One of the hardest things to do — especially for those of us who’ve carried a lot of pain for a lot of years — is simply to sit with it. Sometimes that pain shows up as body memories, sometimes as emotions or old stories that seem to rise up out of nowhere.
They can get into our heads, start pulling the levers, and before we know it, we can start acting out into the world in ways that might not be too nice.
And then comes the aftermath…
Today’s a day for knocking out a couple of writing projects. Tomorrow and the day after, we’re looking at windchills of way below zero. That’s far too cold to be out in the shop, when all that stands between me and Siberia is a kerosene heater and drafty old garage door.
So, it looks like a few days of laying low and tending to indoor stuff.
Lately, I’ve really been leaning into letting my life do its thing. I was joking, just the other day, that being retired is actually my job. And after these last few years, I think I finally might be getting the hang of it.
When I was in the 9-5, I really liked having an agenda. It was good to know the what’s and when’s, so I could schedule things accordingly. Now the work is typically catch-as-catch-can.
I won’t lie; it took me a while to acclimate to the shift. Not that my last position was the busiest job in the world. I was a trainer, so there was a lot of hurry up and wait. But I travelled some of the most congested roads in the Metro Philly area, so my days often ended up being pretty long. And I ate up a lot of tires and brakes on that gig.
Now my commute is two small flights of stairs, and the only thing I need to replace is my worn-out bedroom slippers. To be fair, though, I’ve probably gone through 5 or 6 pairs since it all started…
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…
Bonja the Bodger 