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 something that can only be found while closer to the ground, closer to our hearts.
This humble doorway of pause and reflection is what humanity makes a living running from. In the busyness of work, school, sports, all the normalities of daily living, we bypass quiet wisdom only found when we slow down enough.
Sickness and loss bring us there. Whether it be losing our job, being struck by serious illness, or the sudden death of a loved one, personal hardship and tragedy are often the necessary gateway that humbles us and brings us to new, enlightened perspectives. Through time and healing, difficulty opens our hearts. We don’t feel as disconnected from ourselves, others and life.
The wise and wonderful spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson says it perfectly:
“Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. Perhaps, in a way, that’s where humanity is now: about to discover we’re not as smart as we thought we were, will be forced by life to surrender our attacks and defenses which avail us of nothing, and finally break through into the collective beauty of who we really are.”
Crisis has the power to do just this. In fact, it may be its very purpose—the necessary “medicine” one must imbibe to wake up. Usually in hindsight, those who fully receive their medicine don’t hold resentment towards their hard times. For, they would not be who they are today without their experiences.
The pandemic arising from COVID-19 is needed medicine, but on a global scale. The natural response, as it would be if someone was struck with cancer, is for the disease to go away quickly so we can get back to normal. But what if preserving normal isn’t the agenda here. Instead, what if waking up is—waking up to, as Marianne Williamson noted, “the collective beauty of who we really are”?
Up until one is struck with disease or loss, doesn’t life seem so utterly normal? Putting on that dark suit and high heels; the daily grind of a 9-5 job; kids shuffling off to school followed by a couple hours of homework and soccer practice; okay relationship with the spouse; emotional disconnect, watching the news, sporting events; two weeks of annual holiday time; night out with the gals or guys, a few drinks here and there, maybe some pool at the pub; squeezing in a bit of exercise as time and energy permits.
The concreteness and routine of everyday living, as it is. Just trucking along, right? Isn’t this what life’s about? Seems so.
Despite our ardent determination to uphold perceptions of how life is and ought to be, there’s a cost when resigning to consensus reality, a cost to falling asleep to “normal”.
Alarming levels of anxiety, depression and suicide amongst our kids; chronic and often mysterious pain; climate disasters like the recent wildfires in Australia; mass shootings at schools; corruption and crime headed by political and corporate figures; severe pollution of topsoil, water, and air; overwhelming suffering of animals in industrial agriculture. You know the story. And that’s just part of it.
The chaos is intensifying. We can all feel it and agree that we live in troubled times. Leading up to the virus outbreak our collective vulnerability was palpably building.
The dream of separateness
“No matter what problem you look at, every ecological problem comes from this illusion that we are separate from nature.” ~ Vandana Shiva
Part of “normal” is the belief that chaos “over there” has nothing to do with me. Some may even think, though may be afraid to admit, that the bushfires in Australia and shootings in Texas are their business, not my own.
COVID-19 is teaching us otherwise, in part by the need to think of others, like immune compromised elders, versus simply ourselves; to consider the wellbeing of other communities and nations, not just our own.
Though we may believe otherwise, we are not immune to chaotic rifts on the other side of the planet. We are much more inter-connected than we know.
Twenty-five hundred years ago Buddha taught that, “Everything depends on everything else. The One contains the many, and the many contains the One.” He believed that nothing could be understood in isolation from the greater whole. The nature of a raindrop can be found in a leaf, the nature of sunlight in the ocean and in our epidermis.
Like the ripple vibrations throughout a pond from a single pebble dropped, our subtle energy disseminates frequency changes across the electromagnetic web of life. Instantly, we travel time and space perceiving and receiving information through our sensory gates.
Healers know this web. They’ll tell you that when they touch one part of the body they touch the entire body; when one cell alters its energetic potential, the energetic potential of all 70 trillion cells change. The liver and limbic system, the big toe and right lung are not separate, but one fluid, connected system.
Parents know this web. Without any prior knowledge, a parent can feel her hurting child who resides at a distant location. They know without knowing how they know. Sons and daughters know this web, too. Without any prior knowledge they suddenly feel the passing of a parent. Somehow, across time and space, the subtle fragrance of death finds them.
Dogs know this web. They sense, excitedly, when their owner is coming home. And all sorts of animals know when a hurricane is coming. Despite not crossing their sight, they know, instinctively, to retreat to high ground.
Plants, too, show intelligence beyond time and space. We see this in how “invasive” plant species, normally perceived as a threat, act to “restore system homeodynamis in ecoranges that have been damaged, often by human encroachment.” Instinctually and intelligently, plants know the medicine a particular region needs and migrate towards that environment.
Part of the wake-up call we face is for humanity to know and respect our one collective body. COVID-19 is our dramatic teacher. To act as one. To know the pain in Syria, the pain of the mother who’s lost her child in a school shooting, as our own pain. To live as First Nations people did and do—in kinship with the Lions Mane mushroom in the deep forest, the sparrow in the sky.
The soil is not separate from the grass, and grass is not separate from the cow we eat. It’s one ecology. Harming one piece harms the whole.
We are a multifaceted, complex, interconnected organism. But, we are stuck, stubbornly attached to the normality of separation consciousness, a perennial state that continues to have dire affects on land, air, water, animals, the children we raise and love. We truck on, without the fine awareness that life, in its wisdom, won’t let us keep going.
And so a sudden car crash changes the course of our life. Our businesses, events, life as we know it, shut down. Redirected, slowed down, a doorway opens and we are summoned towards something we had not foreseen. There are bigger plans than “normal”.
Off course. Of course!!
Now the real work happens. Welcome to waking from the dream of normal.
Roots of “normal”
“I think normalcy is a myth. The idea that some people have pathology and the rest of us are normal is crude. There’s nothing about any mentally ill person—and it doesn’t matter what their diagnosis is—that I couldn’t recognize in myself. The reality is that, in every case, mental illness is an outcome of traumatic events … And so then to separate out those who meet the particular criteria for a particular diagnosis from the rest of us is utterly unscientific and unhelpful. More to the point, you need to look at what is it about our society that generates what we call abnormality.” ~ Dr. Gabor Mate
The pull to get back to normal is natural. We watch the news everyday hoping for signs of relief from COVID-19. Though the virus will likely recede, the underlying sickness of our society giving rise to it will remain largely pervasive.
Normal isn’t working. Normal is deeply dysfunctional, but that is hard to know when we, collectively, have been so utterly inured to it for so long.
Going back in time helps to understand this.
Let me begin with a bold statement: The dysfunction we have normalized in society has its roots in normalizing the dysfunction of our childhood.
Take that in for a moment…
I invite you to consider that you created a worldview of “normal” during your upbringing: Parents yelling at each other; parents yelling at you; an emotionally absent father; being spanked, or worse; having a depressed, anxious or controlling mother; regularly smelling alcohol on your father’s breath; parents advising, telling you what to do far more than asking questions, trusting you; moving every year; little, if any, physical affection; your parents separating, you having to go back and forth between stressed single parents; little to no relationship with healthy, mature elders; being beaten up by your siblings; not being protected by a parent; bullying or ostracization at school; the standardized model of coercive education; being taught by stressed schoolteachers who in no way were able to meet your attachment needs.
For most of my new clients, this is completely normal. So much so that when I ask how they rate their childhood on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being most happy and secure, they choose 4 despite witnessing regular verbal abuse in the household, having an emotionally absent, workaholic father, and being spanked.
This is what author Dr. Gabor Mate calls the myth of the happy childhood.
In speaking to a group of people about the consequences of spanking, one woman blithely stated that she had been spanked as a child and “I turned out just fine.” In the words of my somatic therapy teacher, Mariah Moser, so it seems. Spanking, as it turns out, damages the grey matter in the brain, which “is an integral part of the central nervous system and influences intelligence testing and learning abilities.” To this woman in my group, there is a difference between physical abuse and spanking. To the brain, there is not.
This, the insidious power of normalizing.
For those on the healing path, it takes time to come to terms with the difficult fact that their seemingly normal upbringing affected them more than they think. “Normal” dysregulated the nervous system, re-wired the developing brain, constricted the musculature, wounded the heart, and distorted the identity of the growing child, far more than we know or are willing to admit.
Our adaptive survival intelligence is that strong. Few understand experientially the extent to which we, as a species, have suppressed and how this suppression has affected us, and continues to do so, from the shadows. As leading authority on trauma and trauma resolution Peter Levine writes in his book, In An Unspoken Voice, “… unresolved trauma is responsible for the majority of the illness of modern mankind.”
Childhood trauma skews our perception, our ability to see clearly with our own pure eyes. It engenders all sorts of illness from fibromyalgia to Crohn’s disease, from endrometriosis to cancer. It creates tremendous amounts of despair, loneliness, learning disabilities, self-doubt, anxiety and depression.
Trauma incites a closing of the heart and reactivity that troubles our relationships with intimate partners, children, friends and co-workers. As author of the Polyvagal Theory, Steven Porges, succinctly states, “Trauma compromises our ability to engage with others by replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection.” We are biologically wired to connect, but we learn to disconnect to survive.
“(Trauma) is a loss of connection to oneself and to the present moment”, says Dr. Mate. This inner disconnect is the fundamental cause of our disconnection with other humans and Mother Nature. Inner separation is projected outwards creating the dream of separation written about in the previous section. Our protective patterns desensitize us to the outer world—our impact on it—and the web of interconnectivity.
Last, but not least, trauma dampens our creativity and intuition. With the present moment far less available, we become more reliant on the intellect that lives in past and future; where we feel safe in our vigilant planning, our calculating mentation, and where society, namely school, likes to keep us.
Indeed, unresolved trauma, both incurred from our childhood and inherited from our ancestors, affects us and permeates the social fabric of our communities and the natural world far more than we can possibly understand.
It therefore cannot be understated that it’s a huge wake up for my clients when they realize, again experientially, that their “normal” upbringing was harmful; that trauma, known as the eternally present past, continues to exist in their psychobiology, negatively affecting physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.
My clients’ reactivity to their children, their longstanding restlessness, their sexual problems, their chronic joint pain, their addiction to alcohol and work, the constant doubting and fear, the sense of feeling lost in this world, indeed have their roots in trauma. And no, despite the diagnostic trend, they don’t have “mental illness”. The words imply that their suffering has to do with their mind, only; that it’s purely an epiphenomenon of the brain. Contrary to popular opinion they, we, have trauma, accumulated from earlier environmental disruptions and from unprocessed ancestral pain.
“If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Given how hard our parents had it, and their’s, going back in time, we should not underestimate the heavy load of ancestral trauma we’ve inherited.
“Our children and grandchildren are shaped by the genes they inherit from us, but new research is revealing that experiences of hardship or violence can leave their mark too.” ~ Martha Henriques, BBC Future
The dream of quiet desperation
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
Without full acceptance of this we easily succumb to “normal” and perpetuate the story of trauma plaguing our planet for millennia. And without acceptance and awareness, parents and teachers, though well-intended in most cases, make it their purpose to raise children to best fit into and “succeed” at normal. One grade two teacher once said that her job is to “turn her students into little workers”. Being good, getting good grades, achieving college acceptance, getting married, a nice home, having kids, a good job—the consensus indicators of fitting in and success.
Meanwhile, we suffer at home, work, in our health, etc. And we don’t know why. Or, we just numb ourselves with another bout of gossip, a painfully drab conversation with our partner, or a mind-freezing eight hour shift in the cubicle. The doctor gives us pills for our chronic physical and emotional ailments, not realizing s/he is treating symptoms of trauma rather than the whole system.
As Henry David Thoreau speaks to in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, we are a society living in quiet desperation.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.”
“Normal” becomes our tolerated, desperate, status quo… that is until that car accident or illness knocks down our door and drags us to our knees. Something tragic comes our way to shake us and wake us from the dream of normal.
Crisis does its job.
First Nations people call this the work of Raven or Coyote—the Trickster, offering its unexpected medicine of change. In Hindu religion, it’s the ruthless force of Shiva the Destroyer. In Slavic folklore, it’s the disruptive work of the dark old magical woman, Baba Yaga, who pulls the rug from under our comfy existence.
Life is that kind… kind enough to disturb us. The wisdom of spiritual teacher Byron Katie rings true here when she states, “Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it… it’s just easier if you do.”
And then there’s this other piece of magic from Rumi:
And do not worry that your life is
turning upside down.
How do you know that the side
you are used to
is better than the one to come?
Wisdom not easy to apply. Yet, I have learned life will not allow us to remain asleep in quiet desperation. Again and again, life will turn us upside down, inside out, sometimes with sheer force, to bring the fresh, new and necessary. As the old story states, “First God whispers, then knocks, then…” Fail to listen, and the next thing we know we have a global viral outbreak.
A culture hiding “Not so bad”
“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive actions on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The ‘normally alienated’ person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of normal mind. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves, to become absurd, and thus to be normal.” ~ R.D. Laing
It’s fascinating, and no coincidence, that the word “trauma” has its roots in the old German word “traum”, which means “dream”.
Trauma keeps us asleep.
Like with all dreams, we eventually must wake up. And like with all dreams, they seem so utterly real at the time. “Normal” is that alluring. This is not metaphor. What I’m here to offer you is far from it.
That’s how strong the dream of normal is.
For most on the healing journey, what becomes evidently clear is that if they are to heal the pains of a broken childhood, they can no longer hang onto “normal”; to stay asleep in it. They have to fully own the magnitude what happened and what didn’t happen without diminishing it in any way.
(Childhood trauma is a combination of both: Environmental disruptions such as abuse or the absence of something such as physical or verbal affection [neglect]. Trauma or emotional pain arises from both.)
As naive and immature little ones, we have to normalize the failures of our primary caregivers in order to survive. “Normal” can be devastating for a child. To believe that our parents, those we depend on for everything, can’t meet our needs, and would even go so far as to harm us, is crushing.
It’s why children blame themselves for what happened. For the child it’s too devastating to believe that the very people they depend on for love would hit them with a belt, shout at them, ignore or mock them. To uphold the dream of the loving family, children unconsciously take the blame.
“Normal” is the antidote to pain. Normalizing is one of our first endogenously produced “psychopharmaceuticals”. Resigned to the facticity of “normal”, we believe it to be “not so bad”. This survival belief manages the overwhelm that comes from not having one’s biological need for connection and safety met; from not being met with love.
Simply put: If not so bad, I don’t feel so bad.
(But deep down inside, I must be bad.)
And so as children, we shrug it off… so it seems.
More accurately, we rigidify, toughen up, suck it up, get over it, rise above. We do all the things so blatantly messaged through the media and particularly the male machismo, jock culture. Hence men saying to other men, “Don’t be a wimp.” “Boys don’t cry.” “Suck it up and be a man.”
The consequences of this hidden or disguised culture of “Not so bad” are destructive.
Euro-western society is chalk-full of individuals who unconsciously and unwittingly live from “Not so bad”. And we raise, relate to and educate children from that trauma-based worldview. To our young, impressionable ones, we communicate our trauma imprints in how we look at them, speak to them, physically make contact with them. Done directly and indirectly and with regularity we convey, “It’s no big deal”, “It’s not so bad”, “Get over it!”
We parent and teach and generally relate by projecting our own coping mechanisms onto children. We treat them as we learned to treat ourselves given our early life environmental failures.
A “normal” mindset struggles to empathize with the suffering of others. It struggles to intuit how a child’s need for safety and attachment is unmet. It says, “They’re just acting out, crying for attention”, without realizing that they are crying for much needed connection.
A “normal” mindset pushes children without recognizing the origins of their own need to push—their coping mechanism when young to push through the pain and rise above the adversity. A “normal” mindset denies a child’s right to move and learn slowly according to their unique pace. It lacks consideration for their needs, their immanent truth for being here, because when a young child their own needs and immanence were denied.
Historically, we have related to children this way and for these reasons. True, we are growing and changing and evolving. We are maturing at a rapid rate through the abundance of trauma-informed education parents, teachers and the general public now have access to. There is no doubt that, for the most part, children (women and animals) are treated far better than they used to be.
Yet, “Not so bad” is still ubiquitous, even amongst those making the positive changes.
It’s the modus operandi of Euro-western culture, a psychology of desensitization rooted in the desensitization to the undercurrents of unresolved trauma. Indeed, despite our advancements, this “normal” underpins the ethos of most of our systems and infrastructure, far more than we’d want to admit.
The world as we know it, our socio, economic, political systems, our family and cultural values, are vast unconscious expressions of traumatized people who’ve learned “Not so bad.” Wounded children acting as police officers, construction workers, professional athletes, lawyers, journalists, city councillors, and heads of state fill our streets and buildings. They perform, disguising their pain, without any consideration for the extent that “normal” failed them, and continues to do so, and the extent that “normal” fails and will continue to fail their children.
David W. Orr, in his book Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World, says is perfectly:
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
We are waking up, slowly. It’s happening. We have growing numbers of peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. But, despite the urgency of these times, we are still reticent to leave “normal” when our identity and livelihood are reliant on it; like the dysfunctional school system, in which teachers are feeling increasingly conflicted. It’s hard to say clear Yes to our heart when we cannot say a clear No to something we are in a codependent relationship with, and that is draining us and compromising our integrity. And when the lure of power and money is at stake, change becomes that much more difficult.
The loop continues. The cycle perpetuates. Euro-western culture regenerates from blind numbness.
And so crisis must come. It’s where we are now. It is the only thing that will wake us up… that is, until healing does. First the shock of unprecedented chaos that brings us to our knees, then the necessary inner work to open us to new possibilities.
But it’s not easy, this road of healing. It’s not easy to come to terms with the truth of “normal”.
Healing for a new world
“If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.” ~ Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)
What you’ve read may be hard to take in. That’s why healing is essential.
Healing takes us from a conceptual to an embodied understanding where true felt-sense realization is found; the same undeniable knowing a mother has when asked if she loves her child. It’s not intellect that tells her, not the rational mind, but her body, the irrepressible truth of her heart.
This somatic awareness or intelligence births itself into human consciousness when people embark on the healing path. An awareness that says life’s not what it seems. There’s a word for this in the Hindu tradition: “Maya”, a Sanskrit term literally meaning not what it seems, or illusion.
Hence, “dream”.
With dedicated, courageous effort, the reality of maya comes to my clients. The nervous system regulates, the brain re-maps. Space is created within for a patient intelligence far greater than intellect to take its rightful seat in the throne of the human body. Film long-clouding the window-pane to higher consciousness clears. The “doors of perception” open.
Knowing overrides the knowledge we’ve depended on to make sense of the world—the information taught in school and the rationale society pedestalizes that we were raised on and praised for.
Waking up lies in knowing in our body a truth that transcends the temporal and dismantles the illusion of separation. A truth connecting us to something far more mythical than the surface-level stories of concrete reality we are bombarded with through the media.
In waking, falling asleep becomes harder to do. It’s too painful to return to quiet desperation, to the dream of I versus you.
The path of healing and awakening is far from easy, though, as already stated. As spiritual teacher Adyashanti writes, “Just one moment of awakening begins the dissolution of one’s false sense of self and, subsequently, the dissolution of one’s whole perception of the world.”
It’s not easy giving up the internal stratum that makes up how we’ve always known ourselves and life to be; to feel the depth of pain that gave rise to the falseness of our conditioned state. Healing demands a deep let-go into the unknown, a brave descent into the underworld of the untouched and forgotten left behind ages ago when too overwhelming to bear. It asks us to have the courage to feel the uncomfortable—shame, anger, sorrow, rage, disgust, fear, hatred, and more. Some personal, some ancestral.
Healing asks us to face and feel the bad underneath our longstanding act “It’s not so bad”. To feel what’s under the disguise of our survival adaptation.
In uncovering “bad”, we inevitably see and learn to accept that our upbringing was not what it seemed. That though our caregivers likely did their best, their best forced us to hide and protect. For the small vulnerable child we were, “Not so bad” was indeed bad.
The dream bubble of the infallible parents bursts, painfully.
Slowly, in due time, though, with enough tears, shaking, energetic release, acceptance and integration, we realize we weren’t so bad at all. In fact, we were and are good. We reclaim our innate, rightful goodness, one we knew instinctively when born.
Healing, for this reason alone, is so, so necessary: The release of shame and self-blame; the subconscious belief “I am bad” replaced with “I am good”; the body revealing to us the honest truth that we were/are indeed innocent; and through this, the reclamation of our innocence, which is deeply healing for the heart.
But it hurts to do all this, to be quite honest. It’s hard to lift the veil. The old axiom that the truth hurts takes on a whole new meaning when we find its depth in the trembling, feeling, waking body. When we stop hiding.
The Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher, Dogen, reminds us that, “We must always be disturbed by the truth.” We must be willing to be disturbed by the stark reality giving rise to humanity’s alarming predicament, which ultimately lies in the shadows of our own unhealed existence. Awakening to these disturbances long kept silent in our bodies awakens us to the truth of what lay dormant in the collective body of humanity. Feeling their depth reveals the devastating truth of the dream of “normal”.
Healing leads us out of traum—the dream. The more we feel, the harder it is to fit in. They go hand-in-hand. As tears melt the trauma-informed edifices of our psychobiology, aspects of the outer dream world we once found so compelling don’t hold the same lure. Our job becomes that much more difficult, so too do the surface level, emotionally detached relationships. Outer change is inevitable. We seek people and places (like Nature) where we can be with others on the healing, awakening journey; where we can be our newfound self.
Heal the trauma, end the story—personal and collective. The pain-driven mythology dies as trauma dissolves in the collective psyche. Socio-economic and political systems shake and soon crumble (as they do so now) as the inner psychobiological structures that support them fall away.
Dissolution of the internal edifice of trauma, dissolution of its long-standing manifestations. The dream shatters, inside and out.
We wake, and a new world is born.
Our collective responsibility is not to wait for the next shock, but to begin healing now. For the sake of ourselves, our planet, we can no longer wait.
Though it may seem you heal for you, in truth, you heal for everyone and everything. In the same way this virus affects us all, so too does the awakening of our hearts. We heal for our children, their children, the raven, cedar, river, for our ancestors. We heal, each a flicker of light bringing dawn to the darkness that will continue to besiege us. We heal as one unified being.
The time is now.
I leave you with these poetic words from Kitty O’Meara that so poignantly summarize my message here, followed by two options for healing:
“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.
“And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.
“And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.”
________________________
Two options for your healing journey:
“If we consider it difficult for a healthy society to exist without the foundation of healthy individuals, it becomes imperative to recognize the political value of individual transformation.” ~ Claudio Naranjo
Journalling: I invite you to journal on any of the questions listed at the bottom. Honest self-reflection is a good way to begin the path of recovering your spirit. But know reflection is only the beginning. Ultimately, you must travel into the body, into your bones, on the cellular, energetic level beneath the conscious mind.
Which is why I offer the following…
Energy healing: Conducted individually and in groups of 8, energy healing is by far the most powerful, accessible and cheapest healing work I offer. Accessible, because no matter your location, you can receive the healings without having to change your routine. You aren’t in the room with me when I’m doing the work. Cheapest, in that the results come faster than through my other services and you therefore spend much less.
I understand it would take a leap of faith, but I invite you to at least read the descriptions and some of the testimonials. The healings people have received have been profound.
Your questions:
“We ordinarily believe that we know who we are, what we are, what we are going to do, what life is about, what should happen. Inquiry means challenging all these things. Do we really know?” ~ A.H. Almaas
- Where / how am I accepting normal?
- What have I accepted as normal in my childhood that was actually harmful?
- What am I tolerating?
- Where am I pretending?
- What am I afraid to admit / look at?
- What am I not saying?
- What am I avoiding?
- What am I making “no big deal” or “not so bad” with others, namely children?
- Is there a voice in me saying that there must be something more? What’s it saying?
- Is there a voice in me saying that something isn’t quite right? What’s it saying?
- What is my heart telling me?
- What do I long for?
- What do I need?
* * *
Healing & Activation: My invitation to you is to participate in my online healing and activation ceremonies. Drawing upon the power and mystery of Starlight and its many emanations, transformation takes place at the quantum or cellular level, creating radical changes in health and empowerment.
* * *
Check out Vince’s book: Wild Empty Spaces ~ Poems for the Opening Heart
