Monthly Archives: January 2025

Will You Cross The Threshold?

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One morning in practice, I find myself standing on the threshold between two rooms while I face in the direction of the rising sun. I had not intentionally positioned myself there. Yet, the physical placement of my body speaks volumes about the internal choices before me now.

Will I orient in the direction of the new day? Towards what is possible and fresh? In other words, will I cross some internal threshold and choose to face in the direction of the Light? Or will I continue to live at war within myself? Fighting old battles and living in the Darkness of my fears while remaining stuck between two worlds?

It is said that as within, so without. I am feeling this. I am feeling all of the ways that when I look out into the world, I can see my inner battles mirroring the outer battles being waged around me. From forever wars to intractable party politics to so-called incompatible ideologies to the wars being perpetrated on the human and the natural. It is everywhere you look.

And while many of us would state that we want things to be different, that we want to heal the divide, too often, our version of this equals believing the other side is the reason for the conflict. That it is another that must change, or right the wrong.

By holding this attitude we miss what we bring to the table; blind to all of the ways that what we accuse others of is exactly what we are doing, thinking and feeling. We can see the blindness to ourselves in the need to be right. Or our distorted perception that we must take down another to right the wrong. That we must fight, defend, prove and justify to protect ourselves and what we value.

As I explore this within myself, I find that at the heart of what creates the war within me is fear. Fear that my needs won’t be met. Fear that I’m not going to be seen. Fear that another’s opinions will annihilate something that matters to me. Fear that I will be judged and found lacking. Fear that my sensibilities and what I have to offer won’t be valued.

And so I fight.

I do this with the fake conversations inside my own mind, and with the tension that gets generated within my body. I do this with all of the ways that I drag yesterday into today by identifying and rehearsing myself against the ghosts of the past. And I do this with all of the ways I guard against the possibility of being rejected over who I am and what I most need.

We all do this.

We don’t really want to, but it is how we have been taught and how we figured out how best to keep ourselves safe emotionally, spiritually and physically. But our deepest selves yearn for something else. They yearn to heal the divide and to live in harmony within ourselves and with those around us.

But it can feel like a big, vulnerable leap to admit what your heart desires given how many of us got our hearts broken around this as kids. That’s why it can feel insane, naive, or even dangerous to open yourself up like this.

If however, you are feeling the call to be part of helping to mend the world, the first step here is admitting to yourself what it is you really want. By that I mean, what kind of a person do you really want to be, and what kind of a world do your really want to live in?

From there, it’s simply about noticing when your thoughts, words and actions are at odds with any of that.

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Becoming Truly Sovereign

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Whenever themes start showing up in my life, I always pay attention. Lately, everything is converging around sovereignty; both mine and other people’s.

Sovereignty for me equates to rulership over oneself, one’s body, one’s own life. It is the god-given right to determine your own way, and is something that no one has a right to other than you. What I mean by this is, no one else has the right to tell you how to live, what to do with your body or what you should think.

In essence, true sovereignty is about owning oneself; where what is inside of you is far more powerful and trustworthy than what is outside of you.

It may be important here to point out that I am not prosposing some crass free for all where we get to act in disrespectful ways to ourselves or to others. As a matter of fact, the truly sovereign would never engage in such things for they are aware that life is sacred and that to take up the full responsibility for your own life is an act of incredible bravery.

As well as being the greatest gift you will ever offer another. Even if, and maybe even especially when, another doesn’t agree with you or understand what you are doing.

Why? Because when you are truly owning your actions, your thoughts and your behaviors, you become a trustworthy source for yourself and for all those around you. This as opposed to being someone who bends according to the prevailing winds. Who disrespects themselves because they are afraid of what others might think, say or do.

I find the exploration of sovereignty to be both extremely challenging, and at the very same time, perhaps one of the greatest contributions we can make in a world gone mad with telling each other how to live. Whether it be in the virtue signaling pressures and cancel culture of the social media world, the one-size-fits-all conventional medical mandates, or the surveillance culture that leaves us more comfortable with being spied on than on determining our own way, so much of “modern” day life is literally stripping our sovereignty away.

And for far too many of us, we are literally giving it away, without so much as a whimper.

But if you are moved by what I’m talking about here, recalling your own sovereignty can begin with one simple, but direct contemplation: Do I know why I do what I do? Do I know what drives me?

If you can to begin to become aware of who’s actually in charge of your life, you are now in a position to challenge whether or not you want to give that authority over to another person, thought form, system or set of circumstances.

 

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What Are You Entraining To?

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I love the word “entrain.” It always feels to me like a way of becoming absorbed by something. A kind of joining up with a rhythm of some sort. One of the definitions of entrain is “to draw in or to draw along.”

That’s exactly how it felt to me one early morning this week as I sat by the river. Most of the water had turned to ice, though some was still moving beneath the frozen layer.  As I sat with the water and with the trees, feeling an enormous sense of calm come over me, I was reminded of why it is I am called to the woods.

It’s always far more than just a walk for me, or some form of exercise. Instead, it feels like an opportunity to get closer to who I am and to who I most want to be. It’s so much easier for me to remember what I want to remember and what it is that I want to emulate in Life when I am embedded in the natural world. There, the cadence and the flow of everything around me is something my body not only wants and needs, but is.

This is often a far cry from how I feel in the man-made world where the pace, the energies, the expectations, the visual landscape, the smells and more can leave me ragged, overwhelmed and out of touch. I think therein lies the rub for all of us.

What I mean by this is that what we expose ourselves to is what will determine how we feel. What we entrain to by way of what we surround ourselves with creates our experience of being alive. What we allow ourselves to be “drawn into or along by” tells us who we are and how to live. It tells us what is real and what is important. It tells us what is worth looking at and what is worthy of our precious life.

For a moment, just imagine yourself sitting by a river. How does that experience play in your body and mind? What possibilities and mind sets come pre-installed into this kind of entrainment with something outside of you? Then, imagine being glued to your screen day after day watching horrific images of suffering that you have no control over. What happens here?

Every day we have a choice about what we will be drawn into. What it is we will go along with. And while many would say there is nothing we can do. That this is just the way it is now. That’s just not true.

Unless we decide that it is.

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Show Me, Show Me

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It’s not always easy to be in a body. So many things to feel. So many changes to experience. So many unknowns. So many ways we’ve been led to believe how quickly things can go so “wrong” so fast.

Which is why it can be so easy to try and over-manage our own bodies, or to give the responsibility for them to another person, system or thing. Because we have been so conditioned to look outside of ourselves for the fix, it can feel impossible to believe that our very own bodies are a source of great wisdom unto themselves, and that we have access to that wisdom as a source of guidance and inspiration around how to heal.

But if you’re willing to shift your perspective, and be a little (or a lot) brave, there is a way to rethink your relationship with your body that opens the door to all that wisdom, guidance and inspiration. And it all begins by deciding to see that you can be with this body of yours in a way where you come to trust what it is doing, and therefore telling you, about what it needs.

That means seeing the sensations of pain or the symptoms of illness and disease as pieces of information to pay attention to. And while many of us have never been officially schooled in decoding that information, your capacity to understand is already built right into you.

Somewhere deep inside, you do have the awareness of how to be with your body in a more open way. But to access that awareness means putting aside your assumptions and fears about what is happening and what you must do. And to instead, open yourself up to not knowing. This is not where most of us want to go. It feels too scary. Too risky. Too much like we’re not doing enough or that if we take matters into our own hands in this way, something will go wrong.

Not to worry. Your body knows what it is doing. If it didn’t, we would not have survived to this point in time. That’s why if you can be open to that reality, you have created an inroad into a perspective of how our bodies actually work. This as opposed to believing they are dangerous or out of control or something to fear.

One very tangible way to give yourself access to what your body is doing and what it needs, is to say to yourself, Show me, show me. Show me what this is all about. Show me what you need. Show me how to be with you now.

While saying this, if you can put aside, for just a moment, your fears or the drive to already have the answer, you’re in a position to be shown what you most need to know. You are in a mindset now to receive some real guidance as you begin the journey back to a loving and trusting relationship with your very own body. One that will serve you well, as well as serving those you come in contact with.

For the Truth is, you cannot be here without a body, and the more connected you are to your very own body, the more satisfying and connected you will be to your own life, as well as to the lives of all Life.

 

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Yearnings

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All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

~Andre Breton

This beauty came across my desk recently. It felt as if I could have written it. When I thought about it more, it felt as if any one of us could have written it.

Below all of the to-do lists, the distractions, the hurts, the confusions and the unworthiness lives a place that yearns for Something More. Beyond all of the thoughts that would say, This is just how it is, and there is nothing I can do about it, dwells a knowing that anything is possible when the heart and its most sincere yearnings are involved.

Outside all of the fears that would say, It’s too dangerous, you’ll get hurt, that’s naive, people will make fun of you, this could never exist in the world, is an understanding that despite all the push back you might ever get from the world, this is actually what everyone truly longs for. A chance for the heart to give voice to its yearnings.

A chance to put the heart’s yearnings into form, to offer them as a gift to the world and to see them received by other hearts.

This takes a lot of courage. Especially in a world that has grown so jaded when it comes to matters of the heart. Not to mention all of the ways that each and every one of us has had our deepest yearnings denied, ridiculed, driven from us, and even harmed.

But the time is Now.

The true “fix” to what ails us resides in the heart and what it longs for. This is The Force in The Universe powerful enough to cut through the distortions, the derangements and the deals we have all made with the wrong things. Things that will never be enough because they do not honor what it is the heart is trying to name.

Personally, I yearn for relationships that are authentic and that bring out the best in all of us. I yearn to live in connection with All That Is. I yearn for the most loving energies to be in charge. I yearn to speak my truth and for it to be received. And I yearn for all of us to make way for the differences among us.

What does your heart yearn for? Can you be brave enough to name it?

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