We’ve all been given experience in this life that we haven’t been able to process consciously. For whatever reason, it was just too much. Overflow in the vessel.
To turn toward it directly was a portal into overwhelm, shut down, collapse, and fragmentation. It was intelligent to protect a sensitive psyche and nervous system.
Emotional experience that is unable to be felt, articulated, made sense of, and integrated becomes sequestered into underground storage, into neural networks and shadow regions, held in our bellies, hearts, and throats; frozen and crystallized into our muscles, organs, and cell tissue.
From here, it colors our perception and capacity to imagine and play in reality.
Unlived, undigested psychic material becomes personified as the figures who come to visit us during the dream time as well as our dayworld fantasies. Not to harm or take us down. Not as an obstacle to our path, but as an emissary of the path itself. A representative of a future wholeness; an ally of integration, though in an unrecognized, sometimes wrathful form.
There are moments in my therapy practice when I’ll be sitting with someone who is really struggling. But there’s a way that they can’t actually feel what’s happening, they can’t contact the felt quality of the open wound. It’s just not safe enough. And by this “someone,” I of course include myself.
There is no healing without the wound being open first, weeping and seeping its essence, for a closed wound cannot receive the tincture. In a way that the mind has a difficult time understanding, inside the wound the medicine is already active.
In the very center of the physical and subtle tears, the lost orphans of psyche and soma reside, awaiting the nectar that will unfreeze and de-crystallize them, and reveal an open door.
It’s possible to slow down now, lay on the Earth, go into the forest, into inner and outer nature and unveil a portal to these ones, and communicate our intention, desire, care, and devotion to know and hold them, and to help them find their way home.
This isn’t something we do only for ourselves, but for all of life: including the ancestors and the ones who have yet to arrive here, circling until conditions are ripe.
Art credit: The Path is Everywhere by Krista Marlena
A Sanctuary of the Heart: live, in-person retreat with me and Jeff Foster - June 3-8, 2025 in Loveland, Colorado - stay tuned for more information
