Chelan Harkin: The Great Ceremony

This is a most powerful poem, yet another reflection of the stunning wisdom and sacred truths brought forth by and through Chelan Harkin. Deepest bow of gratitude and love.

Held in this poem is a profound reframing of how it is that we perceive and experience grief, ours and that of one another. What I have come to learn over the course of many years of engaging in my own deep heartwork is that if we haven't befriended our own human grief over the inevitable losses and sorrows we experience in our lifetimes, we will be compelled to push away those who remind us of the unattended places in our hearts rather than comfort, witness, honor, and bless the journeys through grief of those around us.

After great resistance, fear, shame, and disdain in the early years of my healing journey for all the great places of sorrow and loss that I had hidden away in my deepest heart, over time I came to gradually recognize that my tears were the sacred doorway into awakening. The doorway into cultivating and nurturing an ever growing capacity for compassion and empathy, vulnerability and connection, healing and transformation, tenderness and kindness, wisdom and love.

This is a lifelong process, this shedding of the obstacles that we have unknowingly built against love. And yet once we recognize that our triggers, our losses, our unfinished business that arises once again that we had mistakeningly believed was healed all the way through — once we reframe these experiences as yet another doorway into greater healing and humility, understanding and awareness, vulnerability and connection, compassion and tenderness, truth and love... then everything changes. Everything shifts, yet again. And again and again and again. And opens, even more deeply.

And we come to recognize that it isn't that we have to do this work, this heartwork. No. We get to do this heartwork. We get to. And then we are able to truly recognize and witness and support the amazing journeys into greater love of others. Blessed be. 

And bless us all on our sacred journeys. 💗🙏 Molly

THE GREAT CEREMONY

Bring not your pity

to the great ceremony

of another's grief

but rather bring your honor

and celebration

to the great sacred room

of another soul's bravery

as through their tears

they shed the old world

Each deep cry

is a right of passage

that should be held as such

Lay your reverence

respect

and gratitude

upon the altar

of your witnessing

You are on sanctified grounds,

you've been let in

to the temple of transformation

What a great privilege

to witness truth

flooding another's body

Each deep cry

is a contraction

of the birth

of our new world

and each of us

is called to do

our heart's labor

to be Her mother.

 

— Chelan Harkin 

 

https://chelanharkin.com/ 

David Bedrick: Deepening My Sense of What It Means To Love and Be Loved

This is beautiful. So wisely and powerfully and compassionately said. Deep gratitude and thanks once again to David Bedrick.

I also deeply resonate. In the early years of my own journey of healing and transformation, I wanted to get rid of every new painful part of myself that I was unearthing.

I believed then that these places that I held in my heart, these places of my long unknown and unattended shadow were all part of what made me flawed, unworthy, and unlovable. My inner critic roared and was relentlessly shaming me. All the fingers of judgment that had been pointed outward onto others before I began my journey of awakening were now pointed at me. Very painful. And incredibly hard to live with so much shame.

Somewhere down the road everything began to shift. My therapist asked me again and again and again if I could hold myself with tenderness and compassion right where I was at in that very moment when shame would arise. And again and again and again that is what I did.

And eventually I came to recognize that this is the journey of love. The journey of opening to loving myself and others. The journey of cultivating the deepest compassion and empathy and kindness. The miraculous journey of becoming who I am. And seeing the beauty in others.

And, yes, always deepening my sense of what it means to love and be loved. 💗🙏 Molly

Photo by Molly: Sunset on the Oregon coast with my husband and our dog Shira

I've been meditating on the word "healing" lately, concerned with the way it is used - too often pathologizing people, leaving them thinking they are broken or needing fixing.

I came across this post I wrote some years ago; I was moved to edit it and share it here:

I carry the wounds to psyche (psyche means soul) in my heart.

I feel them in my body.

They sit beside me in deep meditations and manifest in my relationships.

I feel their company when I am alone walking by the ocean.

In my twenties I hoped the right relationship and career would make them go away.

In my 30’s, it was meditation, acupuncture and therapy that focused my efforts on ridding myself of their pain and disruption.

In my 40's, I became clearer about my purpose in the world. I studied the law and began practicing as an attorney, focusing more on social justice. I learned that "my wounds" did not only belong to me.

In my 50's I learned to play, recovering some of the child-like freedom that also opened more creative doors. It eased the pain of my wounds, but morning after morning we still greeted each other; they hadn't left.

Now, in my 60’s our friendship has grown. I know them as also me, not some pathology to be removed, or cut out like a tumor.

They teach me when to hold on and when to let go, and what the nature of my gifts are and how to walk with Spirit.

And most importantly, they always deepen my sense of what it means to love and be loved.

 

— David Bedrick 

 

https://www.davidbedrick.com/ 

 

Francis Weller: Grieving as a Gateway Into Softening the Hardest Places In Our Hearts

There is another entrance to grief, a second gateway, different from the gate connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places often untouched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our life...

 

These neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair. What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but *we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth*....

 

We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our inacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion....

 

Grief is a powerful solvent, capable of softening the hardest of places in our hearts. When we can truly weep for ourselves and those places of shame, we have invited the first waters of healing to wash through our souls.

 

— Francis Weller

Excerpted from The Wild Edge of Sorrow 

 

https://www.francisweller.net/books.html 

 

Pesha Gertler: The Healing Time

  The Healing Time

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.

— Pesha Gertler 

Wendell Berry: To Cherish What Remains of the Earth

 

To cherish what remains of the Earth

and to foster its renewal

is our only legitimate

hope of survival.

— Wendell Berry

 

Jeff Brown: Breaking Free From Toxic Ancestral Patterns

The way you break toxic ancestral patterns is not by running away from them. It’s by walking back in their direction. Not because you want to keep repeating them, but because you recognize that the only way to truly shift them is to see them up close and heal them at their roots. It’s okay to run from them for a time, but not for all time. Because the flight from what lives inside of you, merely delays your arrival. You think you are on the way to somewhere else, but the plane keeps circling your childhood home. It can’t navigate a new flight path, until you return back to where you came from, and heal its broken wings.

— Jeff Brown 

https://jeffbrown.co/