What is wanting to be met now?

In a moment of activation, with the ally of the breath, shift your awareness out of the overwhelming narrative, for it is no longer safe there. The voices of the past, of a culture gone a bit mad, unable to hold and provide a home for the intelligence of the surging emotional landscape.

The invitation is into reimagination and dreaming a new dream. Telling a new story, reauthoring and reimagining how you see, play, and dance with self, others, and the world.

Carve a new pathway, one that does not drop you down the conditioned rabbit hole of unworthiness and self-blame, or that pathologizes your vulnerability, uncertainty, and shakiness. Reorganize the leftover grooves of an earlier time, by way of empathy, attunement, and embodied presence.

Conserve your precious life energy, remove it from that which is no longer working in your best interest, and direct into your belly, your heart, your throat, and your core. And ask: what is wanting to be met now? What is emerging for just a moment of curious awareness, not come as an enemy to harm, but as a harbinger of integration, an emissary of life?

In what way am I being asked to care for the vulnerable, the tender, and the shaky within me, to tend to myself in a new way?

Once the activation is cooled with the rains of loving kindness, you can then go back into the narrative itself with the magic of creative, visionary thinking and use the mind, the majestic brain, to reorganize… but doing so will be much more effective once the fire is tended to by staying close.

Replace the worn-out circuitry of shame, unworthiness, and self-abandonment with the emerging scaffolding of curiosity, compassion, and radical self-care. Return home. For it is from this home that we will be able to help others, to hold them, hear them, and meet the pain of the world in wild and creative new ways.

Photo by MabelAmber/ Amsterdam

My latest book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster 

Initiation

There is a certain death that occurs as part of the healing process, in the deepening of self-awareness, something that does not survive illumination. While it is tempting to spin out of the uncertainty and into rebirth, there is wisdom and a purity within the reorganization itself, which we cannot know if we abandon it prematurely.

The dissolution itself is initiation as it offers vision not available in the scramble to put things back together. An old part of ourselves that has accompanied us for so long, a fellow traveler is no longer permitted to continue the journey by our side. The crumbling of an old dream – my life and the way I was so sure it was going to turn out.

This prior soul-companion can be another person or it can be a member of the inner family - an image, a feeling, a lens through which we’d been seeing ourselves and others; a part of our world that has come to the end of its meaning, the end of its life.

In order to be initiated in this way, we must slow down, return into the earth and the mud and the ground, and somehow cut into the urgency to enter into the next phase while the current one is still being illuminated. To take some time to mourn the reassembling of our world, to grieve all that we will inevitably lose as we heal and awaken. To set aside what we will get, what is coming next, and attune to now.

To tend to the pieces of soul, the shards of the heart, and the fragments of the psyche that are being dissolved, to honor the role they have played, for standing by us for so long, and providing refuge during difficult and transitional times. To grieve the loss of their companionship and allow them to continue into whatever realm is next for them, permission to travel and experience new things.

To stand in awe at this process, despite the profound pain and grief, to care for all of it as we allow the mystery to reveal itself in deeper and deeper ways. To know that healing and awakening is messy, glorious, and full-spectrum… and is not only an act of creation, but one of destruction as well.

Image from Liber Novus, Jung’s Red Book

My latest book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster 

Embodied not-knowing

At times it will appear that nothing is happening, which can lead to the conclusion that we are “stuck,” “not doing it right,” that we’ve failed, fallen short yet again, or not surrendered enough. The mind has a nearly unlimited capacity to fantasize, especially in ways that follow early neural pathways of shame, self-abandonment, and painful organizations of unworthiness.

It is easy and natural to behold the beloved when he appears as peace, flow, happiness, and gratitude. But when she comes raging as nothingness, flatness, numbness, and confusion, we can become disoriented and return to that conditioned circuitry for navigation.

But for the beloved, each of her emissaries are equally holy, infused with the sacred, and deeper invitations into the tender openness of the body and the heart.

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, answers, and resolving the wild, contradictory activity of love, we must remember that death is required for new forms of life and creativity to emerge.

As an experiment in radical self-compassion, you could give yourself permission to not-know, for now, without any shame, judgment, or pressure to urgently find answers or to resolve the mystery. But to rest and to trust in the unfolding of the human heart.

This embodied not-knowing is not passive or a resigned giving up, but alive, fiery, curious, and honoring of the dark as well as the light. There is profound wisdom and creativity in the core of not-knowing, in slowness, 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 full-spectrum embrace.

Photographer unknown, the harvest bounty of the Colorado autumn

My latest book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available 

The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come

The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster