Your Heart is Designed to Grieve ~ Learning to Live with Heartbreak, Your Gateway to Love
Chances are, you will never heal all your wounds, nor are you meant to. Perhaps they are to be faithful companions on your journey, worthy friends guiding you, reminding you of compassion and humility, and acting as an acutely sensitive barometer shooting aches and pains through you when you are not aligned in truth, or pushing too hard. Indeed, a certain amount of pain and heartbreak may just be necessary for all of us if we are to stay grounded in our humanity and open to the rawness of living and loving in the unfathomable paradox of light and dark we endlessly wander through together. I was walking along the beach the other day when I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in […]
Journey into Mastery: The Integrative Wisdom of Suffering and Heartbreak in Advancing Our Soul
We are here to experience suffering, not avoid it. Please take that sentence into your heart for a moment, and see what it feels like. It’s a big statement that holds great truths and promises filled with paradox, complexity and nuance, ones that may be uncomfortable to integrate into your heart, but that, if you let in, set your soul free. We do not journey as souls to do everything we can to avoid suffering; to avoid bad and only stay on the side of good; to avoid darkness and stay purely in the light. Suffering is freely chosen as a soul as part of our spiritual evolution through many worlds of form; not as something to escape, but something to experience that serves a […]
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 […]
Transforming the School System Begins With Feeling its Heartbreaking Impact on Children, Past and Present
Note to the reader: If you require a brief history of education to provide context for the first few sections, scroll further down to “A brief history of school”. “Be confused, it’s where you begin to learn new things. Be broken, it’s where you begin to heal. Be frustrated, it’s where you start to make more authentic decisions. Be sad, because if we are brave enough we can hear our heart’s wisdom through it.” ~ S.C Lourie At the beginning of many of the talks I lead, the organizer of the event takes a moment to acknowledge the traditional and ancestral territory we stand on and the people it belongs to. It’s a brief period of time in which I pay my deepest respect and […]
Grieving — A Return to Wildness
Grieving is an act of wildness. For a short or long period of time we allow ourselves to be raw, uncontrolled, like the undomesticated nature of life itself. Deeply they are intertwined—grieving and life—one feeding the other. The wildness of grieving opens us to the wildness of life. Something takes hold. A torrent of unexpected sorrow, the urge to scream, the primal instinct to pound the floor, to wail to the stars, to dance, to move as something mysterious and ancient shakes us loose. Like the screaming raven, torrential storms and crashing seas, we too become untamed. Our intimacy with the rigid, fearful, overwhelmed, wounded parts of ourselves, and the world, takes us there, an intimacy with that which aches to be felt and set […]