Hello , here is today’s quote, it is from Griffin’s book “Women and Nature” a powerful read. Unfortunately, Griffin passed in September of last year. During her life she reconciled her German heritage with her Jewish home. That is what doing our inner work does, it helps us heal rather than lashing out at the world from our woundedness. It is what soultending is all about. Anyway, like others I have come to respect over the years I am happy to say she left many wonderful and thought provoking books behind so that her voice is never silenced. The photo I took from the moving car the other day on our excursion to Bald Peak.

January 24

“We learn to be afraid of our nature.”

- Susan Griffin

Thoughts: When we become out of balance with ourselves and the world in which we live we can too easily believe the media or the family or the whatever and think their version of who we are is correct. When drug addicts and alcoholics go into recovery, a well balanced treatment program will invite the family in as well because they too often have an unconscious agenda operating around a family member’s addiction pattern or chronic health challenge for that matter (they impact a family in similar ways). We ask, what is the secondary gain. By treating everybody we peel the layers of habit and perceived protection back to reveal the issues or unconscious stuff at the core. Personally, my role in my loving yet somewhat dysfunctional family was to help and protect others often beyond my heathy boundary but I didn’t know it at the time because it was all I knew and I had done it since my sisters were born. I perceived it as traumatic one time when I tried to step between my mother in one of her rages and my younger siblings. It had always been my role to protect them but that day because I had been sick for a few days my mother sent me away to my room but I could still hear her as I sat dumbfounded in my room not knowing what to do because I knew my mom’s angry words would wound deeply. I cried, that had never happened before where I was not allowed to play out my role of protector of my sisters. My world kind of short circuited that afternoon. Now, I don’t know if it was my nature to protect but it is what my 13 year old self knew to do in my family of origin. Healing for me came a few decades later as I started my recovery and became a therapist as a result. Learning healthy boundaries most of the time and recognizing that we are not as separate from each other and our planet as we pretend to be. Thanks to authors like Griffin and Jean Shinoda Bolen and Iain McGilchrist I know that brain science has finally ’discovered’ that I am a right hemisphere thinker often perceived as very intuitive and highly sensitive to the world in which we live. But nobody understood that when I was 13 or my mom who also felt too deeply the more than ordinary states of consciousness in our world so she used alcohol to numb the noise of so much life chatter within her hearing. Her Christian family couldn’t understand so they worked to tame her nature, make her fit in better to their belief system. This is what can happen when a family or a culture, or a nation decides the only thing of value is logic…even when that logic makes no sense to many of us. Courage is needed to open to our untamed polite selves and re-member who we really are. We need our wild selves as Robert Bly or Michael Meade would say. The thing is once we reconnect with our wild nature, with the totality of God’s map of human nature we stop allowing others to tell us what reality is. The abuse stops because we roared NO! Blessings ♥️♥️