Fire Times
I’ve taken to fire since this pandemic started. We have a plot of land just outside the city. It is wild with weeds and is empty with the exception of a 5,000 square foot. concrete pad. The only structure that remains is a beaten up, free-standing fireplace. Its skeleton is made of red bricks that peek through cracked and broken pieces of chalky white limestone.
Money + Whiteness: A Call for Compassionate Reckoning
Money and whiteness: these are the topics I know in my embodied experience to have profoundly affected my heart, mind and, as importantly, my bank account. The impact is felt and reverberates through and across all of my relationships - the most intimate to the seemingly insignificant. And while my personal experience is important, at least to me, this is not apersonal essay. It is a call for a compassionately held inner reckoning to begin living in honorable and just relationship to ourselves and others.
Holy Not Comfortable: The Divine call to re-infuse sacred pain and discomfort into the unconsciously upbeat spirituality of our time
I have been thinking a lot about my own pithy spiritually leaning FB posts and those of the people I love. And I have been very aware of how I publically speak about my sacred classes and events and those of other healers in my community. From all this thinking and listening what I feel needs some airspace is the way in which we portray the spiritual path and its practices as a means of achieving an elevated state of personal betterment — balance, power, light, joy and so forth.
A Meditation on Busyness & the Inner Life
I have read that the nervous system responds to the gentle holding of the breath as a sign of safety. A way to assure the shivering animal part of ourselves that, we are oh-so –NOT-in-danger and decidedly DO NOT need to run from trouble. It’s as if the slow, held breath is saying, “LOOK AT THIS! We can easily afford to even hold our breath!” As Julian of Norwich, the 14th Century Christian mystic, would say, it is the breath of All is Well, All Shall by Well, And all manner of things shall be well.
68 Signs of Male Privilege within Spiritual/Religious Community, or, 68 Signs of the Sacred Ill That Has No Name
You have regularly experienced people standing up when you or someone of your gender walks into the room out of extreme deference.
You rarely (if ever) have read about, met, or heard mention of the highest person of power within your spiritual or religious order being someone who was not a member of your gender.
You are unaware of the cultural taboo that applies to people not of your gender if they risk speaking about their desire to advance within the teaching ranks of the leadership.