Thursday, May 30, 2019

One of love's children


At times, as a sensitive human being, an image will appear. A sign. A symbol. A message. A symptom. An emotion. A feeling. A sensation. Rippling through your body. Tenderizing your heart. Perhaps uninvited, something is familiar about it, but it also carries the signature of otherness.

While it may appear that this one is working against you, it comes bearing an invitation. Asking you to slow down. To listen. To remember what is most important, something that may have been lost in the dizzying projects of the inner and outer worlds.

Before you turn from the fire, look inside it. Step into the interior. With curiosity, breath, and awareness, offer safe passage for this one to rest from a long journey, to disclose and share its unique essences and qualities.

An old, orphaned, inner soul-piece is expressing its longing. One of love’s children is yearning to come home:

“Please know me. Please hold me. Please care for me. Please remember. Please provide sanctuary where we can dance and play and paint and draw and dream together. I am not here to harm you. Only to remind you of something vast and majestic and blue and gold… and of the revolutionary implications of what it means to be alive.”



Art by DarkWorkX/ Dorothe



Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Video-based teachings, live meditations, question-and-answer videos, and a moderated online support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open 


My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Toward a True Compassion



It is important to realize that the path of opening the heart is not the same as becoming a receptacle for the unloading of others’ unconscious, unresolved beliefs, unprocessed feelings, and unintegrated behaviors. It is to the degree that we are attuned to the “inner other” within that we will be able to skillfully respond to the projections of the external other upon us. This inner other contains all of those partly processed feelings, unmetabolized emotions, and unconscious beliefs that we have lost contact with along the way, the entirety of our disowned vulnerability in all its forms.

The only way to care for and integrate the “other” is by way of profound levels of self-compassion. For many, this holding does not come naturally as it was not encoded into the nervous system of a little one in an environment lacking in empathic attunement, a field not ripe and open enough to contain the magic and brilliance of a unique, unprecedented, unfolding emotional world. But despite early relational trauma, inconsistent empathic mirroring, and the seeding of disorganized narratives of attachment, you can learn and practice this now. You can experience reunion with the disavowed inner other and play with him or her, re-embodying to the pure flow of feeling that was once disallowed and misunderstood in a world that has forgotten.

While appearing “compassionate” on the outside, being an emotional doormat involves the re-enacting of early, unconscious dynamics. We learned that devaluing ourselves, often in very subtle ways, was the best route to get our needs met, to fit in, to receive attention and affection, and to maintain a precarious tie to an unavailable attachment figure. This misperception of unworthiness arose not because there was something fundamentally wrong with us, but from our best efforts to care for a sensitive little heart when we were not developmentally equipped to dance in the opposites, to hold the tension, and to work through overwhelming states of survival-level anxiety.

But the pathways within you are luminous – neither solid nor fixed – and can be reorganized around empathy, kindness, and presence. The urgency of the little one scrambling to be held and mirrored can be metabolized now with new capacities that were once unavailable, replaced with the slower, more grounded circuitry of wise, empathic kindness. But this possibility occurs only by way of self-compassion and the unconditional commitment to no longer abandon the inner other as it surges within you, in the form of feeling, sensation, and vulnerability of all kinds. We must end the spell of self-abandonment, which will require immense courage, care, curiosity, and embodiment, staying close to the eruption of waves of emotion as they present for integration.

Look carefully and see the ways you habitually place others’ needs over your own… not out of true compassion for them, but as a re-enactment of an early environment of shame and unworthiness. With your presence, seed the somatic field with holding and attunement, receive the longing for an update to your holy nervous system, and lay down a new pathway. This pathway is grounded in self-care, which wisely expresses itself in the skillful care of others, and opens a doorway into the unfolding dance of self and other and the eternal mysteries therein.




Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Dialogues, teachings, practices, live meditations, and a moderated support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open now


My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Ask the earth to hold you


No matter how things are going in your life at this time, you can start right where you are. In just this moment, surround and contain the achy life as it surges for integration. None of us can tend to a future moment. In the attempt to do so, we fall into overwhelm and fragmentation. It’s just too much. Stay close.

For just one second, enter the fire and infuse it with presence, compassion, and holding. Renew your vow: I will not turn from myself and my vulnerability. No, not this time. I will not desert myself. I will no longer pathologize my emotional experience. Grief is not pathology. Heartbreak is not pathology. Rage is not pathology.

Two seconds. Then rest. Then three. More rest. As we send breath into the broken shards, into the lost pieces of soul, a new groove is laid down, new circuity is encoded.

Inside the core of the emotional activation, buried in the shaky embodied sensations, hidden in the unique images that psyche is bringing to you now… unrecognized wisdom, a forgotten creativity, a surging of sacred life energy.

Ask the earth to hold you, to share her soothing water, shade, and safe haven, and stay near as you open.

Find a friend, therapist, lover, ocean, moon, star, or holy roaring lioness to bear witness as you turn into the raw alive somatic world.

The seen and unseen ones are always here to help us, to reveal the way home. To illuminate the pathways of darkness and of light, each containing a particle of the mystery, a strand of love seeking you as a tender vessel through which it can come alive here. 






Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Dialogues, teachings, practices, live meditations, and a moderated support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open now

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

Friday, May 17, 2019

Our life's purpose


It is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come, that another opportunity will be given to bear witness to a sunset, take a walk in the forest, feel the grace of a deer, or share a moment of connection with the one in front of us. But some part of us knows how fragile it truly is here, how tenuous, how shaky, and that this opening into life will not be here for much longer.

Before we realize it, we can so easily fall into the trance of postponement. The spell of tomorrow looms large in the personal and collective psyche. At the end of this life – which is sure to come sooner than we think – it is unlikely we'll be caught up in whether we accomplished all the tasks on our to-do lists, played it safe, “mastered” life, wrapped up our self-improvement project, or completed some mythical spiritual journey.

Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?

There are soul-pieces and lost parts orbiting in and around us – unfelt feelings, unthought thoughts, unexpressed art, unimagined vision… the ghosts of our unlived lives. They circle and spiral not to harm, but to remind us of the rare preciousness of this human form.

One day we will no longer be able to look at, touch, or share a simple moment with those we love. When we turn to them, they will be gone. When they reach out for us, they will not find the form they once knew. The last moment to encounter the immensity of one more breath, experience awe at a color, the majesty of the sun, or the tenderness of the moon, or to enter into union with the vastness of the sea.

It will be our last chance to see a universe in a drop of rain, to have a moment of communion with a friend, or to weep as the light yields to the night sky.

One last moment to have a thought, feel an emotion, fall in love, or listen to a piece of music. To know heartbreak, joy, sorrow, and peace – to behold the outrageous mystery of what it truly means to be a sensitive, alive, connected human being.

What if today is that last day? Or tomorrow? Or later this week?

Knowing that death will come, how will we respond to the sacred and brief appearance of life?

Perhaps in the end our “life's purpose” has nothing to do with what career we create, what new thing we will manifest or attract for ourselves, or how successful we are in mastering life. Perhaps the purpose of our life is to fully live, finally, to touch each here and now moment with our presence, our warmth, our mercy, and with the gift of our one, wild temporary heart.

And to do whatever we can to help others, to hold them when they are hurting, to listen carefully to their stories and the ways they are attempting to make sense of a world that has gone a bit mad. To stay attuned to their sensitivity, to what keeps them up at night, at how they are making meaning here in this messy, chaotic, glorious place. To speak kind words to them and not forget the erupting miracle of the other as it appears in front of us. Perhaps this is the most radical gift that we can all give as we honor what has been given to us. 


Photo by skeeze


Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Dialogues, teachings, practices, live meditations, and a moderated support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open now

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2021. 

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Not pathology, but path


Confusion is not pathology, it is path. It has something to show us that whitened, reflective clarity could never reveal. There is wisdom inside the uncertainty, but it is only released into a psychic environment of curiosity, interest, embodiment, and warmth.

The feeling of disconnection is not neurotic, it is intelligent. It has something to show us that oneness could never reveal. Travel inside the felt sense, though the hidden passageways, and you will find the emissaries awaiting. The allies of multiplicity are not at war with unity, but fellow travelers with them on a journey of wholeness.

We are neither “separate” nor “one,” but the erupting holding field in which the energies of “separate” and “one” interpenetrate and dance the relative into being. Neither of these concepts are majestic enough to contain the mystery of the soul. While we may have a preference for unity and oneness over multiplicity and differentiation, it would appear that love does not share this bias and is ready at all times to equally employ either of its manifestations to be its envoy here.

Those visitors of raw, achy, lonely broken openness are not neuroses to be cured or mistakes to be remedied. The shaky vulnerability is not pathology, it is path. As our perception is cleansed, we see that these ones are not obstacles, but passionate, yearning requests into the tending to the lost grief, joy, rage, and peace of the unlived life.

The freedom we long for will never be found in the eradication of the unwanted, but only in deeper layers of attunement to the love and the information it carries.

At times the burning can seem unbearable. Such is the nature of the human heart. We may burn until we are translucent, but it is by way of this burning that wholeness is revealed.





Photo by Stefan Schweihofer

Befriending Yourself - you are invited to join me and my friend Jeff Foster at our new online membership site at the intersection of spirituality, meditation, and depth psychology. Dialogues, teachings, practices, live meditations, and a moderated support community. 

The next retreat - The Deep Rest Retreat: Slowing Down and Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times - September 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado - registration open now

My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is available in both paperback and Kindle editions. 

My next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2021.