Grounding + Becoming
A Spacious Wisdom Cross-Pollination
There is a current between knowing and unknowing. It will carry you.
Each one is troubled by the ultimate questions. And no one else’s answer can satisfy the hunger in your heart. The beauty of great questions is how they dwell differently in each mind, how they root deeper than all the surface chatter and image. How they continually disturb. Your deep questions grow quickly restless in the artificial clay of received opinion or stagnant thought, and if you avoid this disturbance and try to quell these questions, it will cost you all your peace of mind. Sooner or later, every one of us must come to our contemplative longing and gain either the courage, the recklessness to begin our own contemplative journey.
-John O’Donohue
Holy/Hurt with Dr. Hillary McBride
There’s spaciousness here when you’re ready. Dr. Hillary is a trustworthy guide in the podcast about spiritual trauma and healing.
Contemplative Curiosity: Praying Our Experiences
Praying our experiences means being open to seeing ourselves as we are. This requires an awareness and an honesty that will root us in our actual daily life.
Honest Offering: A Prayer and Guided Reflection
Prayer is fundamentally an offering of ourselves to God. It is not a matter of offering the pious thoughts of theologians or spiritual writers. Nor is it a matter of offering God only what we believe to be worthy.
Contemplative Curiosity: Mary Oliver on Praying
What does Mary Oliver’s instruction on prayer evoke in you? Here’s an invitation to engage with her words contemplatively.
Trauma-Supporting Spiritual Care
Have you noticed the concept of trauma coming up more frequently in the past few years? You are not alone; it is confusing. What do people mean when they use the word trauma in this rapidly-changing landscape?
It Can Renew Your Faith in the World
Sometimes an image or phrase can help us gently help us excavate this wisdom (like an archaeologist, not a construction worker!). Here’s a practice to experiment with.
Contemplative Curiosity: John O’Donohue on Beauty
“The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it out everywhere…”
Contemplative Curiosity: Dr. Gerald May on Making Friends with Mystery
When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists only to be solved.
Everything is Going to Be Alright
What words shimmer for you in this poem by Derek Mahon? What arises in you as you hold those words?
Contemplative Curiosity: John O’Donohue on Awakening to Your Life
“…the most trustable form of soul balance is when you trust it to happen of itself.”
Living Centered at the Intersection of Trauma & Spirituality
“You’re able to begin to notice that God speaks to us, God comes to us in our experience, that God becomes known; God becomes flesh in our everyday experience.” - Jonathan Merritt
The Dark Night, Songs for Our Seasons of Obscurity
This playlist is not designed to tell you that your dark night of the soul is not so bad, nor is it an attempt to coax you out of your dark night.
How to Be Alone by Pádraig Ó Tuama, An On Being Poetry Short Film
This is an evocative poem in Ó Tuama’s own voice. What words stick with you when you listen/watch? What is your felt sense of the poem?
Tapestry of Wisdom: Trauma, a curated collection
These are some of the threads I’ve been following related to the topic of trauma. May curiosity and resonance be your guides as you explore this collection.
Reconnecting to Inner Wisdom: A Deep Dive
Disconnection from our inner wisdom disrupts all of our connections — with Self, Spirit, others, and the earth. Trauma-Informed Spiritual Direction is a place to discover, recover, and cultivate our connection to this wisdom.
Being Human: Beautiful and Ominous
Coming home to our bodies is about recognizing we are complex beings whose present-tense needs are worthy of time and care. These needs are not distractions, but rather, a portal to our deepest wisdom.
We Are Always, Already Home
Here’s what’s emerging for me as I contemplate Meister Eckhart and John O’Donohue’s image of the soul as a shared dwelling place.
Please Come Home, a poem by Jane Hooper
Here’s a poem about coming home to ourselves, to inner wisdom — not as an end in itself, but as the place we perceive the ways we are interconnected.