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This especially resonated: "when I allow myself the pause then I can move forward grounded in what I love and not what I fear." I've often had the tendency to leap into life following intuition, entering open doors without much pause. It's only been in the last 4 years, I've really allowed a longer pause to do as Carrie so beautifully expressed, pause. Last year I went on a personal pilgrimage to try to ascertain next chapter of my life. My work is 99% remote do I had the opportunity to travel and sit with myself in different locations including house & cat sitting in Anchor Point Alaska for 2 months last summer. This was somewhat remote. The view put the window was the Aleutian Mountains across a sliver of Kachemak Bay. Every day I sat for hours looking at the mountains, observing the visiting pair of Sandhill Cranes, watching the light change. Going for quiet walks on the gravel road. This pause helped me to truly slow down to introspect, to assess my life. To ask questions, what can my life look like now? It was also helpful grounding foundation as I stepped through a door to be live-in caregiver for my mom who has had decades long struggle with severe debilitating anxiety & cognitive impairment, now early stage dementia. Without the personal pilgrimage pause. I'm not sure I could do what I'm now living. It's still not easy. I learn hour by hour. With gratitude for this reflection and space.

Thank you for permission to complain consciously and to Let It Out! I'm usually a "find the silver lining" type, however,as live-in caregiver for my very negative, non-compliant, often verbally combative mom, I am Really grateful for your post to allow me to complian and not feel badly about it. Liberation of stagnation and some depression because of Holding So Much In. Thank you!

Love this practice of every day awe♡ I walk or run the same 3km path at a local park nearly every day. I stop and sit and meditate on a small stone bridge at the end. Nearly every day I experience awe: a Kingfisher perched on a branch, a duck diving under water, the ornamental grass waving in gentle breeze, the rough bark of a tree becomes waves on a sea... when we look with awe-open eyes we see so much more awe in what before may have only seemed ordinary.

I chose to coddiwomple to a local sanctuary today: Hawk Mountain. Beat part? I decided to use Google maps and it chose a beautiful scenic backroads route rather than the highway. So not only was the destination stunning, the way there and back were too! And on the trail conversation flowed with 2 visitors from Washington state, one of whom happened to be in the same area of Alaska as me this summer, also for 2 months. Talk about coddiwompling! Grateful

To me the practice before the practice is deep presence. This deep presence also is what assists in the unfolding of the practice. Like Mark Nepo's examples of apprenticeship: it is the presence and attention which opens the door to practice. An example in my life is Storytelling. In 1994 I happened upon being asked to tell stories to children in a library. I had a deep presence with books & a theatre background so brought in lots of participation. After 4 years attention & honing this type telling, I apprenticed with several Tellers, watching, listening, paying attention to their craft. And then I began to tell Folktales in schools and other libraries and eventually internationally at festivals and created/facilitated a volunteer literacy project in Belize. The practice before the practice was invaluable. Still is today. ♡

First, this has me thinking about Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer & gold highlighting & honoring the cracks rather than hiding them. The repaired vessel is considered more valuable than before it was broken. A deeply helpful and healing metaphor for our own lives. 'Insistence on perfection precludes growth' shows up for me like this: focusing so much on the perfection of writing/revisions/edits that the book took 6 years from the 1st draft to when it was finally published. Grad school 20 hours spent revising a 1000 word paper (of which there were 14 in the 10 month program + the larger project). Or in a more ordinary example, an hour spent continually revising an email before sending. What was the growth denied? Time to give more to the world around me. Growth in seeing the good enough already present. Liberation!

As a Storyteller, I've always appreciated Nasrudin's wisdom. And thank you for taking us deeper with layers of meaning. To me, the value in emptiness is the heartfelt remembering which may occur. For example, I was missing a dear friend who has been out of contact due to some mental health challenges. I've learned from this person their preferred way of navigating is to go inward and quiet so I wait for them to reconnect when they feel ready. This emptiness in the missing the connection reminds me of the value of this friendship♡ Thank you again for taking us deeper with Nasrudin!

David, I deeply appreciate and resonate with your thoughtful response. Thank you!

Sound of genuine means to me the ability to see/hear one's authentic self beneath the expectations, messages and ways of being placed on us externally. It is un-learning those ideas and reconnecting with who we were as very young children. For example, in my life I have lived an intention of compassion for everyone, no exception. This began when I was a young child and witnessed my father being treated without compassion and I was bullied at school. While these are external events, they connected me to the value of compassion. This is the sound of the genuine for me. If I'm compassionate to everyone it expands love and understanding which feels pretty genuine to me. Not sure I explained this well.

Thank you for sharing this practice of praying with the news. As a Narrative Therapy Practitioner, i relate to the acknowledgement of context/ both/and in emotions. I've practiced a similar prayer in slightly different context of praying for grace for myself and for people and situations which bring up anger. I love this extension to praying with the news to honor and acknowledge the grief so often (nearly always) under the anger. Doing this now with climate change and the human impacts... with gratitude, Kristin

Thank you for your work. As a sister survivor and one who also works with survivors through Narrative Therapy Practices and the Japaneseart of Kintsugi (mending broken pottery with glue and gold to honor and highlight the cracks rather than hide them), I'm with you in the acknowledged pain and suffering And the journey to celebrating the many intelligences and skills survivors utilize to survive. Kintsugi and its metaphors are powerful and poignant in opening conversations about healing. It's been such a profound gift to walk together in these preferred narratives which honor that no one is a passive recipient to trauma. Grateful!

Waiting without expectation to me = presence. Being in the moment. Noticing. It allows ease. I practice this often. At present, I'm grateful to be in presence in the home of my dear friend's godfather who is dying from cancer, in and out of restful state and intense pain. I am here as an additional support lending hands in whatever is needed. Often that is presence, waiting, sitting with, noticing. Due to aphasia, he has only a few words so we notice breathing, body language, gestures. I notice when waiting in presence without doing other tasks I slow down further. My presence is yet deeper. My gratitude expands. Waiting in liminal space, a gift

All we can do is offer kindness, caring, compassion; how these land we may never know. What we can know is no kindness is ever wasted. Just today I let my mother know she is not alone in aging. She'll turn 80 in December and has been fretting ablit that number. Today I shared a blog post by an 83 year old woman who writes oprnly about being 83 and continuing to do what makes her happy including traveling solo. I shared this so my mom could hear this woman also has arthritis, also has a thyroid issue. My mom visibly relaxed. She felt less alone in her feelings. What helps me stop thinking of myself are my daily readings from service space, nice news, meditation and focusing on being of service.♡

Thank you for this. Acting through. which I interpret as allowing myself to be a conduit is how I seek and have sought to live my life and share the gifts I've been given. This has manifested no matter what job or task, I feel spirit or something larger than myself coming through. Acting through has shown up when I shared FREE HUGS, when I facilitate Narrative Therapy Practices with survivors of abuse, when I was a performative Storyteller, when I sought to build bridges between peoples with perceived (and real) differences. I'm incredibly grateful for every time this has happened, a powerful reminder that we are all connected to each other and to something larger than ourselves.

I love this reframe being vigilance as keeping vigil in worship/peace. Thank you. I will need to meditate on this to see what this reframe brings up. I have layers of lived experience of vigilance related to trauma and work with survivors of abuse too, so I have layers of unlearning to do.

Having a sense of purpose makes all the difference, as we see in the story. Many of us live in societies which do not put priority on purpose or the longview of what we're contributing, but on short term gain. Isn't it wonderful when we can stand up for purpose being the priority rather than simply making money as the goal? Like the Stonemasons, we can find purpose too. When I'm teaching Presentation Skills in translating complex data, I remind myself what I'm actually doing is teaching how to connect more human to human heart to heart. What are the human stories behind the numbers? In each assignment I remind myself to be as loving as possible in my feedback and to find the humanity. Theres also the "bigger" purposes. In 2005, I stood up to the prevailing ideas of 'success' & 'shoulds' and sold my small home and sold/gave away most of my possessions to found/facilitate a volunteer literacy project. I donated programs for over 30K children and trained over 800 teachers in 75+ villages how to use their own cultural stories to teach writing. Today, I'm a Narrative Therapy Practitioner whose purpose is to co-create preferred stories, not 'fix people.' I support this with the 50 day contract teaching Presentation Skills. The purpose under all the work is Storytelling, Humanity, Heart. Here's to finding purpose in whatever work, tasks, sharing we do.

This post brings up many layers for me both personally and professionally as a Narrative Therapy Practitioner. In this perspective, emotions are not to be judged, they simply are. The distinction intros post of 'avoid devastating and seek positive emotions' lands to me as potentially judgment. We are taught in Narrative to notice the emotions and to ask the person we are in service to to notice too. What might the emotion wish to te us? Avoiding emotions can push those emotions deeper and actually make a person sick: lots of trauma research around this. Speaking of, a person's lived context has a Huge impact on why they are feeling the emotions they feel. I've more to say, but this feels sufficient for now. There are no 'good' or 'bad' emotions. There are simply Emotions.

I was mugged at gunpoint by 4 young black men, probably only teenagers. They seemed scared themselves by what they were doing. The ot fear u had was that in their fear, they might accidentally shoot me. I felt compassion for them. What had happened to them that they would already have a gun and be mugging someone? I saw them as boys, afraid. They only took my money which meant mercy because they left me with my lil flip phone, my credit card and metro card. I don't know if I saw Christ in them,but I did see humanity which held me in compassion. I think what helps is a breath and then compassion and then humanity which helps us to ask, 'what happened to this person to cause this behavior?' Then we can look from love.

As a Narrative Therapy Practitioner and one with lived experiences of tge impact of traumas, I absolutely disagree with being a slave to our own mind and unable to help ourselves. What we become slaves to is layer upon layer of lived experiences and of external influences that teach us to be slaves. For example, a person born in poverty whose parents have relationship with drugs due to hopelessness which was caused by living in a society without safety nets and with greed which caused a small percentage of the population to consume much and which created the poverty in the first place and treats persons in poverty as if somehow their becoming a thief to survive is that person's fault. I do agree a person can become a slave to other's ideas about them as 'less than' and sometimes this then is internalized into their own mindset and thinking of 'worthless.' None of us is born into a vacuum, we are each impacted by the family we grew up in, gender/cultural/societal norms and Watson of thinking. Additionally to trauma. It is amazing to me how one can then stand up to this and make healthy choices.

Thank you, deeply resonate with your response.