Heartbreak and loss knock the best of us onto the floor. We become humbled by the absence of those who made our lives full, who lifted us up, who helped to us feel loved, desirable, and worthy.

That deep loving connection and acceptance is the greatest gift of loving relationships. To be the focus of someone’s heart, to feel like the most special person in the world, is a deep longing many of us carry. It is one that we are conditioned to expect to experience with parents or love relationships.

And it may also be a hook that keeps us tethered to a bad relationship. In abusive and controlling relationships, the giving of that kind of loving attention may inflate us with euphoria. And then, when the abusive partner withholds that love, it may feel like an existential threat. After several cycles of inflation and withholding, we lose our autonomy and ground.

The fear is, if this person is not in my life, I will never have this feeling again.

Much is said that “you have to love yourself before you can be loved by another,” and my colleague Maria Turner-Carney points out that we learn we are lovable by being loved.

What I am learning, and remembering, is that once we have this experience of being so deeply loved and accepted—it is ours. Our body learns and remembers that feeling. We can return to it and access it and nurture its expression.

It is perhaps much like a campfire. If you are building a fire in the woods and have no matches, flint, or lighter, it’s not impossible but it takes a lot of effort. You have to work hard for that first spark, scraping wood against wood or stone against stone. It is far easier if a kind and helpful person who already has a strong fire burning brings over a coal or lighted branch for you.

Once your fire is burning, though, you can continue to feed it. You don’t need that person to keep bringing you new wood.

Take a moment and, if you have ever had a moment of feeling deeply loved, deeply seen, deeply valued by another person, remember that moment. Remember what you were wearing, where you were, what the person smelled like. Remember what led up to the moment and remember the moment itself.

For some people, that feeling of love and admiration comes not from a lover but from somewhere else, even pets. That is totally okay for this exercise.

Sometimes these moments of deep love get tarnished by painful events that occur with or immediately after. For this practice, keep your memory at the moment of feeling that love and connection.

Notice what happens in your body as you sit with that memory. Imagine that the love and attention you received from the other person emitted from them as a color, as an energy, as a sensation that fills your body. Imagine that to be like a spark of energy that you can grow with slow, steady breathing.

Breathe into that feeling and imagine it saturating your body. If there are parts of you afraid or unwilling to take in that experience of being loved, acknowledge that. Imagine that feeling can surround and support these parts, and let those parts know they can take it in if they wish, but do not force it.

Spend a few minutes being with this. Know that this feeling may have begun as a gift given by another but it is yours now. Your sense of love, admiration, worthiness. Thank yourself for showing up, and go be in love with yourself.

Whatever causes you grief, let yourself grieve. It is healing and necessary to feel the pain of the loss, whether we understand the fullness of its dimensions or not.

Perhaps the grief seems misplaced or remote, but in truth we may be grieving a deeper change that this incident only symbolizes. We are grieving what was once possible, what we once took for granted. We need to grieve to unhook our attachments to what was. We need to grieve so that we can, when we are ready, make something new.

And if something does not cause you grief, but it does for others, that is okay too. You can be the one who listens and supports this time, who cares and witnesses while they do their work. And hopefully when it is your time to grieve, others will be available to you.

Grief is deeply painful and we can at times feel lost in it. Yet grief is also the cool well of refreshing water when we have been moving through an arid and hot land. Sinking into the grief refreshes the soul, makes us ready to create something new.

We are in dire need of grieving the old and embracing the changes that have been thrust upon us. We don’t have to like the changes that are occurring and being demanded, but fighting them is a waste of our power. Grieve, remember love, and still make time for joy.

This week, Gods & Radicals published in two parts my essay “The Prison and the Key: Pagan Perspectives on Suicide.”

Part 1 is available here.

Part 2 is available here.

This is an essay that is personal and dear to my heart. I attended a Jesuit high school, and in one class I was assigned a paper to write about religious perspectives on a controversial issue, and to find a religious perspective for and against the issue. I chose suicide at the time, and had to look hard to find in Shinto a perspective that condoned suicide.

As an adult practicing in neopagan traditions, experiencing the suicide of a person in my life, that young me lifted up his head and wondered, “What do pagans think of this?” This essay is the result.

Spiritual bypassing can look like ignoring the pain and discord in the world and retreating to my comfort, my meditation, my transcendent spiritual practice.

Yet simply succumbing to despair, only listening to the prophecies of doom, and surrendering my will feels like another kind of bypassing.

To live in this world and continue to make efforts, knowing how challenging it is and yet believing what I do matters, is both liberating and heartbreaking.

Recently a friend shared with me a quote that I know now is by Antonio Gramsci, who was an Italian Communist imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascist government, ostensibly from a letter written by him in prison: “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”

Context aside, this quote came after a session of working with the intellectual, emotional, and willful parts of self with a client, in which I was surprised to hear the potent energy and optimism of the willful parts of self restrained by the fearful and suspicious protections of the intellect.

Gramsci’s summation cuts to the heart of a human psychology that I see in clients and myself, I am saying. The will only focused on the work and the effort, taken out of the personal and social meaning. To be will-driven is to be indifferent to what this effort means to me, who is against it, my personal story about it. To be intellect-driven is to be wholly ruled, often by fear, by a removed and totalizing belief that one knows everything and thus should not bother trying anything.

All of these, in a sense, are forms of bypassing the experience of the heart, which cares for others and experiences the personal impact of life. And yet it is the heart which may gather the insights of the intellect and the power of the will and direct it in ways both life-affirming and socially conscious.

In this video, I discuss the need and benefits of looking at our beliefs about money, work, and material wellbeing in contrast with our deep longings about belonging and safety. In a time when we are being forced to reckon with these basic questions as a society, let’s take time to look inward and begin to find the personal and collective solutions to foster more resilience in creating the lives and communities we desire.

There are plenty of spaces! Register by paying for your space before the work begins on January 9th, 2019.

Lately I find myself having thoughts along the lines of, “How can we be such sophisticated monkeys who create so much beautiful art and innovative technology, and this is the society we’ve made?” How can I live in a country that seems to really pride itself on being a land of opportunity while, compared to other industrialized countries, the likelihood of social mobility is rather low? A country that prides itself on its virtue while still struggling to admit to our tendencies toward wealth inequality, gender-based and racial violence, and environmental harm.

The veil of cynicism is not enough to cover over despair, disappointment, hopelessness. These feelings point to our deepest longings and hopes that want to surface. Something in me, and I think many of us, believes—knows with a surprising certainty—that life can be different. Knows that we’ve been given false choices around what kind of life is available to us, what kind of resources, who is worthy of comfort and joy, who deserves health and protection.

That belief, that hope, runs into tension with those parts of us that feel disillusioned. Parts that remember feeling a deep sense of belonging that turned out to be conditional. Parts that remember the hurt we’ve experienced when we took risks and tried. Parts that fear if we question the values we’ve received, if we reject the society we’ve been given, we’ll lose our ground of connection. Parts that fear betraying our family legacies, even when those legacies carry harm.

These parts constrict in fear when we want to move toward faith and hope. These parts take in our ancestral legacies of seeking safety and security when we want to move toward possibility and freedom. We need to bring all of these parts of us into dialogue, to discover the new dream that is free of the old illusions, one in which we can pursue with hope and passion.

The veil of cynicism is not enough to cover over despair, disappointment, hopelessness. These feelings point to our deepest longings and hopes that want to surface. Something in me, and I think many of us, believes—knows with a surprising certainty—that life can be different. Knows that we’ve been given false choices around what kind of life is available to us, what kind of resources, who is worthy of comfort and joy, who deserves health and protection.

That belief, that hope, runs into tension with those parts of us that feel disillusioned. Parts that remember feeling a deep sense of belonging that turned out to be conditional. Parts that remember the hurt we’ve experienced when we took risks and tried. Parts that fear if we question the values we’ve received, if we reject the society we’ve been given, we’ll lose our ground of connection. Parts that fear betraying our family legacies, even when those legacies carry harm.

These parts constrict in fear when we want to move toward faith and hope. These parts take in our ancestral legacies of seeking safety and security when we want to move toward possibility and freedom. We need to bring all of these parts of us into dialogue, to discover the new dream that is free of the old illusions, one in which we can pursue with hope and passion.

Do you want to join me in this inner dialogue? Join me in January for the first Recalibrate session, From Safety and Security to Resilience. We will engage in a daily process of contemplating the tensions between our longings and our beliefs, coming to know our truth more deeply, and committing to action that lives out that truth.

In this video, I offer a few simple strategies for calming the nervous system to help stay focused, thoughtful, and resilient when doing the things that matter to us.

If reality is a hallucination created by the brain from our environment, biological processes, and learning history, then one cannot escape the questions of whether one’s apprehension of reality is correct, and to what extent that matters. While our neurosystem is able to build a coherent sense of “ego” that believes itself to be consistent across time and experience, practice in self-observation leads us to begin to see all the inconsistencies and vacillations that occur throughout at day.

My personal favorite these days is making plans. When I make plans, I feel excited about them—but they’re far away. When it’s time to do the plans, some days I spend the morning hoping they’ll be canceled. If they’re not and I do the plans, I usually end up thankful that I did. In these sentences I’ve used “I” to denote the brain-body-bucket that had all these experiences, but with so much vacillation there does not seem to be a consistent character to that “I”.

At times our “I” becomes what Internal Family Systems would become “blended” with parts, each of whom have their own distinctive worlds and subpersonalities. That blending could be momentary or pervasive. At times I might be blended with a part that feels sensitive to rejection, and perceives in those around me all these signs of rejection. Maybe that part of me is right—these are little rejections. Or maybe it’s projecting its rejection fear onto others.

Either way, when that rejection-sensitive part runs the show, I’ll respond to these with all of my rejection “stuff.” These reactions often tend to foster greater experiences of rejection in me, either because they gravitate toward rejecting people or they wear down my loved ones into finally rejecting me. When in that rejection-sensitive part, we may have the same conversations with the same people, seeking the same reassurance that they’re not rejecting, but find the conversation never lands, which exhausts everyone.

These experiences of rejection, and all the thoughts and sensations that go with them, are in some sense actually occurring within the organism of the self. Whether the other person believes they are rejecting or not, the person “in” rejection experiences all the pain of it.

Where growth and maturation happens is whether that person can be with the pain but not identified as the pain—to see that what they feel is real and valid, but the story about the pain may not be. When we agree with the story, then we have to fix the story, but the story is not the pain. The story might be “My partner secretly hates me,” no matter how often the partner provides evidence to the contrary, until they get wearied of explaining themselves and show even the mildest moment of impatience that confirms the story for that part.

If we can be with the feeling without trying to fix the story, if we can get access to the consciousness that surrounds and is greater than the part, we are in touch with a greater selfhood that helps the pain of that part to move and heal. Perhaps this pain is activated by an actual rejection, perhaps not, but either way what we need to heal is presence and supportive people in our lives who can validate our feelings but give us space to work through the stories.

Jung often spoke of synchronicities, and the Jungian therapists I have worked with and admired often speak to these moments when we make contact with the greater Self and either heal or free ourselves from the complex, which seems to transform reality itself. After years of anger, I finally forgive my sibling, and then they call me out of the blue. I work through fear and decide I’m ready to step into power, and suddenly an opportunity arrives to do it.

Perhaps there is a mystical dimension of this, or perhaps having freed ourselves of that particular painful hallucination we are ready to see a greater field of reality. Perhaps these opportunities were already there and we weren’t ready to see it. Perhaps we live in a field of social energy and intuitively sense when openings arise. No matter what, it’s really cool when it happens.

As the phenomena of “gaslighting” and “spiritual bypassing” become more popularly understood as a form of abuse, I find myself often reflecting on the relationship between these behaviors and the psychoanalytic defenses. Projection, repression, denial, bypassing, and other defenses may be said to be a form of self-gaslighting—constructing reality in a way that denies or mitigates certain troubling truths.

At the same time, these defenses lend themselves quite easily to deployment as gaslighting tools against people. I suspect that is one reason I see them less widely used in popular discourse.  Popular connotations around the defenses are that such experiences are “not real” or not valid in a meaningful way. One can imagine the enlightened guru saying, “You’re just projecting your anger onto me!” after spending ten minutes telling you how shameful your behavior has been and how un-enlightened your objections are.

I notice that the intrapersonal, intrapsychic model of spiritual growth and development that seemed so prominent since the 1970s, which gave rise to The Secret, seems to be giving way in younger generations toward a more external attention to systems and abuses of power. Now talking about how freeing one’s self of a projection lead to a new job opportunity would be met with the valid counterpoint that focusing only on the internal process ignores the material systems in which one lives. To ignore this allows us too easily to blame people for “manifesting” their misfortunes and focus exclusively on the personal.

This is a view that Jung himself critiqued in his long essay “Answer to Job.” In this excerpt, Jung speaks of Job being allowed to suffer and have all of his wealth and family be destroyed, and then having his friends and family wonder what it was he must have done wrong to deserve such suffering:

“Job’s friends do everything in their power to contribute to his moral torments, and instead of giving him, whom God has perfidiously abandoned, their warm-hearted support, they moralize in an all too human manner, that is, in the stupidest fashion imaginable.”

There is no simple answer to whether one is projecting or being gaslit, at least not at present. In a sense, I believe we tend to project onto people who have something in them that we can “hang” that projection onto—meaning there is a little both/and. But then we could also say that to be gaslit, we must allow ourselves to receive the gaslighting—a little both/and.

That both/and is not wholly helpful in working through circumstances on the ground. If one is actively being gaslit, then stopping one’s internal gaslighting is a necessary and healthy step toward breaking away from the abusive relationship. If one is actively projecting, then recognizing the validity of one’s projections but also finding the psychic roots of the projection is a necessary and healthy step toward having a mature relationship with others.

We need both, and we need to fumble our way toward competency in both. We need validating, supportive, safe relationships, and we need internal self-awareness and ability to discern. We need to take risks in having scary communications, and we need clear boundaries. We need the awareness that we live in a context, and we need to remember that we only know that context through our subjectivity.

If you would like to support my work, you can get early access to my posts, including the opportunity to comment and dialogue with me, by becoming a patron on Patreon.

When you become who you are,
the stories you’ve told are leaves
browning and shriveling in fall
when your reverence withdraws.
In winter you stand exposed,
vulnerable, undecorated, cold,
bereft of those justifications
and names that shaded you,
equipped only with the truth
of your bark, your heartwood,
your roots interweaving among
those of your copse, yielding
nourishment according to need.
When returns the sun and heat,
your truth emerges anew, fresh
with green expressions of self,
boldly thrusting into weather
to feed, flower, fruit, and seed,
and spread your knowingness
to where it might flourish new.
Until, again, these bolder truths
desiccate in obligation, stories
told too often, ready to be shed.
Returning to silence, heartwood,
the winter source of the self.

So many popular strains of spiritual healing and coaching, frequently referencing popular spiritual modes like The Secret, are revamped and de-Christianized forms of Evangelical prosperity teachings that wealth and success go to the spiritually adept, and those who experience pain or suffering in this world have manifested it through their own failings. Like many popularized teachings, I think there were one or two profoundly insightful truths that at some point got blended up and watered down to be accessible (and marketable) to a wide audience.

Nearly every religion and spiritual system has something in it that we can use to try to avoid, minimize, or rationalize our suffering, just as most or all of them also have teachings that we could use to deepen, strengthen, and bring more resolve to times of difficulty. Even in the same church or coven you might hear one person saying a chronic illness is a sign of poor practice and another saying this is the time when one most needs their practice.

United States culture is not particularly friendly to limitations, restrictions, restraints. Like the capitalist system we tout, success to us looks like a continuous upward path of constant growth. When we experience contractions and constrictions, we respond as though these are crises engendered by some bad actor and not something inevitable when living in mortal bodies in a finite planet.

We’re not here to grow upward and outward indefinitely. Sometimes we must move downward and inward. Sometimes we must experience those unpleasant, messy, painful feelings to discover the next path of growth. Contraction, grief, anger, resentment—none of these have to be anybody’s “fault”, but they can very well point out larger causes of suffering that need to be addressed for future health. Like pollution of our lands and water sources. Like cultures of sexual coercion and entitlement that elevate a narrow range of human experience and demean the rest.

Or, more personally, those experiences of grief, pain, and anger that have secretly ruled us for years, things which we’ve taught ourselves not to look at too closely. Those sources of envy and jealousy that show us our secret insecurities, the things we long to achieve but are too afraid to risk trying for.

Few people are excited to face unpleasant, toxic truths about ourselves and the cultures in which we live. Naming our poisons helps us to discover the antidotes. These “dark” emotions are connected to our deep needs, needs we have yet to know well enough to meet. These needs are not the face they wear—my envy won’t be satisfied by my neighbor being less, but rather by me becoming the more that I am afraid to be.

Sitting in meditation, some days I find myself lost in thoughts not matter how much I practice. Other days, when I sit I feel pain and discomfort in my body. The pain roots me in the moment, it calls me back to presence. Parts of me despise it, but this limitation is no longer allowing me to move through life like an automaton.

This does not mean I simply endure it, believing this suffering is warranted and I should just suck it up and not complain. This pain is something to work with, to learn about, to discover where it leads for healing. This pain is a wakening.