Suddenly there is so much space

The next time you find yourself looping in repetitive thinking, spiraling within shame circuits, and drowning in a cascading waterfall of overwhelm, slow down and cut into the momentum with the warmth of your own awareness.

Slow the situation down. Feel your feet on the earth. Breathe deeply from the lower belly. Things are not always as they seem.

Come out of the seductive, sticky storyline and shift your center of gravity into the center of the raw life that is surging to be held. One microsecond at a time. Underneath the circulating heat, spin, and claustrophobia is a tender soft core that is longing for just one moment of you exactly as you are.

Stay close. Be a friend to yourself. Provide sanctuary and safe passage for the visitor to be illuminated and held. While the habitual groove is out of the shaky center, just this once step off the battlefield and turn home. Your body is aglow with sacred data illuminating the way ahead.

Slow, curious, warm. Open to a new way as you ask: What is it that I need right now? What have I abandoned in myself? What is being asked to be tended to, right here and right now, with a storm of lovingkindness? Can I breathe into and with what has come, not as an enemy to transcend or overcome, but an ally of the depths? Why have you come, I am listening, I will not forsake you.

In this, seeds of empathy are planted in your nervous system and scattered within the cells of your heart, watered and soothed with new forms of self-care as compassion pathways are grooved and brought alive. Suddenly there is so much space. Breath where none was to be found. You are already held by something vast.

Through this aspiration to no longer abandon yourself, you come back into your power, grounded and embodied in the reality and perception of the warrior, a warrior of love, come here not only to heal yourself but as a vessel of presence and transmutation for all beings.

Photo credit: the winter holding field in Lapland c/o adege/ Andreas, Gelterkinden/ Schweiz

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

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, 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

Sometimes broken, sometimes whole

There was an old dream that opening our hearts was always going to feel safe, that somehow love promised that.

That allowing another to matter was going to be easy, that staying close to our vulnerability was somehow not going to feel raw and at times unbearable.

That to heal meant we’d be in some protected, resolved, untouchable state where we had transcended the sensitivity of being an open, naked, alive human being. That somehow healing meant we’d only have to live in one narrow band of the spectrum.

But love has no interest in our fantasies of invulnerability, trances of mastery and control, or sure knowing as to what is coming next. It is just too wild for all that, too creative, and oriented in the mystery.

Love seeks a vessel in which to come alive here and you are that vessel. It finds you by way of that quivering, that tender not-knowing, that willingness to start all over again. Sometimes broken, sometimes whole, sometimes a mess, but always alive. In all of your chaotic glory.

When we are totally unclothed, love will show us what we are. When the known crumbles away, all that remains is this burning heart. There is nothing more alive than that. There is nothing more sacred than that. There is nothing safer than that.

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

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, 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

Death and rebirth

In each moment the sacred process of death and rebirth is playing out within us. With each breath, something in us is dying: some aspect of who we think we are or what we’re doing here, the death an old dream, a relationship we were sure would last forever, an idea about how it was all going to turn out.

In the face of this dissolution, the question isn’t so much how can we be reborn, but will we participate in death, fully, and with an open heart, paving the way for new forms to emerge, trusting that rebirth will take place according to a timeline originating far away in the stars.

In times of transition, our tendency is to rush to rebirth, quickly back into the known, in an urgent attempt to cure, maintain, or heal that which is dying, that which longs to transform. It is so natural to resist falling apart in our need to put it all back together. But it is only from the core of the womb of death - a death tended to consciously - that re-birth can come into being.

The invitation, which we can at times hear clearly, during the dark of night, in the slowness and the depths, during time with the moon and as we move in and out of states of sleep and dream, is to not abandon death in our rush to be re-born. To not short circuit the intelligence and creativity that death is, and to remember that rebirth is not possible without the creativity of dissolution.

Allow the death some time to unfold, to share its poetry and its fragrances, which are not partial, but of a light that is whole. In those times in our lives, when things are being rearranged and reorganized inside and around us, we can attune to what is truly being asked, whether it is to cure death and reassemble the known, or to allow the forms of love safe passage to continue their journey.

To honor the forms of love as they come into our lives and touch us and share with us their beauty. But equally allow them to dissolve so that new forms may emerge and enchant this place. To give them permission to dance and play and participate fully in the sacred return.

Art by Beate Bachmann

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

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, 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 yoga of relationship

Close, intimate relationship (including, but not limited to the romantic) is a powerful (and heartbreaking) yoga and one of the most precious, disappointing, and illuminating vehicles we have in the modern world for catalyzing healing, and revealing light within the shadow.

While it’s not possible to know ahead of time to what degree we can “count on” our partners and friends to be there for us, see us in the way we long to be seen and hold us in the way we yearn to be held, there is one thing we can absolutely count on: that they will, over time, if we will allow them to matter, somehow illuminate everything within us that is unresolved and longing to return home.

This is the great promise that they are sure to fulfill. How precious. How devastating. How holy.

While we may never understand or resolve the relationship between the inner and the external other—not to mention the relationship of these ones with the Great Other however he or she appears to us—we can dance and play and explore the sacred world as fellow travelers, together and alone, alone yet together, as we embrace the mystery as beginners on the path of love.

Photo by Patrick – adwriter via Flickr

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

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, 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 home for the other within

Usually when we talk about the “others” in our lives, we are referring to persons external to us who we are in relationship with—friends, lovers, children, neighbors, family members, and colleagues.

The basis of a healthy and nourishing relationship is reciprocal attunement to one another’s lived experience, mutual caring for how each person is making meaning of their lives. And the capacity to participate in the relational field together, where we listen, share our feelings, provide empathy and boundaries, and allow one another to truly matter, at times leading with our vulnerability and at other times emphasizing our separateness.

To see the other not merely as an object in our own awareness, but as a unique subject in their own right and to honor this subjectivity and care about how it is unfolding. To dare to look out the window that the other is looking out and not only our own.

But there is another “other” found not external to us, but inside, weaved of the lost pieces of our hearts, broken dreams, partly digested feelings, and the content of our unlived lives. Just like external others, these ones also long to be known, heard, and cared for, to receive a moment of our uninterrupted attention.

They are not limited to only a few forms but appear in infinite ways, as shape-shifters who are of endlessly creativity in their ability to make their way into our experience to remind us of something we may have forgotten.

While we may never understand the mystery of these two or come to any fantasized resolution or answer as to whether they are the "same" or "different," we can allow them to touch and accompany us as we break open into the sacredness of the question together.

Art by Stefan Keller

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

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, 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