“What the eye sees better, the heart feels more deeply.” —Robert Kegan
This past winter I facilitated a two month Circling course in the midst of the pandemic. For those who might not know, Circling is a relational meditation practice that is ultimately about connection—with self, with other, and beyond.
It is largely a practice of seeing and being seen. And while that might sound almost sentimental, it isn’t a soft or “lite” affair. In fact, it comes at a “cost” in that it unwittingly pulls us into a kind of care that’s not negotiable. In other words, these fellow humans begin to matter; their impacts have gravity. This is tricky business as we tend not to like being at the mercy of one another. The core wound lives there, after all.
Robert Kegan writes about the “dangerous recruitability such seeing brings on.” When we see others in this deep way, we “increase the likelihood of our being moved” and we also “run the risks that being moved entails. For we are moved somewhere, and that somewhere is further into life, closer to those we live with.”
This is, I imagine, in sync with how psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips elucidates true kindness; not as a saccharine or romanticized “selflessness,” but rather as an impulse toward embracing the sympathetic quiver in one’s heart prompted by evolving affinities of being.
He writes: “Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can (the notion of self-interest implies that we always know what we want, by knowing what the self is and what its interests are. It forecloses discovery.). Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them. By involving us with strangers as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality.”
It is always my experience that no one really understands Circling until they actually experience it—and maybe not even then. I find that, seven years in, satisfying explanations still elude me, even for all of my articulateness at times. Such is the dilemma of explicating a bottom-up, non-linear practice in a top-down, logical world. It can never quite be captured in words.
And yet I continue to try, even as I say, “I am so tired of maps, of endless stories, of sense-making.” Selfhood, identity, and the need to understand can be exhausting ventures—tyrannical even. Lately I find myself called to a simpler (but perhaps more provocative) enterprise—“being-with” as a form of dialogue. This is currently how I might articulate what Circling is, or at least what it has the potential to be.
Phillips, in another work, advocates for what he calls an “impersonal narcissism” in the evolution of psychoanalysis; he is interested in a way of relating that would depend less on the excavation of personal history and psychic material and more on a process of cultivating attentiveness to what is becoming in the living presence of the other. He likens this experience to the way that a mother endeavors to “know” her newborn—through attunement and what Christopher Bollas calls the “aesthetic of handling.”
As synergy would have it, early wounding has been the predominant theme in my therapy practice over the past year. The call has been for precisely this kind of simplicity and holding—for returning to a kind of innocence uncorrupted by the ravages of identity and self. There’s been a need to tend to fried nervous systems, which has amounted to lots of non-doing and being-with.
Our collective exhaustion seems to be prompting us back toward an almost primitive impulse—one that involves knowing and being known in a wholly different way. In that, perhaps there is a provocation toward the kindness Phillips points to that threatens to entangle us. Perhaps this is what we need at this time on the planet.
Something happens when the usual stores of energy are depleted—we naturally loosen our grip. Maybe we don’t have the bandwidth to fight so hard to “get it,” or to understand. Maybe all we can do then is to show up breathing, with simply the tremor of our raw humanity. To be witnessed in such tiny dignities is an unparalleled experience of intimacy.
When this occurs, perhaps paradoxically, we get nourished from a different source—a taproot.
I think this is what happened in the series I facilitated during the winter—nourishment came in via a mysterious route. What could have easily been the nail in the coffin for me (a course on top of my workload which was unprecedented during a global pandemic) ended up being a source of inexplicable aliveness.
But this was not just my experience. Everyone else arrived, equally exhausted and stretched beyond reasonable limits. (Half of the group was comprised of therapists/helping professionals. Many of us had been working overtime during the pandemic, simultaneously navigating a global trauma while attending to our clients and their wounds.). Some evenings, another Zoom call might have felt like too much to bear.
And yet this group of humans kept showing up. And they kept opening to each other, even as they didn’t “understand” what one called this “wild ride” of a practice. Miraculously, I stopped worrying about them out on the rugged frontier of connection (I simply didn’t have the extra energy)—it was okay if they didn’t “get it” in the familiar, top-down way. In fact, maybe it was ideal.
When we are cognitively confused, we have to rely on a different kind of compass to navigate—one that’s much more instinctual. I sense that a return to primacy is at the heart of what was so satisfying about the experience of those eight weeks; something profound happened in our opening to what was unknowably evolving as potential between us.
I didn’t “do” much. Some other force—the collective field, I suspect—told hold. I still don’t fully understand. But perhaps I really got “surrendered leadership” for the first time. I think I also got something deeper about Phillips’ notion of kindness, and the delicate rigors of what it recruits us into.
All of this brings me back to Kegan who reminds us that human survival in fact depends on whether or not an infant moves (or recruits) someone in exactly this way. Quite literally, it is a life or death matter. Babies die for lack of holding.
The word “attunement” came up more than any other word among participants in our last session. As it turns out, there is actually a neurobiological state of limbic system resonance that we might say is equitable to love. Somehow, this mighty force of connection inexplicably penetrated the clunky technology and enlisted us into a reciprocal seeing and attending. For this there was great praise.
And that great praise bespeaks a great grief as well—for our isolation, for our lack of exquisite attention, for our disconnection from body and instinct, for the ways in which we have failed to recruit one another into a more risky but vital commingling.
Lest this all sound too romantic, I want to let it be known that there was grit too. To be recruited into care is to surrender to being hurt. When we mingle our needs and desires in the relational pool, there will always be some precariousness—the one who can satisfy us is the same one who can frustrate us, after all.
And yet there is the possibility of being with this too—of saying “yes” to holding the tension of opposites; of building enough courage to bear the otherness of the other while still staying in connection. And to trusting the wild, weaving path back to each other when we stray.
In relationship there is a moment in between nothing and everything. We humans often get stuck there. This practice can teach us how to hover in the liminal space of ever-unfolding potential; to find humility out on the frontier of what is still being discovered, and to dwell in the rugged magic of that eternal landscape.
It’s a pioneering enterprise to be sure. And it might just be the work of our time.
On Teaching
"I believed I wanted to be a poet, but deep down, I just wanted to be a poem." —Jaime Gil de Biedma
I was a high school English teacher for many years before becoming a psychotherapist. With an academic background in literature and writing, it made sense; after all, I had a passion for reckoning with the human condition which is the territory in which all great literary works traffic, ultimately. Teaching English, for me, was always less about giving a vocab lesson than it was about opening up a sort of collective existential inquiry.
During my teaching days, I steadfastly claimed that I could care less about pedagogical theory. I wasn’t compelled, for example, by questions of how I was going to teach, say, some conceit of composition. Instead, I was interested in offering students an experience.
In line with that, I arranged my classroom in a circle and I adamantly refused to lecture. To this day, I still have an allergy to didacticism (the likes of which I’ve sat through far too much of in two rounds of grad school and two psychotherapy trainings that, for being “experiential,” contained heavy doses of presentation). I reasoned that if I found sitting and listening to someone spewing information in a top-down way unbearable, I sure as hell wasn’t going to put anyone else through it. (I, admittedly, take a sort of perverse pride in not knowing how to create a PowerPoint presentation!)
And so I invited discussion, offered group work, and generally engaged my classes in activities that prompted students to bring themselves into the space in unique and sometimes unorthodox ways (I also got into all kinds of trouble for teaching books with sex and bad words in them…but I digress for now). I was far less interested in proclaiming, with any sort of absolutism, what the green light on the end of Daisy’s dock meant in The Great Gatsby, for example, than I was in creating a kind of participation that stirred something inside of these young people, perhaps something about the vicissitudes of being human.
In many respects, I see the work of psychotherapy as a synergistic endeavor: it’s a practice of engagement that seeks to help us discover and bear our own aliveness and, perhaps, to make meaning of it. In my world, this is always an experiential process—it’s not something to be dictated or gleaned through theory or lectured into being. In other words, it’s bottom-up work, and knowing too much can be a liability as it forecloses upon discovery.
One of the things that I sometimes miss about teaching is the dynamism of it—groups are full of an enlivened energy that feeds the extroverted side of my nature. Plus, there is something really beautiful that often gets to happen in the magic of collective space; we humans are relational beings, after all. For these reasons, over the last couple of years, I’ve been doing a bit more “teaching” again, albeit in contexts different from the more traditional classroom. I’ve facilitated workshops, run several series, led retreats, and I will continue to do a bit of all of that.
As I prepare to launch an upcoming immersive retreat experience (as well as a couple of other forthcoming offerings), I’ve been prompted to (re)consider my relationship with this original moniker of “teacher.” In truth, I feel some ambivalence about identifying that way. To me, “teacher” has always implied a kind of hierarchy that I’m uncomfortable with—it sets up something of a positional one-up, one-down dynamic where the one on top is the “expert.” It’s tinged with a sort of “guru mentality” that has never been completely aligned with my own sensibilities. (For the record, I have similar reservations about calling myself a “psychotherapist,” as it, too, is derived from a hierarchical lineage. That said, I’m also something of a realist and I accept that we may not be able to live completely outside of these contexts of power that are so much a part our world.)
In any case, the idea of espousing too much top-down, how-to content holds very little appeal for me in any context. Not to mention that I feel downright oppressed by the onslaught of “expertise” in our culture. Let us not forget that we live in the era when every self-help guru on the Internet proclaims to have the answers (in five easy steps, no less!) to your troubled sex life or your financial woes and can’t wait to sell them to you ASAP. One of the thorniest dilemmas of our time is that we’ve mistaken information for wisdom and egregiously mixed up the two.
I suppose I seek to move people more than I seek to “educate” them in any formal manner. The best “teacher,” in my experience, is always the one whose transmission does the work; in other words, the energy that emanates from his or her being radiates a sincerity of reckoning that cannot be manufactured. All the technical, informational know-how in the world will never compensate for a lack of what Chögyam Trungpa called “full human-beingness.”
Nevertheless, what speaks to me at this juncture, whether I’m doing psychotherapy with an individual or leading a workshop or hosting a retreat, is this idea of prompting an experience; I seek to rouse something in the subtler depths that touches people in an inside-out way and has them making more profound contact with their own hearts (and perhaps with the hearts of others as so much of this work is relational ultimately).
To that end, I feel more like a guide than a teacher or even a psychotherapist. Perhaps I’m just a transparent practitioner. Stephen Jenkinson once said something really beautiful when he walked into a room of “students”: “I’m here to be troubled out loud. So don’t confuse me with a teacher—I’m a practitioner. Everything I teach I am practicing in front of you.”
Maybe all I’ve ever truly been interested in doing, at the end of the day, is engaging the inquiry and practice of being human, ardently and aloud, with the invitation for company on this rigorous adventure.
Love Letter to a Wild Mentor
"Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us." --Virginia Woolf
Dear Wild One,
Our recent time together was a feast. It's all swirling and metabolizing in this really beautiful way, even despite the tinges of embarrassment that come as I hear the echoes of those crazy fillies who make me seem like a floundering, graceless girl.
You honor those fillies, the obstreperous young ones who run interference, and revere them as "wild," while I feel ashamed of them when I listen to myself. Your love for them, despite their frantic antics and the dust they kick up, is tremendously powerful.
There is a part of me that wants to say "I'm sorry" for subjecting you to them. I feel slightly ashamed; I want to say "I know better." I'm embarrassed that for all of my knowing, I still can't get out of my own way sometimes. These are the moments when I imagine you probably have it all together and I wonder if you ever feel hijacked by neurosis and fear. I'm sure you do; you're human, after all. But I see the side of you that holds me so exquisitely in all of this and I can't help but tell myself the story of how you've figured it all out somehow. And then I go into feeling separate and deficient. When I feel "unworthy" or like I "can't play," I pick at things. Usually what happens from there is that disconnection ensues. But, strangely, in our dynamic, something else occurs: I find my way back into the grace of truth. I don't know how to name what transpires in the alchemy of our process that binds us to connection ultimately, but it is new and remarkably precious. Forgive me if I fumble in the face of so much love. I'm still learning how to navigate such magnanimously hospitable terrain.
Thank you for holding me accountable, for calling me out, with such gorgeous respect, on those places where I still mistake the noise for the signal. It's a rare feat; almost no one in my life can or will do it-- and certainly not with such impeccable skill (which is to say with nothing but love for the residue that's "in the way"). Those fillies, as you remind me, are strong. If they manage to take you for a ride, I can only imagine the havoc they wreak for the less-practiced among us.
If one of my superpowers is that I am "a feaster designed to receive and be overwhelmed in the most wonderful way by the exquisiteness of this world," then one of yours is that you are an ambassador of fierce love, a masterful penetrator who disarms with artful, reverent candor. I long to be the one who cuts through so cleanly, to deliver (and land) exacting truth with the utmost devotion. I wonder sometimes if I have conflated ferocity with a certain kind of violence; no doubt I have one in there who says, "If you fuck with me, I will annihilate you." She's fronting with tenacity but she's actually terrified. I'm not sure it ever occurred to me that I could be fierce without stationing a bully at the helm...or at least without employing the slightly cleaned up version (the one who picks at things and calls out crossed wires). But as I watch how you show up to the game again and again, I am humbled by having to learn a wildly different way to play.
You and I have talked much of reciprocal impact; how we both feel and are felt by the world around us. We've nodded to the power in that, and the beauty and terror in it as well. You're no stranger to the fact that I long to feel my impact on this planet and am simultaneously terrified of it. Sometimes, despite your astute observation that I am someone who was, in fact, designed to feel every nuance of sensation, I don't always show up fully for the feast. And even when I do show up, I often prefer to partake in private. There is always that tempering. As I've told you, I'm embarrassed by how much and how deeply I love.
Lately I've been wondering about the relationship between love and hunger. You've called me both a lover and a feaster. You've said that I serve as permission to be ravenous in the world; that it's food for you all the way over there. I've long been ashamed of my desire and my appetite; my story is that it's weak to want so much. But you seem to have a different idea...and in your reverent gaze, something is beginning to alchemize. I'm reminded of a Mary Oliver poem that stopped me cold the first time I heard it in a workshop years ago; in it she equates the "desperation" with which the bees go into the flowers with "love." The reframe absolutely arrested me at the time and one line in particular has never left me alone: "But they did this with no small amount of desperation -- you might say: love." I've been afraid that if you see too much of the need, too much of the hunger, too much of the ravenousness, too much of the insatiable desire, too much of the heartbreak, that you will come to the conclusion that I am not in my wholeness. (Perhaps this is why those fillies think they need to work overtime.)
But you're beginning to have me see that perhaps wholeness is far more generous than all of that; that it is, above all, inclusive. That it's not just about paying lip service to the idea that all parts serve, but rather it's about daring to love all of those wild ones back into the fold.
I have this fear that if I show you how deep my gratitude and my love run that I'll be somehow at your mercy. But I know that's just a "good loyal soldier" talking. It's not the Truth. I've gotten it backwards somehow. My love isn't holding me hostage. I've been holding my love hostage.
In the name of setting it free, I want to say that I have extraordinary, boundless love for you. As I write this now there are voices that want to protest: that's feeble, it's lame, it's little-girl-like, it's bound up in primary wounding and transferential bullshit and all kinds of messy humanness. It's not "pure."
One of my greatest fears is that my love will feel trivial. That it will be insignificant.
I'm starting to know better, thanks, in no small measure, to you. It's courageous and grueling work to reconstitute "deficiency" as superpower. I'm comforted by the fact that, as I sit here, I can feel you embracing all of those parts (including the part that judges), without any regard for what is supposedly "superior" or "inferior." And out of that equanimous holding emerges a quietude, a stillness. A place where the turbid gives way to the pure essence of the thing.
I often think that the most difficult task of being human is to withstand love. To tolerate the light of it in the places of our deepest wounding feels excruciating at times; the impulse to turn and make it "wrong" can be absolutely overwhelming. I'm awed by how steadfastly you love the stubborn, unruly, chaotic, critical, childlike, and even ugly parts of me. I'm also humbled by how much I need this. Even still, as a grown woman.
Initially I thought this was a love letter to you. And it is. But it's more than that. It's also a love letter to myself...and to all the parts of myself that I've forsaken or shamed and that I've needed you to hold back up to the light. I guess that makes it a Thank You letter too. And maybe an amends as well.
Ultimately, though, this is a love letter to Love itself. It's what happened when I wrote my way to the other side of the dust that those fillies kicked up. I needed to get to the purest heart of the matter; I'm determined to get those young ones to finally line up in service of freedom.
Once upon a time I learned that, "Not everything needs to be so damn heart-wrenching." Tenderness has been my cross to bear in a world that isn't particularly kind to it. It's temping to keep trading it for a certain coolness, but that comes at a cost. I've yearned for a model of vulnerability that isn't sappy or insipid or lazy; one that, paradoxically, is rooted in a robustness, a rigor, even.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, it is simply an honesty that I'm seeking. Maybe the one I've been withholding from the world.
So here is the truth. My heart breaks every day that I'm here on this earth and I don't know of any other way to live. I'm not talking about being mired in melancholy when I speak of heartbreak. I'm talking at least as much about how, for example, my heart swells and bursts every time I think of our connection for even a moment, and I silently marvel at whatever intelligent force of magnetism it was that delivered me into your orbit.
Thank you for showing up so radiantly with your wild medicine of Wholeness.
It's catching.
And thank God.
For yes, our lives do indeed depend on it.
The Heartbreak of Giving a Shit
It is St. Patrick's Day and I am fortunate enough to be sitting in a seminar with poet and writer David Whyte. He is keynoting tomorrow at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington, DC, a massive gathering of my professional "tribe." "Thank goodness for a poet among shrinks," I think to myself as I sit, front row, in what is a surprisingly cold ballroom on an unseasonably warm day in mid-March.
The workshop title is "Solace: The Art of Asking the Beautiful Question." And because I relate to my work as being much more of an art than a science, it's a welcome respite from all of the latest clinical research that, while perhaps "cutting edge" today, will be old news tomorrow. There is something timeless, however, about our existential reckonings; the human spirit will never be irrelevant or outdated.
David Whyte works with what he calls "the conversational nature of reality"; he is interested in questions that come from the Source rather than from the peripheral personality. And he believes that beautiful questions shape us more by the asking than by the answering. Anyone who has ever been set free by the precision of inquiry in a seemingly unbeautiful moment can attest to the fact that he is onto something.
His invitation, in essence, is to "turn sideways into the light" and, in doing so, to turn away from the conversation of habit. The tendency to stop paying attention to that which we cannot conceptualize or control is fierce in us. Therefore the task at hand is to remain faithful to our vulnerability in those moments when we most vehemently want to check out and run for cover. And that requires engaging a fundamentally different dialogue with the world.
David Whyte beckons us to the conversational frontier. There is no more being in exile. "What is the beautiful question you have not been asking yourself?" he wants to know. And so we drop in. First to our bodies in silence. And then we take pen to paper.
I can feel mine. It lives in my heart and my gut. I'm having trouble articulating it perfectly but it has something to do with love...and what it demands of us. I close my eyes and track my internal landscape. And then, suddenly, it comes in a fury: What it is to live with the full weight of love's consequence?
Earlier this week I was reading the blog of a mentor when a seemingly unassuming phrase arrested me: "the heartbreak of giving a shit." It strikes me that we are called to feel this precise burn; to become good citizens of our vulnerability and, by extension, our magnanimousness. "Everything is waiting for you," Whyte reminds us. "Including your own disappearance." The truth is that we will ultimately lose everything. Yet, in the meantime, the world is begging for us to participate.
David tells us a story. It's about Rumi and his complaint of a lazy pilgrim: "He stays inside the temple all day so that God has to go out and praise the rocks." And I'm struck, at once, by the entitlement of living at arm's length from the world; it's as if we've shirked our duty and left some disembodied cosmic hand to do our bidding in the mud.
We create solitary conversations to escape; when Life decides that it will not acquiesce to play on our terms it becomes a standoff. And that standoff takes many forms, from refusing difficult encounters, to overworking, to munching our way through the junk food, to retreating inside ourselves and glorifying it with a name like "introspection" rather than calling it what it actually is, which is isolation.
Being available to the world requires that we are betrothed to heartbreak as an initiatory gateway into the grandeur of our becoming. Martín Prechtel writes of grief and praise as if they were sisters; to grieve is to pay homage to that which we love. To love is to endeavor to care enough that we are leveled by the loss that is inevitable.
One of the most insidious ways in which we try to inculcate ourselves from our fragile humanness is to "know"; we strategize and conceptualize and frame and name. We are lost without our competency and our logic. David Whyte jokes, "If you're in a bar in East Texas and you say to someone, 'Turn sideways into the light,' you're in trouble." But he doesn't linger long in the humor; seconds later a seriousness befalls him and he reminds us of a sobering truth we cannot afford to forget: "The imagination always knows what to do with this invitation."
The initiation into the tenderness and dissolution of "not knowing," has been my personal crucible as of late so this reminder comes at the perfect time. One of my mentors is a woman who sometimes functions more as an elder in a culture that has regrettably traded wisdom for information and egregiously mixed up the two. We've been exploring this place in which our "not knowing" has been used against us by a misguided world; it's been a source of shame rather than a beckoning into the largess of our deepest humanity.
In one of our recent conversations, when I was coming undone by this part of myself that doesn't have a blessed clue, Christiane reminded me: "You cannot know everything. And you do not know everything. And you don't want to know everything. And if you lived in a healthy culture you would have been raised by elders who would have said, 'Sweetheart, get over yourself. You've got such a powerful one in you. And her power is only going to serve to the extent that you can know this: in some realms you know almost nothing yet. And it's beautiful.'"
And so I have been learning how to hold a wildly different kind of conversation with the world. It is one that is much slower, much more present, much more penetrating, much more embodied, and, ultimately, much more humble. Anyone who knows me knows that I like to gallop; I'm smart, quick-witted, and I rarely miss a beat. But I'm tired. Exhausted, in fact. I've grown weary of holding up space. Of needing to know. Of being always at the ready with an answer. Of having, as the poet Tomas Tranströmer writes, "words but no language."
I'm becoming well-versed in fumbling my way to a new fluency.
After we dare to pose to ourselves the beautiful question we haven't been asking, David Whyte instructs us to find a partner and share. I pair up with a woman named Ellen. Ellen is older, probably in her 60's, from New York. She strikes me as anxious and slightly needy and I notice the places in which I have already gone into judgement. I decide I will open myself to the possibility of being surprised. She shares with me a short piece she's written about wondering what's happened to an old, childhood part of herself. It's aching and beautiful and I find myself moved in an unexpected way. I reflect how deeply I feel her. And then I venture an offering: "I wonder what it would look like to connect more deeply with that little girl."
She halts me, but in a way that is welcome. "Notice how quickly we go there; to wanting to know and do. Maybe sometimes it's enough that we've simply asked the question. I'm going to trust that."
A tear gingerly escapes from my right eye. "Thank you," I say.
I marvel silently at how deeply it lives in us, this one who must name and qualify. I'm humbled in that moment by the places in myself in which I am still caught in the conversation of habit.
The tears come with more ferocity now. I'm not sure exactly what I am grieving but I suspect it has something to do with the ways in which I have failed to companion well the one in me who is exquisite and perfect in her helplessness. In "Santiago" David Whyte writes, "You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach."
It's one of my favorites for a reason.
The workshop ends; today is only the "warm-up." Tomorrow the Prime Time begins. I learn that this is the 39th annual Networker Symposium; it began in 1977. That was the year I came into the world with the umbilical cord tangled around my neck like a noose; the very force of energy that propelled me into the light of day could also choke and kill me with the strength of its resistance. It's been a fitting emblem of the ambivalence I've carried about incarnation.
I've also been ambivalent about joining the "official" ranks of my profession. I've always been a bit of a renegade, an outlier, an off-the-map traveler; I don't like to play by the rules. I put off clinical licensure for years because I wasn't sure I wanted to rightfully take up the lineage and call myself a "psychotherapist." It was too sterile, aloof, detached, rigid, and hopelessly caught in the thorny entanglements of hierarchy. It wasn't "progressive" or "innovative" enough, I argued.
For a lot of the last 39 years, I have specialized in the art of saying "no." But living with the full weight of love's consequence or "the heartbreak of giving a shit," requires a very different dialectic with the world.
Or so I'm finding.
I still have all of my very compelling reasons for questioning the ways in which I've chosen to belong to my profession and, beyond that, to the larger human world. They may never go away. But my honest, mined-in-the-harrowing-trenches "yes," has been the alchemical agent that's shaken something free. It was never about a solution to the problem so much as it was about my own willingness to go all in, to show up for the full catastrophe, to love with wild abandon, knowing that, ultimately, the deck is stacked.
I'm finally learning how to be here. It's no small task as it requires, to use Whyte's metaphor, that I "abandon the shoes that brought that [me]." In "Finisterre" he writes: "No way to your future now but the way your shadow could take, walking before you across water, going where shadows go, no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass except to call an end to the way you had come."
This is indeed a threshold.
Quite literally, this afternoon I will go wandering around DC in my new golden shoes. I'm still breaking them in, so I'll be sure to walk more slowly than usual. Later, after a blind man has asked me for an arm to cross the street, after he has led me to the Metro on the other side, after I have ridden the seemingly endless escalators down into the underground and back up again, after I've unearthed unexpected poems in the corner of an old haunt, after I've finished birthing the vision for a women's circle with a friend back home via phone in a coffee shop over an impeccable chai tea, after I've enjoyed a spontaneous, heart-wrenching two hour park bench conversation with a prison psychiatrist from LA, after I've listened to a street musician play a stellar and soulful cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," after I've danced my ass off with a group of several hundred strangers, and after I've been summoned from across a ballroom by a woman magnetized by my "meditative presence," I will smile as my heart cracks a fraction of a hairline deeper and say, "Oh yes. This. Thank you."
On Paradox and the Alchemy of Arrival
“Don’t stop arriving. You’re almost there. You know the clearing is just ahead. I know because we are happening at the same time.” –Buddy Wakefield
One of the things that I’m famous for saying to clients repeatedly is, “The process is the solution.” If you’re anything like me and the majority of people I work with, you too, likely fall prey to the occasional delusion that there is that magic moment of deliverance.
Maybe sometimes there is. But it’s fleeting.
If I had a nickel for every time a client said to me, “But I thought I was done with that,” I’d never have to work another day in my life.
We tend to think of “arrival” as a fixed concept. But what if it’s also fluid? What if it’s something that “happens” and also something we do again and again?
Here’s a slightly uncomfortable secret: We’re never “done.”
The good news is that, because those pesky Usual Suspects will undoubtedly rear their heads every so often, we can take the pressure off of our Inner Exterminators.
At the end of the day, it’s not about eradicating core wounds and chronic issues. It’s about changing our relationship to them. Remember that energy is neither created nor destroyed. There is no addition or subtraction; there is only transmutation.
This is the concept behind Psychoalchemy.
So here we are at the Big Launch. There’s a brand new website and a blog and shiny social media pages. My uber-brilliant team at Neon Butterfly did a bang-up job. I couldn’t be more thrilled.
One might say I’ve “arrived.” And, in a sense, I have. But, at the very same time, I am still arriving.
I will always be still arriving.
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Inherent in Buddy Wakefield’s quote is a fundamental paradox; there is this notion of getting “there,” while at the same time there is a plea for concurrent and ongoing arrival. The two live side-by-side.
It’s easy to see the creation, the product, the “there” in the case of Psychoalchemy.com. What’s less apparent, perhaps, is the “still arriving” aspect; the ongoing inner alchemy.
I live and work the process that I teach. And while it’s tempting to just display the shine and call it a day, it’s not the most honest portrayal. So I am going to take you behind the scenes. Or behind the “seens,” as it were.
This project, which included everything from creating a “Brand Story” to building the beautiful site you see before you today (and lots in between) was a nearly 8-month journey.
But I was arriving even before we ever began.
If you follow my writing at all, you might have read “The Things That Make Me.” In short, it’s a reckoning with personal power; with feminine leadership; with “showing up.” I wrote it after co-leading a Transformational Yoga & Coaching Retreat in Italy last year.
I have always had a paradoxical relationship with being seen. I both crave it and dread it simultaneously. The great psychologist D.W. Winnicott said, “Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.” This is precisely the ambivalence I’m talking about.
A couple of years ago, during the time I was doing a transformative yoga training called Conquering Lion, I had a conversation with my teacher, Kelly Morris. A fellow writer, she had recently penned some brilliance and sent it to an old college writing professor. We were on the phone when she announced that she wanted to read me his response because I needed to hear it too.
This line still rings in my ears: What strikes me is just how uncomfortable you are with your own remarkableness.
It was a significant moment. Something deep and true and fundamental got touched.
There is no gift more precious than being truly seen, even when what’s witnessed is the “unflattering” struggle. Reflecting someone accurately, in her own true image, is an exquisite offering of love. Yet we often resist it with a vengeance.
Those individuals who not only have the gift of penetrating sight, but also the generosity of skillful rendering are rare. Considering that my Conquering Lion training was a portal to connection with some phenomenally powerful people this way, it is fitting that I found Abby Allen of Neon Butterfly through the CLY network.
A big part of me absolutely dreaded the prospect of re-branding; I associated it with gimmicks and shticks. The visions of terror were relentless: aesthetic abominations in the form of hokey, cartoonish headshots super-imposed on busy, larger-than-life stock banners with violent pop-ups holding innocent perusers hostage for an email address. If this was "marketing," I was out.
I value authenticity far too much to abandon essence for formula. And so I was terrified of being “watered down” or made to look like a caricature. But the project was inevitable. My old website threatened to crash every time I updated it. It wasn’t mobile friendly. And I’d certainly evolved alongside the technology in six years' time.
And then there was that “being seen” thing. If I was going to create a brand and a website and get photos taken and write, well then, the point was visibility. Not in an attention-seeking, self-aggrandizing way, but in a way that sought to pay homage to the (uncomfortable) magnificence.
I don’t even know how to begin to talk about Abby and her work. At face value, I hired her and her team to build a platform, create a brand, and launch the media that would get the story out into the world. She certainly did that. But, in a way, that was the tiniest part.
Well, it was and it wasn’t.
See here’s the thing: I struggle greatly with the material world. I am a visionary; when it comes to the practicalities of translation to form, I can get paralyzed.
One of my favorite books is called On Becoming an Alchemist. In it there is a chapter called “Dissolution” in which the author talks about creative energy in its “volatile” (unmanifest) form and in its “fixed” (matter-like) form. The first time I read about the journey from “volatile” to “fixed,” all I could do was sob. To bring the energy of pure potential down into the world of form is to contend with a sort of death. The third dimensional world is imperfect. A vision can never be rendered in its inherent perfection once it becomes fixed.
This is precisely why I prefer to allow my dreams, visions, and ideas to exist in their volatile form…which is to say, in the imaginal realm, where I can enjoy them devoid of a “warts-and-all” status. The problem, of course, is that books don’t get written. And pictures don’t get taken. And websites don’t get built.
Not to mention the invisibility issue.
At every turn of this project, when Abby would come back to me with something concrete-- a logo, a site layout, a revised version of some copy-- I would feel my body tighten and clench. I almost didn’t want to look. After all, I was wired for disappointment; form was an inevitable letdown.
Here’s the thing that still astounds me: every single time she showed me something I was blown away. I expected to be relieved at best-- because what else could one hope for when there was simply no way to translate the impeccability of vision to the concrete realm?
It seemed that Abby had managed the impossible.
Only it wasn’t impossible. Because she had done it.
I've been very tempted to give her all the credit (and she sure deserves a heap!).
But then something hit me: the alchemical agent was, in part, my budding ability to recognize the remarkableness that Kelly and her professor were talking about. Sure, Abby had to render it. But I also had to see it.
It was a co-created effort.
Abby honored the depth of my vision; she "got" my essence so profoundly that she was able to mirror back to me a version of myself that, at some level, was clearer and perhaps even more accurate than the murkier ideations floating around in volatile space.
How insidious the ways of resisting our own light can be.
A couple of nights before we finished a draft of the site, I was soaking in my bathtub listening to a dharma talk by Tara Brach. At one point Tara turned to a somatic exercise and the point of inquiry had to do with what we, in that living moment, were unwilling to feel in our bodies. Much to my own astonishment, the answer that came back wasn’t sadness, anger, fear, or disappointment. It was love. Pure, radiant, unfettered, painstaking love. Let’s face it: that kind of love is annihilating. Despite the platitudes that pervade social media textgrams and all of the “spiritual correctness,” love of the sort I’m talking about is far more exacting. There’s nothing breezy or romantic about it; it wreaks havoc on will and ego and all of the other inner upholders of status quo comfort.
Suffice it to say that this project has had me up against my own edge. Self love, especially, is both a harsh and tender mistress.
I almost never say that I'm proud of myself. (I'm not proud of that.) Pride is one of the seven deadly sins, after all. It most certainly gets a bad rap. But feeling good about who we are, what we've created, and the gifts that we have to share with the world is integral. I'm not talking about hubris. I'm talking about being in right relationship with our own radiance.
A couple times during our process, Abby mentioned how proud she was of herself; she'd held and rendered some aspect of the vision in such a true and honest way that she was almost giddy. She wasn't afraid to share with me that, after the first draft of the site went up, she awoke in the middle of the night, excited, marveling at how incredible it was.
I'm going to steal a page from her book: it's not only okay-- it's vital-- to celebrate ourselves and our efforts. All of this-- the seeing, the being seen, the delicateness of vision, the clumsy unwieldiness of form, the rendering of remarkableness, the resistance, the ambivalence, the fear, the love, the truth of heart-- this is the work of the sacred journey.
I’m wildly proud of our co-creation.
Here we are, hovering in the sweet spot where the finishing and the embarking overlap. This moment is a finite pause in an infinite process.
We stand here together. There is always a collectivity to these things. It starts with showing up.
And we’ve shown up.
So, welcome. Thank you for arriving.
Don’t stop.
We're almost there.
We're just getting started.
The Things That Make Me
If you've talked to me at all in the last six weeks, I’ve probably insisted that you read Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things. (P.S. You should. P.P.S. It takes a lot to impress me, but when I get hooked on something, I don’t shut up. So humor me.) Anyway, I could sing the praises of this extraordinary gem of a book for innumerable reasons, but there is one, in particular, that compels me, perhaps above all others.
You see, it’s an “advice” book. Before she revealed herself as the phenom who wrote Wild, Cheryl Strayed was the author of the “Dear Sugar” column at The Rumpus where she “advised” readers on everything from how to become a writer to how to recover lost faith to how to live with (and love!) one’s Inner Perv.
The book’s queries cover vast terrain, and serve as testimony to the beauty and grit of human experience.
Strayed is a master of multi-dimensional listening. She hears what is above and below the actual questions; what is absent in light of what is present. She pays attention to negative space. But even that isn’t her gift par excellence.
Here’s what is: She gets in the mud with people. She lets us see her mess. Rather than dispensing expert advices from Up On High, she offers stories from her own life; ones that serve as corollaries to the precise lessons sought by her querents. And in that offering of fellowship, she turns the traditional Advice Column genre on its head.
There is no expert here; there is only an invitation to meet in the trenches of our shared human life. This is Story Medicine, wherein the roles of Witness and Confessor become, at times, indistinguishable.
In a word, Cheryl Strayed is humble. And to be humble when cast in the role of Deliberate Knower is an even more radical thing.
This is wildly refreshing as I’ve always had a deeply ambivalent relationship with my role as a leader-- as a teacher, as a therapist, as a healer, as someone in a professed position of power. As someone who is supposed to have the “answer.” There’s something about having some sort of supposed authority that has always felt a bit disingenuous at best and slightly grandiose at worst.
And so to guard against the possible obnoxiousness of actually believing that I know what’s best for anyone (the horror, the horror!), I become almost self-effacing. Only that doesn’t work either. Although I suppose I reason that it’s better than the self-inflated thinking that would have me believe that I’m somehow saving the world. And so I commit myself to it on days when I don’t know what else to do. (There are more of those days than you might imagine.)
There’s no potency at either pole. It’s either I’m up too high or I’m down too low. And the work gets done at the ground level (thanks for the reminder, Cheryl.). Neither position is truly humble, precisely because neither one is honest. They are equal opportunity afflictions.
As fate would have it, I was reading Tiny Beautiful Things on a flight to Italy, where I was going to be co-leading a Transformational Yoga and Coaching Retreat. And wielding my power in the balanced and honest way that I want to stymies me tenfold when I work with groups. (Which, of course, was what I was about to spend a week doing.)
One-on-one work (which is mostly how I fill my days) has always felt more organic and relational to me. And that comes fairly easily. But when I have an “audience,” this strange thing happens. I get “performance anxiety.” I contract. I don’t take up my space. And in that tightness, I rob myself and others of an effulgence that might just free us both.
Fittingly, in the kind of poetic way that these things go, the quality that I am by far most critical of in my teachers is always some version of the un-humble virus. (My favorite strain to protest is performativeness; that part of them that wants fandom rather than the essential nutrient of honest contact.) But any strain will do.
I often pride myself on being able to suss out the answer to this key question upfront when I consider a teacher: Is this person willing to let herself be moved by me and our process? If the answer is no, she is in violation of one of Jung’s incontrovertible truths about alchemy.
Ironically, my own lack of humility announces itself in the witch hunts that I have, at times, gone on in order to expose a few crossed wires. (Let it be known: I have made my fair share of messes here.)
It also announces itself in my refusal, at other times, to stand in what I know. To own it. To engage. (Recently, a teacher in the coaching program I’m currently enrolled in said to another student something along these lines: “When you know as much as you do and you hide, you look creepy and dangerous.” I feel like she might as well have been speaking directly to me. Goodness knows my quietness doesn’t usually fool people. And it unnerves the hell out of teachers when I sit in the back of a room.)
So given all of this, I’m more than a little bit mortified to admit that I struggle with letting the essence of who I am simply flow through me when people are looking.
But I do.
Last year, while in the midst of my Conquering Lion Yoga training, I had a conversation with one of my teachers (one who, incidentally, transmits a rare reverence and humility). Maria recognized the struggle in me; the fear of pushing out more unabashedly. Perhaps more importantly, though, she recognized the heart that wanted to push out.
One day she said to me, “Ashley, when we’re stuck in our self-consciousness, and we’re worried about doing it right, or how we look or don't look, we’re not being of service. Because then it’s all about us.” It was something that I’d heard before, put in a different way, and knew to be true. And yet in that moment I heard a truth underneath a truth that I hadn’t acknowledged fully: there was a selfishness, not to mention an arrogance, to my having to come across a certain way; of needing to present as The Woman Who Actually Has Her Shit Together.
The thing about being on a residential retreat is that, like it or not, you’re in community. For at least a little while. And as fast as you might want to run away when you’re in cahoots with some unflattering bullshit, it’s hard to completely hide. Much to my chagrin (or maybe not), others saw when I got cranky about shitty WiFi, found myself seasick on a boat coming home in the rain, fell prey briefly to my Obsession Du Jour, or cried at lunch when my co-leader unexpectedly penetrated me with a question about desire.
It’s a tricky thing, this being with; this being in communion while also holding the rails. I don’t really know how to do it. There are few, if any, good models. I have a lot of teachers who are doing the best they can with what they have but who are still at the mercy of the heartbreaking phenomenon that I witness again and again: they’ve built and nurtured these beautiful communities but they remain constantly at the periphery of their own creations. They’re “within” by virtue of association, but they’re “without” because, somehow, they won’t come down fully into them. They’re too busy “holding space” and/or taking care of everyone else’s needs to let themselves get worked.
It’s been an inconspicuous hiding place for too long now.
And I’ve been guilty too.
There is this yoga teacher I take class with often. I have a deep fondness for her. Many times, after class, I’ll be talking and laughing with friends who show up to practice. And she will be there, tucked behind the harmonium, entertaining the usual “thank you for class” gratitudes until the chit chat fades and she walks out past us on the street corner as we’re still gathered. Sometimes I notice this slight sadness behind her sweet smile and wave goodbye and I feel the sting of a nameless gap that I fear is attributable, at some level, to a sort of hierarchical notion of “roles.”
We learn to stay in our places.
I’m going to say something that’s charged. So here it is: I think that sometimes “boundaries” are simply failures of humility disguised as “evolved relating.” Do not misunderstand; there are “good” boundaries (if we want to get into the qualifiers), like refusing to enable an addict or a Narcissist, or saying no to colluding with a co-dependent family member. And then there are the I’d-rather-you-not-see-me, pride-as-unevolved-vulnerability “boundaries.” I have experienced the latter on many an occasion over the years; they’re rife in the therapy community (remember, we descended from the ranks of Freud and the “blank slate” mentality), the yoga community (hello, guru culture), and even some creative communities I’ve been involved in that prized accolades over authenticity. And dare I say, even in my two most recent trainings focusing on the feminine (which is to say a less hierarchical, less top-down way of relating), it has still been wonky at times.
One of my current teachers tells the story of being traumatized by a trauma lecture. To her way of thinking, there is an egregious arrogance to this expert-on-high who swoops down into the gnarly abyss to “save” these God-forsaken victims. “I know what I’m doing,” it presumes. “And you don’t.” From the perspective of the feminine, it’s a deeply flawed system. Because true fellowship happens when we dare to get in the trenches with each other and admit that sometimes we don’t actually know. Instead, our addiction to competency has it be that we dwell in the higher ranks rather than on the ground.
So I learned something about the feminine that week in Italy. I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing on some level. But here is what I do know: I learned what I did not by the brute force of my will, but because I was too tired to be “on” in that laborious, performative way that we learn we have to be. I simply didn’t have the energy to curate my Face Display so as to look only like my “highest” self.
Nor did I have the energy to keeping pulling the proverbial covers up over my head (which takes just as much effort, mind you).
Sometimes my best yoga practices happen when I’m tired, for this simple reason: I don’t have the luxury of willfulness (which takes a shit ton of energy) to muscle into the postures. And in that fatigue, surrender comes with a different kind of ease. The body gets to take over in its less-than-charming involuntary state, and another intelligence reigns.
It’s a marvelous thing, really.
A month before the retreat I stood up in a room full of 150 of my peers at a coaching intensive to, presumably, ask a question of my teacher. The mere idea terrified me. My usual MO is to play it cool in the backseat…at least for a while. But, by withholding, I was creating a force field that was becoming unbearable. And so I made a promise to someone that I would do this. It wasn’t so much about the particulars of the inquiry as it was about the gesture. And it wasn’t so much about a promise to her as it was about a promise to myself.
“Don’t worry if you don’t have anything to ask,” this woman told me. “Nicole will know what the question is when you stand up.”
So there I was, messy, without a coherent query, teary and shaking. I’m not sure I even know, fully, what happened. I remember her saying this: “The first thing I want you to do is to take your space.”
And then the floodgates opened. After that, she asked me what I wanted. And in a torrent of emotion, I unleashed a passionate litany of longings from teaching to leading to writing to sex to love. And somehow Italy came up. She focused in on it with laser precision. It felt important.
She asked me to embody the upcoming trip.
“What does it look like? Feel like? Smell like? Taste like?"
The answers flowed out, unfettered by the usual shackles of self-consciousness.
“You have a ton of desire,” she said, smiling.
Yes. It’s true. It’s always been true.
“Allow yourself to have it.”
Lately the theme for me has been how I’ve kept myself from what I’ve wanted most. But in order to not do that, I was going to have to admit my hunger. And “need” wasn’t my style.
Which is to say: I was above it.
Only I wasn’t.
I went off to Italy tired, hungry, and full of longing. These are not the ingredients that we would typically vote for in a leader. And yet they were the raw materials I was working with.
Luckily, I’m an something of an alchemist. Which means I know a thing or two about that transmuting lead into gold stuff. Or, I’m learning anyway. And the crucible of our container, which I was able to live inside of by some force of magic, was hot enough to burn off a good bit of the residue that week.
There was a moment, on the final night of the retreat, where I was facilitating a game called Hot Seats. It’s a game about seeing and being seen. Participants get to take turns sitting on the Hot Seat, and players get to ask them questions, on any topic, at any level of intensity they choose. It's what we called an "infinite game," in that it has no knowable beginning or ending; rather, it is played simply for the sake of continuing play. Kind of like life.
After everyone had gone, one of the women, Carol, asked me to go up.
Without paying any heed to the fact that I was leading, or that that wasn’t my “role,” or that this was the first time that anyone on that veranda had played before, I got out of my chair. And like a good pinch-hitter, Tanya, my co-leader, took over.
Cheryl Strayed’s words echoed in my consciousness as I took my seat: “The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you’ve got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us.”
I loved these people. That deeper love was the reward I received for getting out of my own way. For getting humble. And this was an opportunity to stand closer inside the circle together. For us to feel each other. For them to see a little bit more of what made me.
Carol asked the first question: “What did you learn, as a leader, being with us this week?”
I told her some version of this story.
I told her it didn't have an ending.
You see, that's the thing about infinite games; they continue to make us. For as long as we let them.
On Depth Psychology and "New Age" Spirituality
As a healer/therapist (and, admittedly, one who might be said to embrace a "metaphysical" paradigm of thought), I have been thinking a great deal lately about the relationship between what I am going to call depth psychology (think Jung, shadow self, integration) and "New Age" spiritual teachings (think Law of Attraction, Abundance, Manifestation).
For years, I was steeped in the depth psychology side of the equation. While I was interested in and curious about concepts like "our thoughts create our reality" and the virtues of positivity, it all felt a bit too "light" somehow-- like it couldn't possibly be the whole picture. I had more faith in the grittiness of deeper work-- of really trying to be present with all the facets of what I was carrying. (And, let's face it-- some of that material wasn't light and/or breezy!)
For a time, I had a friend who was avidly devouring books about the Law of Attraction and Cosmic Ordering, and she had no interest whatsoever in therapy. "The past is the past," she would tell me. "It just creates discord to unearth that stuff. I'm trying to stay positive." In other words, digging deep was going to cramp her style; her manifestation efforts would go to hell. Or so she thought.
The curious thing was that, as far as I could tell, her life seemed like kind of a mess. She wasn't holding jobs. She couldn't decide what to do about school. She "attracted" men who treated her poorly. Suffice to say that this was a woman who appeared to be running from herself.
Meanwhile, I was hanging out in the trenches of therapy. I was on a mission-- and it involved going head-to-head with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. My unofficial mantra probably went something like this: "Authenticity or Die." Now, in the end, that endeavor served me quite well as it provided an essential foundation from which to launch a more whole Self out into the world. But I'm not going to lie-- there's a way to get stuck on that side of the equation as well. (More on that in a bit.)
Something that I have come to understand is that, while there is, in fact, great truth in many of the "New Age" teachings my friend was so fascinated by, one cannot "attract" the ideal from a broken place. Denial of our pain and our shadow selves only creates a distortion in our energy field, which then gets transmitted out into the Universe. In other words, in order for us to manifest true soul desires, the inner and outer worlds need to be in alignment. All of the positive affirmations on the planet will never stand in for the painstaking inner work of true integration.
Writer and spiritual teacher Jeff Brown says it beautifully:
The universe responds to authentic transformation-- nothing feigned will do. If our positive thinking is incongruent with our emotional reality, if we have not done the real work to ready ourselves for humanifestation, then our wishes will fall on deaf ears, falling to the bottom of the fountain with the rest of the pennies. We need to get our emotional world consistent with our "positive thinking" in order for our requests and visualizations to be taken seriously by the “Universal Broadcasting System." If we are all blocked up with pain and anger, our "positive thoughts" will not be authentically sourced and organically positive. The more emotionally unresolved we are, the denser the message we transmit.
Perhaps this all sounds like some grand therapy initiative. And depending on where you find yourself with regard to the (im)balance I'm talking about, I suppose it could be. But, as I said earlier, there is certainly room to get stuck (as I did!) on the other side of the spectrum-- the side that, at times, glorifies the grit and downplays the grace; the side that, in spite of itself, is unwittingly addicted to the wounded aspects of Self and the "struggle" for wholeness at all costs.
The other day I logged onto Facebook, where another of my favorite writers/spiritual teachers, Oriah Mountain Dreamer, had posted a blog entry entitled "Spiritual Wincing." Her concern was with "harsh admonishments disguised as spiritual truth" (i.e. "Let it go," "Accept and move on," "Think positively" etc.). Such slogans, she asserted, trivialize the deeper challenges of the human heart, and indicate a lack of faith in how we are made. Her offering was beautifully-written and, like everything she conceives, full of an undeniable wisdom. Yet, at the same time, I found myself wondering about the other side-- about the times when such "superficialities" might be, in fact, necessary and even legitimate...especially if we are prone to overstaying our welcome in the heavy stuff. Some of us need to push ourselves to authentically engage with our shadows; to honestly attend to our deepest pain and sorrow. And, conversely, some of us need a "tough love" reminder about when it might be time to come back to the world of the living. In the end, I do think that it can be just as "safe" to stay groping in the half-light of broken space as it can be to cheerlead those positive affirmations from on high.
I've recently come to discover that there is something inherently vulnerable about learning to see in the Light. But this vulnerability doesn't come from any form of spiritual or psychological bypass-- it comes from building a deeply integrated foundation. Sure, there are times when it can be easier to hide from ourselves by not venturing to look very far beneath the surface. And, alternatively, there are times when it can be easier to stay mired in our own "muck." Ultimately, though, as with everything in the Universe, it's about a harmonizing of opposing forces.
May you hold that paradox.
Life Purpose and Our "Rejected Stone"
As we herald in the unofficial start of summer, it might seem sort of odd to entertain the ponderous weight of something as massive as “Life Purpose.” After all, we often think of summer as the season to “check out” and go on vacation; to take a break from all of the heavy lifting. But the Cosmic Forces That Be clearly have something else in mind.
I’ve started a bit of a trend; last month, prior to writing, I did a reading that highlighted a particular flower essence whose healing properties were especially relevant to a poignant issue in the collective. Partly out of my own curiosity (and partly to help you!), I did the same again this month.
What came up was an essence called Silver Princess. Silver Princess is native to Australia and is an exquisite and rare member of the Eucalyptus family. It is said to bring about an awareness of Life Purpose, though not necessarily all at once. It is often indicated for those at a crossroads, showing them what the next step on their path might be. It is also helpful for those who may know, more globally, what they are here to do, but who are hanging in question as to the next concrete action step.
Oftentimes we know more than we think we do when it comes to matters of the soul. We’re just really good at coming up with a million “rational” reasons why what we want is impossible or futile. Thus, the most important work we can do right now is to listen; to quiet the noise and the naysaying voices and to find the space that is eternal, ever-present and always in approval.
This work of companioning ourselves is hard. While the proliferation of New Age thinking might suggest otherwise, the conscious life is a practice. Just like yoga. And sometimes we have to sit in “poses” that arouse discomfort in their revealing. This may be one such phase for you. Trust that there is valuable information here.
This morning I came across a quote from The Gospel of Thomas. It says, “Show me the stone which the builders have rejected. That one is the cornerstone.” As you sit in discernment about how to move next, I encourage you to consider the possibility that your most radiant gift might not, in this moment, look glistening and polished. Embrace it anyway.
In flower essence therapy there is a principle called The Doctrine Of Signatures. It maintains that the physical properties and circumstances of the plant are emblematic of the imbalance that it seeks to restore. Silver Princess is a very rare and beautiful strand of the Eucalyptus tree; it grows in a remote region of Australia and takes great effort to find and cull. In fact, one might accidentally bypass it for this very reason.
Such is the case with our own greatest treasures. We may overlook them; or we not even see them, because we didn’t dare to venture far enough out. Or to look under the right rock (incidentally, Silver Princess grows on Boyagin Rock, a granite outcrop in southwestern Australia. We think of rock, of course, as being inhospitable to growth, but it is the heartiest plants that bloom in the most unsuspecting places, after all.)
If you feel yourself at a crossroads of purpose this month, perhaps take some time to consider your own “rejected stone.” It might surprise you. And it might just light a spark in the collective, too.
Are You In It For The Cure?
We are at a critical juncture. I don’t mean for that to sound scary; it actually has the potential to be very exciting. But, as one of my dearest mentors has been saying, this is going to be a month of Choice Points. How it all goes down is really up to you.
This past week the following Anthony DeMello quote made its way into my field of awareness: "Most people tell you they want to get out of kindergarten, but don't believe them. Don't believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. ‘Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success.’ This is what they want; they want their toys replaced. That's all. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don't really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful."
I’m in the business of curing, although sometimes I get folks who are more interested in relief. Let me be clear about something: we’re getting to an evolutionary point where there is essentially no such thing as “relief” anymore. As a planet we simply cannot afford it. The Universe has upped the ante and is asking us to do the same. If we’re not in it for the “cure,” we’re going to have a rough ride from here on out.
Here’s the deal, as raw and real as I can put it: If you’ve been in troubleshooting mode, guarding against what’s swimming underneath those pesky symptoms, the jig is up. It’s time to do the hardest work of your life.
But don’t take my word for it. Consider your world right now. More than likely, you are being confronted with some kind of major trial or transition. It might or might not be an outer crucible; either way, there is a deep internal recalibration going on in the collective. This inner shift will eventually have some kind of impact within the outer world. For example, a realignment of values might lead to a change of job, relationship, or purpose.
Everyone’s “test” will look a little different. Perhaps you are making a career change. Or leaving a relationship. Or getting ready to start a family. Or perhaps you’re in the midst of a deeply disorienting spiritual awakening and you have no idea, yet, what the implications of that will be in your life. Or maybe you’ve hit a wall with a partner or family member and are being asked to reconfigure the relationship along completely different lines. No matter. The crucial thing is that you’re fully in whatever it is, facing it head on, and inviting everything – the good, the bad, and the ugly – to the table.
Easier said than done, that bringing-it-all-to-the-table stuff. When we’re up against our most seemingly intractable issues, resistance will come to the fore, sometimes with a vengeance. It’s human nature to run like hell when we meet our edge. We will find every excuse in the book to not do the work. We don’t have time. We need to save money. We don’t think anyone or anything can help. And the list goes on.
If there’s one thing that is of vital importance right now, it’s this: don’t let yourself off the hook (you definitely want to beat the Universe to this!). Be ruthlessly honest about where you’re running. Pause. Take a breath. Allow the resistance to be there. And then find a way to kindly dig in in spite of it.
Conscious work is not “easy breezy.” While sometimes it can feel that way for a while, especially when the process is still new and exciting, there comes a point where our core wounds and deepest issues demand attention. This is usually the point where the work “loses its luster” and we fail to be as enamored as we once were. But this is actually a sign that we’re touching down in the deep. If you’re someone who has bolted at this juncture, I invite (and compassionately challenge) you to get back on track.
The major Choice Point lies in essentially this question: Will you continue to seek “relief” (if that’s what’s been motivating you to this point) or will you step up to the work of curing?
Igniting Our New Moon Fire
It has been about a year since I've blogged here. I’ve missed you!
The last 12 months have comprised a period of great shift for me. I know that a lot of us are in the throes of major transition. In an effort to slow down and really integrate the wisdom of recent experience, I spent some time going inward for a little while. I’ve been here the whole time, just a bit more quietly. But now I’m ready to ignite the fire of new growth with the jubilance and playful spirit that comes with Spring.
I have been refining my areas of interest and focus a bit as I’ve come through the last year. And while I’ve always worked with flower essences/vibrational medicine, lately the profundity of these remedies has been particularly awe-inspiring. In meditating on the theme of this newsletter, a directive came to me: I was supposed to tap into the collective energy, or douse for a remedy that would speak to the issues currently on our cosmic radar. And so I did.
What I came up was a flower called Mulla Mulla. At first I was perplexed; Mulla Mulla is a very niche essence and is used specifically to treat the fear of fire. And then I got another piece; today’s New Moon is in Aries. Aries is a fire sign.
When I think about fire, I think about sparks and ignition – the life force that’s housed in our core. It’s a catalyzing element. Its power to generate is commensurate to its power to destroy. It’s high stakes.
But that’s the way our Life Force energy is too. And a theme that is revealing itself to me again and again lately (in my own life, in my work with clients, and even in my work with a dear mentor) is this: we are paradoxically paralyzed by our fear of this energy and desperate for it at the same time.
Last week a client came to me wanting to explore her terror of death. “There’s no fear of death without a simultaneous fear of life,” I told her. And so it is with fire; we are afraid of both capable ends. The very thing that can make us come alive most profoundly can also annihilate us. Therefore we must wield it with impeccable skill.
I recently heard it said that the level of resistance is proportionate to the level of Desire. The latter is the stuff of fire; it’s the fuel that we run on in this world. But most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, are caught in an unsatisfactory jockeying between these two poles. Which feels kind of akin to driving with the parking brake on.
The good news is that it’s a perfect time to break the cycle. The world needs that from us – it’s time to ignite our visions, to come out of hiding, to show up Bigger. Playing small simply isn’t an option. As one of my favorite bands, Stars, says, “When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.” Indeed the time has come.
So the New Moon is in Aries. My sources tell me that it may feel like a Cosmic New Year, rife with fresh beginnings and breakthroughs. It’s reputedly an excellent time to begin new ventures and to answer the call that perhaps you’ve been putting off.
Don’t allow fear to eclipse you. Embrace the fire of your Desire. Let it burn bold and bright!