The Wisdom of Pain and Suffering ~ Surrendering to the Gifts of Weakness in a World that Pedestalizes Strength
“Be crumbled. So wild flowers will come up where you are. You have been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.” ~ Rumi “To be worn out is to be renewed.” ~ Lao Tzu Pain and suffering are difficult gateways no one avoids. We wish it was different, but it is the way of life. They are fierce and necessary teachers at times, initiating us to disarmour, soften into vulnerability, into our heart. They wear the edges off our hubris and pride so we become humble and compassionate in ways we could not without the adversity. To feel more deeply at a cellular and soul level. Pain and suffering did exactly this for me. Bit-by-bit, they crumbled the arrogant, overly-driven and insensitive man […]
The Dark Forces are Waiting for You to Show Up in Your Power
Maybe the dark forces are waiting for You to show up in your Power. And that in spending so much time pointing them out, highlighting their nefarious hidden agendas, you can continue hiding your light. All the while you confuse your persistent pointing with your power. It’s a deceptive and convenient game many are playing these days. Your power arises first from confronting your powerlessness. This is the purpose of tribal initiation practices and rights of passage—giving youth a taste of the depth and wisdom of uncertainty and vulnerability; of giving way to a higher force. Because most in the West have not been initiated, they, most naturally, are afraid to be powerless. Yet there are significant consequences. Namely, that they project this fear onto […]
Rising Levels of Chaos, Complexity and Confusion Serve to End the Division of Self from Life
Let it all come to an increasing boil, as is happening now. Let it boil away your ideas of right and wrong, good and bad. For, whatever narrative you choose, I can assure you, it is wrong… unless it is right, unless both, unless neither. That is yours to decide. Ultimately, God, The Universe, or whatever you wish to call It, cares and does not care about your preferences, your ideas of what is or what should be. It has its own reasons and ways, irregardless of your own. So often, humans confuse their preferences with truth. It’s worth considering that whatever narrative we choose, whatever preference or bias we have, whatever we feel should or should not happen, may not be it. May not […]
The Safe, Inviting and Eloquent Language of “I Miss” to Bring Another into Your Heart
Language is powerful. One word can make or break a conversation. Yes, most of what we communicate lies in the unspoken, the space between the words or energy underlying them; but the words you choose have the power to bring someone closer to your heart or further away. Connection—the tube The heart of communication is connection. Consider connection to be like a tube running from my heart to yours. The wider the tube, the larger the connection; the more can be passed through, felt and experienced between us. That tube is never static—it’s always changing given how something is communicated and what is being communicated. The tube, or openness between two people, fluctuates moment-to-moment depending on the words chosen, one’s energy and body language—the three main aspects […]
A Love Whose Time Has Come ~ Healing the Disembodied Human and Our Ravaged Planet
“A person suffers if he or she is constantly being forced into the statistical mentality and away from the road of feeling.“ ~ Robert Bly We are a disembodied species, deprived of the weighted feeling of being in touch with our senses, attuned to the murmurings of our heart, the pleasures, ecstatic and intimate, that go with rootedness. We have lost touch with the once innate feeling of connectivity to strangers, the delight in a butterfly, the awe when struck by the glowing moon’s presence. We have squandered the feeling worlds of imagination and creativity born in pause and even boredom. And we’ve lost touch with the inborn capacity to feel profound sadness and anger, fear and pain, to be unbridled in our emotional expression, […]
The Dark Waits for the Light in You: Healing World Suffering Begins with Befriending Your Own
You can’t change the world until you see yourself as the world. And then you only change yourself. To the extent that we deny our needed suffering, we refuse the needed suffering of the world. We resist the virus-related suffering occurring now, pleading for it to end, because we have long refused our own suffering. We have skimmed the surface, or dipped our toe down, under the threshold of comfort, but not far enough, not enough to truly feel and befriend the forlorn. The temptation is to have this quarantine cease so we can get back to the old suffering we are more familiar with. The unconscious suffering that we call “normal everyday living”. The suffering of banal jobs, hectic, disembodied living, disconnect from […]
12 Questions Kids Need and Long to Hear ~ The Consent of Inquiry and How it Cultivates Self-esteem, Trust and Respect
“Trust children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” ~ John Holt 12 Questions (Scroll to the bottom for 6 follow-up questions) What do you want? What do you need? What do you feel / think? How do you feel (about that)? What does your heart / intuition / gut say? What feels right / true to you? What brings you joy? What’s your dream? What would feel like fun? What would you love to do? What matters to you? What do you hope for? Jack’s story “One major study of 700 preschool classrooms in 11 states found […]
The COVID-19 Pandemic is Not What it Seems
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke Friends, it’s not what it seems. Point too much and you miss the larger picture. Resist too much and you lack trust in what’s trying to unfold. Even in those darkest of intentions there’s light acting out, finding its way through, making way for the rebirth of these times that Easter symbolically holds. The main agenda now is to up our spiritual game, not to fight the dark energy. To rise as we are meant to, as One Being, as one taking […]
From Caterpillar to Butterfly: Quarantine is Humanity’s Necessary Metamorphic Time in the Chrysalis
Use this time of quarantine wisely. It’s not a time to push away the silence and pine for the “good old days”; rather, it’s a unique opportunity for self- and world-reflection. This is not a time to wish us quickly back to the comforts and familiarities of “normal”, to the life of the caterpillar; rather, it’s an essential right of passage, a metamorphic period where “normal” must dissolve into the butterfly. The metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly is a widely-held representation of the stages of transformation that no human being can avoid, try as they might; a transformative period we are now in the thrust of. The stages are, in essence: 1) Leaving the known and comfortable; 2) Incubation and dissolution of self; 3) Emergence […]
Healing and Self-Love: The Courage to No Longer Diminish the Truth of Our Childhood Adversity
Listed at the bottom are 26 examples of adverse experiences you may have diminished in order to cope and survive. I’ve also included a short video to add further context. There’s a saying: “Love is a place we go when we no longer wish to hide.” The same is true with healing. Because healing is seeing and feeling something for what it is, without diminishment, which is an act of self-love. Healing occurs when we no longer diminish our childhood adversity — both what happened (verbal and physical abuse, for example) and what didn’t happen that we desperately needed (affection, for example). It occurs when we own the magnitude of the environmental failures endured. We own the stark reality that our older brother beat us, […]