Wishing all who read this a joyous, safe, and reflective holiday time. Thank you for sharing your hearts and journeys with me this year – your suffering, your chaos, your courage, and your love.
This time of the year can be difficult for many, opening up feelings and memories of deep loneliness, shame, sadness, and rage, activating wounds held in our families of origin as well as touching into the intergenerational transmission of trauma and pain.
You may also have some positive associations with the holidays – joy, connection, play, and belonging – a childlike innocent orientation to what the holidays symbolize. For most, it can be a complicated, unresolvable mix. Take a moment, now and then, over the next few weeks, to tend to it all, include the joy and the grief, the loneliness and the connection, the sweetness and the ache. Turn your attention into the archetypal mysteries of birth and death, crucifixion and resurrection, transfiguration and transmutation, and appreciate with some sobriety, this intensely transformative winter season. As a collective consciousness we have been through so much these past few years. Many of our familiar reference points no longer exist. Refuge and meaning can be challenging to re-establish, since the rug was pulled out from underneath us. Not only external, but internal quarantine, has asked that we turn toward the shattered and the unlived within us. It has been intense. Take a moment . . . many moments . . . to touch and to shepherd the grief – not only the loss of health and life, but the loss of the dream of the way we thought it was all going to turn out. Rebirth is tied intimately to our willingness and capacity to grieve, a holy activity not always honored in our world. But here we are, feelings of despair, ecstasy, sorrow, and wonder . . . all elements of the winter season. The aliveness we long for, which will come in the Spring, depends upon our embodied attunement to the full spectrum of the human experience . . . thus, attend to the Winter we/you are in right now. The process of “falling apart” . . . dying and letting go . . . is not some great cosmic error or mistake we need to correct or repair, but rather an emissary of wholeness, a way shower of what will emerge from the ashes. It is love, of course, that will guide the reorganization and the rebirth. But it is love, too, that is the substance of the ashes, and also the tears…
Blessings of the season . . . my heart is with you.
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