Saturday, December 21, 2024

John O'Donohue: A Solstice Blessing

Photo by Molly

A  Solstice Blessing

1

Somewhere, out at the edges, the night
is turning and the waves of darkness
Begin to brighten on the shore of dawn.

The heavy dark falls back to earth
And the freed air goes wild with light,
The heart fills with fresh, bright breath
And thoughts stir to give birth to colour.

2

I arise today

In the name of Silence
Womb of the Word,
In the name of Stillness
Home of Belonging,
In the name of Solitude
Of the soul and the Earth.

I arise today

Blessed by all things,
Wings of breath,
Delight of eyes,
Wonder of whisper,
Intimacy of touch,
Eternity of soul,
Urgency of thought,
Miracle of health,
Embrace of God.

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,
Clear of word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.

John O’Donohue
From To Bless the Space Between Us

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Francis Weller: The Secret To Being Fully Alive

This is worth posting again. I believe that the essence of these wise quotes from Francis Weller is deeply relevant to these times and all times. I find myself affirming again and again that opening our hearts to grief and gratitude is a spiritual practice that I have found to be an extraordinary gift. It is not easy to be human and to live our lives open-heartedly and whole-heartedly. Among my ongoing prayers is that we humans may increasingly find the support, courage, commitment, and wisdom that we need to grow into the wholeness of who we are and our great capacity for love, kindness, and generosity. Our world will be healed and transformed as we heal and transform ourselves. With heartfelt blessings to all... 💗 Molly

Grief Keeps the Heart Flexible, Fluid, 
and Open to Others 

The work of the mature human being is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other, and to be stretched large by these two things.
 
Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.

I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive.

When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.

Herein begins the slow, insidious process of carving up the self to fit into the world of adults. We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion, even if it is provisional. We become convinced, on some basic level, that these pieces of who we are, are not good enough—that they are, in fact, shameful—and we banish them to the farther shore of our awareness in hopes of never hearing from them again. They become our outcast brothers and sisters.

Shame ruptures our connection with life and with our soul. It is, indeed, a sickness of the soul. When feelings of shame arise, we pull back from the world, avoiding contact that could cause or risk exposure. The last thing we want in times of excruciating self-consciousness is to be seen. We find ourselves avoiding the gaze of others, we become silent and withdrawn, all in hopes of slipping under the radar. I remember sharing with the audience that the goal of the shame-bound person was to get from birth to death without ever being an echo on the radar of life. My tombstone was going to read “Safe at Last.” Gershon Kaufman, one of the most important writers on shame, has said that shame leaves us feeling “unspeakably and irreparably defective.” It is unspeakable because we do not want anyone to know how we feel inside. We fear it is irreparable because we think it is not something we have done wrong—it is simply who we are. We cannot remove the stain from our core. We search and search for the defect, hoping that that, once found, it can be exorcised like some grotesque demon. But it lingers, remaining there our entire lives, anxious that it will be seen and simultaneously longing to be seen and touched with compassion. 

At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”

In the absence of this depth of community, the safe container is difficult to find. By default, we become the container ourselves, and when this happens, we cannot drop into the well of grief in which we can fully let go of the sorrows we carry. We recycle our grief, moving into it and then pulling it back into our bodies unreleased. Frequently in my practice patients tell me that they often cry in private. I ask them whether, at some point in this process, they ever allow their grief to be witnessed and shared with others. There is usually a quick retort of “No, I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to be a burden to anyone else.” When I push it a little further and ask them how it would feel if a friend came to them with his or her sorrows and pain, they respond that they would feel honored to sit with their friend and offer support. This disconnection between what we would offer others and what we feel we can ask for is extreme. We need to recover our right to ask for help in grief, otherwise it will continue to recycle perpetually. Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.

It is important to look into the shadows of our lives and to see who lives there, tattered, withered, hungry, and alone. Bringing these parts of soul back to the table is a central element of our work. Ending their exile means releasing the contempt we hold for these parts of who we are. It means welcoming the full range of our being and restoring our wholeness. Until then, we will continue to carry a feeling of worthlessness and brokenness. 

To die before we die means that we must become radically honest with ourselves. We must shed the skins that do not foster aliveness. One man, while participating in the first weekend of the Men of Spirit initiation, suddenly realized how conscripted and narrow his life was. At that moment, he jumped out of his chair and flung it across the room in disgust. He clearly saw that he had unwittingly made an agreement to live small and to consistently tell himself what a good life he was living. This realization broke him open to the great well of grief he was carrying in his heart from all the times he had abandoned himself for the sake of fitting in and getting approval. 

The collective denial of our underlying emotional life has contributed to an array of troubles and symptoms. What is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-grade chronic grief locked into the psyche, complete with the ancillary ingredients of shame and despair. Martín Prechtel calls this the gray-sky culture, one in which we do not choose to live an exuberant life, filled with the wonder of the world and the beauty of day-to-day existence, one in which we do not welcome the sorrow that comes with the inevitable losses that accompany us on our walk here. This refusal to enter the depths has shrunk the visible horizon for many of us, dimmed our participation in the joys and sorrows of the world. We suffer from what I call premature death—we turn away from life and are ambivalent toward the world, neither in it nor out of it, lacking a commitment to fully say yes to life.

David Whyte offers a beautiful poem on the ways we are invited to welcome back the outcast parts of our being. This stanza from “Coleman’s Bed” is filled with self-compassion. Be taught now, among the trees and rocks, how the discarded is woven into shelter, learn the way things hidden and unspoken slowly proclaim their voice in the world. Find that inward symmetry to all outward appearances, apprentice yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back all you sent away, be a new annunciation, make yourself a door through which to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you. 

*****

I’m not sure how or when I began my apprenticeship with sorrow. I do know that it was my gateway back into the breathing and animate world. It was through the dark waters of grief that I came to touch my unlived life. . . . There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive. Through this, I have come to have a lasting faith in grief.

Still, the ground beneath me felt unsteady, as though at any moment it could shake and easily take me to the ground. I stumbled upon what Zen priest and author Susan Murphy calls the koan of the earth. How do we answer the riddle of our times? How do we sift through the shards of our broken culture, our fragmented psyches, and come once again into “our original undividedness and the freedom it bestows, right there in the suffocating fear itself.” This was the question at the heart of my despair, ripening in the vessel of my sorrow. What felt different this time was the interior experience of the grief and despair. It was not centered on personal losses—my history, wounds, losses, failures, and disappointments. It was arising from the greater pulse of the earth itself, winding its way through sidewalks and grocery lists, traffic snarls and utility bills. Somewhere in all the demands of modern life, the intimate link between earth and psyche was being reestablished or, more accurately, remembered. The conditioned fantasy of the segregated self was being dismantled, and I was being reunited, through the unexpected grace of fear, despair, and grief, with the body of the earth.

Imagine the feeling of relief that would flood our whole being if we knew that when we were in the grip of sorrow or illness, our village would respond to our need. This would not be out of pity, but out of a realization that every one of us will take our turn at being ill, and we will need one another. The indigenous thought is when one of us is ill, all of us are ill. Taking this thought a little further, we see that healing is a matter, in great part, of having our, connections to the community and the cosmos restored. This truth has been acknowledged in many studies. Our immune response is strengthened when we feel our connection with community. By regularly renewing the bonds of belonging, we support our ability to remain healthy and whole.

Psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan uses the term intervulnerability to describe the need for this mutually held space. When asked about this idea in an interview, she replied, When I say we are “intervulnerable,” I mean we suffer together, whether consciously or unconsciously. Albert Einstein called the idea of a separate self an “optical delusion of consciousness.” Martin Luther King Jr. said that we are all connected in an “inescapable web of mutuality.” There’s no way out, though we try to escape by armoring ourselves against pain and in the process diminishing our lives and our consciousness. But in our intervulnerability is our salvation, because awareness of the mutuality of suffering impels us to search for ways to heal the whole, rather than encase ourselves in a bubble of denial and impossible individualism. At this point in history, it seems that we will either destroy ourselves or find a way to build a sustainable life together.  

To alter the amnesia of our times, we must be willing to look into the face of the loss and keep it nearby. In this way, we may be able to honor the losses and live our lives as carriers of their unfinished stories. This is an ancient thought - how we tend the dead is as important as how we tend the living. 

Silence is a practice of emptying, of letting go. It is a process of hollowing ourselves out so we can open to what is emerging. Our work is to make ourselves receptive. The organ of receiving is the human heart, and it is here that we feel the deep ache of loss, the bittersweet reminders of all that we loved, the piercing artifacts of betrayal, and the sheer truth of impermanence. Love and loss, as we know so well, forever entwined. 

My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief.

Coming to trust the darkness takes time and often involves many visits to this land. Our arrival here is rarely a chosen thing. We are thrown into the darkness or are carried there on the back of a blue mood. What we make of this visit is up to us. Recalling that the darkness is also a dwelling place of the sacred allows us to find value in the descent. In this place of lightlessness, we develop a second sight. 

It is challenging to honor the descent in a culture that primary values the ascent. We like things rising—stock markets, the GDP, profit margins. We get anxious when things go down. Even within psychology, there is a premise that is biased toward improvement, always getting better, rising above our troubles. We hold dear concepts like progress and integration. These are fine in and of themselves, but it is not the way psyche works. Psyche, we must remember, was shaped by and is rooted in the foundations of nature. As such, psyche also experiences times of decay and death, of stopping, regression, and being still. Much happens in these times that deepen the soul. When all we are shown is the imagery of ascent, we are left to interpret the times of descent as pathological; we feel that we are somehow failing. As poet and author Robert Bly wryly noted, “How can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means ‘no ashes.’ ”

Another facet of our aversion to grief is fear. Hundreds of times in my practice as a therapist, I have heard how fearful people are of dropping into the well of grief. The most frequent comment is “If I go there, I’ll never return.” What I found myself saying one day was rather surprising. “If you don’t go there, you’ll never return.” It seems that our wholesale abandonment of this core emotion has cost us dearly, pressed us toward the surface of our lives. We live superficial lives and feel the gnawing ache of something missing. If we are to return to the richly textured life of soul and to participation with the soul of the world, we must pass through the intense region of grief and sorrow. 

Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need. To feel valued for the gifts with which we are born affirms our worth and dignity. In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment - simply being who we are confirms our place in the village. That is one of the fundamental understanding about gifts: we can only offer them by being ourselves fully. Gifts are a consequence of authenticity; when we are being true to our natures, the gifts can emerge. 

Teacher and grief specialist Stephen Jenkinson says, “Hold your sorrow to a degree of eloquence, whereby everyone around you will be fed by your efforts to do so.” Becoming skillful at digesting our grief makes us a source of reassurance and stability for the wider community. 

This beautiful poem by Rashani Réa, “The Unbroken,” offers us a glimpse into what we may find nestled inside our deepest sorrows:
There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctified into being. There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside which is unbreakable and whole, while learning to sing. 

My daily practice is to wake and immediately bring my attention to this thought: “I am one day closer to my death. So how will I live this day? How will I greet those I meet? How will I bring soul to each moment? I do not want to waste this day.

― Francis Weller
Quotes taken from The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of 
Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief 


Monday, December 9, 2024

Satish Kumar: When Individuals Feel a Sense of Sacred Connectedness

Photo by Molly

When Individuals Feel a Sense of
Sacred Connectedness

Sometimes I come across a tree which seems like Buddha or Jesus: loving, compassionate, still, unambitious, enlightened, in eternal meditation, giving pleasure to a pilgrim, shade to a cow, berries to a bird, beauty to its surroundings, health to its neighbors, branches for the fire, leaves for the soil, asking nothing in return, in total harmony with the wind and the rain. How much can I learn from a tree? The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer.

We depend on the gifts of nature, but these gifts must be received with gratitude and not exploited or abused.

Earth is a living entity. And if it's a living organism, then we have to have a reverence for all life.

The great work of social transformation begins with the first small step of stopping, calming, relaxing, reflecting and acting in a beneficial way.

If individuals start to walk on the path of spirit and feel a sense of the sacred connectedness, then social, economic and political problems will also begin to get resolved.

We human beings are spiritual beings. We have soul. We have spirit. We have mind. We have consciousness. We want fulfillment, we want happiness, we want satisfaction, we want joy. We want imagination. We want art, culture, music.

Happiness is possible only when we are kind to others and contented within.

Our relationship with Nature... the best way of forging this relationship... is to be a pilgrim and not a tourist on Planet Earth. 

The force and the strength for peace will come from people. And that will happen when people start to realize that all the diversity and differences we see of nationalities, of religions, of cultures, of languages, are all beautiful diversities, for they are only on the surface. And deep down we share the same humanity, the global humanity. 


— Satish Kumar

Brian Doyle: Love Is the Story and the Prayer That Matters Most

Photo by Molly

Love Is the Story and the Prayer
That Matters Most

We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.

Your library is where the community stores its treasures. It’s the house that imagination built. It’s where all the stories that matter are gathered together and celebrated and shared... People come to it communally for something that’s deep and ancient and important beyond an easy explanation. Who you are as a town is in the library. It’s why when you want to destroy a place you burn down the library. People who fear freedom fear libraries.

The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children.

But you cannot control everything... All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference... You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow... That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.

Love is the story and the prayer that matters most.

— Brian Doyle

Terry Tempest Williams: The World Is Holy

Photo by Molly

 The World Is Holy

The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves.

The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, and not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, and without giving up  ever  trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?

Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.

I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend word of wounding without having these words becomg the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.

— Terry Tempest  Williams


Oriah Mountain Dreamer: The Invitation

Photo by Molly

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon...
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.

 Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Jane Goodall: Only If We Understand

Photo by Molly

 Only If We Understand

Only if we understand, can we care. 
Only if we care, we will help. 
Only if we help, we shall be saved.

You cannot get through a single day 
without having an impact on the world 
around you. What you do makes a difference, 
and you have to decide what kind of 
difference you want to make.

The greatest danger to our 
future is apathy.

We have the choice to use the gift of 
our life to make the world a better place
or not to bother.

We have so far to go to realize 
our human potential for compassion, 
altruism, and love. 

 Jane Goodall  

Friday, December 6, 2024

Shining Our Light Ever More Brightly In Our Beautiful Hurting World

Photo by my dear friend Lynn Negrete
Shining Our Light Ever More Brightly 
In Our Beautiful Hurting World

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.

— Rumi

* * *

As we experience the suffering within ourselves, our loved ones, and the world, I believe that it is the strength of our individual and collective Light and Love that matters and matters deeply. 

So what empowers us to not turn away, to not lose ourselves in despair or hopelessness, to keep the eyes of our hearts open, and to grow in resilience and passion for doing our part in the healing of ourselves, our human and nonhuman family, and our Earth Mother? We will likely each have our own unique responses to this question. And this is where it can sometimes be helpful, healing, and empowering to share our experience, strength, and hope with one another.

For me, some of the roots of how I am moved to respond are found in the first parts of the question: How do we not lose ourselves? And that is certainly something that has been a profound and deeply spiritual experience for me to contemplate and explore.

Over the course of many years, what I have discovered within myself, and come to witness in us all, is that we humans share in common having many conscious and/or unconscious parts. It can also be difficult to not get caught up in misidentification with our parts, believing that we are our shame, depression, addiction, fears, and trauma. Or we can be misidentified with the flip side of "not good enough" or "broken" through actions and beliefs reflected in perfectionism, image management, being better than, power and control, entitlement and grandiosity. 

Certainly I have personally experienced both sides of these reflections of being lost to myself which for me began as an infant and manifested for over half of my lifetime with believing myself to be deeply flawed, unworthy, and unlovable. It is this pain of unworthiness and shame and fear that I learned early on to cover over with judgments of how I was in some way better than you. I share this with the compassion knowing that our inner judgments always have to go somewhere. And to the degree that we hold ourselves with shame and a harsh inner critic rather than understanding, compassion, tenderness, and love  is the degree that we are lost to who we truly are.

* * * * *


There are countless experiences that we humans can have which cause us to build protective walls around the tender places in our hearts. To cope and survive, we learn to not be vulnerable, to not trust, to not be intimate and honest, to not say no and maintain healthy boundaries, and to feel that it is not safe to be who we most truly are. And we go to sleep, oblivious to how much of our authenticity that we have sacrificed and numbed and buried within ourselves, individually and collectively, in order to create the illusion of safety, connection, meaning, truth, and reality.

I reflect spontaneously now on how our inner exiles and inner walls find mirrors in the outer walls and exiles that we build and create on the outside in our relationships, our nation, and the world. If we don't truly see and experience ourselves and, therefore, are unable to see and experience the truth of each other, how are we to embody the compassion, wisdom, and heart-to-heart connections with our planetary sisters and brothers that we all need? We can't bring something of depth to anyone else that we are first denying ourselves. And yet it is this felt connection within ourselves and with one another that is vital to the wisdom of knowing how to act on behalf of a highest good for us all.

There is great wisdom in this: We cannot be bodhisattvas to our human and nonhuman family if we are not first bodhisattvas to ourselves. This is a deep and abiding truth. To the degree that we are lost to ourselves and denying our deeper needs and truths is the degree that we will experience disconnection from one another. And rather than bringing consciousness and compassion to our hurting world, we are more likely to bring fear and judgment, shame and blame, anger and hatred, bitterness and resentment.

For decades there were old triggers, old buried beliefs, old attachment injuries, and deep, deep trauma which continued to haunt my life as an adult. This was true even years into my sobriety, years into counseling, years into 12 Step programs and other resources that I sought to help me heal generations of pain. Yet for years into my journey I continued to suffer in the present from old wounds out of my past. And my greatest pain was when I began to see the legacy burdens of ancestral and cultural trauma show up in my sons as they entered adolescence. I had no idea what was missing.

Today I do. 

* * * * *


Strengthening our connection with our inner Light, our core Essence, our sacred Self is life changing and a powerful antidote to being lost to ourSelves and our interrelatedness with all beings. At least this has certainly been my experience  and which today I believe to be a sacred truth.

I have been moved to share this quote from Mark Nepo again and again, who describes the essence of our Self in this way — “Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, Theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love.”

This transformative and deeply spiritual process is not a matter of needing to grow my heart stronger, or grow my compassion muscle, or strive to be loving. As I've continued to evolve on my journey of awakening, today I recognize that these qualities are already within us — a strong heart, deep and abiding compassion, and an expansive love and caring that excludes no one. This is who we are. This is what it is to be a fully embodied human being deeply connected with our Sacred core. As we bring more and more of our exiled parts out of exile and lovingly listen and attend to them, we strengthen our connection with our Self.

It is my experience of befriending and healing my many parts that continues in an ongoing way to clear the obstacles to embodying my Self. This is the opposite from pathologizing, labeling, judging, or trying to get rid of anything. Instead, this is a process which is honoring, compassionate, tender and wise, deeply transformative and empowering, and grounded in abiding Love.

It is this Light emanating from Self which is something that I believe is threaded through us all. Unblending from and unburdening the wounded exiles that so many of us have long carried within our bodies frees up a depth of compassion and courage, resilience and strength, kindness and love that may otherwise be impaired or inaccessible. It is my belief that this potential lives within us all because this "spot of grace" is our birthright. 

There is no self-improvement required. Rather, we are just learning how to recognize and live out of the consciousness of the beauty, wisdom, strength, and love of our true nature. We are then also empowered to know, remember, and recognize that Self is within everyone.

This is true freedom from the barriers we've built within ourselves and with one another. The personal to global implications are profound.

* * * * *


From this revolutionary perspective and experience, there is no pathologizing. No shaming beliefs in sin or demons, nothing within us that is unworthy of love, and there is no trauma that we've brought upon ourselves because of our actions in past lives. Trauma can never heal more trauma. It is also true that after working with hundreds of abused children over the course of my professional life, I clearly recognize the undeniable sacredness of every single child. No one is born a "bad seed", as my own mother once believed to be true of me. No child deserves abuse or neglect or any form of violence. Period. And it is clear that narratives related to sin or the devil or inner demons only perpetuates fear and shame, unworthiness and powerlessness, and the  sense of being deeply flawed and unlovable. And all of this contributes to our experience of lack of safety and connection with others and distance from the strength and beauty of our true nature.  

There is tremendous empowerment that occurs when we realize, when we really get it, that there is no longer anything within us to get rid of, there are no pathologies that are doomed to haunt us for lifetimes, no damning and incredibly limiting diagnoses that we misidentify with. Instead, and as Richard Schwartz wisely states, there are "no bad parts." Absolutely none. All can be embraced and listened to and valued and ultimately freed from their painful legacy burdens  burdens that have often been carried and passed on for many generations before us. Freedom from this pain and suffering is absolutely possible and what I believe to be our birthright.  

At its core, this journey is one of learning how to love and hold ourselves and each other with compassion and lovingkindness. It is about learning how to be the loving parent who we may have never had. It is also the extraordinary process of transforming old roles and patterns which may have plagued us for decades with addictions, trauma triggers, depression and anxiety, shame and fear, flooding and overwhelm, and harmful thoughts and beliefs. As we gain greater access to our Self, our old triggers lose their hold over us and we gain the tools to lessen and greatly diminish experiences of being triggered, flooded, and overwhelmed.

This is why I have no fear today of ever relapsing. None. Yes, I am incredibly grateful for my 40 years of sobriety, which has been an essential part of my healing journey. And it is also true that I no longer identify by the part of me that has been an alcoholic. That part of me simply no longer holds any power over me whatsoever. The burdens of the carried pain that pushed parts of myself into my addictions to alcohol and cigarettes and other addictions have been unburdened in an ongoing way and radically transformed.

This is also why I have no fear of Alzheimer's, although both my mother and grandmother suffered from this disease. What resonates for me is what Gabor Maté has spoken about and also written about in When the Body Says No — Alzheimer's is most likely an autoimmune disease. And when we have unaddressed trauma that has plagued us for years and caused us to not live our lives grounded in our most authentic selves, there is a deep cost that builds over the course of our lifetimes. 

This was certainly true when I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in 2003. Gratefully, my doctor knew my history of trauma, did not prescribe any pain medication, told me to "not get stuck in my diagnosis", and sent me off to get alternative care. I've now been free of all symptoms of this autoimmune disease for twenty years. And given the deep and transformative healing work that I've engaged in, coupled with the growing authenticity of how it is that I now live my life, I have no fear of Alzheimer's or relapse into old addictions. 

The freedom from trauma that comes with unburdening ourselves of the trauma legacies that we were blindly handed by our ancestors and larger culture has profound implications. It is truly radical transformation that I could not have imagined before first experiencing it myself.

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I have now long been on this journey of unblending from my hurting parts. Increasingly, it is my Self that is able to be curious, courageous, compassionate, and able to hold and listen to the pain I have held in my heart and body. And, with time, these parts have ultimately come to be released from the painful roles they'd taken on so very long ago. While these old patterns and coping strategies had helped me for many years to survive, it is also true that they later developed into patterns and beliefs which caused harm to myself and those around me. 

Finding freedom from these old painful triggers and parts and roles is, again, an incredibly life changing and profound gift. Coming from a history of great trauma and pain and its many symptoms — multiple addictions, depression and anxiety, unhealthy relationships and unhealthy beliefs, and deep shame and fear and disconnection — today I am a walking, living example of what is possible when we access the Self as Healer within.

This is also a journey which we cannot take in isolation. We humans are relational beings, and while early attachment injuries may have pushed us into patterns of defending our hearts, it is absolutely possible to find the wise and loving support that we need to bring our exiles out of exile and cultivate a deepening connection with our many parts and with our Self. Both are intimately linked. And, ultimately, we can come to experience the profound freedom that emerges as we learn how to undefend our hearts.

In more recent years I've been blessed a great deal of support, including with a therapist who has empowered me to more deeply heal and radically transform past traumas. This has included healing the traumatic wounds I've experienced from earlier counselors and therapists who had not done their own deeper work and carried their own unaddressed trauma legacies. No one can support anyone else in connecting with our Sacred core and unblending and unburdening from the pain carried in our different parts without first doing that work themselves. 

And this is something that I've come to understand for many years now. None of us can assist in bringing anyone further than we have first gone ourselves. And as I have learned from many painful experiences, it is deeply important to discern who we can trust as midwives on our sacred journey and who we cannot. I had understandably been incredibly instinct injured and for many years, including well into my sobriety, did not have the skills of discernment needed to know who to offer my trust to. 

Today, gratefully, I do.

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It is not easy to be human. Today millions of us are suffering the trauma of our unmet individual and collective needs for planetary thriving. And whether we are aware of it or not, we humans absorb the suffering of our planetary sisters and brothers. This awareness highlights the vital need for us to find our own ways of continually strengthening and expanding the consciousness, healing, wisdom, compassion, courage, and love that we bring to ourselves and each other. The ripples we create truly matter.

So many of us, as I have been, are also impacted by misidentification with who we truly are, not recognizing the understandable impacts of living in an unhealthy culture. And tragically, we are continually encouraged to divide ourselves up into polarities — of republican or democrat, gay or straight, Christian or non-Christian, white or non-white, American citizens or undocumented "illegals", rich or poor, depressed or seemingly thriving, alcoholic or nonalcoholic, rural or urban, and on and on. And as we buy into the constant narratives that divide rather than connect us, we lose sight of who we truly are. 

And when we lose connection within ourselves and with each other, our Light dims. The personal to global implications here, again, are profound. When our connection with Self is diminished, impaired, or severed, we are limited in the loving, wise, and compassionate presence that we are able to bring to ourselves and to our human and nonhuman sisters and brothers.

For so many years of my life, and including for decades into my healing journey, my own connection with Self was impaired. My parts continued to trigger and flood and overwhelm me, continued to impact all of my relationships, and continued to hold large influence over how I lived my life. I continued to experience a limited connection with my core Self and my sense of interrelatedness with all beings. My many unhealed and wounded parts were often remaining central to my experience of life. 

Today, at the age of 73, that has now greatly shifted and continues to shift and evolve with each year as I grow older. This is such a blessing! And I love and am so very grateful for the gift of becoming an Elder!

Learning how to embody Self-Leadership changes everything. 

This is something that is our human potential and, I believe, our human birthright. This is the message that I give to my now adult children and many others. We can heal and radically transform and unburden any trauma legacies that have been passed on in our families and culture for so very long. We can grow into being who we truly are. We can open and deepen our connection with Self. And with that experience, our inner Light will grow to shine ever more brightly — something which I believe is an imperative in our hurting, beautiful world.

Bless us all, no exceptions...
Molly

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Some Suggested Resources:
  • "Becoming Our Compassionate Self: Integrating Parts of Ourselves into the Process of Spiritual Awakening" with Richard Schwartz and Lama John Mackransky:
  • "Rethinking Addiction" with Richard Schwartz, Gabor Maté, and Mark Lewis:
  • Gabor Maté on "When The Body Says No: Mind/Body Unity and the Stress-Disease Connection":
  • Francis Weller On Grief: