We are relational beings with open, sensitive, tender hearts and mirror neurons and offer one another so much. To listen carefully and attune deeply to what our brothers and sisters are feeling and how they are making meaning of their experience.
To not dismiss or shame the story that pours from them or the ways they have come to imagine themselves and the world, but to hold it in a spacious, compassionate, merciful awareness. To allow it to touch us as we embrace the unknown together.
In the busyness of the inner and outer worlds, we can so easily forget the miracle that is unfolding here moment by moment. The rarity and preciousness of the whole thing, including the chaos and the glory, never quite knowing how love will twirl, dance, play, and shift into new forms, even during difficult times. It can take our breath away. If we will allow it.
In those moments when our heart breaks in response to the immensity of it all, the temptation can be overwhelming to scramble to put it back together again. But if we 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, the shattered light, the burning darkness, to stay close as I ache, to hold me. Please don’t turn.”
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 hallways and corridors of the cells and their synapses.
Each time we listen carefully to another, feel their feelings and attune to their emotions, hold them, speak kind words, offer a soothed nervous system where they downregulate and rest… together we break more, burn more, and somehow become more whole.
Art by Gerd Altmann/ Freiburg
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
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
