Category Archives: Spiritual journey

Shifting Patterns of Hurt and Guilt

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Recently, in a situation I was both peripherally and deeply involved in, I could see the paradox in that situation and was aware of old patterns of behaviour, interaction and showing up beckoning at the door.  I knew in my heart it was an opportunity for me to see just how much I may have shifted the shape of my old patterns.   I wanted to enter into the space and conversation being demanded of me in a way that was open but with clear boundaries, with compassion and the ability to listen rather than be defensive.

I had the good fortune of receiving wisdom from a dear friend, a Warrior of the Heart.  What he told me resonates with me weeks later – a clear indicator of just how powerful his advice was for me in my journey.  He said it was okay to be clear about my boundaries, to even identify that I had a limited amount of time available for the conversation if need be.  And then he said the thing I still sit with: “You will only absorb us much hurt as you feel guilt.”  That landed with a quiet but powerful thud, breaking into my awareness with precise clarity.   “You will only absorb as much hurt as you feel guilt.”   Wow!

I had a bit of time to reflect on what, if anything, I might have felt guilty about in this particular situation.  Just having the opportunity to ask myself the question released anything that may have been lingering, unaware and unconscious,  under the surface.   Which meant it did not show up energetically in my field as part of my shadow.

I was then able to enter a potentially difficult conversation with far more openness and receptivity than I would otherwise have had available to me and there is no question in my mind it shifted the shape of the conversation.  I had no need to overtly claim boundaries – they were honoured in the conversation.  I was able to acknowledge the experience of the other person and knew exactly what support I was authentically able to offer, support that was acknowledged graciously – and that would not have been the case in past interactions.

Since this particular incidence, I have been sitting with this amazing, unexpected little gift: You will only absorb as much hurt as you feel guilt.  I can see how this dynamic and pattern has clearly played itself out in my life, over the whole course of my life.  Absorbing hurt was just what I deserved for whatever wrong – real and imagined – I committed against others.  Fortunately, I don’t feel the need to closely examine every little (and big) example of this throughout my life (that would probably take another whole lifetime) but now being able to consciously ask myself this question going forward is a gift to me for clearing shadow in beautiful and unexpected ways leading to results I might not have thought possible.

What’s your reflection on how understanding this little statement: You will only absorb as much hurt as you feel guilt, shifts the shape of your experience?

Unexpected Little Gifts

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Appreciating the little and the not so little unexpected gifts feeds the field of gratitude, makes the heart glad and the soul sing.  It shifts the the shape of the moment, the day, our world, the world we touch including our relationships.

If we only care to pay attention, there are so many unexpected little gifts that show up in the run of a day –  and some of them are not so little.  A comment here.  A nice touch in there.  Someone noticing, paying attention, listening.  Connecting with other human beings – sometimes friends, sometimes strangers –  contact illuminated in a gesture, a word, eye contact, a touch.

Unexpected little gifts in my life in just the last day or so?  Dinner last night with a friend of mine and a beautiful young friend of my teenage boys – they are away for University, their friend, who has become my friend, stayed here for University and we headed out for dinner at The Wooden Monkey.  The Wooden Monkey in Halifax is one of those not so unexpected little gifts – beautiful, home grown, organic food lovingly cooked and served with care.  A beautiful late September night inspiring a walk on the waterfront and a drink later at an outdoor cafe.

As I write my book – Embracing the Stranger in Me – coming across really good writing from a decade ago that I had completely forgotten I wrote so now I don’t need to rely on memory – my writing from the time will take me back there into those compelling experiences that contributed to the me who now shows up in this world.

My hairdresser, unfortunately, broke her wrist and couldn’t cut my hair, but referred me to a place a client had given me a hundred dollar gift certificate for a few months ago.  Nice unexpected little gift.

Friends find me on Facebook chat or skype and we have short or long chats that pick up the spirit and make the day shine, sometimes just a hello and sometimes opening up the gift of possibility.

My eight year old says, “Mom, you’re the best mom ever.  I wish there were two of you!”  (I do too, but probably not for the same reason.)

There are so many more delights in every single day.  They shape my world.  They make me smile.  They energize me.  They motivate me.  They bring me joy.  They give me strength, remind me of my strength, connect me to my strength and then I radiate the joy, peace, and connection I experience, attracting more of it, helping me see and support brilliance in the world, in my friends, my family and the people I have the honour and privilege of working with.

Like my Brazilian friends who I will be joining at the end of this week (along with another good friend from Colorado) for an Art of Hosting training near Sao Paulo.  Good friends.  Deep relationships.  Amazing work already – with each other and in Brazil.  The swiftness with which my travel visa was processed. Smiling to sense into what more will emerge there.

Unexpected little gifts.  In every single day, in so many ways.  I like it when they shift the shape of my world and my experience. I look forward to seeing what unexpected little gifts show up in my day tomorrow and the tomorrows after that.  Maybe you will be one of them.  Maybe I will be one of them for you.

Contemplating Joy

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Byron Brown, in Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within, asserts that compassion, strength, love and joy are essential soul qualities.  He says that ego – or our internal judge or critic – would have us believe this is not true, that we are in constant search of these qualities and that usually they are unattainable, maybe because we believe we are not worthy.

A constant search for these qualities would always have them in the future and, while we may have fleeting glimpses of them, they are elusive.  We are thus, by default, relegated to a life of strife and striving, doomed to be ruled by the internal judge or critic who, when we are not doing well admonishes us that we can do better and when we do well, first congratulates us and then says, “How long do you think you can keep that up?”.  Stepping out of this habitual, ingrained pattern in our thoughts and in our life takes conscious, intentional effort but when it happens we experience moments of freedom – even joyful freedom.

Of the essential soul qualities, it is joy I am contemplating most frequently at the moment.  Joy because, as the shape of my world has shifted, I feel joyful – often.  I wake up in the morning feeling joyful, go to bed at night feeling joyful.  I don’t necessarily feel joyful every moment of every day but at least I’ve become aware of my emotional journey and am living into it – rather than walking through it as if it was happening to someone else – or, maybe, happening to just a shadow of myself rather than the multi-coloured range which has become more available to me over the last couple of years.

Joy feels freeing and expansive.  It is fed by gratitude and appreciation. It is fed by noting it and sinking deeper into it – surrendering to it, letting it seep into all my pores, breathing it in with every breath and back out into the world so other people can also feel the expression of joy – even if they do not know what it is they are experiencing.

And as I notice joy and joyfulness in my life, in any given moment, every now and then I also notice the little voice that says — yeah, sure it’s summer now, but what about the fall?  How do you know you are actually going to keep your business busy enough to sustain yourself in the fall?  You should be worried about that now!

Hmmm, you should be worried about that now.  Sounds like the voice of my internal judge wanting to be heard – in fairness to it, it does want to keep me safe and financially sustainable, but it has a limited range of options with which to do that and they all include struggle, worry and fear – emotions I am very familiar with – as I am also familiar with how constricting and how limiting they can be, shutting down the capacity of the soul to be in full expression – which includes full manifestation that comes from a place of trust.

Most of us have learned that life is full of struggle and if you want to get ahead you have to work hard, really hard – and even then there are no guarantees.  We have learned that life is not handed to us on a silver platter, we have to work in order to live and adversity makes us stronger – you know that phrase – that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

Okay, so there may be some truth in that but I declared awhile ago (a bit more than a year ago in fact) that I was welcoming ease into my life.  I’ve had varying degrees of success with that over the last year and a bit – it takes intentionality and really paying attention  in any given moment, and, for now, it seems to be more and more a characteristic of how I am living my life and what is showing up in it.  It doesn’t mean there aren’t difficult things or moments that show up. My father’s diagnosis of prostate cancer is a good example, the uncertainty of this story as it unfolds over the next 6 months to a year and the impact on me as his main source of support in his health care.  Or my mother’s journey with dementia in a long term care ward.  Or entering yet another new phase of my life as both of my older children prepare to depart to different provinces in the fall for University.  But it does mean I entertain these stories, events in my life, with a different kind of graciousness which invites ease into how to hold them them.  And it doesn’t mean I can’t feel joy or be in a state of joyfulness as I experience the ebb and flow of my life and the ebb and flow of the lives of people I care about.

I am welcoming ease, welcoming joy and welcoming the full array of what all needs to show up in my life, saying no to worry and to fear, yes to presence and to calm.  I am aware that fear, worry, frustration are waiting in the wings some days, some moments, but I am no longer expecting them and no longer inviting them – consciously or unconsciously.  Every moment will take care of itself.  And, if I believe that, it is a far more playful and fun way to show up in the world, a world of joy and joyfulness.

If it is true that the other shoe will drop, why can’t it look and feel like the first one rather than the one we allude to: the heavy handed, heavy-hearted counterpart to joy, love, compassion and strength?

Resentment, Anger and Grudges as Soul Journey Teachers

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“If I destroy you, I destroy myself. If I honour you, I honour myself.” Nunbatz Men MAYAN

This is a daily meditation offering from White Bison.  The message: if I secretly hold a grudge or resentment against someone, I will be a slave to that person until I let them go so let me remember to look at my brothers and sisters in a sacred way.

This is a hard lesson to really accept and learn when we so want it to be about the other person! Yet when we hold that grudge, the person we hold it against actually has power over us.  To be even more direct, we have given our power away to them.  Nothing can be resolved unless they do something, healing cannot take place unless they do something.

What a sad and wretched way to live if this is what we choose – completely at the mercy of another’s journey.  What if they never change?  What if they never offer us what it is we think we need of them?  Or, even worse, what if they do and then we discover that that isn’t really the magic cure we’ve been waiting for? It’s not nearly as satisfying as we were sure it would be?

Healing of the soul is not an outer journey dependent on someone else.  It is an inner journey that only we can navigate.  Fortunately, there are many helpers, guides and teachers who show up along the way – but only when we are ready and can either perceive others as teachers or invite them as such.  It is easier to understand coaches and mentors as teachers, less easy to understand those we hold a grudge (or worse) against as a teacher although they often catapult our learning once we open to it.

When we feel wronged, and particularly when we feel deeply wronged, it is hard to step into the path of inquiry that asks: why have I invited this into my life?  This is not to make us wrong, make us a victim or cause us to take responsibility for another person’s actions.  This is solely to help us understand our own soul’s journey and the lessons we need to learn.

When I have felt marginalized in my life, I learned to ask the question: Why am I inviting marginalization (or marginalizing myself)?  How does that serve me in the place that I am in now? In a place of marginalization, I hide from stepping into my own power and purpose in life and, for some strange reason, this feels “safer”.

When I have felt voiceless in relation to other people I wondered what was my journey to reclaiming my voice?  I recognized my own feelings of judgment arising – about others and about myself – and learned to step into it, initially with great trepidation I might add, inquire into it, ease up on it.  Voicing my fears, issues and concerns in the light of showing up in ways I do not aspire to (as judgmental) began to bring me back to reclaiming my voice – a step toward also reclaiming my power – as a being of compassion, strength and love with important work to do in the world.

Jerry Granelli in my ALIA module  Leader as Shambhala Warrior said: if you resent one moment of your life, that is aggression.  Wow.  Just one moment of resentment is aggression.  Powerful.  It resonated strongly with my journey and learning to find the gifts in life decisions I’d made that I’d come to regret.  In truly finding the gift, the regret left, creating space for more compassion, strength, love and great joy – qualities that Byron Brown describes as inherent soul qualities in his book: Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within – a book that literally changed my life.

Letting go of regret and resentment can be a daily exercise, a daily reminder that this is a journey and, when we do step into it, it is a shape shifting journey.  We get to make a choice about it every day.  We only come to understand it as a choice as we journey, as we learn, as we sink into the soul’s journey by inquiring – with curiosity – into resentment, anger and grudges as they show up in our life.

Life has an interesting way of bringing to us that which we most need to learn from at any given time. My experience is that by learning to embrace it, it is usually a gentler journey – and I’ve learned that the hard way – from all the choices I made that brought me into deeply intense learning experiences that I wouldn’t necessarily have “chosen” for myself but which I now see that my “soul’s journey” chose for me to create the conditions necessary for me to step more fully into the gifts, power and talents that serve me and serve my work in the world.

These soul journey teachers do not appear to be friends when they show up.  If we make them enemies as much as the others they show up about, we wither and die – literally and figuratively, spiritually and physically.  This is motivation enough to take the difficult first steps of seeing them for their enormous potential as teachers.  The more intense the experience, the greater the return in the soul’s journey.

Because at some point I embraced this journey – which was better than the alternative internal toxicity I found myself living in a few years ago, every day and most minutes in a day, I now find myself in a place of deep appreciation, gratitude and joy for my journey and the ALL the people in it who have contributed in some way.  Waking up feeling joyful does not get old!

What’s Breaking Your Heart Open?

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What’s breaking your heart open?  Powerful question and powerful to notice how one little word in this question can completely change the tone of it from “what is breaking your heart?” to “what is breaking it open?”

Meg Wheatley opened the ALIA module “Leader as Shambhala Warrior”, that she co-hosted with Jim Gimian and Gerry Granelli at the beginning of this month, with this question and it was the question I woke up with this morning.  Some people answered with what is breaking their heart.  Sometimes the response stops there because that is as far as we have come in our understanding of the circumstance we are sitting in.  Sometimes it is so fresh we have not yet been able to move on to the next phase.

Meg was really suggesting that what breaks our heart can also break it open and in this place of open heartedness, even when that is about sorrow, we have a greater capacity to act and act with strength and compassion.  Her heart is broken about what is happening with the devastation in the gulf as a result of the oil spill and she speaks about this in in this blog posting in YES! An Antidote to Urgency.

In answering the question, I focused on what happens when our heart breaks open.  It is this question that most resonates with my journey over the last few years – learning to live into my experience – including and maybe especially my emotional experience, rather than walking through it as if I was going through the motions of some else’s story.   I think I tried to just walk through the motions for so long because I was afraid of being overwhelmed by sadness, despair, loneliness and hopelessness.  I tried to hold those things at bay and it did nothing to keep life from periodically crashing down around me.

What a difference it makes to notice and acknowledge my experience as I’m in it.  Contrary to my fear, it is actually freeing and liberating!  This morning I’m noticing how much I’m missing my seven year old son as we begin establishing the rhythm of a separated family.  It breaks my heart that he can’t be with me all the time and it breaks my heart open knowing how much I love him, how much he loves me and how much he is loved by others including his father and his father’s family.  This is a rhythm and a pattern we will all grow into, served by love.

Over the last five years, an expanded  story of my life has been pieced together as information has been unexpectedly  revealed to me about my journey, essentially since birth.  As I have absorbed all the information, it breaks my heart open to now know how loved, supported and guided I have been from the time I was an infant – even in my darkest days.

All those moments when I reach beyond the physical world and feel my connection with spirit or non-ordinary reality, it breaks my heart open to know there is so much more than our physical bodies and the things we can touch and see.  We are supported and loved in ways often beyond our knowing.

When I watch my older children grow into their own life paths and step into the next phase of their lives with both the maturity and immaturity of their age, it breaks my heart open to know that they have strong foundations and love in their lives.

And as I recount all the things that break my heart open, they all come back to love in one way or another – feeling it, accessing it, living it, speaking it.  Letting people I care deeply about know that I love them – in how I show up for them and in speaking it aloud from time to time.

My heart is breaking open, more fully and completely every day – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  It has shifted the shape of me, my life and my business.  Thank you Meg for the question.  It lives on in me and in my journey.

The Mind Cannot Take You Where the Heart Wants to Go

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The mind cannot take you where the heart wants to go.

I wrote this statement at the bottom of a random piece of paper that has been floating around my desk for some time now.  I do not remember how it came into my awareness but it has caused me to pause and reflect every time I happen upon it.

This simple statement is why so many dreams go unrealized.  Our dreams reside in the heart and beyond any logic.  The mind seeks safety through logic and analysis.  In so doing, it has the potential to paralyze the dream – and often does.  It shuts down vision, beauty, aspirations and possibilities while looking for the right way or the right time to do things or waiting to have enough – information, money, time, experience.

In waiting for the logical evolution of things, there is no right time.  And yet, right time and right timing emerge through heart space and consciousness if only we pay attention to what is whispering in our awareness.  It requires a different kind of listening born out of quieting the mind, stilling the body and surrendering to the inspiration of the visions and dreams that call out to us, reminding us what is ours to do in the world right now.  It takes courage and fierceness, even gentle fierceness will do.

We do need both the heart and the mind in order to realize our dreams and our potential and to contribute to others doing the same.  We have however, tended to lead with our minds and, with the shifting shape of the world, it is time to lean into leading with our hearts – in our relationships, our work and our lives.  This is how we will contribute to the healing of the world we live in and the regeneration of its people – us included.  The more we live our inspiration, the more we gather and feed the energetic field that is also shifting the shape of the world.

The mind cannot take us where the heart wants to go. We need to grow our wisdom, capacity and faith to lean into the calling and movement of the heart.  Once the heart choices are clear, the mind becomes a tool to move mountains to achieve what it originally thought not possible.

As we lean into and lead with our heart choices, the shape of our personal world will shift and so will the shape of the world we work and live in.  I see it now.  I experience it now.  Many of my friends experience it now.  If we stay true to where the heart wants to go and connect with others who are doing the same, it is only a matter of time before this movement is more real, tangible, recognizable and palpable in more and more places.  It is not about not doing hard core work, transformational work, difficult work, systems work.  But it is about leading it with heart and noticing how much more powerful all of our work and our relationships become and how much more able we are to create the shift we want and need to see for our future, the future of our children and their children’s children.

Shifting Perspective on My Mom and Dementia

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When I walk into the dementia ward of the long term care facility that is now home to my mom, her eyes light up when she sees me.  Does she know I’m her daughter?  I don’t know.  But she sure knows that she knows me and she knows that she loves me and that I love her back.

It is this language of love that is causing me to shift perspective on my mom and her dementia.

We think her symptoms began the year my youngest son was born – 2002.  Naturally enough, it was my dad who really began to see them – the forgetfulness – forgetting how to do things she had done all her life, even simple things like how to make a sandwich or turn on the washer.  Tucking folded tissues all over the house – in drawers, under pillows, in her purse, in her pockets, in the toilets.  Watching the weather network for hours on end and complaining that it was the same thing over and over again but not remembering she could change the channel.  Falling asleep in her chair.

Like so many other families dealing with this issue, we eventually faced the dreaded decision about long term care.  My dad was her main care giver and had reached the point of exhaustion with 24 hour care for her and especially interrupted sleep both because mom began to wander a bit at night and because she had incontinence.  My dad showed a whole new dimension of himself and of his love for my mother as her caregiver – something I never imagined I would ever see.

The day we took her to “that place” and walked away and left her was one of the most difficult days of our life as a family.  To see a wonderful woman lose her capacity to speak coherently, to dress herself, to care about her appearance, to become someone other than the woman we all knew and loved, living with a ward full of people who have also become someone other than the person their family and friends all knew and loved.

My mother has been there for almost two years now.  The scope of her life is this ward.  She has some mobility issues that make it very difficult for us to take her out.  It’s hard to get her moving without assistance and if she refuses, well, that’s it.  She used to just sit in a chair, looking out the window.  Now she has a wheelchair and can that woman move!  It is hard to pin her down to one spot.

I reconciled some time ago, that this was no longer the woman who raised me and I just needed to be present with the woman who was now there.  If I responded to her incoherence as if it was a fully formed thought and created a repartee with her, her spirits were fine.  If I was to get stressed or upset, she would too.  That was the first level of my discovery.

I have often wondered as I walk through the long term care facility filled with very old, sleepy people, to the dementia ward in back, what is the meaning of life when you are so old and incapacitated, just waiting to die or living in your own little demented ward with a whole bunch of other people also living in their own little world.

As I’ve pondered this, and visited with my mom – being present with her – I moved to my next level of discovery that is really shifting my perspective on my mom and her journey with dementia.  This is a soul’s journey.  When I visit with my mom I am not visiting with the personality and the ego that inhabited her body for all those years before dementia.  I am visiting with her in the spirit of her soul’s journey.  If I can look past unbrushed teeth, unkempt hair and incoherence,  and my own sorrow for the loss of this vibrant woman and mother in my life,  I can actually be with her in spirit and it is her spirit that shines through her eyes with delight when she sees me.  Her soul is connecting with my soul and she is relating to me on the level of soul, not the level of this physical plane.

I need to see her with new eyes in order to be in a place of appreciation for her journey.  I know that sounds odd and yet I can’t change her journey as much as I might like to.  I could be stuck in lamenting what I perceive to be her loss, or I can begin to see her in the beauty that is called forth in her as I greet her in the context of the soul journey.

“That place” is her home now.  She is well cared for by all who work there – people with special gifts of love for their charges that shines forth in how they treat them and interact with them.  There is a community of support – not just for her, but for my dad too.  Because it is in a small community, the irony is that there are a surprising number of friends who show up at the same time in this place – each living in their own little world that most of us would consider a confined space, each traveling their own soul’s journey.

Yes, it’s tragic but there is a strange kind of beauty that also shines forth and really shows up when invited.  And – when you’re visiting, there is never a dull moment.  Lots of stories that may be told someday or may have already served their purpose in causing laughter and making for a little brighter day.