Category Archives: Spirituality

When your Yes becomes No

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Woman sitting on a rocky beach

Do you want to say No to people, situations, and commitments that used to be Yes? You’re not alone. This is a common theme with my clients, especially as we re-emerge from Covid.

These “used to be Yes” items run the gamut from the immense – a marriage, at least in its current form – to the seemingly small – dropping out of a small group or unsubscribing from an email list.     

Why is it so hard for women to honor their new No?

Here are two stuck spots my clients experience. A third, women and our discomfort with our power, is a subject for another newsletter!

1. You feel afraid of hurting someone’s feelings. Fear of hurting someone’s feelings is actually just avoiding conflict. Underneath the avoidance of conflict is the belief that your own desires and priorities aren’t as important as the perceived desires and priorities of the person whose feelings you’re afraid of hurting. And this belief you have, that your desires and priorities aren’t as important as other people’s desires and priorities, is bullshit perpetrated on you and other women by the patriarchy. (See last week’s newsletter for more about trusting your desires.)

2. You feel afraid of the emptiness and openness created when, not knowing what might emerge to take its place, you honor your No. This fear of unknowing, of emptiness and openness, is actually the belief that you can’t trust yourself, your desires and your priorities. And your lack of trust in yourself is actually a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s nature and your connection to It.

We’ve been trained to believe in a linear, patriarchal, masculine, capitalist model that we’re one and done. That the goal of life is to figure out what we’re supposed to do, go do it, and then maintain this state, kicking and screaming if necessary, until we die. That there’s one correct answer and our job is to figure it out. Get it right or die trying.

This false, toxic model underlies that question we ask kids: What do you want to be when you grow up?

This false, toxic model also underlies the questions we ask ourselves as adults: What’s my purpose? What’s my calling? Who did God create me to be?

Beloved, this is NOT how Creator works. The God who is constantly making all things new asks us very different questions: Who am I called to be right now? How can I respond most fully and joyfully to this moment?

The answers to those questions almost certainly aren’t what they were ten years ago, ten days ago, or even ten minutes ago.

Creation and the force continually creating it, aka God, is always birthing, dying, and being reborn. Always. As members of that matrix, inextricably entwined in this holy cycle, we are born, we die, and we are born again. Over and over and over.

No is as holy and as necessary as Yes, when your No is rooted in your soul. Listen to your No. Trust your knowing. Trust your desires. Trust God to be at work in you, continually creating you, continually making you new.

PS. I share news, dates for upcoming free Zoom conversations (our first one is June 17th!), and coaching opportunities through my weekly newsletter. You can subscribe here.

Photo by The Humantra on Unsplash

Deconstruction 101

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Open hands holding a yellow daisy

What exactly is this thing we’re calling “deconstruction”? And, if you choose to deconstruct your faith, how exactly do you do it? These are the questions I’m asking right now, mainly because you’ve been asking them of me.

“Deconstruction” implies that the thing we’re taking apart was constructed at some time by some one. The thing we’re deconstructing wasn’t delivered whole and entire in one piece from on high. Someone made it up. Someone built it.

We usually think of deconstruction as demolishing. That when we’ve taken something apart, all we’ll be left with is a pile of rubble. If we’re feeling anger toward the thing, that demolition might feel really good. But what many of us are feeling when we think about deconstructing our faith, along with a little or a lot of anger, are grief and fear. If I take this thing apart, what will I be left with to shelter me? And what about the parts of it I love and that do nurture me? If I blow the thing up, those pieces are smashed to smithereens.

Deconstruction can be thoughtful and nonviolent, if we choose to do it that way. Deconstruction can honor your history, your tender heart, and your anger.

Why take our faith apart? To get to the deep structure. The Ground of Being. The unconditional. The treasure beneath all the religious trappings.

Here’s how I’m currently deconstructing my faith:

1. Let the structure fall down. Let it go. Stop spending valuable energy propping up what needs to be allowed to fall. You have more important work to do. Make the decision to tear it down.

2. Collect the pieces in a pile. Cover them with a tarp and walk away for awhile. Wander into the closest wildflower meadow, maybe. Lie back and watch the clouds. Put your feet in the nearest creek.

3. When you’re ready, sift through the pieces for usable and beautiful remnants. Hold each piece in your hands and feel your body’s truth. Keep only what makes you feel open and free.

Jesus is a keeper, for me. His essence, his stories, his life and his death – these are all life-giving for me. I’m keeping the mystics – Hildegard, Julian, Margery, Claire and Francis, Meister Eckhart. I’ll keep Harriet Tubman and Oscar Romero. I’ll keep the Beguines, abolitionists, and Catholic Workers. I’m keeping all the preschools, soup kitchens, and twelve-step groups in church basements. I’ll keep English cathedral organs and choirs. I’m keeping cloisters, too.

But “sin” I’m letting go. The masculine god “up there,” separate from Earth? I’m letting Him go, too. The rules about who’s in and who’s out? Nope.

This isn’t a rational process. It’s more like the KonMari method for deciding what to keep and what to let go of: “Does this spark joy?” If not, out it goes.

4. Take your time rebuilding. You have time. Let this emptiness be a gift. It’s okay to be unsheltered for a while. Receive the “gift of the goo,” as one client put it recently. This is where finding your community can be incredibly helpful. Feeling unsheltered is scary. It helps to have friends out here in this empty place.

You may find that you use very little from your former shelter. You may find that you need to move completely and start over from bare Earth. You may find that you’re mostly good where you are, and that just a few tweaks are necessary. I know and love many Christians who are perfectly content living in the shelter of the traditional church.

I’m also hearing from more and more people who are simply no longer willing to tolerate the church’s refusal to listen and change. Your stories of leaving church are heart-breaking, and your courageous walks into the empty spaces in search of a nurturing, whole faith are inspiring.

By doing this process, you’ll be able to identify what’s healthy and healing for you because it sparks joy, and what makes your body feel awful and you won’t tolerate it anymore.

Why deconstruct? To return to the Source, the Living Water.

PS. I’m sharing current happenings and coaching opportunities in my newsletter, including upcoming free Zoom conversations. You can subscribe here. Thanks!

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

There’s no such thing as heresy.

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Little girl sitting in the forest with sun shining on her

There is no such thing as heresy. “Heresy” is just someone’s opinion. If your spiritual practice hurts your soul, please stop doing it. Let it go.

Thank you, dear readers, for your responses to my story of leaving church. You thanked me for my bravery, saying that now you feel more brave. You shared your own stories of leaving church. Turns out it’s a common story. And you wanted to know more about how to do this work of “deconstructing faith.”

First of all, let’s be very clear. You get to do this work. You have the right to do your own theology. You do not need permission from any external authority to deconstruct a faith that’s not working for you. If your religion is harmful to any part of you, you have permission to tear it down as needed. Not only do you have permission, we all benefit when you do this work.

You have a right and a responsibility, if only to yourself, to do this work – the work of creating a spiritual structure in which you can live in wholeness and integrity. With passion and joy. A faith that shelters and empowers all of you, including your pain and your messiness.  

And you know how to do this work. You just have to remember who you are at your core.

When I was a young girl, my parents took us every Sunday to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Prescott, Arizona. I liked going to church. So, one sunny morning when I was eight or so, I felt inspired to take a Book of Common Prayer to the forest behind our house and have church. This was before my parents divorced, when my still-intact family lived in the house my parents built on a piece of land covered with Ponderosa Pine, manzanita, and granite, bordered on one side by Aspen Creek and on the other by National Forest.

I dutifully set the prayer book on a lectern-shaped piece of lichen-covered granite sheltered by a stand of Gambel Oak, and began to read. Almost instantly the prayer book words became irrelevant, and all I could do was gaze at the sky. Sun and clouds and true blue dream of sky broke in and filled my awareness. No barrier between little girl me and God. Rather than having to be good to earn love, in that moment I knew I was loved because there was only me and Love. No separation.

This memory has never faded. It’s vivid still. But I forgot its meaning and tried valiantly for many years to make myself fit into the church box.

You have experiences like this buried in your memories, too.

You know how to do this work. Remember who you are underneath all the façades you’ve accumulated. Reclaim your original blessing. Recommit to living a life of integrity with your soul.

Here’s a step-by-step way to remember, reclaim, and recommit.

1. Bring to mind an early experience of deep knowing, peace, awe, holiness, oneness, the numinous. This might be a church experience.

2. Inhabit this experience fully. Be in your body as much as you can be. Be that kid again, bathed in joy, resting in peace and belonging.

3. Notice how your body feels. Choose three to five words to describe this feeling. (Mine are “awe, loved, peaceful.”) Put these words everywhere. They’re important.

4. This feeling is your soul’s voice. Listen to it. Follow it. Amplify it.

5. Single voices are beautiful. So are choirs. Share your voice in community, if you choose to, when you’re ready.

Know what you know. Feel what you feel. Say what you mean. Do what you want.

You will find your way. You will create a sanctuary for your soul, and we will all be stronger for the work you’ve done.

PS. I’m planning a series of Zoom conversations in June. More details will be forthcoming in my weekly newsletter. You can subscribe here. Thanks!

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

Blessed are the nice, for they shall be liked.

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Girl sitting in a field of flowers with the sun shining on her

The problem with living from your soul is that other people don’t like it.

Last week I wrote to you about the first healing shift I teach my clients: more soul, less façade. I gave you lots of high-falutin’ reasons why soul-based living is better than going through the façade-based motions of living.

But it’s hard at first, isn’t it? Making this shift can be hard because we’re afraid of our loved ones’ reactions. And even strangers’ reactions, to be honest. And we’re all about honesty around here.

If you’re worried about what other people will think or how other people will react when you start living from your soul and telling the truth, you’re not alone. You’re just human, with a human brain.

Culture, a web of constructed social systems, depends on its members caring what other people think. We’re taught to be nice from the cradle. Especially women living in a patriarchy.

Not only are we trained into scoping outward for approval, we’re also hard-wired internally for belonging. Our brains have evolved to fear disapproval and disconnection, because to be cast out of the group back in hunter-gatherer days was almost certainly to die. Our ancestors who cared deeply about belonging to the group lived to reproduce, while those who flouted the group norms were left to die lonely, hungry deaths on the savannah.

Hence our brains that go batshit crazy when they think we’re going to be disapproved of. Disapproval = death, at least to that part of our brains. And that part of our brain screams like a banshee.

Here’s how that shift and its accompanying fear are playing out in my own life right now. I know some of you will relate.

I’ve quit church. This goes deeper than COVID-related church attendance restrictions. I’ve begun checking the “none” box on surveys that ask about religious affiliation, because the “Christian” box no longer fits.

Leaving church has been easier during the pandemic, but the jig is about to be up. Come this fall, when it’s safe to do so, those who want to will be able to attend church in person again. I will not be among them. If history is any guide, this will be “a thing.”

I don’t know why it’s so important to members of my husband’s parish that I attend church. All I know is that when I’ve taken sabbaticals in the past, folks get worked up. I think sometimes this is just affection and concern for my welfare. But when someone I don’t even know asks Jed’s parish administrator, “Is Barb sick? I haven’t seen her lately,” something else is going on. They ask Jed where I am and if I’m okay. Parishioners see me out and about and say how much they’ve missed me. It’s a thing. Maybe it’s more of a thing in my brain than in real life. The result is the same.

My fear of others’ reaction has kept me silently complicit and out of my integrity for years now. My truth: I will no longer sit silently in the pew while God is referred to as “He,” texts are read that perpetuate violence against women, and our holy Earth is denigrated.

My husband does his heroic best to mitigate these messages with his preaching and his presence. He does as much as he can, within the constraints of his ordination. It’s no longer enough for me. Patriarchal, misogynist, dualistic language and doctrines are built into the structure of the institutional church. The institution seems unwilling to look seriously at the damage it’s done and continues to do.

I’m over it. When I imagine sitting inside a church on Sunday morning, my body feels icky – tense, hunched over, closed down. And when I imagine mountain church or river church, I feel strong, free, and peaceful. I feel happy.

Because my happiness matters to me, I choose myself and my priorities over being nice and propping up this harmful system with my presence. By the way, this is the same choice Jesus made – to speak his truth and live his integrity. His choice led him to the cross. Mine only leads to braving my own discomfort and judgment of others.

So, my friends. This shift from façade to soul with regard to church is scary for me. Jed and I have had some uncomfortable conversations. He supports my decision while also feeling the loss of my presence on Sunday mornings. More uncomfortable conversations are probably heading my way as we emerge from our Covid cocoons. And that’s okay. I can handle them, because I’m confident in my decision. My body is telling me the truth, and I believe her.

These are the trials and the rewards of integrity, of living more from my soul and less from my façade. I feel more scared, while also feeling more powerful, whole, and free. That’s how this goes.

When you make this shift and people don’t like it, that just means you’re doing it right.

PS. Want to talk more about the four healing shifts and coaching together? I offer a free, no-strings-attached clarity call. Contact me here to schedule. I’d love to connect!

PPS. My newsletter is where I share the latest updates, like new coaching offerings, classes, workshops, and easy ways to work together. I send it weekly, and I promise never to spam you or share your address. Your info is safe with me.

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash

Practice Resurrection: 3 poems

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Woman gardening
Practicing Resurrection

Resurrection is a discipline. We live in a Good Friday world – patriarchal, consumerist, capitalist, colonialist. This world needs our Easter selves – hopeful, irrational, bursting out of the tomb, aspiring to love and kindness. Here are three poems to support you in your practice of resurrection.

Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You’ve been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.

Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.

Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also, like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

Mary Oliver, from The Leaf and the Cloud

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.

There you can be sure you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.

You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness

to learn anything or anyone

who does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte from The House of Belonging

Photo by Zoe Schaeffer on Unsplash

A letter from God to her daughters who observe Lent

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Woman with a cross of ashes on her forehead

Dear Daughter,

On Ash Wednesday, if you were in church, the minister would invite you to the observance of a “holy Lent” and mark your forehead with the ashes of repentance.

Let me be very clear about this: I love you so much. I delight in you. I cherish you. For ever.

Here are a few more things I want you to comprehend. Despite what you’ve been taught, “holy” does not mean pure and unearthly. “Sin” does not mean breaking my rules and making me mad. “Penitence” does not mean listing and wallowing in all the ways you’re wrong and bad. “Repentance” does not mean promising to do better to stay out of trouble.

Please think about these words a new way, on Ash Wednesday and every other day going forward.

What if you only sin when you refuse healing and cling to brokenness? When you use those sharp broken edges to hurt yourself and others?

What if holiness is when you choose to be whole, even though you’re terrified? When you embrace and enfold those pieces of yourself you’ve lopped off to fit into others’ molds?

What if penitence is when you see yourself clearly, and know, speak, and live from your heart?

What if repentance is returning to your true self in all her messy glory?

What if, this Lent, instead of focusing on the ways you’re not good enough and the ways you fall short, you commit to your own healing?

I was there at the Big Bang, enlivening every particle, atom and molecule. You are made of me, and through me you are connected to everything and everyone. I am everywhere, my love. You live in me and I live in you.

This means, my dear, when you let yourself be healed, your healing heals the world. And when you cling to your brokenness, the world stays a little more broken than it needs to be. Your healing is important and necessary.

You think your healing is selfish. That’s incorrect. On the contrary, your healing is crucial. I’m using that word deliberately, sweetheart. Your healing is the crux – where you and I come together.

This Lent, the only fasts I want from you are these: Fast from distractions that allow you to stay wounded and broken. Fast from believing you’re not good enough. Fast from making yourself small, and nice, and silent. Fast from all judgment, especially of yourself.

This Lent, make space for me to flow into you and through you.

Befriend your fear, your anger, and your sadness. They are a deep source of nourishment and strength.

Let your love go free.

Let your joy be unconfined.

Sweetheart, healing isn’t complicated, and it’s always here for you. All you have to do is tap into it, like a springtime maple tree or an aquifer of living water. You know this. But it’s so easy to forget, isn’t it? All you have to do is let me clear out the dams and the trash, the resentments and identities and old, too-small skins that keep you stuck and stagnant. Open your heart armor just a little. Let go, child. Breathe and soften. That’s all you have to do. I’ll do the rest.

This Ash Wednesday, let those ashes symbolize our unending connection, a connection so easy to forget and so simple to strengthen. When the priest wipes those gritty ashes on your forehead and says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” celebrate your elemental oneness with this dear, dirty earth, and with me. I am in those ashes, in the dust, in the stars, and in you.

I need you, my daughter. You’re the only you I created. Please, let yourself be the creation I made you to be. You don’t need someone outside yourself telling you how to live. Trust yourself. Trust your heart. Trust me. I’ve got you.

All my Love,

God

A Lenten gift for you: two printables of this post are downloadable here.

Photo: Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash

The Feast of Barely Beginning

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Crocuses emerge in snow

I heard a lesser goldfinch sing his spring question and answer melody today. Waking up? he asks. Oh, do, he answers.

Crocuses, daffodils and tulips quicken underneath the snow.

Buds swell on bare trees sturdy as sculptures, though it will be many weeks till tender leaves emerge.

The feast of barely beginning is here!

Weeks of winter left, yes. Yet … Have you noticed the sun rising just a little earlier, shedding golden light on surfaces untouched for months by her rays? Have you noticed her just a little higher in the winter sky? Have you felt the lengthening days?

Earth, barely pregnant with new life, dances in snowy meadows and along forest trails, arrayed in festal white, silver, and the barest hint of spring green, holding her barely bulging belly.

Women walk riverbanks, gather new green willow branches and weave Brigid’s crosses to mark thresholds in this fresh year.

Melt, just a little, in the warmth of Brigid’s fire. Let go. Let yourself dream, dear child, of what could be. Dream, daughter, of what you want to create in the coming long summer days. Courageously dream into being the world you want to live in. And dream, Braveheart, of your heart’s companions in this work.

Bake bread. Make space. Speak true words at the right time. Bravely create the world you yearn for, one seed at a time. One furrow at a time. Row by row.

Set your holy intentions.

Tend your taproot. Feel your roots deep in the Mother wake up and slowly, so slowly, stretch and reach to touch your sisters all around you. Feel how everything you need is here. Feel your immense quiet power, slowly waking, held, supported, nourished by Earth—rich dirt feeds you, fresh cold snowmelt trickles down between your roots, warm sun limbers your branches, bright air infuses every leaf and needle. You have everything you need. Everything you need is here. You are perfectly placed. Be who you are. All will be well.

The Feast of Barely Beginning is here. Be here now, a creature of this glorious barely waking Earth. Be where you are, and come.

Let yourself be moved, just a little. Let yourself be warmed, just a little. Just a little. Let yourself be a peaceful slowly burgeoning miracle, waking, swelling, singing softly, rooting, growing. Just a little.

Just a little.

Just a little.

This poem is about Imbolc. Imbolc is one of eight Celtic celebrations rooted in Earth’s cycles – four solar festivals of solstices and equinoxes, plus four pastoral festivals: Imbolc in February, Beltane in May, Lughnassa (or Lammas) in August, and Samhain in November. These Earth-centric celebrations affirm the birth/death/rebirth cycle in which women especially are embedded by virtue of our menstruating bodies, and for which we have been shamed by patriarchal culture.

Celtic rites are an antidote to Earth-denigrating, patriarchal Christianity which is hostile to women and girls, and not all that kind to men.

At Imbolc (Candlemas, Brigid’s Day, Groundhog Day, the Feast of the Presentation), celebrated at the beginning of February, we begin to see the first stirrings of rebirth after the darkness of Winter Solstice and the longest night. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, days lengthen perceptibly. In Bend, today is an hour longer than it was on December 21st, and the sun is just a little higher in the winter sky. Bird behavior is just beginning to change, as the males begin to preen and sing and vie for female attention, and the females begin to consider their mating options. Buds on trees begin to swell in the growing daylight, although it will be weeks before leaves emerge. Bulbs begin to sprout in the dark dirt under the snow.

The energy of Imbolc feels like beginning. A gentle beginning, not raucous and full of fireworks, but slow, steady, almost imperceptible. Imbolc feels like the first little belly bulge of a new pregnancy. (Imbolc may derive from the Irish Gaelic word for “in the belly,” although the etymology is uncertain.)

Some Imbolc rituals have survived in Ireland for centuries and are rooted in pre-Christian history. Some are probably just invented because they help Earthlings ritualize the passage of time and ground them in Earth’s rhythms. February 1st begins the Feast of Brigid, also called Bride, one face of the Celtic triple goddess composed of maiden, mother, and crone, adopted by the Christian tradition as St. Brigid. Traditional Imbolc celebrations center on Brigid, an icon of holy change.

Imbolc celebrations in Ireland, and around the world for people who have adopted these Earth-honoring practices and made them their own, include some common elements:

  • White, green, and silver in cloth and candles.
  • Weaving Brigid’s crosses from local grasses, reeds, and willow branches, hung over doorways to mark thresholds.
  • Deep cleaning and space clearing, in preparation for new life.
  • Literal seeds: bake seeded bread or cookies or cake.
  • Seeds of intention: Make a vision board for 2021. Choose your word of the year if you haven’t already. Let the gentle spaciousness of Imbolc feed your vision, and you may come up with something more whole and healing than what you would have on January 1.
  • Sheep’s milk or wool: Imbolc in Ireland is when ewes begin to lactate in preparation for giving birth, so eat some ewe’s milk cheese. Tie off your Brigid’s cross with wool.
  • Light candles. Sit by a fire. It is still winter, after all.
  • Bird feathers, especially those of the swan, can be used on your cross or your altar.
  • Snowdrops are the traditional flower of Imbolc, but any white flower will do, if snowdrops are in short supply.

Go easy with yourself. Let the gentle energy of just beginning permeate your February. Sit with what feels good to your barely burgeoning roots and shoots. Brigid won’t mind if you weave her cross next week, or make a vision board later in the month. Be gentle. Watch for rebirth, yours and the Earth’s, barely beginning.

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash