40 Days of A Space for Soul
Be Spacious, Be Joy
Pain, Pain Go Away
I have sorrow surfacing this morning. This sorrow bubbled up after I heard about the break-up of two people I love. Like the tender little flowering vine above, this sorrow winds itself around my heart. And it tightens its grip when I read about some people’s reactions to Bowe Bergdahl’s release from years of captivity in Afghanistan. Most of the press about Berdahl is so mean and cruel; he went from being a victim we heroically rescued from the Taliban to an evil deserter perp in record time. And now his parents are getting death threats. I am so sad when I hear about how cruel we can be to each other. I just don’t see how arguing about who is the real victim and who is the baddest person of all helps anyone.
I am sad from watching people push hurt and pain onto someone else while insisting that it is the right or moral thing to do. We humans excel at off-loading our grief and hurt, don’t we? Instead of sitting with hurt or sorrow and allowing ourselves to feel it, own it and then honestly express it, we spew our pain all over someone else. I get the sense that this pain passing round robin is why we keep repeating the same mistakes again and again, re enacting the same wars, crimes and petty nastiness against each other generation after generation. We lob our yucky dissonant feelings (what Eckhart Tolle calls the pain body) on to another person like a hot potato. We may feel better temporarily, but we’ve simply passed the pain on to someone else and nothing ever gets resolved.
In all the years that I had a private healing practice, I spent most of each session teaching clients how to get in touch with their pent up emotions and then express them than in way that didn’t hurt anyone else. Expressing the difficult emotions is such a key part of being able to heal and move on. But instead of feeling and healing, we continue to spew and blame others for every pain.
Humans have clubbed each other over the head with their pain and their hurt for millennia. Only now, we have raised pain passing to fine art; we employ hate radio jocks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to help lob our pain “out there” – onto some evil person who “deserves it.” Or we post and tweet hateful things about people we don’t even know and call it entertainment. It’s easy to lob our pain onto a stranger and walk away.
I am sad about what I heard today. It hurts to be sad, I do NOT like this feeling. But I’ve learned that the only way to move beyond sadness or grief without lobbing it on someone else is to acknowledge what I am feeling right now; I need to sit with it. Sit quietly and breathe deeply. So I will sit and breathe and focus on whatever sensations come up in my body. I will honor this feeling and the big open hearted part of me that cares so deeply and feels so sad. I may weep. I may feel like my heart will break. But I will sit with this sad and honor it with my attention. And slowly, like a summer storm blowing through, this sad will pass.
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Transmuting Sorrow
Sit in a safe, quiet place
Slow down your breathing; count to 3 with each in breath, then 4 or 5 or 6.
Breathe slow and deep. Notice whatever you’re feeling right now.
Lengthen your exhale. Make your exhale longer than your inhale.
Imagine that you can breathe out difficult feelings and sensations. No need to ignore or push them away; just breathe them out.
Just breathe and notice whatever bubbles up from within you; body aches, emotion, difficult thoughts. Just notice whatever comes up and breathe it out.
Breathe it all out without judging it harshly. Breathe it out with as much compassion and self-love as you can muster.
If tears or rage come, breathe that out too. Try to open your heart to each feeling, each sensation. This is your inner weather – this storm will pass.
Just notice and breathe. Notice and breathe and open your heart.
Advice to Myself – Choose Wonder
Each moment of life holds a choice; I can sleepwalk through my days or wake in wonder to this miraculous planet and all the beautiful beings I share it with. Through my meditation practice, I’ve learned that focus and awareness shift everything. Whatever I focus on, increases.
How much richer can day to day reality become if awareness and joy became top priority? Whenever I choose joy and wonder, the world seems to shower me with even more joyful and miraculous experiences. Learn more about being joyfully mindful here: Wake up to wonder.
I have a choice in every moment
I choose joy and wonder now!
The Soul of the World
This is What You Are For
What you stir
lovingly in your depths,
what you fiercely imagine,
will break through like a storm,
like a rapture,
simplifying,
revivifying?
This is what you are for.
To imagine the impossible is deeply human.
To muster the heart
to stretch for what beckons you
is your birthright.
Stretch.
Tear.
Explode
your heart.
This is what you are for.
Your cellular capacity to imagine
is a subversive technology.
It alters
every thing
through an evolutionary,
kaleidoscopic spin,
juicy with
elemental creativity.
Dangerous.
This is what you are for.
When you imagine with all your heart’s
brilliance
and meaty courage,
you will be claimed
by darkly-feathered hands
of unchained
angels who come to take you
hard, down into the deep caves
of what flushes your delicate skin,
dampens your palms.
Wakes you like a raging
dream
come to carry you by shimmering
forces
unknown.
Here, you will know
you have no choice.
Finally.
You are free.
This is what you are for.
If you’re ready
enough,
let this Trouble
take you
to your knees.
With your sweaty full attention,
imagine how you’d
kiss
the plump, pink lips
of your tender
soul.
But wait. Re-member:
This is not about you.
You are being used
by Every Thing.
This is what you are for.
Once re-membered,
you will draw into
your being
the throb
you came here to taste.
The one way of belonging
that is yours to make matter.
This is what you are for.
The broken-hearted,
glistening hum of
your taught, tangled
body will give
off a fragrant, unruly
intelligence beyond the Machine’s measure
of right, wrong, reason.
This is what you are for.
Have you come here to make Trouble
for Comfort and Security? For Greed and Convention?
For Routine and Predictability?
Good.
Those are the Killers of
what you are for.
The planet is very uncomfortable.
She is writhing in pain.
Feel her suffering in your blood, and
you will know what you are for.
Taste compassion for the slaughtered, and
you will love like the Milky Way.
Shatter your old ways, and
show me how your soul blushes
alive
with arousal.
This is what you are for.
Be an unpopular
harbinger,
a tender, sprouted
sentinel of
the rhizome of archaic revival.
Do not take a seat.
She is ready for you.
The soul of the world
will see you now.
What have you come to give her?
~Melissa La Flamme
Shamanic Soulwork
Happy Beltane
My Celtic ancestors held huge celebrations today in honor of the abundance and fertility of the growing season. The time to plant has just begun here in the northern hemisphere and Beltane honors that fact.
Last night under the dark of an earthy Taurus new moon, we slid quietly into the light half of the Celtic year. The light half of each year is filled with sun and warmth, new growth and abundance. And then in 6 months, on November 1, we will dive into the dark half of the Celtic year, marked by short, dark days, fallow ground and long cold nights. And so the cycle of the seasons progresses, year after year after year.
The Celts were avid observers of the seasonal shifts, both on Mama Earth and in the skies above her. So it doesn’t surprise me that my Welsh and Scottish ancestors held outdoor festivals to mark Beltane, also known as May Day. The tradition of teen aged boys and girls dancing around the May pole is believed to have started with the Celts. The dance was a way to have fun AND symbolize the intertwining and merging of the male and female energies that ultimately creates new life on the land and in the waters all around us. Beltane marks the beginning of Mama Earth’s season of fertility and new growth.
For me, Beltane is all about celebrating intimate relationships. My own anniversary falls on May Day, so I consciously celebrate my union with my partner David on this day. But Beltane has other meanings for me as well; my hubby would tell you that this is my absolute favorite time of year, and I love to spend it outside in nature. I love to get outside and commune with Mother Nature by hiking, dreaming in my hammock, picnicking, or just sitting with a tree listening to the wind rustle a million new leaves above me. And I find that every moment I spend connecting with nature nourishes my Soul.
Beltane is the perfect time to connect with Mama Earth in a deep intimate way.
If you can, spend a few moments outside this week. Turn off your computer and go walk barefoot in the grass. Breathe in the scents of spring. Pause and notice the abundance of new life sprouting up all around you; green shoots of grass, tiny new tree leaves and a plethora of flowers all show us how fertile and abundant Mama Earth is at this time of year. Meditate on the beauty and bounty of Mama Earth. Give thanks for every gift that this beautiful planet joyfully shares with us. Give thanks and revel in spring.
Happy Beltane!
Synchronicity Above and Below
In the heavens above us, a full lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse occurred this month. I share Jia Hao’s images of this week’s solar eclipse above (link to more eclipse info). What a bizarre and amazing sight to see our sun temporarily snuffed out by the shadow of our moon!
My astrologer friends tell me that eclipses intensify and stir up whatever is going on in our lives here on planet Earth. Some believe that eclipses bring up our subconscious shadow selves to be healed. But the Cardinal Grand Cross that formed in our sky a week ago is even more unusual than an eclipse. This huge planetary cross was created by Jupiter, Pluto, Mars and Uranus; 4 planets actually lined up in a perfect cross formation in our sky this month. You can bet that I sat up and paid attention when I heard that this cross was slowly forming in our skies and would be perfectly aligned on April 23, my birthday. Yikes!
I don’t know about you, but it has definitely been a month of shakeup and shifts for me and my entire family; we moved into a new home, lived through huge job shifts, a delay in the release of my book, and weird illnesses with odd body symptoms that hang on and on… There have been so many unusual events happening in my neck of the woods that I can’t help but shake my head in wonder. And the world around me seems all stirred up too. I have been engulfed and surrounded by chaos and shakeup all month.
I can’t help but wonder what wisdom is held within this crazy, chaotic Grand Cross time for us? Shamanic astrologer Tami Brunk shares this on her web site, Astrology for Earth Renewal:
“This Cardinal Grand Cross is about a cataclysmic transformation of human culture. At its center is the heart–of our shared humanity, and each of us as individuals. The heart of Retrograde Mars in Libra on an inward journey asking the question–how do I care for both others and myself? Jupiter in Cancer asking–how can I find a home in my own heart, and nurture my family, my tribe? Pluto in Capricorn asking–how can I break down the structures and fortresses and walls that have been constructed between each human being, between masculine and feminine, between humanity and the Earth? The heart of Uranus in Aries asking–how can I awaken humanity to a New Beginning, a radical new path forward, filled with Spirit, with consciousness?”
~Tami Brunk
It seems funny now that I never paid much attention to astrology (or astronomy) when I was in my 20’s and 30’s. Back then I would read my horoscope for laughs, but the movements of the planets just didn’t seem that important to me. But over time, I’ve come to realize that the workings of the sun, moon and planets actually do have an effect on my life; I’ve experienced so many instances of shifts in my life lining up with shifts in the heavens that defied the odds of chance. And as I watch the heavens this month, the synchronicity between my life and the cyclic movements in the sky above me just gets more and more obvious.
My Celtic ancestors would laugh at how long it has taken me to accept the idea that I might actually be affected by what’s happening in the heavens. The Celts believed in the spiritual principle of “as above, so below”; what happens in the heavens is synchronized with what happens on planet Earth. The Celts actually studied how the movements in their sky affected and interacted with events on Earth. They used the synchronicity between heaven and Earth to inform and guide their lives.
I wonder why this synchrony between heaven and Earth is such a strange and foreign idea for us today? When did we lose this knowing and why?
Quantum physicists have shown that just the act of observing the inner workings of atomic particles changes the behavior of those particles. Maybe it’s not so weird and far fetched to believe that the movements of huge planets around our sun actually affect and interact with all life on Earth. Maybe, just maybe my Celtic ancestors were onto something important.
I look at everything that’s happened recently in my life and I can’t help but nod and affirm what my ancestors knew so long ago, as above, so below…
“Not just beautiful, though–the stars are like the trees in the forest,
alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.”
~Haruku Murakami
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Fairy Magic
Our new yard in Boulder has fairy flowers everywhere – even under the deck!
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“When the first baby laughed for the first time,
the laugh broke into a thousand pieces
and they all went skipping about,
and that was the beginning of fairies.
And now when every new baby is born
its first laugh becomes a fairy.
So there ought to be one fairy
for every boy or girl.”
~James Barrie, Peter Pan