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 …
Category: Uncategorized
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 …
When you read the writings of mystics from any tradition, one thing you notice is their different perception of time. The now moment- this precise and ever opening point of time- is a flow of change and movement. Here in this moment, things are happening the way they are happening. We are happening however we are happening. When I am absorbed in this very moment, all is well.
Waiting, seen from this point, is a tear or a fracture in the now moment as we anticipate a time that has not yet blossomed into the now. This separation is a …
I have been waking up. I am waking up. Sometimes the dreams carried inside fade out and then re-emerge. The dreams are like everything else, they hang out in the soul. They are not lost. They have been planted and are waiting for the right conditions to open, to sprout, to transform.
My favorite thing is being in deep conversation about this human spiritual journey. How are things moving, for you? For me? For us? When does a community weave and open to the same strumming melody? How does the melody co-create our community, our bodies, our way of being …