Disappointing another

In any meaningful relationship, we will inevitably disappoint our partners, families, and friends. To skillfully navigate the energies of disappointment is a real yoga that can take quite a lot of awareness (and compassion). The landscape of disappointing another can be incredibly challenging, especially if our role in early relationships was to set aside our own needs for another, where caring for them was the primary way that we received love and attention.

What is it like for you to disappoint someone? To let them down? To not be able to save them? To feel that you could be doing more to care for their unlived life? To not be able to mend their broken heart? What does it mean about you if you disappoint them? What are the consequences if you are not able to “make them happy” or remove their anxiety, meaninglessness, or uncertainty?

Will you be abandoned if you disappoint them? Will you be the target of rage and judgment? Will you be shamed? Are you unsafe? Should you just go ahead and try to make them feel better at all costs, even if detrimental to your own self?

What are the feelings and emotional conclusions you are asked to tend to in the wake of your letting another down, when you aren't able to help them, see them, and be there for them in the way they need in a given moment? When no matter how hard you try, they feel that you have misunderstood and let them down.

Aren’t we supposed to meet their anxiety, heartbreak, phobias, and symptoms in a way that is consistently helpful, empathic, and supportive? Say insightful things? Give wise advice? Fix them? Cure them? Heal them? Make it all go away? What if we fail and they become disappointed? What does it mean about us as humans (and healers) if we are not healing, but disappointing?

It’s some very rich territory that we can explore.

Photo by Guzi11

It's okay to feel sad

It's okay to feel sad, to be uncertain about it all, to be melancholic, to lament, and to grieve.

Despite the madness of our world and a collective disembodiment to the blue shades of the spectrum, these states are not evidence that something is wrong with you, that you have failed, that you need to meditate more, pray harder, become better at staying in the present moment, manifest the opposite of sadness, or that you are lost or beyond redemption.

It is high-voltage evidence that you are alive, with a tender beating heart, subtle and perceptive mirror neurons, and senses that are open to the chaotic glory of being a human being who is simultaneously broken and whole.

Just in this one moment, be sad. Fully. Not partially. Go inside the sadness. Find the sad one there. Speak with her, listen to him, feel what she is feeling, see what he is seeing, stay embodied to the reality that you are a vessel, a temple where the lost orphans of psyche and soma can come to rest.

Separate a bit from the visitors so you do not fuse with them. Dare to go close, but not too close. Intimacy without fusion. Relationship without merging, honoring your own integrity and perspective. Find the boundary which is provocative, but not flooding. Enter the middle. Provide sanctuary and safe passage for the broken pieces to unfold and illuminate. For they, too, are filled with light.

Sadness is not something you need to fix, cure, or transform. It need not be healed but held. You need not shift sadness into some “higher” state or apply teachings so that it will yield into something else. For it is complete and pure on its own.

With the fire of awareness and the ally of your breath, descend into your belly, touch your heart, tend to your throat. Go on a journey into the core of the feeling, the sensations, images, and the raw, shaky life that is longing to be held. And listen.

It is by way of this journey that sadness will be revealed to be what it is, a secret wisdom-guide and bridge into the universal heart, a messenger of power, mercy, and fierce compassion that wants you as its midwife.

Photo by jensphotography

Free video - The Alchemy of the Heart

Dear friend, 

I recently recorded a video on "The Alchemy of the Heart," which you can watch here:

>>Access the short video webinar on The Alchemy of the Heart here

During the webinar, we’ll explore:

- The importance of taking time each day to attune to the images, feelings, and other living messages that are reaching out from the soul

- How metaphors and images from the alchemical tradition can help us on our unique journeys of individuation and healing

- Bringing awareness and compassion to those parts of us that may have an unconscious investment in keeping things the way they are

- How our deepest emotional vulnerabilities and sensitivities are unique passageways into the soul

In this free short webinar, I speak about the nature of healing through the varied lenses of the alchemical imagination, relational neuroscience, meditative awareness, and depth and somatic psychologies.

Each of these doorways provide a series of perspectives and practices through which we can come to know who we are as open, sensitive, relational human beings, with bodies and feelings that can sometimes shatter and hurt.

But it is in the core of this shattering, inside the shards of the heart and fragmented pieces of the soul that the mysteries of healing are to be found. It is inside the wound that the tincture is flowing. The ancient alchemists — our friends on the journey — referred to the illumination arising out of the darkness as the scintilla, or the sparks of light.

Healing may never look quite like we expected or imagined – it’s just too wild and untamed for all that. It requires that we question the status quo of the culture and shift our perception outside the intergenerational matrices of collectivity and trance.

Photo by Colin Watts