Posted on

Becoming An Agent of Change

Share

bi_rali3xp4-yasemin-k

 

We are creating our world with our actions. Our actions affect the whole. And, our words (or other actions) can be powerful catalysts if we source them from within and will write or speak them into the world.

When some people have more power than others because their voice is heard by more people and they are in positions of authority, those people have more power to shape the story of this world and how it unfolds. And when those who have little to no power have no voice, little to no authority, the powerful keep their stranglehold on the cultural narrative.

So what do we do? How do we change this?

There are many of us who have more power than we think. We’ve learned in many ways that we are powerless, but we are not. We might not be in traditional positions of power, but many of us have access to the world wide web, which is part of creating this new culture. And we all have the power to create community and to be part of many communities.

If you are reading my words, you have this access. You, too, have this power to create our culture. Your voice matters. Your creations matter.

So what keeps you from being a part of this new creation?

What keeps your voice quiet?

What keeps your words unknown, perhaps even to you?

How might you become an agent of change in a way that is grounded in Soul?

I see this as a process.

  1. Come into your inner world. Deepen your awareness of what this world is and what your inner voice is saying. Listen.
  2. Find some method or practice to bring what you find/hear in your inner world into this outer world, even if it is simply for yourself. You can do this through writing or art-making or even dance. But find some practice that puts into form what you find within.
  3. Discern if what you’ve brought into form wants to indeed be shared with others. Does it need to be spoken into the world?
  4. Realize that you are the authority of what comes through you. And you are the authority of whether or not you get to say what you need to say, share what you need to share. No one else can give you this authority. No one else can tell you whether or not what you have to share is worthy of being shared. This is a crucial piece of the creative process – to no longer judge yourself and your own inner voice and knowing. To no longer stuff it down inside you. It can be simply a decision you make. And, this can take some deeper internal transformational work to shift your beliefs, something I do as a coach.
  5. To become an agent of your own voice, to find agency within yourself. Agency – the ability to take action, the impulse to move and express – comes out of an internal kind of thrusting, just like the seed cracks and thrusts out of the soil and into the world. What is the source of this power? It comes out of Source itself, out of Eros, the impulse to live, to express fully, to know oneself fully.I have found that personal agency comes out of the transformation of our stuck emotional leftovers, by doing the inner work that allows the energy itself to transform into the essential qualities of who you are – especially anger. When anger is thwarted, our agency is, too. Even if we are one who expresses a lot of anger, it still isn’t our essential strength. Essential qualities lie under the emotions we use to navigate the world. When I worked with anger and rage, what I found access to were essential strength, will, and power.It is normal to feel anger. It is a sign that something is off, wrong. When it stays stuck, which it does when we are young because more often than not children are taught to stuff their anger down, we have little to no access to our sacred strength, will, and power. Instead, we push and strive which is tiring. Sacred, essential energies flow naturally once we do the work to transform these stuck energies.
  6. Take action that is aligned with your own unique expression in this world, action that aligns with what you value. There is great power in no longer simply being against something, but rather being for the birthing of something new.

This is how we each become an agent of change – through our own internal agency. If what we are acting upon is this inner voice, this inner knowing, this is power from within.

It is power with others. It doesn’t seek to deny others of power. Rather, it is generative power. It is life-affirming because the inner voice is the greater intelligence that is at the heart of life.

On Saturday morning, I popped onto Facebook Live to share what was really burning inside of me. Basically, I followed these steps. This is what I shared. Please feel free to share it with others if you feel it would be helpful.

 

Toward the end, I mention that I think it is helpful to find a place where you can practice these steps – where you can get comfortable going into the inner world, listening for what is there, writing the words down, and then speaking them out loud. There is great power in connecting the inner voice and the physical voice. Many of us as women have been silenced from a young age, oftentimes by our mothers or other women who want to help us stay safe. But now we must speak if we are to be agents of change – if we are to come to embody both authority and agency.

sweetpeaswscriptspring2017This is one of the main reasons I started Writing Raw almost three years ago – to give women exactly this experience. The writing is secondary. What matters is that you come to express the vast creative voice of your inner world out here into the external world.

Writing Raw begins tomorrow, March 14th. You can join anytime this first week.

Please join us if you feel this is a necessary next step in your evolution as an agent of change. We are all in this together and isn’t it wonderful to be together?

Share
Posted on

Anger holds a place at the table laid out by Love

Share

photo (23)

I’m discovering a lot about anger and love, and holding onto the old pain of not being seen nor given what I thought I should have been given. I’m learning how to be with anger, and I’m learning it holds a place at the table laid out by Love.

I offer it here as my experience. Perhaps it might be of use to you.

It’s old, old stuff this anger. But, what I know about this is that we leave ourselves psychological grappling hooks to the past, a hook into a place where we refuse to budge until someone listens deeply enough that ‘letting go’ can take place. We cannot force the letting go. It has to come from the part of ourselves that put the hook there, the part that must be listened to, the part that must let go of her own accord, in her own way. She will let go when she feels heard and seen and loved for who and what she was in that moment in time, including her anger – or whatever other emotions were there that felt, and still feel, too big or bad or wrong to accept.

And what I know in my own life is that the one who must listen is me. We must listen to ourselves. We must allow the voice to be known, heard, and received. This part must be honored, acknowledged, and cherished for who she is, just as she is, with dignity.

Think about it. What would allow that hook to be let go of? What would allow that hook to give way?

We cannot force it. We cannot make the letting go happen. Only she, the one who placed it there, the one who still hangs on to it, the one who took that moment in time and froze in it, with it, as it. She is still back there, waiting for what she never got. Only she can unhook the hook for she is the one caught back there in time.

And what she taught me when I finally found her back there after all these years, when I finally traced my way back to that hook is this:

You cannot force another to give you love in the way you think you should be loved; but you can receive the love they offer you.

You cannot force another to receive the love you give, but you can give it unconditionally in whatever way you can.

You CAN give yourself love and you can receive your own love. You can complete this circle of love within your own being. This is really the only place where this can happen – this circle. And it can be infinitely given and received. You can be an infinite circle of unconditional love. Perhaps this is what self-love really is.

I’m finding it begins right here. Right now. I open my hand to her. She didn’t take it immediately. She didn’t want it. She wanted what was back there, back then. I had to listen to that. I had to not try to change her mind. I had to hear her out.

This is where anger comes in. She was angry. Pissed off. Royally so. Anger was a message that something was off. Something was wrong. Not acknowledging my anger just made that hook go in deeper.

She’s been fighting against everything – but doing so down where I wasn’t conscious of it. It was affecting my life, yet I could never quite see why what was happening was happening.

Over the past few weeks, as I’ve opened more to the deep well of unexpressed anger within me, it began to come in waves, wave after wave, so powerful, so alive and radiant. I could feel it being lifted out of the tightly packed pockets it had been stowed away in for decades.

And after feeling it, giving it the space it needed to flow again, it feels more integrated, like I now understand I need it. Of course I do. It is here. It is a part of what it means to be human. It is fuel for creativity. It is passion. It reminds me that I am a soul with dignity, and that others also are souls with dignity.

I can now feel that the anger knows it holds an important seat at the table laid out by love.

If it is all love, then it is ALL love. Everything has a function, a place. Everything within our own psyches must be seen and touched and acknowledged with dignity. If it is all love, then it is ALL love.

And if you’ve been taught that these voices are not real – try telling them that. Try to inform them they are not real. I’ve tried. It does not work. They will hold on to that hook until the cows come home…or until we die…unless we listen and open and love them as they are.

And if you tell yourself to ‘suck it up’, to ‘get over it’, or some other such phrase, okay. See if that works for you. It worked for me as long as I refused to feel what was really here – until the pain of it got to be too much.

These parts are some of the hardest parts of our psyches to be with. They are the ones we push away vehemently. And they’ve felt this push-away for years.

This is deep soul work. And it is worth it. It is taking responsibility for ourselves at the deepest level so that we can fully live our lives in a way where we can respond to life, rather than push against it.

These parts are waiting to be a part of this circle of love. They long to receive love…and they have much love to give.

Share
Posted on

Being With: Reflections on 9/11 and Sandy Hook

Share

photo (8)

 

What I am going to share here is based solely on my experience – what I’ve experienced personally. As we come to the 2nd anniversary of Sandy Hook (tomorrow, December 14th, 2014) I’ve felt a strong urge to write this. These are my reflections.

 

As many of you know,

I worked with people directly affected by 9/11 for over three years, from ’03 – ’06. In the first year or so, I coached a large number of family members who’d lost love ones in 9/11 as part of a larger program they were taking, which comes out of the same core program I teach. Then, during the second year, I taught a couple of those courses and continued to coach.

Following these courses, I was hired to design and teach a dating relationship class to women who’d lost their spouses/partners in 9/11. Over eighteen months, along with my colleague Julie (yes, two Julie’s teaching together), I had the truly lovely experience of working with these women to discover a way to bring a new loving partner into their lives while also still grieving their loss. It is not true that we have to put our grief away in order to date again. We can find a partner who is willing to enter into a relationship with us even if we have experienced major loss.

Over the time I worked with these many family members, I found we as Americans to be supportive and truly desiring for there to be healing for these families. In fact, there was so much public attention around 9/11, many of these family members had a hard time finding a way to grieve privately – something we all need when going through the grief of traumatic events. We need our privacy, while also needing to know we are part of a larger community that is holding us firmly in love and respect.

During these years, 9/11 was still very much in the news, not only news of the American response to the attack, but also news about the family members and things they were beginning to do in the world.

When I would speak about my work with people in general, people engaged in conversation with me about it. There was a willingness to talk about it. It had affected all of us in a profound way.

This past Winter and Spring, along with two other women, I had the incredible opportunity to teach the same course again, but this time to people directly affected by the tragedy at Sandy Hook School, in Newtown, Connecticut. It was the first time the course would be offered, and I was asked to join-on because of my experience in teaching this material to so many diverse populations over the past twelve years. I won’t share anything about the experience of teaching there. It is too private, too personal, and requires a great deal of respect and confidentiality.

What I want to speak to is the difference in how I experienced our response to this event as Americans compared to our response to 9/11. It feels vitally important to do so.

I remember when I first heard about Sandy Hook. I was preparing to be on a Mastermind group call. We all got on the phone together, but I couldn’t continue. I almost couldn’t speak at all, the shock was so great. I excused myself from the call and sat down and sobbed. The shock and grief hit me hard, like I know it did for many Americans and many others around the world. What happened at Sandy Hook was something horrendous – so many very young children being killed in such a violent way. Still to this day, it is hard to truly think about what happened with full consciousness. I can only imagine it, based on what I have heard and read.

So as I prepared to teach, I began to really sit with the whole experience, not only what happened that day, but how we as Americans had dealt with it since that day. I first knew I would be teaching prior to the 1st Anniversary of Dec. 14th, 2012. I began to watch how we as a country spoke about this event. I noticed, especially as I mentioned to others I would be teaching, a marked difference in the responses to Sandy Hook versus the responses to 9/11.

I’m not here to compare them as better or worse. But I want to talk about how they were, and continue to be, different. I’ve thought a lot about why they would be different, based on my own experiences and reflections. Obviously, in many ways, 9/11 was a much larger event. More people were killed in 9/11. And, our largest city was affected not only by the deaths, but also by many injuries and fallout from the towers falling, as well as the ongoing fallout from illnesses and trauma. I understand this. I am not comparing the two events on scale. I am comparing them because they are two events I’ve been involved with on some level, and because I’ve noticed things simply from my own perspective as an American and as a human being trying to make sense of how we continue to turn our hearts away from the level of violence we experience here in our country.

In 9/11, the perpetrators were from the outside. They weren’t ‘one of us’, which made a clear distinction where to put our care and attention – on those affected by the attack. We could do this because those affected could be marked distinctly from those who were responsible for the attack. The event was horrendous, yes, and we drew a clear line of distinction between who was ‘bad’ and who was ‘good’.

With Sandy Hook, though, the person responsible was not only one of us, an American, he was from the community of Newtown. Suddenly, this dark, horrendous event was not outside of American soil, it was right here in our backyard, right here in our own culture, right here in our own family.

In 9/11, we could focus our anger and outrage on ‘others’, but with Sandy Hook we could not. There was no other. There was a barely-adult boy who was one of our own.

I noticed how people responded differently to me when I would speak of the work with 9/11 families versus the work in Newtown. Our faces tell a great deal.

But what I truly noticed was how quiet our country has been about the entire event. For the first few weeks, we heard a lot about it. Then, we went quiet. At first there was great outrage, then there was little. I know not everyone has been quiet. There are mom’s groups working to dismantle the power that gun lobbies have, as well as the many groups that have helped to bring healing to Newtown, one of which was the center that hired us to teach. But the media and our politicians, as well as most Americans do not talk about it. I think this points to something important, not only collectively but individually.

When we can point the finger at someone else, it is much easier to be actively vocal about things. We can look at them and ‘other’ them so that we create a firm separation of us vs. them.

But, when we have to look at ourselves, it becomes much harder to accept. Whether it is our country collectively, or ourselves individually, to do the deeper work means we must come to look within ourselves, and within our own culture. This is where many of us tend to shut down, because we don’t want to see what we are capable of. We don’t want to see the darkness that lurks right underneath our noses. We’d rather ‘other’ each other, believing it will solve our problems if we just grow more armor, more separate, ‘securing’ ourselves behind beliefs that somehow separation from each other will keep us safe from some imagined possible transgression in the future, or from a past hurt we’ve never been able to truly look at.

I never spoke about this with anyone during my stays in Newtown. That wasn’t why I was there. But, it’s been on my mind for a year, and in my heart. There is a very important learning here for us – very important. Every situation, every person, can be a teacher if we are willing to learn.

And, it’s not just what happened at Sandy Hook. It’s happening over and over and over here in our own country. Whether it is one of the multiple school shootings since Sandy Hook, or the recent events in Ferguson, NY, and Cleveland, or any of the other violent events in our country, we must begin to talk about what is here right in our own backyard. We must begin to talk about how we treat each other, and in turn how we defend ourselves so aggressively against each other. And, we must talk about shame and silence.

The healing we can offer each other is great. It is powerful. And it is needed. But it won’t happen if we can’t talk about it, if we can’t see that what is ‘out there’ is also right here in our own backyard; if we can’t see that everything outside of us in others is right here within ourselves.

I believe with Sandy Hook we felt fear, but more importantly we feel shame and guilt. It’s like a cover of silence descends over the event, a shutting down, a turning away.

Shame is a nasty beast. It causes us to go silent. It causes us to defend. It causes us to separate. It causes us to shut down, to lash out, to vow never to trust. I know. I’ve done a lot of personal work with shame, as have many of you. Guilt does the same things.

The funny thing about shame and guilt is that we go unconscious. For the most part, we don’t even know we’ve gone unconscious. We don’t realize how we’ve not talked about, nor faced on a deeper level, that which has caused us to feel shame, guilt, or fear or whatever else we might be feeling.

Think about it. How hard is it for you to think about Sandy Hook and what happened there? And how might that difficulty be affecting not only those affected by the event, but also your personal ability to heal as well as our collective healing?

And, when we won’t look at something, what are we making more important than creating a culture safe for our children, a culture of peace?

Is our fear of discomfort in facing what feels like a mountain of things we don’t want to see or feel keeping us from being who we need to be to create this change?

What are we valuing over life itself?

What matters is that we need each other. Life isn’t easy. We are vulnerable as human beings.

I know, after working with so many people over these years, that we heal, we create much healthier families and communities, when we open to each other and ask for help and give help. When the larger community we are a part of acknowledges it has our back, that it knows we’ve suffered and that it is here for us, we feel held and can heal. We are reminded we are not alone. Whether this larger community is our own family, our friends, our town, the country in which we live, or our global family, it is the same. And in this way, the larger community heals, because when we offer ourselves to others we heal, too. We grow, too. We transform into more compassionate and kinder people, and a more compassionate, kinder nation.

To do this we must stop and be present to what we’ve created as a society. Together.

When will we be with the hard and difficult feelings?

When will we begin to ask the hard questions that can lead to transforming the culture in which we live? 

When will we be with each other?

The time to create community to face these things is now. It is too much to bear alone. That’s why we have each other. We cannot do it alone.

 

 

 

 

 

Share
Posted on

Reclaiming Flesh is Holy Work

Share

 

The innermost layers of a woman’s flesh hold stories whose endings can emerge as the most beautiful tales of redemption and liberation.

Redeeming flesh is not easy; yet it is holy work.

~~~

This is a vulnerable post. I won’t tell you details, but I’ll tell you I’ve been weeping – you know that kind of crying where the tears just run out your eyes and down your cheeks? It’s as if the tears have a life of their own. They just flow. You aren’t completely sure why they are flowing, but it is clear the tears know. They flow out from these innermost layers of flesh, places and pockets where pain from long, long ago were secreted away.

There’ve been many little moments this week that seem to be bringing forth these tears – moments where I can feel love wants to move through me, guiding me, yet I feel frozen because of fear. While the culture, and of course my own ego, would tell me I am right to trust my fear, my heart just breaks when I do…when I choose fear over love and offering myself to the moment at hand. These are real life moments, with people I do not know. Love wants me to move toward them in moments that might very well be unsafe. Yet, I can feel the love, and I can feel the grief when I do not move with love.

This week, though, rather than getting upset with myself for my responses, probably because I’ve been softened inside and out these past two weeks, I find these tears flowing from the heartbreak of seeing just how painfully, and beautifully, human I am. And, yes, it is painful when I see myself choosing between ‘staying safe’ and offering myself to an unknown I can’t know.

And there’s been a big moment, an experience that’s really accelerated this ‘undoing’, something that has me feeling into these deep places and pockets where I long ago secreted away experiences too painful to feel at such a tender age.  In the dark, stories of rejection and abandonment grow into what seem like beasts too fierce for reacquainting.

At some point, these stories wake up and begin to make noise. They don’t like being caged. Like everything else in this world, they long to be free.

 

I can feel love behind these tears, right behind them, trying to make its way in on the tail of my tears. The tears soften my flesh and love rushes in.

It feelings like a river of undoing, like the river that is rushing is wearing away my resistance to love. I can feel that to choose love is to let go of a kind of ‘forced certainty’ I can hold onto when I stay insulated. It is forced because I am forcing it. I get that.

The river is rapid and insistent. Love is that way.

It is in these moments of choice that I come right up against my flaws and learned separation, and the habit of responding from fear. The stories the flesh holds about letting love in to these darker places put up some strong resistance. And I see how deeply the pain and shame of past hurts is burrowed into the innermost flesh in my body.

And the flesh holds stories about power and instincts, about unleashing and unchaining, and all the things that could happen. So many damn stories about this power within me

I remember it as a young girl – this instinctive connection to all of life.

 

I remember the power dancing with instinct as if they’d known each other forever.

But now, I sometimes feel like a lioness that has lost her footing. Her power is there, but the instincts aren’t fully conscious, so her big furry paws step guardedly rather than assuredly.

I sense this is why there is fear in some of my choices. When the instincts have been deemed too much or too powerful or inappropriate, they get caged where they can’t roam free. Instincts need to touch ground, feel the wind and sun, and be nourished with breath. They need to be fed and loved. They need to feel the earth.

Four paws that are in divine relationship with the earth know where to take that next step, can feel into the next step, and can sense direction and speed and gait. Four paws that are bound know little of these necessities.

 

The deep love a woman has for life, and her ability to hold the space for it, needs her instincts to ground it. We need this instinctual self to sniff and taste and hear and feel what is so. This love, this power, these instincts – they are all part of our aliveness, our vital life force. They are part of our creativity, and redeeming them out of the stories in our flesh is our necessary work, necessary for our own emancipation and the emancipation of our planet.

The process of reclaiming flesh is intelligent. Tears falling shows us something, especially when they fall of their own accord, as if flushed out of flesh ready to be free again.

Reclaiming flesh is holy work. Your tears can lead you across the threshold into these secreted places. And even though the stories were created in a time when it felt like true love was nowhere to be found, a river of love is riding on the tail of each tear, ready and waiting to inscribe ‘The End’ at the end of each story.

~~~

Update May 18th, 2015:

bafonbadge300pxIf you are curious about the journey of embodiment and coming to know again this sacred creativity, join me for my new course, Becoming a Force of Nature. We’ll be walking on four paws, feeling our instinctual way through a magnificent journey together. You can read more, here. The Early-bird price ends Sunday, May 24th at Midnight PDT.

 

 

 

 

Share
Posted on

Weather Report for Today: Hips, Hands, & Heart

Share

“Movement never lies.
It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.”
Martha Graham

The truth is close at hand. Just move and you will know it.

::

Today at dance, a different teacher played the music and guided us through our two-hour practice, a teacher I’d not yet danced with. As with each 5Rhythms teacher, he played a unique blend of music and guided us in his own unique way. And as has always been the case, my dance today was another unique expression of where I am, right now, a as a soul, dancing with another 149 other souls, to another unique soul’s musical selections.

I think back over my eleven years dancing the 5Rhythms as a moving meditation practice and how my soul has moved over those years. If my thousands of dances had been recorded and put into one long stream, it would be a long weather report showing the changes in the state of my soul over the years – and there have been infinite state changes along the way.

When I first started dancing all those years ago, I felt called to it – even though it freaked me out to dance, freeform, without steps, in a room full of strangers. I kept showing up, week after week. This taught me so clearly how we know where our soul wants to move even if we fight it or fear it.

Yes, I felt embarrassed often. Yes, I even felt like I might die of embarrassment – and I didn’t. Something pushed me to go. Something without words. It was instinct. It was knowing. It was intense.

Eleven years later I can’t imagine not dancing. I can’t imagine not knowing the people I’ve met through dance. I can’t imagine not having come to know myself so much more clearly. I can’t imagine not being more deeply awake in the cells of this body. I can’t imagine NOT knowing that this powerful joy is possible to know on a regular basis.

Joy comes even when my soul is in the middle of stormy weather, because the joy comes from movement itself, not from being ‘happy’.

Movement is like that. It shows us what’s up inside. It shows us how we are unfolding.

Creative expression is movement through the body. Whether we’re moving the pen across paper, brush across canvas, feet across the floor, the body loves to move and the soul loves to express. We are creative beings by nature.

But here’s the thing.

Anyone or anything that tells us our expression, movement, disposition – basically the expressions of who we are – should be all sunshine and blue skies all the time doesn’t know a damn thing about weather.

Being human is not always sunny and blue skies – not if we’re truthful.

When your hand is moving across the paper or your feet across the floor, don’t stop your soul from moving the weather at hand – or foot. Let your soul pour rain onto the paper, or dance a dark star-lit sky across the floor, or move strong confident wind across your vocal cords.

We are nature. Why should our movement and creative expression be any different than the weather?

It only is when we try to control it by hanging onto it, forcing it, or telling a big story about it that we stop the weather from rolling out across the plains of our lives.

Let your expression move and you will come to know clearly, and beautifully, exactly the state of your own soul and a profoundly grateful joy. Our hips, hands, and hearts know what’s going on inside and they’ll be the first to report the weather if you’re willing to move.

 

 

Share
Posted on

Grief knows this. It will lead you home.

Share
Heart Remembering

No words can know how a broken-open heart feels.

When my heart first broke, it felt as if something reached into my chest and tore my heart apart. Then, when I realized my heart was not broken, but breaking-open, I could feel a bit of light peeking in. Just a bit. Slowly, very slowly, the light began to grow around and through the scarred tissue that had wrapped its way around my heart. And as the light grew, the scars softened and the tissue that is my heart began to return to a pinkness I once knew, but only vaguely remembered in the cells.

::

The Heart knows.

It remembers.

It longs to break open.

Grief knows this.

It is intelligent.

It will lead you home.

::

I don’t say this lightly, or flippantly. I know grief, well. I know joy, well. They are close cousins.

Share
Posted on

Everything’s Full of Life

Share
Everything's full of life!

“For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.” ~Audre Lorde

Yes, we have survived.

We are poets in this linear culture of reason and rationality.

Poets of feeling.

Poets of beauty.

Poets that long to nurture and nourish life.

We feel deeply.

But, what if our feelings no longer kneeled to thought?

What if the feminine in all of us, in women and in men, no longer kneeled to the masculine but danced in right relationship with it.

What if we didn’t hide our feelings, and instead realized the gift they are?

What if we allowed our own hearts to break open, to feel deeply what is here right now?

Would we finally wake up enough to feel what we have done to the Earth? to the animals? to the world’s children? to each other?

Would we begin to let in the stark possibility that the world we leave to our grandchildren will be far from what we have known?

Would we reawaken to the sacredness of life?

Would we finally feel the grief that is so close at hand?

Photo by by Arianna_M(busy)  on Flickr AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved

Share
Posted on

Grief, Growth & Beautiful People

Share

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” – Elizabeth Kubler Ross

broken-open heart

Yes, beautiful people don’t just happen. And, what can open our hearts to the beauty of life, making us beautiful people, are the events that every human being experiences throughout our lives. Living is a vulnerable proposition. It’s what we do with the experiences, how we hold them, if we are open to the gift of them, that awaken the soul to its true richness and beauty.

We all experience suffering.

On a retreat with Adyashanti, he once explained that suffering is our doorway in to awakening. And I would add, to our beauty.

Difficulty in life is real. We all, every human being, experiences what Kubler-Ross writes about.

And, it is these difficulties that are the pathway to a broken-open heart. In my experience, I’ve felt heartbreak many times. And, when I’ve fully felt the loss, when I’ve allowed grief to take me in to the depths of that feeling, riding the line of its experience in my body, that is when my heart breaks open to the beauty inherent in these times of life.

a beautiful offering

I’m writing today to let you know of a beautiful ebook I’ve been blessed and honored to be a contributor to:

Picking Up the Pieces guide

is an offering by Alana Sheeren. An offering from one woman, and her fellow broken-open-hearted friends, that guides you through the many facets of the journey of grief.

Alana started writing at LifeAfterBenjamin.com after her baby boy, Benjamin, was stillborn last year.  She has been in the deep process of grief, sharing some very intimate moments along the way.

This guide is not only beautifully designed and put together, it’s also filled with so much wisdom about grief and the process of grief.

The guide is written by Alana, designed by Shenee Howard, with artwork by Diana Nelson and supplemented with contributions from Christa Gallopoulos, Dyana Valentine, Emily Lewis, Erica Staab, Gail Larsen, Karen Maezen Miller, Roos Stamet-Geurs, Vera Kate Hadley and me.

Grief

Grief takes many forms and appears, many times, when we least expect it.

I wholeheartedly recommend Alana’s guide.

With love to Alana, and to you,

Julie

Share
Posted on

Rage, Love, God & Red-Tailed Hawks

Share

All the fear has left me now
I’m not frightened anymore
It’s my heart that pounds beneath my flesh
It’s my mouth that pushes out this breath
And if I shed a tear I won’t cage it
I won’t fear love
And if I feel a rage I won’t deny it
I won’t fear love.
~Sarah McLachlan

Okay. I admit it. Here. To you. Now.

I… am in love with… God.

I know, I know. The ‘G’ word scares people.

I could say Spirit, the Sacred, the Divine, the Universe, Nature. I have and I do and I will.

But, something in me melts when I acknowledge I am in love with God. This isn’t the love I always thought love was; it’s the deep humility and awe I feel each time I experience the love and grace available to me when I’m stumbling out of my own distractedness, and ‘fumbling towards ecstasy‘.

Even as I write the word God here, and share it with you, I can feel old thoughts and feelings of fear creep across my mind. Old feelings brought about by a system that turned God into something I felt I had to fear, because if I didn’t, I would find myself in some bad kinda way.

Last night, Jeff and I went to Inspiration point in Tilden Park, here in the Berkeley hills. We went to mark the Solstice, the longest day of the year, by sitting in nature. You know, the nature that is hills, trees, birds, sun, wind, moon. It’s easy to say, “I’m going to go spend time in nature”, as if somewhere I’ve forgotten I am nature, you’re nature, we’re all nature.

We found a bench where the view didn’t quite catch the sun setting, but we could see its orange glow spreading out across Mt. Tam and the Golden Gate.

From our spot, I breathed in the scent of the wild.

Two red-tail hawks, life mates, followed each other from tree top to tree top. Each time they sang out their tell-tale ‘Screeeee’, and each mate responded to the other, something in me also responded, as if I were also being called by this wild, untamable force that moves both the red-tail and me.

A gopher, close by to my right foot, chewed vigorously on the long grass, causing it (the grass) to disappear down into the earth. She was chewing with such intensity, such wild ferocity.

As the sun set, the slighty-over-a-half moon glowed intensely against the deep blue almost-night sky.

Something stirred deep within me. It always does when I open to the wild forces, the wilderness that we really live in…and that lives us. I am wild and feral, even though so much of my personality was created to keep this bit of reality away from my conscious awareness. After all, if I remember how wild I really am, what will I do? What kind of trouble will I create? What kind of joy might I know? What kind of emptiness and ecstasy might I fumble into? What kind of rage might I feel and express?

This wilderness is God. I know my old fears of a mean, sitting in a throne man, are the lies I was told. This wilderness out there, and in here, are God. This wild and woolly force, which is completely unknowable and yet totally available,  is God. This life force pulsing through my veins is God. It is powerful. It is fierce. It is loving.

I can’t say I don’t fear it or that I’m not frightened of it anymore. In fact, the opposite is true. The wilderness scares the bejeebers out of me. But this fear is not the fear I was taught about God. This fear is not about my sinfulness, my automatic ticket to hell simply because I am human…and female to boot.

This fear is that heart-thumping, breath-catching feeling when you know you’re being called to step into the wilderness within, that fullest place of empty that awaits.

This fear comes from my remembrance of wild, of passion, of unleashing. This wild has nothing to do with pretending to be an over-sexed psuedo-goddess that lives to please others. This wild will never be tamed. It can’t be tamed. This wild knows tears and rage. It doesn’t deny them.

This wild is calling me to know the tears and rage that remain buried deep in this body. It is calling me to know the shame and humiliation. It is calling me to know the love and the power that waits, just under the darkest of dark emotions.

All of this, all of everything, all of nothing is God. And even then, I don’t have a clue as to what God is. I just know the love.

And, you?

There is much rage hidden in women’s bodies.

Do you feel rage? Do you deny tears? Do you fear this wildness? Do you fear love?

And, if you are a man?

What can you share about rage? About the wilderness? About your own fear of tears?

I’d love to know…

This post on Wilderness is part of Dian Reid’s blog challenge, as well as Bindu Wiles #215800 blog challenge.

Share
Posted on

A Fruit is not Afraid

Share

A fruit is not afraid of its own weight. It grows into its skin fully. It is whole, each part of its body equally alive. ~Gayle Brandeis from Fruitflesh

::

Since my last post on despair, my body has been heavy with feeling. Heavy not in a bad way, but simply full, like ripe fruit. Full of the life blood that comes with feeling deeply, down into the body. Not thinking about feeling, but feeling. Not running from the emotions, but rather allowing them to mingle with one another as they move from coming to going.

Sometimes these emotions are ripe for the picking, ready to share their succulent wisdom if one is open to eating the fruit. For me, grief is like the bushel basket that holds the ripe emotions that are being offered up for tasting.

I realized, when I allowed despair to dance, that grief had brought it to my doorstep. Grief is such an intelligent, wise process. It knows what we need to become more alive, more real, more human, more awake. Grief opens the door to feeling fully alive, the raw place where nothing escapes our awareness.

Over the past few days, I came to see that I’m grieving the loss of the way things used to be. It seems so clear to me that life as I knew it has changed. The times of believing life can be one full long sumptuous banquet of eating whatever you want, as much as you want, whenever you want has come to an end. Our culture’s mentality of no-end-in-sight growth, a kind of westward expansion towards a never-ending horizon, had taught me so many things that were lodged in my psyche. When I opened the door to despair, they came tumbling out.

It’s not that I hadn’t seen this before. Heaven knows others have been telling us this all along. This was different though. What came in on the other side of grief is the realization that this banquet I had been taught to enjoy, in many ways had provided little sustenance.

All through the illusion of having my way, getting what I want, a laziness to change my habits, the real riches of life have been offering themselves up to me. Only I was too focused on consuming, acquiring, devouring things in order to feel safe, in control, full. I was too focused on thinking, trying to figure it all out, so I could feel in charge, powerful, again, in control.

I’ve tasted grief many, many times, as have we all. After times of great loss, always, always grief has created room in my heart – if I am willing to invite grief in, to allow it to soak me in its wisdom, to allow it to be my mid-wife, as I birth myself anew. It leaves me able to know more of life’s riches, those riches that can’t be seen, but can certainly be touched and tasted by the heart.

This fullness that is here is not the same as the false fullness of having stuff. It is a weighted down feeling, like a mother heavy with child, like a pear so juicy, the juice almost seeps through the skin, while its mother branch bends deeply to hold it until it no longer can.

Something opens in me – I should say a deeper opening – into the realm of the fullness of life itself. I feel the fullness in the air, in my breath, in my belly. It’s as if I can touch this fullness with my eyes, as I gaze out at the life I swim in. I can hear the fullness. As I listen, it speaks to me, in silence, of its love. It wraps me in its blanket of existence. It pulsates. It throbs. It vibrates and quivers. It’s the fullest, ripest emptiness I could ever imagine.

This fullness is right here, right now. Always here, always now. I’ve come to see it as that which holds me as I dance in the unknown spaces that seem dark and pulse with life. This is what I can trust in when I don’t know, which is only every moment of existence.

::

Image courtesy of Andrew Michaels on Flickr; Creative Commons 2.0 license

Blog Widget by LinkWithin
Share