What Remains

This week, a beloved aunt passed away.  My cousin eulogized her beautifully.  She was, by societal standards, a 'simple' woman - yet she was nothing less than a force of life and love, and her loss is deeply grieved.  Is it not 'simple' qualities like the ones she possessed which truly remain and allow us to touch the infinite in our mortal dress?

I have been pretty 'roughed up' for my beliefs about life, truth, love and justice, but my commitment to them only deepens and I hold them even closer, despite all the evidence that seems to point to the contrary, and all the challenges and losses I've faced in my desire to honour them. 

Why?

For as much evidence that tears away at them, I find more that leads me into the heart of them when I am able to see with the eyes of my true nature.  It is through the little things that the infinite often sounds its potent existence. 

This past week, it was the way the sun bathed her coffin at the front of the church in the midst of days that have been remarkable only for the depth of their greyness and chill.  It was in the rivers of tears that spoke of her capcity to love in this life, and the dignity summoned by those who loved her back to honour her in the midst of their unfathomable grief.  It was also in the smiles and joy of the children too young to understand this loss, yet wise enough to bring forth their new life to shine on broken hearts - their medicine the balm that tugs gently at the hollowness, a reminder to return again to the gift of embodiment that remains for those who live.

The doorway to the infinite was there even more potently when a beautiful teacher of indigenous ways raised her ancestral pipe in ceremony to see my aunt's life in its barest essence.  I cried at the reverberations of the truth of her message.

When we leave our mortal dress, what remains?

I believe it is the essence with which we tried to live the eternal in our finite existence.  How well did we love, pursue truth, heal, seek justice, act courageously, and embody the gift of life more fully through gratitude, joy and creativity?

These are the infinite gifts granted to our humble lives. Our task, one that is often not easy, is to say - in spite of it all - Yes.

Power & Love

So many people are working to shift our collective trajectory at this time.  The movement, as Paul Hawken writes, is a "blessed unrest" - a myriad of individuals, groups and movements seeking to restore balance to the world.  What are the challenges that undermine this work?  How can we become better, more conscious, more loving, and more powerful agents of positive change?

In his new book Power and Love, Adam Kahane explores our two fundamental human drives: power, which he defines as the focused pursuit to achieve one's solitary purpose, and love, the drive towards unity.  When we fall into either extreme, we are not as effective as we need to be.  We either escalate conflict by pushing for our own agenda at all costs, or we avoid conflict to keep a false peace and harmony.  Either approach taken without a respect for the other lands us into trouble.  Kahane quotes Martin Luther King: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”


We are challenged to hold the paradox of both.  Yet this is not as easy as it sounds, as I think we have all been imprinted by the toxic power drives that have so imbalanced our world.  Power has ruled without love in our world for a long time, and we are dealing with the consequences today. Without a conscious effort to healing that split within ourselves, we are vulnerable to falling into either side of the abyss.  Where do victim and victimizer find peace?

Somewhere in our minds and hearts are the answers, I think - pulsing with vitality and clarity, yet vulnerable enough to yearn and reach for what we long for in the deepest corners of our being.

Can we trust ourselves enough to use our power with conscious, loving intent?  Do we love fiercely enough to move us into our true power? 

Can we join together, empowered in our love, to do what needs to be done to ensure a better future?

A Woman's Love

The subtitle I wanted to add to the above was "Precious or Pernicious?" I am wondering if there is anything in the world less trusted, or perhaps less valued at a collective level, than a woman's authentic love. 

I am not trying to exclude men or folks along the gender binary here, but want to speak from the reality of my own experience and what I have come to understand through my conversations with,  and my engagement with the work of, other women.  I know that all people suffer from not having healthy avenues of expression for their love.  What I would like to touch upon here is how women's love can be taken up and perceived when it is expressed.

Does our struggle to honour women's loving have to do with our psychological struggle with our own mothers, and our spiritual struggle to see the feminine valued in the world?

When a woman expresses her love, gives from her heart, and speaks from her deepest truth, I see again and again that these acts are put under a suspicious microscope.  Being real in our loving (which encompasses many things, including honouring our truth) can often put us in direct line of projections.  This creates a vicious cycle.  The more we experience our deepest authenticity being unwelcome in a power-driven world, the more we hide that essence, or become more skilled in disguising it, or more strategic in protecting the truth of our being and knowing, which makes us feel like we are hiding a shameful secret (Shhh...don't let them know you love that much!).  The most dangerous thing it seems we can be in our current cultural climate is genuinely open-hearted and honest.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that power does often masquerade as love in our lives.  When we are experiencing the real thing, it's hard to know if it can be trusted.  Conversely, we can get severely hurt by mistaking love that really isn't love at all for the real thing, and that gets us into all kinds of challenging and painful situations.

Our bodies can be our greatest friends in helping us to know the genuine from the false, but having ignored our body's wisdom for a long time, this takes patience and skill.  How do we know when our old fears and wounds are getting triggered?  How can we know if the feeling of mirroring we are experiencing in a relationship is genuine?  Again, the devaluation of the feminine principle that is reflected in our disembodiment needs to be challenged in order to befriend the wisdom of our most trusted ally, which is our body, our very matter.

Learning the language of our greatest guide can then release us into what Mary Hamilton refers to as "original flesh" in her book The Dragonfly Principle: An Exploration of the Body's Function in Unfolding Spirituality.  Honouring and expressing our body's innate capacity for love and joy allows us to be more capable of receiving the love of another.

As we become more embodied in our spirituality, the hope is that the feminine depths of love that we are capable of expressing will be restored to a cherished place within our world, and that its extraordinary ability to heal and renew is remembered for nothing less than what it is:

The sacred essence of peace.

The Power of Projection

Have you ever found yourself at the centre of a vicious storm of projection and betrayal?  The wounding of being so devalued and delegitimized to the point of dehumanization results from the confrontation with the raw, brutal energy that has been split off from feeling or empathy.  It's something that one never forgets if one has experienced it.  It is part of the collective memory that lives in the bodies and psyches of those who have experienced genocides (at the collective level), and serious bullying (at the personal level). If you are a woman, it is often experienced as the energetic equivalent of being perceived as "the witch."

Owning our projections is the difficult work of a humanity seeking to embody soul values rather than keeping them out of life on a perfectionistic pedastal.  Reclaiming our capacity for deep love is the healing journey that leads us into our frailties and wounds, and the ways in which these wounds prevent us from trusting new dimensions of life and love to flow through our bodies and psyches.  It is not an easy journey, and it takes us right into the centre of our own fear and the tender bruises of our heart's frustrated efforts to connect and be received.  It reminds us that our vocal chords may be 'choking' on the repressed expression of the truth of our experience, and our eyes are fearful of recognizing what they see as plainly as posssible.

While projections have real power when they are unleashed, they are equally powerful when they are reclaimed.  Instead of that energy being placed out there on the "enemy", it can instead flow into creative possibilities and connections.  With new eyes, we can see others in a fresh light.

In the reclaiming, we remember who we really are - and are humbled and healed by our own perfectly imperfect story, and our ability to honour it in the other.

Life's Exquisite Promise

To believe that love is stronger than fear and hatred is the most radical idea to embrace.  I would argue that it is more radical than any political philosophical position.  How does one live this in a world so fractured?  How do we embrace this within our own wounded hearts?  What does this mean in the context of life's realities, and our personal and professional obligations and responsibilities?  How is an open heart lived within the paradox of the fundamental need to protect oneself and others from harm?  How do we allow ourselves to be inspired by transpersonal ideas and symbols, yet work to manifest these within the small and immediate realm of our human lives and communities?

From an early age, I have been asking questions centred around the reality of love, and its possibilities for transforming our world.  Rilke's words have helped me in this inquiry - an inquiry that has been (and I would imagine will continue to be) full of challenges, contradictions, pain and joy.  In Letters to a Young Poet he writes:

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Now that I am entering early middle age, I revisit Rilke's words again with a more experienced eye, and a fuller and wiser heart.  I glimpse an implicate order where myriad manifestations of its stunning accuracy reveal themselves if I pay attention.  I recognize the capacity of life to bring me into situations that, if responded to from my deepest truth, reveal their brilliant tendrils forcing me, leading me, to greater wholeness and healing.  I am brought face to face with my deepest fears, my hidden wounds, and my unclaimed gifts.  I am brought face to face with my capacity to love, forgive and learn in the face of life's unrelenting force of will. 

Life is the most radical, transformative classroom of all, and its lesson, its promise, is so simple that it is always a learning in process, one that takes lifetimes to master:

Love.

The Diva, the Warrior and the Priestess

In conversations with women, I am noticing a persistent thread emerging around new visions and symbols to guide us in claiming our deep empowerment in the world.  This week I was asked, "How can women balance remaining true to their integrity and their deep and passionate impulse for life with their emerging leadership roles within society and within systems that are inherently set up to demand the "getting ahead" ethos of competition and scarcity?"

Much literature, from a wide range of disciplines and orientations, has emerged to critique this stance within our world, yet the problem and conflict persists at deeply entrenched levels.  Again I have to return to the fundamental importance of what is embodied in our cells, and the ways in which certain energies flow into our lives to assist us in creating new structures in the outer world, just as we work to shift the energies within ourselves.

I've categorized the different energies that are powerful archetypes for women (particularly as they emerge in our leadership) and would like to offer a brief differentiation of these energies.  In many ways, I think that the Diva, the Warrior and the Priestess can all signal a healthy femininity, but they must be engaged with consciously, otherwise they have the potential to be destructive.

The term Diva has negative connotations, yet has also been embraced by many women at the popular cultural level.  Being a "Diva" is appropriated as symbolizing the ability to express one's creativity, and to assert one's needs and suck the marrow from life by boldly going forth to claim what one desires and what one deserves.  There are many positives in the ability to do this, particularly in the face of a long, deep history of repression of women's needs and a devaluation of their contributions and creative expressions.  Where the Diva slips into her shadow side is when she doesn't keep the thread of empathy and love in her consciousness, and the assertion of her needs and worth becomes a "me-first" repetition of the worst aspects of a power-driven culture, or when her creativity becomes devoid of any life-affirming qualities but instead drowns in excessive egotism or materialism.

The Warrior is rarely associated with women, yet historically there are many women who have carried the torch of tenaciously taking up a cause and taking a stand in order to advance cherished ideals and values.  The Warriors are the female activists.  They have passion and purpose, and are determined to create a new world through their hard work and dedication to articulating what is wrong and putting forward their vision of what is right.  The Warrior allows us to take an ethical stance, and work to support those values.  This energy allows us to feel strong and powerful, and emboldened by our vision of a different world.  Where the Warrior can become overwhelmed by shadow is when anger becomes the fuel to keep burn-out at bay, and in-fighting results when the gains have not lived up to their nourishing promise or have not been achieved in the fullness of the vision, which then feels like failure in the face of all the hard work and sacrifice.

The Priestess is, to me, the most unexplored of the energies.  In a culture which is both very secular and very religious, the essence of spirituality and mysticism have suffered a pretty severe repression.  The Priestess is an energy that one must search far back into history to find.  She is the one who tends to life in all of its paradoxes, and honours love above all else.  She tends to the fires of her deep intuition and wisdom, and keeps faith with the most enduring, sustainable and nourishing values of life - truth, integrity, courage, humility, love, justice, and respect.  She places the mystery at the centre of her life, and values the indigenous wisdom that lives in her bones, instructing her on her connections with all of creation.  In her shadow aspect, the Priestess can become inflated with false power and ungrounded fantasies, and her charisma becomes a form of manipulation and control.

Of course, there are a myriad of archetypes and symbols that inform the lives of women.  These three, particularly among women finding themselves in leadership roles, are important ones to meditate on.  If we can strike a human balance, we can live the possibility of asserting our needs, expressing our creativity, allowing our desires to be consciously fulfilled, taking a stand to further passionately felt values and visions for future generations, and tending to the fires of our deepest wisdom and knowing in service to life and to love.

Sounds like a full and beautiful life to me.

The Dignity of Descent

The  "successful"  journey through life often presents itself as linear, or as an inclined linear passage, meaning that one climbs to a summit of success.  The illusion being that one can, through conquest and successful will power, achieve a steady upward progression through life. To set goals and strive to achieve them is not at issue here.  What I'd like to explore is how this notion of linearity flies in the face of life's truest, deepest rhythms and challenges.

While we are so often presented with the notion of climbing and striving as being the true challenge and test of one's character, the reality is that it is surrendering to the descent and accepting the paradox of transformation through death and re-birth that requires as much, if not more, strength, grace and grit than the upward climb.  The ultimate paradox lies in the fact that to truly surrender and accept life's realities requires levels of courage that lie closer than bone, and a strength that can endure the shattering of what one has held sacred.

We are in the realm of the deep feminine here.

In Sylvia Brinton Perera's groundbreaking study Descent to the Goddess, she explores the feminine cyclical pattern of death and rebirth through the Sumerian Inanna myth.  This is not your average fairy tale - the myth is challenging, dark and, at times, frightening.  It is all these things because it is about what we often fear most - death.  Not just physical death, but the death of our ideals, the death of relationships, the death of identities, and the death of old patterns and ways of relating.

Perera writes:

The Inanna mythologems of descent and return reintroduce two great goddesses, primal feminine energy patterns and their partners, and the possibility of an individual human response to bring them into incarnated, personal life.  The story presents a model for health and healing the split between above and below, between the collective ideal and the powerful, transformative processual reality underlying the feminine wholeness pattern...[and can lead us] on the path as we suffer the return to the goddess and renewal.

Healing the split between above and below can be understood at a personal level as healing the split between the mind and the body - cleaved apart by a rationalism that does not hold the body's wisdom in an equal and loving embrace.  Yet by healing this deep split, we are returned to our birthright as embodied souls and can better express the full spectrum of our humanity.

Our bodies are the reminder of why the linear incline is an experience within life, but cannot be a model for life itself.  It is our bodies that undergo the descent and transformation of a mortal journey - meeting the deep feminine through death and decay.  This embodies both the literal experience, and the metaphorical understanding of death as that which brings forward new life - that real transformation is, in fact, only possible through death.

Another paradox presents itself here: by accepting that truth, life becomes more vibrant and filled with possibilities.  When Plato was asked to summarize his life's work and philosophy, he responded by saying, "Practice dying."  In essence, Plato is inviting us to practice surrendering to change, practice accepting what is, practice releasing the fear of the unknown, and practice letting go.

When the fear of change and letting go is preventing new energies from being born into your life, steel yourself with Rumi's question:

When have I ever become less by dying?