New book/ Kindle version - The Path Is Everywhere

Dear friends, the Amazon Kindle/ electronic version of my book, The Path Is Everywhere, is now available. You can find it here. I hope you enjoy the book and find it helpful.

Drawing on my personal journey as well as my work with others as a therapist and guide, I wrote The Path Is Everywhere with the intention that it serve as a provocative, alive, and compassionate invitation to re-enchant our ideas about healing and spiritual awakening in the modern world.

Weaving together the wisdom streams of contemplative spirituality, relational and somatic psychotherapy, and the poetic imagination, The Path Is Everywhere reminds us that the depth and magic of the sacred world is always already here, buried in our emotions, bodies, relationships, and in the natural world itself.

Many have grown weary from a long search, exhausted from an endless quest to improve, hold it all together, heal all their wounds, and complete some mythical spiritual journey. But you are not a project to be solved. You are a mystery coming into form, and you have the raw materials that you need, right now, to live a life of profound depth, purpose, and meaning.

We hear much about healing and spiritual awakening, and the deep joy, clarity, and peace that are its promised fruits. Often ignored, however, are the disappointments of awakening and the ways it can shatter our hearts, breaking us open to the reality of the crucifixion, resurrection, and transfiguration we are likely to encounter along the way.

In the rush to convert the negative to the positive, manifest everything we believe we want, and manage our lives into some permanent state of "happiness," we lose contact with the reality that there is no transfiguration without embodiment to the dark cross within. The journey of becoming a true human person is messy by nature, as it emerges directly out of the unknown and requires compassionate confrontation with the entirety of what we are.

As we journey together as fellow travelers, let us commit to embracing both the joy and the heartbreak of the path, and bear witness to the wisdom shining out of our immediate experience, whether it appears as sadness, bliss, despair, or great joy. Grace will appear in both sweet and fierce forms but it is still grace, sent from beyond to open us to the radiant fullness of being.

It is my hope that these words, as limited as all words are, will somehow ignite a fire within you, spreading in the four directions, seeding everyone and everything in its wake with the erupting and outrageously creative energies of pure love. And that this book will make even a minuscule contribution to the reduction of suffering in our world.

A firestorm of presence

Just below the compelling storyline, beneath the colorful emotional landscape, there exists a rich, mysterious world of sensations: a somatically organized field of intelligence, creativity, and aliveness.

It is dizzying here, awash with particles of the unknown. It is so unguarded, so naked, so raw … exhilarating in a sense, but also disorienting as there is no reference point around which we can organize.

The urge to return to the known, to get hold of “my life,” and to renew the trance that we are in control can appear as overwhelm in the nervous system. Without dishonoring the longing to return to solid ground, the invitation is into deep rest, to relax into the unstructured nature of pure being, and into the truth of not-knowing.

Breathe deeply from your lower belly. Feel your feet on the ground. Lay your hands on your heart. Allow yourself to sink into the mud of the earth while simultaneously opening into the heavens above. Behold the rare opportunity that has been given to know what it is like for spirit to come into form.

While the mind will scramble in its attempt to locate a problem, dare to consider that nothing is wrong, nothing need urgently be resolved, and that no answers are coming … for now. Open instead to the sacredness of the question, which is where you will meet the mystery.

You are in the nonordinary world of unconditioned awareness: strangely familiar but dreamlike and highly creative. Here, there is a primordial sort of trust that no matter what might be going on in your life, nonetheless you have everything you need to fully participate here, to know a causeless joy, and to make meaning of your life in new ways.

While the mind may continue its search for what is wrong—based on a lifetime of innocent attempts to ensure your survival—in this new place there are no “problems,” no complaints, no blaming, nothing to transcend, nothing to be transformed, nothing lacking that must be manifested, and no spell of unworthiness in which to get tangled.

There is no “spirituality” here or any movement to replace one experience with another. No journey to make from multiplicity to oneness. No evidence that you are healed or awakened, or not. Just pure life. A firestorm of presence, aliveness, intimacy, and warmth.

These qualities have somehow come together and have assembled your very own heart. There is no greater miracle than this.

Photo of the holding field of Maroon Bells, nearby in Aspen, taken by Laura and Doug Bennett

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

The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now (we're about 85% sold out as of June 1)

The alchemy of healthy intimate relationship

What is the best way to prepare for a healthy, deeply satisfying intimate relationship? How can you attract the right partner? Someone who can accompany you on the path, a fellow traveler who is genuinely interested in exploring relationship as a transformative, modern-day crucible of healing and awakening?

There are many responses to these sorts of questions: workshops to attend, ten “secrets” to attract your perfect soul mate, twelve steps to manifesting your twin flame, tantric practices to learn and master. It can be important to experiment with any approach you feel drawn to and is resonant with your longing.

The suggestion I usually make, however, is not nearly as sexy or compelling, or all that fun or flashy, or even overtly “spiritual”: learn how to take care of yourself. Start there and you will lay the foundation for a rich, meaningful, and nourishing relationship with another. For it is the degree to which you are able to take responsibility for your own core emotional wounding that you will release your partner(s) from this burden, which is not theirs to carry. 

As long as there is a subtle expectation that your partner’s role is to enact the archetype of the “good other” that was missing in earlier developmental times, you will not be able to assume the risk that intimacy demands, lead with your vulnerability, and harness the incredibly transformational energy of the relational field.

Allow yourself to become curious about what triggers you, the feelings you’ll do anything not to feel, and the unique behaviors you engage in to distract yourself from activating emotional experience. Rather than urgently spinning to find relief from this material, instead move closer toward it. Train yourself to enter inside it, touch it, feel it, and come to know its texture. Provide a holding environment where the feelings can be illuminated, be worked through, and integrated in loving presence.

To what degree do you believe another person will fill the void for you, make the emptiness go away, relieve you from feelings and limiting beliefs you do not want to confront, and protect you from the unattended ghosts of your unlived life? As spiritually-oriented people, we are quite sure that we have transcended all this, but please inquire carefully, for its expressions can be subtle. As long as we are looking to our partners to fulfill those functions that were not offered to us as young children, it will be difficult to come into a fulfilling, loving relationship that is not riddled with the pain of projection.

Your partner is here to help and support you, and make the journey by your side as a loving, caring fellow traveler of the path. But they are not here to (re)parent you or take care of your unlived life for you, for this is your sacred work and it would be unkind of them to attempt to take these holy tasks from you. All the long-lost allies of abandonment, rejection, unworthiness, and shame. Rage, jealousy, unmet grief and partly processed loneliness. 

They have all come into the relational field with you, as part of an extraordinary gathering.

When all is said and done, perhaps there is no secret to co-creating a fulfilling, supportive, mutually beneficial intimate relationship, as it is always in the end a movement of the unknown. Healthy intimacy is not something you will figure out one day by way of some checklist or magical formula, but something you are asked to live in each moment, in all its chaotic glory. By learning to take care of yourself, you are creating a foundation upon which the mysteries of intimacy can come alive within and around you, providing a crucible like no other for the great work of aliveness that you have come here to embody.

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

The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now (we're about 85% sold out as of June 1)