“create the boundaries within which we can listen to the loving, caring, gentle presence of Goddess/God…”
“If it is true that the word of Scripture should lead us into the silence of God, then we must be careful to use that word not simply as an interesting or motivating word, but as a word that creates the boundaries within which we can listen to the loving, caring, gentle presence of God… is it also possible for the word to be spoken in such a way that it slowly moves the attention away from the pulpit (speaker) to the heart of the listener and reveals there an inner silence in which it is safe to dwell.” Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart
Henri Nouwen wrote these words from his life as a Catholic priest, and he is speaking to those in the same role. I am not a priest, nor am I a christian, so for me the word of Scripture can be any text that is connected to and supports spiritual growth and the realization of wholeness. This might be Christian Scripture, Vedic mantra, ritual invocation, poetry. It can also be a text that emerges from our deepest knowing, words that emerge from within our own silence.
My energy work and coaching centers on this kind of listening. With my words, my presence, my body, and energy, I help the person I am present with move through our connection toward their own heart, and into the “inner silence where it is safe for them to dwell.” Perhaps the text, the word of the Scripture, is our bodies, and as we deepen into the experience of our very own bodies, we come into a relationship with a quiet fullness within us, and we begin to trust that it is safe to dwell there.
This is a kind of safety that we can carry around with us. The more we practice, the very sense of our life, our body, can become the boundaries within which we can feel love, care, belonging, protection. This is not a safety which keeps us from experiencing what is happening around us. It is not the request for safety that is intimated by a term like “white fragility”, in which a white bodied person, unconsciously requests that those around them not make them feel unsafe or uncomfortable by pointing out racism and the privilege of having a white body in the world we currently live in.
It is a kind of safety that asks us to ground our energy into our Mother Earth, and to learn skills to deal with the trauma that we have gathered in our bodies, including the trauma pointed out by the very experience of white fragility. This safety roots in the skills of feeling and knowing our own essential belonging. As a healer, an educator, I am most interested in offering people the chance to experience their own well being, and learn to access this as a support in the evolution of their life.
When a person with diabetes comes into my office, I am most interested in feeling connection and ease with them. In that connection and ease, I experience well being with them, and in that place they are quickly able to experience truths about their lives. They are allowed to feel what they are actually feeling, and often it is sadness, despair, fear, confusion, shame, and guilt. We sit together, and we experience that it is ok to feel any of these things. And from the okness, we move into the quiet place close to their heart. This is a nourishing place, and place of guidance, knowing, love. We have to feel all those other things to get to the vulnerable core that is being protected by them. From this place, this connection, this presence to our lives together, we can find information, capacity, and solutions that we didn’t even know were available. This is magic. This is love. This is the gentle presence of our oneness the goes by many names.