Letting Go

"When a relationship ends, use the pain and difficult feelings to deepen your practice... to see vividly the infinite depth of being in the intensity of your broken heart". -- Ken McLeod

True Love

This winter has been especially difficult for me. Maybe you can relate.

I feel in some ways that I have been dismantled by the difficulty of this season. In fact, I think I am probably writing from right inside the middle of the dismantling process, and not from on the other side of it just yet. 

Perhaps the dismantling is unrelated to winter, and more related to aging. Perhaps, as I commit myself to engaging more authentically in the reality of world I am living in, I am just more aware of the difficulty. Perhaps, prior to now, I was using the naivete of my own mostly satisfying young adult life to try to defend myself against the reality of unavoidable, un-fixable human heart-break. 

As a person devoted to learning how to be with people in their own experiences of heart-break, I look back now on my first few years practicing this art, and wonder if my clients ever felt abandoned or disappointed by my unconscious attitude that "things can and will get better with the right kind of hard work". Because lately, I have been learning the exact opposite lesson. The lesson that says, "even if you do everything right, tragedy can and may still find you". 

It can find you despite all your hyper-vigilance and preventive practices. It can come and find you while you're sound asleep inside the safety of your own spiritual or psychological resiliency. It can set up camp right in the center of your own human heart... making the safest, most authentic place for you to dwell, also the most excruciating place to try sit down and take stock.

So, for now, I feel like I am trying to locate myself again... trying to find my new perimeter, new center, and new dimensions. It's strange, and uncomfortable, and I keep hoping that it will still feel beautiful to be a part of the human family... instead of simply horrifying. 

Sometimes I am not sure, and that's probably one of the most honest things I've ever said in my whole life. 

And yet, still somehow, within me, there is this experience of Love. Even when I'm totally worn out, if I take a minute to land in my own heart space, I find it. Endlessly pulsing, seemingly tireless. Somehow, this remains. Over and over. Indestructible. Unbroken, seamless, cohesive. Unconvinced by my defensive numbing out strategies. Beyond my personal limitations, this is the force that remains. As if it's beyond, or outside of wounding altogether.

A miracle.

Consequently, my daily practice, if I am tender enough with myself to remember it, has become this: recognizing how any encounter with Love is a gift beyond all suffering. Or maybe a gift that can hold all suffering. Never erasing it, of course, but strong enough to be with it. 

For this, I am humbled, and I am thankful. 

Namaste,

Whitney

Soul Sanctuary.

.... One day when I don't live in this physical place anymore, I'll miss this spot in my living room the most. 

Because I have made this space sacred with my own intention, 
and then delighted myself by spending countless hours alone here. 

It's been right here that I've slowly learned how to listen to my whole Being most carefully. 

And from within that silent observation, I've discovered this new kind of intimacy:

Conversation with my own soul. 

Learning how to meet myself in this way feels like coming Home.

As if I could find a feeling of family reunion inside my own body.

Or rest inward towards my own exquisitely tender embrace.

I now wish everyone could find a way to get this close to themselves -- or hopefully, even closer.

Because I know there is even more than this too.

Namaste,
Whitney 

Non-harming includes ourselves.

Welcoming Rejection.

"The gift in rejection is that it can become the new face of liberation".

I've been silently repeating this to myself for several days now, hoping it will stick.  Turns out, I'm weeks away from being 30 years old, and the possibility of rejection is still a big, scary thing for me.

Perhaps too early in my life I suffered from an incomplete initiation into this particularly devastating kind of pain, and have subsequently been trying to avoid it by learning to be "likable enough" in most situations, most of the time.  Today, I'm hoping that these nearly 30 years of life experience have finally allowed me to decided that the price one pays for that comfortable "likable" status is way too high.  Every effort to avoid this experience on the outside, the searing pain of rejection becomes internalized instead.

All too recently - despite years of therapy and other healing interventions - I have discovered that this inner ridicule is still wreaking havoc on select parts of my psyche and bodily systems.  Fortunately, I also know -- largely as a result of all those same years of therapy (etc.) - that many of my initiations into the bitterness of rejection have also carried with them an elixir of healing far beyond any kind of suffering I had feared before.

So, to expand on my original mantra: I'm thinking that the gift in a conscious approach to any experience of rejection is that it may become a powerful teacher on the path of liberation.  Exactly what that teaching will be teaching 'you' is unknown until it's endured, I suppose.

May we have the courage when we need it.

Namaste.

All Relationships Are Sacred

"All relationships are sacred", I said to my friend the other day.  When he asked me what I meant by that, I was happy to A) realize that I did truly mean what I had said, and B) that I might actually be able to explain to him exactly why I felt this was true.

I imagine that most of us can accept this notion when our relationships feel inspiring, supportive, and loving.  We know that those types of relationships feel precious to us, and we are typically willing to work very hard to honor and protect them.  Yet, I was also acknowledging - at least in my own life - that even the encounters that have felt quite destructive may be equally valuable experiences, which deserve some strange kind of honoring too.  

Many of my own most destructive experiences in relationships appear  - often retrospectively - to have been calling me to do precisely that:  destroy something in myself that needed destroying.  (Perhaps something in the other needed to be destroyed too -- but I can't speak for them).

For me, however, it's sometimes been my naivete or idealism that needs destroying.  Sometimes it's my passivity.  Or my sense of powerlessness.  Or my arrogance.  Or bitterness.  Or dishonesty.  Or self-protective emotional numbing.  Sometimes I have needed to destroy unconscious patterns of relating to myself or others that I'd learned from equally unconscious role models (not blaming anyone in particular - just noticing that we all seem to sort of cross pollinate one another... for better or worse).  

And painful as it has been at times, I know that all of this has ultimately been for my absolute highest good.  In fact, it's this kind of 'clearing out' that has subsequently created an ever-deepening capacity to experience true satisfaction in my relationships with others too.  

So it seems to me that the opportunity in any relationship (beautiful or painful or both) is to discover whether we're capable of accepting the initiation it's offering us, and allow ourselves to be transformed by the mutual Mystery.

I suppose I would only only add this addendum to my original statement:  I believe that all relationships can be made sacred.   

Love After Love

The time will come, 
when with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, 
in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, 
sit here.  
Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine.  
Give bread.
Give back your heart to itself,
to the stranger who has loved you all your life, 
whom you have ignored for another who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 
the photographs, 
the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit.  Feast on your life.

Dereck Walcott

Clumsy Stumbling Forward

“Don’t fix yourself up first, then go forth: the two are inseparable.” -- A Buddhist teacher

The intelligence of 'Trance'.

There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows substance up—
Then covers the Abyss with Trance—
So Memory can step
Around—across—upon it—
As one within a Swoon—
Goes safely—where an open eye—
Would drop Him—Bone by Bone. 

-- Emily Dickinson

There's an incredible book called The Inner World of Trauma by Donald Kalsched.  In the book, Kalsched explores the way self-destructive habits get created in response to early traumas we might experienced.  Essentially, he suggests that these self-destructive habits were ORIGINALLY intelligent because they allowed us to survive what was unbearable at the time.  As we begin find a way to start looking at these painful habits later in life - the gift and burden of consciousness then becomes learning how to forebear what we once could not in order to give up what no longer helps us thrive.

The intelligence of the psyche will not allow us to go there, however, until we feel authentically safe enough to survive this kind of regression into old psychic injuries.  In my work as a therapist, I often realize that the symptomatic 'acting out' that brings people into my office must then be intrinsically linked to an unresolved feeling of danger.  Figuring out how to help people get safe in their bodies, safe in their relationship with me, and safely connected to their own inner reality feels like the heart and soul of what I might hope to achieve with each new person I see.

Lately, I've become convinced that figuring out how to create this safe space for someone else requires a certain reverence for the 'symptoms' themselves.  When we approach our destructive habits with curiosity and compassion, I believe we afford ourselves a chance to learn how to follow their trail into an accurate understanding of their symbolic function.  Once we can see clearly how our own attempts to survive our lives may no longer be helping us to do so, we might be able to forgive ourselves for holding on to what hurts us and begin to let go.  It sounds like somewhat of a paradox, of course, but I truly believe that it's our capacity to honor the original intelligence that created these personal habits that imprison us the most, that then gives us the possibility to begin living beyond them.

Namaste.

Soul Dance

We have come to be danced
Not the pretty dance
Not the pretty pretty, pick me, pick me dance
But the claw our way back into the belly
Of the sacred, sensual animal dance
The unhinged, unplugged, cat is out of its box dance
The holding the precious moment in the palms
Of our hands and feet dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the jiffy booby, shake your booty for him dance
But the wring the sadness from our skin dance
The blow the chip off our shoulder dance.
The slap the apology from our posture dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the monkey see, monkey do dance
One two dance like you
One two three, dance like me dance
but the grave robber, tomb stalker
Tearing scabs and scars open dance
The rub the rhythm raw against our soul dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the nice, invisible, self-conscious shuffle
But the matted hair flying, voodoo mama
Shaman shakin’ ancient bones dance
The strip us from our casings, return our wings
Sharpen our claws and tongues dance
The shed dead cells and slip into
The luminous skin of love dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the hold our breath and wallow in the shallow end of the floor dance
But the meeting of the trinity, the body breath and beat dance
The shout hallelujah from the top of our thighs dance
The mother may I?
Yes you may take 10 giant leaps dance
The olly olly oxen free free free dance
The everyone can come to our heaven dance.

We have come to be danced
Where the kingdom’s collide
In the cathedral of flesh
To burn back into the light
To unravel, to play, to fly, to pray
To root in skin sanctuary
We have come to be danced

WE HAVE COME.


by Jewel Mathieson