The weaving of new cloth

At times, the most wise, skillful, and compassionate action is to establish a boundary with another person. To stand up and assertively say No. To move in an empowered and swift way to protect our own integrity. To privilege our own autonomy and interiority. To meet narcissism, abuse, and neglect with fiery aliveness.

This is not only the case with “external” others – those other persons in our lives – but also with the multitude of “internal” others as they shift shapes and take form as voices, figures, and images of the interior landscape. These visitors can be relentless and do not give up easily. But they have no choice other than to surrender, ultimately, to what you really are.

The voices that come and declare – “There is something wrong with you. You have failed yet again. You have fallen short. You have done life wrong. You are no good. You are uninteresting. You are unlovable as you are.”

The voices of the past, the shadow of the teachers and the culture, the lineages of intergenerational trauma and unconsciousness. The voices of a world that has forgotten the holy within, that have lost touch with the sacredness of the human form.

These internal characters must also be met with the boundaries of curiosity, consciousness, and the intention to care for ourselves in radical new ways. To enter relationship with these ones, to dialogue with these figures and to proclaim our own basic goodness. To not merely accept their conclusions, reality tunnels, and the lenses through which they have come to see things. But to step into what we are.

To take the risk of telling a new story, dreaming a new dream, spinning out a new tale, weaving new cloth. And to allow ourselves to be turned by the great Weaver itself… as new vision is revealed.

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon. 

We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here. 

The magic of a book

One of the gifts of isolation, solitude, and social distancing is the opportunity to reconnect with pieces of soul and strands of vision that have become lost in the busyness of our ordinary lives.

Reading for many has become a lost art. We can become so used to turning on the news, scrolling through Facebook, becoming lost in hours of YouTube or Netflix, or fused with one electronic device or another. Nothing wrong with any of these, but at times an alternative portal will open.

To take a book and find a place within your home or under a tree or out in the park and go on a pilgrimage with it. Ask the stars to help you to find a place to just be for a while and open to revelation.

It need not be a “spiritual” book, though of course those are fine, too. A book of poetry, a novel, a book of art history, or of mythology.

Allow its images to come alive, its metaphors, its characters… step into the poetic landscape with the figures and enter a state of receptivity and play. Sense what they are sensing, feel what they are feeling as these correspond with the internal others dancing within you.

Not necessarily reading for “information,” but for communion. Allow the language to open you, to uncover a feeling you haven’t felt for a long time, an ache in the heart that longs for tending, a dream you had forgotten, a vision that you sense circling around you.

Read a paragraph or two and close the book. Enter the interactional field – with the natural world, with the visions, figures, moods, feelings, and images that seek your attention, your curiosity, your care, and just a moment of your being-ness.

We can so easily forget the magic of this place, of the imaginal realms, of those liminal places in between the physical world of matter and the transcendental realm of pure spirit. In the liminal we can dance and play and see and perceive and sense and intuit something holy.

A good book can help us do this, can serve as a companion as we step into uncharted territory.

Reading has been such an important part of my life. My books are my friends, lovers, allies, guides, and they also challenge me, break me open, tenderize and marinate me in the Unknown. They reveal how little I know about this world, this soul, this heart, this place, and the unique opportunity to be here. I find this so lifegiving.

I fantasize that perhaps in other worlds there are no books. That is sad to think about. For me, at least.

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon. 

We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here. 

A friend to another in difficult times

During times of uncertainty and transition, we will inevitably be asked to companion a friend, family member, client, or patient who is in the process of falling apart, unraveling, hopeless, and scared.

While it is natural to want to do whatever you can to help them feel better, listen carefully to what it is they are truly asking for. Extend to them a calm, soothed nervous system where their experience can be validated and held, exactly as it is. Ensure them that they need not "get over it," "accept everything as it is," "stay in the present," shift, transform, or heal in order for you to stay close.

To provide such an environment, you must first offer safe passage for the unmetabolized in yourself: the unmet sadness, unacknowledged fear, discarded grief, disavowed hopelessness, and disembodied aloneness. Otherwise, you may rush to talk them out of their experience prematurely, urgently spinning to relieve them of their feelings as a way to cut into your own anxiety and discomfort. All the while subtly and unconsciously turning from the raging intelligence buried within the dark.

Together with them, make the commitment to not pathologize their experience. Fear is not pathology. Hopelessness is not pathology. Grief is not pathology. They are path.

Collect the pieces of the broken world and create a container of empathy and love for the crumbled hopes and dreams to be held and tended to with the pieces of light. Honor the holy truth that the forms that love take will always fall apart – for this is their nature – in order that they may come back together in more integrated and cohesive ways.

Please do whatever you can to help others in whatever way you are able: attune to their emotional experience such that they feel felt, listen carefully to what they are saying, and how they are attempting to make sense of this time.

Slow way down, bracket your favorite psychological and spiritual jargon and theories, and sink into the space between you, for it is filled with sacred data. Hold them in your heart, speak kind words, and provide safe passage for soul to disclose its mysteries. And remind them that love is here and is alive.

Photo by Marquise Kamanke

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon. 

We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here. 

An invisible bridge

There are times when things fall apart. When internal and external structures, references points, and the axis around which we spin is dissolved… not by ourselves, but by nature, by the great Other.

In the face of this dissolution, it is very natural to go through a process of disbelief, fear, and rage. What will happen to me? To my family? To this world? To sentient life?

It is essential that we turn into this dissolution, which is a wrathful, yet holy emanation of the soul, of the beloved as he or she or it makes its way into this world of time and space.

To take some moments to slow down, root into the earth, and to craft these bodies as vessels to contain, hold, and integrate the feelings, the images, the impulses, and the uncertainty. These experiences, though difficult and challenging to tend, are not obstacles to our path, but are the very essence of the path itself.

As we offer safe passage and sanctuary for the falling apart of me and my world and how I dreamed it would all turn out, we step into the realm of the warrior. Our heart is turned into a temple. Inside this temple, fearlessness does not mean never being afraid, or pathologizing fear, transcending, or shaming it. It means the profound, alive, creative, empowered willingness to meet fear, moment by moment, with the power and beauty of our brokenness.

As we turn this body into a vessel of presence, attunement, curiosity, and love – and as we metabolize and assimilate that which we’re being asked to hold now – we might discover a tenderness underneath it all, a soft spot, even a soreness, an ache. It is an ache of grief for this world, for how fragile, temporary, delicate, and tenuous it truly is here.

How precious it is, how rare, how outrageous, even, to be given another breath. This breath. And this one.

In this recognition, we see that whether things are falling apart or staying together, somehow it is workable, what we’re feeling is valid, and that our lifeline is that invisible bridge that connects one heart with another. 

My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. 

My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon. 

My monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, co-facilitated with author and spiritual teacher Jeff Foster, is currently closed to new members, but periodically opens throughout the year. To place your name on the mailing list for additional information, please visit the course page here.