A guide into a golden world

At times, a broken heart will appear as a hidden guide into a golden world, and you will be asked to place the shattered pieces on the altar in front of you.

To grieve the passing of that which has fallen apart, to be washed by waves mercy, and to allow an old dream to die and to recycle into a new form.

The invitation of the broken is rarely sweet and peaceful, but always reorganizing and whole. “The freedom you are longing for is found inside me,” it says, “not in sending me away.”

An ancient companion has arrived as a purifying ally from beyond, come not to harm, but to reveal.

Come to walk with and guide you into a holy spiral of imagination and revisioning. With something to disclose that is not accessible during times when everything is resolved and put together.

That pure longing for connection, for aliveness, to participate fully in the miracle of spirit and matter... will never be revealed by eradicating the falling apart, but in deeper layers of attunement to the love and information it carries.

Our annual spring retreat will take place April 22-27, 2020 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with myself and Jeff Foster. Please stay tuned to our websites, Facebook pages, and this blog for additional information. Tickets will go on sale on January 1. 

My online community, co-facilitated with Jeff Foster - Befriending Yourself: Meditative, Nondual, and Depth Psychological Perspectives - is currently closed to new members. To learn about the program and put your name on the mailing list for future re-opens, 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 Ourselves in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

Both separate and connected

In close personal relationships, it is important to emphasize a secure attachment bond and the co-regulation of challenging emotional states. To practice kindness toward our lovers and friends, listen to the way they are making sense of their experience, attune to what they are feeling, and hold them during difficult times. To take the risk to allow them to matter and share our vulnerability, prioritizing connection and its value in our lives.

It is also essential to be on the lookout for unhealthy fusion, honoring the reality that we are not only connected, but also separate. Any secure attachment must include healthy differentiation, where at times the most skillful activity will be to establish firm boundaries, assert our independence, emphasize our own personal integrity, and allow the other to struggle with feelings of aloneness, uncertainty, and confusion.

At times we will disappoint those we love, and this will activate our historic core vulnerabilities. For many of us, disappointing another is not okay. It’s just not safe. The consequences could be devastating. There is an urgent impulse to do whatever possible to prevent the shattering of their heart and the achy confrontation with their own unlived life. But we must see if this is really the activity of love or if it is something else. To allow the other to meet the reality of their own heart is an act of profound mercy and compassion.

While from a transpersonal perspective, we can speak about unity and oneness, within the relative we are also distinct, each with our own unique histories and ways of organizing our experience. Each with our own fate and relationship with the divine. With our own path to travel. To dissolve these differences into some homogenized spiritual middle does not honor the sacredness of form.

If we do not consciously explore the reality of our separateness, it will inevitably express itself in less than conscious ways – in tangled, looping, and unproductive conflict – unleashing unmetabolized shadow into the relational field. Like all work of depth, this art form evolves slowly, as it marinates and cooks in the alchemical vessel of the body.

May we be kind to our partners as we navigate this territory together, honoring the vehicle of intimacy as one of the most transformative, sacred, and challenging that we have in our modern world.

Photo by Manfred Richter

Our annual spring retreat will take place April 22-27, 2020 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with myself and Jeff Foster. Please stay tuned to our websites, Facebook pages, and this blog for additional information. Tickets will go on sale on January 1. 

My online community, co-facilitated with Jeff Foster - Befriending Yourself: Meditative, Nondual, and Depth Psychological Perspectives - is currently closed to new members. To learn about the program and put your name on the mailing list for future re-opens, 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 Ourselves in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020. 

The mystery of the "Other"

It is so natural to long for deep relationship with another, a fellow traveler with whom to navigate the twists and turns, to explore the uncharted lands of the heart and wild terrain of the body. To enter the dark and light places and seed them together with shared essence.

In our own unique ways, we call out for union, to no longer postpone entry into the temple. This yearning is pure, valid, and can be honored for its authenticity. While it may seem that we are forsaken, the return message is always given. It is found inside the longing, within the core of the burning and not in its resolution.

Alas, the prayer is heard. In response, the “other” appears. But is it the one we imagined? The holy other does not always appear in external form, but often as shards and pieces of soul, and luminous light-fragments of the heart.

Sadness rushes onto the scene: “When will you practice intimacy with me?” Loneliness is next, pleading for a moment of your undistracted attention. Shame, rage, despair, grief, jealousy, fear: “We are here too. Do not abandon us and turn away for some other lover.”

When we make the call for the other to return, the ancient ones will always respond, spinning and shifting the forms of the phenomenal world, arranging meetings and encounters with the emanations in all their glory and mess.

These ones arrive not as enemy to disrupt, but as the most true, faithful lover, never able to truly abandon you. Not to harm but to illuminate. Not to fragment but to seed wholeness.

In that encounter, we are reminded that we will never be able to be more intimate with another than we are with the unwanted lovers within. If we do not provide sanctuary and safe passage for the unmet inside, how will we ever truly recognize, breathe, and play with the beloved in external form?

Photo by Bettina Güber

My online community, co-facilitated with Jeff Foster - Befriending Yourself: Meditative, Nondual, and Depth Psychological Perspectives - is currently closed to new members. To learn about the program and put your name on the mailing list for future re-opens, 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 Ourselves in Difficult Times, will be published by Sounds True in 2020.