May 26 by Lisa Avnet
Grief can be lodged in the body, a boulder on the heart, the internal landscape of loss. Many of my clients report feelings of grief and sadness, living in this time of profound personal, collective, and ecological loss. They may have lost connection with themselves in the fast pace of daily life; they may have lost a loved one, a relationship, a job, a home, a dream. So many metaphors describe the somatic sense of grief, sadness, and loss: I feel like there is a boulder on my chest, like my heart is broken, heavy, squeezed...it takes my breath away...all the color is gone. These metaphors describe the feeling of the unseen energy of emotion which has form in both our physical and energetic bodies.
Our modern culture has a difficult relationship with emotions in general, and with grief and sadness in particular; which can play out in daily life by limiting the flow of our life force, causing dullness, heaviness and fatigue. We cope by holding on, holding it in, holding it all together, tuning it out rather than allowing emotion to flow through us and dissipate naturally. Grief and sadness may be denied, minimized, and held in; people receive explicit messages to "suck it up" and "get over it" by those around them, and there is often little support, even within ourselves, for the vulnerability inherent in open expression of emotion. Often, a client has had no modeling and no support during childhood in expressing emotion. Grief has a minimal sanctioned period in our fast paced culture - perhaps a year in the case of a major loss. The pain of loss, particularly the loss of a deep attachment such as a parent or longtime partner or friend, has no timetable and can linger for years, eventually going underground. Grief can become a ghost, a boulder in the heart, that affects many areas of your life.
Sometimes, though, the loss might be old, minor, unrecognized and unconscious. Because emotions, including grief and sadness, are located in the body/mind or somatic unconscious, they often arise in dreams. Sometimes you may know what the strong feeling of grief was about, it's explicit in the dream, but just as often, it's inscrutable because it's been relegated to the unconscious. The feeling in the dream seems unrelated to the action and images.
Because emotions come from a different part of us than rational thought, and live outside of our brain, it's possible to understand the story behind what happened, perhaps why it happened, and why you feel something, and yet, your feelings and emotional reactivity doesn't shift or change and remains firmly lodged - it's still easily triggered or felt, coming out in dreams or crying during sad movies or while listening to music.
Throughout the early days of the pandemic, when hospital wards were full and death was coming hard and fast, my grief and pain at the situation was overwhelming. I grieved so many things: lives cut short; the loss of connection with others; the deep political divisions that arose; the valiant front line workers; the children stuck at home; the pain of women torn between the needs of their children and their jobs. I found an antidote, releasing my pain by howling daily along with the wolves via the Wolf Conservation Center live or recorded wolf cams, allowing my pain to flow. Vocalizing along with the wolves, offered me a sense of comfort in community that was unavailable during the lockdown.
I offer several pathways for working with held emotions, tailored to the unique needs of the individuals I work with. Energy work combined with somatic methods; interactive guided imagery combined with hypnosis; shamanic practices; and dreamwork are all quite effective.
If you're interested in learning more, you can book an information call or a session here
January 16 by Lisa Avnet
All of the garden photos on my website were taken in my own garden beds. The gardens are a legacy from my parents in law, both devoted gardeners, who installed them over the 4 decades that they lived here. My sister in law, garden designer Judy Murphy of Old Farms Nursery in Lakeville, CT designed the main bed with its Asian style rock garden many years ago. The mossy stones bring a special energy to the yard year round, and clients coming for an office visit are invited to enjoy the gardens, which have many places to sit and meditate or journal.
As a dedicated gardener and lover of plant life, I find gardening an apt metaphor for the process of personal evolution and growth. Gardens respond to outer conditions of weather and the other life forms that are ever present, just as we respond to life. The wind, rain, seasons, microbes, bugs, birds, bees, bunnies, woodchucks, mice and voles constantly shape the gardens, creating changes big and small. Oh, and I mustn't forget the pesky chipmunks digging holes everywhere! The garden is always changing. In the course of time, some flowers have disappeared, and new ones have arrived without me lifting a finger. Blue lobelia, or cardinal flower, a large one called nicotiana, and others have come into the garden in the years I've been tending it. Natur, and life, truly works in mysterious ways.
While I love flowers and have admired gardens all my life, I came to gardening relatively late in life. The learning curve was steep: gardening is so much more than just weeding! I always dreamed of having the kind of gardens I admired at my in law's properties and in magazines but I was completely naive about what gardening involves and the sheer amount of time and effort it takes to maintain them. A gardener friend did tell me that 20-30 hours a week for much of the weed season was going to be necessary in order to keep up the gardens here, and in my naivete, I thought she was exaggerating. Not so. What a shock. Real life is not the movies!
However, the garden gives back so much more than I put into it - the joy that fills my heart just looking at the gardens is a huge sustaining energy in my life. I love walking around the yard, taking photos of whatever catches my eye, and I've got about a zillion photos of them taken in all weathers, seasons, and times of day. My Instagram "berkshirehaven" is a place I post them, although it includes a few photos taken at my workplace at the Canyon Ranch Lenox property. The garden is a never ending delight, and sitting in various spots brings peace and grounding that balance my day.
Spiritual traditions worldwide have used the garden as a metaphor for that part of us often known as the heart, and sometimes, the soul. I often use it as a metaphor for the mind as well, as in "weed out the thoughts and worries you don't want and replace them with what you do - a mantra, phrase, affirmation, or prayer that over time, creates a new pathway in your thinking." My Mindfulness Meditation teacher once taught that we think approximately 90 thousand thoughts a day, and of those, 89,990 are similar and often less than positive things - part of the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening in our lives, the negative thoughts, and negative self talk that makes up our mind chatter.
Try identifying and pulling a specific mind-weed from the garden of your mind, and replacing it. If it's a negative thought like "you suck" find something you are proud of and reverse the negative with: you rock at ______! Or if it's a worry, weed that and replace with asking for, or sending, a blessing or acknowledging something you're grateful for. Like a garden, the thought weeds will keep popping up, and you just keep up the practice of weeding and replacing. In the short term, you can feel the benefits of this practice in your energy - it feels better! Over time, like water wearing a groove in stone, your persistence will yield the beauty of a more expansive and peaceful mind.
One of my favorite poets, speaks of it thus:
The Seven Of Pentacles by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
If this metaphor intrigues and delights you, consider booking a free Q and A call or a session here. My new signature program offering "Tending the Inner Garden" is a deeply restorative, organic unfolding of transformative practices and inner work. Read more about it here.
January 15 by Lisa Avnet
When I saw this beautiful painting by artist Mara Friedman I was struck by how accurately it depicted the energy of the coaching container - what it feels like to sit with an attuned, compassionate, and loving practitioner - the energetics. There is a magic that happens in the coaching session: you are held in safety, free to show all of yourself, deeply listened to and mirrored in your wholeness, a rare and deeply nourishing opportunity in life.
In my experiences with my own Soul Centered Coach, I noticed that my consciousness was amplified by the coaching dyad; that insights and epiphanies spontaneously arose in each session. Images, archetypes, and symbols have energetic form and that energy becomes available to us when we engage with it consciously, creating valuable resources to draw on in daily life. The symbols in Mara's painting - the butterfly, spiral, and flower, the golden orb - are arising in the energy field created in the session - the synthesis of my energy field and yours bringing the mingled field to a new and higher level, a level from which insight arises.
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
From poem "St. Francis and the Sow" by Galway Kinnell
As a healer and guide, this poem is dear to me, as it touches into the heart of the coaching relationship. In our work together, we'll be exploring your inner world through the lens of your soul self with love and an eye to developing that "self-blessing" .
I'll share an example from my own experience. In the early spring of 2022, an image of a wise woman holding an ornately decorated scrying bowl arose in one of my own coaching sessions and began to kindle my imagination. It seemed to be the perfect image for the energetics involved in working with someone as a practitioner - the bowl as the container. I brought this into daily life, gathering some of the many bowls in my home and considering their energetic qualities and what that might represent. I journaled on this and have included a segment below. It was an enlivening and satisfying process.
I
I hold this sacred image, a wise woman holding a bowl in her two hands, offering it to those seeking soul sustenance.
When I sit with a bowl on my lap, the well of my heart opens and pours love into the world.
When I'm tending a soul, my own, or another’s, which container will best serve their needs?
The blown beach glass bowl with swirls of blue waters to bring flow and clarity?
The Himalayan singing bowl, to sound the complexity of overtones and bring forth new energy?
The heavy clay bowl, Raku fired with wood, and its many hued blue glaze, bringing its gift of earth, water, and fire, and grounding into the body?
Or the turned wood bowl, gifted to me with love, full of the nature elements of the standing people, home to the winged ones, and of earth, air, and sky?
Which bowl is called into service today? What energy is needed in this particular coaching container, with this precious being?
What is an image you hold? Can you expand it into daily life using metaphor?
If this intrigues you, book a free clarity call for more information or a session, here.
January 13 by Lisa Avnet
Growing up, we often learn to turn away from the instinctive wisdom of our heart center.
The message at home, school, and with peers, is often to put aside the inner knowing of your heart's wisdom, to ignore it and instead, to go along with the main consensus to get along with others. We learn to squash, hide or shut down heart knowing and feelings, in order to please, to be accepted, to get along or be safe.
And slowly, over time, shutting down how you feel becomes the default pathway. The voice of your heart is silenced. You no longer feel, hear or valued its priceless wisdom. Modern culture doesn't teach us to how to access the the knowledge and wisdom that we hold in our hearts. We're taught to ignore and move away from our heart feelings and voice in order to get on with it, to be agreeable and fit in.
One of the most powerful tools we have to guide us, to connect to ourselves and the world around is our heart, and it's vital to be connected to this priceless inner gps system.
The human heart is mysterious, intelligent, powerful, deeply feeling and often misrepresented.
In these modern times, especially within western culture, the heart has been largely left on the shelf and forgotten.
And yet, there remains ancient wisdom and stories to guide us, information about the heart as a seat of the soul, a place of knowing and the compass and guide of our being. In many diverse spiritual traditions, the heart is given a place of honor, referred to as the "cave of the heart", the "well of the heart" and in early desert Christianity "the cell of the heartt", in energy medicine, the "portal of the heart". Taoist wisdom and Chinese medicine identifies the heart as the "Emperor" that governs all other function in the human body. These diverse perceptions have been substantiated by numerous scientific studies, showing the heart to be an organ of perception and communication, rich with nerve cells and a brain in its own right through which we view the world, an organ deeply rooted in our emotional and mental health.
Twelfth century Christian mystic, Hildegard of Bingen wrote, “The soul sits at the center of the heart, as though in a house.”
“The majority of modern peoples, if asked to find the place within their body where the unique self resides, would say they live about an inch above their eyebrow….. But most indigenous and historical peoples would locate the self someplace very different. They would gesture in the region of the heart. For most of our history of habitation on earth, that is where the seat of intelligence, the seat of the soul, was located. That this has changed is more an expression of how and what we are taught in western cultures than of some exact truth.” - Stephen Harrod Buhner
Slowly, we are returning to the awareness of the heart's importance. The heart's central place in our being is slowly being restored. The Heart Math Institute has developed a simple practice called Heart Coherence to restore us to connection with our hearts, which been taught world-wide for many years.
Our heart's nervous system is attuned to other fields and is contantly receiving information in energetic form. Our world is full of the invisible and the felt, the language of the soul.
The Greeks had a word for the hearts ability to perceive meaning from the world - Aisthesis. The word literally means “to breathe in”. It is receiving the world, a taking in of soulful communication that connects us. When we experience this, we experience that we are not alone in the world. Aisthesis denotes the moment in which a flow of life force, imbued with communications, moves from one living organism to another.
“the organ of aisthesis is the heart; passages from all the sense organs run to it, there the soul is set on fire” - James Hillman
Want to get started strengthening your connection to your heart wisdom? I offer several pathways to re-connection. Book a free consult today for more information.
December 23 Metaphors for the Beauty Way of tending your inner gardens – a Map of the Territory.
I had fun one snowy day in December, on the new moon, dreaming and weaving some words about soul qualities that I carry and kindle in others. Hope you enjoy this list and perhaps are inspired to create one from your own life experience.
I’m a tracker, following the threads of image, dream and story and assisting in bringing them to consciousness. As a tracker, I listen deeply and ask questions to help you connect with your own tracking system to find and follow the thread your through line.
I’m a gatherer, harvesting words and wisdom for sharing. As a gatherer, I delight in sharing my knowledge and in learning from yours. I hold the sacred bowl in our work together, lighting the way .
I’m a sower with a myriad of seeds to share for individual and community growth - like Johnny Appleseed, my basket is full. As a sower, I plant seeds for future growth into the fertile field of consciousness.
I’m a gardener and tender, helping the flowers flourish and the weeds wither. I am a guide to the garden of soul, watering the keepers, and replacing the weeds with the seeds of new growth. As a gardener, I help you tend the symbols, images and stories that arise.
I'm a weaver, like Grandmother Spider, always weaving colorful threads into the web of my life, repairing as needed and starting anew when I must. As a weaver, assisting others in cultivating the threads and weaving the fabric into their own unique life tapestry.
A hearth tender, I'll teach you to tend to your heart hearth with the energies you have gathered and how to fan your inner flame of inspiration and joy.
And a poem would be in order but that's for another day. I do what I can, with the time I have, and my to do list is calling.
December 10 by Lisa Avnetrepost from Tad Hagrave's Substack page "On Culture Making" written June 2021
Last night, driving home to Victoria from Courtenay, I was listening to Martin Shaw and Manchán Magan on the work of John Moriarty. Martin had just written up a collection of John's work in a beautiful book called A Hut At The Edge of the Village.
"He wasn't woke. He was dreaming," said Martin of John.
That difference struck me as worthy of sinking into.
There is such a focus on being 'woke' these days. I'm not against it but there's more to the story. Being awake is half the story of being human. The other part is dreaming or, even more so, being dreamed.
The condition of being awake is a hard one. It means seeing this world with a blazing lucidity with the noon day Sun banishing all shadows. It means coming to sobering grips with the consequences that made us and that we have made. It means attending to the 'wake' we have left behind us and trying to discern which boat left the wake in which we find ourselves.
It means regularly attending the 'wake' of all the endings, limits and frailties that are a part of life. There's a lot of grief in seeing clearly. As Stephen Jenkinson puts it, "the sound of waking up is not 'aha'. It's a sob." And that's often true.
But there's another whole side to this.
It's being on the receiving end of the deep mystery often in the form of images that appear to us. Sometimes those images come to us in the form of poetry and old folk tales. Sometimes they come to us in dreams.
We didn't generate the images any more than we generated the eggs we cook or apples we pick but they nourish us just the same.
Being awake lets us see the territory as it is, but being dreamed by forces greater than us is what allows us to navigate that territory and choose a direction.
Part of being awake must also be to wake up to the hard limits of wakefulness. Of course, the science, statistics and data matters. But, if that's all we have, we are left directionless and overwhelmed.
Dreaming and being dreamed is the home of our intuition, of synchronicities, of the ways that the natural world speaks to us and gives us signs.
I suspect that traditional people's understood that the little ones born to them came out of the Big Dream, from the other side, that they were a sign of something and some ones. That the appearance, the gifts, capacities, personalities and interests of this little one could tell us something of the times we were in. They were a communication from the Great Beyond.
And this matters. As Martin put it in another wonderful book of his called Scatterlings, "Of course we're outgunned. But outnumbered? Not when you call in the myth world, not when you call to ancestors deserving of the name, not when you weft your life to the thinking of a hare or the open-shouldered stance of a midwinter beech. Make a stand for something small, specific and precious. Do it today. Amen and let it be so."
We are being spoken to constantly. Part of that speech we hear when we are awake. Part of it is banished by our insistence on constant, vigilant, wakefulness.
Calling out bad behaviour is important but so is being able to hear the call of your soul telling you where to go next.
Can we, as Yeats suggested, "make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us to see their own images and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even a fiercer life because of our silence."?
Wakefulness tries to offer us safety rooted in control. "If we just understand enough of the facts, we'll finally be able to relax," says some younger part of us obsessed with the idea that universe is a machine. It's understandable but it's not the only kind of safety there is. The little bird doesn't feel safe because it trusts the branch won't break.
Wakefulness gives us a map but dreaming gives us a compass. Maybe it's something like that.
Statistics are like bread. The calories burn quick, man. But images? These are the full, exploding with nourishment, dripping fat left to us in the mystery feast of our ancestral art and stories. It's amazing any of it has survived at all.
Dealing with the troubles of the world can't happen by logic alone. It will also take radical imagination. The root of this word is 'image'. The images we receive from nature, good art, our dreams, poetry and myth. No image? No imagination. No imagination? No new direction. No new direction? More of what's become normal and, as Bruce Cockburn says, "The trouble with normal is it always gets worse."
While we are busy trying to 'figure it all out' we may have missed the most obvious and important thing: we are the world's way of sorting out the messes of the world. Imagine a body full of white blood cells waiting for someone to come along to deal with the troubles of the body. We, ourselves, are one of the images, planted in the world at just the right place and in just the right time.
Dreaming is that hut at the edge of the village. It receives strange guests all night long. They leave gifts for you when you wake. You will need them in the times to come. The ones to come will need them more.
https://open.substack.com/pub/tadhargrave/p/the-woke-and-the-dreaming?r=kbiem&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
April 16 by Lisa Avnet
