“To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear.”
~Stephen Levine

So much of my work comes down to that: Touching with love, with care, with respect, that which we have previously touched with fear. Approaching our difficulties in this way allows us to take a deep breath and relax, to appreciate our humanity. We all have barriers, challenges both in mind and body and it’s how we meet those barriers that determines our well being. It’s not so much the content of what’s happened to us but how we carry the history, how we tell the story, and what happens when we discover to our relief and delight, that we can make new choices.

“The clarity we need to meet the world as it is, arises out of self compassion: here is the intersection of inner and outer work.”

From the point of view of depth psychology and the wisdom traditions, we each have a center point, the ground of being that is untouched, unfazed, unharmed by anything. Different traditions call it different things: the Self with a capital “S”, Awakened Heart, Atman. I refer to it sometimes as our “bright and shiny being”. It has no one name but it belongs to all of us and is not corruptible. We can become quite confused and lose track of it but it doesn’t mean it has ever lost track of us.

When I first entered the small 10′ x 10′ cabin (that’s 9.29 square meters) and began to settle in with my clothing, food, etc. panic shot through me: I’d made a mistake. I’d just spent 10 months in limited social contact and now I was entering into complete isolation?

What was I thinking?! I remembered that I could leave at anytime. I had nothing to prove, this wasn’t an endurance contest, there were no retreat police holding me there. Yet I also relished the challenge of 21 days in solitude. I needed the alchemy it would provide.

As some of you know, I made time for a 3 week retreat last month: a much needed protected solitude. I’ve discovered that times of deep quiet are essential hygiene for me.

Throughout the retreat this quote from Rumi played through me: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find the barriers that you have built against it and embrace them.”

This year has brought us to our knees

Whether that movement to our knees be in prayer or protest, defiance or despair, gratitude or grief, that gesture is alive. We see vividly how our body, this “chalice of the heart”, expresses without words.

Body awareness is an essential part of our instinctual wisdom.