Re-Emergence

Mar 19, 2022 | Blog

Dear Ones,

 

Whew… What a moment, right? I mean perpetually, yes. And in the last couple of years, certainly. But even just recently, it has all seemed increasingly and ridiculously tumultuous.

 

Tumult tends to send me inward, and so I’m just tenderly stepping back out onto this platform after an exceptionally introverted time of gestation and self-reflection.

 
What a time of testing this has been—personally, collectively, globally.

What a time of reckoning.

 

It seems like just about everyone I know and love, including myself, has been put to the test lately…whether with unexpected health emergencies, or circumstantial upheaval, or financial or relational challenges.

 

It’s been rough.

 

What a time that asks for rigorous self-reflection, generous self-compassion, ruthless truth-telling, and increasingly skillful prayers.

 

As Life continues to provide the most provocative and at times troubling mirror, what an opportunity to become ever-more still, and steady, impeccable in our word and in our actions.

 

What a time to honestly inquire into what exactly is our part of the mess to grieve and to heal, our piece to bravely stand for, our gift to bring through?

 

And I don’t necessarily mean some grand, important gesture or public offering.

 
Often, I feel my greatest offering is my simple capacity for presence.
Or my willingness to sit down, be quiet, light a candle, and listen.

Or my stubborn allegiance to love.

 
Where can we take personal responsibility inside this larger, systemic war at hand?
 
What’s our individual work to do in the presence of insidious suffering, internally and externally?
 

And what can we authentically offer, in any given moment—towards awakening, freedom, and peace?

 
Personally, these questions have found me emptying out at the altar, for months now.
 
Burning, burning, quieter, quieter still.

Emptying out, wider and deeper, clearing out from within all that is not impeccably aligned with truth.

 

Silence, Trust, and Integrity have been my most challenging, devoted teachers.

 

That might sound poetic, but in practice, it involves the grueling work of exceptional self-honesty.

 

It’s the willingness to receive the mirror that life and all my relationships provide, and to bravely take in the reflection.

 

Resisting the tendency to collapse, to dramatize, to go to sleep, or to spin out.

 

Using the most challenging triggers of my life to go deeper into stillness and silence.

 

Daring to not feed un-useful narratives.

 

It means continuously examining how it is I am lying to myself, and whether I’m willing to tell a deeper truth.

 

It means discovering true stillness in relation to fear…

 

Real discernment in relation to endless temptations to self-betray…

 

And an outrageous willingness to trust Life, God, the Mystery, myself—wholeheartedly, without condition or restraint.

 
It’s never-ending, isn’t it?
 

This call to presence, to silence; daring to embody what we know to be true.

 

This call to know who we are, to love who we are, to know what we serve, and to serve this with every breath.

 

And then to forgive ourselves and one another continuously, for all our failing and forgetting!

 

What a calling. What a task. What a challenge of a lifetime.

 
And, can I just say? A BIG shout-out to all my fellow parents of children and teenagers in this time…. And an especially deep bow of awe and empathy to my fellow single parents! 🙌

Those of us who are on this wild, tender path of personal evolution while raising the next generation! Holy moly. Talk about a true challenge!

 
So…

In honor of these themes that currently have my heart’s fervent attention, themes of:

 
🌟 Living Truly: Cultivating Real Integrity
🌟 Staying Awake while Stewarding the Next Generations of Humans
🌟 Making Medicine of the Madness
🌟 Letting Stillness Have Us
🌟 Discovering Right Relationship with Fear

🌟 Learning True Trust & Faith

 
I’m coming out of my introverted hole, and I’m going to be offering some new opportunities to gather in potent, evolutionary ways this spring and summer…

Here are my ideas for upcoming On-Line Groups, specific forms TBD:

 
✨ A Writing Group focused on the incomparable nourishment of Writing As Medicine.
✨ A Satsang Group on Staying Awake while Stewarding Young Humans
✨ A Satsang Group on Living Truly & Breaking the Spell of Self-Betrayal (this will definitely be an advanced class!)
AND

✨ A Satsang Group on Stillness, Silence, Trust & Deepening Surrender to Life

 

Do any of these resonate for you more than others? I’m curious…

 

I intend to offer all of them, in one form or another, but I’m still feeling into which comes first, starting in early May.”

 
Please feel free to email me directly if you’d like to hear more.

Thank you for all your good work, your courageous self-love, your grieving, your kindness, perseverance, and humor.

 

I meet you here, devotedly. 💖

 

 
This love,
Jesua

Facebook Comments

More Blog Posts

Opening Wider & Diving Deeper into the Immeasurable Beauty & Pain of Life

It’s not a spiritual requirement to be fascinated by what inhibits our greatest aliveness; and somehow compelled to uncover and reveal surprising pathways to deeper freedom.

And yet it did resonate for me when recently I heard brilliant author Brene Brown say: “Our capacity for whole-heartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted.”

Yes, thank you. When we discover firsthand the direct relationship between meeting […]

Oedipal Bliss

My sweet boy Ezra Star (6.5) jumped onto my lap today, throwing his little arms around my neck, and apparently milking the Oedipal Phase for all it’s worth, announced: “You know, Mama? We can’t really get married to each other. Even if we wanted. Because you are 41, and I am 6 1/2. And it’s just NOT appropriate.”

I burst into giggles and kissed him on both delicious cheeks: “No? That wouldn’t be appropriate?” He laughed too: “No! Even though […]

Lessons of Choice, Failure & Forgiveness

n these last weeks I’ve been pondering the tender intersection of choice, failure, and forgiveness.

Always poignant topics inside a human life vulnerably given to the forces of love and loss, what has driven these issues directly and painfully home to my personal heart of late is the rather angst-filled decision to let our sweet, amazing dog, Ekara Faith, return to the breeder from whom we received her in December.

And let me assure you, right from the start of this tender story, that while it is an intensely difficult choice, I completely trust this is the right choice, the wisest, most compassionate choice~ for this incredibly beautiful dog (who will now be devotedly trained to become a service dog for someone in need) as well as for my broken-hearted family, who truly wants the best life for Ekara, even more than we want to get to love her personally.

After many months mixed with incredible love and intense challenge, realizing we had made a commitment to loving an intensely intelligent dog who needs (and deserves!) […]

Good Enough Again

Last Sunday I had one of those days. It was like a Jesua version of Alexander’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

One thing after another went askew. I won’t even bore or depress you with the detailed account of everything that went wrong. It was like a comedy of errors, except at the time it really didn’t seem funny to me at all.

All day long I barely held it together; triggered by circumstance, humbled by hormones, and challenged by life’s sometimes mean and messy ways.

Finally, when I arrived home that evening, late of course, I walked in the door and Ekara, our 5 month old puppy immediately jumped up onto me and tore a hole in my longtime favorite, most beautiful hooded sweater.

The one I wear every day, through all the seasons~ to work, to be cozy […]

The Blood Test: A Mundane Story of Wound & Repair

Yesterday I had to take my beloved boy Ezra (6) to get some follow-up blood work at the doctor office to investigate more thoroughly some of the numbers that had returned from the tests we had gotten the week prior. Nothing dramatically troubling at this point, just some slight abnormalities worthy of investigation.

Well, needless to say, getting blood drawn from his arm is not my boy’s favorite way to spend a free morning with his Mama. But Ezra is a pretty fearless soul by nature, and so he was buoyant and open-minded until the actual moment came, sitting on my lap in the lab, with the rubber tourniquet tight around his upper arm, while we removed the bandaids that had numbing cream under them, in support of inviting as painless a procedure as possible.

We watched as the nurse kindly and gently prepared the needle and vials in front of us, and then suddenly I felt Ezra tightening and tensing his body against mine, everything in his body instantly transforming into “No!”

The nurse opened the needle and I held his arm steady. And then he suddenly strongly twisted his arm out of the range, making the vein inaccessible, and began resisting, loudly, saying: […]

Heart-Fed Babies Become Heart-Led People

I loved having babies. I loved the relative simplicity of that chapter of parenting. Such a physically raw time, yes, wow; literally growing their bodies from my own flesh and blood, my milk, my chi, my sleeplessness given, helplessly, to the devoted care of these young mammals.

But I loved how my job then was to just feed them my heart, carry […]

The Consequence of Truthtelling; Taking a Bold Stand for Love

This is such a loaded time of year, isn’t it? It can be a beautiful time, yes. Full of sparkly lights and brisk walks bundled in layers, sweetly, arm in arm. In this part of the Northern Hemisphere it is a time of turning inward, into the darker months, shorter days....

A Bone to Pick with God

A couple weekends ago I received the space to finally dive, ceremonially, into the angst and heartache I was carrying following the immensely stressful ordeal we recently went through with my beloved 9 year old daughter Arayla, in which I had been painfully forced to...

A Shark and A Boat

I've noticed the children haven't wanted to speak a lot with each other about Arayla's hospital journey. They've just wanted to recalibrate to one another, to play joyously as well as quarrel in familiar ways. Ezra( almost 6) and I definitely needed to process upon...