Summer Solstice
We arrived on the first day of the retreat in awe of the wild, beautiful natural surroundings of Ballycroy, Co. Mayo in the stunning, pristine, natural landscape of the Erris Blanket Bog. Here in the wild West of Ireland, it would be no surprise to encounter selkies at dusk where the sand dunes meet the ocean on the further shore of the estuary, the confluence of the two black-brown rivers as they dissolve into the broad, salty ocean. This encounter with the „wildness without“ is conducive to our opening up to the „wildness within“, a wildness that often gets buried beneath layers of societal expectations, childhood coping strategies, urban living, busy schedules, family obligations, and the superficialities of life in our driven consumer society…
Indivisible Reality
When we say a person has her feet on the ground, we mean rooted in reality, perception unclouded by denial, delusion, illusion, grandiosity, or anxiety, all states that skew our sense of reality. If we can’t even recognise where we are, we will have enormous difficulty in getting where we want to go. It’s a bit like asking Google Maps to take me to „Cologne Cathedral“ and when the prompt comes to submit my current location, I enter „unknown“. Even Artificial Intelligence algorithms are going to have great difficulty in providing accurate directions under such circumstances…
Boundaries
It is incredulous that we survived such experiences as children. The abuse was bad enough, but the icing on the cake was the fact that no one was there to turn to for solace, for protection, for understanding, for solidarity, for a comforting hug. I dared not bring it up with my parents for fear that a second round of punishment would ensue. This stance emanated from my observation of how my parents treated older siblings in similar circumstances. I was smarter than that, I surmised. Into that trap I would not fall. It is this „no one being there for us in our time of need“ which is described by Gabor Maté as the „über wound“…
Vulnerability
It was all those jagged edges that bewildered and overwhelmed me, that had me on the run almost from the time that I had learned to walk. Now I can see that these were the product of the unexpressed grief, the denial, and the crazy making which characterized the family in which I grew up. There was no one there to hold me with my jagged edges, so I simply covered them over in the hope of avoiding further mutilation. When we hide things from others for long enough, they become hidden from us too. Yet beneath the armour, the wounds continue to ache. And then they begin to fester. Only when the pain becomes intolerable do we cry out for hope.
Dealing With Fear
I have had countless discussions with others in recovery or on the threshold of such an approach. The hallmark question that has emerged from these interactions is: “How safe did you feel while growing up? To my genuine surprise, an overwhelming majority of people answered that they often didn’t feel safe, and then went on to describe aspects of a nebulous state of distress which comprised one or more of the following: danger, risk, peril, threat, hazard, jeopardy, trouble, distress, chaos, unpredictability, instability, vulnerability, violability, etc….
Regrets
„Compassion“ (or „Empathise“); the love of self, others, and circumstances. „Explore“; the love of discovery, of expanding our scope of experiencing the endless abundance and opportunities of life. „Innovate“; the love of new ideas and breaking new ground. „Navigate“; the love of purpose and deeply held values, – and aligning our thoughts, emotions, and actions with these values. And „Activate“; the love of moving from thinking and feeling into taking action, while guided by the Powers of Sage. We move through life drawn by love rather than being driven by fear…
Scapegoating
On the definition of sin, I can remember many lessons in junior school where countless examples of sin were expounded by the elderly Jesuits in whose care our education was placed. Original sin, venial sins, mortal sins, white lies, etc. Egged on by my classmates, I would distract the teachers from our regular school work by asking to which category this or that deed (or thought) belonged. Today, I prefer the definition of sin provided by Richard Rohr, contemporary Christian mystic, namely “missing the mark”. This implies that our thoughts, emotions, or deeds are not in alignment with our deeply held values…
Trapped
As long as we are constantly hijacked by our Saboteurs, fear rules our lives and the lives of those around us. This takes place sometimes very obviously, sometimes more subtly. Fear’s toolbox contains a very powerful device that, if not addressed and relinquished, will ensure that the old order will forever rule the day. This device is denial. For many years I stewed in the juice of denial. Sara Bareilles describes the dynamic eloquently in her sublime song “Orpheus“:
Missing the world
The one you knew
The one where everything made sense because you
didn’t know the truth…..
Indeed, many of us didn’t know the truth for long stretches of our lives. Denial has an important role to play in our survival…
Dis-illusion
Then there is the case of Deepak Chopra whom I have admired as a spiritual teacher and a person who has not only achieved heightened states of awareness but has also been very effective in helping those who have embarked on a similar quest. What alarms me is the documented propinquity, familiarity, and absence of scruples between this powerful spiritual figure and a man (Epstein) whose crimes against children and young women were not only widely known but had already led to criminal prosecution. When someone claims moral authority, association itself becomes evidence of lack of discernment. When Chopra positioned himself as a global moral authority, and spoke endlessly about consciousness, healing, and enlightenment, while simultaneously maintaining close relationship and correspondence with one of the most documented child sex traffickers in modern history, no further „evidence“ of his spiritual bankruptcy is needed.
Slave Patrols
I have been living in Germany for many decades now. My arrival was preceded by the NBC mini-series on the Holocaust which had been broadcast on German TV over four consecutive nights in January 1979 and coincided with public interest in the third instalment of the Majdanek trials, the longest Nazi war crimes trial in history, spanning over 30 years. Members of the main government party, the Social Democrats, had seen the original — English language — NBC series some months earlier and urged its broadcast in Germany, dubbed in German, of course. Broadcast on WDR State TV, the viewership was estimated to have comprised up to 15 million households or 20 million people, approximately 50% of West Germany’s entire adult population….
