Alone on an empty beach, overflowing with a full heart. My fellow travelers have gathered - the sea gulls, the ocean, the sand, and the moon.
The longing of a lifetime fulfilled in this moment. Only one prayer remains: Thank you.
Sending love to my friends everywhere on this Christmas day. Thank you for sharing your sacred stories, pain, and joy with me in 2017 and for never letting me forget the courage, bravery, and unstoppable, outrageous, wildness, and creativity of the human heart.
In the face of an avalanche of painful emotion and limiting self-beliefs, we can fall down the rabbit hole and drown in the momentum of a lifetime.
Whose thoughts, feelings, and voices are they anyway? Are they my own, or am I carrying the exiles of unworthiness and trauma of my parents, grandparents, ancestors, and culture?
In a moment of activation, it’s not easy to cut through the trance and step outside the orbit of the conditioned psyche. The invitation is to flood the arising inner family with space, presence, curiosity, and compassion. To encode new circuitry and choose a new way.
Though it can feel like moving a mountain, here we are. Together. Now. It is up to each of us to bring these fruits can into the collective, not only for our own benefit, but for our brothers and sisters everywhere.
To remember what is most important, and to live from that. To take a risk in allowing another to matter, to allow this life to truly matter. To care more, not less. To set aside the fantasy of transcending our vulnerability and sensitivity, and instead making use of the broken and the tender as bridges into the hearts of others. To no longer stay on the sidelines, but to fully participate in the bounty that has been placed inside and around us.
To allow Christ to be born inside our hearts, raging and alive, buried in the core of our cells, organs, and synapses, overflowing with the water of life. To behold that wisdom essence as it re-colors our perception, cleanses our imagination, and bathes our nervous system in rest, creativity, breath, and new life.
May we pause today in awe, take a break from the holiday madness and remember the gift of life. Behold the utter majesty of being given a human body, the chance to touch the sand, feel the water, and explore the mystery with our fellow travelers.
On this new day, let us share the most profound gift of our presence, listening carefully to others and what is most alive in their hearts. To care deeply about how they are organizing and making meaning of their experience, and what matters most to them.
To speak words of kindness, to touch and hold them and do what we can so that they feel felt. To validate their emotional worlds and provide safe haven for their essence to unfold in the field between us.
And to remember that in the end, when we are passing from this world, there may be only one thing that truly matters: how well did I love when I was here.
Emotionally-sensitive, somatically-grounded inner work is unique to each nervous system. We must discover for ourselves the most skillful, direct, and compassionate ways to open and enter into the body, psyche, and heart. No one can tell you what the right way is for you. The journey is individual by nature, requiring experiential, primary experience; a collective spirituality will never meet the longing within.
It is difficult to do emotional-shadow work on our own, and is often best approached via an empathic, attuned relational field, where our experience can be co-regulated, in very small doses, titrating and pendulating emerging feeling states by way of the relational field itself. To “borrow” another’s soothed, calm nervous system as we enter into the uncharted territory of the body and psyche.
The way of direct revelation and embodied, experiential discovery is not the easy way. It is not the path of five-steps to empowerment, manifestation, or thinking our way into permanent happiness, abundance, and bliss. It is a humble journey, heart wrenching at times, as we will inevitably be asked to compassionately confront the disowned selves that are longing for reunion with the inner family.
The goal is not to become dependent upon another in an unhealthy way, but over time to learn the art of self-regulation and be able to shift wisely, skillfully, and compassionately between the two.
Wherever you are on your journey, you can ask a guide to bear witness as you move into unknown territory, honoring the truth that reorganization requires an immense outpouring of courage and support. Find a therapist, lover, mentor, or friend; a tree, a bird, a mountain, or dog; the sky, the sun, the stars, or the moon. A God or Goddess, wise inner figure, or being of light. Allow your symptoms to merge into these protectors and enter into dialogue, practicing intimacy with the inner material, but without fusing with it.
It is unlikely we’ll ever fully understand or resolve the mystery of self and other, of separation and union, of sun and moon. But we can break open into the questions together, as beginners, as amateurs, and as servants of the mystery.
