Category: Self Awareness

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Desire, pleasure, & trauma

The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect. ~Peter A. Levine 

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive. ~Eleonora Duse

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love. ~Washington Irving

Earlier this week was Mother’s Day here in the United States.  It’s a day that is mixed with many emotions for me personally, and there are few Mother’s Days I can look back on as 100% good or precious memories.  Mother’s Day, for me, is a day of grief, a day of frustration, as well as a day of love.

I know for many this day can be a mixed a bag.  Perhaps our mothers weren’t the mothers we needed them to be.  Perhaps they have died.  Perhaps we longed to be a mother and aren’t.  Perhaps we never wanted to be a mother and are.  Perhaps we desperately wanted to be mothers, are now, but are filled with frustration or regret.  Perhaps this day brings other emotions up for us.

I know without a doubt, that Mother’s Day has never been about pleasure for me.  It has historically not been a day just for or about me, as a mother.  It has never been a day of rest or doing what I wanted.  Last year was a particularly hard Mother’s Day filled with grief, heartbreak, anger, and frustration.

It is funny sometimes how much our lives, how much we, can change in a year. Twelve short months and we look back and wonder at the person we were, are in awe of the changes and shifts we’ve made, are surprised to see where we are now.

A truth is that I didn’t do a very good job of receiving on this day.  Another truth is, I rarely spoke up and stated what exactly I wanted.  I didn’t do a very good job of advocating for my own pleasure, for my own joy, for my own enjoyment.

I know why this is, of course.  There was my own ingrained messages of how asking for what I want isn’t acceptable, that pleasure is bad, and then all the stories about whether or not I “deserved” or was “worth of” doing what pleased me.

The why I didn’t advocate for my own pleasure is a tangled web of complex trauma, fear, and shame.  There is also a heavy dose of the narratives about wanting, about desire, about pleasure, saying they are all bad and only “bad people” want or desire any thing beyond what they have.  Or more specifically that a woman should want, should desire, should seek pleasure in any form.  

Desire, in an of itself, is a complex notion. We are all taught on so many levels to be thankful for what we have and that wanting more or different is not a good or healthy thing. I’ve written in the past about how the whole gratitude movement makes me want to scream, because at its roots can be shame around wanting more than what we have, in wanting different.

We can both appreciate all that we have and want something more, something different. It is possible to hold both, for both to be 1000% true.

Learning to explore our wants, our desires, has so many levels to it.  Unraveling the indoctrination by our culture is one level.  Looking at the ways our families approached desire and wanting is another.  Examining the shame we carry from our childhood traumas is yet another layer.  

We have learned from so many places that wanting is bad.  That desire is bad.  That we aren’t deserving or worthy of pleasure, of peace, of feeling full, nourished, complete.

We learn to strive, yes.  To keep reaching for that carrot.  But we aren’t taught to examine if that is the carrot we even want.  We are sold an idea of what success looks like and if we don’t meet that standard then we are failures and that is even more proof of how unworthy and undeserving we are.  

Slowing down and taking the time to unravel, explore, examine, and experiment with what we actually want,  what we truly desire, what brings us undeniable pleasure is no easy feat in and of itself.  Learning to allow ourselves to experience pleasure, joy, fun – takes practice, time, intention.  And yes, coming home into our bodies.

Learning to be at home in our own skin, to tolerate both discomfort and pleasure, is an important part of the work.  And it is not the whole of it all.  We also need to consciously examine the stories we hold in our minds (and yes bodies), and practicing new ways of thinking, to do the work of growing new neuropaths and allow the old ones, where all these old stories live, to atrophy.

It is not easy work.  And, as I have said many times before, I do believe it is deeply worth it.  

/../

Embodied Writing :: Pleasure Edition is a seven week program where we will explore different aspects of pleasure, our internalized narratives about pleasure, and learning to reclaim pleasure as a part of our lives through stream of conscious writing and embodiment practices.  To learn more click here. 

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On Anger

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. ~Joe Klaas, Twelve Steps to Happiness

Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness. ~Viktor Frankl

In the Unleashed Woman Book Club call a couple years ago we got to talking about the idea of “going with the flow”.  The conversation was inspired by a FB post by Toi Smith.  Toi wrote ::

“silence is beautiful.

not speaking up is sexy.
going with the flow makes you tolerable.
doing everything without complaint makes you loveable.
making yourself always available is the expectation.

-love letter to women from patriarchy”

We talked about all the ways we have been trained and conditioned to go with the flow.  To not speak up.  Eventually this led to a conversation about anger.

A couples therapist recommended a book to my now ex-husband and I about anger when we were trying to find ways to save our marriage.  It’s not really an anger management book per se, but it talks about all the ways anger is bad for us and how it “destroys our lives” (that’s a direct quote from the book).

I’m guessing you can imagine my response to this book. Wanting to throw it across the room was the most tame of my responses.

I did skim through it.  There were some interesting, and perhaps in the right context, valuable exercises.  But the premise that anger will ruin our lives had me rolling my eyes and wanting to burn the book.

In general my issues with the book, beyond this uninformed premise, are:

1. It does not come from a trauma-informed perspective
2. It does not come from a systems perspective
3. There is not discussion of the neuroscience or neurobiology of anger (it did talk about the physiological affects of anger)
4. Because it does not come from a systems perspective, it does not tie anger to social/political/institutional reasons for anger
5. There is zero discussion of epigenetics and how anger (or other unprocessed by our ancestors emotions) may be passed down
6. It did not offer any somatic-informed approaches (it only talked about the mind and thoughts)
7. It was written by three white middle aged men with PhDs who I am assuming are at least upper middle class in economic status and carry with them all the privilege that comes with this.

Again, admittedly I only skimmed the book, however the general sense I got was that anger is bad.  And there was no science to back up their claim.

(That said, again, the exercises in the book, which are mindfulness based, could be helpful for people in processing some anger and in helping to control their (potentially harmful) actions that stem from anger.  We can’t always throw the baby out with the bathwater, even if the baby is mostly made up of elitist and privileged bullshit).

I have become very weary of anyone who claims that anger is always a “bad” thing.  Or that is it always destructive (and in these cases destruction = bad.  My view is that often destruction = good, growth, change.  But that may be another conversation for another day). That we should move past anger as quickly as possible.  That anger will “destroy our relationships and our lives”.

Anger, as I have shared before, is an active emotion.  It needs movement.  It requires physical, emotional, and cognitive movement.

What this means, is that when we are in the height of anger, we do need to physically do something to help release it.  This could be going for a walk or run, screaming into a pillow, punching a pillow/punching bag/mattress/cushion, doing jumping jacks/pushups, running up and down stairs, etc.  Once enough adrenaline and cortisol (two chemicals that are produced by our bodies when we are stressed, which includes when we are angry) is burned off, we can then move into calming practices, like the nervous system soothing exercises I share with you each week.  But those chemicals have to be burned off and begin to flush out of our systems first otherwise our nervous system will stay activated and we won’t be able to fully connect to our frontal lobe (where logic and empathy live).

It also means that when we are angry, not in a rage, more that we are simmering, that we can use this anger as a motivator for action and change.
It means it can be an encouragement to have those difficult conversations with our partner about how they have hurt us, or those difficult conversations with our boss about how we aren’t compensated fairly, or to make difficult decisions that will change the trajectory of our lives.

Sometimes there are other emotions beneath our anger.  Sometimes there is sadness, grief, frustration, hurt, betrayal, or any other number of emotions. And it is important to be self-aware and to recognize when our anger is protecting us from some of those even more challenging emotions, particularly those of hurt, betrayal, and grief.

And it also is true that sometimes we are simply angry.

Angry because of any number of injustices that take place daily in the world and possibly even in our lives.

Our rage is valid.

Historically speaking and present day speaking.

When we take the opinion that anger is a “bad” or “negative” emotion or that it will “destroy our lives” then our tendency is to shut our anger down (or at least to try).  To stuff it.  To ignore it.  To pretend we aren’t really angry at all.

Let me tell you something, that doesn’t work out so well in the end.

Remember how I said anger is an active emotion?  It will come out, even if you (try to) stuff or shut it down.  It will show up as:
• stomach/gastrointestinal and/or digestive issues
• depression
• anxiety
• chronic pain
• chronic illness
• mood swings
• irritability

It will manifest itself, in one way or another.  And you can choose to try to ignore it, or you can meet it, shake its hand, and find ways to release, process, and be (positively) motivated by the anger.

Anger in and of itself is not bad.

Sometimes how we act when angry can be harmful to both ourselves and others.  And finding ways to release, process and be motivated to healthy action is important.  I am in no way condoning physical, emotional or psychological violence to ourselves or others using the excuse that we were angry.

We can all learn to find that space between “stimulus and response,” to expand it and find our ways to responding to and with our anger in appropriate ways.

And, because sometimes some people act inappropriately, or even in harmful ways, when angry, does not mean that anger itself is “bad” or will “destroy our lives.”

Anger can be our way of protesting the status quo.  It can be our way of saying we will no longer go with the flow.  We will no longer be compliant and complicit.  We will use our voice and our intelligence and our resources to promote justice, to demand justice.

So, remember::
Our rage is valid.  It is the culmination of generations of rage that has been suppressed and passed down.  What we choose to do with this rage, well, that is up to each of us, individually and collectively.

/../
This essay was originally written for my newsletter in September 2017 and has been edited for publication here.

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Slowing into the pause & breaking harmful patterns

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. ~Rollo May, The Courage to Create

she learned to walk away
from everything
that didn’t inspire her
toward greater things
~Mark Anthony

a successful life is created
with two words: yes and no
have the courage to say yes
only when it feels right
and no to the old patterns
that do not serve you
~yung pueblo

One way that complex trauma impacts us in our adult lives is in our relationships, be they with friends, family, or intimate partners. Many of us with complex trauma are not good at tolerating painful emotions, like sadness, frustration, or disappointment. 

In fact, most of us don’t have a lot of tolerance for the more “positive” emotions like happiness, joy, and pleasure either.

Any feeling – sensation and emotion – can feel too much and can trigger our fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. The feelings can be overwhelming and so we need a way to release them, to get them out of us, because actually feeling them is intolerable.

So, we start fights. Or turn away and cut people out of our lives. In the moment we may freeze and feel stuck or placate and people please and then later move into the space of either wanting to fight or flee. Depending on the situation we do one or the other of these or we do some in rapid succession. 

Our reaction is generally immediate and coming directly from our back (or reptile) brain. There is no thought that is going into it. We don’t slow down to engage our front brain and are fully in our survival instinct. Because feeling our feelings feels like our actual lives are in danger. It feels like they might consume us. It feels like we won’t survive the sensations and emotions that are swirling within us.

I know for me a go to reaction was always to flee. And by flee I mean turn my back and cut people out of my life. One disappointment, one time of feeling rejected or abandoned, and it was “proof” that the person wasn’t trustworthy and therefore I needed to shut them out of my life. My armor would go up and if need be I would start fights if they wouldn’t “let” me leave. 

It has taken a lot of time, therapy, practice, patience, and self compassion to find my way to pause between the action of an emotion being activated and responding.

Because for most of my life I reacted, immediately, and without thought. What I want for my life, for my relationships, is for me to be able to thoughtfully respond, to slow down and evaluate the facts of the situation and previous situations so that I can respond intentionally and mindfully.

This has meant coming into my body. This has meant learning to tolerate all those intolerable sensations and emotions. This has meant practicing keeping my front brain (where logic, reasoning, creativity, problem solving, and compassion live) online while also experiencing the sensations and emotions that live in my back brain.

It hasn’t meant stuffing my feelings down. 

It has meant allowing myself to experience them and learning to know they won’t actually kill me. They will be uncomfortable, I may not like it, but I certainly won’t die.

When we are able to engage our front brain while also experiencing our feelings, we can begin to look at situations more objectively. We can look for patterns, for habits, for cycles. We slow down not to make excuses for the other person, but to see if our own pain is actually stemming fully from something they did or said or if it also stems from a long ago wound that never healed. 

And then we can decide how we want to respond to the person. We can intentionally decide if this is an opportunity for our own personal growth and processing. We can decide if it is an opportunity for us to communicate our needs, to repair in relationship and to stay. Or to communicate our needs, set a boundary, and possibly leave.

It is true that when another person triggers our feelings of disappointment, frustration, abandonment, and or betrayal that it was indeed their action or words that did this. It is true that our hurt is in part due to the what the other person did or said.

And.

They don’t deserve the full force of our fury or rage or pain, most of which comes from past hurts from others we trusted.

Sometimes when another person triggers our painful feelings it isn’t intentional, or may be a matter of circumstance or what they did or said is actually a perfectly reasonable or normal thing, but it sets off our alarms anyhow. Sometimes these triggers are not an indication of who they are as a person.

And honestly, sometimes it is.

Which is why we need the pause. So we can slow ourselves down and determine what we actually know about the other person. What we actually know about ourselves. What patterns we have seen. What other actions and words we have witnessed or not. 

We need the pause so we can engage our frontal lobe and respond in a way that lets us stand in our own integrity and authenticity. Without needing to cause another pain. Without lashing out. Without cutting people out because in that moment we are hurting and find it unbearable.

The pause requires us to be in our bodies, to be able to tolerate uncomfortable even painful emotions and sensations. It also allows us to enjoy the fun and pleasurable emotions and sensations that can also a part of living as a human.

Learning to live embodied, to tolerate, experience, and sometimes even enjoy the sensations and emotions of our fully human lives is a life long process. There are not five easy steps and then you are done. It is not a one time thing we can check off. It is a constant practice that will have its own ebbs and flows.

The pause will not come to us quickly. It will take time. At first you will notice while you are reacting that you are indeed having an immediate response. With time you will be able to “bring yourself down” more smoothly and quickly. Then, you will begin to notice that you are about to lash out and eventually stop it. In more time, with more practice, you will be able to catch yourself at the very beginning of being triggered. You will be able to feel the sensations and emotions and also be able to explore them, analyze them and the situation logically. And then intentionally decide how we want to respond.

Having patience and compassion for ourselves during this process, while learning to come into our body and to tolerate all the different, varied, and nuanced sensations and feelings and learning how to find that breath, that pause, when some or all our old wounds are triggered is vital and part of the process.

It is true that what was done to us by others is not our fault, we are not to blame for their actions. And we are responsible to learn to respond to new hurts in ways that hold us in our own integrity, in a way that does not continue to pass on harmful patterns, in ways that allow us to break painful cycles for ourselves and the generations to come.

/…/

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Trust, needs, vulnerability, & Complex Trauma

What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful. ~Brene Brown

What happens when people open their hearts?
They get better. ~Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important. ~Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone – but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy. ~Frank Crane

I’ve been feeling a lot lately. Emotions and sensations swirling around in me, creating chaos, or perhaps expressing the chaos, within. They have been happy, joyful, pleasurable feelings on the one hand. And completely terrifying on the other.

Terrifying because they are new and different.
And.
Terrifying because I am actually feeling them. 

And terrifying because I am beginning to be emotionally vulnerable with another person. I am learning what that actually looks and feels like. I am doing it in small steps and most certainly keeping much still to myself, and also with each little step of expressing my emotions to them, I am finding new, not harmful ways, of caring for myself and the overwhelming feelings of all the experiences I am having.

I’m trying on adulting.
Clearly stating boundaries.
Telling the person how I feel around them.
Not running and hiding or putting all my armor on with extra reinforcements.

It has not been easy. I have probably misstepped. I know I have gotten caught up in conversations in my own head that didn’t go well and lead me to tears (hello INFJ).

And still. I am doing things differently. Which is new and different and feels strange and yes, is terrifying in moments.

As humans we have very real needs of attachment and belonging. We actually need to feel loved, adored. We need to be respected in having our autonomy and our autonomy needs to be not only respected and accepted but also rejoiced and celebrated. We need to be physically safe, and also we need to feel emotionally and psychologically safe. We need to feel connected, understood by another, and to feel they feel connected to and understood by us. 

Having these needs met, to even a minimal degree, allows us to survive as infants and children. They are absolutely necessary for survival. In some ways it doesn’t matter who meets these needs. Ideally it would be our primary caregivers, but it can be secondary, or even tertiary caregivers. And we only require these needs be met just enough for our actual survival.

That means as children we can be neglected, abused, disregarded most of the time, but as long as there are moments of feeling like a person, even our abusers, actually care for us, we will survive.

As adults, the needs are the same, but the requirement to have them met for our survival isn’t as dire. As adults having these needs met means the difference between simply surviving and beautifully thriving in our lives.

We all have these needs, and yet expressing them can be incredibly delicate and feel overwhelmingly vulnerable. 

And vulnerability in our culture is considered a weakness.

And when we have had childhoods where there was abuse and or neglect, expressing our vulnerability could have literally meant our deaths.

So. What are we to do, as adults, with our wounding, our pain, our fear, our trauma, to have our needs actually met?

First I want to note that it is important that others meet our attachment needs, yes. That is part of thriving in our lives and being in a loving relationship. However, it is equally important that we know how to meet these needs for ourselves too. That we are able to build our resilience when those we love inevitably hurt us in some way.

I say inevitably because we are all human. We all cause unintentional harm. We all have our own “stuff” that we need to work through. And so, part of being open to a loving relationship where another meets many of our attachment needs also means that we are open to them sometimes hurting us. It also means that we will inevitably hurt them also. What matters here is how we come back into relationship through repair.

When we are able to process the traumas we have experienced as children and are able to come back into our bodies, we learn what it actually means to fully experience our emotions and their correlating bodily sensations. We begin to learn how to titrate so we don’t go into overwhelm. We learn how to hear our bodies long before they are screaming at us. 

And.

We learn to trust ourselves. To have compassion for the people we’ve been and the person we are today. As we learn to trust ourselves, we can also begin to trust others. 

Learning to trust another is yet another piece of our trauma processing. So many of us were abused and or neglected by our primary and or secondary caregivers, starting at such early ages. These experiences train us to distrust those we love and those who express that they love and or care for us. Part of our trauma processing is also allowing these old distrusting neural pathways to atrophy while we build new paths that allow for us to trust, and know who to trust in the first place.

It is important to note we need to be connected to the feelings – emotions and sensations – of our body to move into deeply trusting relationships. Being embodied means we can actually hear the appropriate alarms, and trust that they are correct and act accordingly when it comes to relationships. It also means that we can trust another when those alarms don’t go off.

And once we can trust another, then we can begin to be vulnerable with them.

Being vulnerable with another person is terrifying. We are opening ourselves up to being hurt by them. We are also opening ourselves up to being loved by them and see what it feels like to be truly respected and adored. 

It’s not easy. We will have many missteps. We will dip our toes in and share something deeply vulnerable and then immediately pull our toes back out and maybe even take several steps back or run away and hide for a bit. With practice this sharing of ourselves, the more raw and vulnerable pieces, becomes easier, but perhaps never totally easy (I have no idea actually, I’m still in the dip my toes in and try not to run away and hide stage!). 

And before we can share our feelings, we actually need to be able to feel them. 

/…/

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To learn about my six month Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivors go here. The next cohort begins April 15.

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Love is not a victory march

And love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
~Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

The last year plus has been traumatic for our world politically and culturally, and because of this, also for many of us personally. We have seen some of our worst fears of what would happen with Republican run Executive and Legislative branches here in the United States. We have seen so much put back forty or more years in time, so much more that has been attempted to be put back. With each hit it feels like we are sinking deeper and deeper in a dystopian novel.

And.

Last year saw #metoo. And this year #timesup.  We see more and more women coming forward and some of the men who perpetrated sex crimes actually having consequences for their actions. I have been witness to more and more people becoming aware of the social injustices in the world, acknowledging their own internalized biases, compliance, and complicity, and doing the work to make change both within themselves and out in the world.

This shifting in our culture and within ourselves has been about love.

Unearthing what love actually means.

That love is a verb.

That love is not always gentle.

That love can be fiery, fierce, loud.

That love can be both protective and can push us outside of our comfort zones.

That love and justice can and should go hand in hand. And in that mix there needs to also be compassion and boundaries.

I believe that on any given day in any given moment all of us are doing the best we can with the tools we have.

This best we can may not be good enough. This best we can may actually be harmful to ourselves or to others. Other’s don’t have to accept our “best we can”. And in order for me to have hope in humanity, I do still believe we are each trying our best to be the best humans we know how to be.

And.

It is also true that sometimes the “best” others can do is something we need to say a firm NO to. And this No can, and in my opinion should, come from a place of deep love. Love for ourselves as well as love for the other person. And perhaps love for all humanity.

The #metoo movement that has caught fire in the last couple of years is a statement of this kind of love. A love comprised of clearly stating this is where I end and you begin and you don’t get to cross this line without my permission. A love comprised of compassion for ourselves and the traumas we have experienced at the hands of (mostly) men. A love comprised of empathy for others with similar experiences and especially for those who are able to speak up and out.

It is a love that seeks more than justice. It is a love that seeks our humanity.

We are at the dawn of a new epoch of human history. We have perhaps been at this dawn for the last hundred or so years. We have seen cultural “norms” slowly, sometimes painfully slowly, shift. We have seen the emancipation of slaves, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, all in the last 150 years. This is after, literally, millennia of slavery, and the de-humanizing of women, persons of color, queer folks, the poor, and anyone who is not a white, heterosexual, middle class (or “better”), CIS, male.

One hundred fifty years is barely a drop in the bucket when you look back three to six thousand years.

The shifting of our culture feels slow. And it is taking multiple generations. And will likely take multiple more before we live in a world where racism, misogyny, ablism, and homophobia are quaint things of past.

And.

With each movement, more movements are born. With each small shift there is a ripple effect.

And those ripples are getting larger. And stronger.

And the more we do this work of shifting ourselves and our world, the more we see the importance of doing this work with love made of justice, compassion, empathy, and boundaries.

Love is not always gentle. In fact, I believe love can actually be rather rude. Love shows up when we set our own boundaries and love shows up when we respect and honor the boundaries another person has set for themselves, whether we like those boundaries or not.

Love is willing to be uncomfortable. To sit in the discomfort of unraveling our own familial and cultural training. To sit in the discomfort of unraveling the trauma that lives within us and sorting what is ours, what is our ancestors, and what has absolutely nothing to do with us or our lineage. To sit in the discomfort of sometimes being wrong and causing harm and doing the work to make amends. To sit in the discomfort of acceptance that we are not always in control, and that sometimes honoring the boundaries of another person can be personally and emotionally painful (not harmful, painful) for us.

Love is fierce. And can be filled with rage. Love can be loud and bold and demanding.

Love is sometimes gentle too. And can be quiet. Love is supportive, always. Love is in the giving and receiving. To ourselves and to others. Always and in all ways.

Love is not a bully. It is not used as a weapon to cause harm or manipulate and impose unrealistic expectations.

Love is a comrade. It is a tool we can use to deconstruct our oppressive culture. It is a tool we can use to create a new world where there is justice and safeness and the embracing of differences.

Love is speaking and listening and hearing. Love is respecting and honoring.

The Christian bible states in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 ::

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

I can agree with most of this. And, I do believe that love is not blind, that while it doesn’t keep score and it does trust, it is always smart and aware and knows who and when to trust and when not. Love is not gullible.

Love has been a tool for change within myself for most of my life and in particular I have leaned on love this year. Love for my Self. The love of friends and family. Love as a verb. Love as a lesson. Love as a breathing, shifting, thing that both has torn me apart and put me back together.

May we all use love as a tool for destruction of our own old harmful patterns and ways and for creation of new ways of being which invite ourselves and others to live in compassion, empathy, justice, and truth.

/../

This essay originally written in December 2017 for the subscribers of my newsletter.  I edited it a bit for publication here.  If you’d like to subscribe to my weekly love letters you can fill out the form on this page.