If your heart never breaks...

Nearing the end of 2019, I don't think I'm alone in feeling this was a year of massive challenges and lots of heart-break on the individual, collective, and global level.  Trauma-talk is everywhere. So many of us are trying to reconcile the relationship between past grief and present conditions and wondering what kind of future we are manifesting, or if there will even be one.
  
For my part, I am coming through a several year period of profound personal breakage, during which I thought the dark night of the soul might never end, but I was determined to learn all I could about many of the life passages I was experiencing, existential wounds in my life and the lives of those around me, and my coping skill--research--led me to read hundreds of books that did indeed help me move through my own betrayal trauma and grief and find a way to begin to transmute those things into service to others.

They say, if your heart never breaks, you spiritually starve, and many of the world's faith and philosophic traditions offer guidance for moving through what we all go through to find something larger than ourselves. One guide of mine phrases it this way: get behind the medicine. A literary hero of mine, D.H. Lawrence put it this way, "Not I, not I, but the wind that moves through me."

And so little by little, I have been trying to find my way to serve better in the world, to cultivate gratitude, to draw light out in those I am lucky enough to teach or mentor, to practice forgiveness (and it is an ongoing practice), to look at my own inauthenticities and performances, and work to stop projecting on others and take responsibility for myself and to see if I can be as gentle as I can in expecting others to do their work, as well, and believe in the possibility of conscious relationship, inter-dependence rather than enmeshment, energy based growth mind-set versus fear-based triggering and armoring, and hope for co-creativity that includes a healthier, more respectful, world.

Right. Big goals.  And we all have a tiny part to play.  Mine is very small, but my updated website reflects some of where I am now, as I begin to peek out of the long dark woods I walked a long time in. We all go through those woods, sometimes multiple times, and if I can make any light along the way for someone else, I'd like to. 

I'll be posting about heart math, polyvagel theory, vibrational healing, betrayal trauma, post traumatic growth, emotional literacy, how to live as an empath, art, writing, literature, film, and poetry.  And maybe a few other things. 

Come on 2020. I'm ready.