The issue isn’t whether we’re constructing a narrative in the attempt to make sense of our experience, but whether we’re aware of that narrative and the associated emotional material that has been lost and found along the way. We come to imagine ourselves, others, and the world by way of the relational field and at times are called to the holy art of re-imagination.
Often it requires an attuned other to help us access and articulate disowned experience, including those thoughts, feelings, and bodily material that have become dissociated and left behind in the shadowlands of the unconscious. Whether this is an actual or imaginary other – an animal, a god, a moon, or the earth – to be witnessed is sacred and can illuminate the darkness.
The main point is not in what form the “other” comes but whether they are genuinely interested in hearing about our experience, what we are feeling and thinking and what is most important to us. What keeps us up at night, lights our heart on fire, scares and inspires us, how we are making sense of holiness, chaos, and confusion.
There are parts inside us, inner figures that can play the role of witnessing but we must look for them and approach them with an open, humble heart. They await dialogue and long to know us and provide the scaffolding for reorganization, which is weaved of particles of love.
Once we become aware of the ways we have come to organize our experience – with as much subtlety and depth as possible – we can then explore whether we would like to tell a different story, dream a different dream, imagine a different world – one that is healthier, more integrated, and more flexible, oriented not in the “there and then” but in the unfolding here and now.
For all of us, there is joy, grief, peace, and heartbreak occurring outside awareness, shards of somatic and emotional dissociation, forgotten thoughts and dreams and meanings… in many cases, these can only come back into conscious embodiment in the presence of a witness. Whether it is an attuned external other or rediscovered inner part, it is dialogue that can open the portal.
Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians
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
