Disappointing another

In any meaningful relationship, we will inevitably disappoint our partners, families, and friends. To skillfully navigate the energies of disappointment is a real yoga that can take quite a lot of awareness (and compassion). The landscape of disappointing another can be incredibly challenging, especially if our role in early relationships was to set aside our own needs for another, where caring for them was the primary way that we received love and attention.

What is it like for you to disappoint someone? To let them down? To not be able to save them? To feel that you could be doing more to care for their unlived life? To not be able to mend their broken heart? What does it mean about you if you disappoint them? What are the consequences if you are not able to “make them happy” or remove their anxiety, meaninglessness, or uncertainty?

Will you be abandoned if you disappoint them? Will you be the target of rage and judgment? Will you be shamed? Are you unsafe? Should you just go ahead and try to make them feel better at all costs, even if detrimental to your own self?

What are the feelings and emotional conclusions you are asked to tend to in the wake of your letting another down, when you aren't able to help them, see them, and be there for them in the way they need in a given moment? When no matter how hard you try, they feel that you have misunderstood and let them down.

Aren’t we supposed to meet their anxiety, heartbreak, phobias, and symptoms in a way that is consistently helpful, empathic, and supportive? Say insightful things? Give wise advice? Fix them? Cure them? Heal them? Make it all go away? What if we fail and they become disappointed? What does it mean about us as humans (and healers) if we are not healing, but disappointing?

It’s some very rich territory that we can explore.

Photo by Manfred Richter

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

The next book, A Friend of the Breath, 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

A new compassion

If we heal our old wounds of shame and unlovability we may no longer be able to take refuge in the unconscious trances of inflation and unworthiness that have accompanied us in close personal relationships, that narcissistic organization that each of us employs to one degree or another in our (often misguided) quest to stay safe and be seen, to receive some mirror back to our basic goodness.

At some level we know this and while we long to awaken from the trance some part of us is just not so sure about it all. This hesitation, uncertainty, disorientation is not some cosmic error or mistake but an emissary of the beloved itself, come to reveal the contradictory, wild, alive nature of healing and what it asks of us, which is everything, really.

Just try to imagine for a moment engaging in our lives without those familiar reference points. Even if that organization has been interfering with the intimacy and joy that we yearn for, it has provided a well-known axis around which we have been able to orient in the world without having to feel too much groundlessness and tender exposure. It is not possible to imagine, ahead of time, what our lives would be like without the habitual lenses through which we learned to navigate. It is important to honor those parts of ourselves that are wired to hold onto prior organizations as we turn into the unknown and give them permission to return to the stars.

While the prospect of stepping into the raw, naked, open unknown may seem thrilling—a life free of our conditioned history—the consequences are profound. It is an act of kindness to prepare ourselves to confront quite a lot of contradictory and paradoxical feelings about the whole thing—on the one hand a genuine desire to heal and transform while on the other some real trepidation about what we know is going to be required. To bring a new level of compassion to ourselves and our journey in our honoring of what the implications truly are.

Art by pixel2013/ Silvia & Frank via Pixabay

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

The next book, A Friend of the Breath, 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

How well did I love?

Sending love to my friends everywhere on this Christmas day. Thank you for sharing your sacred stories, pain, and joy with me in 2018 and for reminding me of the courage, bravery, and wildness of the human heart.

It a world that at times can forget so easily, we learn to pretend there is something more that matters. Thank you for helping me remember what is most important. To take a risk in allowing another to matter, to allow this life to truly matter. To care more, not less. To set aside the fantasy of transcending our vulnerability and sensitivity, and instead making use of the broken and the tender as passageways into the heart of the world. To no longer stay on the sidelines, but to fully participate in the bounty that has been placed inside and around us.

To allow Christ to be born inside our hearts, raging and alive, buried in the core of our cells, organs, and synapses, overflowing with the water of life. To behold that wisdom essence as it re-colors our perception, cleanses our imagination, and bathes our nervous system in rest, creativity, breath, and new life.

May we pause today in awe, take a break from the holiday madness and remember the gift of life. To behold the utter majesty of what it really means to have been given a human body, the chance to touch the earth, listen to the birds, and explore the mystery with our fellow travelers.

On this new day, let us share the most profound gift of our presence, listening carefully to others and what is most alive in their hearts. To care deeply about how they are making meaning of their experience and what brings their hearts alive. To remember that just like us they only want to be safe, happy, and free.

To speak words of kindness, to touch and hold them and do what we can so that they feel felt. To validate their emotional worlds and provide safe haven for their essence to unfold in the field between. To bear witness to the majesty of pure spirit as it comes into this miracle world of time and space.

And to remember that in the end, when we are passing from this world, there may be only one thing that truly matters: how well did I love when I was here.

A new kind of moment

“No, I’m not going to do that any longer. Even though it takes everything in me and feels so shaky and uncertain, I am going to embrace my vulnerability and care for it, slowly, and choose a new way. I will be a friend to myself now and am no longer willing to be an enemy. Even though I will not be perfect at it and will likely fail at times, I will remain steadfast in my commitment to not turn away, to no longer abandon myself in a moment of activation."

This is where the work shifts more to that of the heart, where we aren’t as focused on clear insight and pure awareness, safe as a witness on the sidelines, but rather begin to explore what it would actually mean to open our hearts to our pain, confusion, and grief. For just a moment setting aside the need to understand it, determine its cause, or even how to transmute it into something else. A new moment, a different kind of moment. Just this once. And see.

To hold it like a mother or father surrounding and enveloping their little baby. To make contact with the lost visitors of soma and psyche and provide sanctuary where they can be tended to. This can be pretty radical and truly goes against the grain. We start to bring kindness to the feelings, to the parts of ourselves we had to disown at an earlier time, untangling and enlivening them with the warmth of our own presence, which in these moments we need more than ever.

Photographer unknown via public domain/ Pixabay

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

The next book, A Friend of the Breath, 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

A temple of rest

There is a certain excitement as we step into new territory, but it can also generate disorientation as we sense a pending confrontation with the unknown.

This disorientation is not an some error or cosmic mistake to be remedied by way of process, but a sacred expression of the burning of the ashes of an old world, reminding us that it was never going to turn out the way we thought.

The pain of this realization, the achy longing in the heart, the crumbling of an old dream are the foundation for new life and the creative essence of the death-rebirth cycle.

We must be kind to ourselves during times of transition, honoring the implications of what it truly means to heal and for our perception to be cleansed.

To slow down and soften as we are asked to provide sanctuary for the wounds, grief, and unfelt joys of a lifetime, as we offer a temple of rest where the disowned inner travelers can gather and return.

Photo by Jordy Meow/ Tokyo

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

The next book, A Friend of the Breath, 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 

Embodiment to the majestic

Inevitably we will be asked to tend to the heart as it breaks in response to a life and a world that is simultaneously devastating as it is precious.

Tending to the broken does not necessarily require that we mend the heart, for this may not be what it truly wants. If we listen, it will tell us whether it needs to be repaired or whether it is longing for something else.

At times, the invitation is to fall to the ground in response to the pain, in surrender to the darkened magnificence of it all. Awestruck at the light hidden there and the bounty that has been laid out before us.

To allow ourselves to fall apart. To fail. To get back up. To be humbled again.

To start over. To be a beginner. To realize we are and always will be an amateur at the ways of love. Unsure and uncertain as to what this life is asking of us or why we’re here. But somehow we open more, and break more, and close, only to open, break, and close yet again.

To make this journey with our fellow travelers, and the sun, the moon, and the stars. And realize together how little we know in the face of it all.

But in the core of this unknowing, in the embodiment to that level of majesty and creativity, somehow it is enough, more than enough that we have been given. 

Photo of Mystic Mountain within Carina Nebula via the Hubble telescope

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

The next book, A Friend of the Breath, 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