In times of transition

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. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here. 

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. 

Lunar shades of the spectrum

There’s a fantasy that we’re supposed to know what to do with our lives. And if we do not then this is clear evidence that something is wrong with us, that some cosmic error has occurred which must urgently be remedied by figuring it all out.

Especially if accompanied by waves of uncertainty, hopelessness, and confusion… more evidence that we have failed or fallen short, fueled by further imagination that psychic states such as contradiction, doubt, and deflation are not very “spiritual.”

What about the endless stream of “high” vibrations? The manifesting of more and more cool things for myself, that I’ve dreamed will make me happy? And the accompanying inflations of a happy-happy solar-based self-help industry which has pathologized the wisdom of the darker, lunar shades of the spectrum.

At times it will appear that nothing is happening, which can lead to a framing that we are “stuck,” “not doing it right,” or “lost in some sort of ‘low vibration.’” The mind has a nearly unlimited capacity to fantasize, especially in ways that enact early patterning of shame, self-abandonment, and misattuned empathic failure.

But before we turn from the non-conventional allies of confusion and doubt, let us slow down and reimagine. In a world that is fixated with doing, with answers, and with resolving the contradictions and wildness of the human being, we must remember that death is required for new forms of love and creativity to emerge.

As an experiment, you could say out loud, with the earth as your witness, “I don’t know.” And give yourself permission to not-know, for now, without any shame, judgment, or pressure to resolve the mysteries of the heart.

There is profound wisdom and creativity in the core of not-knowing, in slowness, in patience, and in rest, but we must retrain ourselves to receive that level of revelation. In this reception, we see that not-knowing is a perfectly valid, honorable, and authentic place to be, and not in need of transformation. It is a pure expression of life, in and of itself, exactly as it is. Its value is not in its transcendence, but in its embodied embrace.

Art by Anja Osenberg

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. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here. 

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 sliver of hope

One way to speak about trauma is a state of psychic unbearability. Where thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images begin to loop, cascade, and waterfall upon us.

We cannot contain, tolerate, or hold it. We’re on the edge of utter fragmentation, drowning in a black pool, slipping underneath the quicksand.

To have another person, with a soothed empathic nervous system, near us, resonating right-brain to right-brain, to help us to collect the pieces into a sealed container, can appear as a momentary miracle.

Even if the intensity does not lessen, somehow we sense at a very primordial level that we will not go down. We will make it. There is a sliver of hope. A small piece of light.

To help another in this process of metabolization - to provide a home for that level of overwhelm, terror, and dysregulation - to digest it together and offer it back to them in more manageable bits, is an act of love.

Like a mother bird who eats and partially digests a worm for her sweet little babies before spitting it back into their mouths.

No, we cannot always provide this function and we must be honest with ourselves about our real-time capacities and our agreements with others, at times helping in other ways, including establishing clear boundaries in order to protect our own integrity. To not shame ourselves for what we are able to provide in a given moment.

To offer our listening presence, a blessing, some warmth, a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on; to pray that this one be guided, held, and not forsaken. To set aside our need for them to heal, shift, or transform, “get over” what they are experiencing, or go through it in a way that prevents confrontation with our own unfelt emotional world.

To seed the interactional field with hope, mercy, and kindness... the activity of intergenerational reorganization.

To breathe with them, listen carefully, say even a few simple words, anything so that they feel felt in that moment, that they are not alone.

Never underestimate the power of love and the devastating truth that so many of our dear fellow travelers have never really received this, a safe container in which to tend to overwhelming thoughts, feelings, and memories.

May we do whatever we can to help this world, to bear witness to the wildness of the human heart and nervous system to reorganize, and to the soul shining out of all sentient life.

Photo by Rene Rauschenberger

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. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here. 

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 ally is revealed

As long as we have a body, there will be shadow. The goal isn’t to “get rid of” the shadow or even to “fully integrate” it, as its emanations are being ever created by way of psychic movement and creativity.

Rather, to illuminate and engage it more consciously, as partner, emissary, even lover. While at times it may appear as enemy, underneath the disguise the ally is revealed.

It is only through cultivating a relationship with it that we will not project its contents onto others or into the world… to allow it to take its rightful place in the larger ecology of what we are, as one voice or figure among many. In this way its wrathful intelligence can find its way here.

The shadow is not some worthless, neurotic repository of unenlightened thoughts, feelings, and impulses, but hidden expressions of wisdom, creativity, and soul, awaiting redemption and the light of awareness.

It is through the very natural and human process of projection that we come to know disavowed and previously undisclosed parts of ourselves, pieces of soul that have fallen out of awareness or have not yet found a proper portal for emergence.

That which we are unable to access, dancing and twirling within the personal and archetypal psyche, will make itself known as it is evoked in another or enacted within the relational field.

The purpose of shadow work is not to eliminate shadow. Shadow is not pathology but is path.

Photo by Anja/ cocoparisienne

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. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here. 

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.