The Current Devotion

You are already in a supremely devoted practice.

Those patterns you keep creating are the map to your practices of devotion, but alone, you are at risk for getting trapped in the swamp of shame, pedaling away on the stationary bike of trying to fix/build/become.

This is one of the first lies I tackle with my clients: I'm not committed, not showing up, not doing what I know I need to do. I'm incapable of devotion, I don't know how.

We turn to the truth of the moment. Where ARE they devoted? What are the systems that provide for their actual current practices of devotion? How does their devotion contribute to their practices of creation and destruction? How does their devotion inform their communication to others, themselves, the world?

Shame's compounding, exponential nature causes us to turn away from some of our deepest genius and gifts. My presence offers a space where my clients will never be shamed or judged for their being, a space where it is safe, even, to reveal their own harsh judgments of themselves. I advocate for the way that they are, the way that they have been, the wholeness of their practice, process, and result, and the way that it reveals deep wisdom.

In that witnessing, my clients come to see their own vast power in holding patterns, ready to be claimed. The holding patterns are revered as vaults, temples of power, fortresses full of resources, and the inner landscape transforms from a war zone to a flourishing cityscape, as we begin to allow that it might be safe, even to go on being EXACTLY as we are.

Safety is a practice of devotion, and the unavailability of safety can alienate us from practices of safety.

Yet safety's availability cannot cause us to enter that practice.

We must each learn, commit, and walk into practices of safety, decide that the war is over, or that war is not the way, that we would rather be devastated again and again than continue fighting.

Do you see it, right there? The willingness to be devastated. It's genius lying in plain sight. All the suffering we put ourselves through in the moment, striving to get somewhere safe. We are supremely willing to suffer. Are we willing to delay that suffering? To spend that power elsewhere, and use the moment to love exactly what is happening? Mind-bogglingly, might we apply that love, EVEN to the choice to suffer in the moment?

The genius is that we are willing to hurt. The question is, are we willing to HAVE the love we've been striving for? To experience openheartedness, trust, equanimity, compassion, safety, and sovereignty, even as others and ourselves judge harshly, have condemning thoughts, express dissatisfaction and disappointment?

Are we willing to rise above the "threat" that emotions represent, and honor that they happen and we experience them?

I can always say Yes, Thank You, to what reality offers, so long as I am willing to feel.