Never underestimate the power of love

At times, you may find yourself with a friend who is upset, falling apart, confused, hopeless, sad, and afraid. Nothing is making sense anymore, they are overwhelmed, and the emotions are unrelenting.

You are unsure how to help.

While their pain may trigger you, and bring alive an avalanche of urgent, anxious, fixing energy – activating the shadows of your own unlived life - an invitation has appeared.

Slow way down. Ground awareness in your body and listen. Not just to the words they are saying, but to the secret request that is emerging out of their heart. Perhaps they are not asking for you to fix, cure, or even heal them. Perhaps their deepest longing is not for advice or teachings or even being reassured that everything is okay. It is not okay, and that is okay.

While you may be burning with the need to talk them out of their experience – overflowing with solutions, techniques, and processes – return into spaciousness. Infuse the environment with pause, rest, and resonance. With the slow circuits of empathy and presence, step into the vessel and seal it with non-urgent loving kindness.

This may not be the moment for you to give your friend an answer, but to hold them as you confront the vastness of the question together.

Offer the gift of a soothed, calm, and regulated nervous system. Turn your heart into a temple and sanctuary where together you can validate their feelings, and provide safe passage for their process to unfold. Do what you can so that they feel felt, that they need not heal in this moment in order for you to stay near.

Never, ever underestimate the power of love. Even one moment of empathic, attuned, contact can change our lives forever. Please don’t forget that for many, they have never actually known this sort of holding – or have had it in only very small amounts.

You have tremendous power to be a vessel in which healing can come into this world, to help another make new meaning and find new breath. To slowly dissolve the trance of unworthiness and know their true nature. Please do whatever you can. And please never, ever give up on love.

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

An inner sanctuary

When we’re sitting with someone who is struggling, confused, or in emotional pain, it is important that we listen carefully to what they say. But at times even more essential than the words they use is what they are feeling, sensing, or imagining, but not able to access consciously. That which we cannot access we cannot articulate, and that which we cannot articulate we cannot make sense of. It is difficult to discover the meaning of inaccessible experience, as this meaning is buried in a secret place.

This goes for ourselves as well, where the “other” is not only those persons external to us, but the inner other in all its forms, appearing as lost feeling, denied grief, unacknowledged narcissism, blocked rage, unearthed joy, causeless bliss, and the entirety of our unlived experience.

One of the real gifts of our embodied presence—that capacity to attune to the moment-to-moment unfolding the other’s subjectivity—is to help them access dimensions of self that have either fallen outside conscious awareness or never had a chance to come into it in the first place.

If a certain emotion, way of being, or way of perceiving was not made room for in our families, cultures, or religions, it becomes lost in a faraway space, in a liminal, in-between realm that we cannot quite reach. From this liminal dimension it calls out, comes by way of dream and symptom, to find us, not to harm but out of its longing to return home.

By providing sanctuary where none was originally provided, by making room for breath where no breath was to be found, we step into a world where it is safe to feel again.

The verbal dimension of our exchange with another is important, while at times the nonverbal is more alive, more relevant, and more meaningful. We need not come to some fantasied resolution or takes sides, but only to remain in awe.

To provide an environment where the lost pieces of the soul, the forgotten aspects of the heart, and the unremembered dimensions of the psyche can return home… it is a gift of compassion and mercy that we can impart to ourselves, one another, and to life everywhere.

To weave this sort of temple together, to tend to and care for this alive inner sanctuary where wholeness can be embodied and reimagined, where we can touch the mystery and realize there is no end to its depth.

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

The trance of postponement

It is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come, that another opportunity will be given to bear witness to a sunset, take a walk in the forest, listen in awe to the birds, or share a moment of connection with the one in front of us. But another part knows how fragile it truly is here, how tenuous, and the reality that this opening into life will not be here for much longer.

Before we realize it, we can so easily fall into the trance of postponement. The spell of tomorrow looms large in the personal and collective psyche.

At the end of this life – which is sure to come much sooner than we think – it is unlikely we'll be caught up in whether we accomplished all the tasks on our to-do lists, played it safe, healed all the wounds from our past, wrapped up our self-improvement project, or completed some mythical spiritual journey.

Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?

There are soul-pieces and lost parts orbiting in and around us, the ghosts of our unlived lives; those aspects of ourselves that have not been allowed safe passage. To attend to that which remains unlived – to listen to its poetry and provide sanctuary for its emergence – is a radical act of compassion.

One day we will no longer be able to look at, touch, or share a simple moment with those we love. When we turn to them, they will be gone. One moment will be our last to encounter the immensity of one more breath, experience awe at a color or a fragrance or the blooming of a violet, or to enter into union with the vastness of the sea.

It will be our last chance to see a universe in a drop of rain, to have a moment of communion with a friend, or to weep as the light yields to the night sky.

One last moment to have a thought, feel an emotion, fall in love, or listen to a piece of music. To know heartbreak, joy, sorrow, and peace – to behold the outrageous mystery of what it truly means to be a sensitive, alive, connected human being.

What if today is that last day? Or tomorrow? Or later this week?

Knowing that death will come, how will we respond to the sacred and brief appearance of life?

Perhaps our “life's purpose” has nothing to do with what job we will find, what new thing we will manifest or attract for ourselves, or what mythical awakening journey we will complete. Perhaps the purpose of our life is to fully live, finally, to touch each here and now moment with our presence and with the gift of our one, wild heart.

And to do whatever we can to help others, to hold them when they are hurting, to listen carefully to their stories and the ways they are attempting to make sense of a world that has gone a bit mad. To speak kind words and not forget the erupting miracle of the other as it appears in front of us. Perhaps this is the most radical gift we can give.

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