When they describe a painful experience in a way that centers another person’s actions, perceived intentions, and history, what stands out is that I am not hearing my client’s own experience directly named. What comes through is the hurt underneath, and their absence to it. Tightening, trying to figure it out, and self-abandoning, in an effort towards survival, belonging, or approval.

I’ve been there, too.

When a client tells me about the burden they feel, the heaviness, the sense of slogging through a challenge, I hear echoes of their past. Of absence or devaluing that translated into believing they don’t matter, and of grief wanting to be included.

And when they describe pain in their jaw and neck and their frustration about what’s not working the way they need it to, I hear their critical orientation. The pressure of anger turned inward in self-blame or outward in pushing through what’s challenging, or both.

I know those from the inside, too.

When clients talk to me about their overwhelm around an important social or collective cause, I hear their disorientation in the face of issues that are heartbreaking and bigger than any one person or any single lifetime. I hear their need to contribute and their struggle to tend their own balance at the same time.

I’ve felt lost in a collective wormhole, too.

Perhaps, like me, you can recognize yourself in some of these stories.

The hard thing

Most of us hold patterns of tension in our bodies from long ago. Responses to stressful events that could not be fully tended, or early, formative experiences where we missed something essential. Or even ancestral legacies. One way or another, we form conclusions to try to make sense of what we carry. We believe it means something about our value, our identity, about life itself. Our adaptations often include self-shaming, self-censoring, or doubting ourselves.

The hard thing is facing into what you carry ~ the tension, burden, pressure, avoidance, or whatever it is for you specifically ~ with openness around your interpretation of what it means about who you are and what’s possible for you.

Humbly honoring your experience without blaming yourself for your experience.

Your interpretation of what you carry in your body does make sense, but maybe not in the way you thought. It’s an interpretation designed to try to tolerate something in the past that was otherwise intolerable.

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What is possible

You can find a new relationship with what hurts, so that it can begin to make sense in a new way. This shift in how you orient loosens the grip of your previous sense-making. A new way through becomes possible, and your experience begins to take on new meaning.

We need enough safety to come into contact with what was hurt. Family conditioning, cultural conditioning, gender conditioning, racial conditioning. It is held in your body and emotions, as well as your beliefs. We need enough spaciousness to bring it into relation.

Nora Bateson uses the phrase warm data. As I use it, it means self-contact while sharing about your experience in your body, relationally. In proximity with your experience in a warm and compassionate way, even when that experience is painful, distant, cold, or absent. Compassionate curiosity allows new meaning-making to unfold. It’s wider, generous, kind. When what’s held in your body comes into this new focus in relational presence, what you’ve been holding can begin to change.

Tangibly, the re-orientation leads you toward:

Presence with yourself and your experience, connected and supported. You can pause and reflect. You are grounded, moving at your own pace, with warmth of inner connection and acceptance, and your belly can relax.

Feeling lighter, clearer, more integrated. You are not avoiding grief. You are in contact with your longing, no longer ashamed of your feelings, available to discover your deeper needs. There is more freedom in your body, an open chest, more spaciousness, access to your innocence and playfulness.

A sense of agency in how you meet your experience and your choices about your authenticity. You are choosing when you want to say yes and no, loosening the grip of pushing and forcing yourself into a mold of conditioned expectations. Your energy is freer to go to what matters most to you. Your creativity is here, with a fuller breath, with what calls you more and more centered in your life.

What you are looking for, you already know. You heard the call to it a long time ago. It is your great adventure. It may be a vision, a feeling, a knowing, a flow. You know something about what you are here to be, create, give, contribute, and you intend to follow through.

Choice points

So, there’s the hard thing, facing what you carry, and honoring what is calling you, what you know in your bones is possible for you.

Only you can assess whether your well-being is going in a direction you don’t like. Whether burdens you carry are sustainable for you to continue. Whether harshness, criticism and pressure are taking a toll you no longer want to pay. Whether your authentic expression feels constrained or neglected.

So often people confuse passively waiting for change to find them with trusting the universe. Or pushing part of themselves aside with putting their best foot forward, confusing self-denial with self-improvement.

What I’ve learned from working with people for many years is that I don’t foretell the future. My work has taught me to be humble, and to make myself available as best I can for what wants to come through, to emerge, within myself as much as in the people I work with.

My wish for you is that you make the choices that value your wholeness, which has been here all along. That you find your unique way forward where your body signals you, your feelings unfold meaning for you, and you choose how and where you want to express yourself.

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My experience is that saying yes to your calling, orienting to meet your experience in your body, bringing the foundational elements of your experience into relation is both easier than it sounds and harder than it sounds.

When you’re in flow, it’s easy, and you are doing it anyway. When you meet material in you that is not yet integrated, it feels hard. This can feel like backsliding, where you worry you were wrong all along. In meeting that experience too, freer and freer of fixed interpretations, something begins to turn inside out. A new ground grows within.

Once you know what you know about how you operate, and about connecting with yourself, you cannot unknow it. The step is to say yes. To yourself. To your experience. To life.

I had to release my own solitary, enlightenment-or-bust path and let myself receive relational support and mirroring. As I’ve become safer and safer within me and grown my capacity to let life flow through me, my authentic voice has evolved. It’s both deeply me, deeply personal and individual, and also something that is coming through me that goes beyond the personal. The more I meet myself, the more I belong to life.

It turns out that meeting yourself and meeting the world are not two separate things.

The Living Map is a grounded, systematic, repeatable orientation to your body, your emotions, your history and your longing. Something you receive relationally, in a group, and then make your own. I walk people through it step by step, in their own bodies, over six months. Weekly live group calls, two one to one somatic sessions with me, practice pods, and the LITRA Method so you have a reliable way to meet yourself wherever you are. Pricing is on a sliding scale, self-selected based on your ability to pay.

[Details and enrollment here]

For long stretches of life, especially in the wake of trauma, experience feels like something happening to us.

As children, this is certainly the case. Our perceptions and our fundamental capacities are initially formed by our environment and by relating with our caregivers for the first several years. We adapt to what happens to us as best we can.

Even later, as adults, circumstances arrive. Other people’s choices arrive. Our bodies react, brace, tighten, and push through.

Energy goes toward coping and surviving. There is real intelligence in this. Bracing protected something. Carrying allowed us to keep moving forward. Nothing about this is a failure; it is a system responding to life and adapting to what it was given.

But there is a cost.

When life is happening to me, I perceive my experience as imposed. My choices shrink. My body may read even neutral events as something more I must bear.

Life is happening by me

Somewhere along the way, something begins to shift. I may discover that I am not only a recipient of life; I am a participant in it. My creativity comes online. Choices become possible. I start to notice what I want, what I value, what I am moved toward, and I begin navigating from the inside out.

This is the stage most personal growth work aims at, and it is genuinely transformative. Agency grows. The question changes from “What is happening to me?” to “How can I respond? What am I making, choosing, creating?” With the spaciousness of choice, authenticity becomes a practical lived reality to navigate.

Many people hit a subtle wall here. Survival strategies may continue in a more subtle form. If I am the one making my life happen, does everything depend on my effort, my vigilance, my getting it right? The old bracing wears new clothes: self-improvement, over-responsibility, the exhaustion of efforting to author every outcome. This stage can turn into more slogging, only with a more enlightened story.

I know this wall intimately. For years, whenever things got difficult, I believed I was the cause, and that if I could just be better, everything would work out. My growth became another place to push. It looked like forward movement. It felt like a heavy weight.

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Life is happening through me

Through deepening presence, something blooms. A felt sense of where life originates. Rather than something I must conjure or push against, life begins to register as a current I am carried by and participate in, one that was moving before me and continues beyond me. I am a part of something bigger.

Life happening through me is a gentle widening of perspective. A spacious recognition that my life exists within a longer arc of time than my own biography. My experience is mine, and it is also a continuation of the life that came before me. And life will continue after I’m gone.

I touched this during a silent retreat I joined unofficially, from home. The deepest opening came not only in meditation but in creating space for others who were also outside the official retreat to practice alongside me. Life moving through me, in stillness and in service, turned out to be one movement. It was during this time that the form of The Living Map came through and crystallized.

Ancestral connection

When life is happening to me, ancestral burdens may register as weight. When life is happening by me, ancestry reconnection and healing can register as one more project in the effort of self-authorship. When life is happening through me, something else comes into form.

The people who came before me stop being simply behind me. What they survived, adapted to, protected, and passed forward adds clarity and a richness to my own purpose. What I’m called to didn’t start with me. My belonging is an integral experience of being connected through my lineages within the web of life.

There is restoration that becomes available here. Our lineages likely carry places where our people were harmed, and places where our people caused harm. When life is happening through me, neither needs to be cloaked in shame or worn as a fixed identity. Where there was hurt, value and belonging can be restored. Where harm was done, responsibility becomes possible, and with it, a deeper reconnection with life. With intention, restoration unfolds through presence and at the pace each person is ready for.

Here is the clue I have learned to trust, in myself and in the people I work with. When we attend to the life that came through our people and is now coming through us in a life-affirming way, it feels good at some level. Even when it is hard, it’s restorative. A felt quality of replenishment is the signal that the ancestral dimension is being integrated. In my experience it is tremendously heart-opening and shows up as feeling like I am a part of a movement of life that is much bigger than me.

Collective healing

A similar shift can unfold in our relationship to the collective.

When life is happening to me, the state of the world lands as overwhelm, threat, or despair.

When life is happening by me, engagement with social change often runs on will: I must do something, I must do enough, and underneath, a fear that whatever I do won’t be enough anyway. This is where so many caring people burn out. We unconsciously ask our youngest, most wounded parts to do the outer work, and no amount of commitment can make that sustainable.

When life is happening through me, contribution becomes reorganized. Instead of asking “What should I be doing?” which invites someone else’s answer, the question becomes “What is moving through me, and what is mine to tend?” Right relationship can be discovered in an ongoing way. Where our lineages caused harm, responsibility and reconnection; where our lineages were harmed, restoration of value and belonging. Neither collapses into shame, and neither is bypassed. The end of the story has not yet been written. We are a part of it.

One of my important teachers, Thomas Hübl, teaches that life itself is a healing impulse. Life wants to heal. Our work is not to force healing, individually or collectively, but to create the conditions for it to move. Presence in our own system is one of those conditions. Presence with each other is another.

The individual and the collective were never separate

Every increase in your capacity to be present in your own body is an increase in what can move through you toward your people, backward and forward, and into the world we share. And every encounter with the collective, when met from a resourced system, deepens your own wholeness. The current flows in every direction, because it is the same current.

Wherever you experience yourself in consciousness, to me, by me, through me, nothing about your experience is wrong. Each carries its own intelligence, and makes sense from within the experience.

Embodied relational practice allows each to open as a possibility that can unfold in the wisdom of your own body.

Much love,
Rhonda

If you’d like a systematic, embodied way to grow this capacity in your own system, my six-month course, The Living Map, begins September 17.

Enrollment is now open.

https://www.embodiedwitnessing.org/the-living-map.html

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Every one of them believes fulfillment is possible, and that the old way of dealing with stress is not going to work any longer.

Maybe you know this from the inside. When you hold more than your share of responsibility toward others, when you shape yourself to fit someone else’s mold, you miss out on the fulfillment that comes from showing up as your actual self. You miss out on relational warmth in your connections, because your authentic self isn’t there to receive it. Not showing up, however you define that on your own terms, is a deep loss.

That may sound grim, but there’s power in it. When what is calling you comes into clear focus, the cost of misalignment becomes clearer too. It’s a turning point when you recognize that it’s not just the stress that’s harmful. What’s harmful is leaving the stress unmet. We all come to moments when we know we must change. Those awakenings are a blessing, even when they’re deeply uncomfortable. They often arrive with a surge of energy and a knowing that more fulfillment is possible, and that the pull toward your values is greater than whatever shows up as an obstacle.

For me, it was the breakup of an important relationship, one that precipitated a move from one country to another. I knew I could no longer afford to show up in relationships the way I had: partially. With a significant amount of enabling, fawning, and holding back my truth. My work with others was supporting leadership and authenticity, and I needed to find a deeper iteration of that for myself.

I did what most people who hold values of authenticity and leadership do. I got involved with therapy, coaching, and deepened my spiritual practice. I began a whole new series of studies.

What clicked was a coming together of everything I’ve learned. It came through an experience of being held in my wholeness by the chakra system, an ancient map of seven subtle energy centers, which was transmitted to me through the living Himalayan tradition I was initiated into in 2003. It’s been a part of my daily meditation practice ever since.

Each center is a gateway to many aspects of experience, including specific gifts:

Root ~ grounding, belonging, the ancient ground of being
Sacral ~ flow, feeling, aliveness
Solar Plexus ~ empowerment, dignity, capacity to meet life
Heart ~ compassion, courage, interconnection
Throat ~ voice, listening, authentic transmission
Brain Center ~ vision, discernment, witness consciousness
Crown ~ surrender, timelessness, interbeing

What came together in these last few years is recognizing that the chakra system is an anchor not only for spiritual practice, but also for the day-to-day presence and relating that anchor authenticity. And beyond that, for the deeper work of ancestral and collective healing.

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In The Living Map, with heartfulness, you learn how to inhabit your body, tend well-being at each center, create right-relationship with what moves through your embodied experience, and navigate your choices and expression of authenticity.

I’ve watched what changes when people take this on. They become more grounded in daily choices connected to their values. They grow capacity to access what they need inside themselves, even in relational misses and conflicts. They grow more centered, with less pushing through. They experience more belonging and a sense of their unique creative contribution.

And the vision grows from there.

When you reliably experience alignment and empowered choice around your radical authenticity, your fulfillment expands. You feel at home in yourself even as you keep growing. Whatever is challenging appears to you as a doorway. Your healing is no longer only personal. It ripples outward. You find yourself inside the collective change you care about, and you discover that showing up as yourself is both your deepest gift and your most direct contribution to the world you want to create.

This is what I knew I had to share: a way of listening to your body as a signal rather than a problem, walked together, center by center.

The map is open.

For those who are called to it, your path to step in starts here.
The Living Map begins September 17.

Special path, solo journey. It may have seemed to be the only option after being told your sensitivity was too much. Healing culture can reinforce the message: fix yourself. Elevate this aspect of you, and dismiss that. The pressure to do it on your own, to prove your worth.

It plays out as a sense of distance, even from people you love. Hovering near the exit. Or clinging, pretending, quietly deciding you’re above needing anyone or not worthy of being supported, or shrinking to feel safer. In the ache of not being met, the inner critic steps in: something is wrong with me. Or them. Or both of us.

That conclusion costs a great deal. The first thing it costs is the fulfillment of an innate need ~ belonging. A loss of your own authenticity in connection. Trying to prove your right-to-be takes enormous energy. It’s exhausting. It breeds loneliness, self-shaming, or disdain for others. Gifts remain at least partially unlived, because gifts are relational ~ they ripen and become substantial in our lives through mirroring and genuine connection.

What I know from my own journey and from years of guiding sensitive, gifted people is that wounds and gifts are usually entangled. Your unique sensitivity is a gift in itself as well as a doorway to other gifts. As you unwind whatever past hurt got wired in along the way, your capacity to embody and enjoy your gifts increases.

Your sensitivity brings you information and energy from dimensions of experience that everyday conversation rarely touches. At some level, you already know that whatever your sensitivity brings to you is sacred. You are not separate from the sacred. You are interconnected ~ you belong ~ even if your knowing has so far lived in the realm of the lofty and the etheric. Even if that knowing has been tangled with painful past experiences.

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What’s needed is to commit to valuing all parts of your experience and all of your needs, even the ones you don’t yet know how to meet. To recognize the cost of not moving forward and decide you are ready to find your way through. To meet and be met in your wholeness, one doable step at a time.

When you make this commitment to yourself, you meet your inner world, your emotions, as well as how you experience your sensitivity and other gifts you carry. As you grow your capacity to compassionately connect with yourself, becoming more solidly here, you make daily grounded, doable choices about your “yes” and your “no” based on what’s most important to you.

As you grow your ground to meet and value the whole of your experience, your understanding of how you operate deepens, which increases inner safety and spaciousness your body can relax into. Your expanding capacity connects you to the sweetness of being human with access to your vulnerability, your strength, your longing, and your aliveness. You find yourself standing taller, head held high. Your relationships upgrade, because you are more present when you relate.

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The truth underneath is simple and natural. Your present experience ~ gifts and challenges ~ is the ground for your way forward. Whatever blocks or problems you experience around sensitivity and your authenticity are not a verdict, but natural steps in a process. What you need lives in a real, embodied, relational orientation toward your experience: you as a living system. The way through is an embodied orientation to wholeness which you can make your own.

This is what The Living Map is for. It is a guided, sequential, relational way to meet yourself. So you can inhabit your whole body and your whole life and discover how your sensitivity connects you rather than exiles you.

Your creativity and your authenticity are available. The power to step into the changes you desire is already in you ~ it always has been. You belong here.

The Living Map

We were exploring the legacies, both the gifts and the burdens, we inherit through our mothers’ ancestral lineages, and how our legacies connect with our experience of sacred female rage ~ in our bodies, and in our lives. My heart felt open, raw, strong, and tender as I entered this sacred ground with my co-facilitator and the courageous group of women with us.

It all began last March with a powerful new project: co-leading a 10-month collective trauma integration lab through the Pocket Project, for women healing collective gender wounds ~ integrating sacred female rage and exiled energies into right relation.

I’ve been leading groups for a few decades. Group facilitation ~ supporting groups with presence, emergence, resourcing, relating, inquiry ~ is one of my favorite things. It’s my craft and my calling; where I am in my element. And leading a collective trauma integration lab is different from anything I’ve done. It’s new. It’s about finding out together in groups what can be healed on issues which ripple throughout humanity, complex issues that live in each of us in one way or another. To paraphrase a quote by Thomas Hübl who founded this body of work, it’s about walking important questions together. Creating enough group coherence that we can dive in and discover some answers together ~ things we didn’t know before ~ which we can walk forward into each of our lives.

Because my lab topic is about women healing collective gender wounds, I knew we would eventually explore the matrilineal line. What I could not have known was that my mother would transition from this life just ten days before this meeting. That I would arrive in deep grief, in reflection about her sacred impact on my life, honoring her in the most poignant and painful of ways. I had returned to work a week after her passing, and it felt like a stretch. As my co-facilitator and I prepared for this meeting, we chose something new: to each share some of our own personal resonances with the group. Given my mom’s recent passing, the reflection topic was especially raw for me.

The surprise

Moving back in time a year or so ago in Spring of ’25:

The collective trauma facilitator training was nearly complete, and I was beginning to explore lab topics. I would not have predicted choosing a topic focused on women. I thought of myself as a human more often than I thought of myself as a woman.

What I did know was that I believe diversity and difference are an important component of healing regardless of the topic. And I knew I favor somatic approaches: slowing down, connecting to nature and our grounding so we can listen deeply to our bodies, to earth wisdom, what some people refer to as feminine wisdom or indigenous wisdom. It’s a connection to something ancient, powerful, and innate. The specific topic and the title of the lab became clear in relation with my co-facilitator. It was a resonant, fruitful, meaningful exploration which unfolded through honoring our unique differences and aligning with a slow, embodied, somatic approach. We began our lab journey last March, with 33 women joining us.

My Mama’s legacy

During the facilitator training, as in my earlier studies with Thomas Hübl, I often spoke with my mom about what I was learning: how our individual experiences relate to our ancestral experiences, and how that connects us in a particular way with the collective. Not just all of humanity, but all of life. She was always interested, and she had lots of questions. We enjoyed deep conversations about our life experiences, and how our life themes echoed through the generations. Connecting about this brought warmth, sometimes grief, usually some relief, greater understanding, and a sense of beauty. Now more than ever, I am grateful for these conversations with her.

My Mama was always a connector. She had never been explicitly interested in ancestral research. Present-moment connections among family and extended family were what mattered most. However, tending and decorating family graves was very important to her. Before my ancestral studies, I hadn’t fully understood. Once I began delving into ancestral connection and healing work, it was obvious. It meant the impact and the connection continue beyond this life. It was an act of love, tending, remembrance, and honoring life. Connecting with ancestral legacies is about this too.

Since she passed less than a month ago, my understanding of how I carry ancestral legacy has grown exponentially. In my grief, I feel tremendous love, both towards my mom and from her. Things I have known for a long time about what Mama brought into her family system now carry more weight and power. She shifted the wider system to include hugging her parents. To say “I love you.” She was a force of connecting and protecting across the family system.

As I honor her and honor my own experience, what I’ve learned about healing is affirmed. Everything can be included. I am giving myself fully to my grief process, so that loss and love can flow together in my heart. Grief is changing me, bringing things together, which results in more understanding and wholeness. It’s an “ouch” and a “wow.”

Lineage rivers

Ancestry, like time, flows like a river. Each generation flows into the next. Each of our lives flows into the lives around us: the people, the land, everything. Our lives flow into everyone we touch, as their lives flow into ours. Everything is connected.

When I sit with the women in our lab, I sense our lineage rivers meeting. Each woman carries her particular ancestral legacy related to our topic of women, gender, and sacred female rage. Each person and their ancestors have been shaped by their experiences as well as by how they responded. How they experienced their gender, and the relationships between genders. What each woman in our lab can express and what has not yet been possible to express. What got supported, centered, celebrated, or silenced across the generations. What could flow and what had to go underground.

When life force is suppressed in one generation, it does not disappear. It moves underground and emerges again later in the same form or another form. Legacy burdens, symptoms of disconnection, hardship, and harm compound across the generations, until there can be a restoration.

This is one way I have come to understand sacred female rage. Not as an emotion belonging only to women, and not an against-ness. I understand sacred female rage as a bottom-up, earth-based wisdom ~ life force itself, rising through our bodies, in all beings. It is sacred with the power to honor the innate dignity in all of life, protection of the vulnerable, restoration of right relation. Life force includes our defensive and protective reactions around what could not be expressed. Grief, fear, shame, hate, blame, numbness, absencing … everything begins to make sense when understood as adaptations in a world with so much historical oppressing and oppression. Whatever hurt power dynamics exist in the collective today live in all of us one way or another. None of us is separate from the whole.

Anger itself has many expressions. In its natural form as life energy, anger serves life: protesting, protecting, clarifying, stopping harm, restoring dignity and right relation. Anger can also be expressed in ways that separate us from life, harming in some way, disrespecting life, or discharging / venting energy only to repeat the cycle: the repetition compulsion of trauma.

Learning to tell the difference, in our own bodies, in real time, is some of the most important work I know. Allowing anger to become a healing force through us. Disentangling the harm ~ the turning against ourselves, each other, and the planet ~ from the illuminating, restorative flame that clarifies, centers, and cares for what is essential and precious.

Gender as a collective field

Gender socialization touches all of us: women, men, and the genders beyond and around the binary. These wounds are a human inheritance, personal and ancestral and collective at once, and they shape each person uniquely.

We can learn a lot about the collective by witnessing how those more vulnerable are protected or not. Children. Trans folks. Women. Anyone who identifies as Femme. Protecting the feminine, which lives in all beings somehow, is about protecting life. When the feminine is not protected, whatever we identify as masculine is also deeply hurt. Ultimately any harm harms ourselves. As we are all connected.

Our lab holds a container for women because my co-facilitator and I identify as cis-gender women, and because in our experience, there is powerful medicine in women gathering to meet this material together. And the healing that happens does not stay in our circle. It moves out into families, communities, and the wider field we all share.

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What the lab is teaching me

Women from around the world are a part of our lab circle: ages 27 – 70 from multiple cultures, 13 countries. We are discovering both the diversity in our lived experiences, and also what we hold in common. The specificity matters. The commonality matters. Both are essential. I’m excited to find out what we will uncover and learn together in the next several months. We are at a threshold of coming closer in, stepping into the dark to illuminate what can be restored through our group process.

I’ve collaborated with other facilitators frequently over the years. My relationship with my co-facilitator in the lab is teaching me about how the quality of our relating directly impacts the group energy and container. Our experiences, our challenges, our different professional backgrounds, lived experience and ancestries, our mutual appreciation for what the other brings. I grow, stretch, and open my heart inside our collaboration. And then watch the fruits of it flow into the lab group. It is truly beautiful and inspiring.

Through the facilitation itself, we are learning what it takes for a group of women to connect, to settle together, to access our strength and our vulnerabilities, and to create a container strong enough that we can uncover the deeper collective wounds as they live in each of us. There is a rhythm to it: synchronizing, resourcing, listening to the voices that arise, integrating, restoring.

Here is something I love about this work: the facilitation competencies are related to life skills that are important for everyone. Presencing. Relation. Resourcing. Coherence Building. Inquiry. Emergence. Turning towards what has been suppressed or hidden. Opening to wholeness, creativity, innovation, possibility. These are capacities anyone can grow in their lives.

Everything’s a doorway

In our recent meeting, I had the honor of sharing with the group my own answers to the question we were all contemplating: what is my matrilineal legacy, and how does it relate to my experience of sacred female rage?

What sacred female rage means to me at this juncture is giving myself fully to my grief, to the flow of my life force, so that loss and love can flow together. And recognizing that my mom’s legacy of interconnection within our extended family system lives on in me: personally, in my connection with my children, family, and extended family, and professionally, in tending groups and creating the conditions for healing and restoration. I was able to express the power of the stand I feel for the women in our lab, and how I feel my Mama lives on through me in this work.

It is powerful to express myself so vulnerably and honestly. And to receive the belonging that flows through me in the recognition that my facilitation work is connected to my lineage gifts. My calling is not separate from my ancestry. It is part of the same river.

Thank you, Mama.

Coming in closer: what’s present is my Mama, her recent passing, my grief, my body, my particular lineage rivers. Welcoming what’s getting restored in me these days. Going out wider: women across the world, gender as a collective field, the whole human family, nature, the earth. Widening and deepening my sense of belonging to life. Everything’s a doorway into presence. Into love. Into this wild and alive moment, in me and in each of us.

With love and honor for my Mama, and for all the mothers in all our lines.

What resonates?

• Work with me through The Living Map, an online course which supports you to come home to the truth your body holds. It’s a powerful foundation for ancestral and collective work, and deeply valuable as a standalone. Not just how you feel inside, but how you show up in your relationships, your communities, and what matters most to you, so you can make the contribution that only you can make. The course begins September 17, and early-bird enrollment is open through July 31.

• Subscribe to Substack to receive my writing directly in your inbox.

• Learn about the collective trauma-healing work of the Pocket Project organization, here. They do amazing work which includes the integration labs and many other offerings.

• If something in this piece touched you ~ a memory of your own mother’s legacy, a stirring of that deep, rising life force ~ I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment or reach out to connect. These conversations are part of the healing too.

Like all of us in one way or another, I had light, and I was conditioned by life around me to channel that in particular ways. My conditioning was learning early to disconnect from myself in order to belong. To override what I felt, numb what was inconvenient, push through what hurt. I didn’t have a way to relate with myself, so when life got hard, I coped, got lost, and blamed myself for both. I had all these parts of me, my body, my emotions, my spirit, my creativity, my love for the world, but nothing to hold them together. Each one lived in its own room in my heart. In my body. In my life.

Connecting with only one part of me at a time and ignoring the rest was stressful, exhausting, and unsatisfying. Spirituality left my emotions behind, and didn’t include a relational space to protest, to want, or to need. Achievement in school left me feeling lonely. I was successful, but didn’t feel that I belonged. It was similar with dancing: being admired for my creativity and loving it, but also I felt separated somehow. I tried to connect mostly through being a good girl, a caretaker, and trying not to need support. And compartmentalization compounds. I felt lost, and I was trying to do it alone. None of this is about blame. As I would come to understand later, no one in my family system had the conditions available for integrated wholeness either.

In 2003, I had only recently left my fourteen-year marriage to the father of my children and restarted my life. A few years earlier, I had found yoga and my practice and work was now teaching yoga: weaving my love of movement together with my spirituality into the healing arts, shifting away from my previous career in dance, choreography, and the performing arts. At a yoga workshop I saw a flier on a table with two words on it: sacred link. I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. I knew I must respond.

Two weeks later I was in my car, driving across the country to meet the teacher offering the Sacred Link conference, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait. When I arrived, I asked for a meeting with him. In that meeting, I was initiated into the Himalayan tradition. Now I was connected not only with the healing art of yoga, but with an authentic, ancient lineage that includes yoga, ayurveda, and the right-hand path of tantra.

While I was there I signed up to return the following month for the conference. That was the beginning of an intensive ten-year journey of study at the Himalayan Institute and with supporting teachers. One of the teachings placed in my hands and heart was the chakra system.

When I received the chakra teachings, many things came together at once. My connection with Jesus and everything I understood about love and grace. My body, its health, its movement. My emotions, my energy, my sensitivity. It was an ancient and powerful map, and the goal it pointed to was twofold: enlightenment and bringing love down to earth, into the world, into my life.

And here is what I didn’t expect: my whole life before that moment started making more sense too. The struggles I had carried weren’t evidence that I was broken. They were locations on a map I had never before been shown how to read.

I was initiated into an unbroken living lineage, received person to person. The teachings of the Himalayan tradition were a bridge between East and West, the fulfillment of a mission my teacher’s teacher had given him: to carry this timeless wisdom to seekers in America. It meant a great deal to me to find a home there. The tradition was born in India, a long way from Oklahoma where I was born, and yet inside the sacred teachings I could feel my wholeness, all parts of me included, more than I ever had in my life up to that point. I hold what I received with accountability and respect.

For years, I studied, practiced, lived, and eventually taught the chakras in the traditional manner they were shared with me. It was an ascendant practice, moving up the spine into the light. And it was a descendant practice, moving down the spine into grounding. Into human life, and into the earth. These sacred practices remain at the center of what I offer. What became clear over the years is that I needed to transmit them differently than I received them. Not as a hierarchical lineage transmission, but as a companion and a guide. The image I hold is walking side by side with the people I work with, holding hands. This shift is important to me, because while I personally felt blessed by what I received from the lineage, the lineage itself ~ and the lineage model ~ carries trauma which I choose not to carry forward.

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Over the years, I was drawn to include many other teachings which eventually would become layered into my map, deepening my integration. Nonviolent Communication, Conscious Living, Conscious Leadership, the Historical Trauma Master Class for Native Americans, NARM (The Neuro-Affective Relational Model for working with complex trauma), the mystical, relational, and collective healing work of Thomas Hübl, and lineage healing with Daniel Foor, to name a few.

Somewhere in all of that, I discovered my particular gift, the thing people reflect back to me again and again: I can take something vast, complex, ancient, and esoteric, and help you find it in the next breath you take. Everything I learned, everything I lived and still live, is synthesized into what I now call The Living Map.

Over this 23 year journey, what has changed is significantly more coherence instead of compartments. Much, much less effort, less proving. The old survival strategies ~ the tightening, pushing, shrinking, running on empty ~ have loosened their grip, gently and over time. And struggle itself has been reframed: whatever I was struggling with was not wrong. It was my current step. Life began to flow through all of me at once. I cannot write about this without tears coming to my eyes, and I feel deeply grateful for all that has opened in me.

I have come to see that individual healing and collective healing are interdependent. When a person’s inner system is no longer running on domination, extraction, and control, they become, in themselves, a living example of a sustainable system. That is a quiet form of social change, and a real one. My message is not against-ness. It is inter-connectedness.

And inter-connectedness begins close in, in one body, one life. In mine, it has looked like this: emotions and sensations that once overwhelmed me became messages I know how to receive and respond to. Creativity has become a way I move through my days. Step by practical step, self-denying gave way to wholeness, not as a leap I had to make, but as a next step to navigate. The chakra map gives me the ground for all of it: a way to work with vision and imagination, with emotion and sensation, with history and memory, so that authenticity is no longer an idea I reach for but a rhythm I live. More fulfillment. More ease. More connection and belonging. Not because I needed to fix myself or become someone else or someone better, but because all of me finally got to be included. That’s what I mean by wholeness, and it is learnable.

That map I received in 2003 is the root of everything I live, practice, share, and teach. In The Living Map, I don’t hand you my map. I show you how to read your own, the one already written in your body, so that whatever needs to come together in you can flow and make sense, the way my life finally does to me.

The Living Map is now open for early-bird enrollment.

I used to be someone who didn’t know how to reliably listen to and value myself. I downplayed my emotions, was enmeshed with others, and pushed myself to do more than I wanted to. I suppressed my authentic expression in relationships.

And I was struggling in my intimate relationship.

Whenever things got difficult, I disowned my experience and downplayed my emotions. Compartmentalizing myself and suppressing my voice wasn’t satisfying. Since I was convinced having difficulties meant I was doing something wrong, I tried hard to learn what the right way was. All that pushing, draining, and self-criticizing took a toll on me. Beneath my efforting, I believed I wasn’t worthy of love and belonging. I was trying to prove my loveability by overgiving.

I knew I had to change.

Creating significant change in our lives can be hard. It’s important to understand that when we long to make a change, and it’s not happening, it’s for a good reason. Even when we aren’t yet clear what that reason is. Usually, there are blocks in our system that must be met in order for change to occur; in order for our lives to flow in a new way. And these blocks became invisible to us because at some point in our history (or our inter-generational history), our survival was more secure by not seeing them. That said, changing is doable.

As I began to look into how I was contributing to the dynamic, I realized I could not push through this alone. With support, I began to value myself in new ways. That gradually led me to begin setting healthier boundaries.

Observing that as I got healthier the relationship got worse instead of better, I could no longer deny that this was an entanglement that was dependent upon me acting a certain way which enabled my partner to feel good about themself, rather than a relationship where we could discuss challenges and work through them together.

I found the courage to leave and start anew.

I became someone connected with my wholeness, who knows the innate worth and value of my essence and my experiences. Not just cognitively but in my bones, organs, and tissues. I became someone who listens to my emotions, values their messages, respects myself, sets healthy boundaries, and opens my heart only to relationships where people not only honor my boundaries, but want to respond to my needs. I became someone who takes time to myself, and reaches out for support when I need to. I became someone with something to give, not from self-denial, but from overflow. I became someone who found my authentic way, alongside others. Not copying anyone else, but discovering my way through. Parts of me unlocked that hadn’t known how to trust life to flow through me, and that was changing.

Now when I think about my past, I can see how the past version of me was trying to show me my wholeness all along. I can see how my vulnerability and my strength wanted to be together, both essential and valuable. I can see my power, my resilience, commitment, and love shining through.

I expanded and refined my daily practices, bringing multiple things together that I had studied and practiced for a few decades but never before combined.

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Many insights came through, which led me to:

• Deepen self-connection and self-value, receiving messages from my inner experience which showed me my next step.

• Open up to relational practice, and discontinue pushing through difficulties alone.

• Stop pushing myself past my limits in relationships, which freed up energy and opened space to breathe more deeply and relax more fully.

• See how my life came to be that way, which allowed self-forgiveness to flow, loosening the grip of self-blame and shame.

• Change how I spoke to others, bringing in the voice of my wisdom and power, as well as my vulnerability and needs.

• Grow my capacity to choose where I wanted to be, and how I wanted to express myself: saying yes to others when I meant yes and no when I meant no.

What happened next is that some relationships and collaborations bloomed into meaningful connections and work. It unfolded in a natural process where I allowed people to show me who they are without blaming myself for what they showed me. As I reliably treated myself with warmth, respect, and care, and discerned what was unfolding in my relationships, the ones I chose to deepen reflected warmth, respect, and care, and even appreciation. These changes led me to joy and more freedom, love, peace, and fulfillment.

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Here is what I now know, not as an idea but in my bones: your wholeness is not something you have to build, earn, or get right. It is already here, speaking through your emotions, your body, your longing, even through your difficulties. Change doesn’t come from pushing harder, finding the one right way, or copying anyone else’s formula. It comes when you learn to listen to and value what is moving through your whole body-mind system, and when you stop trying to do it alone.

If you recognize aspects of yourself in the person I used to be, whatever struggle you’re in is not evidence that you’re wrong, or that you’re doing it wrong. It is your wholeness trying to show itself to you. The parts of you that feel like obstacles are carrying messages. And your way through will not look like mine, or your teacher’s, or your community’s. It will be yours. It can be found, one embodied step at a time, with a map and with support.

Now I include and welcome all of my experiences as essential steps on my sacred path, and so can you.

The Living Map exists as a path home to yourself, and is now open for early-bird enrollment.

Looking back, what I wanted most was to feel at home in myself. Centered, grounded, knowing my own value. That I was enough. Trusting myself to make my own choices, and allowing life to flow through me. I couldn’t have said it that clearly then. What I could have told you is that I loved dancing. And somewhere along the way I had come to believe that being good at it was what made me loveable. I also came to believe that needing support was a weakness.

In my late teens, I didn’t achieve a dance goal that meant everything to me at the time. One try-out, one no. I left the college performing group that I was a part of. I even left school. I stopped dancing entirely for nearly five years.

The meaning I made was simple. That I was a failure.

What I downplayed was needing support. I didn’t know then that my emotions were a part of a process, and that my difficult and painful experience didn’t automatically make me a failure. It didn’t define who I was or what I was capable of. I didn’t have a way to put it in context and make sense of my experience. At that time, like many of us in difficult situations, I thought that pushing through without support was the strong choice.

The gap between having that experience and resolving it was hard. In those gap years, I made multiple life choices that weren’t connected to what I really wanted and needed. I avoided facing my grief, and addressing the shame of believing I was a failure. The rock bottom difficulty was the sense I was living someone else’s life. I felt “off.”

It was a very painful time for me.

Then I felt ashamed about being off, which meant my suffering compounded.

Five years later, I got real with myself. I realized that holding onto my interpretation that I was a failure was not helping me, but stopping me from what I most wanted. Gradually I found the courage to move back into doing what I loved, dancing. Even though I was out of shape and didn’t seem to be good at it anymore. This time without all the pressure that came with believing I was a personal failure if a dance goal didn’t come to fruition. My shift to orient towards dancing out of my love for it vs. dancing with pressure to succeed (and not fail) changed everything. Once I allowed myself to dance again for the joy of it, I went on to have a career as a dancer in Los Angeles. I got some jobs and didn’t get others. Either way I enjoyed my adventure. When I retired from performing at age 30 to have my first child, I was fulfilled and ready to move on to the next phase of my life. But that’s another story.

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What I understand now is that my emotions were part of a process. What I called failure was a difficult, painful experience, and it never defined who I was or what I was capable of. What I had needed all along wasn’t more pushing through. It was support. A way to put the experience in context, to make sense of it, to let it move through me instead of hardening into an identity. I needed to know that I am human. I am natural. And my present experience ~ body, emotion, history, longing ~ was the very ground for my way forward. What I had called failure was a step in a process. I just didn’t have anyone showing me how to make sense of it.

When I integrated my “failure” as a dancer and found my fulfillment, what changed was coming back into contact with the life flowing through me. I felt like I was living my authentic life, on my own terms. It was a return to my natural, felt sense of who I am.

I lost five years to a story about myself that one supported conversation might have loosened in an afternoon. That’s the real cost of trying to do it alone. Not just the painful experience itself, but the years of making life choices while not being connected with your authentic self. And it can compound over time.

You don’t need five years. You need an orientation to include your wholeness. Your body, your history, your longings, and a relational space warm and precise enough so that what you already know can click into place.

If you want support with how you navigate your authentic life, check out The Living Map. Enrollment is open now and the early bird is active through the end of July.

One afternoon at school when I was 9, joy came through me for no reason at all. I laughed and laughed, eventually lilting home from school picking flowers for my mother. At 12, I would lie in the backyard grass and become the ant, the sky, the breeze. I didn’t have words for it… I was connected to something essential.

Like all of us in one way or another, through my childhood and beyond I experienced moments when essence shone through, and moments when it was necessary to adapt in order to belong. I learned to self-abandon, doubt my own perspective, and tighten inwards. To believe that my being was not worthy of being loved, and that I should try to be different, which came with a physical and emotional sense of burden. I learned that when things didn’t work out, I could survive by criticizing myself relentlessly and clenching my jaw and my body. I became over-responsible and controlled myself to fit people’s expectations.

By my mid-twenties I was married and dancing professionally. I experienced the adventure of a dance contract in Japan. While I was there, my body told me a truth in a language I couldn’t argue with. I decided to make a big life change and leave my marriage. Then I came home and did the responsible thing instead. Little by little, I tightened my body, held in my expression, and tried to be who I thought I should be. It would take me years to learn the hard way that overriding my knowing is not the same as being responsible.

Several years later, it was my second pregnancy, and I wanted a natural birth. I held onto my vision for the birth even when things logically looked impossible. The baby was breech. I qualified for a medical study about the safety of breech births after c-sections. I was a powerful advocate for what I wanted, and I learned something important about what could unfold when I am aligned, standing in my authentic ground, and clear about my vision. The birth of my daughter was one of the highlights of my life.

Later, in the hardest season, grace showed me something. A vision came which laid out my whole life as a map made of points of light. I could see all the key moments up til then, and how each led to the next. It was sobering and empowering. Now my choice was in my own hands, and the cost of not consciously choosing for myself was clear. I left the marriage. I didn’t know it yet, but I had just begun a whole new journey, with the first glimmers of understanding the living map of my life.

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After my divorce I followed my lifelong love of movement into yoga and meditation. Through years of practice, I could sit in stillness for an hour, but I couldn’t stay present in a hard conversation. The practices weren’t wrong. They were incomplete. Whatever healing was, it wasn’t going to happen only by sitting alone. I began nonviolent communication and other relational practices.

Years and chapters later, after raising my children, my work taking off, and leading multiple professional trainings, at age fifty-four, I left a relationship with almost nothing. When everything external was stripped away, I could finally see all the adaptations I had been carrying: not just my own patterns, but my parents’, and my people’s. The living map wasn’t only about my life. It ran back through generations.

After returning to St. Louis where I had raised my children, it was time for a deeper and more spacious (multi-year) pause to reflect and take stock. Through deep inquiry, relational practice, turning towards my ancestral legacies, and studying collective healing, things began to click into place. Every wake-up call, every joy, every success and challenge, many years of study, practice, and service through multiple modalities. One living map. Life had been teaching me all along through my experiences, through my body, my energy centers, through the support of mentors and teachers, long before I could see it clearly.

The Living Map practice showed itself to me.

I finally could know and feel the naturalness, the humanness, of my experiences, and how each one is a step in a process. A ground which I was standing on and could step forward from. I learned about myself as a living system with life flowing through me. I learned to relate to my whole experience without disowning parts of me, a whole-body, whole-history orientation.

It became possible for me to be in more reliable direct contact with what’s moving through me, and how to bring my experience into relational space. What became possible is feeling centered. Grounded. Authentically myself. Saying yes when I mean yes and no when I mean no. Feeling connected and supported, knowing I have what I need inside, energy expressing outwards in a flow.

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Everything is different now. Not that I no longer have challenges, emotions, or times of feeling confounded about what’s unfolding in the world. What’s different is I’m coming from a different place, and I have a way through that I can rely on. A way that includes being supported, and that incorporates the absolute necessity of community. A way that includes my belonging to life.

It took me decades and many experiences to learn to read my own living map, because for many years I was trying to do it alone, one method at a time, disowning whatever didn’t fit.

You don’t need decades. You need your body, your history, and a relational space warm enough and precise enough that what you already know can click into place.

That is why The Living Map exists. Not to give you my map. To walk you home to yours. What becomes possible is greater self-understanding, self-value, inner peace about your past, and a claiming of your unique authenticity. With access to your vulnerability, your strength, and your creativity, creating balance so you have energy for what matters most to you, and can show up to contribute what only you can.

The Living Map opens for enrollment on July 12.

If this story stirred something in you, reply to this note and tell me. I read every reply.

You can bookmark The Living Map page, which will be fully published on the 12th.

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I’m writing today because I’m opening something I’ve been building toward for a long time, and I want you to know about it before registration closes.

On April 6th I’m offering the first session of the Embodied Chakra Gateway: a 7-week live online series that moves through all seven chakras as living territory rather than intellectual content.

This is an introduction — a first walking of a map that has much more to offer. What you build here becomes the ground for everything that follows: ancestral work, collective healing, white racial healing, spiritual and mystical teachings. The lived practice of showing up whole in a world that needs exactly that. But those doors open from this one.

Here’s what I know about the people this is for: you already sense that your personal healing and your presence in the world are not separate things. You’re not looking for another system to follow. You’re looking for a deeper trust in the one you were born with. You want to live imbued with the rhythm of your essential self — not as a mental or spiritual concept, but as a felt, embodied, daily reality.

That’s precisely what this series is designed to cultivate.

Over seven weeks you’ll move through each chakra as a gateway: root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, crown. Each session includes teaching rooted in ancient wisdom, guided meditation and contemplative practice, embodied movement, and genuine relational exploration in a small, intimate group.

Since being initiated into the Himalayan Sri Vidya tradition in 2003, I’ve spent over two decades studying, practicing, living, and teaching this framework — finding out how it moves through a body under pressure, in relationships, in grief, in joy, in the full complexity of being human. What I’ve learned is that the most ancient wisdom is also the most practical. My gift is making the vast and esoteric findable in the next breath you take.

The series runs seven Mondays, April 6th through the end of May, online and live.

Investment is offered on a sliding scale, and space is limited. Registration closes April 3rd or when spaces fill.

If this is calling to you, here is the full description and registration link.

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And if you have questions, reply here. I’m glad to have a brief conversation to help you discern whether this is the right next step for you.

Thank you for being here, and for the quality of attention you bring to this work.

Rhonda

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You don’t arrive broken. You arrive carrying frequencies the world forgot how to hear.

Most of us learned early to override our bodies’ knowing. We perform wellness, perform competence, perform okayness. Somewhere beneath all the compensating, the rhythm of your innate being is still here waiting to be remembered and tapped into.

This series is a practice of coming home: to sensation, to rhythm, to the truth your sacred system already holds. By the end, you won’t have a new system to follow. You’ll have a deeper trust in the one you were born with.

This series is an introduction: a first walking of a map that has much more territory to offer. What you build here becomes the ground for everything that follows: ancestral work, collective healing, and the lived practice of showing up whole in a world that needs exactly that. But those doors open from this one. This is where we begin.

Enrollment is open.

When I was a preteen, I remember playing a game of pretend in my backyard. At some point I noticed an ant crawling up a blade of grass, and I lay down on my belly to get a closer look. The game of pretend forgotten. I became engrossed in the ant and the blade of grass, which looked lush up close. I wondered about the ant’s perspective: How did that blade of grass appear to the ant? How did it feel? Perhaps to the ant, each blade of grass was something like a tree looks to me. And the area of a few square feet like a topographical forest. What would it be like to crawl up and then down a blade of grass? And another? After studying the situation intently for a while, I felt the aliveness of my body on the grass and dirt I was lying on. Did the grass feel the ant? Did the ground feel me? I decided that it did as I had the sense of being felt by the ground.

My heart touched with wonder and awe, I rolled onto my back to wonder some more. There was the sky. A brilliant blue with a few fluffy white clouds gently moving. Slowly floating. I wondered what would it be like to be a cloud, and change shape and form. What would it be like to be the sky.

What was the sky to the ant? What was I to a cloud?

My pondering was bigger than my mind, but not too big for my heart. I was connected. Connecting. To everything. A part of life.

This came to me as a peaceful experience. A knowing: warm and grounded. Simple and timeless.

. . .

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As you know, there’s much unfolding in our world today.

One thing I’m placing my attention on a lot lately is the deployment of ICE to implement the current administration’s mass deportation initiative. I’m following what’s happening in Minneapolis and around the country — the raids, the terror, the impacts on families and communities and on all of us who are watching, especially people of color: people racialized as brown. The ongoing violence has been perpetrated on these lands I inhabit since the establishment of the United States. While the current political moment may seem new, key aspects of it are baked into how we became a country in the first place.

Presencing all this brings up nausea in my belly as I write. I feel angry.

When I take a few deeper breaths, pause, and step away from my laptop, I start to sense the space of my heart. I need some minutes. Sip some water. Stroll slowly around my living room, appreciating the beauty of my houseplants. The warmth of my living room. Recall some moments of inspiration and connection earlier today.

I have the blessing of these things being available to me right now. This is not a small thing. Even the spaciousness that makes it possible for me to process and tend my experience is a gift.

My heart feels powerful. Strong. I still feel angry. I feel grounded.

. . .

My heart knows about interconnection. Once I knew~felt it, I can’t un-know it. I’m part of this world. Of our collective. Of what’s happening with ICE.

Grounded interconnection doesn’t always feel good. Sometimes it’s painful.

What’s my part in this?

Not a question I can get right. Not one I can finish.

Only one I can walk with — heart online, turning toward what arises: sensation, emotion, memory, resonance. Tending my relationships. Strengthening my presence as a citizen of this collective. Listening to how I and my ancestors are woven into how things got this way, and how I might become part of something different. With others.

Listening to my heart and honoring my heart’s knowing of interconnection and interbeing is what guides me into finding my part in an ongoing way. Sharing this post is one aspect of my part.

. . .

Ancient wisdom about the heart chakra points to capacities and gifts that arise through this center. I’ve been sitting with this framework for over twenty years. It found me before I found it, in the way the things that resonate with our souls usually do.

The Sanskrit name for the heart chakra is Anahata, which means unstruck sound, a vibration or sound that emanates on its own accord. It’s the heart’s nature to do what the heart does. We might need to tend our body-mind systems and our lives in specific ways to be available to the wisdom of our hearts. We may need to carve out space in our lives to recognize the sound of our hearts, but we don’t make it happen; it’s innate.

The heart chakra is associated with the element of air, the way our breathing is both an inner and outer experience which physiologically interconnects us with each other through oxygen and carbon dioxide, with trees, and with life on this planet. Our heart connects us both to ourselves and relationally, and is associated with courage, willingness, our capacity to know ourselves and to commit to what is essential for us, as well as our courage to grow and evolve how we experience ourselves and each other. The heart is one of the centers where we grow our capacity to stand ‘for’ what matters most free of othering or internal fragmentation.

The heart chakra is our central chakra which connects and integrates seeming opposites: above, below, right, left, inside and outside, me, you, us. Here we may find longing, grief, or joy — sometimes all at once. We may experience ourselves as vulnerable and tender, as well as plugged into an inner strength. Through this center we may experience a calling of our soul, a quality of stillness, a magnetic presence. We might sense our love emanating from here.

. . .

A Simple 5 minute practice related to your Heart Chakra

Place one of your palms over the center of your chest. Close your eyes or soften your gaze, gently gazing downwards, whichever you prefer. Take your time.

Pause, and notice what you notice.

How is your breath? If it feels good to you, breathe a little more deeply, slowing your exhalation.

As you sense your palm on your chest, connect with the sensations both of your hand and within your chest. It’s a relationship. Your palm is resting on your chest at the level of your heart chakra. It’s as if your palm is being available to your heart, warm and receptive and kind. And your heart is being invited to have some more space just to be. And to be felt by you.

This is sacred.

Take a few more breaths here, perhaps letting your gaze land on something in the space around you that you enjoy. A color which catches your eye. A texture. Continue to sense your heart and your hand, connected.

Taking one more breath now, release your hand and stretch a bit, and flow on with whatever is essential now.

. . .

In the coming weeks, I’ll be offering an introductory class: Embody Your Innate Being / An Introductory Series on the Chakras.

I’ve been in relationship with the chakra system for over two decades. In 2003 I was initiated into the Himalayan Sri Vidya tradition by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait — a living lineage that includes the chakra system as an embodied map of wholeness. I offer this integration as an invitation to listen deeply through your body and your life.

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Befriending our inner depths builds capacity to cultivate connection and (inter-)being. We begin to feel more, to feel how we are connected with life, and sense how we already, innately, belong.

Befriending our inner depths gives us access to more life energy. As we honor our experiences and befriend the range of emotions, energies, and intensities that emerge, we become more humble.

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As we experience direct connection with our life force, there is less tendency to understand our place in life through the concepts of a fixed identity, less need to interpret ourselves or others as all “good” or “bad,” “right or wrong.” (Nor to say we don’t still have identities, we do; we just lean on them less and experience less separation.)

As we befriend our inner depths, we explore our innate rhythm and pace, individually and in relationships. Connecting with our innate rhythm and pace as we move about in our lives helps to bridge our inner and outer experiences.

This is a form of social change, as the suppression and control of innate life force is a fundamental way that collective traumas are enacted and internalized. A return to honoring Nature’s rhythms in our bodies and lives tends to be restorative. Something new can open and flow through us.

When we don’t have to work to avoid difficult or intense emotions, we grow our sense of wholeness.

We grow our ground of safety, presence, emotional warmth, acceptance, compassion, and aliveness. As we feel more and more connected with ourselves in our specificity, our capacity grows to be curious and open to others’ specific lived experiences, even when different from our own. Welcoming differences and complexities with a safe enough ground opens space for us to learn from and with each other.

Connecting across differences opens possibilities in community, restoring the social fabric around us.

Did any part of this post resonate for you? I invite you to like, comment, or share. Would you like support in befriending your inner depths individually or in relation to social issues? I invite you to reach out via DM or my website to explore the possibility of working with me.

Each of our views is subjective, based on our lived experiences. Plus based on the lived experiences of our ancestors which were passed down to us / or not passed down to us. And the conditioning we received as we grew up. Plus, our subjective perspectives are likely at least partially obscured due to what’s unresolved in us.

With that awareness, we can be humble. Even as we honor our inherent dignity, subjective perspective, lived experiences and whatever is our truth.

And as we honor the inherent dignity of others.

But often we forget to be humble and believe we know the right answer.

Which means we believe some others are wrong.

Even after we address our wounding and our conditioning (individual and ancestral and cultural) deeply, still none of us has the whole view.

We only have our own view and it’s challenging enough to take responsibility for that. To bring healing and maturity so that our perspectives are as whole and complete and integrated as they can be.

Start here —> the belief that the problem is “the others” and “out there.”

A shift is to explore how I am a part of what is happening in the world, in my country, and in my communities. What if there is no ‘out there’?

How is what is happening about me? About my people?
About us?
How is what is happening for me, for us?

My experience is twofold:

~ It’s essential to turn towards what needs tending within ourselves.

~ It’s essential to turn towards what is happening in our world.

While the practice of tending will be specific to whatever we are working with, those two areas cannot be separated as they are interdependent. Whether we want to admit it or not, we are interconnected.

We will gain a more comprehensive perspective by being informed by others’ lived wisdom as well as sharing our own. We need each other.

Facilitating embodied social witnessing practices so that people can grow their capacity to relate with themselves, a group, and world events fulfills one of my core values: interconnection.

It brings me a kind of flowering fulfillment even while turning towards painful collective trauma symptoms that we see in current events around the world. That’s how I recognize I’m in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing – for me. That’s how I recognize my alignment with my inner world, and outer world.

I trust this process.

Want to learn more? Visit my website page about embodied social witnessing. Or if you’re more drawn to the inner work, visit the somatic sessions page.

If something you read resonates for you, please like, comment, or share this post.

#embodiedwitnessing #socialwitnessing #embodiedsocialwitnessing #globalsocialwitnessing #magneticvisibilitysprint

P.S. I’m doing a daily posting practice about various aspects of my work on IG / FB for 30 days, and this is day 8. If you’d like to see those, check out my profile at either, although some of the posts are abbreviated on IG due to character limits.
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This is my first post to you paid subscribers. Thank you from my heart for stepping in closer and contributing to support my work! It means a lot to me.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to offer you.

To begin, what comes to me is to share simple practices, invite you to experiment with them, and offer my availability to receive your …

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The heart of the practice of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) founded by Marshall Rosenberg, Ph.D, is a shift of consciousness from domination paradigm which correlates with power-over and power-under to a paradigm of shared power where everyone's needs matter.

When we want to change our consciousness and create meaningful change - inner change and change in our world - we need to create a pause. To ground, center, and cultivate enough inner stillness to discern a disconnecting reaction from a response which aligns with our deeper values. If you’ve ever tried to change a habit or an ingrained pattern, you likely know how challenging this can be. My intention to create more responsiveness and less reactivity in my relationships is what motivated me to start learning NVC all the way back in 2005. The NVC process was and still is one of the ways I tend my relational capacity and capacity to change paradigms. It also helped me with parenting in the way I wanted to vs. automatically repeating old patterns.

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In the NVC process, one of the central ways we can begin to inhabit a context of connection, collaboration, and possibility is to connect with needs: Universal Human Needs. Universal Needs have both:

• a specific component in how we connect with our experience of life energy through our bodies which takes the shape of specific needs in a given moment,

• and a universal component, in that we all share and experience life energy and Universal Human Needs even as different needs are alive in each of us in various moments plus we may prefer different strategies to meet needs.

Connecting with Universal Human Needs offers us a place to meet and honor the aliveness in all of us, which we share. Feelings indicate our present experience related to our needs. When we make contact with feelings and needs, our state – our level of consciousness – shifts and our perspective opens.

Nonviolent Communication is based on historical principles of nonviolence-- the natural state of compassion when no violence is present in the heart.

Ahimsa is a Sanskrit word which means nonviolence. Satyagraha is a closely related concept, which is often related to nonviolent action, or resistance. Satyagraha includes the Sanskrit words satya, or truth, and and āgraha, which means to hold firmly. Satya is derived from the word sat, which means being.

​According to Ghandi:

“Truth, satya, implies love, and firmness, āgraha, engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance,’ in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word satyagraha.”

Integrating compassionate nonviolent communication into your life is an inside-out process which can deepen self connection, connection with others, and with all of life.

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Life can be confusing. Choosing how I want to engage my will, what choices to make, and what I want to commit to is not always clear to me. Burnout has been a factor in my life, when relationships or my life choices weren’t sustainable, and I found that out the hard way. A powerful orientation in my life is setting an intention to connect with a paradigm of shared power and collaboration to the best of my ability. Even when I don’t immediately know what to do or how to do it, committing to a way of being where love, collaboration, and shared power and justice benefit all is where I stand. Where my Soul stands. From raising my kids, to navigating hardships, to finding my way in today’s world with the injustices, polarization, and societal collapse that is unfolding, I know I am committed to that paradigm even in all the moments of not knowing. And orienting to community and social efforts where those values are shared bears bountiful blessings.

Embodiment and Trauma

While the heart of NVC supports people to connect with the beauty of life, it’s important to acknowledge that obstacles to connection do exist.

One of the ways to understand trauma is the trauma response is the physiological response to difficult events within the physical body, the nervous system, emotions, and thinking mind (as well as the traumatic event or situation itself). Whether the stimulating difficulty is a physical accident / mishap, a war, systemic oppression, neglect in the family system, or many other possibilities, human body intelligence will respond to protect life and well-being in creative ways which initially are helpful (for example to numb the physical and emotional body when hyper-activation cannot be sustained) and later show up as symptoms, if left unaddressed.

When we engage with feelings and needs in the practice of NVC, we will likely meet some trauma responses or survival strategies which are held in our bodies. This is not a problem, per se. We’re not necessarily trying to connect with what’s behind the trauma response (for example, the emotion underneath numbing) but instead opening to curiously and compassionately connect with whatever’s here, including numbing, understanding that it’s here for some reason, even when we don’t know what that is.

It’s helpful to be aware that connecting is a capacity, and all of us have varying levels of capacity – both in the stage of our lives we are in, and also on a moveable basis, like responding to someone snappishly when we need rest. Practicing NVC tends to strengthen our capacity to connect, especially as we practice over time.

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One of the things I’ve learned over the years (and am still learning) is to care for myself and my capacity first to whatever degree is possible. Self-absencing patterns such as self-denial, denying my needs, not knowing what my needs are, people-pleasing, or pushing myself to meet an external standard of success are exhausting and draining. When I neglect myself, my contribution and impact also suffers. A paradigm of interconnection and interdependence includes ourselves. Is it selfish? Or is it self-full? Perhaps each of us need to find our own answers to that inquiry. What I’ve learned from my experience is that giving from a full cup feels grounded, joyful, and interesting, at the same time I make a contribution to what matters most for me.

A key point of practicing trauma-informed NVC is bringing curiosity and compassion towards whatever shows up within us and in our relationships. NVC practice in itself is not always the strategy to resolve or heal every challenge: other support may be needed. Connecting with our needs and tending our capacity can help us move into action in support of life and well-being for all.

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Embodied Social Witnessing

When we learn to stay connected to ourselves while facing challenging topics and world events, something transformative becomes possible. Touching the felt truth of how a social topic lives through us can bring us into closer contact with earth, with our hearts, and with the most beautiful aspects of humanity which we share.

But in order to experience challenging social topics in a way that deepens our connection and well-being, we need to find ways to be with and care for our emotions. We need to learn to regulate or co-regulate our emotions. We need to honor our limits, recognizing that when we feel overwhelmed, ungrounded, disregulated, etc., that is not an experience to skip over but an experience to include. In my studies over the years, I’ve learned that many approaches to emotional literacy don’t include this degree of precision. No inner experience we are having is wrong or inherently bad. (I’m differentiating the felt experience of an emotion from an action we may take to express, act out, communicate, or discharge that emotion.) There’s always a reason for our inner experience even when we don’t know what that reason is. Emotions serve a function: They arise to show us something.

(I’m aware there may be exceptions to what I am saying regarding hormonal imbalances or illness, for example. If this approach does not resonate for your situation, I invite you to leave it.)

Part of emotional literacy practice as I see it is to be in relation with our emotions and discover what that is for ourselves. Some people call this befriending emotions. As I wrote about earlier, in the NVC process, emotions connect us to our needs. So of course, social issues and collective events will touch emotions in all of us, possibly including emotional reactions like numbing, turning away, shutting down, or various coping mechanisms. Social witnessing practice will bring us closer to our personal experience of emotions and any coping patterns we may have. For me, social witnessing practice contributes much to my healing journey and sense of belonging in the world, as I have a deep care for our collective well-being and value knowing a way to turn towards issues I care about and simultaneously deepen connection with myself, my communities, and our world.

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Embodied Social Witnessing combines compassionate, heart-centered communication skills with social awareness to tend both personal experience and the collective traumas that shape our world. Drawing from Global Social Witnessing / the work of Thomas Hübl, as well as ancient wisdom of the Native American Medicine Wheel, this approach is grounded in the understanding that all life is interconnected, whole, and embedded within the sacred web of existence. Just as the Medicine Wheel teaches that we are not separate from each other or from the natural world, this practice recognizes that our individual healing is inseparable from the healing of our communities, ancestry, and social systems.

We are surrounded by challenging world situations where polarization exists. Due to the many traumas surrounding us, none of us will likely be able to relate to world events with full presence individually—we need each other.

For many of us engaged in a healing process, whether that includes therapy, spiritual practice, personal development, communication skills, or other approaches, sooner or later we find that our hearts are a gateway to not just our past hurts, but to important gifts. Our authenticity begins to widen and more of our essential selves can be included in our daily life and relationships. The distinction between vulnerability and strength shifts and become more intertwined. Giving and receiving shifts to include ourselves and more of others’ essential selves as well. Our love permeates more. . . in every direction, including other than human beings, and Nature. These heart themes eventually make it even more obvious that community practice (in one form or another) is essential. Because our individual selves have limits to what can be felt, addressed, or created. Collective issues, or collective trauma, includes a backlog of generations or centuries of unresolved issues that are heavy, and that tend to repeat in some form. How can we learn? Not just as individuals. Even a whole bunch of individual selves do not have the power of a coherent, connected group. Sharing the weight of collective issues in community can help us deepen our ground and strengthen our vessel to meet the challenges in our world today, opening new possibilities to move from chaos to presence to connection and creativity. Thomas Hübl calls this becoming a walking answer to the (walking) questions we hold most dear.

Do you live in the St. Louis, Missouri area? If so you might be interested in:

Compassionate Connection & Collective Healing

A Workshop & Class Series for Embodied Social Transformation

in person in St. Louis, Missouri

Sunday October 19th (afternoon)
8 Mondays beginning October 20 (2 hours)

Interested in the Workshop? Check out the Workshop Flyer.

More about Embodied Social Witnessing, as a group practice

Embodied Social Witnessing offers practical skills for recognizing when you're overwhelmed and grounding yourself, so you can witness collective issues without getting stuck in reactivity. In practice: You'll learn specific techniques to notice when world events trigger stress in your body and how to calm your nervous system so you can engage with difficult topics from a centered place. Rather than carrying the weight of our world's many traumas alone—including ancestral and collective wounds—we discover that sharing this weight in community creates space for transformation instead of overwhelm, connection instead of polarization.

Practicing Embodied Social Witnessing in a facilitated group helps you build capacity to engage authentically with difficult conversations while staying present and heartful with what's painful in our world. You'll learn to recognize your authentic response to what's happening in the world which builds capacity for ongoing healing and action.

We begin by learning to connect compassionately with our own inner experience - our feelings, needs, and body sensations. From this foundation of self-awareness, we expand into witnessing challenging social topics and world events together as a group. Rooted in medicine wheel teachings of wholeness and interdependence, we understand that when we can share the weight of collective trauma rather than carry it alone, something new becomes possible: transformation instead of overwhelm, connection instead of polarization.

This practice bridges the gap between personal growth work and social change by honoring our kinship with all life. Instead of choosing between inner healing or outer activism, we discover how they support each other. Our embeddedness in the larger web of life means that by witnessing difficult topics through our bodies in community, we develop the capacity to stay present with what's painful in our world while maintaining our hearts and our ability to respond creatively from our place within the whole.

Workshop Flyer

Questions about the Workshop? Contact Rhonda

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This was the most powerful training I’ve experienced.

As I reflect, I celebrate all aspects of the training: Thomas, the team, and the cohort of participants that went through the training, about 150 of us from around the world. Previously, many of us were together in the 2-year Timeless Wisdom Training, so we had a significant amount of dedicated time to learn, practice, train, and grow together. The depth we experienced together was profound.

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Learning to hold space for collectively polarizing topics is a big deal. The topics we are dealing with in today’s world – conflicts, wars, politics within and between countries, climate, natural disasters, migration, the “ism’s” – racism, sexism, the legacies of enslavement, genocide, extinction of species. . . As I continue the list, I feel the weight of these topics – the “too much-ness,” heartbreak and very real challenge to find ways to move forward in connection. I learned that if we want to address a collective wound, we need to be collectively resourced to sustain presence and stay related: which for example could be love, resilience, spaciousness, devotion, creativity. Otherwise, collective wounds by their very nature will lead to polarizing and splintering the group. Coming through multiple collective trauma integration processes taught me much about how to navigate.

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One aspect of the CTFT training is developing Individual-Ancestral-Collective fluidity, which refers to dimensions of our wholeness: the interplay between our individuality, our ancestral legacies, and how we are each specifically part of the collective now and historically. These dimensions show up together. They are both distinct from each other and have some overlap and embeddedness. We trained our capacity to listen and respond to the complexity of how this shows up in ourselves, and with clients and groups. I came out of the CTFT with a greater understanding of myself and these dimensions of my life, for which I am forever grateful.

One of the biggest potential blocks to holding group space for collective trauma integration is any place of individual stuckness, absence, or shadow. The training was sometimes deeply uncomfortable. I celebrate the fruits of growth, integration and empowerment available on the other side of discomfort. I got even clearer how doing this kind of work calls for an ongoing commitment to shadow-work, healing, and taking exquisite care of myself physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. So, my learning will continue to unfold, ongoing.

Even after more than 20 years of facilitating groups, I’m excited about gaining more facility to guide groups through these kinds of collective healing journeys.

I intend to participate in the mentoring phase of the Collective Trauma Facilitator Training through the Pocket Project Labs beginning in early 2026, and I will share more about how that is unfolding next fall.

Over these last few years, I’ve incorporated my learning into my work – somatic sessions, Nonviolent Communication, Embodied Social Witnessing, and affinity groups. I recently updated my website and invite you to take a look. https://www.embodiedwitnessing.org/

I’m turning towards ways I can share this beautiful work. Message me if you’d like to learn more about collective trauma healing and how that could support you, your group, or organization.

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An assignment to complete the Facilitator Training was a 2-page abstract on a collective trauma topic interesting to me, which could be more research-focused or personal. I chose to write about whiteness, which is a topic that connects me with my individual and ancestral healing, social activism that is close to my heart, and which is one aspect of my professional work. My paper is included below. I hope you enjoy!

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Exploring Whiteness Awareness:
Whiteness Awareness = whiteness + witnessing consciousness

Background and Personal Context

I am a white-bodied, mixed-race woman, with English, Irish, Cherokee, Scottish, and German ancestry. I began to dive deeply into my racial identity and ancestry after a somatically stressful experience – something like a panic attack - during a local Witnessing Whiteness[i] class in 2019.

My stressful experience mystified me, and I felt catalyzed to delve into the source of this stress in my body (which eventually became clear through connecting with my ancestry.) I had already begun studies with Thomas Hübl in early 2018, which supported my embodied exploration. I began a discovery process about whiteness, my lineages, and how both inform my identities.

The inspiration for the Whiteness Awareness Exploration theme arose out of an early experience in a CTFT mixed-race small group community meeting. When I brought up the topic of whiteness, I did not intend to focus on whiteness to the detriment of other categories of collective trauma or to categorize all racial trauma into a white-black or white-brown binary, but to some degree that is what showed itself to me in that moment. I experienced a déjà vu: an echo of my arrival, around feeling called to contribute the fruits of my inner exploration of whiteness, ancestry, and mixed-race racial healing to others.

As Thomas teaches us, each of us carries some combination of victim and perpetrator within our lineages. My experience is when ancestry comes through multiple cultural lineages, the integration process includes not only integration within and in relation to a particular lineage, but also a reflection of the historical relationship between the lineages, including victim and perpetrator dynamics. Two specific lineages I am currently focusing on are my matrilineal lineage through my great-grandmother (Cherokee, various English, including Quaker) and my patrilineal lineage through my great-grandfather (English, connected with the English Church of Latter Day Saints up to the time of my 2nd great-grandfather).

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Domination Paradigm and the Complexity of Defining Whiteness

Race is one of several collective, social and historical classifications which are part of a domination paradigm[ii]. The domination paradigm is connected with colonization, patriarchy, and other collective traumas. Racialization (the way people are or have been categorized by race) has material impacts historically and in the present day.

Whiteness can be hard to define, since whiteness and race are social constructs, rather than a physiological or biological reality. In different parts of the world and different points in time, whiteness means different things to different people and has varying systemic impacts. Many of our ancestors likely needed to make choices about their racial identities, and/or about how to respond to the ways they were racialized in their time.

One important aspect of the domination paradigm is that it is constructed to be invisible - or to seem neutral - to those it centers. The closer to center in the domination paradigm, numbness and absencing tend to increase. This is true for race, which in many locations around the world centers whiteness, as with many other identity categories often represented on a ‘wheel of power’ such as gender, language, ability, sexuality, etc.

Despite increasing awareness of structural and systemic racism, whiteness remains largely invisible to many white-bodied individuals, perpetuating collective trauma and preventing healing racial wounds.[iii]

Embodied Exploration of Whiteness Contemplations

Embodied awareness and witnessing consciousness are pathways to make unconscious aspects of whiteness visible and transform collective racialized trauma. Embodied contemplation questions, especially when witnessed within a group, are powerful ways to make the subjective impacts of whiteness more visible. For example: What do you sense in your body when you presence whiteness awareness in yourself? What do you sense in your body when you presence whiteness awareness in the world around you?

“Our individual healing is magnified when we share our vulnerabilities – our emotions, narrative, and experiences – in the presence of others. Our embodied witnessing enhances the healing power.” – Thomas Hübl[iv]

Embodied explorations of whiteness can be transformative for people of all races, but in distinct ways. For this abstract, I will write specifically about people racialized as white and people racialized as mixed-race or “it’s complicated” since I can write about those categories through first-hand experience. Affinity group spaces can support these kinds of explorations, not as an endpoint, but as a step on the journey to make racialized impact more visible and felt within a space with a group who shares overlap in their lived experience of race.

For people who are racialized as white, whiteness tends to be invisible until we engage with it intentionally in ourselves and our ancestral context(s). Turning towards whiteness will likely be uncomfortable. It’s a gradual process which goes deeper with time. Agency, consent and motivation are important. While exploring whiteness benefits the collective, I believe the work is most powerful when people who are racialized as white connect with their inner motivation to engage in whiteness awareness practices for their own healing (individually and ancestrally), sense of belonging, sense of community, and kinship with all of life, as unconsciously whiteness functions as a disconnection.

For people who identify racially as mixed-race, mixed-culture, or “it’s complicated,” awareness of whiteness might be fundamentally connected with survival, as with people of color or global majority. Or there might be a resonance with an aspect of dominant culture other than whiteness which is more central. There may be various inner experiences from multiple perspectives, cultures, races, and ancestral streams, or something else I haven’t mentioned since experience will be particular to specific racialization and cultural streams. In my experience, people with ancestry from more than one distinct race, ethnicity or culture may offer particular insight into collective healing, as the individual embodiment process requires some form of inter-cultural relation or restoration.

Conclusion

Connecting directly with the gifts, burdens, and complexities of my lineages while continuing to explore whiteness has deepened self-contact and embodiment, brought awareness to where I needed support for developmental trauma, contributed to more soil in my base, and informed my sense of belonging and how I see the world. I can see / feel more closely how me and my ancestors are specifically interwoven within the ecosystemic fabric of the web of life.

In the teachings of Native peoples, each one of us is a point of contact for 14 generations: 7 which came before and 7 which emerge from here. Through this practice of White Awareness Exploration, my prayer is: May those of us who are called to these practices unfold a mystical, ancestrally restorative interconnectedness which will resonate through us and into our ecosystems, as well as backwards and forwards in the river of time.

Wado / Thank You for your presence.

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[i] Witnessing Whiteness has been a foundational text for many since 2007. Now in its third edition, the book offers a timely analysis of what we face today, offering a comprehensive, nuanced, step-by-step path toward deeper understanding of race and antiracist action. https://www.shellytochluk.com/witnessing-whiteness/

[ii] The matrix of domination is a paradigm that explains issues of oppression that deal with race, class, and gender, which though recognized as different social classifications are all interconnected. Other forms of classification such as religion, or age, or sexual orientation apply to this theory as well. https://www.continued.com/social-work/ask-the-experts/what-matrix-domination-134

[iii] The dearth of research on white youths’ racial identity development reflects long‐standing racist ideologies, specifically white normativity and supremacy, that shape U.S. society. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9543382/

[iv] https://thomashuebl.com/our-world-is-rooted-in-collective-intimacy/

Even as we struggle with trauma, sometimes feel disconnected from our purpose, and sense the weight of collective wounds, we are not alone.

There is a path that honors both individual healing and collective responsibility, even if at times we can’t see it. Together, we will discover our way.

Our transformation happens not by bypassing difficulty but by turning toward it with compassion, as our personal healing journeys are inseparable from healing the world around us. Turning towards our experiences with compassion can be as simple as noticing our body sensations and emotions, where we meet an edge of overwhelm, then placing a hand over our hearts and taking a deep breath, saying “I’m here” to ourselves. Or putting on music and moving our bodies to match how we feel. Or connecting with a like-hearted friend to share our embodied experiences.

With courage and commitment, we endeavor to live with deep alignment between inner truth and outer action, creating a life of meaning, connection, and service.

~~

On a more personal note, this wisdom feels especially urgent today as I watch the news of the US bombing Iran, then calling for peace. My heart is breaking. We don’t create peace through violence. As Michael Franti sings, “We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can’s bomb it into peace.”

The inspiration to write the posts on mirroring arose through reflecting on my various interests, how they are related, and my motivation to delve into each of these topics over the years.

By contemplating aspects of life as a mirror, I don’t intend to dismiss difficult experiences or injustices. There are moments when contemplating life experiences as a mirror is empowering, and times when it’s not. For example, when we are experiencing a crisis, what we likely need is to directly tend to what’s happening, vs. contemplate what we can learn from what’s happening. Timing makes a difference, as well as the intention to find grounded relation with what happened or what is in order to empower ourselves and each other.

I’ve written about contemplating life as a mirror in seven different ways. Each section points towards ways we can learn and grow by including more, including what’s difficult, and integrating and potentially transcending contexts we are ready to outgrow.

Now, onward to Part 2.

In Part 1, I touched on:

• Meditative Silence as a mirror

• Relationships as a mirror

• The World as a mirror

• Social Architecture as a mirror

Part 2 includes a bit about:

• Ancestral Legacies as a mirror

• Birth Experience as a mirror

• The Stars as a mirror

  

Ancestral Legacies as a Mirror

In the last 4 or 5 years, studying ancestral healing has opened up my world in surprising ways, deepening self-understanding and changing my perspective. What I learned through Daniel Foor’s book and online course, Ancestral Medicine, has become foundational for me, particular in how grounding I experience my contact with my various ancestral lineages. Ancestral healing studies with Thomas Hübl, along with his courses focused on healing, mysticism, and collective trauma facilitator training continue to be a foundational resource and community in my life.

I’ve learned that we can restore belonging and a sense of rootedness through felt connection with our ancestral lineages. Hyper-individualism, a predominate construct in today’s world, cuts us off from knowing ourselves as an outgrowth of our ancestral lineage(s).

Attachment plays a part here. Our early connection with our caregivers impacts how our nervous systems are wired. Our innate intelligence supports us to adapt, survive and optimize our experience within our relational environment. These early adaptations, which can take many forms, occur before our front brain is online, operating unconsciously. Whatever our adaptations, they are functions of resilience: our body/mind/heart’s capacity to find a way through our experiences, just as our ancestors found a way. And thus, we are here.

In a healing process, we tend to begin with individual healing. As we open more complexity, we may discover that some issues we are dealing with are not only individual. The understanding, ‘It is part of my life, and it belongs not only to me,’ enlarges the context. Whatever our ancestors couldn’t resolve remains (in some form) as an issue for us to resolve.

There is a connection between contemplating social architecture as a mirror and ancestral legacies as a mirror, as our ancestors’ experiences unfolded in relation to the time, place, and social situation they lived in. Just as we adapt into our caregiver environments and/or family systems, our family systems are embedded into a larger cultural and social location, which was embedded within a particular point historically. So too, with all our ancestors. Each of our histories is embedded within and inter-woven with other histories.

Reflecting on our ancestral legacies is about connection, interconnection, inhabiting our bodies, and bridging engagement among present and past, as well as within ourselves and with each other. Contemplating our ancestral legacies opens our consciousness to a bigger river of time including and beyond the duration of our lives. It can be very meaningful to feel ourselves a part of something that began before we were here, something much more ancient.

The ancestral healing process includes unpacking the specific gifts and burdens in our lives that we each carry as ancestral legacy. The legacies take on a different context when we perceive them through an ancestral lense vs. identifying them as only individual. New possibilities emerge as we have the right-sized container for the size of the issues we are dealing with — like how much liquid can fit in a certain sized cup. Ancestral-sized issues need an ancestral-sized (and attuned) consciousness to integrate, allowing us to expand the gifts and gradually melt the burdens.

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Birth Experience as a Mirror

Birth is a significant initiation as we transition from beings in the womb to breathing on our own. Our entry into this world impacts our nervous systems and emotional patterns, and impacts how we relate, as well as the lense we see the world through. These foundational perspectives / lenses are usually invisible to our consciousness and may get reflected back in various ways through themes in our life experience.

Like any pattern we become conscious of and want to transform, melting or evolving from our birth patterns is possible. I first learned about working with pre- and peri-natal and birth patterns (for myself and with clients) in 2009 with Katie Hendricks as part of her 2-year Leadership and Transformation Training. Multiple modalities support a somatic connection to our experience of the birth transition, and to pre- and peri-natal stages. A somatic approach to reflecting on our birth experience as a mirror can facilitate melting into a softer, warmer, more contactful way of inhabiting our bodies and our lives.

Recently, I am returning to focus on unwinding early patterns and find it empowering, like becoming a doula to my ever-emerging Self even as I continue to integrate residual experiences from these early stages. This healing work unfolds in a spiral, deepening over time.

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The Stars as a Mirror

I enjoy reflecting on the stars (via astrological transits and various kinds of charts). I was first drawn to astrology a few decades ago as I experienced receiving a kind of empathy through natal chart readings, which grew my self-understanding. Learning about various astrological systems was fun, and I occasionally brought it into my work over the years.

Reflecting on the stars as a mirror, I want to be clear about cause. When (subjectively) meaningful things co-arise, there is a tendency to attempt to find safety in the form of trying to understand what causes what. For that matter, it is a common phenomenon to struggle to cognitively understand when we are scared, confused, or overwhelmed. As if, by understanding, we could get rid of the difficult feeling or state. I’m not saying that understanding what causes what isn’t important. It is part of developing and maturing. And it’s not always simple, clear, or even possible.

I don’t look to astrology from a causal perspective, as in ‘my sun in Leo causes me to have certain personality traits or behave in certain ways,’ but as a mirror which contributes to self-exploration. Astrology itself is a type of mirror, based on what is reflected in the sky at the moment of birth. Human Design and Gene Keys charts include an additional element of a second chart calculated 88 days before birth, reflecting the beginning of the last third of a full-term pregnancy.

Regardless of the content of a particular chart, we all were born under the wholeness of sky: we all have the whole sky in our chart. Based on what was happening in the sky at the precise location and moment you were born (and also based on which astrological system you are looking at as there are different ways to calculate), you may discover synchronicities with your chart (of whatever astrological system you are drawn to) and what you experience so far in your life.

Each archetypal quality alluded to in a chart carries a range of potential expressions. They are not moral distinctions. My perspective is none of the information reflected in a chart is inherently better or worse than any other information. Just as a multiplicity of qualities in Nature co-exist and are interdependent, so are qualities in the cosmos which are reflected in an astrological chart. Each bit of information in a chart emanates a quality which is an essential aspect of wholeness.

If you choose to engage with any kind of astrological chart, I recommend you not take anything in your chart as a fact about you, particularly about your future, nor a rule about how you should be. It is a mirror to explore, relate with, and learn through your embodied experience if you choose.

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Conclusion

Patterns that are operating unconsciously tend to replay themselves through us. Without a ground of presence and an orientation with curiosity, our unconscious patterns tend to repeat and are often experienced as happening to us. When we’re aware of a pattern we wish to transform, we begin to discover and integrate what’s here for us, creating intimacy with our somatic experience.

We need to find ways to restore and bridge new connections with ourselves, each other, and our Earth. Our capacity to sense, feel, and orient to life in a grounded way with an intention to discover a response aligned with our values opens new possibilities. We can refine our intentions or create new ones and make new choices.

What are your mirrors, your paths? I invite you to drop me a line and let me know.

Reach out if you want to explore working with me. Each of the sections I have written are aspects of my work.