Monday, March 31, 2025

Turning toward them - and holding them in love


At times, pieces of soul will become frozen or crystallized, and fall out of reach, only to call out to us, through strange feelings or moods, images and dreams, and through a variety of what we often refer to as “symptoms.”

These lost orphans of psyche and soma are personifications of our “unlived lives,” aspects of experience which we’ve lost contact with: unfelt grief, unmetabolized sadness, abandoned joy, disavowed anger and shame, dissociated states of connection and Unity.

Recontacting the unlived life, and the figures who carry these experiences on our behalf, is the activity of mercy, compassion, and intelligence, a vital process on the path of embodied healing, individuation, and spiritual renewal.

Whether due to unresolved trauma, stress, environmental or social factors, disorganization in attachment, or effects of a narcissistic or borderline early holding environment, these ones become sequestered into underground storage, into the shadow and somatic unconscious.

From here, they live and move and breathe, spin and twirl, in their longing to return home.

Especially in uncertain, transitional, and other in-between periods of time, it’s easy to lose contact with the figures who inhabit these more subtle regions of the spectrum of consciousness.

As a result of this splitting, dissociation, and rupture in relationship, we can feel tired, weighed down, depleted, and exhausted, not only physically, but at a deeper soul level.

Turning away from the unlived within us – personally, culturally, collectively, ancestrally – is something we all do as a way to protect ourselves, from fragmentation, a survival-level anxiety, and an annihilatory sense of panic. This is not neurotic, “unevolved,” or “unspiritual,” but intelligent and adaptive, early forms of self-compassion.

It was the best way we knew to take care of ourselves and keep us out of an immediate, overwhelming, unbearable, naked confrontation with our historic core vulnerabilities and sensitivities, all of which have a way of surging in times of uncertainty and transition.

Recontacting the achy, burning, longing, shaky, tender pieces of soul – turning toward them and holding them in love – is one of the essence-alchemies of our time.

Sunday, March 23, 2025

A vessel for love to find its way here...


It can be an act of love (and revolution) to take a few moments each day to pause and interrupt the density of the collective right now, the trance-loops of disembodiment, and the pull up into sympathetic arousal, restlessness, and stress.

It can seem as if there were a slow descent of cortisol or adrenaline dripping down into organ, muscle, and cell tissue; into throat, heart, belly, and into the air and soil around us. Infusing the space around and inside.

It’s seductive out there, and so easy to find ourselves on autopilot, tangled in spirals of repetitive, unfresh thinking, disconnected from our senses, our bodies, and especially from what we’re feeling.

But the unlived life, the untended grief, the unmetabolized shame, fear, apathy, wild joy, and rage – and the figures carrying these experiences – are circling and longing for a home in which they can be held, and from which they can share their voice, body, and mercy-essence.

There is a spin in the collective matrix that requires our presence, our care, fidelity, and devotion to move behind the veil, even if for just a moment. To call forth the wisdom-guides to help us to see, and to feel.

What is emerging now, in my body, belly, heart, and throat; in the imaginal field; what is it that is alive in the somatic unconscious that is needed at this time?

What am I experiencing right now, in my body and in my vision, without any interpretation or commentary; without referring back to what I already know and what this world is telling me? Just for a moment. It will all be there waiting for us when we return.

Just a few moments of raw immediate, embodied knowing, right-brain attunement, image, feeling, sensation, senses open.

Even if a few times a day we can return into the crystalline, transparent vessel, perhaps love can find its way through into this world, with us as its vehicle. To find some sort of open portal though which it can incarnate into a world that so needs it right now.



Sunday, March 16, 2025

When the Center is Lost (special Blood Moon eclipse edition)


When the Center is Lost: Navigating the Healing Cycle in Times of Heartbreak, Uncertainty, and Grief (special Blood Moon eclipse edition)

The path of the heart is not only one of transcendence – ascending and rising above – but also one of descent: into underworld, earth, and shadow, and into relationship with the figures who we find there. Companions on the night sea journey.

These pieces of psyche and soma – personal, collective, cosmic - have something to share with us, that longs to be incarnated, indwelled, and embodied in this time, an element of the mystery that has been forgotten in a world that has (understandably) grown weary.

The lunar way isn’t as clear as its heroic or solar counterpart. It is unclothed: of fixed concept, a precise map, and knowing how it’s all going to turn out. It has a way not of confirming but of dismantling the (spiritual) persona. That disassembling has a way of burning, aching, and also of tenderizing us, at times to our very core.

Inside the temple are the holy images of our broken dreams, disappointments, hopes, and fears – the entirety of our unlived life; the grief of the ancestors, the lamentation of the earth, and the sensitivities of the soma. Along with lost joy, wonder, beauty, and awe.

Here, in the center, the wound is weeping; it is opened and no longer covered over. This is what allows the tincture to enter. In this we may discover that perhaps the heart’s deepest longing isn’t so much to be mended, but permitted to disclose its essence, which reveals a doorway into compassion, aliveness, tenderness, grace.

I'll be presenting on this material in a free live Zoom call next month. Details to come. You can always join my mailing list to receive new writings, videos and information about live and online gatherings. 


Image by Stefan Schweihofer