​Fear is seeping through almost every aspect of life right now. You may not feel it so much or acknowledge it.  Or you may be hyper-aware of its prevalence as you try to move out of the frozen states that we have all had to climb into over the past couple of years. You don’t have to feel afraid to be afraid, to unconsciously make decisions that limit your full experience of life. 

Fear, the greatest teacher of all, invites us to engage with it, to feel and acknowledge its brittle structure, its “no you can’t,” or “just stay safe” messaging. We are all, without exception, breathing the smoky air of fear right now. Just look around you, beautiful souls afraid to get back into life, or others pretending nothing’s wrong. We can try to deny it or get into a fight with it. We can get angry or frustrated or sink back into our hiding places. 

But until we open our arms to embrace fear as an ally we will remain in fear of fear; we will stay in the frozen wasteland of our own stuckness.

Please join me today to explore the healing power of facing into fear..  

Sometimes, as they say, we make plans and the Gods laugh. We wonder, “why are they laughing?” We get frustrated, seeing so many possible roads before us and not having a clue which is the “right” one. 

There’s nothing funny about needing to find a direction in life, to figure out what we really want and need, what makes sense in our particular universe. Mostly, we will employ our egos to figure out what feels good or seems right. Other times, we will try to copy a path walked by others who we think are successful.

If the Gods are laughing, it’s at the folly of our thinking that we actually have so much control over our destinies.  We do – to an extent. But so often we try to decide what we want to do, instead of finding what it is that is actually calling out to us. When we discover that inner voice, we begin to have a feeling of something greater than ourselves sending us signals. 

They may not be clear, may not make sense, and it may not lead to a lifelong profession. But if we follow that voice, and do the work of it, that trail will always lead us somewhere usually unexpected and in alignment with the true needs of our soul’s journey. 

We need a total reset. How do we come out of our self-centeredness and acculturation in order to have a personal and collective reset? We who are the edge dwellers who dance around on the edges of time hoping to usher in the new age that is coming whether we take the ride or note: this is an invitation that is coming in for us all to do what is needed to get what's needed. Will we allow for the revolutionary shifts that actually want to happen? How do we find our way to yes? 

HOW TO SUPPORT SOMEONE IN PAIN

In this Wisdom Wednesday, we are addressing something fundamental to life itself – how to support someone who is in pain. Recorded from my “hall of mirrors” we address the reflections we give to those who are close to us and who are in pain, whether it’s mental, emotional, physical or even spiritual pain.  When someone, especially someone we love, is in pain, our first thought is to try to help them get away from it.  We may try to fix it, to help them get distance from it or we will simply sympathize with them and take it on ourselves.

But none of this is truly supportive, and the person in pain can feel more frightened and alone than ever.  In order to really support someone – or to be supported ourselves if we are in pain – we have to come out of conflict with the pain itself.  Pain is not necessarily bad, or something that we need to “fix.”

​Pain is the body, or the mind warning us that something is out of alignment.  It is signaling a healing process that is either underway or that needs to happen.  To support someone in pain means to not make the pain wrong, but to help them take the ride with it.  Even as anger or deep fear or hopelessness might arise, support means witnessing more than it means fixing.  Helping is about reminding the person that you have their back in the process but that it is a process that needs to be lived and engaged with.

THE GREAT UNDOING. Do you ever feel like you’re coming undone? You start becoming aware of the thousands of pieces that have to work together to make you work. And then suddenly they all feel like they’re at war with each other. The results can be devastating, mentally, physically and spiritually, depending on where the misalignments are. We live in a time of undoing, with many of the institutions, belief systems and norms of our society falling apart, and even coming into conflict with each other. Times of change are perilous but necessary.

This undoing, whether it’s personal or societal, needs to happen. As painful as it is, the process of undoing releases all that is not in service to our highest needs. Coming out the other side of a great undoing requires opening to change. Personally, the undoing asks us to let go of everything we think we know, to come to a place of openness and healing.

As a society, we are being asked to let go of so many of our old ways of being and thinking so we can come to a whole new way of life with each other.

​Please join me today to explore the ways we can allow this Great Undoing to be a healing process.

LOVING WITHOUT EXPECTATIONS. What would it be like to love purely, fully, unconditionally, without needing to receive anything back?

Imagine loving another person, or perhaps a group of people, or maybe even the whole world of us without any personal attachments to the nature of that love. Imagine love fully unleashed – love without judgements or fear or agenda, only the pure awareness of love.

So much of our loving is transactional – we give and we get – or we try to keep those scales balanced. The next level is to let go, to be able to open our hearts and love simply for the sake of love.

At the Tuesday Spirit Lab someone mentioned the situation in Afghanistan, but instead of anger towards the Taliban or grief and shame that could make her look away, she only felt love for the Afghani people. She is reading their stories and feeling a connection that is more powerful than the noise machine being generated by our own helplessness and guilt.

​It is the love she is feeling that truly supports, that will motivate whatever actions are aligned with her truth and her spiritual connection.

WALKING ON A SPIRITUAL PATH. A conversation about walking the path of spirit with Marina Qutab. There has been a massive shift in our relationship to spirituality, as the tectonic plates of our religious belief systems have been moving and sometimes disappearing.

Many of us have abandoned religions and spirituality altogether, only to feel at some point our hearts pulling us back towards God. “I’m not religious but I am spiritual” has become a mantra of sorts as we explore a more personal relationship with the Divine. What we come to is that true spirituality is not a belief system at all, it is more a path that we walk.

Sometimes the way ahead is not visible, and we are asked to walk into the unknown with our hearts open and trusting that our feet will land on solid ground. Other times we get to a fork in the road and we know we need to make some choices in life and also to deepen our spiritual engagement.

​This new spirituality asks us to keep clearing and healing old emotional and psychic wounds so that our path is one of evolvement and opening to life and experiencing true love here.

When pain visits – whether it’s emotional or physical, we tend to cope with it by either rising above it or finding ways to get rid of it. Products and services that help us deal with pain and the fear of pain are huge industries. And we are conditioned to believe that pain is part of something evil.

But, like everything else right now, the idea of pain as an enemy that we must fight needs to be reevaluated.

What wisdom can we add to the thousands of books already written and the words of so many teachers and all the drugs and methods of dealing with pain? When something hurts, we want to make it go away. But what if there was a different kind of relationship with pain?

​What if we learned how to expand our consciousness to not create an enemy out of pain in ourselves or others? Join me today to open this up in our hearts and minds and see where the future is trying to lead us.

​HEALING THE OTHER PANDEMIC...Many of us experienced life as we knew it unravel and disappear over the last year and a half. We witnessed up close, or from a distance, the ravages of a virus dealing death blows to hundreds of thousands of Americans and countless millions around the world. It’s far from over yet, but we are beginning to emerge from our quarantines and see each other’s smiles on unmasked faces for the first time. 

The battlefield littered with the detritus of this war is still there and is home to the other pandemic of lostness. It’s equally as debilitating and distressing as the COVID virus and unlike the first one, it shows no signs of letting up. It is affecting all ages and all people.

The emotional toll it has taken on us is growing like a cancer. It’s fueled by political polarization, fear, and mistrust in all existing institutions. Many of the structures set in place by the industrial revolution of the 20th century are breaking down quickly. People don’t want to go back to soul sucking jobs and children are questioning whether they can return to classrooms where they feel stifled and unseen. Emotional issues are flowering into full-on psychotic breaks and other mental illnesses. And many of us are on the edge.  

There is no vaccine for this epidemic, but there is medicine. We have to find ways to support each other to heal and to move on from old ways of being. Join me today to open this up in our hearts and minds and find a path ahead.