I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately and talking a lot with others about the idea of being of service. Specifically, how do we assist those who come to us looking for advice or help of some kind, especially within the context of their own emotional recovery or spiritual healing? Where do we draw the line on our own involvement? When does “help” turn into “enabling”? When does our desire to assist turn into our own need to fix, save, or rescue the person that’s come to us?
If you’d like to see more, please check out my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
I was talking with my teacher and his wife a while back, and I said, “Y’know, I feel like a hammer that gets hung up on the wall of the garage. If there’s a nail that needs to get banged down, I get taken off the wall, the nail gets banged down, and then I get put back up on the wall and just hang out and wait.”
My teacher’s wife started laughing, and she said, “Yeah, but a hammer is still a hammer even when it’s hanging on the wall.”
And man, that really, put the hook in me.
These gifts that we have, whatever they might be, they require us to live in a certain way. Those of us who grew up in dysfunctional households, who had to learn the skill of empathy – had to learn how to read the room so that we could anticipate what was going to happen next, we know a lot about how hard it is to live in the type of world that we live in today. This is not a place that takes kindly to those who feel. And sometimes we need to disappear for a little while, lay aside the things that get in the way, and just rest…
If you’d like to see more, please check out my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
As we get older, if we’re lucky, if we’re brave enough – strong enough – to look at these things from our past, to really, really sit with them, and to examine the consequences as we look out at the wake that we leave behind us through our lives, we begin to realize how we’ve affected others.
And sometimes, the desire to make amends comes about.
Not everybody wants an apology. Sometimes, our apologies are good, true, honest things, and other times, we just want to be left off the cross. But nobody can really do that for us; that’s something we have to do for ourselves.
And so, what’s left, then, is what’s referred to as a living amend: looking honestly at what we’ve done – the effects of our actions – and deciding, “I will not do that again,”
and doing our damnedest not to…
If you’d like to see more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
As we’re getting down to the last few scraps of 2025, it’s probably a good time to do a little bit of reflecting on what this past year has been like.
Speaking from the perspective of my own emotional recovery – my own spiritual healing – the work’s been pretty difficult, and at times, it’s just been downright exhausting.
But there’s one thing I’ve learned these last many years, and that is, that when you plow deep, you’re going to hit some big stones. It takes a lot to dig them out, but when you do, buried beneath them, you can usually find some pretty good, rich, fertile soil. And that’s definitely been the case this year…
If you’d like to see more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
Codependency, counter-dependency, and the inability to receive…
It’s been said that you can’t pour from an empty cup. It’s also been said that you can’t receive in a cup that’s filled. For a cup to be of true value, to be truly serviceable, it doesn’t remain full or empty; it transitions between those states as necessary:
I’m thirsty, so I fill a cup. I drink from it. The cup empties.
My friend is thirsty, so I fill a cup. I give it to my friend. They drink from it. The cup empties.
When we’re healthy, we learn to become both the full and empty cup as required. In the sickness of codependency and counter-dependency, however, the truth of the matter is that cup is never empty. It’s always filled with one thing: my own need for safety, for love…
If you’d like to see more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube.
As a kid, you walk into a room and you feel anger there…well, you feel angry, so you must be angry. You feel sad, so you must be sad. We learn to internalize those things, to take them on, and to come at the world from the perspective of those things that we’re feeling – believing that they’re our own.
As we get older and lean a little heavier into our work, hopefully, we begin to sort some of that stuff out. We begin to learn what’s ours and what’s not; what we can let go of – what we can hang onto.
And this can be incredibly difficult when we see people we really love going through a tough time. One trap in particular that it’s easy to fall into as someone who’s empathic, is the fix, save, and rescue trap. We see someone suffering, and we want to fix the situation. We want to save them from it; to rescue them from their peril.
Sometimes our motivations aren’t as unselfish as they seem, whether we’re aware of that or not. Part and parcel of growing up in a house full of emotional instability is often the dance of codependence: “I love you because of how you make me feel.”
In the presence of suffering, especially when it’s the suffering of those we care for, we don’t like the way we feel when we see them suffer, and so we want to rescue them; to stop their pain in order to stop our own.
If you’d like to hear more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube…
One of the great blessings of my own healing work has been that I have found myself in the presence of teachers who, consciously or unconsciously, have never been afraid to show their humanity. Some of it has been extremely noble, and some of it hasn’t. But the wonderful thing about that, is that I have learned lessons along the way that I could not have learned any other way.
I have gotten to see people being completely human in my presence, and that has opened up space and allowed me to do the same…
As we progress through our healing work, there are parts of us that are going to kick and scream at every attempt that’s made to heal them. They see this work as a fight to the death.
We know that you don’t stop falling until you hit bottom. When that happens, something’s going to shatter. But the only thing that shatters is the lie. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. But that’s what breaks.
And what gets up and walks away, the truth, is a little more healthy than what hit bottom.
Really living through that experience; coming to terms with it and allowing it to be what it is in all its glory: the light, the dark, the love, the hate, the anger, the joy… all of it, that’s really the only way we’re ever going to heal. That’s really the only way we’re going to come through these things and to find the gifts that they carry wrapped inside them…
When you’re a kid, you’re pretty much at the mercy of the environment you grow up in – and the people who inhabit that environment. You can’t pack your fucking bags and move to Podunk when you’re three, that’s just the way it goes.
And so, we learn to adjust.
We learn to eat the food that we’re given. And sometimes, that food comes in the form of some pretty negative beliefs – pretty negative realities. We get told that we’re an idiot. We get yelled at. Maybe we get beaten. Maybe we get emotionally abused, or even worse. We come to find out, sometimes, that the love that we really want is highly conditional and based upon how well we fall in line, or dance to someone else’s music.
As we get older though, we sometimes continue on with those beliefs. We can hear those stories again and again in our heads. And though the voices might sound like the people who said those things – it might even be their words – sometimes, those people have been out of our lives for years or even decades. Maybe they’re even dead.
So, the question is, “Whose voice is it, really…?”
Amongst the things that get passed down to us from our families – the things that continue to support us, like family traditions or pictures or stories, heirlooms like China, wooden spoons, or upholstered rocking chairs, there are other things that can continue to structure our lives, like fear, shame, and guilt, and some of the darker, more intense stuff like hypervigilance, codependence, or toxic self-reliance.
When you’re raised with dysfunctionality, you learn very quickly how to read the territory. You learn to check the temperature of the air around you. You look for changes in expressions, changes in tones of voice… the slightest clue can give you a read on the environment.
And you learn how to adapt, how to adopt certain behaviors like people pleasing or hiding, never speaking your own opinion but constantly copping to the opinions of others. Or you learn how to constantly challenge authority, to yell back in order to make yourself bigger, so that the threat becomes less.
That was a favorite tactic of mine for many, many years.
These patterns provide a sense of structure and carry us through difficult situations. They can cause us to pick certain types of romantic partners, or repetitive dead-end jobs. They can drive us into reckless spending or self-destructive lifestyles.
Left unchecked, these things can continue to shape the way we live our lives. And so, in their own way, they, too, become family traditions…
Bonja the Bodger 