More Than Feeling, Healing Demands Courageous Questioning and Acting
“We live in times when the call to full and critically aware citizenship could not be more urgent. We need to rediscover the careless courage, yet devastating simplicity, of the little boy who, in the middle of the numbed multitude, in naïve Socratic fashion, blurts out: ‘But the emperor has no clothes.’ When spoken, the word of truth can bring down citadels of falsity.” ~ John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings Healing is more than uncovering and feeling old pains lost in our bodies. Healing demands something else, something that can take even more courage: Questioning and acting… Questioning that invites us to brave the unknown. Questioning the old, entrenched, outdated agreements we’ve made with others, and ourselves. Ones […]
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 […]
5G Summons Us to Be the Frequency-Emitting Towers the World Waits For
5G towers summon us now to be frequency-emitting towers ourselves. There are billions more people than there will ever be cell towers scattered amongst us. Weare the needed frequency holders if we are willing to do the work. To emit, like the wifi symbol symbolizes, waves of energy to the masses that matches and transmutes all the worry and dread tired fingers point at. This isn’t metaphor, but quite literal. There already are towers spread across our planet, as there always has been—wise ones, shamanic elders, sages, those who plant and hold a frequency for us to rise to. They are the interconnected “network” few talk about wrapping itself around the planet, a web holding the planet like a womb for birthing. Too busy talking […]
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 25 examples of adverse experiences you may have diminished in order to cope and survive. 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. The response to my article COVID-19: A Call to Wake from the Perennial Dream of “Normal” has been overwhelmingly positive to say the least. So struck by the emotional response, I feel the need to add the following information as an adjunct. Healing occurs when we no longer diminish our childhood adversity—both what happened (verbal and physical abuse, for example) and what didn’t […]
COVID-19: A Call to Wake from the Perennial Dream of “Normal”
When the world pushes you to your knees you are in the perfect position to pray. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi In times like this, with the world besieged by outright panic and high levels of uncertainty, the words of ancient wisdom keepers, such as Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, resonate loudest. Now is a good time to take in the sages whose words have so often fallen on deaf ears. Indeed, with growing fear and a collapse of global infrastructure—sporting events, conferences, schools, businesses, etc.—collectively, we are being brought to our knees. The slowing and stoppages bestow a rare opportunity to see/consider something we cannot when lost in the busyness of everyday living; when upright in our usual stance. We are being forced to uncover […]
To Welcome Someone into Our Heart, First We May Need to Learn to Push Others Away
There is a great emphasis put on letting love in. “Open your heart” says the self-help teacher. “Give yourself to love” sings the romantic poet. They make it sound so easy! Yet, for the one who learnt that love is unsafe, the heart is quite guarded. Coiled around it, usually for decades, is protective barbed wire. The closer one gets to the heart, the closer one gets to the wound and the protective mechanisms keeping people away. For this wounded one (who makes up many, if not most, Euro-westerners), asserting boundaries may be the necessary first step. Before letting love in, the old truncated impulse to protect must be exercised. Completing survival responses A precursor to the vulnerability of receiving is so often the vulnerability […]
The Co-Arising of Play and Grief: How Empowered Choices Draw Out the Pains of Childhood
It’s been said, and it’s certainly been true in my experience, that if you laugh long enough you’ll cry, and if you cry long enough you’ll laugh. Two sides of the same coin, these emotions are closely entangled. As participants connect to the joys of play in my playshops, it’s common for them to feel the stirrings of grief rising within. With each moment of exuberance and freedom reclaiming its rightful place in their body, it becomes harder to deny the despair from having lost their innocence decades ago; from forgoing beauty and wonderment to survive a challenging or unbearable childhood. Indeed, for many who delve deep into the wild fields of childlikeness, grief co-arises with newfound playfulness. Play draws it out from its sleepy […]
Hidden Treasure
I turned my back on him, the younger part of me. There was no choice. Alone, unable to hold and afraid to feel the magnitude of what occurred, knowing, at some deep, subterranean level, if I could just keep it, him, at bay, locked in his room, I could stay strong and rise above, escape the overwhelm, weakness, the unbearable aloneness. I could move away, far away, fast forward into life, chasing success after success. What seemed so important. Yet, after many climbs to high mountain tops, the view, that oh-so-dear rush, lost its charm. Truthfully, it never felt quite enough. Nothing felt enough. Something was always missing. Little, if anything, touched that old, desolate part of me still hiding from, reaching for me. My […]