Beyond Broken

Wendy’s Writing

Follow Your Heart

When I took my first serious writing class I learned a startling fact: To write you must read. “The more you read the more you will be inspired to write and the better writer you will become,” my teacher said. I had never linked these two activities.

As an only child I kept myself company with books. The characters became my friends. The children’s book The Lonely Doll, by Dare Wright in 1957 expressed my dilemma. “Once there was a little doll. Her name was Edith. She lived in a nice house and had everything she needed except someone to play with.” I was four when the book was published.

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It Is Good To Be Human Part 2

 

One of the most common problems I hear about is the habitual tendency to turn on oneself or turn on another. Someone has to be blamed in order to avoid feelings.

“Splitting is defined as the failure in a person’s thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism used by many people.”

In the Pathwork, The Guide calls this our dualistic thinking and describes the challenges of being human in a dualistic world where our natural dualistic divisions of good and evil and life and death are not actually the truth.

Recently, I spent an hour with a group of people stumbling around a room with translucent plastic grocery bags over our heads.  Eventually our eyes adjusted and we could see shadows and light. The point? Our human perceptions are so limited and we believe we have the whole picture. From this illusion we take our stances of opinions, cases, judgments – we do our splitting….

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It is good to be Human – Part 1

It Is Good To Be Human – Part 1

“As long as you cannot admit that you are human….you can not be helped in your problems, nor can you form real relationships” from PWG Lecture #106

I am heading to the beach at sunrise. I am hoping for a deepening into my spiritual path. I am going for an all out God experience.

I tiptoe out of our house with my iPhone for picture taking and begin to walk on the beach. It is dawn and only a slight color spreads among the clouds on the horizon. I imagine I have missed the sunrise. I watch what is there and feel the under current of my disappointment.

As I watch the surf come in and make beautiful patterns on the shoreline I feel a deepening expansion. These words fill my head ­– “I am on the rim of God”.

At my elementary school fair I used to play one of those toss the ball games. My ball would always skirt the rim of the circle, never falling into the center. I never won the prize.

I hate the rim and want more. And I also marvel at the capacity to be this close to God, to have the capacity to expand in human form this wide and deep. A moment later I am thinking about our laundry detergent. Our towels and clothes smell bad. I am astonished that I can move so easily between the great and the small.
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Uncovering Lost Resources

When trauma occurs we look straight ahead. We cannot see left or right. Time seems to stop and our bodies hold our breath. In this myopic, shut down place we often miss the people who were there, who did see our pain, who tried to help. We carry this narrative forward in our psyches and in our bodies ¬– we were all alone, no one understood. This is the story we tell ourselves for the rest of our lives.

This narrative holds us in a grip of expectations of what life has to offer us and we repeat the story over and over again with slightly altered scripts and new characters.

Until…… we go back to the moment of the trauma and ask; what happened next? We move the narrative forward now and look around to see what we might have missed….

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Our Investment In Our Grievances

“Holding on to my grievances give me a sense of power, which protects me from feeling vulnerable. It’s a way of standing up for myself and defending myself from being hurt, disappointed, or rejected again. It keeps me vigilant”

This hardening of our hearts is the ‘beast’ in us. It is the wounded beauty that has lost faith in itself because it was never fully seen or recognized.

“What keeps the wound and hardening from healing is not knowing that we are lovely and loveable just as we are while imagining that other people hold the key to this.”

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