Freight Train or Gentle Grace?

It’s felt like a rough day. I’ve stood up for myself and my principles and had to take some hits on that. The result has been an inadvertent stepping into old emotional patterns that got triggered and the consequent struggle to rise above them.

Scanning Your Body

Scanning my body has become as natural and instinctive a practice for me as grounding and centering. All of these are important as they contribute to the WHOLESOMENESS of unifying the three aspects of our being. Let me explain for those who might not yet know.

New Urd’s Well Logo!

Wow! Since I have been involved with the Norns and Hela, I have drawn myself many different aspects of Yggdrasil, just to increase my understanding of the rich symbolism inherent in the Tree.

Forging a Book

School starts the week after next, and I drive a school bus. It’s going to be a major shift of hats that I wear: from introverting to acting the extrovert; from driving a large bus, I am shifting to driving a special needs run; from having a relaxing summer at home to the coming cold months of anticipating the need to dig out from deep snows in order to arrive at school, just in case they don’t call a snow day. These are just the facts of life. There are still irons in the air. Some of the irons I am juggling feel like they still bear the heat of the blacksmith’s forge. In a certain way, all the choices that we make and the consequences which those choices bear, shape us as the heat of the forge and the hammering of the blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil shape the destiny of the iron. I have done some of that work in my life too, shaping shoes to fit a horse’s hoof. That was not work I was temperamentally cut out for, but I do have the experience of it.

Motivation

I was thinking about the impulses that motivated me to give up Christianity. It felt like a huge act of rebellion given how church-going my family was. Mom was a Sunday school teacher who loved Jesus and only gave up teaching when her last illness made her body too weak to continue.

Stepping Into The Day

It’s been a while since I’ve written. It’s been a full summer, with many hours of my day going to the self-care of exercise in order to keep losing weight. I’m down thirty-some pounds since a year ago at this time, when the blood sugar and the diabetes were getting a bit out of control. There is nothing like the fear of breaking down a strong body, which I’ve always taken for granted, and perhaps blindness, to jump on the self-care bandwagon.

The Wren

I finished up the morning chores, and went into the bathroom to take care of business, and there was a tiny bird caught in between the blinds and the window. No idea how she got in, never happened before. I looked and it was a Wren. She would not let me capture her to carry her outside. What to do? Finally it dawned on me, “Open the window, you idiot!” So I did.

More Ideas on PTSD

For those who are doing the shadow work of releasing repressed emotions, trauma, and coming into an understanding of what their personal patterns and triggers are for those behaviors that do not serve us very well – here are some thoughts I’ve been having as I do my own inner work. I want to be

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

My topic today is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is rather personal today, but I feel called to talk about it, because until recently, I have been wont to claim the experience for myself. I am not a Soldier, Sailor, Marine, or war veteran, so I thought, how dare I claim the experience? Dysfunctional family, sure, I have been through that. And I must also acknowledge the sensitivity children have before the hard knocks of life deaden them emotionally – if they allow it. Children are sensitive, but they are also resilient. They get through, but maybe not without picking up some dysfunction of their own.

Waking Up

This morning I was reflecting on how the Mythos of any religion relies on symbols taken from Nature in order to guide and deepen human understanding. From the Christian religion, for example, Jesus often talks about the need to “wake up.” His examples parallel the waking and sleeping cycles of day and night, but His meaning is far deeper. His meaning is the same as the Buddha’s when the Buddha talks about the process of Enlightenment. Jesus and the Buddha are talking about a process that every human being will go through from birth to death, and from death into rebirth.