Light in the Darkness
This week I have been weeping and also feeling deep joy on behalf of a man in Africa and a young woman from Iraq. Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad have each won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for their work to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war in armed conflict. The Nobel Committee commended them both for having “put their personal security at risk by courageously combating war crimes and seeking justice for the victims.” Whatever our feelings about the Nobel Prize, it does...
Read MoreShaken & Stirred ~ Moving through the Birth Canal
Only what shakes me to the core leads me onward. The rigidity breaks, growth follows. —Bert Hellinger We human beings are strange creatures. We protect ourselves a lot, and try to remain in a comfortable, familiar place. And we long for adventure, for the healing movement of unfolding and awakening. The impulse to defend and protect ourselves is very natural, and needs to be respected. And it can carry us into a place of real rigidity and isolation, where frozen pockets of energy can...
Read MoreA Good Day to Dance, A Good Day to Weep
~ The glory and the difficulty of the human incarnation A dear childhood friend of my daughter’s, a young man I have known and loved for a long time, died a few days ago. It was a sudden death, and tragic. I do not really know what is tragic and what is not; and when people who love him refer to the death as a tragedy, it gives dignity to who he was, and to the depth of our loss. It came to me, deep in my heart, that there was a way to honour him and his mother, and his father too, who...
Read MoreUnwinding the Past ~ The Healing Medicine of True Apology
I have been interested, for a long time, in what it actually takes to heal the past. Not just to stuff it away and pretend that it’s gone, but to actually dissolve its power over us. As William Faulkner famously said, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” Easy to say, “Let it go, start again, it’s new moment.” Not so easy to actually inhabit the fresh bright energy in this radical place of new beginnings. Transforming our relationship with the past is the way we...
Read MoreThe Offering of Love ~ A wilder, deeper embrace
There is a possibility for us as humans, that I call ‘the way of love’. It asks us to learn how to give and receive love, the way that we breathe air, in and out. It’s a way known to very few of us, in our families, in our culture, in our world. It’s a way that has to be learned, practiced, committed to, very deeply. And it’s a way that asks us to unlearn the old ways of un-love, of judgment, of separation, and self abandonment. It helps to lay a clear foundation...
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