How well did I love while I was here?

On this new Thanksgiving Day, it is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come – that another opportunity will be given to witness a sunrise, spend a moment with someone we love, or be astonished at the crystals in the newly fallen snow.

But another part knows it is so fragile here, precarious, shaky, outrageously precious and at times so shattering, that this opening into life will not be here for much longer. One moment, we will turn toward it, and it will be gone.

May we give thanks on this new day by no longer postponing our time here, not waiting any longer, not forgetting.

By remembering what's most important and what truly matters. By doing whatever we can to help others, using our words wisely and with kindness, listening to others so that they feel felt and understood, holding them in moments when they need a lamp in the darkness.

At the end of this life, it is unlikely we'll be caught up in whether we accomplished all the tasks on our to-do lists, manifested all the things we fantasized we wanted, played it safe, or completed some endless self-improvement project.

At that moment, there may be only one question that remains: how well did I love?

Did I pause each day to slow down and truly behold the beauty of this place? Was I willing to take a risk, feel more, allow this life and others to truly matter to me, and experience what is already here, what has already been given? To fully participate in that overflow.

The sound of the birds, the sunset, an emotion all the way through, to truly experience a color, a tree, the sky, the miracle of this human body and heart, and the wild, undomesticated chaos and glory of the whole thing.

Ending the trance of postponement and dissolving the dream that there is some breath, some beauty, some love coming tomorrow. Tomorrow is a dream that may not arrive. Love is now.

The bounty and harvest of thanksgiving is upon us, waiting to be seen, felt, tasted, and heard, in the trees and the snow, in the imagination and in the heart.

In the very center of our holy mirror neurons as they light up when we attune to one another and bear witness to their subjectivity, to how they’re making sense of this crazy world, what keeps them awake at night, what is truly meaningful to them, what scares them and brings their heart alive.

To peer behind the veil for just a moment and into the background majesty of the sacred world, as it unfolds itself, as the Beloved pours herself out of herself, weaving the world of form, of time and space.

Needing us, these bodies and these hearts, as an increasingly translucent vessel in which she can finally come alive here, in the incarnational journey from pure Spirit into wild manifestation.

I hope I make it all the way through this Thanksgiving Day, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.

Anxiety and the Alchemy of Integration

 

When we speak of anxiety, we often mean a restless unease — the shakiness, a racing mind, a panicky belly, the sense that something unnamed is just slightly off. At this level, anxiety can be a messenger from the body, a signal that something in our life longs for safety, movement, or rest. This anxiety has more of an existential essence than a medical one.

There are also more clinical forms — those with biological or hereditary roots, where the chemistry of the brain and body conspire to generate waves of fear and agitation seemingly independent of outer circumstance. These can be supported through the healing arts of relational therapy, the conscious use of medication, and somatic regulation.

Beneath these surface layers, there exists another form — one that feels less like a symptom and more like an initiation. It’s what Heinz Kohut called disintegration anxiety, though in the language of alchemy, we might call it a nigredo — the dark ferment where the old structures of identity begin to dissolve.

When this level of anxiety arises, it can feel as though the self might come apart, that we might dissolve into chaos and never return. It is not merely the fear of death or failure, but the trembling of the ground of being itself — what Winnicott so hauntingly called the fear of “falling forever.”

I’ve sat with many courageous people in this place, and it asks everything of both of us. To remain in that vessel together — without rushing to fix, to interpret, or to soothe — is its own act of devotion. We must, for a time, set aside the understandable human longing for relief, and open instead to the underlying intelligence that shimmers beneath the chaos.

This kind of anxiety is not a mistake in the system. It signals that something buried, something vital, is beginning to stir. Often, this energy lives in the subcortical depths of the body — the belly, the throat, the solar plexus — where it was stored long ago, unheld and unspoken.

In those moments, I often imagine that we are descending together into the mythic underworld — where Persephone and Hermes tend the threshold, and where even the gods know the trembling of rebirth.

To meet this kind of anxiety requires not analysis but companionship, breath, and slowness. It asks for faith that what feels like disintegration may in time reveal itself as reorganization — that the chaos we fear may be the psyche’s way of reassembling around a deeper center of gravity.

The energy that once held the self together through contraction can become the very energy of aliveness. In this way, anxiety — even the most terrifying kind — is not the enemy of healing, but the guardian of the threshold, the trembling before new life.

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Perhaps all therapy is grief therapy in the end

THE CIRCLING AND SPIRALING OF GRIEF

Perhaps in the end, all therapy is grief therapy.

Not only grief for that which we have lost, but for everything that has remained unlived.

For the love we needed but never received.
For the words we never learned to speak.
For the instincts we had to bury.
For the creativity that was shamed or forgotten.
For the joy we could not trust.

And also the grief that moves through wider, ancestral and collective fields — the unlived life of our culture, the losses our lineages never wept, the ruptures our world has not yet metabolized, the grief of the Earth herself, aching in our bones and breath.

Grief lives in the soma — in the belly, heart, throat, and nervous system. It takes up residence as tears, as numbness, compression, exhaustion, emptiness, as wild undomesticated rage.

As a figure in a dream, a wave of longing, a homesickness that has no map. Its timeline is not found in psychiatric manual or insurance panels, nor is it found in disembodied therapies and spiritual techniques.

The heart is endless and grief may be a companion for the duration of a life. It is not so much a process as a non-linear, unfolding partner. It moves not by way of straight line, but by circle and spiral.

It is an invitation into relationship, one that is alive with the activity of death and rebirth, washing us out from the inside and preparing the field for new life.

Grief is not an obstacle to the path. It is the path.

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