A container of holding

When we experience heartbreak, tragedy, uncertainty, and grief, we are touched not only by our own personal, biographical layer of experience. Additionally, we find ourselves in an archetypal situation, a surrounding world where we are not alone. Sitting next to us is every other human being who has also been shattered by pain, trauma, and sorrow. Depending on our cosmological orientation, perhaps also that of the animals, the earth, the mountains, and the stars who, too, know death.

Is it my pain alone that I am feeling, my personal emotional overwhelm, my trauma, my grief, my uncertainty, my anguish? It’s so much to hold. Or is it that of the ancestors, the stories and feelings and memories and images of those who have come before, or even have yet to come? It is not always easy to tell and the weight of tending to it all can be unbearable at times.

Here, the ancestors are not only those ones related to us genetically (my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s experience) but also our universal ancestors throughout history. These ones, too, have carried these same burdens, have struggled to find meaning in these experiences, and have through their longing come to unearth the wisdom, courage, and guidance buried in the darkness.

We can see or sense these ones in vision, prayer, and ritual, and also in fairy tales, mythology, literature, film, and religion, as well as hidden in secret places that we cannot name in words.

While recognizing our common humanity and history—and the vast relational field that we share with others who have come to know healing, wholeness, and mercy—doesn’t necessarily make the pain go away, it provides a context or container of holding in which we can find the strength, the hope, and the vision to find a way through, to discover a light that has never truly gone out.

To reveal to us that we are connected in ways that are not immediately apparent, but come shining through with the force of love in ways that will astonish us, if we will allow them. 

Photo by skeeze

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

No greater temple

At times the visitor of melancholy will appear, arriving from the night world, from the moon, not to harm, but to reveal. A tenderness, a disappointment, a raw achy uncertainty. The guide has appeared but wasn’t quite what we thought. Such is the way of the heart. As we are made into dust, the fire is tended.

While it may be tempting to replace the burning with bliss, the sadhana of disappointment demands that we listen, to the stories and feelings and whispers and longings, and place the shattered pieces on the altar in front of us.

To trust in our immediate embodied experience and to renew the vow we once made to no longer abandon ourselves. And stand in awe as we turn toward a sacred reassembling.

Even if we cannot love, accept, or transform what has come, we can always bow. What this bowing looks like for each of us will never conform to others' fantasies and ways; for the map is weaved deep into our soul alone.

We can fall to the ground and bear empathic witness to the broken wholeness, to the wisdom shining out of the human heart, for there is no greater temple.

Photo by Devanath 

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

Ripe for revisioning

As a little one, “I feel bad” equals “I am bad.” Perceptually, we were not capable of discerning between feeling and being, a process which is not only tangled for an infant, but a default pathway for each of us in times of emotional activation.

When sadness arises, or rage, jealousy, fear, or confusion, in an instant we turn these very natural human experiences into identity-structures, scramble to make conclusions about what their appearance means (e.g. there is something wrong with me, I’ve failed yet again, etc.), and fall down the rabbit hole of flooding and fusion.

In a moment of activation, we are invited to slow down and open to an embodied journey. This journey will span the territory from “I *am* sad” to “I am aware in this moment that the visitor of sadness has arrived, longing to be known, to be held, as it dances across the layers of my experience – as core beliefs and vulnerabilities, data-filled emotions, intelligence-rich sensations in the body, and unique psychically valuable images evidencing the ways I’ve come to imagine myself, others, and the world.”

By way of this journey, which requires that we infuse our immediate experience with warmth, attention, curiosity, and kindness, we can begin to discover experientially if “I feel bad equals I am bad” is accurate – or whether this lens of perception is ripe for revisioning.

The embodied and compassionate meeting with the figures of the emotional world is not always going to be easy, not always going to feel safe, and will require that we tend to the very valid and very human grief, pain, and uncertainty with a merciful awareness and through befriending ourselves in wild and new ways.

The implications of this sort of reorganization are vast as they filter down into our nervous system, the cells of our hearts, the synapses in our brains, and into and through the relational field, affecting not only the dance with the external beloved, in all of his or her forms, but with the dissociated internal beloved, who longs to know us once again.

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