Expedition Self

'The body is what makes us human. Those of us who have been brought up in a patriarchal world tend to stay in our heads. We want to stay with ideals. We want to put spirit ahead of body. We want to live outside the limitations of this poor stupid thing below the neck that can't, or won't, do what we want it to do.

We try to push all the parts of ourselves that we don't like into our bodies: our greed, our jealousy, our lust. All the darkness we don't want to accept, we push down into our muscles, bones and heart. We pretend we have no shadow and try to escape into our heads. Powerful energies are locked in our bodies. Eventually they rebel, usually in illness.

Sometimes people will paint a picture of their body, in terms of color, and there will be black areas where they cannot see any image. Very interesting things often go on around those areas. As soon as the person puts an image there, it starts to transform. Flowers turn into false teeth, which turn into arrows, and the transformation process goes on. The energy starts to move, light comes into that area. I don't think we've begun to touch the power of imagery in the body.'

--
🎨 Peter Birkhäuser

Your actions matter

via

'Our most emotionally active life is lived in our , and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in , and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a , and most like an angel.'

--

'Some periods of our are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before.

Whenever we , we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening...

Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

-- ,
Living by the Word: Essays

'Let there be
an opening
into the quiet
that lies beneath
the chaos,
where you find
the peace
you did not think
possible
and see what shimmers
within the storm.'
-- John 'O Donohue
[Art: Sampo Kaikkonen]