pain

It Takes A Long Time To Change

August 19, 2024

What you are experiencing today is just the aggregate of all the days and experiences you have had up until this moment. Your body is a recorder for every experience, no matter how minute, so nothing is lost. You might think you can avoid, neutralize, or forget the ones you are not sure what to do with, but you have assimilated all of them in some way. You are just a container for all the things that have happened and how you have metabolized them. This might make you feel helpless, but nothing ... Keep reading

Lean into Darkness

February 4, 2024

And just when you feel like you have reached the blackest, sickest darkness, that is the time to lean in even further. When God feels out of reach, your only move is to become still, keep your ear to the ground and wait. The waiting itself will change you. And the answers are somewhere there in the dark and stillness.

The caterpillar submits to a kind of death and forms itself into a chrysalis by instinct. If it had consciousness, it might know it was going to emerge light enough to fly. If it ... Keep reading

Your Many Deaths

January 21, 2024

If you do it right, you will suffer many deaths in your lifetime. And if you do it right, each one will bring you closer to your real self. Believe it or not, everything that is happening in your life is working to bring about these little deaths, which will peel back the layers of your false self and allow the truest form of your being to emerge. Really your “false self” is just all the forms of you that existed before this and which must be shed, like a snake repeatedly sloughing off its ... Keep reading

Becoming Open

June 20, 2022

I’ve had some things on my mind for a while, so I thought I better write them down. I’ve come to believe prayer is just learning to be open. It is not about saying anything or changing anything. It’s about learning to open yourself and practice intimacy. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring my inner world and realize now that it was all so I could learn to let God in. And if you do that, you will soon learn to let others in. The whole goal then is to provide space (“hospitality”) ... Keep reading

Mother Death

January 17, 2022

Loving death

With all of its requisite pains,

Has come

To each of us in its own way

Each secret strand is strange to the others

Though they flow from the same spring

Silent and dark, barren and daring

You always feel

It is your fault:

“What did I do to deserve this?

“There must have been something.”

No one else seems to be suffering

In this way

Though they suffer in secret

With the same questions

When you first woke up, you did not know death

Though you were given directly from it

You were born ... Keep reading

Flex Your Resilience Muscle

April 21, 2018

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who display resilience and people who do not. The thing is you can be one or the other at any given moment. The difference between someone who is resilient and someone who is not is that one displays resilience and the other does not. 🙂 Faced with a challenge, the resilient one pushes herself across the threshold into the unknown. It’s like jumping out of an airplane. Either you launch yourself out or you don’t.

Take addiction for example. ... Keep reading

Continual Rebirths

April 18, 2018

Life done well is the continual process of reinventing yourself. Sometimes this happens in a sad way – as in a mid-life crisis: finding a new wife, a new life and maybe a new car. Sometimes people just take on a new outward appearance. Your outward appearance can be a reflection of an internal process, but recreating yourself is more than just changing how you look. It is undergoing real and thorough transformation. Some people age, but do not really grow. They stay rigidly attached to “the ... Keep reading

Creating Something Beautiful: The Synthesis of Our Pain

January 24, 2018

Creativity is the only thing. We all enter these states of confusion, disrepair and darkness at times. These can be particularly distressing if you don’t know what they’re about – what you can mine from them or what their meaning is in your life. But the secret is in the sauce: making sense of and meaning of your brokendownness. It’s about what beauty you can make from the ugliness, the despair. All beauty emerges from darkness. What else is life about?

I often say the only thing that ... Keep reading