The Wisdom of Pain and Suffering ~ Surrendering to the Gifts of Weakness in a World that Pedestalizes Strength

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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 Courage to Break Free from Worry

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The Courage to Break Free from Worry

“Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts so seriously.” ~ Eckhart Tolle  It takes courage to break free from worry. This may sound strange, but there is comfort in the fears that underly our mental fretting and catastrophizing. They are familiar, more familiar than we know, and they buffer us in insidious ways. For these reasons and more, we easily get stuck in fear and thus in worry.  Many don’t associate worry with fear. They spend their minutes, hours and days worrying, often believing it’s a feeling—“I feel worried”—without considering that worry, like planning and analysis, is a state of mind. The thinking kind of mind. Fear, however, is clearly an emotion, and it’s the primary and primal one giving […]

The Dark Forces are Waiting for You to Show Up in Your Power

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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 […]

More Than Feeling, Healing Demands Courageous Questioning and Acting

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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

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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

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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

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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 

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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

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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, […]

COVID-19: A Call to Wake from the Perennial Dream of “Normal”

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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 […]