This in and of itself is an alchemical question.
What matters to you?
What is the “matter?”
In a certain kind of relational field – one oriented not in cure, but in curiosity, warmth, empathic attunement, and not-knowing – the other may be able to access certain thoughts, images, feelings, memories, sensations, emotions, and impulses that had become hidden in the psychic landscape, or buried in the body.
In order to integrate, make use of, metabolize, or transmute experience, we must first be able to access it - touch it, feel it, sense it, think it, hold it, hear it… penetrate and be penetrated by it.
Once accessed, we are able to then begin the journey of articulating it, becoming poets of the inner world, breathing life back into what had lost breath.
By way of images, words, and metaphors – or creatively through paint, clay, dance, or drawing – we serve as midwife for the lost pieces and scattered shards of soul to come back into form.
We enact it back into being, giving it body, lighting it up with the sacred movement of our consciousness and our interest.
It is from this ground, this attuned scaffolding and sanctuary of embodied presence that true integration can occur, where the differentiated can become linked, the separate can become synthesized, and the dissolved can be recrafted... where the frozen is thawed, the forgotten is discovered, and the orphaned is reclaimed.
Photo by Manfred Richter
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 online community, co-facilitated with Jeff Foster - Befriending Yourself: Meditative, Nondual, and Depth Psychological Perspectives - is currently closed to new members but will likely re-open later in the year. To be on the mailing list to learn about the program, please visit the site here.
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.
