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Beyond Broken

Pathwork

I Want to Write About Faith…

April 4, 2023

 

“I want to write about faith,” is the first line of one my favorite poems by David Whyte.  He continues, “but I have no faith myself…but let this then, my small poem…be the first prayer that opens me to faith.”

I have always loved this poem because from my experience, it describes the process of faith so honestly.

Recently a client asked me, “Wendy, do you pray?”  She is in the midst of her own struggles with faith.  “Yes I pray,” I said, “and prayer for me seems to have seasons.”  The answer came out without thought.  And I was pleased with it.  I have spent many years trying to ‘install’ a prayer practice in my life.  I memorized “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace, where there is hatred let me sow love…etc.”  I learned ancient chants in odd languages, repetitive songs in Portuguese and most recently prayer beads each morning at the edge of the ocean.

During the Pandemic something changed.  The tremendous longing I felt to reach God — to feel some sort of communion— not to feel so alone, diminished.

Friends are experimenting with drugs to help them feel closer to God.  Especially of interest to me is one nicknamed ‘the God Molecule’.  “Take it and you instantly know the face of God,” they say. Other friends invite us to join a church with them.  My husband Tom answers, “We are the church.” And I know what he means in all humility.  At some point we have wrangled with faith and prayer long enough to have what Sharon Saltzberg calls ‘Abiding Faith’.

We have been through the other stages of faith that Saltzberg maps.  The faith she calls ‘Bright Faith’ — the exciting time when we discovered a spiritual path and it felt like this is it!  I will follow it and all its dogma, ritual and conventions.  Here I turned my faith over to a charismatic guru.  He had what we needed if we followed him.  Recently this man died and I think over my relationship with him throughout the years.  Sometimes I would ask him to help me with my faith and he would give me one of his favorite books to read.  It was a personal and meaningful gesture to me — thumbing through his book, the worn pages—but the words were esoteric to me.  I could not connect to them.  It left me feeling more alone.

Other stages of faith must include doubt and the right to question.  I remember sitting in a circle with a renowned spiritual leader a few years ago and we all talked about faith.  I was the only one in the circle that named doubt as a key ingredient to my faith.  It felt good to give voice to doubt — for me it is what grounds faith.  Doubt comes when you actually begin to ‘live with faith’ and the first thing to run into is doubt.  It feels inextricably bound to faith.  Two sides of the same coin.

The opposite of faith is fear.  Being together so much during the pandemic I experience a connection with my husband that is a salve to my deepest longing.  I say something obscure or half thought out and he is right there with me, understanding, filling in the unformed parts like a miracle.  Over time the miracle has transformed into the everyday pleasure of ‘us’ and my seemingly unquenchable need for God has disappeared.  I hear friends, reaching, searching, experimenting with changing states of consciousness and I think, “Oh that used to be me.”  And I am startled.  So much alchemy happened and I am just now noticing!

The next moment I feel crushing fear…and I may lose my husband, either through my death or his.  Or fear says,” even worse, either of us may have some debilitating illness and the loss will be gradual and so painful.”  With this fear I can run many scenarios of dread.  Intense love, intense fear right on it’s coattails — my dualistic human self will drum it up immediately.

However, recently I worked with a young couple facing a terminal diagnosis.  I was so moved by their faith.  Their resolute commitment to each other and the apparent difficult path they had chosen together.  The session was about one of them taking in that the other was fully ‘in it’ with them.  They were not alone.  It was like life shrunk to one essential thing, that connection. I went straight afterwards to a body worker I see frequently. But something extraordinary happened there.  The energy in my body became animated with intense pleasure. Time slowed down to a standstill.  I could feel warmth slowly seeping into the bottom of my feet in ecstasy.  All day this feeling persisted. Swimming, my body moving through the water, the sunlight shimmering.  This was a shift in consciousness.  I imagined this was what Echardt Tolle walked around feeling all the time, awakened.  I felt all my body tension and holding patterns which have braced me against fear loosened. I could be in life free of fear and all the musculature in my body that defends against it.  Life shimmered with energy and possibility inside and outside of me.

Gradually, it dissipated.  I went back to the body worker this week and tried to describe what happened.  “I know,” he said.  “I felt it too.”

On Valentines Day last month I was at the gym working out and listening to my playlist.  Landslide by Stevie Nicks came on.  And these words that she wrote when she was 27 years old felt that they were meant for me as I approach 70.

Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changin’ ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Well, I’ve been afraid of changin’
‘Cause I’ve built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I’m getting older too
I felt another shift in my love/fear dynamic as I let the music wash over me — listening on repeat many times.  The words “I am ready” came to me as if written across the sky.  I came home and told my husband I was ready for this next chapter of our lives.  I felt ready for the ‘changing ocean tides’, for death.  He cried tears of relief.  He had been worried.  Worried about dying and leaving me and how fearful I was.
The ultimate faith is what Sharon Saltzberg calls Abiding Faith — Faith in Ourselves.  Can we hold ourselves and our life experiences with enough trust and faith to be the mantra and prayer?  A Buddhist teacher once drew a large V on a big white piece of paper and asked the class what it was.  Everyone agreed that it was a bird in the sky.  No the teacher said, no, it is the sky with a bird in it. The sky is that vast open space of awareness that can hold all the birds that come into view.
The sky has been particularly blue these first few days of spring.  I hope you are noticing too.

 

Filed Under: Attachment, Couples, Pathwork, Relationship, Self Exploration

The Mandala Moment

January 4, 2023

This past fall a class gathered to take a deep dive into the topics of Autonomy and Authority.  Eleven of us from around the world took on the challenges and the promise of this work.  First we opened up to an audacious concept that infinite possibilities are available to us at any moment.  It is amazing to tap into this energy — that all you can imagine already exists waiting for you to grasp it!  Then we had to examine deeply what is in our way of actually doing so.  Each of us looked and felt our young emotional dependency, waiting for a parental figure, a gate keeper, to give us the permission we felt we needed as children.  In this mindset someone or something was in the way of what we wanted — of all that was possible.  We each had to answer the question — what do I really want when I wait and lean on another for all that is already waiting for me?  This was a vulnerable place.  I could feel each of us literally grow up a bit as we began to activate in our selves what we wanted from another.

Next we embraced another huge, expansive idea. If you focus inward and are willing to go through the uncomfortable emptiness, you will find everything!  This is a challenging practice. We found constant distractions.  And then we found that what was in our way was how we all give over our attention to outward authorities and wrestle with them instead of finding our own inner authority.  The promise of an ongoing practice of turning inward versus reaching out is that we will experience vibrancy, aliveness and an unleashing of our innate creativity….

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Filed Under: Attachment, Pathwork, Relationship, Self Exploration

Spring Gardening

May 2, 2022

In my garden this year the weeds are plentiful.  Especially one kind of weed that is very satisfying to find and pull out.  It is wide and can spread out its lush and large tendrils for several feet in all directions but at its base is a small ball and if you are lucky and pull it out just right you get the very deep central small single minuscule little root.  I am always amazed that such a small yet tenacious root can give rise to such a prolific plant.  Buckets of this weed come out of my garden and into the compost.  A Taproot, as it is called, turns out is the first root to appear from the seed and remains the central root of the plant.

I love this as a metaphor.

While we may, in our lives, spread out in many directions with flashy, fleshy greenery we have one central root to our lives and it has always been true.  In the Pathwork this is called our Soul Task.  The promise is that finding this task and staying true to it is the secret to a satisfying life.  Recently, my husband Tom found a letter that I wrote him in 1988.  We had been married for 7 years and I was about to turn 35.  In the letter I say that I  feel like I have checked important boxes in my life: kids, self employment and married for life.  While all this is great I go on in the letter to answer a question Tom has asked me the week before.  He asked, “Do you think we will ever make the Big Time.”  He is  referring our fledgling technology business at the time. Reading it all these years later, I am pretty astonished at my answer .  I write, “I think we will — but on a different track than what we are on now.  I think the contribution we can really make is to share with others who we are and how we are and that is our most marketable product!”  I go on to say that I am clear I can only keep going in this business for two more years….

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Filed Under: Attachment, Couples, Pathwork, Self Exploration, Trauma

New Workshop: Who’s Afraid?

December 1, 2021

Recognizing and trusting basic goodness does not arise through thinking. Rather, as we step out of our thoughts (again and again) and bring a gentle, kind, and clear presence to life here and now, we experience that essence for ourselves.

from Tara Brach’s New Book Trusting The Gold

As we step into the present moment fear vanishes and we are left with true abundance – Gold

An Experiential Workshop

Friday, January 7th 2:00-5:00 pm EST

On Zoom

For those of us with histories of trauma – we can be less resilient and more caught in fear cycles – this can be overcome!

Price is $35.00 per person payable on PayPal or Zelle

If there is interest, this class may result in an on-going monthly process group on Friday afternoons

To Register email Wendy at whubbard0@gmail.com

Register soon – class is limited to 16 people

Filed Under: Pathwork, Trauma, WORKSHOPS

The You AND Me Universe

September 18, 2021

Join me in an exploration of the Me AND You Universe, a concept introduced to me eight years ago by Diane Poole Heller.  She described an interpersonal Me AND You universe; I have found that idea applies also to our intra-personal and transpersonal experience.

In one of her modules of her DARe Training, Diane teaches about how the Me AND You Universe contrasts with the Me OR You Universe.  She calls each state of mind a universe because they are a lived reality that is exclusive of other realities in a person’s experience.  Most of us live in the You OR Me Universe.  Unfortunately, our early attachment experiences lead us to the conclusion that we can have either ourselves or the other, me or you. In Pathwork terms we might call this a Main Image.  It’s a belief that “if I have you, then I lose myself, and if I have me, I lose you.”  This is a duality of consciousness or psychological splitting which is very painful.  The way this often shows up for me is that I am loving being with you, but also can’t wait for some “quiet time”.  Then when I am alone and have this “quiet time” I am missing being with you.  Either way there is a tinge of dissatisfaction and a lack of wholeness.

…

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Filed Under: Attachment, Pathwork, Relationship, Self Exploration, Trauma

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Wendy Hubbard

About Wendy

Wendy Hubbard, M.Ed., SEP, is a Pathwork Helper and Somatic Experiencing (SE) Practitioner. She has studied and practiced the Pathwork® for 25 years and SE for 10 years. She is also certified in Hellinger Family Constellation Work and Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning Experience (DARe). This rich mix of modalities and trainings informs her work and enables her to bring hope and healing to her clients. She provides individual and couples sessions and leads therapeutic groups and trainings, often with her husband, Pathwork Helper Tom Hubbard.

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