My therapist shared this talk by Daniel Siegel with me yesterday in an email after our session. A good therapist is synonymous with a good friend to one's heart and soul, and Doug Pullin has certainly been that for me over the course of several years now.
Phrases like "talk therapy" limit the scope of what a wise, heart-centered, and conscious therapist — or any wise and deeply compassionate teacher, healer, friend, mentor, storyteller, author, artist, poet, visionary, spiritual guide — can bring to us. For me, Doug has been just one among countless others who've been supporting me on my journey from brokenness and fragmentation, fear and shame, separation and illusion, projections and triggers, addictions and distractions, loneliness and isolation, blind spots and ignorance into wholeness and love.
And yesterday, as always, sitting in the safe and compassionate presence of Doug (now on zoom) creates the space for what needs to arise to conscious awareness to be spoken, felt, understood, witnessed, held, integrated, and gleaned for its gifts. And yesterday there was so much. It was the anniversary of my father's death 45 years earlier. It was two days past my 10 year anniversary since meeting my husband, the love of my life. There are the heartbreaking and ever growing cases and deaths due to the coronavirus. There's the trauma and devastation of hurricanes and typhoons and the always present trauma of our warming climate. And an election had happened which was both a relief and to be celebrated, and which also revealed the great tragic, painful, and dangerous divides in our nation and beyond. And, of course, out of these political divisions comes the consciousness of how our human separateness from within ourselves, each other, other sentient beings, and the Earth have caused such suffering, devastation, and death.
And I was feeling through all this and more with waves of gratitude and joy, grief and empathic consciousness washing through me, ebbing and flowing, always opening and strengthening my heart. And I spoke to Doug about my profound gratitude that today I can feel. I can feel! And I flashed to all those many years ago when I first got sober and began therapy and thought that the tsunami which was then emerging of a lifetime of suppressed emotions would kill me.
That was in my other lifetime. What I live and breathe and experience today has been radically transformed and continues to evolve and deepen with each day and every year that I am alive. And yesterday towards the end of my session I spoke to the fluidity that I experience, how I am able to more and more meet life as it is and, in the words of Frank Ostaseski, increasingly "welcome everything and push away nothing." In his brilliant book The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully — https://fiveinvitations.com/the-book/ — Frank offers these deeply empowering, healing, and awakening guidelines for living:
- Don’t Wait
- Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing
- Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience
- Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things
- Cultivate Don’t Know Mind
And this is what I have been integrating into my life — these practices grounded in presence and mindfulness, welcoming everything and pushing away nothing, compassion and openness, tenderness and witnessing, peace and renewal, purpose and meaning, healing and transformation. And I spoke to Doug about how I experience being on a lifelong journey of integration into ever growing wholeness. At the same time, I wept with how lost and fragmented I had once been, holding my younger self with great tenderness and compassion. And holding us all...
It was this sharing about fragmentation, compassion, integration, and wholeness which prompted my therapist to wonder if I'd be interested in hearing this talk I share here by Dr. Daniel Siegel. And, of course, I welcome all that Doug is moved to offer me.
There are so many wise and needed teachings here. Perhaps this will speak to you, too, as Dan Siegel touches on these things...
- what happens between the inner you and the inter-you
- impaired integration
- being stuck in the illusions of our smaller self
- how our disconnect within ourselves feeds the illusions of our disconnect with each other and the larger world
- the global consequences of our human disconnections and living out of our fragmented smaller self
- misguided stories that we tell ourselves
- modern culture has given us messages about our "self" which if we don't question we are in deep, deep trouble
- expanding our understanding and the experience of our profound interconnectedness
- becoming fully embodied
- fluidity
- compassion
- interrelatedness
- how trainings in focused attention, open awareness, and compassion facilitate our experience of interconnectedness
- how love and awareness overlap
- how reflective practice, compassion practice, mindfulness practice help us to integrate consciousness and are the antidotes to separation
- how we become able to experience, not think, but experience these practices as conduits of reality
- accessing consciousness is accessing love
- our interconnected nature is the fundamental structure of the universe
- it is an integrated self which links together life
- love and kindness are the strongest ways that we humans have of being on the planet
- compassion practice gives us the experiential awareness of how we're all in this together
- it is vital to spread the true narrative of reality of our deep interconnection
- human consciousness can rise above the polarities which dehumanize
- humans can and must integrate the me and the we
It is my experience that we are all souls having these human experiences and that we are all walking each other home. What a gift it is when we can receive and extend wisdom that is healing for our hearts, minds, and souls. We truly are all related, all part of the one great Sacred Whole.
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