The invitation of the broken

At times, a broken heart will appear as a guide into uncharted territory. It is tender and rich inside and requires a cleansing of perception to mine the gold found only there.

On the altar are emissaries of the shadowlands – an assembly of unfelt feelings, unmetabolized grief, and the entirety of the unlived life. Not only the representatives of our own personal historical psyche, but intergenerational travelers, the ancestors and the ones yet to come.

The invitation of the broken will rarely fit in with the status quo or confirm to the spiritual and cultural fantasies of endless happiness, consistent certainty, and streaming positive high vibrations. For it is reorganizing, whole, and of the vast.

The ancient companions have arrived, not as enemies to harm, but as wisdom-guides from beyond, along with your fellow travelers the moon and the stars.

These ones have come to walk with you on a blessed journey of depth.

Art by David Ho

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

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster 

From inside the center

As we wander through a new day, there is always the possibility that the visitor of melancholy may join us, coloring our experience, infusing the interactional field with a longing, a broken-openness, just feeling raw about the whole thing. About this precious, devastatingly, relentlessly alive human experience.

Not the mind’s version of sadness where we enact the primordial trance that something is missing, that we’re not okay as we are, that we must become something new or someone different. Instead, it is an emissary of the tender, a reflection of how open it truly is here and how it will never really turn out the way we thought.

Inside this body is the sun and the moon, the stars, the oceans, and the entirety of the seen and unseen places. Joy is here, as is loneliness, confusion, heartbreak, and bliss – each a unique portal through which to enter into intimacy with all things.

The dusting of snow in the morning hills, the birdsong from beyond, the orange inside the orange of the leaf, the yellowed place just outside my door.

No longer having a bias for union over separation – or for oneness over multiplicity – free to fully engage here and to no longer postpone the offering that you are. Committed to whatever appears, ready to hold and transmute it for the benefit of self and other. In awe at the spirit buried inside matter and the richness of the sensual world.

From inside the center, it is no longer possible to weave the narrative that the broken, the vulnerable, and the melancholic are obstacles on the path. Rather, they are the path itself, illumined from within by pure awareness. While at times this awareness may appear empty and of the void, it is filled with outrageous qualities of luminosity, warmth, and compassion.

This is what you are.

Photo outside in the park where I am often found napping and dreaming and wandering…

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

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster 

To bring light to the symptom

In a moment of activation, when our emotional world is on fire and we've fallen off center, an invitation arrives. An opportunity to choose something different, to encode new circuitry, to replace the ancient pathway of self-abandonment with that of curiosity and holding.

To slow down and reaffirm an old vow to bring light to the symptom, to offer breath where it was lacking, and to care for ourselves in a way that was not possible until this moment.

To drop into the body and feel our feelings, sense our sensations, and soothe a stimulated nervous system. To send life into the belly, the heart, and the throat... and any other area which longs for our attention and kindness.

Once we have come back into our window of tolerance, feet resting in the earth – even if still a bit shaky, vulnerable, and tender – but slower, more embodied, and grounded, we can begin to illuminate and reorganize the core beliefs that are looping with the emotional and somatic material. We can honor the holiness of thinking, feeling, and sensing, each a gift of the beloved as she unfolds into time and space.

Engaging the path of neural integration, we bring together the various layers of our experience, explore their interrelations, and plant the seeds for future freedom.

To begin to infuse each level with new awareness, with compassion. Untangling the wounds of the heart, the contractions of the body, and the conditioned narratives that have emerged in the attempt to discover meaning and make sense of our experience.

To suffuse new life into the limited beliefs, painful feelings, and addictive behaviors that have grown out of our response to trauma - personal, cultural, and collective. To flood this material with breath, spirit, and soul.

To attend to each layer, in turn, bringing light to the darkness. While awareness is required, mere insight is not enough. Clarity is not enough. We have seen this. Rather, it is some activity of love that seems to be required, to give birth to a new world. But what this love is must be discovered by each of us, not as a concept, but as a movement of revelation within.

Photo by U. Leone/ ulleo via Pixabay

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

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster 

The risk of reimagination

There are times when we lose contact with pure vision, with the imaginary landscape, and with the darkened wisdom of the night sea journey. Before we know it, we’ve fallen into trance and forgotten the majesty and splendor of just one human heart.

We wonder where god is, or more lovers, more healing, more awakening, more experiences. We forget that the journey is not only from “here to there” but how “there” emerges from the stars and infuses this world of time and space with the substance of love.

We wonder why there is no response to our deepest prayers. But that burning, that longing, that still small voice… while the mind may spin for further indications, our prayer has been answered. We have not been forsaken.

The invitation is to travel into the mess with eyes wide open. To fall apart, be put back together, to fail well, to forget and remember, dissolve and come back together. And take the risk to reimagine.

To set aside the fantasy that one day, when we do it right, we’ll come to some consistently safe, secure, and certain resolution to the wildness of love and its contradictions. That one day we’ll become a “master” at life, wiggle into some untouchable state, tucked away and protected from the reality that the rug can and will be pulled out from underneath us when we least expect it.

To stand in awe at how the beloved will appear, over and over and over again, as this pulling, as an act of mercy and is only her pulling you home.

To allow another to truly matter, to allow our hearts to break (and maybe even not be mended), to practice intimacy without becoming fused, to fully participate in the dream without falling into trance. And even if we fall into trance, to dare to see it, too, as none other than the beloved in disguise. And how majestic all of it is, being lost as well as being found.

It’s really like being a character in our own fairy tale, with all the mythical and archetypal beings by our side, curious as to what we will happen next… standing in awe of the human form and the inseparability of matter and spirit.

Photo by Myriam-Fotos via Pixabay

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

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster 

What is wanting to be met now?

In a moment of activation, with the ally of the breath, shift your awareness out of the overwhelming narrative, for it is no longer safe there. The voices of the past, of a culture gone a bit mad, unable to hold and provide a home for the intelligence of the surging emotional landscape.

The invitation is into reimagination and dreaming a new dream. Telling a new story, reauthoring and reimagining how you see, play, and dance with self, others, and the world.

Carve a new pathway, one that does not drop you down the conditioned rabbit hole of unworthiness and self-blame, or that pathologizes your vulnerability, uncertainty, and shakiness. Reorganize the leftover grooves of an earlier time, by way of empathy, attunement, and embodied presence.

Conserve your precious life energy, remove it from that which is no longer working in your best interest, and direct into your belly, your heart, your throat, and your core. And ask: what is wanting to be met now? What is emerging for just a moment of curious awareness, not come as an enemy to harm, but as a harbinger of integration, an emissary of life?

In what way am I being asked to care for the vulnerable, the tender, and the shaky within me, to tend to myself in a new way?

Once the activation is cooled with the rains of loving kindness, you can then go back into the narrative itself with the magic of creative, visionary thinking and use the mind, the majestic brain, to reorganize… but doing so will be much more effective once the fire is tended to by staying close.

Replace the worn-out circuitry of shame, unworthiness, and self-abandonment with the emerging scaffolding of curiosity, compassion, and radical self-care. Return home. For it is from this home that we will be able to help others, to hold them, hear them, and meet the pain of the world in wild and creative new ways.

Photo by MabelAmber/ Amsterdam

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

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster