Category Archives: Healing

The Espaliered Woman

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Espaliered apple tree
An espaliered apple tree at the Chicago Botanic Garden

You’ve probably seen them. They’re often apple or pear trees, planted right up against a wall, limbs twined onto wires so they’re flat against the wall. The trees still bear fruit, but they take up much less space.

These trees are espaliered.

I used to admire them. Such pretty trees splayed out against brick walls. Now I feel sorry for them.

What would that feel like – to want to grow, to bud and fruit, but instead to be trained and pruned, wired and flattened, so you didn’t take up so much space and you look beautiful? How handy for the gardener – for his tree to be small and orderly, but still produce fruit.

The tree herself is still wild, yearning to grow, to stretch her strong branches up to the sky in search of sun. To be nourished from her deep, wild roots. To feel her leaves unfurl and buds form, and to feel the power of forming fruit.

And along comes a gardener (all the gardeners shown espaliering apple trees in my web search appear to be male) who thinks, I’m gonna make me a tree that still gives me fruit but that is well-behaved, by golly.

So the tree is pruned and wired and trained for maximum fruit production and minimum encroachment into the gardener’s territory.

An espaliered tree is an apt metaphor for the contrast between our social, culturally-constructed selves and our true wild nature.

The wild tree is our true nature – our essential, instinctual Self gifted to us at birth. Those wires and pruning and snipping off of anything that doesn’t fit the preference of the gardener, well, that’s the false, social self at work.

We all have false, social selves. Personas. They’re the costumes we wear to fit in, get along, stay safe, and make others happy. They’re part of being human. Our social selves are necessary. They keep us out of the street and out of jail. The trouble comes when we aren’t able to choose when to wear them anymore – when we forget that we’re wearing a disguise. Then these selves become rigid, too-small skins. Trapped inside them, we slowly suffocate.

We all wear masks in order to go along and get along and navigate the culture we’re in. And thankfully we all have, somewhere deep down inside, who we truly are: that elemental, essential, instinctual wild Self who carries our knowing, our purpose, and our passions.

For many of us, there comes a time when we realize we’ve lost touch with who we really are, at root. We realize we’ve let ourselves be espaliered – pruned, flattened, trained in straight lines. Beautiful to the eye of the gardener, for whom we’ve produced abundant fruit. We exist for him, and not for ourselves.

At this point, unlike the tree, we human women have a choice. Choosing to remain espaliered has its rewards: shelter, warmth, less risk of damage to those precious limbs. Many women will choose to remain safe within the castle walls.

Others of us will come to understand that to remain espaliered is equivalent to choosing death. We will pull ourselves free from the wires and away from the wall. We will return to our wild root stock. We will become feral, unsafe, free-ranging and open to the elements. We probably won’t produce as many apples, but other rewards will take their place. Wild birds will make their nests in our newly-craggy branches. Fierce badgers will den in our roots.

We will be who we are, again. We will be becoming who we’re meant to be, again. 

Here’s one way to feel the difference between your social self and your essential self. (This is a riff on the Body Compass, a foundational tool for Wayfinder Life Coaches and their clients.)

Imagine yourself as an espaliered tree. Become the tree. Feel the wall at your back. Feel your limbs tied to the wires running in straight lines. Feel the urge to send out unruly shoots. Feel them snipped off by the gardener. Feel him admiring your rule-following prettiness and fertility. What do you notice in your body? Choose three words to describe this feeling of being espaliered.

Now take three deep breaths and shake your body. Move the energy of espalier through your body and let that shit go.

Finally, imagine yourself as a wild tree. Become the tree. Feel your wild roots deep in the soil. Feel your sturdy trunk. Feel your strong limbs spread and stretch for the sun. Feel new shoots sprout all along your limbs. Feel your leaves unfurl and your buds form. Feel the buds solidify and become fruit. Feel the fruit become heavier and heavier. Feel the birds build nests in your limbs, and the badger make a home in the space between your deep, sheltering roots. There is space for all. What do you notice in your body now? Choose three words to describe this feeling.

Which tree feels stronger? Which tree feels more powerful? Which tree would you rather be?  

When you’re living and making choices from your social, culturally-constrained self, your body will tell you. You will feel more like the espaliered tree. And when you live and make choices rooted in your wild, essential Self, your body will feel more like the wild tree.


Did you try this exercise? I’d love to hear about it. Contact me here or leave a comment below. Thank you! 

PS. I’m transitioning to sending email newsletters rather than blog posts. If you’d like to receive fresh content as well as information about my latest offerings, please subscribe. You can subscribe on the form in the sidebar here. In my newsletter, I go a little deeper into one of the four touchstones I use in my work with clients, and suggest a practice, exercise, or journal prompt to explore it further.

(Photo credit: Chicago Botanic Garden)





Four healing shifts and a simple awareness practice.

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Sun shining through fingers

I’m convinced that healing happens as we make four simple shifts. These shifts aren’t rules. They’re more like touchstones. Truths. Signposts along the way of integrity. They’re not linear, but rather a spiral unfurling. They’re my attempt to “systematize Mystery.” 

  1. More soul, less façade. To orient ourselves more and more to the truths of our hearts and souls, and less to others’ expectations. 
  2. More acceptance, less resistance. To accept and celebrate the ever-changing nature of being embodied on this earth more and more often, and resist life’s inevitable changes less often.
  3. More intention, less reaction. To choose our thoughts with intention more often, and become caught in our emotions less often. 
  4. More creation, less victimhood. To actively create our lives more often, and less often behave as passive victims of other people, circumstances, or “fate.” 

Supporting my clients as they make these four shifts is the core of my coaching. These shifts are simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy. And we have to know where we’re starting from to get where we want to go.

Moving the dial on these shifts requires awareness of what’s happening in our bodies and our brains.

Powerful, lasting change begins with clearly seeing, acknowledging, and being with our current reality, and loving ourselves no matter what we find when we tune into ourselves.

My clients and I begin every session with a few minutes of tuning in. We stop, we feel our bodies, we breathe. This tuning in is non-negotiable. 

Here’s a simple two-minute awareness practice. You can do it anywhere, and you won’t need any special equipment. Don’t complicate it, or try to excel. Just do it.

1. Stop what you’re doing. Take three breaths, Feel your feet.
2. Scan your body for sensations.
3. Whatever you feel, simply allow it. Let the sensations be what they are.
4. Sit with yourself for two minutes. 

Do this practice as often as you remember. Set a reminder on your phone, if you want to. Journal just a few words about what you find, if you want to. Pay attention to any patterns you see, if you want to.

That’s it. That’s all. This simple awareness practice, just coming home to your body for a couple of minutes, is such a powerful place to start making important shifts. Your body is your life. Your body is a gift. Your body tells you what’s true and real and alive. 

Your body is your connection to your soul. Your soul is your connection to meaning, purpose, and deep joy. Everything starts with your body.

You might find as you do this practice regularly that you become aware of emotions and thoughts. If you do, you can jot them down if you want to.

All change, for conscious humans, begins with awareness.

I go a little deeper into one of the four shifts mentioned above in each newsletter, and suggest a practice, exercise, or journal prompt to explore it further. I value your feedback. 

I’m collecting everything I’ve written about these four touchstones into a short e-book. Your responses and questions will help me make that book clearer and more useful. Contact me here or leave a comment with your thoughts. Thank you! 

PS. I’m transitioning from a blog subscription to a newsletter, in order to serve my readers better. Please visit my website and subscribe to my newsletter to continue to receive posts. Thank you!

Photo credit: Daoudi Aissa on Unsplash

A letter from God to her daughters who observe Lent

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Woman with a cross of ashes on her forehead

Dear Daughter,

On Ash Wednesday, if you were in church, the minister would invite you to the observance of a “holy Lent” and mark your forehead with the ashes of repentance.

Let me be very clear about this: I love you so much. I delight in you. I cherish you. For ever.

Here are a few more things I want you to comprehend. Despite what you’ve been taught, “holy” does not mean pure and unearthly. “Sin” does not mean breaking my rules and making me mad. “Penitence” does not mean listing and wallowing in all the ways you’re wrong and bad. “Repentance” does not mean promising to do better to stay out of trouble.

Please think about these words a new way, on Ash Wednesday and every other day going forward.

What if you only sin when you refuse healing and cling to brokenness? When you use those sharp broken edges to hurt yourself and others?

What if holiness is when you choose to be whole, even though you’re terrified? When you embrace and enfold those pieces of yourself you’ve lopped off to fit into others’ molds?

What if penitence is when you see yourself clearly, and know, speak, and live from your heart?

What if repentance is returning to your true self in all her messy glory?

What if, this Lent, instead of focusing on the ways you’re not good enough and the ways you fall short, you commit to your own healing?

I was there at the Big Bang, enlivening every particle, atom and molecule. You are made of me, and through me you are connected to everything and everyone. I am everywhere, my love. You live in me and I live in you.

This means, my dear, when you let yourself be healed, your healing heals the world. And when you cling to your brokenness, the world stays a little more broken than it needs to be. Your healing is important and necessary.

You think your healing is selfish. That’s incorrect. On the contrary, your healing is crucial. I’m using that word deliberately, sweetheart. Your healing is the crux – where you and I come together.

This Lent, the only fasts I want from you are these: Fast from distractions that allow you to stay wounded and broken. Fast from believing you’re not good enough. Fast from making yourself small, and nice, and silent. Fast from all judgment, especially of yourself.

This Lent, make space for me to flow into you and through you.

Befriend your fear, your anger, and your sadness. They are a deep source of nourishment and strength.

Let your love go free.

Let your joy be unconfined.

Sweetheart, healing isn’t complicated, and it’s always here for you. All you have to do is tap into it, like a springtime maple tree or an aquifer of living water. You know this. But it’s so easy to forget, isn’t it? All you have to do is let me clear out the dams and the trash, the resentments and identities and old, too-small skins that keep you stuck and stagnant. Open your heart armor just a little. Let go, child. Breathe and soften. That’s all you have to do. I’ll do the rest.

This Ash Wednesday, let those ashes symbolize our unending connection, a connection so easy to forget and so simple to strengthen. When the priest wipes those gritty ashes on your forehead and says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” celebrate your elemental oneness with this dear, dirty earth, and with me. I am in those ashes, in the dust, in the stars, and in you.

I need you, my daughter. You’re the only you I created. Please, let yourself be the creation I made you to be. You don’t need someone outside yourself telling you how to live. Trust yourself. Trust your heart. Trust me. I’ve got you.

All my Love,

God

A Lenten gift for you: two printables of this post are downloadable here.

Photo: Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash

We’re all messy miracles.

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Hand with paint all over it

I have a dream: imagine we all knew that we are perfect just as we are. We’re messy miracles and we’re fine with that. No need to be perfect or exceptional. Just breathe and love and raise good humans and be good friends, lovers, community members. If we knew that there’s always enough if we share. If we met ourselves and each other with a deep, holy, accepting, life-giving presence. If we said to each other everyday, “There you are. I’m so glad to share the planet with you.”

I posted these words on Facebook last night, November 4, 2020. If you’re reading this in the future, let me remind you – it’s the night after November 3, Election Day, and 24 hours later we still don’t know who won. (As I write this on November 5, 2020, we still don’t know who won. As I post on November 6, 2020, the winner is still unclear.)

No matter.

What matters is what we can control, which is how we live, move, and have our being in this precious world.

What’s your dream for our world?

I dream that all have enough food, shelter, water.

I dream that we live simply so others can simply live.

I dream that we remember that we are all connected.

I dream that we have each other’s backs.

When you’re sick, you know you’ll be cared for.

Your children will be held by a cadre of caregivers and meals delivered to your door.

Fossil fuel stays in the ground, and human encroachment into irreplaceable wild land is out of the question.

Plants and animals and ecosystems are cherished and valued.

Every person is welcomed into the human family, no question.

We can walk or bike to the grocery store, school, and park.

We have a robust and sustainable local food infrastructure.

We understand that we humans are part of the web of life, not outside of it.

I have a dream that the only achievement expected of us is that we grow into our fullness as humans. Both my gifts and my foibles are accepted with generosity, so I can be generous with my gifts and forgiving of my foibles, and yours.

I’m beginning to understand just how deeply comparison, scarcity, and the need to excel are embedded in my thought patterns. These thought patterns cause so much suffering. They stop the flow of creativity and love. They keep me stuck in perfectionism and fear.

Here’s the truth: You are perfect just as you are. We’re all messy miracles. We all have gifts. We all have parts of ourselves that don’t work so well and cause suffering for ourselves and others. That’s okay. That’s how humans are. Your only job is to breathe, love, and be a good human in all the contexts you find yourself. There is always enough when we share.

There you are. I’m so glad to share the planet with you.

Now, get clear on your outrageous dream, and live into it. Be courageously average, make mistakes, and be a good human.

Be a messy miracle.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

This could change your life. I’m not kidding.

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In every situation you encounter, you choose to behave as either a victim or a creator. Which orientation you’re operating out of makes all the difference in how your life feels and looks, and the impact you have on the world around you. Once you see this difference, you can consciously choose to act from a place of empowerment. This is the basic idea of David Emerald’s TED: The Empowerment Dynamic, a cheesy yet profound book. I’m finding this concept mind-blowing and incredibly helpful.

Like many of you, I’ve known about the Drama Triangle—composed of victim, persecutor, and rescuer—for decades. But the antidote to it, the “Empowerment Triangle,” is a new idea for me.

I feel like I’ve discovered the secret of life, the Rosetta Stone, the key to personal and organizational growth and health.

Most of us, most of the time, are living as victims. This is completely understandable. Our culture is a victim culture. We’re taught victimhood from our cradles. We’re steeped in it. We swim in it like water. We’re mostly unaware that we’re approaching our life and our choices as victims. This Drama Triangle feels completely natural.

An alternative triangle, what Emerald calls the “Empowerment Dynamic,” is composed of a creator, a challenger, and a coach. To grow up is to become aware of where we’re living as victims and to choose to take on the creator role. To grow up is to see that we’re always making a choice. This is scary as hell, sure, but it’s also why we’re here.

When we behave as victims, we approach our life as a series of problems to be solved. Viewing life as a problem creates anxiety, which causes us to act in ways that reduce the anxiety but almost certainly don’t solve the problem. And the cycle starts all over again. Not much changes.

Creators, on the other hand, develop clarity on what they want to see happen in a particular area of concern. Clarity leads to passion and motivation, which creators then harness to move toward their desired outcome or vision. Creators change themselves and thereby the world, if they choose to.

When you’re feeling frustrated, stuck, and powerless, you’re in victim mode. When you blame others for your feelings and criticize yourself and them, you’re in victim mode. When nothing changes and you really wish it would, you’re in victim mode. When other people aren’t doing what they should and you’re sick and tired of it, you’re in victim mode.

Conversely, when you’re energized, focused, and open to surprise, when you’re making choices that move you toward what you want to see happen, when your boundaries are firm and you’re in charge of your time, you’re acting as a creator.

How do you make the shift from victim to creator? Realize that you’re always, always, always making a choice. Even if you’re truly a prisoner and you can’t actually make decisions about your actions, you’re still in charge of your thoughts, and thereby your feelings.

If Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl can be responsible for his attitude while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, we can learn to be responsible for ours. Frankl famously said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

If you’re curious about how this shift feels, you could choose to try this exercise:

  • Bring to mind an area of your life where you feel stuck, frustrated, and powerless to change the situation. This might be your marriage, your job, your aging body, COVID, or political polarization in the US. (Many of my clients feel the most frustration with their marriage.)
  • What do you see as the problem? (For many of my clients, their perceived problem is that they crave growth and change, and their husbands or wives seem to want to stay the same. This disparity causes my clients to feel afraid that if they choose to change and grow, their marriage will end.)
  • In this scenario, who’s the victim? Who’s the persecutor? Who do you expect to rescue you? Do these roles seem to change?
  • Now, ask yourself what you want to happen. What’s your vision for this area of your life? What’s the outcome you desire? Take time to get as clear as you can. Your clarity will be your motivation.
  • What’s one tiny step you can take in the direction of your desired outcome or vision? If it’s doable right now, go do it. I’ll wait. If it’s truly not, make a plan to take that step.
  • Check in with your body. How do you feel now? Do you still feel stuck and frustrated? Or do you feel more energized, compassionate, and empowered?
  • If you’re feeling more open and enthusiastic, pat yourself on the back! You’re making the shift from victim to creator.
  • If not, please know that’s okay. This work may be simple, but it’s often not easy. Celebrate your new awareness and give yourself compassion. There are many reasons, some of them very good reasons, why we choose not to change.

Questions? Want to go deeper? Contact me to schedule a free no-obligation conversation. I’d love to talk!

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Messy Flamboyant Contradictory Wholeness of Reality

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Getting ready to hike the Sierra in 1972

This is me, my little sister, and my dad getting ready to head off into the Sierra Nevada wilderness on our annual backpacking trip. The photo was taken in 1972, I think, when I was fourteen and Carol was twelve. I posted this photo to Facebook on Father’s Day, because even though my dad’s been dead for over 40 years now, I wanted to express my gratitude for the gifts he gave me, primarily my love of wild places. So many people responded with positive comments, mostly about what a good dad he must have been.

But he wasn’t. Not really. Not in the classic sense. At the time of this photo, he and my mom had been divorced for several years. He was actively drinking, and he was between wife #2 and wife #3. My brother, sister, and I called him “Wayne,” not “Dad.” Our mom gave me and my sister those “Chicken Shirt” t-shirts for this trip – perhaps, I see in retrospect, as a commentary on our father.

There are so many questions I’ll never have answers to. He died in a skiing accident when I was twenty-one, and my mom’s been dead for almost twenty-five years. There’s so much I don’t know or can’t remember. I was just trying to keep my head above water while saving my family from drowning.

For decades, I’ve held either the good or the bad Wayne, but not both together. He was the good dad who took his girls into the woods, or he was the bad dad – the arrogant alcoholic who hit his son and his dogs and left his wife to be with other women. Somehow, his goodness or badness meant something about my goodness or badness – if he was bad, I was irrevocably wounded junk. If he was good, I needed to deny my own experience in order to defend and prove his goodness. But he couldn’t be both.

Now, today, through writing my first novel that includes an imaginative seeing into my dad’s reality, I’ve found healing and forgiveness. I’ve found acceptance of him in his totality, as far as I can know him or it. I’ve found a way into my sequestered pain and grief, and an understanding of my dad’s choices, through writing about them. It’s a sort of miracle.

I’ve learned that healing comes through listening to and feeling the pain and grief I’ve carried for half a century, and letting go of the suffering that comes from wanting life to have been different. Healing comes through accepting reality as it is, with all its messy contradictions and flamboyant wholeness, and profoundly owning my “one wild and precious life.”

Death and resurrection is the way of the universe. Healing grace – resurrection – is always available to us.

Love is always there for the flowing, even if it takes fifty years.  

Happy Father’s Day, Wayne.

Love, Barb.

Joy in the woods
2020, Three Sisters Wilderness

PS. You can contact me here if you’d like to talk about any of this.

2020 photo credit: Jed Holdorph

“I need to repair my leaks.”

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Woman holding a string of Christmas lights
You’re here to make a conscious, intentional, reverent offering of your energy to the world.

True confession: I sometimes hear voices. To be precisely accurate, I hear a voice. This voice seems to come from both within me and from outside of me. I know that makes no rational sense.

Martha, the heroine of my new novel Lost and Found: A Magical Journey on the Camino de Santiago (now available for free download here), also hears a voice. This voice comes to her, completely unexpectedly, as she’s walking the Camino. To her intense surprise, Martha’s healing is the voice’s aim and highest priority. Martha doesn’t know she needs to be healed, so she’s unprepared for what happens when she listens to the voice.

I got longer missives from the voice on the Camino in 2014, just as Martha does. At home, in real life, the voice isn’t as verbose.

I only hear the voice when I’m quiet, and usually just a phrase or a sentence. Short and to the point. The voice doesn’t mince words. I’m always surprised by what it says.

Here are a few examples. About twenty years ago, while doing yoga, the voice told me my job is “to understand and share.” Two summers ago, while sitting on a rock in the sun, feet in a high mountain lake, obsessing over something or over, the voice told me to relax and trust. “Stay connected and flow,” it said. I hear the voice in my coaching work with clients. It says things like, “Ask her about her connection to trees,” when I have no conscious reason to think a woman’s connection to trees is important.

Maybe it’s intuition. Maybe it’s God. Maybe I’m crazy. All I know is the voice has my healing as its aim and highest priority, and it’s always a good idea to listen.

This morning, feet in the Deschutes River, pondering my new inability to prioritize other people’s priorities over my own, I heard, loud and clear from out of nowhere, “I need to repair my leaks.”

What does this mean? Here’s what I think it means, for me and possibly for you:

I have a tendency to be diffuse, to let my energy leak. Like a porous canal or a pipe with a hole in it, my energy goes places I don’t necessarily want it to go. This is how women are trained in a patriarchal culture.

What’s actually true is that I am in charge of my energy, and I want to notice where my energy goes. I want to decide if it’s going where I want it to go, or if I’m prioritizing someone else’s priorities.

  • Are things plugged into me that I don’t necessarily want to power?
  • Am I trying to manage others’ reactions to me?
  • Am I maintaining a façade? A fake front?
  • Am I pretending to care about something I don’t actually care about?
  • Am I attempting to control the uncontrollable?
  • What incompletions and open loops are draining my energy?

You are in charge of your energy. Your energy is your life. Your energy is all you have.

You might be asking, “But won’t being selfish about where my energy goes make me a heartless monster??”

No. Here’s why: Being who we are, being connected to and flowing with the holy in our unique way in our unique life, is why we’re here. We’re not here to power other people. We’re not here to power institutions we don’t believe in. We’re not here to be colonized. We’re here to be free.

Ask yourself what you’re NOT here to do. What’s on your “To Don’t” list? Repairing those leaks directs your energy to your soul’s purpose. This is why you’re here – to make a conscious, intentional, reverent offering of your energy to the world.  

Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash