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

Beauty.

...just because it is.

Freedom

The other day, a stranger in my local grocery store approached me and announced that I was “born a queen, remain a queen, and will die a queen".  I was surprised and confused, and I’m pretty sure I simply stared at him for 30-60 seconds before I decided he wasn’t dangerous or crazy.  He then continued by telling me that he felt compelled to remind me of my own absolute Freedom.  He told me that I needed to look up the definition of the word ‘sovereign’, and understand that it applied to me.

So I looked it up right then: "sovereign: one that exercises supreme authority within a limited sphere".

He went on to tell me about his brother, a doctor, who went to medical school to learn how to help people heal themselves, and wound up working in a hospital where he saw 30-40 patients every day. And then there was this moment when his brother realized that this medical model wasn’t aligned with his values as a ‘healer’, and quit his job a few weeks later.  Apparently, this man’s brother now feels that his soul is significantly more ‘free’.  He concluded, “we don’t have to be any more bound up by things than we want to be.  You can always choose to set the soul free when and if it demands this".

Curiously, less than 45 minutes before this strange interaction at the grocery store, a very wise friend of mine was attempting to share with me what he knew about the hero/heroine’s journey re: the soul’s liberation from self-imposed fundamentalism of any kind.  In a different way, he was also encouraging me to remember my own ultimate freedom and sovereignty within the limited sphere of myself.

These two strong voices - both echoing the others’ message - got my attention.  The Universe seemed to be gently encouraging me to consider (again) how the psychological prisons I often feel held within might be self-imposed constructions.  Of course, the work of liberating ourselves from our habits of thought is no simple task, but I imagine it’s one that others might relate to, and figured I’d do my part in offering both solidarity and support to everyone else on the same journey toward true (shall we say, "inner"?) Freedom.

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.   

Stories.

The sage and her student were standing by a pool discussing longing and ambition.

"What do you want more than anything else?" the sage asked.

"To perfect my ability to love all of creation the way I love myself," the young man replied.

At that moment, the sage tackled the student and shoved his head beneath the water. Accustomed to letting his teacher shape the unpredictable contours of his education, he did not resist.

One minute went by. Then another. The student began to struggle and kick. His teacher was strong.

Finally she released her grip and the student surfaced, fighting for breath.

"What did you want more than anything else during these last few minutes?" the sage inquired.

"Nothing else was in my mind except the desire for air," gasped the student.

"Excellent," beamed the sage. "As soon as you are equally single-minded in your desire to perfect your ability to love all of creation the way you love yourself, you will achieve your goal."

Self Reflection

One day you will decide to risk
Sharing your own deep truths about being and becoming

No matter how dark the substance you must sift
You will risk and risk and risk again

Believing now that you're able to survive
The exacting gaze of your own knowing

Because on that day you will have already had the mysterious and good fortune
Of catching a glimmer of Love -
Both strange and familiar to your tired human body

And everything after that glimpse will never be the same again
Now that you know that meeting the gleam in your own eyes
Doesn't require so much stalwart bravery as you once thought

Your gaze now only serves to return you into your own open arms
Where you can finally hear the sound of your own soothing voice
Saying simply this: "I will welcome you in".

Yes.
I will welcome you in, I will welcome you in, I will welcome you in.

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

Let The Earth Receive Your Stirring

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

--Wendell Berry

Mother Moon.

Healing the Ancestral Lines

Recently, I had a beautiful and strange experience called a Tarpana ceremony. Tarpana is an Ayurvedic ritual that combines physical massage with spiritual journeying (or "active imagination") into a timeless, spaceless place in which I was encouraged to have conversations with people (alive and dead) with whom I have established or inherited unhealthy relationship patterns.

The Tarpana ritual turned out to be much more powerful than I expected at first. Combining bodywork with spiritual and psychological sensitivity helped me feel into the places in my body where I was holding onto these attachments. From there, I could then work to release these holding patterns in the psyche and the body simultaneously. I have done many, many kinds of therapy and spiritual healing rituals in my life, but this one in particular brought something unexpected: a new sense of personal responsibility.

Let me explain.  

After the ceremony, I felt myself start to understand - both mentally and viscerally - that my attitudes towards the people in my life (past and present) manifest as inner attitudes towards myself. I could see how all the negative energy I’d been directing towards any of my relationships created the same experience of negativity in my own body! For example: if I was defending against empathy and understanding in a relationship with someone else, I was blocking off the flow of empathy and understanding within my own system. Alternatively, when I allowed empathy and understanding to arise towards this person, those same energies began to flow freely in my body again.

Many intuitive healers talk about the role of psychological or spiritual sickness in the manifestation of physical dis-ease. I saw this very clearly during my Tarpana ritual. It was as if the innate flow of healing energy was being released from behind a dam of my own creation. It became suddenly obvious to me that while the abundance I seek is within my own reach, it is also not freely available if I’m willfully defended against others - alive or dead; present or absent; known or unknown.

As Rumi says, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it".

May all beings Awaken. Namaste.

Creation Stories

"In the Beginning, Nothingness longed for Love.  And so it was made possible: this planet of contrast, where the play of opposites could Become the dance of Love that was longed for at the start".  -- mine

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"

A Sincere Approach to Meditation

While listening to an interview with one of the Dalai Lama's principal English translators, I learned the most stunning thing about the original meaning of the word "Meditation".  Sometimes while "meditating", I often wonder if I might be doing something wrong b/c I don't get nearly as much out of empty mental gazing, as I do from a gentle investigation of whatever it is that arises in my immediate experience.  Of course, I probably wouldn't be capable of the kind of investigation I'm speaking of if I didn't also know how to access the neutral curiosity that gets strengthened by those practices that value this process of "stilling" or "emptying" the mind.

According to this interview, however, the English word "meditation" is being used as a translation of the Sanskrit term (bhavana), and the Tibetan term (gom).  The Sanskrit word bhavana has an alive quality to it that means something like cultivation, like cultivating a field.  While the Tibetan word gom  has the connotation of familiarity, but also suggests a process of familiarity rather than a static state of familiarity.  So, arguably meditation can understood (at least, in part) as a process of discernment that has movement through stages and layers of discovery.  Consequently, meditation is a practice aimed at acquiring knowledge -- maybe the kind of true knowledge that available through sincere contact with direct experience.

The word sincere begs a little translation here too.  Sincere - meaning "without wax", from the Latin words “sin” (without) and “cera” (wax).  Apparently, this phrase "without wax" first became widespread during the height of Roman and Greek sculpture artistry.  When a sculpture had a flaw, artists would often fill cracks or flaws in the work with wax to match the marble, masking the imperfections.  An honest artist would create pieces of work "without wax".  For me, cultivating a practice of sincere contact with direct experience (both inner and outer) means trying to approach the immediate moment without the layers of self-deception, denial, and glossing over that so often cover over the truth that can be found there.

Curiously, a good teacher once said this to me about the practice of meditation:  "Even one sincere breath is a full practice".

Fruit of the Spirit

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a shamanic retreat at a beautiful retreat center near St. Louis.  For those who are unfamiliar with the concept of shamanism, here's a few rough talking points: a shaman is an indigenous (i.e. in some way native to the "place" they practice) healer.  They often facilitate "journeys" to transpersonal realms so that people might have experiences of healing and transformation they may not otherwise have access to in their ordinary waking state of consciousness.  In shamanism, there is also a deep belief in reciprocal exchange between all potential and manifest energies.  In other words, it's possible for us to have a mutually influential relationship (and an ongoing conversation!) with all things - visible and invisible.

During this recent retreat, for example, I was able to receive some information about the psychological origins of a current experience of dis-ease in my physical body.  From this previously mentioned belief in the possibility of reciprocal relationship with all energies, I was encouraged to ask the dis-ease itself about it's origins.  I asked this specific energy why it had manifested at this time in my life.  It answered back immediately: "because of your belief in scarcity".  I also asked the dis-ease where the physical origins of this energy block - or holding pattern - were located in my body, and it responded by showing me the back of my heart.  I was working with a woman who is both a shaman and a neurologist during this particular exercise, and she reminded me that the back side of the body often holds the unconscious beliefs associated with each organ or energy center in the body.  Subsequently, I then decided to then ask that energy center if it would allow whatever was unconscious to become conscious (i.e. unblocked).  After a moment or two, I received this answer:  "THE LOVE IS REAL".

I didn't understand that message in it's entirety immediately, but my body responded by softening in such a way that convinced me that this answer must be exactly right.  Later that evening - in the middle of a Despacho Ceremony - I kept noticing feelings of the deepest kind of tenderness in my body.  This feeling of tenderness was connected to my own experience of love towards the many energies and persons that were being honored by this ceremony.  Spontaneously, I understood that what Spirt meant by "THE LOVE IS REAL" was that my own experience of love in my physical body is a real experience of Love.  At that moment, I could literally feel my heart pouring itself into every other cell in body, and I wept many tears for many hours out of this experience of profoundly loving overflow.

That night, I had a dream.  In the dream, I became aware of a feeling of deeply satisfying joy in my body.  As I went searching for the source of this joy, some kind of disembodied dream voice explained to me that "joy is also experienced on the inside".  Fortuitously, I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down all that I could remember from the dream before falling back to sleep. During our lunch break the next day, I went outside to find a place to make "Sand Art" (another shamanic ritual involving reciprocal exchange with nature).  While gathering up some sticks I intended to use to enclose my sand art with, I happened to stumble upon this literal sign in nature that read "JOY":

As you may be able to see, I placed my sticks in a circle at the foot of this altar to JOY, and then began to clear away the leaves with the boundaries of the sticks.  Underneath the leaves, I found a small stump.  Upon uncovering this stump, I noticed that it was literally shaped like an anatomically accurate human heart!  See image:

When I turned the stump over, I discovered that the entire back side of this heart-shaped stump was covered in ICE!  The "back of the heart" was literally frozen over.  Immediately, I allowed myself to feel into that real experience of love I now believed to be available in my own body, placed my hand over the icy stump, and proceeded to send love and warmth to that frozen heart until I felt nothing but warm wetness underneath my palm.  At the exact moment I realized the thawing process was complete, the noon-ish sun shifted in the sky just slightly, spilling all of it's radiance onto my face, and casting a perfect shadow from the "JOY" sign right through the center of that heart-shaped stump.  I understood the tender message that the natural world seemed to be speaking to me in that moment, and allowed myself to become conscious of the real experience of joy in my physical body too.

Some moments later, I got up in order to walk away from this sacred space and ran into another literal sign in nature that read "PEACE":

I stood there gazing for at it for a moment, trying to honor the message that might be trying to reveal itself to me.  I felt peaceful, certainly, and could appreciate that this feeling of peace could also become an internal refuge.  But when I tried to walk away from this spot, I felt something pull me back toward it.  I looked all around the little meadow of trees, and only found one other sign:

In a single moment, I remembered (thank you Christian youth camp!) that there's a passage in the Bible lists the "Fruit of the Holy Spirit" in precisely this order:  LOVE, JOY, PEACE... Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-Control.  I laughed out loud, feeling myself filled with gratitude for this newly enlivened teaching, as I suddenly understood in a new, deep way that they are ordered in this way for a reason.  I wondered how much of my life I had spent trying to master self-control in order to gain an experience of love (something that probably got reinforced by this same youth camp, unfortunately).  At this particular moment, however, I could see very clearly the grievous error in this way of thinking, and felt the grace that comes with an embodied understanding of how things could be different.  It seemed that Spirit had given me a living, breathing experience that would continue to help me understand that we must start with a belief in the immediate, experiential, available reality of Love, and everything else we value would flow forth from there.  

Mary Oliver says it this way: "You do not have to be good.  You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.  You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves". The rest will follow.

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

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

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.

Tree of Life

On a warm night in January of 2009, while taking a very necessary year-long hiatus from independent adult life, I sat down by a tree in my parents' backyard and wept bitterly about my own feelings of alienation from myself.  Sometime during that powerful release of grief and fear and shame and longing, I began to press my whole body and face into that old, familiar tree in their yard.  I suppose I must have called out to the spirit in that tree in some way that evoked its presence, because very soon I began to feel a visceral kind of sweetness reaching out to me from deep within the tree.  I let my exhausted body and mind yield into that small miracle of connection to nature, and from a place of gentle surrender, I began to feel as if that generous spirit in the tree was also within me.  My mind was suddenly able to see how I had been trying to live my life out on the furthest, most outward-facing branch of my experience, and that this was in fact the cause of my suffering.  I realized then that by choosing to live out on this fragile limb, I had become completely identified with the weather patterns - or vicissitudes - of my immediate subjective experience. 

From a sense of deep kinship with this tree, however, I began to feel curious about my own sturdier branches, trunk, and roots -- my deepest, most essential self.  I believe that this connection with the tree afforded me both the courage and the grace to discover how I might symbolically turn around from my outward-facing position on that limb where I had been living, and look deeply into my own origins instead.  I reference the need for courage because I remember exactly how terrified I was to look that deeply into myself; I was almost paralyzed with fear about what I might find there!  I also understand that grace played a part in this experience, precisely because I did not know how to bring my own conscious awareness into what had remained so willfully unconscious until then.  

But I learned how to do it that night!  And with my back pressed into the trunk of that ordinary tree, I swallowed hard, and surrendered my ego's firmly held position on that far-reaching limb, in order to actually see my-Self (consciously) for the very first time.  To my utter amazement, I saw something so neutral, timeless, cohesive, eternal, spacious, and incorruptible that I began to laugh out loud!  I could not believe that I had been so afraid of this profoundly empty, receptive, flowing, spacious, awareness.

I wrote a poem of sorts that night, which I later understood to be a kind of reflective love letter to my most Essential Self.  And the poem goes like this:

Lover.

Filled with wonder.

Playmate of the Universe.

More curious than afraid - a steadfast friend to Mystery.

Soft.

Tender.

So soft and tender.

Spacious enough to include all beings.

Different than trustworthy: Entrusted.

The way a river has a course, yet is absolutely Free.

I've kept those words and that embodied understanding with me ever since -- and my experience of mySelf has never been the same.  The profound feeling of alienation ended in an instant.  I also understood in an instant that I would continue living a life full of plenty of mistakes.  The lasting transformation for me, however, has been that I've never doubted for a single moment since this one that I could find my way Home to this place within myself whenever I notice that I've lost my way.  

A few days ago, I painted a picture of a naked, yet luminous tree at a friend's arts-y birthday party (see image below).  I had never painted anything before, and was amazed that this image was willing to manifest itself through me that night.  It felt like another gift from that same spirit I first connected with inside that old tree.  The next day, I showed a picture of this painting to one of my colleagues at work.  He took one look at it and said, "It sort of looks like you - I mean, it has a feeling to it that reminds me of how I experience you".

I don't know this man very well, but he gave me a tremendous gift inside of that simple statement. It made me feel like my Essential Self was indeed infusing my outer branches with it's innermost Truth more and more consistently.  I went home that evening after work and looked for the poem I had written back in 2009.  To my astonishment, I discovered that I made this tree painting exactly 4 years TO THE DAY that I had this experience I've described above.

Looking at this painting now, I feel grateful for my own human journey - and simultaneously less and less afraid of being down here on the earth; where pain and beauty seem to always exist in the same place at the same time, and nothing worth having ever comes easy.

May the grace and courage that was given to me four years ago continue to assist in the liberation of all sentient beings.  Namaste.