Heart Feet: Walking with the Ancestors

Group Inner Constellations, Reflections

Clarence Dalton Hicks (“Grandad” circa 1918)

“Heart Feet: Walking with the Ancestors” is the Workshop title for the next Inner Constellation Workshop on Saturday March 4, 2023.

For many years of my life, I did not realize the importance of my roots. I was focussed on my individuality and the blessings of my wings, rather than the deep embodiment of my roots.

I was unaware of the division and lack of peace this isolated paradigm was creating in my life. I felt as though I was an alien in the world, and therefore sought my belonging within the spacious light of mystical dimensions. In these moments I felt a belonging in a spiritual or timeless sense, but not on the ground. I was very connected vertically (with soul in God/source) but the flow did not continue easily into the horizontal (relational) dimension much of the time. My becoming and belonging were not synchronized. 

The traits of our genetics and DNA, and the way our ancestors have treated one another, create the substance of our horizontal realities. We are born into them. In my case, I experienced the horizontal landscape as hostile towards the inherent grace of soul’s vertical resonance. The fragmentation between our “wings of becoming” and “roots of belonging” is ubiquitous. It has created famous sayings like “be in the world, but not of it (Jesus),” or “engage but don’t enrol (Thomas Hübl).” If we are going to live in peaceful ways, we are tasked with befriending these disparate parts of ourselves—because the ground we stand on is where peace begins.

The science of epigenetics is now showing how unresolved wounds continue through the generations. Like our hair and eye colour, trauma patterns are passed down through the generations. Until they are seen, felt, and integrated into life, they are experienced as a lack of belonging roots (as in my case) or a lack of becoming wings (experiencing the light)–or both. Many times we are not aware of where our divisions are, we just feel the symptoms as some kind of gnawing discomfort or suffering. Eventually, we may come to accept our “symptoms”  as normal and just “how life is.” 

Collectively, we share a wounded humanity that is still largely in unconscious denial of that wound. Where denial is active, projection is strong and we make “how life is” someone else’s fault. A blaming syndrome is driven by fear and separation.  It alienates us further as life  happens “outside” of us rather than through us. We become limited by victimhood rather than free to participate.

According to Ken Wilber the evolutionary movement of our consciousness is one of transcend and include. Like me, you may have been pretty good at the transcending part and have forgotten about the including – the roots of your authentic belonging. Although painfully challenging at times, I have found new ground in my heart through walking with the ancestors. It has freed me from entangled ways of relating that were habitual (survival oriented) rather than authentic. Contact with ancestral patterns helps us to befriend—rather than distract from—the wounded life we are born into and walk with. When vertical transcendence includes horizontal embodiment, we gradually become everything we have longed for–eventually realizing that we have been looking everywhere else for a very long time.

Grounding Thought: Making Sense of the Present

Group Inner Constellations, Reflections

For most of us our thought habits and patterns interfere with our ability to be still and present in life. Although this doesn’t have to be the case, thought patterns often become a disembodied helicopter whirring around on-top of life — a sort of  “life-manager.” As a consequence, we tend to divide life circumstances and people into parts: safe and unsafe, good and bad, with me or against me. Unchallenged thought-patterns continue until we pause to feel the energy driving them—often a younger self where we have had to pull away from life to protect ourselves.

Divisive thought patterns lack the warm intimacy of an organic relational trust in life. Experiencing the truth of our wounding is not a mental process, but a surrendered willingness to experience what is true. The beauty of this gesture also allows the soul’s spaciousness to be felt in our nervous system. A state of innocence and unconditional belonging arises when disconnected trauma wounds are felt, witnessed, and understood, rather than managed.

Gathering in groups where non-bypassing-presence is priority allows thinking patterns to ground through a felt sense of their energy-flavour. Our mind-dominant culture has been hypnotized away from a direct experience of life. With courage and room to explore, we begin to trust that our bodies, hearts, and minds are a process of life-evolving and not solid and fixed. We are “life in process.” Feeling life may initially be more uncomfortable than managing it, but it is also a starting point for engaging in an abundant life of deep connection and belonging.  

What is arising in you while reading this blog post? It could be a mix of resistant thoughts as well as an uplifting heart-glimmer that feels a call to a new life. It is helpful to feel the two different paradigms running through our nervous system: one from the contracted density of our unintegrated ancestral and cultural conditioning and the other from the expanded light of our soul calling us home to our life. 

Even a small taste of the generous abundance of our true nature can be a huge blessing in our life because we discover a miracle: that we can relax and be here in the simplicity of how things are. Managing life creates a lot of ungrounded (disconnected) thinking that robs us of our life-vitality and our life-place (which always begins where we are). Pausing to be touched by the suffering under repetitive thoughts can make the timeless whisper of our soul more audible. As divisive thoughts are grounded through the felt-awareness of our individual, collective, and ancestral bodies, our life changes.  Our life begins to make deep sense through the timeless stream of our soul’s embodiment.

The Deep Silence of Solstice

Group Inner Constellations

Solstice Silent Prayer 2022

May we dwell gracefully in the darkness of the silent unknown.

May our inner-stillness provide a womb for the unborn light that shines through eternity as the inexplicable mystery of our life’s belonging and purpose. 

May the light of the universal heart show the way in these darkening days.

Words of depth and Silence are strong medicine for the yearning heart of the mystic. The Soul hears them from a timeless transmission that brings them into the present moment. In presence, they find a unique home within our body, heart, and mind.

The language of depth is transpersonal and yet intimately personal. Although it touches every moment in our life unconditionally, we only feel its influence as our knees bend in gratitude, and our heart softens towards life’s unfoldment.

Our soul’s innate capacity to embrace the unknown has become burdened with divisive mental structures in our collective. These structures favour the security of scientific materialism, secularism, and/or religious fundamentalism. The vast inner-spaciousness that continuously nourished our heart as young children can seem distant and remote.

This is never to lay blame, but to become curious about what might be blocking our connection to the fecund nature of the soul’s dark womb. What do we fear losing? Or perhaps more accurately, what do we fear discovering? Often it is the life-altering discovery of the light that we fear the most. Light gives us nothing to hang on to … and yet everything we long for …

May we learn to rest in this dark time: to still the restless mind and heart and to listen to the distant intimacy of the light beckoning from beyond the veil of the dark unknown. We are truly blessed to be living in this enormous time of change.

I hope you will join us for the free Universal Heart Solstice zoom gathering on Wednesday, Dec. 21 2022 (10 to 11:30 AM Pacific).

Divine Light shining in the ground of my being,
Draw me to yourself. 
Draw me past the snares of the senses, out of the mazes of the mind. 
Free me from symbols, from words, that I may discover the signified,the Word unspoken in the darkness that reveals the ground of my being. 
(Dessert Father’s & Mother’s 4th Century CE)

Belonging in our Becoming

Group Inner Constellations

My Birthplace: Nova Scotia’s south shore
(Elaine Olmstead photo)

I was graced with strong essential contact as an eight year old. With the confidence of innocence, when asked what we were going to be when we grew up, I announced to the class and my grade three teacher that “I [was] going to be me.” I knew it with my entire body and being; and with the powerful uncompromising joy of that experience I was unable to do anything but announce it with absolute confidence.

Through my family and cultural conditioning I learned that this kind of experience —  however true and beautiful — was awkward, unwelcome, and misunderstood. Although I learned to develop an acceptable “belonging-self,” I have always encountered strangers who “saw through” that. Although their encouraging statements were confusing at the time, they helped to keep a delicate soul-flame alive in my heart.

My experience is a personal reflection of a larger colonizing “power-over” paradigm where the profound connectivity of indigenous wisdom is denied and forced into the collective unconscious or shadow. My life has been a “reconciliatory dance” between this outer/inner conflict — a journey of  both “coming out” and “coming home” and sharing it with interested others.

Like a collective orchestra warming up together, we may not sound terribly coherent as we learn to play our authentic instruments. Confusion, deep division, outrageous violence, and dominator paradigms appear to be increasing as trauma continues to erupt from within our collective and personal shadow-fields. Patience, intention, and attention to life as it is become helpful navigational tools as we discover our unique inner-instruments and learn how to play in harmony with life and each other.

We live in exceptional times. I am happy to be here and thrilled for this opportunity to explore the relational depth of an alchemical process — a download I have named the Inner Constellation Mobile (ICM). Within a group of committed participants, the organic movement of the ICM deepens levels of relational understanding where all of our human dimensions belongs. New possibilities become palpable as trapped cultural and ancestral energy are included as an essential part of the whole. Hidden from the time bound structures of conditioned awareness are the living waters of our inner-being and the universal truth pulsing within our own hearts.

The peace and beauty we seek is within us. The passion, presupposition, and exploration of my doctoral dissertation has two primary presuppositions: (1) unresolved trauma is spiritual amnesia (i.e., as a collective we have forgotten who we are and therefore our relating-place within life); (2) our nervous system contains a timeless soul-intelligence where trauma is neither wrong or mistaken. This work fills my heart with the joy and gratitude that comes from the truth of being alive “as me.” My eight year knew something beautiful and also that it had to be shared — or blurted out! For all of us the recognition of our inner-beauty is our most precious gift — in both the receiving and the sharing.

Healthy Ancestral Relationships/Healthy World

Group Inner Constellations

My Father 1922 – 2016

Is it possible to be in healthy relationship with our divided and wounded world? Responsible spiritual embodiment is a viable pathway to such a relationship. For many of us, this involves the soul discovering its authentic calling or ground in the world. Soul contact is essential for healthy spiritual relationship. This is especially true now, as old world structures collapse and new, more collaborative energies emerge. Soul’s deep presence becomes a steadfast compass as new life possibilities emerge and habitual structures dissolve. 

Soul’s movement is often felt as a quickening in the nervous system as new possibilities land in our awareness. As authentic soul-individuation raises the energy of our nervous system, it also reveals slower, unintegrated shadow patterns. As we consciously embody these slower (uncomfortable) patterns in our nervous system, we might discover them to be ancestral energy patterns. Strictly speaking, they are not ours, but ours to include and bring home.

Contrary to what we might imagine, conscious inclusion of our ancestors does not involve “looking back.” It has more to do with presencing ancestral gifts and shadows as our nervous system’s substance or matter. This can be difficult because we are trained to navigate life through mental habits rather than the subtle awareness of our nervous systems. Being alive within life is the embodiment of our soul’s authentic belonging. Including the ancestors while transcending the limitations of time heralds the soul’s arrival in our bodies, emotions, and heart in every moment. 

By “including,” we are free to transcend because embodied spirituality is about being here. We are not so much seeking the light as honouring (through sensate presencing) where the light is not … where our ancestors lost contact with the flow of light in their bodies. Until a felt awareness touches our frozen ancestral blockages we, like them, will attempt to manage life rather than relate to the difficult parts. Our relationship with life becomes an abstraction from rather than a living with, and its dire consequences are increasingly apparent. 

The buildup of denied shadow in our collective energy field is challenging to resolve on our own. Small group practices such as the Inner Constellation Mobile help us to experience our nervous system as not simply “ours,” but as a multi-generational evolutionary intelligence living through us. When given space to be as it is, wounds and all, life becomes an intelligent flow with immutable and sacred laws. As the hardness of our individuated self begins to soften, the more relational “soul” individuation comes into view. Our bodies, hearts, and minds become compost for a new life purpose as we digest stored ancestral trauma.

Unintegrated trauma precludes soul individuation because mysterious synchronicities exists between the soul and the world in which we live. As our soul’s belonging grows, so does our capacity to authentically host the world. We learn to include the repetitive nature of unintegrated trauma through our ancestors and the collective. 

Nervous system attunement is essential for Soul’s embodiment because the body is a truer expression of life than the mind—at least at the beginning. Deep intimacy, respect, and trust in the course of life develops as we experience life as an intelligent process that includes us as we are. This radical change in perspective allows us to feel spacious gratitude even when we may not understand or like what is happening. Courage is a grounded heart that can authentically engage in life and initiate us into a larger whole.

A direct and felt relationship with the ancestors is an intimacy that deepens our soul’s individuation and purpose. The heavy collective trance of our conditioned individuation has taught us to project difficulties onto the world rather than feel our unique relationship with those difficulties. Conscious inclusion of pernicious unconscious defense structures is nothing less than a re-writing of history and the birth of a new future. Together, we walk the ancestors home with a new human story.

The Hidden Gifts of Integrated Shadow

Group Inner Constellations, Reflections, Silence Practice

By Keira Louise Madsen at vaedderstudio.com

 

May your awareness be relaxed.
May it expand to include the grace and beauty of life during these intensifying times.

 

Turning towards the increasing intensity of unintegrated/denied/frozen collective and ancestral shadow contains within in it a hidden gift—a gift beyond imagination, a pearl beyond price, a heart open to a universal and timeless belonging-intelligence. This may sound altogether too fantastical, but when a quiet experiential belonging-to-a-larger-flow sense begins to pulse  through our nervous system, the resting-in-what-is gifts of shadow integration become difficult to deny.

 

Paradoxically, it is a sincere willingness to turn towards the exiled and undesirable that expands our contact with life. As we learn to trust life, we begin to realize that we have the ability to slow down and allow shadow to be here–seen and acknowledged. Presence comes on-line with this willingness, and allows us to know experientially that life is a process we belong to, irregardless of what the experience is. “We are not seeing the world as it is, we are seeing a wounded world” says Thomas Hübl. Shadow’s trapped unintegrated energy continues to explode in the world because it has nowhere to land, and yet must land–consciously or unconsciously. As conscious beings, the choice is ours. An abandoned shadow lives in our world and is creating chaos. Our western lives are built upon the habit of “getting away from.” Many use their spiritual practice to in order to get away from embodied life; wanting the light but not the dark.

 

If we choose life through personal preferences that avoid shadow, the collective message is that shadow is bigger than light. We actually add to the accumulation of shadow, while making “the mess out there” someone else’s” fault. This certainly seems to be the reality of our shared world: lots of pointing fingers and few integrating ones.
Our fear of unintegrated shadow and its chaotic nature is a learned fear. Each generation reinforces the turning away paradigm. And yet, we are souls born for these times are we not? Are we really separate from our wounded world, and not an essential part of it? Do we turn away and try to live on top of generations of trauma shadow, without honouring shadow’s repetitious and intensifying call for attention? Shadow teaches us where we have separated from life and calls us back from unconscious shadow-habits. The light lives within our courage to explore and bring unconscious energy back into life.

 

An important question for each of us wanting to evolve and expand our life is to look at how we are “here” in relationship to life. Are we here only as the echo our familial/cultural conditioning? Or can we also sense that we are here as a soul, that there is a part of us that is not bound by our unconscious conditioning? Can our “here” include life as it is right now: shadow or light, pleasant or unpleasant, shallow breath or deep breath … without trying to change how it is? What do I experience when I stop trying to manage life and simply listen to how life informs me? What old patterns, friendships, contracts are naturally released? We must discover the integration process for ourselves because shadow’s gift is given through the intimacy of direct experience.

 

Our willingness to be with life’s wounded shadow-parts expands to become a movement of universal restoration. No longer limited to a few saints through history, embodying the light behind the shadow is like small orchestras-in-training. LIght’s healing power is listening with life, not managing over life. One is joy-filled, one is stress-filled, and our body will let us know where we are in the process. And yet, I cannot open to the light authentically unless I trust in something I don’t already know.
So how do we learn to trust?  Ah! There is the question! Just for a moment, try turning towards what you are experiencing right now with a sort of naked vulnerability–not a top-down inquiry from the mind–but through an aware sensing that is without agenda. Turning towards life without a personal agenda takes less than a second, but over time it can change the quality and course of your life. The deepest change-makers in life are those “being changed” by life.

 

Without deep connection to life as it is, our spiritual path is vulnerable to disembodied ideologies that further distance us from the hidden gifts of authentic connection. We each walk a unique path and yet we can support each other to walk that uniqueness into life more fully. Contrary to what we may have believed, discovering our “authentic walk” within unintegrated shadow is profoundly healing. Mental habits of projection and fixing begin to calm and relax as we experience being in deep relationship with life just as it is. In these moments of pause and embodied reflection, we might discover a precise and intimate felt-sense of our inner landscape—healthy or wounded, unbound or contracted, flowing or numb–and somehow, it all belongs. I am not meaning to imply that this is easy, only that the reward is implicit within the journey.

 

When finally seen and felt, we understand that all of life belongs, because the nature of life is light and shadow. When we see and feel the aspects of our displaced shadow-exiles  compassion naturally arises. We no longer need to resist or find fault with life when we engage with life on its terms. Within the depth of this understanding the wounds of the past have space to be welcomed into our consciousness. Witnessing the paradoxical miracle within this depth continues to be the blessed inspiration for my PhD studies, related ICM/UH groups, and sound healings. Making the hidden shadows more apparent and including what our ancestors and human collective have historically feared and rejected is a living and felt-sense in our nervous system. When trauma belongs more fully and precisely named and felt, we discover that we can be in life with more joy, spontaneity, and authenticity. We are free from the human wounded story because we have been brave enough to include it. In doing so, we make space for an authentic human story to awaken within us. We heal the world because we make peace with it. The war inside subsides.

 

For most of us, direct experiential contact with our historic, personal, and collective wounds occurs within a strong intentional group energy—that is, an open field of presence where we are not trying to manipulate or fix anything. Initially, we are simply being with our discomfort, but we stay with this because we honour where we are. The Tao reminds us that “we start the journey of 1000 miles beneath our own feet.” We learn to listen to how our discomfort informs our body, emotions, and thought patterns.
The intelligence of our nervous systems is universal and timeless. It also holds the unintegrated shadow patterns of our ancestors, our souls, and the collective. Many of us have experienced this wide-open relational intelligence as children, but exposure to the unintegrated trauma of our birth place/time/family caused us to protect ourselves from this deeply alive and universal connection to life.

 

Both the Fall Inner Constellations Workshops and Spring Universal Heart series have emerged through the grace of Thomas Hubl’s mystical teachings and trauma trainings. Following on the heels of ten years of exploring healing through Silence and Sound, Thomas’s uncompromising commitment to including trauma in our spiritual practice has been revolutionary me and the way I work with groups and individuals. I now understand that a grounded or embodied spirituality frees us from having to “wrong” life or each other in any way because we learn to be here for life and with life.
Practice groups willing to explore and embody shadow-inclusion expand our shared world. We know ourselves and each other from a more holistic and generous consciousness. Light flows more naturally and effortlessly through our nervous system. The soft trusting centre of the heart becomes the pearl beyond price as we learn to trust life through a deeply authentic experience of her in all her earthly human parts. With joy and an expansive sense of home coming we discover the life-giving gifts of integrated shadow.

The Greening Promise of Summer Solstice

Group Inner Constellations, Reflections

As summer solstice approaches and we witness nature blooming all around, we might chance to be blessed by a similar stirring within our own bodies. Life’s abundant promise rises in our midst once again as winter’s dormancy tranforms into glorious green canopies and flowering blossoms— endless in their variety, shape, and colour. Once again, nature reminds us of the miraculous universal intelligence from which we are inseparable—even in Ukraine summer’s greening continues.

How then to navigate the stark contrast between human destruction and life’s abundance? How to realize our true place within the radiant miracle of life while traumatizing atrocities abound? Here is precisely where the “rubber” of our spiritual practice meets the “road” of our incarnation. Slowing down to presence and feel the intergenerational trauma unconsciously stored within the nervous system of our own body can be as radically restorative as the lush greening of a dried winter branch. Our latent spiritual potential arrives as an awakened nervous system and a heart pulsing with the promise of a new humanity. Throughout history, this timeless inner-greening potential has brought mystics and saints to their knees in gratitude, wonder, and service.*

An embodied spiritual response to trauma is one of slowing down so that trauma symptoms no longer need to be “managed,” but find their place in a consciously engaged relational process. Acting out trauma symptoms through projecting or numbing is a collective habit. It causes us to build our lives on top of trauma rather than in relationship to it. We learn to take this way of living as “normal.” A spacious awareness, on the other hand, reveals where our inner-greening potential is damaged.

Summer’s greening potential needs the soil of our individual, ancestral, and cultural blueprints. Greening takes all of us, including the unconscious exiled parts that continue to show destructive symptoms. The life that has contracted from trauma becomes the rich soil of embodied spirituality. With considerable humility, we discover that our trauma belongs here as a “vital ingredient” on an embodied spiritual path— and not an obstacle “in our way.” As we encounter the radical grace of inner-greening a universal intelligence begins to pulse within our own hearts and nervous system.

Instead of being many, splintered, we unify into the one body of the world. We create peace. Thomas Hübl

Pause for just a moment … reflecting on what resonates in you as you read these words. I encourage you to slow down and sit with your embodied (felt) perception. Do the words open an inner-space in you? Does your mind argue with them? Are you left unmoved by them? Confused by them? Invited by them? More important than our cognitive assessment of whether these words are true or false is our felt sense of them. How do these words inform the subtle nature of your perceiving and understanding of yourself and the world you live in?

Many paradoxes swim together in the stream of our spiritual embodiment: in emptiness, we are filled; in being intimate with the darkness of fear, a light begins to glow; in not-knowing, a deep transpersonal knowing begins flowing through our nervous system. The promise of summer solstice is an invitation towards relaxing and enjoying the abundant life-presence in this moment. “Trust me,” the greening whispers … “trust me because I am your deepest nature.” As the heart awakens to this compellingly intimate, ancient, yet ungraspable promise, it is as though a wind passes through our heartstrings, releasing harmonious notes of blessing and peace. Where do you sit in relation to the glory of your true nature as summer solstice approaches? How does the greening potential show up in your life?

The promise mirrored in nature’s beauty is already within us. As we practice breathing life into our trauma contractions—just as they are—we are also opening ourselves to the eternal greening promise of summer. Conscious presence is the activation energy of a timeless promise that invites our greening potential into every moment. Our deepest purpose is revealed through our courageous relationship with life and mirrored back to us each year in the greening promise of summer’s solstice.

* (For more about “greening,” see Greening Moon-Coherence in a Sun-Seared World at https://lauramadsen.ca/phd-research/)

A Spring Birth

Group Inner Constellations

Painting by Keira Madsen at vaedderstudio.com

We are not in a birth process we are a birthing process. This may sound like picky semantics, but it is much more than that. The awakening consciousness and its emergent spring nature is our very own nature birthing itself. This may sound all too Zen for some of you, but if you feel into the energy behind these words they take you somewhere. 

Allow the stillness of your contemplative mind to come on-line. It creates a pulsing and a streaming sensation in the body that simply knows this is true. The contemplative mind can validate a more wholesome consciousness than the calculative mind, which is burdened by conditioned limitations. It is the calculative mind that creates a great heaviness and darkness in the world. The root of our individual and collective suffering is the pain caused by separating ourselves: from life, from nature, from other groups, even from our so-called intimate relationships. 

When we begin to see this habit working in our individual and collective lives it can be shocking. I have found it so. The calculative mind habit is not the fault of one person or one group. We all easily default to finding the problem out there. When we do this, we forsake our true belonging here. We forsake the grace and beauty of our Soul as soon as the finger points outside of ourselves. Our news is full of this fault finding. This is not to say there isn’t a lot in the world to be changed, but pushing against it and making it wrong only adds fuel to the division.

For many of us leaving our calculative dualistic mind is very challenging. And it is a mistake to resist it and make it wrong. When we practice, especially in groups that hold a place for higher resonances, we expand our awareness of our “othering,” our habits of right and wrong. We begin to trust something entirely new—an inner birth or awakening that has been there waiting all along! 

We become free even while our conditioned self also circulates in our nervous system. We are never free from anything … we are free with everything.

I hope you will join the spring equinox practice on Wednesday, March 23. We create much hope and beauty in the world when we attune to the possibilities of our inner spring. Aligned with nature as our bodies are,  this is a fortuitous time of year. Awakening to the light even as the darkness is all around us, that is what our evolution is. The manifest or created world has never been free from darkness. This darkness also lives within our nervous system and thought habits, through our lineage and collective influences …  but … the biggest “but” of our lifetime, nothing can ever destroy our inner light. The eternal nature of our being lives within the universality of our heart. Every spiritual teaching reminds us of this. It is not wishful thinking but an emergent joy and timeless blessing.

May the joy and blessing of your universal heart bring you and yours joy and comfort as we experience the rebirth of spring.

Life’s Valentine to You

Group Inner Constellations
LIFE’S VALENTINE TO YOU

How can we possibly receive a Valentine from Life when increasingly we take issue with how life is? We should not be destroying our remaining old growth forest, my mother should have been more available for me, my father not such a tyrant, Russia should not be threatening to invade Ukraine, vaccines should/shouldn’t be mandatory … the list goes on and on. Our distrust of how life presents keeps many in a constant state of judgement, fear, and condemnation. Hardened social fields begin to collude with life’s perceived injustices and more division is created. Life feels pressured, and seems to be forcing us to take sides, and to push against.

Divided, confused, and entangled, humanity has created a collective impasse—a crisis calling out for attention on every level of life. We have no inner peace because our resistance and “pushing against” creates division in our own heart.

We are life though. Are we not? Are we really so separate from the chaos and the crisis of life evolving itself in the form of you and me? Aren’t we also agents of the life we are condemning? Our collective resistance to seeing and feeling life’s wounds is strangling life and her evolution. Each individual “no” to feeling life’s shadow grows a little more shadow, swept under the proverbial shadow-mat of our collective. Until finally, it appears that life itself is teetering.

Denying life keeps us life-victims rather than life-agents. How do we transition from one to the other. Do any of us consciously choose to be a victim?

One small ray of light at a time, the tender eyes and arms of individual consciousness shine a light on shadow’s dark recesses. Each moment we engage in aware contact with the ignored/exiled parts of our ancestry and collective, our heart learns to trust life’s unfolding, rather than resist and push against. The broken heart of received and acknowledged pain becomes a tender heart that is not afraid to feel, to be available. There is another life just beyond fear’s desire to control or numb from life. Mystics and saints throughout time have whispered encouragement from this place. They have willingly received Life’s Valentine and it changed them irrevocably.

Life’s Valentine calls us from across the great divide of our wounded separation. Her beauty is waiting discovery just beyond the tangled web of our wounded habits—for centuries swept under the unstable shadow-carpet of our collective. Life looks scary like this for a hardened heart; for a heart broken open, life is evolving.

On this Valentine’s Day allow your heart to receive Life’s Valentine by being with life as it shows up in you one breath at at time. That is all it takes. Nothing could be more simple–or challenging. Paradoxically, staying with life creates room for life. Something magic happens as life begins to evolve and take shape within us in new ways. We discover hope and love where fear and contraction once lived.

Accepting Life’s Valentine is like receiving a divine heart-kiss. It turns a fearful heart into a grateful heart as we experience the joy of life evolving through us, within us, as us! By receiving Life’s Valentine we discover that we actually belong to life just as it is. In this place and with this deep understanding, we gratefully find room to breathe right where we are.

Happy Valentines!

An Inner-Spring

Group Inner Constellations, Reflections
AN INNER SPRING

An inner-spring is arriving: a rebirth of beauty, an experience of knowing our true nature from this grace-filled place. Can you feel it moving in your nervous system and heart? My sense is that this abundant beauty lives within us all the time, but the spring season helps it arrive more viscerally.

This spring feels different as we enter the second year of Covid-19 lock-down.  It feels like the “pause” time is birthing something new–a gestation. A new way, a new sensitivity, a new relating, a new me, a new you, a new us. If together, we discover a spiritual beauty that stays with, that befriends, that understands, and “stands under” that which is challenging to presence within ourselves, we become  containers of bold sensitivity, ushering in new possibilities.

These possibilities help to stabilize the emerging inner-spring that sees and keeps track of exiled trauma pain with heart-eyes  of compassion. The simple recognition that there is nothing to fix, and that our willingness to be in relationship with discomfort is love, and the most effective of trauma remedies. A better future calls us home to our “now”; a future of spiritual embodiment where good, kind, whole and connected become the norm. It will take groups of like-minded/hearted people to land the beauty of our inner-spring. Just two letters rearranged, and we move from “scared” (in) isolation to “sacred” connection. In that vital relational movement to see and feel, the world becomes a brighter more friendly place because we are in relationship.

We touch life and each other differently when trauma has been befriended. Experiencing ourselves and others more authentically reveals the beauty of our Soul. Tibetan Buddhists long ago foresaw the arrival of Warriors of Compassion and Discernment. However fragmented our inner and outer worlds may seem, we walk this evolutionary journey together. As we begin enjoying the beauty of Spring 2021, I wish you the blessings of befriending the challenging places and feeling the warmth of connection.