Below is the post I shared last night on my new substack page that is a collaborative project with my friend Brittany Veenhuysen. This is a weekly back and forth conversation on topics like paradox, spirit, parts, life and death, light and shadow, archetypes, mystery, and our attempts to put words to the unnameable. While I will post my side of the conversation on my personal blog here, it is the playful back and forth that will bring life to this project. So I invite and encourage you to subscribe to our substack page. A free portal that allows you to be a part of this conversation.
Here we go……
Embodying Relationality
I have had a transformational week personally and professionally. The visceral understanding of relationality as an ontology and epistemology is settling deeper into my bones. This perspective that everything is relationships, that who we are, how we see ourselves, how we see the world, what we think we know, all filters through a lens of how we are being with what is. How we love, how we receive love, how we perceive love, is shaped by how our nervous system learned (and continues to learn) to be in relationship.
Consider, what could be worse than the felt sense of distress, suffering and isolation? It’s hard enough already to feel pain - emotional or physical - but when you add a component of loneliness, separation, or “something is wrong with me” to the mix, it seems to amplify the devastation. Not only do I recall this from my own lived experience, but I am reminded daily as I connect with clients in the relational field we step into together….the felt sense of an attuned other being present to your heart-ache, pain, or struggle lightens the load and brings in hope and possibility that wasn’t there before.
Listening to a Rich Roll podcast this morning, his guest John W. Price has many quotable moments, including a quote he offers from Richard Rohr who said: “In the absence of mythology we have pathology”. As a mental health practitioner, I deeply align with non-pathologizing models of practice. These words immediately connected me to why I love using the Hero’s Journey and Archetypes as frameworks to teach and explore. In countless conversations I have heard clients refer to an aspect of their life or their current experience through a lens of confusion, not wanting, and not understanding, and as soon as I bring in the possibility of viewing their distress as a signpost of where they are in the rhythm of this mythic journey, the archetypal stories this aligns with, and the wisdom that awaits when we step back and beyond our individual experience to recognize the collective, historical and intergenerational struggles, a shift in perspective and a breath of fresh air is felt. We are not individuals struggling with mental health afflictions, we are a collective that is in-toxified by a misguided zeitgeist, inflicted with the festering wounds of our colonial past and present, and hysterically trying to fit within an archetype of “human” that ignores the depth and magic of who we truly are.
So, no, there is nothing wrong with you or anyone as an individual being, but there is definitely something that is missing in the collective “us”. There is nothing inherently wrong with what is right now, but there are opportunities and possibilities unseen because the gateway is found internally first. What if the path to health and wellness was less focused on taking things away and more focused on expanding to make space for more complexity, diversity, and ways of knowing and being? Rather than piecing apart, distilling down, fearing and resisting what is, or zooming in to find the “problem”, what if we zoom out, see the whole picture, remember who we truly are, and trust that there is an intelligence within us, around us, and between us that will offer wisdom and support when we have the space and capacity to listen.
I am curious Brittany, what was it like for you to read through this? What stood out to you? What is moving and asking to be seen? And, how are you being with it?