An invitation into imagination

Inside each of us there seem to be many figures, a rich variety of soul-parts and inner ones, many of them have been alone for so long. Somehow, in the busyness and craziness of the inner and outer worlds, they’ve become forgotten. They have been sent away and rendered homeless, for we have come to believe that they do not have a place here.

But from time to time – early in the morning, late at night, as the sun goes down and yields to the moon and her silvery essence… the voices emerge, appearing as our longing for the beloved, in whatever form he or she might take for us.

From this perspective, love is not a feeling or emotional state or some sense of comfort, sweetness, or calm. But is the activity of revolution, of turning back toward the dignitaries of the heart, the emissaries of the psyche and providing them a new home, a sanctuary… refuge to rest and create and infuse the world with their creativity and unique expression.

Here, love is a metaphor and an invitation into imagination, into the qualities of curiosity, compassion, interest, and care. It is risky and alive and an emanation of the unknown. To slow down, allow the inner other to matter, to tend to him or her, to touch and be touched, to fall apart and come back together again, to allow this longing to become the poetry through which the water of life may flow.

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

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

Touch the emptiness with love

Buried inside even our deepest neuroses are the raw materials of healing. In the tantric and alchemical traditions, those less-than-awakened thoughts, emotions, and raw sensations are the prima materia for us to work with. They are the secret keys to the sacred world and special portal into the intimacy, connection, and aliveness that we long for.

The shit, the piss, the dirt, the failures, the heartbreak, disappointment, the crumbling relationships, the disintegrating ideas about the ways we thought it would all turn out, the raw eruption of our vulnerability, the achiness of a tender body and heart. These are the holy materials we have to work with as alchemists of our own lives.

While we live in a world that has forgotten the mystery of dissolution, it is the nature of all form to arise and to pass, a shapeshifter of new forms which evidence wholeness. When the forms are dancing in this holy reorganization, go into the earth, into slowness, into the body, and into the ground. Lay your hands on your heart, on your belly. Listen. Feel. Sense. The temptation will always be to replace the darkened form with something else – some new person, belief system, identity, or feeling to cut into the hot, rich, textured, pregnant, groundless void.

This ancient longing for relief need not be shamed, nor approached with abandonment and aggression, but held as utterly valid and workable, allowed to arise, unfold, and be metabolized in curious, loving awareness. But the deeper invitation is to rest in the deflation itself, to descend inside the core of the creative energies of the dissolution, and take refuge in the intelligence of the naked, the tender, and the raw unknown.

To slow down, finally, and touch the emptiness with love. To become an archaeologist of the inner landscape, to see with cleansed perception the inseparability of inner and outer, and to know the union of matter and spirit. It is up to each of us to bring these truths into the collective, in a world that has grown a bit weary.

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

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

An unexpected visitor

There are times we wake in the morning and are greeted with an unexpected visitor. Perhaps blue in color, we feel her in our heart, his presence has seeded our body, saturated us with uncertainty, a sadness, a raw tender unsurety about who we are and what we are doing here.

In these moments, it is tempting to remedy the situation. Apply some teachings. Think positively. Manifest a new state. Remember all the reasons to be grateful. Replace the sadness with joy.

In this way, the visitor is abandoned and denied entry, turned from at the door and sent away. But she had never come to harm, he was never an obstacle to be overcome; only a non-ordinary companion, a fellow traveler and penetrating guide into the mystery.

Sadness is not something you need to fix, cure, or transform. It has come not to be healed, but to be held, to be allowed safe passage in order to reveal. It need not be shifted into some “higher” state or operated upon so that it will yield into something else. For it is complete and pure on its own.

There may be an important message in the core of the sadness – a unique blessing which is not able to be received in moments of peace and joy. A reminder of something that has been calling you home. A dispatch from the beloved that can only be decoded in the slow silence of aloneness.

When turned toward and entered into, sadness reveals a portal through which we can connect with ourselves, with others, and with this world, a world that has forgotten something sacred about the wisdom of a broken heart.

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

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

Falling apart, holding it all together

Falling apart, holding it all together. Then falling apart, then coming back together. Cycles of clarity and confusion. Hopelessness and hope. Heartbreak and bliss. As the seasons of the natural world unfold, so do the creative and destructive aspects of love as it makes its way into matter.

Inside the opposites it is relentlessly creative, but there is no solid ground from which to orient. Some sort of death has occurred and we know that things cannot stay the same. Something is calling, reaching back into the past from a future that is marinating in the womb of now. But what will be reborn from the ashes is not yet known.

Rather than scramble out of death and into rebirth prematurely, stay in the fire. It is unknown here, naked and fresh, and pregnant with the qualities of some new third thing, which transcends the opposites and the way things have been. Death does not need to be “healed” or “transformed,” for it contains its own integrity and is utterly pure on its own. Enter inside the multiplicity and discover the unity that is found only here.

If we remain too identified with “falling apart,” we lose contact with innate radiance and become misattuned to the holiness of immediate experience as it is. We disconnect with the magic of embodied presence, the wisdom of the earth, and the unshakeable confidence in our true nature. We forget that the darkness, when provided sanctuary, is brighter than a thousand suns.

But if we remain too identified with “holding it all together,” we disconnect from natural vulnerability and the spontaneous mystery as it appears, turning from the surging reality that things can disintegrate and reorganize at any moment. Raw, tender heartbreak may approach at any time, requesting safe passage inside us. But it is through this broken aliveness that the poetry of our lives will flow.

Right in the middle of “falling apart” and “holding it together” is the secret place. Rest and explore there. It is here where light and the dark are in union, integration and disintegration emerge as one in love, and lunar and solar weave together particles of the sacred world. Where the white emerges from the black and yellows into the reddening of the realm of the heart.

Photo by Donnchadh Murphy

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

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

The place the light enters

Psyche seems to have an innate, autonomous ability to generate symptoms, disturbances, wounds, and hurt places to remind us of a certain majesty and vastness, that there is so much we’re not in control of, that we are at all times being imagined by something larger.

As Auden said in one of his poems, "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand." I think he was onto something.

Rumi and other poets of the imagination spoke quite a lot about the wound being the place where the light enters. If there were no wound, no heartbreak, no raw tender opening, then how would the light break through?

It is not easy to tend to the soul when things are falling apart, as difficult emotions erupt, in the wake of an avalanche of critical, ruminative thoughts. Yet here we are, at some sort of precipice: asked to do this work not just for ourselves, but for the collective – for the ancestors and for the ones yet to come.

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

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

The endless play of hide and seek

The goal of this work is not to transcend the world but to attune to its sacredness in deeper and more subtle ways. Not to leave here for some other reality or dimension, but to finally realize that spirit and matter were never two.

Buried in the chaos, hidden in the mess, disguised in the muddy body, watery emotions, and this majestic brain are the silver and the gold and the sun and the moon. In the heartbreak and shakiness, in the confusion and uncertainty, even in the core of the dream of unworthiness, the soul is awash with the substance of love.

Even in those moments when we forget, and then remember, only to forget once again… in the endless play of hide and seek with the beloved, the true nature of the human form is revealed.

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

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

Intimacy without fusion

In a moment of emotional activation, it can feel as if the walls are closing in around us. The ruminative thinking, the painful feelings, the sense that we must urgently take action into fight, flight, or freeze. There must be some way to cut into the claustrophobia, groundlessness, uncertainty, and panic.

We know that denying or repressing the inner visitor will only enliven it in shadow form. But to act it out, fuse with it, or become flooded by its engulfing energy – to fuel it with more stories of shame, blame, and conditioned modes of attack – is also a form of self-abandonment and portal into further suffering.

The invitation in these moments is to first slow way down. Breathe deeply. Feel your feet on the ground. Lay your hands on your heart and your belly. Sense the new pathway that is alive in the womb of now, circling around and inside you. Feel the circuits of presence, empathy, and attunement longing for your recognition and communion. Follow the longing into the holy middle, into that creative, yet unknown dimension of spacious, loving awareness.

Step back from the chaos just a bit, but not so far that you fall into denial and dissociation. Come close, dare to come close, care so much that you can only come close, but not so close that you fall in, become engulfed, and forget who you are. Intimacy without fusion. In between the urge to fight or to flee the new pathway has appeared. Sense it. Feel it. Imagine it. Open to it.

As we ground ourselves into the earth and send breath into the symptom – temporarily setting aside the demand that it be cured, fixed, healed, or transformed – we provide sanctuary and safe passage for its wisdom to emerge. Shifting our perspective from “what went wrong” to what is longing to be met within us, we plant the seeds for new life.

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

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

To listen once again

The contradictory feelings of hope and hopelessness, meaning and flatness, anxiety and rest. The shakiness and uncertainty in the belly. The tightness in the throat. The raw breaking inside the heart. The joy that at times is there, but never can seem to be sustained.

All the techniques, the teachings, the things to manifest, the new beliefs to take on, the worn-out ideas about the true source of peace, aliveness, and flowing abundance. Perhaps there were once answers to these questions, but now there is no answer to be found. Only a burning where the questions once existed.

This burning is the doorway, the portal, pure evidence of the connection.

A cosmic sort of exhaustion can come at times, where we find ourselves in the bardo between one moment and the next. We can’t quite go back to the way it was, but the rebirth has yet to appear. There is a creativity in the liminal but it can seem out of reach. We are asked to marinate in the womb of now, tend to the groundlessness, and find refuge in the unknown: to be midwife to the darkened illumination. There are signs and symbols and guidance all around and inside us, but their appearance is governed by a timeline written somewhere else.

As we bear witness to a new day, in awe at the gift that has been given… the breath is here. The heart is quivering. The birds have come. Sounds from the other world, another opportunity to hear, to behold the miracle of the senses. The sun has come up again. The moon is hiding nearby waiting her turn. For just one moment, the veil parts and the perfection is there awaiting our participation.

Your life is not an unending self-improvement project and your heart is not a venture to be undertaken, mastered, and completed. Perhaps today was never going to be the day when you figured it all out, got all your questions answered, or resolved the contradictions. It's just too wild for all that. Just too creative. Just too alive.

Today may not be the day for answers, but to let your heart break open to the vastness of the question. To fall to the ground as a humble lover of the mystery. And listen once again.

Photo: heartbeat at the Baltic Sea

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

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

The silvery essence of the heart

As we wander together on the path of the heart, we are sure to encounter the “other” in its mystery, its glory, its devastation – in its relentless, infinite forms. As a lover, a friend, a child, an inner figure, an animal-guide, a mood, a feeling, or even as our most challenging symptoms.

Something is attempting to reach us, to reveal something outrageous and merciful about the majesty of the rare and precious human experience. In this way, love is a shape-shifter, taking endlessly creative forms – as color, image, light, dark, earth, and star – to find us and touch us and remove the veil.

In this encounter – as we allow the “other” to penetrate us, matter to us, mean something to us – we open ourselves to falling apart, to being dissolved and reconfigured by love itself as the artist and poet of a new world. The ground falls out from underneath us, revealing a very earthy foundation – a groundless ground – from which things will never quite look or feel the same.

In this moment, the curtain is pulled, the clothing removed, and the sacred world is laid bare. Not as a causally produced fruit of some profound psychological or spiritual improvement project – or completion of some solar, mythical enlightenment finality drama – but as always, already here, as the kingdom, and Queendom that is already upon us.

Buried in the mud and hidden in the doubt, shining out of the mess as the golden silvery essence of the heart.

Photo by Gregory Colbert

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

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

Entering into the vessel

One of the reasons I do these retreats and work as a therapist is to enter into a space together with another, or a group of others, where we discover a vessel in which the lost aspects of soul and psyche and body and our hearts can find sanctuary to return. Where that which has been disowned or dissociated can find safe passage, can be held, articulated, and entered into intimacy with once again.

It’s not only material from our personal, historical past that comes into thecontainer for illumination and to offer its revelation, but also nonpersonal material from that which is yet to come into being, but exists in seed form – from those future selves and aspects and qualities which long to find a place here, to come into the world of time and space, as emissaries of the mystery.

Within this sort of crucible, the concepts of “past,” “future,” and also of “the present moment” turn into living beings and are no longer abstract generalities. They are infused with imagination and allowed to play and dance in that vast field of being, in that majestic environment that is revealed when two or more are gathered.

When all is said and done, we attune together to a field a permission where we enter into the unknown, into creativity and imagination, into the art and poetry and painting and sculpture of a life, of psyche, of the heart, and allow ourselves to be crafted as a vessel in which the energies of love can find a home here.

It is less about self-improvement or getting rid of our symptoms or replacing thoughts and feelings we don’t like with others or fixing ourselves or curing our melancholy or transcending our vulnerability… it’s more about soul and intimate communion with the entirety of the mess, the pain, the beauty, the glory, the dark, the light, the courage, the hopelessness, the joy, the grief, the full spectrum of what it means to be a human being.

Art credit: in the liminal, carving by an unknown artist by way of Flammarion’s L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire

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

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

The downward movement of depth

Let us not forget the descendent current, flowing into the unlit places, the underworld, and the dark caverns of the psyche. The realm of dream, fantasy, imagination, and creativity. The invitation here is one of embodiment – into the contradictions, the chaos, and the deflation we must confront on any journey of depth.

There is a cultural fantasy that we are supposed to know what to do with our lives, that things are supposed to be clear, that we are supposed to feel solar and heroic and in control of the feelings that wash through us. But love is full-spectrum and will equally employ the energies of not-knowing, disappointment, and reorganization as part of its revelation here. The process of dissolution is non-negotiable. It is by way of this sacred washing of the known that new forms can find their way here.

Inside the vessel of life, encrusted, worn out ideas and opposites are washed away, such as silence over noise, oneness over multiplicity, quiet over inner revolution, crystal clarity over shaky uncertainty, and power over vulnerability. While we may have our conditioned preferences, love does not share these biases and will use the entirety of the emotional and phenomenal world to reach us. Even in the darkness, the numbness, the chaotic, and the mud the wild, untamed activity of the soul erupts.

It is natural and ordinary to disconnect from the downward movement as we overly identify with the ascending, the upward, the light, and the transcendent. In the rush to exit immediate experience – for something that is higher, purer, less messy, and less contradictory – we turn from the waters of life and lose touch with essence.

While it is natural to have a bias for one current over another, let us not do so at the expense of fragmentation. In ways the mind may never fully understand, there is a luminous middle place where the currents intertwine. It is buried in a secret chamber inside your own heart. Enter there. Rest there. Dance there. Play there.

Art by Krista Marleena

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

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

The doorways are infinite

Inside your body
are the sun
and the moon,
the stars,
the oceans,
and the entirety
of the seen
and unseen worlds.

Joy is here,
as is loneliness,
confusion, heartbreak,
and bliss.

The doorways
are infinite,
each a unique passageway
into the mystery.

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

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

The dissolution inherent in healing

There is a certain death that occurs as part of the healing process, in the deepening of self-awareness, something that does not survive illumination. While it is tempting to spin out of the uncertainty and into rebirth, there is wisdom and a purity within the reorganization itself, which we cannot know if we abandon it prematurely.

The dissolution itself is initiation as it offers vision not available in the scramble to put things back together. An old part of ourselves that has accompanied us for so long, a fellow traveler is no longer permitted to continue the journey by our side. The crumbling of an old dream – my life and the way I was so sure it was going to turn out.

This prior soul-companion can be another person or it can be a member of the inner family - an image, a feeling, a lens through which we’d been seeing ourselves and others; a part of our world that has come to the end of its meaning, the end of its life.

In order to be initiated in this way, we must slow down, return into the earth and the mud and the ground, and somehow cut into the urgency to enter into the next phase while the current one is still being illuminated. To take some time to mourn the reassembling of our world, to grieve all that we will inevitably lose as we heal and awaken. To set aside what we will get, what is coming next, and attune to now.

To tend to the pieces of soul, the shards of the heart, and the fragments of the psyche that are being dissolved, to honor the role they have played, for standing by us for so long, and providing refuge during difficult and transitional times. To grieve the loss of their companionship and allow them to continue into whatever realm is next for them, permission to travel and experience new things.

To stand in awe at this process, despite the profound pain and grief, to care for all of it as we allow the mystery to reveal itself in deeper and deeper ways. To know that healing and awakening is messy, glorious, and full-spectrum… and is not only an act of creation, but one of destruction as well.

Image from Liber Novus, Jung’s Red Book

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

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

Spirit buried in matter

The difficult emotions, the confusion, the struggle, and the heartbreak. The fear, the doubt, the ending of the relationship that was supposed to last forever. On any true path, we must confront and integrate the ending of dreams, the dissolution of one world so that another may emerge.

The hopelessness, the struggle, the devastation of the crushed longing. The disappointment that it was never going to turn out the way we thought. The painful wondering if we’ve done something wrong, if somehow we’ve failed.

These are the raw materials we have to work with on the path of the heart. Place them on the altar in front of you and bless them with safe passage. You need not transcend your vulnerability, problems, or neurosis to know this. For inside the broken is a wisdom found only there.

Sadness has something to show you that joy could never provide. Inside aloneness is a secret offering that can never be found in connection. Hopelessness, when entered, reveals meaning that hope is unable to reveal.

It is pure and creative inside the symptom, but remains unseen in the overemphasis on becoming and in the tragic loss of imagination. But the alchemists and tantrikas and the poets and the unseen ones and the moon, the sun, and the stars have come to remind us. To re-enchant the imaginal and pull back the curtain to reveal the gold behind the veil.

There is spirit buried inside matter. Multiplicity is just as holy as oneness. The dual and the nondual are not two. There is no separation between the raw tender feelings and the flow of wisdom essence. Each are made of the same substance.

While the trance that there is something wrong with you is sticky and seductive, slow down, unplug from the unreal, and listen. Feel. Sense. 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 book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

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

The mystery of self and other

While one goal may be to regulate very intense feelings and emotions on our own, at times the most skillful and kind approach is to reach out to another for help, for a friend or partner or therapist to share their soothed, relaxed, grounded nervous system such that we may regulate with them.

Where, together, we can return into our window of tolerance and breathe deeply, bringing in new perspective, new levels of meaning, and to reorganize our experience in a new way.

This reaching out to another is not a sign of “codependence” or that we’re doing it wrong or that we’ve failed, but is the reality of a human nervous system, which is a miracle, really.

We are relational beings with open, sensitive, vulnerable hearts and mirror neurons and can offer one another so much. To listen to one another and attune deeply to what our brothers and sisters are feeling and how they are making meaning of their experience.

It can be difficult to truly reach out to another when we are struggling, when we are suffering, confused, or in pain. Many of us did not (and currently do not) have a safe place to share our feelings, our fears, our trauma, and our confusion. Stepping into this sort of trust is sure to bring forward so much within us.

It can also be challenging to listen, to feel deeply, and to let ourselves be touched by the pain and the struggle of another, as doing so has a way of constellating any unresolved emotional material deep within us. To set aside any demand that the other change, shift, transform, or heal – just for a moment – so that we can make contact without any agenda except to listen with our hearts open.

Yes, it’s hard. And at times heart-wrenching. And scary. And groundless. And uncertain. But here we are. To take that sort of risk, to push ourselves just a little, to share ourselves with our friends, family, co-workers, lovers, and counselors. To reach out when we need help and to truly be there when that same request is made of us. To explore the realities of self-regulation and also co-regulation, self-love and other-love, to dance in those opposites as we move deeper into the mystery.

Photo by Johnny Franzen

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

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

A new vision of healing and integration

There’s a lot of talk about “integrating” and “healing” traumatic experience which I believe has led to a lot of confusion.

We have to re-envision words like “integration” and “healing” for they can so easily lose their meaning, magic, and aliveness. Before we know it, these concepts can become further tools of shame, blame, and self-abandonment, enactments of an early environment lacking in empathic attunement, replaying the developmental trauma that colored the inner world of a tender, sensitive nervous system. We must breathe life back into these ideas in an imaginative, grounded, and creative way.

Often what is meant by “integrating” or “healing” trauma is that one day we will “get over it,” “transcend” it, “outgrow” it, meditate or somehow zap it away by the latest technique, or otherwise purge it from our psychic-emotional-somatic being. In my experience, this view of trauma is in large part inaccurate, aggressive, misguided, and at times even dangerous and violent. There are some things that happen to us that we will never “get over” nor would this even be an appropriate goal or lens to use in approaching the sacredness of the human temple.

But if what we mean by “integration” is discovering a place inside us where we can hold and contain our experience, make sense of what happened in new ways, bring together and illuminate the shards of dissociation, and discover deeper meaning, then these concepts can come alive again. Slowly, over time, we can begin to bear that which has been unbearable, providing sanctuary and safe passage for the pieces of the broken world to re-organize.

As we train ourselves to re-inhabit our bodies even in the face of profoundly disturbing experience, we can begin to weave a more "integrated" narrative of our lives, re-authoring the sacred story of who we are, what has happened to us, and how we are being called into a new future not yet known. We can gather the pieces and begin to trust in the validity of our experience again.

The goal then is not some fixed, “cured” state where we have successfully purged an aspect of our self-experience from what we are, as if it were some wretched foreign substance, but rather to find a larger home for it within us. Slowly, we can allow what has become frozen and solidified to thaw and become flexible. Perhaps, when all is said and done, it is love that will soften the wounds of the body and the heart, for they will never unwind in an environment of abandonment and aggression. It's just not safe or majestic enough there.

In this way, perhaps we can salvage these concepts such as "integration" and "healing," at least for today, re-envisioning and re-enchanting them with the force of an uncompromising and unapologetic compassion, slowness, patience, and care of the soul, as we open into the mystery together.

Or we could also set these words aside if they no longer resonate with the untamed, unprecedented, uniqueness of our lived, direct experience, and replace them with new words, to chart a new course and to bring a new poetry into the world.

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

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