Already held

In those moments when we are held, our nervous systems down-regulate, our minds soften, our hearts open, and we come into an ancient sort of rest. That rest that we've been longing for in a lifetime that always seemed just out of reach. The rest from becoming.

While our true nature as open, luminous awareness is the ultimate holding environment, as tender human beings we are wired to rest within a relational matrix. To enter into this field with another – weaved of the alchemical substances of presence and of space – is one of the great mysteries of the embodied world.

Held by another, held within by our own hearts, or held by a star - despite the pain and confusion and hopelessness and doubt - somehow we are already held. It's not something we must earn or deserve or frantically search for.

Held by the morning light as it comes into a room, by the song of the birds, by the imaginal world. Somehow. Already held.

Photo by RitaE/ Deutschland via Pixabay

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

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, 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

An unfolding partner

In my experience, grief is not something we “get over” by following pre-prescribed stages, but something we may be asked to tend to throughout our lives. It is very individual and takes a unique expression for each person.

The timeline for this voyage is not given by the psychiatric community, nor by insurance panels or teachers of spirituality, but written in the stars. To pathologize the experience of grief is a work against nature.

The grieving process may not have an endpoint, a goal line, or state of completion in which we come to some final resolution, where we “finish” and land in some untouchable place, free from falling apart and breaking into pieces yet again.

While some forms of spirituality and healing have this fantasied end state as a targeted objective, the heart is endless and grief may be a companion for the duration of a life.

For me it is not so much a process as a non-linear, unfolding partner. It moves not by way of straight line, but by that of circle and spiral.

Art by Hans Braxmeier

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

The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, 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

Intelligence within the wound

In the alchemical and tantric traditions, it is believed that our wounds contain information and if we eliminate the hurt places, we will lose contact with the intelligence within them. Though the complex may never be fully eradicated, our relationship with it can change profoundly. Even though it may continue to arise, it does so within the context of enormous space and while perhaps still frustrating and painful, it is no longer able to throw us off center in the same way and tends to dissolve in shorter and shorter periods of time.

For example, a difficult conversation triggering cascading shame, rage, overwhelm, and abandonment that once took an hour (or more) to digest and metabolize, may lose its charge in 30 minutes, or 15, or 5. Eventually, in some situations, we may even notice that the activated material dissolves simultaneously with its arising, as we are able to infuse arising experience with new levels of curiosity, warmth, and awareness.

In certain meditative experience, while challenging thoughts, feelings, and sensations continue to emerge in moments of activation, they lose their charge almost immediately, where the process of arising and dissolution co-emerge, revealing not two processes, but one. If we observe carefully we may not be able to separate the arising-dissolving cycle. This is something we can each experiment with, slowly, for a few seconds at a time, within the fire of our own direct experience.

And in this embodied investigation, we might come to realize that we need not get rid of or purge certain thoughts and feelings in order to live a life of freedom, spontaneity, creativity, and aliveness. But tend to the fire in a new way, reordering our perception, and infusing the material with a wild sort of love.

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

The next book, A Friend of the Breath, 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