The Emerging Feminine ~ Healing Collective Trauma & Restoring Love
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” -Arundhati Roy On December 16, 2012, in New Delhi, a 23-year old physiotherapy intern, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was brutally beaten and gang raped in the private bus in which she was traveling with a male friend. Six men in the bus, including its driver, raped Pandey with an iron bar, beat her friend, then stripped them naked, and threw them from the bus. Pandey died from her injuries two weeks...
Read MoreThe Need to Worry ~ India & the uncontrollable nature of life
Many years ago, when my daughter was about ten, we left our home in the Himalayas of northern India, and went back to Canada for the summer. Trips back to the west were an ordeal for most of us, with some improbable delights thrown in. We took a taxi down treacherous mountain roads just to reach New Delhi, riding for hour after hour through hazards such as floods, car wrecks, illness, landslides and intense heat. After eighteen hours in flight, we would land like disoriented migrant birds,...
Read MoreA Safe Place To Fall ~ Taking Refuge in the Soft Spot
“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness” ~Peter Levine~ Recently, during a training that I am part of, I had the privilege of holding a beautiful and brilliant young woman I admire, while she wept her heart out. Two other women also held her, softly, tenderly and with reverence. I could feel the medicine of her deep grief informing me, inviting me, softening me. I was so honoured to offer her a safe place to fall, into this river of...
Read MoreYour Come to Jesus Moment ~ The Alchemy of True Humility
Lately, my ears seem to perk right up whenever someone speaks to me about being humbled. It’s really more than my ears—my heart gets stirred as well. There is something radically different in the whole feeling of such a conversation, whenever someone is able to speak directly from the experience of being humbled. I’ve learned that things happen when we are truly humbled. We cannot carry on in the same way. Sometimes I call these ‘our come to Jesus’ moments. I think...
Read MoreA Global Initiation ~ Coming of Age in the Great Unravelling
In 2010 a friend of ours, whom I’ll call Jed, went to Haiti with a group of high school students. The earthquake struck shortly after they arrived. Jed described what happened to those young people as a rapid coming of age, a growing up process that was visceral and immediate. It was so powerful that when they returned home their parents found it difficult to relate to them. They were not the same children who had left home a few weeks ago, and did not want to be treated as such. I asked...
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