Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Illuminating the shadow


Usually when we talk about parts of ourselves that we have disowned and placed into the shadow, we're referring to less desirable material such as fear, rage, shame, and despair. The shadow is seen as the dark repository for all of the so-called negative aspects of ourselves, i.e. our unhealthy dependency, unacknowledged narcissism, unmet hopelessness, and the looming ghosts of our unlived lives.

But it is not only negative aspects that we defend against, dissociate from, and place into the unconscious. Many of us have lost the capacity to access, embody, and express more “positive” experiences such as contentment, pleasure, creativity, sexuality, intimacy, and connectedness.

While it is a bit harder to wrap our minds around, some of us have disconnected from the simple experience of joy, a spontaneous sense of elation at being alive. For example, if the very natural, raw, human experience of joy constellated complexes in our parents – say it brought up anxiety in Mom, anger in Dad, or caused others to shame or pull away from us – we learned quite quickly that joy is not okay, and even potentially dangerous. This reality can be very confusing as we come to associate the experience of joy with being unsafe.

As a little one, with a developing brain and nervous system, we learn to disown or dissociate from any state of mind which has the potential to disrupt the tie to critical attachment figures. This capacity of repression is intelligent and creative, and in many cases saved our lives. But many of us long to know joy again, to feel alive, to fully participate here.

To re-train ourselves to feel joy is not an easy path as by definition we will have to step back through that anxiety, panic, and sense of annihilation that the repression of joy has served to protect us from. But it is a path well worth exploring. To allow ourselves, as part of our inquiry, to see the ways we have placed not only “negative” material into the unconscious shadow, but how we have split off from the positive as well.






The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO

Sunday, February 25, 2018

The invitation of the beloved


In close relationships there may always be ruptures which arise in the field of lovers and friends. When we take the risk of allowing another to matter, when we open our bodies and our hearts to them, a call is sent out to the lost ones of the inner family, an invitation to return home.

Relationship has an uncanny ability to illuminate those parts of ourselves that we have lost touch with – the orphans of the emotional world, and the emissaries of our unlived lives. As wisdom-guides, they remind us of the two great relational fears, of being abandoned or overwhelmed by the other. We’re just not sure if we want to take that kind of risk.

As we deepen along the way, we may discover that the “other” is not only those fellow travelers that we meet, but that there is also an “inner other” who also longs to be known, to be held, and to be a part of the love story of our lives. This “other” yearns more than anything for intimacy, to no longer be shut out, and to enter into union with us exactly as we are.

The lost sadness, the disallowed joy, the unmet rage, the repressed grief. The barely remembered peace, the dissociated despair, the forgotten beauty. These ones are alive and will continue their journey to find you. They will never give up and will continue to take form as your lovers, family members, and friends, including those who irritate you the most.

The invitation of the beloved, in each of its forms, is to step fully into the crucible of relationship where we no longer limit the mystery of love’s expression, resisting the temptation to have the fires of love conform to our requirements. And to open to the reality that perhaps the purpose of relationship is not to provide consistent feelings of safety, certainty, connection, and validation.

The beloved has not come to confirm what we think love is – or the ways we have come to believe we must be seen - but rather to introduce us to the creative terrain of the unknown, and to the poetic depth of our own hearts. To reintroduce us to the inner family and the soul parts that have become lost along the way.

As we reunite with these ones and allow them safe passage, we remove the burden from the external other to take care of this sacred task for us, which was never theirs to carry. They are able to return it to us, as the ultimate act of love, where it will be safe enough for them now to come closer.









The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO

Friday, February 23, 2018

An inquiry into "letting go"


In the contemporary self-help world, we are often admonished to “let go” of difficult states of mind that we do not like, those that emerge out of the darkness and dwell in the underworld, and are not deemed valid by a more solar/ transcendent spirituality. Anger is bad, confusion is a sign we’ve failed, fear is fantasized as some “opposite” of love, and so forth. As a result, these only get pushed further into the shadow where they will eventually come out, often in ways that further suffering for ourselves and others.

As with all teachings and medicines, there is wisdom in letting go, however as always the invitation is into subtlety and into depth, not into bite-sized fast-food spiritual clichés. In my clinical work I have seen how the project of "letting go" for many can be yet another manifestation of unconscious self-aggression and the abandonment of parts of ourselves that were not acceptable in our families of origin. In this sense, the demand that we let them go is often an enactment of the way our emotional world was related to at an earlier time: “Just get over it. Snap out of it. Stop crying. We’ve given you everything, stop being so sad. Don’t you dare get angry with me.” Another way that we end up attacking our own vulnerability, in ways that are remarkably similar to the way it was met when we were younger.

From this perspective, anger does not need to be "let go of," nor do jealousy, shame, sadness, despair, fear, or a sense of unworthiness. The invitation is to step off the battlefield and into curiosity, relationship, kindness, and meaning. We are never going to find the intimacy, connection, and freedom we are longing for as long as we are subtly at war with parts of ourselves, deeming them invalid and splitting off from the thoughts, feelings, and impulses that the world has said are not okay, including the spiritual world which is oriented in its own conditioning. But only by providing a home and a sanctuary where the entire inner ecology of what we are can be held, contained, and its rightful place can be found.

These parts of ourselves need not be “let go” but will “let go” of us when their function is no longer needed, when we no longer require the protection they have provided, and when we have fully turned toward them, listened to their meaning and called off the war. When we have allowed them to share their essence. When we have allowed their wisdom nature to come through the symptom and for its messages to be decoded. When the figures of the inner landscape have been met, tended to with soul, and touched with presence.

In the Dzogchen tradition, it is said that the nature of all experience is to "self-liberate" in open, compassionate awareness. It does not require our efforts to transform it, including “letting it go” in order to experience the freedom and aliveness that is the birthright of all beings. We do not need to get rid, of shift, or even heal these difficult states, or convert them into their opposites. But to hold these parts and provide them with space, as we begin to discover that they are not enemies to do battle with, but as allies come to remind us of how vast we truly are.






The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

It's okay to be shaky


It’s okay to be shaky, to not know anymore, and to allow your heart to break. To fall to the ground and bear witness to the reality that life was never going to turn out the way you thought it would. It’s just too wild, too creative, and too devastatingly magic for all that.

Rather than spin from the death as if it were a defeat, with your breath as your guide, travel inside. There are jewels hidden there, filled with meaning, with pure feeling, and with relentless outrageousness of love as it erupts into the world of time and space.

You will never find your life’s purpose by way of a frantic, urgent, exhausting search. Your life’s purpose is to live. Fully. To participate, to take a risk, to slow down and see the signs, to commune with the colors, the songs of the birds, and to listen to the intelligence of the stars.

The forms that love take are by nature arising and dissolving in each moment, for this is the way of form. But love itself is that which never comes and goes. You never know what form love will choose to take in the future, for there is no love in the future. Love is only now. You will never be able to resolve or pin down the movement of love as it is infinitely creative and at all times unfolding into greater wholeness.

If you become too fused with a specific form you believe you need love to take, your heart will inevitably break when love obliterates that form for something new, which it always will. This shattering is the great gift of form. This dissolving and reorganization is a special kind of grace that the mind cannot know. But the heart knows. The body knows.

Before you seek to “heal” your heartbreak via spiritual process, turn to your heart and ask if it truly wishes to be mended. For this breaking is sacred, sent here so that new forms may emerge.

Be grateful for the forms of love while they appear, but allow them their own journey of death and rebirth. Seek refuge not in love’s forms, but in the field of love itself, that which never comes and goes. For this is what you are.

Today may not be the day where answers will come, but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question.




Sunrise nearby at Brainard Lake, photo by Michael Chilcoat





The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO


Monday, February 19, 2018

How well did I love?


It is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come, that another opportunity will be given to bear witness to a sunset, take a walk in the forest, listen in awe to the birds, or share a moment of connection with the one in front of us. But another part knows how fragile it truly is here, how tenuous, and the reality that this opening into life will not be here for much longer.

Before we realize it, we can so easily fall into the trance of postponement. The spell of tomorrow looms large in the personal and collective psyche.

At the end of this life – which is sure to come much sooner than we think – it is unlikely we'll be caught up in whether we accomplished all the tasks on our to-do lists, played it safe, healed all the wounds from our past, wrapped up our self-improvement project, or completed some mythical spiritual journey.

Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?

There are soul-pieces and lost parts orbiting in and around us, the ghosts of our unlived lives; those aspects of ourselves that have not been allowed safe passage. To attend to that which remains unlived – to listen to its poetry and provide sanctuary for its emergence – is a radical act of compassion.

One day we will no longer be able to look at, touch, or share a simple moment with those we love. When we turn to them, they will be gone. One moment will be our last to encounter the immensity of one more breath, experience awe at a color or a fragrance or the blooming of a violet, or to enter into union with the vastness of the sea.

It will be our last chance to see a universe in a drop of rain, to have a moment of communion with a friend, or to weep as the light yields to the night sky.

One last moment to have a thought, feel an emotion, fall in love, or listen to a piece of music. To know heartbreak, joy, sorrow, and peace – to behold the outrageous mystery of what it truly means to be a sensitive, alive, connected human being.

What if today is that last day? Or tomorrow? Or later this week?

Knowing that death will come, how will we respond to the sacred and brief appearance of life?

Perhaps our “life's purpose” has nothing to do with what job we will find, what new thing we will manifest or attract for ourselves, or what mythical awakening journey we will complete. Perhaps the purpose of our life is to fully live, finally, to touch each here and now moment with our presence and with the gift of our one, wild heart.

And to do whatever we can to help others, to hold them when they are hurting, to listen carefully to their stories and the ways they are attempting to make sense of a world that has gone a bit mad. To speak kind words and not forget the erupting miracle of the other as it appears in front of us. Perhaps this is the most radical gift that we can all give.





The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO



Saturday, February 17, 2018

No greater temple


At times we are asked to enter into the dusty regions of the psyche, where the ground underneath us is taken away. What was once so clear has lost its meaning. Even our deepest realizations have fallen out of reach. We are worn down by the path and left raw and in a state of primordial exhaustion.

We have entered into a liminal place where it is a bit chaotic. The emotions are alive, at times disturbing, and unresolvable. It is a realm of contradictory thoughts and feelings, the abode of Hermes, initiations, transitions, and thresholds. It is uncertain here but also filled with creativity and intelligence.

There are seeds here, emerging out of the stars and into our hearts, calling us into a future that has not yet arrived. As responses to our longing, they are seeds of new vision, but require tending to the darkness in order to find the right soil from which to grow.

The invitation arises from love, but it is not a love that is peaceful and sweet. It is one that is wrathful and fierce, and full-spectrum in its glory: Place your heart on the altar in front of you and enter into communion.

The not-knowing. This broken heart. This ripening body. There is no greater temple.



“Collecting Light” – photo by Guillaume Roche





The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO


Thursday, February 15, 2018

An extraordinary meeting


While it may appear to be another ordinary day, an extraordinary meeting is being assembled. Inside your body the honored guests begin to arrive: the achy one, the confused one, the vulnerable one, and the one who is uncertain about what is coming next. The unworthy one, the scared one, the one who is falling apart.

At times, it can seem that certain members of the inner family are obstacles on the journey, come to cloud perception and interfere with our longing for connection. But in a moment of clear seeing, it is revealed that the path is everywhere.

Something is being reorganized, but it’s not possible to know who you will be on the other side. It’s just too creative. Too wild. Too unprecedented. The old reference points, the familiar identities, the once nourishing relationships… at time these are swept away so that new vision may arrive.

Love is always appearing in new and ever-creative configurations. It is relentless in its activity and will never give up in its journey to find us. While we may very naturally have a bias for the light, love does not appear to share this bias and will emerge at times as the darkness to remind us of something important we may have forgotten along the way.

Hidden in the sky, disguised in a sunrise, or buried in the muddy earth, love is a shapeshifter and will do what it must to infuse its qualities into form, revealing the inseparability of matter and spirit.

As your lovers, your children, your friends, and your feelings – as the colors, fragrances, and essences of the phenomenal world – even as the water and the deer and the trees and the wind, love will continue its journey, until the luminous purity of all form is unveiled. 




Sunrise nearby in Moraine Park, photo by Alex Burke 




The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

The alchemy of your own life


The sadness, the shame, the rage, the confusion, and the sense of unworthiness. The shit, the piss, the despair, the conflict, the bewilderment, and the darkness. The limiting self-beliefs, the reactive emotions, the painful challenges in our work and relationships. This is the prima materia that we have to work with as alchemists of our own lives.

It can all appear as garbage and waste, clear signs that we’ve done it wrong, that we’ve failed, that there is something fundamentally wrong with us. But things are not always as they appear.

The invitation is to allow all of this material into the vessel, into the container and begin to heat it up with curiosity, awareness, compassion, and warmth. Not to get rid of it – or even to understand, shift, transform, or heal it – at least at first. But to mine the gold buried in the core of the chaos.

There is intelligence and wisdom in the symptom, but it is often hidden and out of ordinary sight. There is meaning in the mess as psyche attempts to reach us, revelations about how we are living our lives and what is ultimately most important. We are being called in some way, pulled into a future that is not yet known, into something new, something creative, something alive.

To provide sanctuary and safe passage for the wisdom to unfold is difficult and demanding, and in many ways goes against the status quo, not only the status quo of the conventional world, but against a more general self-help world that is oriented in the unending project of self-improvement and urgently replacing the darkness with light.

There is a light buried in the core of the mess, the chaos, and the darkness of the unknown. But its revelation and unfolding requires a cleansing of perception and the cultivation of a new sort of kindness toward ourselves and our experience. It is the work of a lifetime and endless in its meaning and depth. The path of the heart is infinite.






The next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO

Sunday, February 11, 2018

Your life is not a project to be solved


From the perspective of exhaustion and the longing for rest, it is compassionate to seek relief from the uncertainty, and to replace the groundlessness with something more stable. Honor the call to safe passage and something to hold onto. It is an act of kindness to practice self-care, to weave a new story, and to soothe an overstimulated nervous system.

From the perspective of open awareness, groundlessness and aliveness are one. There is nothing to hold onto, nothing to shift, and nothing to transform. There is no new person to become, no healing which must occur before you can fully show up and participate here. Your life is not a project to be solved, but a mystery coming into being.

While the mind may spin in the attempt to resolve the conundrum, it is pure as it is, of the nature of wisdom, and has been placed inside a temple within you. The mystery is not meant to be resolved, only entered more deeply into. Inside the temple is a primordial sort of rest, which is discovered not through the answering of questions, but by way of intimacy with the contradictions.

As Rilke reminds us, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Though the activity of love is infinitely tender and holding, in its essence it is everything. It is devastating as it is the end of one world, glorious as it is the beginning of another.



Art credit: “Feeling free” by Andycap


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


My next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO

Friday, February 9, 2018

Some will tell you that fear is the opposite of love


Some will tell you that fear is the opposite of love. And in this teaching the war begins.

But love has no opposite. It is whole and without division. Love is the field in which all form comes and goes, including the temporary, wavelike appearance of fear. It is the vast, tender space in which all thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise, play for a short while, and then dissolve.

Just like passing clouds could never taint the purity of the sky, the temporary dance of fear could never stain the majesty of what you are.

Unlike the density of the conceptual, love has no bias for the appearance of courage over fear, multiplicity over oneness, or clarity over confusion. All experience is welcome as valid and as a portal into presence. Everything is path, including the raw, immediate, somatic experience of fear, if it is not abandoned, rejected, and made into an enemy via spiritual theory.

In this embrace, a great mystery can be revealed: there is no suffering inherent in the direct experience of fear, but only in the movement away from it, in its invalidation, and in the conclusion that it is an error which must urgently be remedied.

Fear is a temporary visitor in the nervous system, longing to be known, integrated, and metabolized in the wholeness that you are. It is not an enemy to enter into imaginary spiritual battles with. Call off the war and set aside the pain of a spirituality of aggression.

By pathologizing fear – and concluding that its presence is evidence that something has gone wrong and that you have failed – you attack your vulnerability and keep alive the pathways of self-abandonment.

Love is not opposed to fear, but wishes to embrace it, hold it near, and provide sanctuary for its essence to unfold. Love would never turn from any of its children, including the temporary, wavelike child of fear.

When fully met and safe passage is provided, fear is able to reveal itself, like all other form, as none other than love in disguise. Fear is not the opposite of love, for love has no opposite.



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


My next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Intimacy without fusion


In a moment of emotional activation, when we get hooked into those all-too-familiar patterns of shame, unworthiness, rage, and fear, attacking ourselves, and falling into trance… two ancient pathways appear.

The first is to move away as quickly as possible, to repress or dissociate from what has come, to place it outside awareness so as to not be overwhelmed. To flee from our bodies, to abandon the life surging within us, and do whatever we can to stay out of the underlying vulnerability.

The second is to become flooded by the material, to drown in it, and to become fused with it and lose perspective. It literally takes our breath from us, our life force, and our capacity to be present. There is no longer any space in which to navigate. We become one with the limiting beliefs and the painful feelings.

These pathways are not neurotic or pathological, some reflection of our own failure or inner wretchedness, but adaptive strategies which arose intelligently to protect a developing little nervous system. They were the best way we knew to care for ourselves and prevent unbearable feeling.

To begin to slow down and see the operation of these strategies is a gift of self-kindness and true care for ourselves and this world. In a moment of activation to flood our experience with curiosity, presence, and warmth, and just see how it is we are habituated to seek relief through the abandonment of ourselves. To cleanse our perception and from this more grounded and present place, then decide if we want to choose something different this time. No shame, no blame, no self-attack, just curiosity. And care. And kindness.

To explore that very shaky, contradictory, hot, sticky, pregnant alchemical middle territory, which can appear quite groundless and disorienting until we get used to it. To practice intimacy with our thoughts, emotions, and sensations, while not becoming enmeshed in them. Intimacy without fusion. Close, but not so close we fall in.

While it may seem like moving a mountain, we can encode new circuitry, both in these miracle brains as well as into the collective, into the psyche of the culture. It is an offering that each of us can make, as a practice that we can do, not by way of some fantasy of perfection.

This is an art that we can bring into this crazy world, which seems to need this sort of magic now more than ever.



Art by Kabe Russell

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

My next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO





Monday, February 5, 2018

A vessel of attunement


As we slow down and pay attention to the sensation in our bodies, we prepare ourselves as a vessel of attunement. The alchemists spoke about the importance of preparing the inner vehicle so that transmutation could occur naturally, where the unmetabolized aspects of our experience can be converted into the gold of our true nature.

In this way, we can begin to discover the wisdom inherent in even our most difficult emotions, when they are brought into the vessel of presence. Once located inside, we heat them up with the fire of our curiosity, warmth, awareness, and compassion. Then we can finally see what they are, and what we are.

As we begin to integrate the various levels of our experience – and see how they weave together and craft our perception – we might become astonished at just how intelligent the journey truly is.

And how fortunate we are to have a body, to have senses, and to have a heart that is sometimes broken and sometimes whole. How rare that truly is. How unique this particular star truly is.

We may never know what it is like to take birth in another place where it may not be organized quite like this one, so for the short time we are here we could give our lives to this curiosity, to the painful, messy, chaotic, joyful, gloriousness of being an open, sensitive, tender human being.

Able to reflect on our experience, to know what it is like to have a heart and to navigate the mysteries of separation and union. To be able to see and hear and touch and feel the purity of form, and to know the sacredness of matter.

And from this awe and this revelation, to do whatever we can to help others. To listen to them. To hold them. To validate their feelings. To pay careful attention to the way they are making meaning of their experience. To be that attuned vessel where love can find safe passage here.



Image: from the holding field of Carina Nebula


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

My next two events are a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO
and

The Path is Everywhere: A Weekend Intensive, June 15-18 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO





Saturday, February 3, 2018

Inside the symptom


At times, the emissaries of the dark
surge to resume their rightful place
in the inner ecology of the heart.

They contain an eruption of light,
but it is a light not understood
in a world that has forgotten.

Contradictory, chaotic,
and beyond resolution,
yet overflowing with
wisdom nature.

Like a black sun, or a rose
with poisonous thorns.

What appears as obstacle
is revealed as path.
Inside the symptom
the cure is hidden.




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

My next event is a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO. 





Thursday, February 1, 2018

Weekend Intensive with Matt Licata in June


Dear friends, registration is now open for my weekend intensive, The Path is Everywhere, 15-18 June at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO. More information/ registration here.

Many of us find ourselves interested in and longing to participate more intimately in life, open our hearts, heal old wounds of unlovability, and awaken to our true nature; to work through old patterns of shame and self-abandonment. We sense the real possibility of living in a different way, but there are not a lot of viable pathways in our modern world which facilitate this sort of discovery.

What might a spiritual approach to life look like in the modern world? One that is emotionally-sensitive, body-aware, and psychologically mature? One that honors both the darkness and the light, which includes difficult feelings, and isn’t organized around some new belief system. One that holds the tension between the opposites that the sacred is always, already here, and the truth that sometimes we are not able to see this and live from it.

During our time together, we'll step into a very alive and provocative, yet nourishing and safe vessel of healing, wisdom, and love. Over the course of the weekend, we'll explore therapeutic, somatic, and meditative approaches to psychological growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation, and how we might approach these mysteries within the context of our lives exactly as they are.

Psychotherapy and shadow, mindfulness and compassion training, meditation, body awareness, and relational work each offer a unique set of views and tools addressing the nature of a rich life of inner abundance and resources, one that is imbued with purpose and meaning, oriented in our innate longing for wholeness. Within the holding context of an empathic, attuned relational field, we will explore these approaches as well as the mystery that the path of the heart truly is, the value of not-knowing, and how it is love itself that is the ultimate medicine.

The weekend is open to anyone interested in healing, spirituality, mindfulness, psychotherapy, meditation, yoga, opening the heart, and the mystery of awakening to our true nature. We'll meditate together (no experience required), explore what an integral approach to spirituality and healing might look like for those of us active in the world, and have plenty of time for questions, sharing, and discussion.

We'll begin on Friday evening at 7pm and end Monday morning at 12pm, meeting for a total of eight sessions. You will be well nourished at Sunrise Ranch, with fresh, local, organic food, including plenty of choices for those on special diets.

To learn more or register, please visit the retreat's website



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

My next event is a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO.