A theatre of the sacred

Go out under her tonight and dissolve the trance that something is missing. You are neither broken, nor whole but weaved of particles of the vast. Love has no bias for whole over broken, unity over multiplicity, or spirit over matter, but will make use of each of equally to open a portal into the mystery.

As you rest in the lunar aliveness, allow the veil to part, revealing a fragrance, an image, a feeling, a mood, a sound, a vision to appear. Root into the earth, open to the heavens, sink into the mud. Breathe into the moon and feel her breath as the return message. Allow these to circulate within and around you.

While we may continue to play hide and seek—at times seen and at other times concealed—the beloved is always, already inside us. Planting seeds that come to fruit each time we say something kind, hold another who is suffering, and allow ourselves to be crafted as a vessel for love to come here.

Though the longing may ache, the cosmic enactment of lost and found is not error but holy, not a mistake but benediction, not evidence that you have failed, but that you have been heard. A theatre of the sacred.

At times holding it all together only in the next moment to fall apart yet again. The rotation of the stars as a template for the alchemical rotatio of dream, imagination, fantasy, and play. All alive and moving within you.

Photo credit: the Sonoran Desert near Chandler, Arizona by Saija Lehtonen

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 

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

Your vulnerability is not a mistake

It is not an error
that you have been born
a sensitive human being,
with a tender nervous system
and a heart that is sometimes
broken.

Your vulnerability is not a mistake,
but a portal back into life,
into a world that has forgotten

how to dream.

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 

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

And somehow become more whole

We are relational beings with open, sensitive, tender hearts and mirror neurons and offer one another so much. To listen carefully and attune deeply to what our brothers and sisters are feeling and how they are making meaning of their experience.

To not dismiss or shame the story that pours from them or the ways they have come to imagine themselves and the world, but to hold it in a spacious, compassionate, merciful awareness. To allow it to touch us as we embrace the unknown together.

In the busyness of the inner and outer worlds, we can so easily forget the miracle that is unfolding here moment by moment. The rarity and preciousness of the whole thing, including the chaos and the glory, never quite knowing how love will twirl, dance, play, and shift into new forms, even during difficult times. It can take our breath away. If we will allow it.

In those moments when our heart breaks in response to the immensity of it all, the temptation can be overwhelming to scramble to put it back together again. But if we ask the heart if it wishes to be mended, it will take us into the mystery.

“In trying to ‘heal’ me you remain too far away,” the heart pleads with us. “I want you all the way inside, to bear witness to the broken shards, the shattered light, the burning darkness, to stay close as I ache, to hold me. Please don’t turn.”

Behind the scenes, love is at work, the beloved spinning out worlds of experience, longing to know itself through form, finding illumined passage through the hallways and corridors of the cells and their synapses.

Each time we listen carefully to another, feel their feelings and attune to their emotions, hold them, speak kind words, offer a soothed nervous system where they downregulate and rest… together we break more, burn more, and somehow become more whole.

Art by Gerd Altmann/ Freiburg

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 

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