A new blood moon

Receive the rose nectar as it emerges from the blood moon, soothing neural pathways with awakened lunar presence.

Open your body to the luminous overflow, and rest as you are held in her fertile red field.

As the eclipse yields to the melancholic reddening in the radiant here and now, remember why you have come.

— Under the blood moon on this warm summer evening in southern Finland...

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

The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

My next event: 

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

To engage the work of the shadow

To engage the work of the shadow, to travel the descendent current into the unlit places, is an act of courage and a compassion that is burning and alive.

For when we re-embody to the unwanted we remove the burden from others to metabolize it for us, which they cannot do. We are then able to love them and set them free.

In this way we liberate one another to live as the majesty that we are, no longer having to apologize for our wildness, our sensitivity, and the unique ways we enter into the mystery.

Photo credit: Mark Basarab - https://unsplash.com/@ignitedit.

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

The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

My next event: 

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

So much more than enough

It is so alive in the forest today, the portals are open through which the unseen can find safe passage.

The moss, the mud, the rotting logs. The browns, blues, and greens ache with essence, companions on a long journey home.

The water and the light as it wraps around the trees, as love comes out of the ground and falls from the sky, yearning to make its way here.

In the realm we're in now, it's all music and poetry, overflowing with that most ancient longing of the heart: come closer, all the way inside, allow me in to fill the vessel.

To witness a new fragrance of love as it emerges into the miracle world of time and space. To be given so much. So much more than enough.

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

The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

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 yoga of burning

At times a lonely heart will appear as the teacher and we will be asked to practice the yoga of raw burning. As we are made into dust, the fire is tended.

While it may be tempting to replace the burning with bliss, the sadhana of disappointment demands we set aside all others and place the broken pieces on the altar in front of us.

Even if we cannot love, accept, or transform what has come, we can always bow. Fall to the ground and bear witness to the embodied vulnerability, for there is no greater temple.

Photo by Devanath 

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

The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

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

A raging firestorm of presence

The movement of love
is that of a sacred thief,
come in the night
to remove our clothing
and our concepts,
to burn away
everything that is false
and less than
whole within us.


And when it is done
all that will be left
is a raging firestorm
of creativity, sensuality,
openness, and warmth.

This is what we are.

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

The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

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

Loneliness and aloneness

Despite our connection with others, we are all asked to travel alone. No one can experience life for us, know what it is like to feel scared or touched or excited for us, breathe for us, or enter into the mystery on our behalf.

The whole and broken yogi is at home in this type of aloneness, which burns with the richness of the emotional spectrum, their experience colored by a certain sadness. Not the sadness that something is missing but that it is so full that it aches for this life.

We know that at any moment our hearts might break, we may fall in love in the most excruciating way, the rug is sure to be pulled out from underneath us, and we’ll be asked to meet deep waves feeling. Somehow we have no choice but to enter into the core of mercy and grief, suffering and joy, and darkness and light.

“Loneliness,” on the other hand, is usually born out of a resistance to present embodied experience, a subtle turning from shame, fear, sadness, and rage. When we are not able to provide a home for these ones, we join them in their orphaned state and feel cut off from life, lonely, and disconnected.

In a moment of surging, these ones need not be healed, but held and allowed back home. To abandon and send them away creates the foundation for the experience of loneliness, where we fall out of touch with the grace and wisdom-field of the inner world.

It is so fragile here, this nervous system, these mirror neurons, this sensitivity. Perhaps it is a unique configuration found only in this star. Let us re-open the temple of the heart and provide sanctuary for the inner travelers, that they may reveal the path out of loneliness and into aloneness, which we will walk together with all beings everywhere.

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 breaking of the heart

In those moments when our heart breaks in response to the world, the temptation can be overwhelming to put it back together again. But if we will ask the heart if it wishes to be mended, it will take us into the mystery.

“In trying to ‘heal’ me you remain too far away,” the heart pleads with us. “I want you all the way inside, to bear witness to the broken shards of my being, to stay close as I ache, to hold me. Please don’t turn. Not this time.”

Behind the scenes, love is at work, the beloved spinning out worlds of experience, longing to know itself through form, finding illumined passage through the cells of these hearts.

Each time we listen carefully to another, feel their feelings and attune to their tenderness, hug them hold them, speak kind words, offer a soothed nervous system where by way of miracle mirror neurons they down-regulate and rest… together we break more, burn more, and somehow become more whole.

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

Blue glow

Watching the light play hide and seek in the forest today, the green brown purple moss illumined from within. Everything so fresh and spontaneous, colorful forms crafted of particles of awareness.

Blue glow and alive trees and birdsong that I’m sure has never made it into this realm before this very moment. Here we are now together.

Shaky, tender, and achy, but how to tell if it’s happening inside me or without? Inside this heart or on the outside or both or neither or by way of the Great Heart that has weaved the entire display…

In one way everything seems slightly pink or golden red, as if it were all coming and going inside a blooming rose… the mercy of that, to be given that vision. 

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 most faithful lover

It is so natural to long for deep relationship with another, a fellow traveler with whom to explore the great secrets of union. Someone to accompany us as we enter into the mystery, explore the uncharted lands of the heart and wild terrain of the body, unsure where the journey will lead but pulled by the aliveness of intimacy and its fruits.

“I want to share the burning,” we cry out! The tenderness, the joy, and the aliveness of what it means to enter into partnership with the holy other. To no longer hold back, to give everything to remove the remaining shreds of separation, to lead with vulnerability and courage, to give and to receive fully and no longer postpone entry into the temple of the beloved. This yearning is pure, it is valid, and can be honored for its authenticity and power.

Alas, the prayer is heard. In response to this primordial call, the “other” appears. Sadness rushes onto the scene: “But when will you practice intimacy with me?” Loneliness is next, pleading for a moment of your undistracted attention. Anger, despair, grief, self-loathing, jealousy, fear, and shame: “Us too! Please do not abandon us and turn away for some other lover! We are here and long to share our essence. Your yearning for true intimacy has been answered! We have come.”

Out of the earth, the mud, and the stars, the ancient companions will always respond to this longing, spinning and shifting the forms of the phenomenal world, arranging meetings and encounters with the other in all of his or her glory.

As the lost soul pieces and displaced aspects of psyche, the beloved appears not as an enemy come to disrupt, but as the most true, faithful lover, never willing to truly abandon you. He or she comes not to harm, but for just one moment of your presence, attunement, and the light of your holding. While there may be a memory of being rejected in the past, they come nonetheless, never losing faith in you.

In that encounter, we are reminded, in ways that will be unique for each of us, that we will never be able to be more intimate with another than we are with the unwanted lovers within. If we do not provide shelter for the unmet within us, how will we ever truly live, dance, and play with the beloved?

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