That question was put to me by my spiritual director a few months back and I’ll ask you now: Where do you take refuge? It’s easy to feel we have no respite from the upheaval all around us. And it’s easy to feel our emotional life runs amok. Yet our embodied emotional life is meant as a resource for growing our wisdom.

“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.