Healing Your Inner Star Child and Liberating the Innocence and Power of Your Soul Star Essence
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos We are all children of God, the Universe, Christ, Buddha Consciousness, Brahman, whatever feels right to you. And each of us has what I call a soul star essence; for, we are, along with everything else, made of stardust! Hydrogen, nitrogen, your computer and clothes, everything is made from this magical and primordial Source! Knowing, embracing and shining our star nature is essential to our fulfillment, to realizing our soul purpose. And healing our inner star child is a big part of that. Disconnection from divinity The root of all […]
“If I lose the pain, I’ll lose the love.” ~ The Double Bind Nature of Trauma Bonds
“People have two needs: Attachment and authenticity. When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity.” ~ Dr. Gabor Mate The child who endures abuse from a parent is stuck in an impossible bind. If he pushes away, he loses the parent. If he doesn’t, he endures the abuse. Children generally choose attachment over authenticity. It is a biological imperative to do so that comes from many generations of living in tribal societies where our life depended on being in connection with our community; from being dependent on one another for survival. If that bond was to break and we were outcasted, abandoned, it could mean our life. Attachment is also biologically wired into us because we need our parents, especially our mother, for nurturing and survival. […]
The Therapeutic Power of Play to Heal Shame in Children
The nature of shame is to hide. It keeps pain hidden, the dark corners of our psyche concealed from the masses, too unbearable to share with others, too unbearable to be seen. Look at people with tremendous shame and their head tilts down, their eyes avert contact. Many even have a hard time looking straight into a camera. They must look away. The pain of shame and blame runs that deep. Children are, of course, not immune to shame. Raised in abusive, neglectful, toxic environments, shame inevitably buries into their psychophysiology. Beliefs such as “I am wrong”, “I am bad”, “It’s my fault” are common amongst children who experience chronic failures in love; who grow up not feeling emotionally or physically safe; who come to […]
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, […]
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 […]
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. 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. 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 […]
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 […]
Banks of a Wild River
In play, children remain in a fluid, flexible state. Moment by moment they open to greater, more creative versions of themselves. They touch and bloom the seed of potential in their heart. Children, in their mischief, imagination and spontaneous explorations, don’t try to become someone. They are someone already. They know this without knowing it. They feel the larger instinct of life pulsating through their veins, calling them to reach and spiral into infinite potential. Be sure in educating and parenting our most precious little ones, you do not shape this natural unfolding into what it doesn’t want to be. Instead, give it space to breathe, to run freely. Let any rules and structures you use be like banks of a wild river, guiding children […]
Sacrificing Authenticity for Attachment: The Adaptive Survival Responses of Children and Their Influence on Future Relationships
“If our environment cannot support our gut feelings and our emotions, then the child, in order to ‘belong’ and ‘fit in’ will automatically, unwittingly and unconsciously, suppress their emotions and their connections to themselves, for the sake of staying connected to the nurturing environment, without which the child cannot survive. A lot of children are in this dilemma – ‘can I feel and express what I feel or do I have to suppress that in order to be acceptable, to be a good kid, to be a nice kid?’” ~ Dr. Gabor Mate As children, we learn to sacrifice authenticity for connection. Done mostly unconsciously, our body’s intelligence recognizes that if we are our full, vibrant self, we’ll lose the attachment with our parents. We […]
The Developmental Impulse to Reach: Healing Trauma through Completing this Long-Held Survival Response
Trauma is often defined as an incomplete survival response – fight or flight that could not happen. The body had the impulse to protect or run away, but was overpowered. It could not do what it instinctively knew it had to do to survive. The vital energy driving the biological fight / flight impulse was truncated, impeding the survival response and causing trauma. There is another survival response discussed not nearly as often – reaching. Desiring or needing connection, a child instinctively reaches for her primary attachment figure. Biologically, we are wired to connect. And so we are naturally wired to reach for that connection, particularly in pre-verbal stages of development. We long to have our hand received with gentleness and love. Yet, when that […]