What would be possible if we got really good at detecting the split off universes in our bodies, the unhelpful stories, and the made-up structures of life with crystal clarity and became a bigger space? What would we stop struggling with? How easily might step right out of our limitations? What kind of magic might be unleashed if we could step out of all small spaces and reclaim our oneness? If we came in contact with the ground, became the ground in some way, would we be nothing but our “true self”, our real self? What might fall away and …
Many years ago I worked with a spiritual guide who introduced me to focusing. Especially if I was feeling a strong emotion, she would ask me to find the sensation in the body and we would hold space for it together as I tracked and reported my experience. It was amazingly powerful. I learned to move from being totally captured by the experience of sadness, or anger or judgement to being half a step outside, observing. From that point of observation, there could be a kind of calm and compassionate curiosity and sometimes a deep unraveling of patterns of thought …
Newsletter from August 26, 2024
If you have a body, at some point, you will have pain. If you use your heart to love, at some point, you will have grief. Welcome to the various facets of being alive! If you are here, really here, you are here for the whole thing; the good and bad, the beautiful and ugly, the joy and sorrow. Ideally, the whole mix is filled with goodness.
With support, pain and grief can create intimacy and connection. In community, shared joy and sorrow can create a movement. When we experience any of these opposites …
Newsletter from August 23, 2024
This year has felt like an excavation. I have been trying to clear away layers and layers of artificial structure to get down to the ground. I have been pondering things like land.
I enjoy being in natural spaces to hike and explore. This is one ground that feels solid. My feet find a surface of loamy turf or hard rock and there is contact to hold me standing or to push against to walk.
From there I have been thinking about things like maps. If I was hiking somewhere and crossed a stream, I …
This spring I took the opportunity to go on a 7-day silent retreat in Colorado with a teacher, Susanne Marie. I hadn’t been on a silent retreat that long and wondered what it would be like. I’ve done vision quests before, and compared to 4 days and nights isolated on the land fasting, this seemed quite luxurious. I would have shelter, a bed, and meals!
Silence can be intense, especially if we aren’t used to it, and I was surprised to feel like the retreat was actually not very quiet at all in the ways I was imagining. Most mornings …
I was recently given an assignment to create a vision board of what I wanted to bring forth into life. I love to collage and so I sat down with the idea of what I wanted to bring forth….the deepest experience of homecoming in the midst of life as it is, fun, play and vitality. That sounded like an amazing a juicy collage. As I sat down with my magazines and started looking for images, I felt a total block. A friend who was also working on this asked me if I was in resistance to the assignment. As I …
I was speaking with a colleague recently about a possible talk on suffering for their community. It’s been a while since I had a speaking engagement and I found myself having one of those moments where you meet someone new and you each take turns saying something that really resonates. It was a fun conversation. I had to chuckle as I spoke with the friend who referred me to speak on this topic. She said, “When I heard the topic was suffering, I knew exactly who could speak to that”.
I have been recently launched into another stream of learning …
This past week has been intense. I was in a gathering the other night where we all checked in and as I sat in silence, I wondered how to name what was happening for me. An image came right away. When I was in labor with my first child, it became clear he had flipped upside down and was stuck that way. From the moment we discovered his position, my midwives told me not to push. Sometimes that physical urge is described as similar to the urge to throw up or sneeze, but with exponential intensity. Try stoping that when …
In general when a child asks me a question, I feel a responsibility to answer their question with good will and honesty. “What time is it?” 11:58 I might answer. Specifically, when a person asks me a question shortly after I have already answered the question, I can get playful. “What time is it?” Now, I say. Dinner time, I say. Daytime, I say.
In our time focused culture we give a lot of power to the clock, to the ordering of the world in precise organized ways. Time is a real thing. We experience ourselves and others aging. We …
I love walking the labyrinth. I am fortunate to have several labyrinths available to me with a short drive from home. Invariably I try to get myself oriented on the path and just as reliably, the path itself keeps undoing me with each twist and turn. I thought I was surely almost in the middle when I am led to the very outside ring. I thought I was almost out, when I take a turn towards the center.
Imagine my bemusement today as I settled in to work on some tech issues and stumbled right into a different sort of …