Who Will Stand for the Wild Soft Heart?

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Who will stand for the wild soft heart?

 

Who will stand for the wild soft heart, the deep and steady breath, the hunger of the soul, if not us?

Who will speak for the Earth, the children, the elderly and the destitute, if not us?

Who will love the depth of our humanity, holding it tenderly in all its joy and pain, failure and triumph, blessedness and fright, if not us?

I walked past a homeless man the other day. So young, with already-weathered skin. Just a big boy, really. Cold. Alone. Sitting against a gray wall, empty eyes staring somewhere other than there. My momma’s heart broke open and I stopped. Tears fell against my own weathered cheeks.

I didn’t know what to do.

I wanted to bend down and reach out.

I wanted to do something to help ease his suffering.

I don’t know if he wanted that. But this was my instinct.

I stood not moving except for my breath and tears, standing on a busy San Francisco street, wanting to follow my own instinct, the instinct to care for a lost cub alone in the night.

How do I walk on this Earth, in truth, my body alive with an instinct so quick and real there is no hesitation when a fellow human is in need? An instinct so real because it is once again connected to Life.

How do I begin to remember? How do we begin to remember?

Who will hold this world in her arms against her warm heart filled with light if not me? If not us?

 

Written during a Writing Raw circle.

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What would you do if you didn’t feel bad about yourself?

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“What would you do if you didn’t feel bad about yourself?”***

Let it sink in.

“What would you do if you didn’t feel bad about yourself?”

What do you feel when you ask yourself this question? 

It might take some time to get clear. Or maybe not. Maybe you instantly see and know something.

When I first started to ask myself, I felt incredibly free and happy and almost giddy. Like suddenly this big heavy blanket that had been covering me for so, so long was gone.

Here’s the thing. In this western culture, feeling bad about oneself is an epidemic. It’s in our ancestral lines. It’s in the collective soup. Most of us push it down to where we don’t have to hear the voice or feel the pain. But when you are in this line of work, you become very aware of the taste of this soup.

It’s here. So how will we be with it?

 

In a very simple way,

you have two competing voices – the voice of the Self – your essential nature, an inner knowing that often speaks in a quieter tone – and your personality or persona or ego. The ego isn’t bad or wrong. But it is a young voice that is centered in a kind of self-protection. It is immature. It favors either self-inflation or self-deflation. The true voice is neither. It is simply Self.

Every ego knows both inflation and deflation, but one is usually predominant. We have all seen people who tend toward self-inflation. And we’ve all seen people who tend toward self-deflation. Notice which you tend toward.

I tend toward self-deflation. Hence, when I ask myself this question and feel what it would feel like to simply be in the world without any deflation, “without feeling bad about myself”, this beautiful bright world of possibility opens up. That bright world is what is always here when we aren’t fixated in egoic ways. This is the bright world of Essence which is alive and often hangs out in a kind of soft joy when asked this question. 

When I see the collective pain body, I see a heavy blanket of self-judgment and self-hatred. In our Western culture, we carry so much baggage around suffering and a sense of unworthiness. It’s handed down, generation to generation. We grow up in households steeped in it, even if it is never talked about and not even in family members conscious awareness.When we begin to wake up to this, we begin to see how heavy the path of clearing this kind of toxicity can feel. We begin to see that it’s not who we are, yet the blanket finds its way back over us with such seeming ease.

 

So, what does it mean to wake up into the human experience?

When we come down into the body and are doing work to wake up as souls in the human experience, we come into direct relationship with this old human lineage of the traumatic personal sense of feeling bad about oneself.

We begin to experience being conscious in a sea of feelings about the self that do not feel good. The more we wake up, the more we know that these feelings originally were not ours. They were those of our parents and other family members, going back down the line of ancestors.

Becoming human is to become awake, as Essence, in our beautiful body, in our lives, in our relationships, just as we are. Becoming human is to bring the ego closer to hold it in love so it begins to trust that being here, on earth, is something to dive into rather than fear and flee.

And this is where we must find the courage to decide for ourselves how badly we want to be human. That’s right. How much do we want to have the full human experience?

When I feel bad about myself, I am reluctant to dive into life. When I feel bad about myself, I hang back, often isolate, and fear being seen or heard or known. When I feel bad about myself, I don’t say what I want to say, I don’t express what I’m longing to express. When I feel bad about myself, I don’t let others know that I am longing to be loved, to be touched, to be held…and I don’t let others know that I am feeling bad about myself.

To be human is to be in the middle of life, not hanging back. To be human is to honor the very important need to be loved and connected, to touch and be touched with kindness and tenderness, and respect. Often, we feel bad about our needs, the very ones that make us human. But, there is nothing wrong with you for wanting to be loved. Nothing wrong with wanting to be loved so deeply, without conditions, without fear of abandonment. Nothing wrong with wanting to be touched with kindness, tenderness, respect.

There is nothing wrong with you for being human.

When we honor our deepest hunger for connection, love, touch, and caring, we are more likely to realize that this voice that needs to feel bad is simply longing to be loved. Deeply. Completely. Tenderly. Without fear of being abandoned or rejected.

This is what it can be to be human. This is what we are waking up to. Being love in a human body. Able to ask for love. Able to give love. Able to receive love.

Hold yourself in love. Fully and deeply. Every part of yourself. No exceptions. Especially with the part of you that feels bad. Without turning away. And if you do turn away while you learn how to do this, turning back again to yourself. With love. Always with love. It might feel hard at first. Parts of you might not trust you. They are protecting themselves from more pain. Reassure them. Stay with them no matter what. Be the abiding love you’ve longed for. Decide to stay with yourself and then stay. And, watch how your own love heals the sense of separation within you. This is the way of love. It’s the way I work as a coach. But more like a guide. A guide that guides you back to yourself. With love. In love. Through love. Always love.

“What would you do if you didn’t feel bad about yourself?”

***

togetheroceanwavesTogether begins next week. It’s an opportunity to dive into life. We will meet every other week, face-to-face by video to be with each other. To be real. To be human, together, in all our humanity. This is an opportunity to be with this question in a deeper way, to show up in a group of women with the possibility to say and do and express what you would if you didn’t feel bad about yourself – as well as to be together when these feelings are present.

How else will we find our way to being human if we cannot do so Together???

You can read more and register here. This link will take you to JulieDaley.com, my new website.

 

*** I became very aware of the power of this question after watching Matt Kahn’s video. You might appreciate what he shares.

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Meeting Self With Love

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A few months ago,

I was crossing the street just a block from my apartment. It was a busy intersection with a four-way stop. In San Francisco, everyone is always in a hurry. Always. You can feel drivers ready to pounce on their gas pedals before you, a pedestrian in a crosswalk, ever get across the street. Oftentimes, they don’t wait. Sometimes, they drive right through the crosswalk with you in it. In these circumstances, as someone with early trauma, I’ve tended to jump and startle very easily if a car suddenly pulls toward me and I am unprotected in the crosswalk.

So on this afternoon as I entered into the crosswalk and got about a quarter of the way across, a driver pulled out and immediately began turning toward the crosswalk to make a left turn through it and she did so by punching the gas, meaning she came toward me suddenly. I am always very aware crossing the street, but I did not expect this and I startled so much that I froze in the crosswalk, which led to her lurching to a stop. I just stood there trying to take in what was happening. Freezing is one way of coping with something currently happening that is traumatic, as well as an ingrained pattern from old trauma in the body.

As I stood there with a look of fear on my face,

the woman driving the car got very impatient with me and proceeded to shake her head at me trying to get me to move so she could go through. I was standing there for five seconds at the most and then I started walking again heading to the other side of the road as the driver accelerated through the crosswalk shouting something at me as she drove by.

When I got to the other side of the street and onto the sidewalk, I stopped and noticed my heart was racing and tears were forming in my eyes. My body was responding to this moment as if it was back in the earlier trauma decades ago. I had to ‘unfreeze’ before I could continue walking.

I recently read a quote that spoke to how traumatizing our current culture is. I don’t think we have to look far to see this, especially for those of us living where I live in the U.S. And in this climate if we’ve had any previous trauma at all and haven’t processed that trauma all the way through, we are going to be triggered over and over again. They don’t have to be big triggers. They come out of the blue, which is why they often remind us of the initial trauma. And the way we respond is the way our inner protector responded when the initial trauma happened. This trauma response is our own protection mechanism.

I used to get frustrated with myself.

Now, I no longer do. That all changed one day as I was walking to yoga and I realized (not coming out of the blue really, but rather coming out of an earlier meditation session) that the fierce protection my psyche established was a deep form of love, perhaps the deepest love one’s being can have for itself. I could ‘see’ that my psyche protected itself from fully experiencing the traumatic event(s) by freezing – by doing what I did in that crosswalk. This was an incredible response of love. When I saw this, I could feel love flood my body. Realizing how much you’ve loved yourself is an incredible thing to witness and feel.

When trauma stays stuck in the body, the inner protector of the psyche continues to use the same method(s). And even if we outgrow them (I didn’t really need to freeze in the crosswalk), the protector still uses them until we do whatever work it takes to heal the trauma and allow the trauma cycle to complete.

When trauma is alive in the body, the inner protector is providing a huge loving service to one’s being. If you know this is happening within your being, turn to your protector and give it love and gratitude for how it is working so hard to keep you ‘safe’. Just this will shift things. Not because you are trying to shift them, but because you are actively loving the way you set yourself up to navigate the world while also stuck in a trauma cycle.

When we love things fully and wholly as they are within us – without trying to fix, change, or get rid of them – love moves and heals what is within us.

I have since moved much of that trauma out and I am different. I’m not as jumpy and I have a lot of energy freed up. But I am who I am because I have been through certain traumas, just as you are who you are because of the experiences you have had.

The reason I am sharing this story is to highlight the incredible power of love and what happens when we meet everything we discover within us with love. Pure love that pushes nothing away, that doesn’t try to fix or get rid of, that simply welcomes, holds, and lovingly embraces.

What if you were to have unconditional love for the way your own consciousness responded to what you experienced during the years of your psyche’s formation? Consciousness does what it needs to do to protect itself.

Sometimes we get so frustrated with how we get in our own way, but what if that getting in your own way is actually your protector trying to keep you safe? What if you love it fiercely and thank it for what it has done for you? Do it and watch what unfolds.

Our psyches really do know how to return to love and wholeness.

This is how I work with my coaching clients. Everything we engage in and encounter we meet with love. We do this while working toward their goals. It is in the process of moving toward what you love that you meet the protector trying to keep you safe. And when you meet it with love, what happens is quite beautiful, powerful, and extraordinary.

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Aging and the Impulse to Love

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“If we age honestly, we become love.”
~ Jeff Brown

I recently ended a relationship. A sort-of relationship. It was really more of an exploration. A romance of sorts. A getting to know each other. But it was short-lived – six months from bow to stern.

I’ve been single for over five years. A long time. And in that time I’ve grown older, although I don’t really feel older. I’m in good shape. I love to exercise. I’m physically strong and agile. Yet, I am growing older. I am aging. I am aging honestly, as honestly as I can.

After five years of singledom, I noticed how I’ve changed. I don’t hold back like I used to. I tell the truth, as much as I am aware of it. Aging Honestly

I liked him.
I told him so.
I wanted more.
I told him so.
I let my love fly.
I let my desire run.
I allowed my heart to break.
Open.

And then it ended. And in the heartbreak, I’ve lingered in my memories of us together. I can still feel the sparks. I can still feel the warmth of his chest against my bare skin. I can still feel us. My time with him changed who I know myself to be. A great gift. Deep intimacy will do that.

And I see that what I felt as ‘us’ is also what I am as ‘me’. Great and beautiful longing, running hot, fluidly, sensually – a sublime connection that turned to love. Yes, over this time I came to love him. And, I sense this is partly so because I am older. I long to love deeply. I long to touch tenderly. I long to be with another, to connect intimately, to know the experience of being fully alive in this body.

As I age, I am becoming very aware of the incredible gift it is to be a human being. And how fleeting our time is here. And I am becoming aware of how we spend so much of our time worried, disconnected, stressed out, striving, and so little time being tender with each other, truly exploring the senses, opening to the delight available to us that can come out of trust and kindness.

I came to love him because I am love wanting to love. I can feel love wanting to love through me. But up until now, I think I thought that the intense longing, this intensity was indicating my desire for a man in my life.

I see now that I yearn to love. Yes, men. But more than that. That this love that continues to push me is to embrace life, to offer myself to it.

It is a yearning. A deep and lovely yearning. 

I miss being with him. I haven’t yet met another. But when I tune into this love, I don’t think it cares. It wants to love everywhere and everything.

If we age honestly, we become love. is the first line of a longer quote, but I love this first line just a tad more that the whole. It is short and to the point. It feels so poignant and true and like a powerful punch to the gut.

And this is the rest of Jeff’s wisdom…

If we age honestly, we become love. As the body weakens, love surges through us, longing to be released, longing to be lived. With no time left to not love, we seek authentic embrace everywhere. Our deft avoidance maneuvers convert into directness. Our armored hearts melt into pools of eternal longing. This is why we should look forward to aging. Finally, after all the masks and disguises fall away, we are left with love alone. God waits for us on the bridge between our hearts.

***

Those moments of life that stay with you. The first blush of my bare chest against the heat of his. Standing, so close, lips connected yet silently still as we lingered in this moment we’d hungered for. The impulse to move and arch and join together pulsing between us, but in this one moment something beautiful and holy was taking place. A silent communion where the meeting of flesh was like two hands pressed against a glass that stood between. So close. Two hearts reaching out past the shoreline of skin’s border. Oceans mingling. A momentary peace rising along the edge before the wave rose and crested, then broke between us.

How I loved lingering there. And while it could not be forever, love seared this moment into somewhere even more essential than marrow. And I taste it still.

 

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A New Love

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“The biggest problem today isn’t just that hate is speaking so loudly; it’s that love is speaking too softly.” ~ Marianne Williamson

 

Late in the afternoon on election day,

I was beginning to feel antsy working at my computer. So I went for a walk to the park where I could sit against my favorite tree for a bit. I needed to ground myself and breathe. I played some upbeat tunes as I walked, feeling pretty happy and somewhat confident that the outcome of the election would match my vote.

I sat with my tree and then I walked some more. It was a warm and balmy 68 degrees. Walking in my flip flops and a tee shirt at 6:00 pm, I wondered how the returns were looking. I returned home and checked online. Suddenly, I began to get nervous, barely believing what I was seeing.

As the evening progressed, my nerves turned to anxiety and I hovered on the edge of that old familiar feeling of trauma that has a sense of panic to it. My PTSD was kicking in with the thought of a Trump presidency. The fear of all of that hate being normalized and expressed in a presidency caused a feeling of shock to begin to set in. But at this point, a funny thing happened. I began to feel a clear energy rising up into me, a solid, steady beam of power rising up through me, like a rod, moving up into me from the ground below, and continuing up into my heart.

It’s not that feeling power was new to me, but the particular form and feeling of this power was.

As the evening wore on and it became clear Trump would win, the power never wavered. Even though the traces of trauma hovered on the periphery of my awareness, the power continued to move up out of the ground, through me, and into my heart.

I didn’t feel afraid of what was coming. I felt strong and ready.

 

Here’s the amazing thing.

On Wednesday morning, and throughout the day as it progressed, a few women told me they felt a similar power. And, I read numerous accounts online by women who shared some form of this same experience – the awareness of an energy that felt new and clear.

Two days later, I continue to feel it. It has a steadfastness to it and a kind of clarity of purpose. It is the power to look directly at what we are facing, to finally look ‘the beast’ square in the eyes, and to take clear direct action in response.

This energy is love.

“Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one.  This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling. Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately.  If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love … we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart.  An Eskimo probably would die of clumsiness if he had only one word for snow; we are close to dying of loneliness because we have only one word for love.  Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it come to feeling.”
– Robert Johnson, Fisher King, p. 6

This is a fierce love that is being felt in more than me, a fierce love that is being felt in the collective. I feel it coming from the ground below, from the Earth, from the ground of my being. It’s like a rod of light within.

We only have one name for love while there are 96 names in Sanskrit and 80 in ancient Persian. When we speak of love in our culture, I think we often speak of a softer, tamer love. This is not that.

We exist in a culture that is based on ideas and words, not on awareness of energies within us, or how the body feels, or even the possibility that things exist that we cannot see or even explain in words. Because we have no words for all the kinds of love, we don’t even consider that there might be many kinds of love that exist and that are the very things we need to do the work we must do.

What if,

like the Eskimo culture, we are not only close to dying of loneliness but also close to giving up on our capacity to evolve as a culture and as a species because we have no name for this love that won’t allow us to turn away from the horrors we’ve unleashed as a species? no name for this love that makes it clear it is imperative we connect to each other, no longer allowing ourselves to separate into us vs. them like we have learned to do?

If you knew it was love calling you to rise up in response to the hate and bigotry being unleashed by all of us in some form, by people from all over the world, how would you respond differently with what is occurring?

If you knew this love was coming deep out of the core of your own being, deep out of the core of the Earth, would you trust it, would you allow it to move you to rise up in response?

What I notice is that when I am in tune with it I feel an imperative to connect with you, an imperative to offer what is coming through me, an imperative to act.

Years ago, I was in a year-long study program on Sacred Activism with Andrew Harvey. At the time, I felt called to engage in this form of activism – one that marries love and spirituality with being an activist in the world, but I couldn’t tap into my own fire. I was cut off from it. While I could intellectually see the need for this work, and even emotionally feel the need, I could not tap into the energy of fierceness he was calling for.

Now, I can.

This is fire. This is the fire from the center of the Earth. This is her love. It is her fierce determination to care for all of her children in a way we don’t even consider she might – through US!

Consider a mother bear with her cubs – how she will take down anything and anyone who is messing with her babies. That is love. The Earth feels the same for all of her children.

Let yourself feel the depth of this threat we now face.

It’s not the threat of Trump and what he has unleashed. It’s not the threat of the status quo we’ve been hanging onto for decades through the politicians who’ve been running this country and others. It’s the threat of no longer caring for each other, no longer seeing each other’s humanity, no longer being willing to stand up for our sisters and brothers who have been marginalized and brutalized for centuries. It’s the threat of being so separate from our environment that we can’t even feel the pain that the Earth is enduring. It’s the threat of being so consumed with our desire to possess that we have forgotten that nothing is ours, everything is a gift, and what brings us the most joy is to give back.

The deepest threat is our unwillingness to see things as they are, to look squarely in the eye of what we are facing, to not turn away in denial.

This love is the rising feminine in all of us. She has been rising, but I sense she is now burgeoning from within each of us in the face of what we are now seeing in our world. She knows how to move into those places where her love has been forgotten. She knows how to nourish and succor that which has been starved of her presence.

For quite a while now,

we’ve danced with this idea of the sacred feminine. As women, many of us have done years of work to come to know her and embody her. Many of us, during this time, have mainly seen her as something for us individually, something for us to have and take from.

But she is not this. She is not for us to take. She is for us to live. She is fierce in her need to replenish the places where she was made not welcome. People have been forgotten, not cared for, not loved. This is our job to do and she is reminding us that she is the source of this love.

We are here, at this moment, together, not just half of us, but all of us for it takes all of us to create this situation where love can finally be unleashed in its full, profound glory. I can feel this love rising, unchained and free.

It is time for love to be speaking louder than hate and she is ready to speak through me, through you, through us.

Turn to the Earth, bow down to her, and ask to be filled with her love. Let her help you grieve.  Let her hold you while you grieve. Ask to be filled with her love. Ask to be shown and filled with her knowing. Ask to know and be filled with her wisdom. Ask to be blessed, then be the love that she is.

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She is no longer perfection who fell from her pedestal.

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It’s Mother’s Day today here in the US. I woke up thinking of my Mom. She passed away just about eight years ago. Hard to believe I haven’t seen her for that many years.

As I thought about her, I thought of this picture above of the two of us together, in one of those picture booths they had back in the day. We were traveling across the country by car and these picture booths were available at many of the rest stops in the midwest. The rest stops situated on overpasses that graced the highways. My parents had just split up and mom was taking us to visit our grandparents in Michigan. She drove the four of us, my sisters and me, all the way across the country by herself in her 1964 1/2 Bronze-colored Mustang.

I got up and looked at the real picture and as I looked at it, what struck me, maybe for the first time ever, was her full humanity – the fact that she was just a human being. What struck me was her age – she was 36 years old here. So young to be facing motherhood on her own. She had her parents 2,500 miles away, but she had no siblings. And, she was facing great shame and judgment during a time when single motherhood was very uncommon.

She was just a woman, a young woman, hit hard by infidelity, separation, and divorce.

I could feel this ‘just a woman’ piece for the first time. You know how, as kids, we see our parents as gods? How they seem so much larger than life, as if they are super people with super powers? And in seeing them this way, their love when we get it is magnified like 1,000x? 10,000x? or even a 1,000,000x? And, so are their limitations, wrongdoings, and faults?

I don’t know if that is how you’ve carried your parents’ (especially Mom’s) limitations and wrongdoings, but for so many years I did. They hurt so much.

But seeing her here as this beautiful woman, trying to hold it together while in so much pain, and seeing me next to her, eyes full of love for her and getting my face as close as I could to her face, what has been left of any feelings of not enoughness-of-love fell away. I could see that everything hurt so much because I loved her so much. We do as kids. We love our parents so much because we are still in touch with that purity of love, that innocence of love – until we cannot bear to feel it in a world that’s forgotten it. That was how it worked for me. Perhaps, it was different for you. And, what I see is this underlying way children are, still holding up this huge image of Mom because the love within our hearts is huge and full and without resentment – until it no longer is huge and full and without resentment.

Oh, how I see her now in her humanness. Her frailty and amazing strength to do what she had to do. And, I see my love for her – my big-hearted, shiny-eyed love for her. I just wanted her to be happy and I couldn’t make that happen. I just wanted to be happy and I wanted her to see me happy, and she just couldn’t all the time because of course she was human and doing what we do to get through these lives we are living. Seeing her happy would have made me feel safer during those years.

It feels funny to be writing this at my age – like I should have this all together by now and I didn’t. And, I don’t.

To finally see her in her tenderness, with all of her flaws, trying so hard to keep it together when she probably wanted to just run away from it all, is the greatest gift I could unwrap on this Mother’s Day.

She is no longer perfection who fell from her pedestal. And, neither am I.

 

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A Love That Pulls Itself Toward Itself

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“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.
It will not lead you astray.”~ Rumi

 

Today, I felt this strange pull. It came out of the blue, out of a very generic moment, albeit one that followed quite a lovely moment of connection to life, to beauty, to family.

I felt the silence of it; I saw the silence of it.

I sensed the deep tug within.

There were no words. There were no reasons. There was no inner voice, no mind chatter. There was no against. There was no for.

There was only a deep sensation of pull toward a love of something beyond concept, but with deep feeling.

And, in feeling this pull, the only thing I could find in my mind to describe it were Rumi’s words – the feeling matched the resonance of his words.

Maybe, it is true; that life is a grand, ecstatic experience of beauty, and longing, and love; beyond words; beyond thought; simply, a love that pulls itself toward itself.

Maybe, this is all there is – a love that pulls itself toward itself.

Everything else is just us trying to understand a love that is beyond understanding.

::

In my TEDx talk, I speak about this love, this pull, in words from Pablo Neruda.

This love is what Spring does with cherry trees.

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Allowing My Argument With Love to Die

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~~~

Small, elderly, and frail-looking-but-not-acting, she darted past me on the ashram’s dirt walkway.

She almost knocked me over she was in such a hurry. As she bumped into me, I almost lost my balance. Immediately, she stopped and turned to me. Her big brown eyes were overflowing with love and a gentle request for forgiveness. Her eyes said everything. Mine answered in return. Yes. Of course. Forgiveness. Then, she handed me a card. A small card, like a business card. But this one was different. It had a message, a message from Amma. We were in Amma’s house after all – her house in Kerala, India.

As she watched me, intently with those big brown eyes, I took the card and read the words.

“Grace is always falling like rain. You just have to open to receive it.” ~ Amma

I read them again. And then I looked back up at her…but she was gone.

I stood there for what was probably a few minutes. In that moment, I needed grace. I was homesick and a bit overwhelmed with everything that India offers. I wanted to feel comfortable, and I was feeling anything but.

As I stood there taking in the dusk light and the many people scurrying across the ashram grounds, I could feel, even if just slightly, a sense of the grace Amma was speaking to. I could feel presence. It was faint, like a small window had been opened to a world that has always surrounded me even if I was unaware of it.

I kept that card with me throughout the rest of my time in India. I brought it home with me, back to the States. Somewhere along the way, I lost the card, but I’ve never forgotten the message.

~~~

A window into grace became a doorway into grace; and, eventually a world of grace.

Just the other day, I was speaking to two women about the spiritual ‘work’ each of us has done over the past many years. The three of us share similar patterns of feeling like we must work really, really hard to heal; that it is all up to us; and, that we never think to ask for help. I was telling them about some of the really powerful work I’ve been doing lately. I’ve been so grateful for the openings and awakenings I’ve been experiencing. And, it can be really deep, emotional work. It can feel hard, and yet I have this determination to get to the bottom of it all.

There’s this quest to go all the way in, all the way through. Trauma (the trauma of life) can cause us to disassociate, to leave, to go numb. I went numb a long time ago, and I stayed numb until a death woke me up, and then another death, and another death.

In my thawing, I’ve developed a fierce determination to not isolate, and to not continue to live in world that feels so separate. But, sometimes that fierce determination also comes from a  belief of having to do it all myself, and a belief that it will and must be hard.

One of the women looked at me and said, “You know. We can ask for grace.”

We can ask for grace.

~~~

Two days later,

I was dancing as I do on Sundays. Toward the end of the two-hour moving meditation, I remembered her words. In that moment, I was so open, so vulnerable, so ready. And, in that moment, I asked.

I asked for grace.

Five days later,

Grace came. The details do not matter. What mattered enough to share with you is this:

When grace rained down upon me, I wept because for the first time in my life I truly knew what it felt like to have love pour itself into me, over me, and through me, without having to ‘earn it’; without having to feel unlovable, lovable, or something in between; without having to believe in some way that I was deserving, without having to feel I was broken in some way.

I have felt love fill me before. But this time, what was extraordinary was the quality of love. It was love that gives with a clear feeling of asking for nothing in return. There was a clear sense of the unconditioned nature of love.

There was no duality present – no conditional/unconditional duality.

There was no sense of exchange. There was only a pouring out of itself.

What I did have to do was open to receive love’s rain shower.

What I did have to do was allow myself to be loved – completely and utterly loved – to no longer push love away, to truly feel love and loved. Once I did, I could no longer argue with love.

Grace is love without any demand in return. It comes and pours itself over you. It graces you.

Grace washed over me and through me. Like waves, it came and poured itself into me. Waves and waves of love, each given completely. As it washed over me, I could feel, and finally see and know, how love moves.

Love gives of itself without asking for anything in return.

Love gives of itself.

And in receiving this grace, this love, something in me did die.

What died was my argument with love itself.

There was no argument left; there was only love.

 

 

 

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Anger holds a place at the table laid out by Love

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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.

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Being With: Reflections on 9/11 and Sandy Hook

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

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