pure listening. Shift your sacred life energy out of the spinning and into the aliveness of the body. While it may appear otherwise, the safety we seek is in self-attunement, self-compassion, and holding the visitor as he or she appears.

It is an act of kindness to not fuel the dysregulating narrative, and takes practice, courage, and curiosity. Something is erupting under the surface, longing to be integrated and allowed back home, but it is raw, naked, and unknown. Rather than turn into the restless, claustrophobic, and sticky somatic aliveness, we default back into conditioned history—to the shame, blame, attack, and aggression, anything to keep us out of the tender surging tingling core of vulnerability at the center.

The invitation in these moments is into the shaky interior. Use your breath as your guide into the inner landscape. You are being asked to care for yourself in a new way. See what feeling state the very vivid and colorful storyline is attempting to take you out of, and slowly, with kindness drop underneath the conditioned history and into the hot, claustrophobic, pregnant life that is surging to be held. See, finally, if it is an enemy coming to take you down or whether it is you, in disguise, seeking reunion in the spaciousness and majesty of what you are.

A times, we must set aside our agenda to understand, to change, even to heal … for a moment. We can return to transformation at a later time once we have come back online and into the safety and regulation of Now. Replace understanding with a fiery curiosity. More interested in spontaneous primordial experience than in our interpretations of it, turning our bodies into a crucible of open awareness, filled with the qualities of empathy, attunement, and a previously unknown compassion.

In doing this we call off the war. We dare to practice peace. To step off the battlefield where the mystery awaits, and into the wisdom-field of the always blooming, awakened heart.

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

My next two events: 

The Great Befriending: A Five-Day Journey of Self-Love, Deep Rest, and Coming Alive (with Jeff Foster), September 21-26 in Loveland, Colorado 

Stay tuned for details regarding a five-day winter retreat January 23-28 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado

When caught in a loop of thinking and feeling

The next time you find yourself looping in self-attack, disconnected with your body, and spinning in shame, blame, and complaint, remember… and slow down. Feel your feet on the earth. Breathe deeply from the lower belly. Return to your senses in the here and now.

Come out of the seductive, sticky, compelling storyline for just a moment and send your awareness into the center of the vulnerable, tender, raw life that is surging to be held. Go slowly, pushing yourself a bit, testing your window of tolerance but taking care not to fall into overwhelm.

Cut through the momentum of self-abandonment and descend into the core. Make the journey out self-aggression and into the slower circuitry of empathy, curiosity, kindness, and space.

Stay close. Be a friend to yourself. Provide sanctuary and safe passage for the visitor to be illuminated, held, and transformed, for in a moment of activation you need yourself more than ever. While the temptation is to turn from the shaky center, it is an act of love to step off the battlefield and tend to the fire. Your torso is aglow with sacred data required for the way ahead and is a portal of unimaginable creativity.

As you give yourself this gift of radical self-compassion, presence, and slow spacious awareness, you can ask: what is it that I need right now? What is most needing to be met and held? What have I abandoned in myself? What is being asked to be touched, right here and right now, with a storm of lovingkindness? Can I breathe into and with what has come, not as an enemy to transcend or overcome, but an ally of the depths?

As you slow down and turn in, seeds of empathy are planted in your nervous system, watered with new forms of self-care as compassion pathways are grooved and brought alive. Suddenly there is so much space. Breath where none was to be found. You are already held by something vast.

Through this aspiration to no longer abandon yourself, you come back into your power, grounded and embodied in the reality and perception of the warrior, a warrior of love, come here not only to heal yourself but as a vessel of presence and transmutation for all beings.

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

My next two events: 

The Great Befriending: A Five-Day Journey of Self-Love, Deep Rest, and Coming Alive (with Jeff Foster), September 21-26 in Loveland, Colorado 

Stay tuned for details regarding a five-day winter retreat January 23-28 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado