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

Inner Authority

"I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”

-- Hermann Hesse

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 

Honoring Loneliness

Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly. 
Let it cut more deep. 

Let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients can. 

Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender,

My need of God 
Absolutely 
Clear.

-Hafiz

Love

"Surrendering completely to love, be it human or divine, means giving up everything, including our own well-being or our ability to make decisions. The truth is that we don't want to be saved in the way God has chosen; we want to keep absolute control over our every step, to be fully conscious of our decisions, to be capable of choosing the object of our devotion.  But it isn't like that with love - it arrives, moves in, and starts directing everything.  Only very strong souls allow themselves to be swept along."

-- Paulo Coelho

The Gift of Fear

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”  ― Eleanor Roosevelt

Timely wisdom.

"One of the core competencies of being human is that we are the only corner of creation that can refuse to be ourselves. The mountain is just the mountain, the cloud is just the cloud, and the tree is just the tree. That's why the natural world seems to be so nourishing to us - because we get an intonation of what it might be like just to be ourselves". 

-- David Whyte

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.   

Elephant Shoulders

“I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders;

and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious". 

- Mirabai

Confession

I used to belong to a very charismatic evangelical Christian community when I was very young.

Ever since formally leaving that community I've wondered how to make sense of the power I witnessed then.

At first I tried to live without respect for religion altogether,
But my longing for the Great Spirit was still within me.

No high in the world was like the Ecstasy I remembered
When encountering the Lord God Almighty.

So, finally, I surrendered
Letting grief and fear visit me.
And a part of my heart returned with them.

Caring about my own suffering returned me to myself.

Yesterday, it dawned on me how to reconcile ephemeral worldviews along the journey.

The way the Lover longs to see their Beloved's face from all angles, I want to discover God in every Place.
To know God in precisely the biblical sense of the word: "visceral, erotic, initiatory, epiphanic".

Changing who I AM
With every Encounter.

I approach the Throne Room shyly now; peering up from behind lowered eyes so carefully.

This way of Loving God is what has truly Saved me.

Loss; whose other side is salvation....

Everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

-- Mary Oliver

How To Get What You Want

A very wise woman once told me that you have to create specific receptivity for the things you want to experience in your life.  If you are afraid to tell you the Universe that you want something, it will not necessarily fall into your lap.  Instead, bravery, perseverance and honesty about our deepest longings are rewarded much more often than self-protective indifference.  To illustrate this truth, this same wise woman asked me to think of a moment in my lifetime that felt particularly joyful.  I thought about it and settled on a moment of spiritual significance I had once experienced on a trip to Mexico.

Her follow up questioning sounded something like this:  "Now tell me, did you make yourself available for that joy?  Did you ask for it?  Did you put yourself in its path, and bravely stand there with your naked longing?  Or did you pretend not to need what you received in that moment?"

I think we're often afraid to ask for what we want - let alone acknowledge it to ourselves - because some superstitious part of us believes that we might be setting ourselves up for unbearable disappointment.  Yet, my own short experience on earth tells me that the Universe is not easily moved to collaborate with us when we're defended against her in this sort of passive-aggressive way. Of course, figuring out how to open our hearts towards our own deepest longings takes courage precisely because it means we have to be willing to relate to the most vulnerable parts of ourselves first.

The habitually unexamined self might think we want a certain job, partner, vacation, car, prestige, or positive recognition when really we're after something much deeper like "love, belonging, meaning, safety, healing, significance, or transcendence".  While considering this, I was reminded of the Christian scripture that says, "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you".  Perhaps we have misunderstood this teaching so often because we've misunderstood ourselves more often.

Namaste, you guys.

"The hallmark of insanity is to know that you are God.  It is absolutely taboo, especially in the Christian religion.  Jesus got crucified for knowing it and the Christians said, "Okay, okay, Jesus was God, but let it stop right there.  Nobody else."  But the Gospel is a revelation to us all of something that the Hindus have known all along, tat tvam asi, you are it!  If Jesus had lived in India, they would have congratulated him for finding out rather than crucified him.  There have been many people in India who knew they were God in disguise.  Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Ramana, Krishna, and the Buddha - they all discovered it, because it is not an exclusive claim that I alone am that, but that you all are, and as I look into your eyes I see the universe looking back at me".  -- Alan Watts

Mother Moon.

On Being a Person

Be a person here. 
Stand by the river, invoke the owls. 
Invoke winter, then spring. 
Let any season that wants to come here make its own call. 
After that sound goes away, wait. 
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
[Come back, and hear that call.]
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
Everyone’s dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn’t be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important.
How you listen for the next things to happen.
How you breathe.

-William Stafford "Being a Person"

The temple of the Heart

"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.  There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground."  -- Rumi

The Wisdom of Darkness

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark.  
Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

-- Wendell Berry

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