soulful impact / CLG

Genuine awakening occurs in the delicate, dynamic and delicious balance between agency and surrender.

It’s like suddenly beginning to understand a new language that someone has been speaking to you your whole life — but instead of rational thought, this language is rooted in metaphor, imagery, dreams, feelings, emotions and numinous encounters with wild nature.

The trouble is that ego-based motivation also creates a sort of toxic, fear-based sludge. We might achieve our goals, but sooner or later it costs us in some other way.

I experience this journey as moving through an ever-expanding spiral. Each time I make it through a cycle, I expand my awareness of what’s possible. I expand the range of experiences and parts of myself that I am capable of fully being with from a place of open-hearted equanimity. I expand my understanding of what it means to give my gift. I expand... See more

Through the sheer bigness of your heart, you recognize that even the most repulsive parts of you still contain a sacred essence. They are redeemable, and therefore, so are you. You get to come home to the wholeness that you already are.

Choosing to embrace rather than deny the intensity of our feelings and emotions is like building a new muscle or gaining confidence with a new skill. It may feel scary and awkward at first, but each time you do it, you build more comfort and capacity. Ultimately, this practice unlocks greater integrity with yourself, as you stop fighting with your ... See more

Embracing your disowned parts means finding the willingness to recognize that, despite your ego’s protests, you contain the full spectrum of humanity and possibility within you. Instead of pretending that certain qualities you dislike in other people don’t also exist in you, try on the possibility that if you spot it, you got it.

Our gifts have an uncanny way of inviting us to confront and lean past the edges of our comfort zone, testing and stretching our ego’s constrained ideas of who we really are.

This journey is like a wilderness expedition on steroids. It beckons us to explore the wild frontiers of our living and breathing home planet, the expanse of the cosmos, and the dark fertile depths of our souls

Based on a useful model created by spiritual teacher Michael Bernard Beckwith, there are four ways of being in the world: To Me > By Me > Through Me > As Me. I find it useful to think of these as experience states, in that we can bounce around between all four all the time.