• Glad Tidings

    • October 10, 2023 2:16 pm

    Dearest Readers,

    I have been putting off writing this letter for so long!

    At the beginning of each week, I write the letters “HJL” (short for “Healing Journey Letter”) on my to-do list. At the end of each week, I cross the letters off and re-write them on the page of the coming week.

    Talk about procrastination!

    But I am here now. And I have so much to tell you.

    After a month-long Spring book and retreat tour in BC/Yukon, I returned to Ontario having sold a good number of books, led two inspiring retreats (Being Enough and Soul Care) and connected wholeheartedly with family and friends.

    There were challenges along the way and I wrestled with a few angels and I was acutely aware of how privileged I am and what a fun adventure I was on.

    “How is this my life?” I asked myself one evening after a book talk, staring into a bank of towering trees on Bowen Island.

    While there, a woman who bought O My God sought me out to tell me she’d had a trauma flashback reading the part of the memoir where I describe the sexual assault I experienced as a child. In order to regulate her response, she had immediately taken herself into the woods to rage, cry and heal in the arms of Nature.

    “Thank you,” she said to me after sharing her experience. “Your story helped me to heal a little more.”

    As a person who has struggled with the need to succeed in order to feel worthy, I allowed myself to enjoy the kind of success that cannot be measured by book sales or profits.

    This woman’s life had been deeply touched by mine. My life, in turn, had been newly touched by hers. Nothing else mattered in that moment.

    When I got back to Ontario, I directed and acted in a play that I’d written for the first time in more than 10 years. My co-star was a man whose neurodivergence and acting talent inspired the short play, which we performed for the Port Hope Arts Festival. “This is my dream come true,” he said of the experience.

    Wow.

    In more recent days, I’ve been “chopping wood and carrying water”, working as a spiritual director, writing a novel, and doing my best to live a life of service.

    Port Hope has not had the floods and fires we are seeing elsewhere this summer, though the sudden, torrential rainfalls we’ve had feel unsettling. And it is painful knowing there are so many people who have been struck by disaster in Canada and around the world. I do my best to align myself with these fellow humans through spiritual practice.

    A few days ago, I stepped off a high stair onto uneven ground and my foot turned beneath me. I felt a crunch and went down, groaning and gasping with the pain. An X-ray showed a small, bone-chip fracture in the talus bone. Now, I am wearing an air boot and walking with a cane, hurray!

    Because I am a person who has also struggled with the need to control things, I immediately went looking for the spiritual significance of the injury. Forget about feeling this experience of powerlessness, I must understand it and figure it out.

    Here is what came:

    A meditation experience brought forth the idea that I had (yet again) taken on other people’s suffering to the point of injuring myself. (Ugh. Does anyone smell burning martyr?)

    A website about the mind-body connection gave me the wise (but pretty obvious) advice to PAY ATTENTION.

    A counsellor friend suggested I “Be Still and Know …”

    My boyfriend wondered if I was too busy (again) and needed to slow down (again).

    “How about you’re just clumsy?” one of my sisters said.

    After the incident, the perfectionist part of me was in a shame spiral. The wounded child within felt like she was being punished. I could feel myself going down, down, down into the black, squishy quagmire of self-pity and despair.

    What did I really need? A good cry.

    So I did that. I took the time to bawl my friggin’ eyes out.

    Guess what came next? Gratitude.

    Surprise!

    So often, when we allow ourselves to release the grief, the gift arises.

    What is the gift?

    In this case, for me, just getting to be here.

    I watch people die all the time where I work.

    My life will end one day.

    Being alive now, even with all of the crazy, heartbreaking madness in our world, is really something pretty incredible.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    The Ups of Down

    • February 16, 2023 9:50 am

    This Blog was published first as The Healing Journey Letter. Click here to Subscribe.Dearest Readers,

    As as child of the 70s and 80s, I would have considered 2023 to be “The Future” when I was growing up. It amazes me that The Future is now the present, and though we don’t have flying cars (yet), technology is boldly taking us where no one has been before.

    That said, times are really tough. I sincerely hope that wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you are finding the love, care and support you need to live through the pains of this day and age. I know it’s not easy.

    If you’ve been reading my letters, you’ll know that in September 2021 I began to experience health challenges. In mid-October 2022, just over a year later, I started to feel better.

    Can I get a “hallelujah”?

    Thank you. It feels great. Lifestyle changes definitely helped, but time, more than anything else, seems to have made the real difference.

    Over the course of the year, some of you heard me describe my 3-part wellness program:

    Turn people down; let people down; lie down.

    A friend suggested I share it with all of you, so here is The Down Remedy:

    1. Turn people down:

    Someone asks you to do something for them.
    You don’t want to do it but you are willing to sacrifice your well-being so they won’t be disappointed.
    You realize the insanity of that line of thinking and understand there is no having it both ways:
    You either honour your feelings or you please them.
    You say NO.
    They are disappointed but the world doesn’t stop.

    2. Let people down:

    People admire you.
    You have shown yourself to be someone who can handle anything.
    You start to make decisions (see #1) that shatter people’s opinion of you.
    You are no longer a superhero in the eyes of many.
    Again, amazingly, the world doesn’t stop.

    3. Lie down:

    You don’t want to rest.
    You want to keep stimulating, keep doing, keep going.
    Instead, you force yourself to lie down, to close your eyes, to let go and rest.
    The world does stop, for a while.
    And it’s a very good thing.

    Take as prescribed, Gentle Readers.

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    I Heart Therapy

    • February 9, 2022 11:16 am

    Dearest Readers,

    This past December, two years into a relationship (and a pandemic), and three months into an illness (post-viral syndrome, initiated by a gastro virus), I said to myself, “I need therapy.” I’ve been to therapists on and off over the years and I (virtually) see my own spiritual director on a regular basis but the last time I went to a therapist was more than eight years ago.

    It was time.

    I love therapy. In my teens, therapy helped me to say, “I love you,” to my father (and helped him say it back). In my thirties, therapy helped me to come to terms with my sexuality (I am a heterosexual-identified bisexual, yes!). In my forties, therapy helped me to figure out what to do with my life (quit my job and pursue my calling).

    To illustrate how much I love therapy I will tell you a little story:

    Once, during my spiritual direction training, I was the guinea pig for a “practice” spiritual direction session. My cohort was observing me in the session with a spiritual director who also happened to be a therapist.

    I was talking about my spiritual journey, enjoying the rapt attention of a roomful of listeners, when I said something that made the director stop me and say, “Now I don’t want to go any further here because this is spiritual direction and I don’t want it to become a therapy session.”

    “Oh, I love therapy,” I replied, confidently.

    He looked at me, squarely. Was I really giving him permission to “go there” in front of all of these people? I looked back at him. Yes, I was.

    “Alright. What’s ‘belonging’?” he asked me. I must have used the word when I was talking and he had knowingly (and artfully) picked up on it.

    The question went into my heart like an arrow, penetrating my bravado. “I never felt like I belonged anywhere in my whole life,” I said, tears spilling down my cheeks.

    He had seen something of my inner life and I had been willing to expose it. It was a powerful moment for every single person in that room and … healing happened.

    And this is why I love therapy (and spiritual direction): healing happens.

    In a recent session with my new therapist, I shared some of my latest struggles. “It’s sounds like the story of your life could be titled Life is Very Hard.”

    I felt my defenses rising up because for years I’d consciously avoided saying “life is hard.” It had felt like a negative statement that needed to be transformed. Instead, I’d practiced saying “life isn’t easy” or “life can be challenging.”

    But in that moment I realized something: I work with many people who find life hard and somewhere along the line I had let go of my practice of transforming the words in order to validate the statement for the ones who felt it to be true. “Yes, I hear you. Life is hard.”

    “Maybe I’ve swung too far the other way,” I conceded.

    “Or maybe that’s just my projection,” she said, softening. “What would you call the title of your life’s book?”

    “Never Enough,” I said, without hesitation.

    It’s true. No matter how much healing I’ve experienced there continues to be that deep-rooted shame in my being that tells me I’m not enough. It doesn’t rule my life (most of the time) but it’s never fully gone away. Sometimes it even returns in a full-force gale.

    “Maybe you need to learn to make friends with your shame,” my therapist said.

    This was a new angle.

    Healing the shame? Been there done that. But making friends with shame? Okay, let’s do it!

    So, thanks to good ol’ therapy, I’ve renamed shame “Shamé” and we’re getting along great. We’ve gone for walks, watched movies together and next week we’re going to an outdoor show (weather permitting).

    From the fires of love,

    Celia

    Keep G(r)o(w)ing

    • August 7, 2020 1:36 pm

    Dearest Readers,

    How are you doing? Really, how are you? My own emotions have been on a rollercoaster ride, mostly stabilized in the last week, but definitely up and down. When I am up, I wonder about you, how you’re feeling about the changes in your personal life and in the world, how you’re coping with it all.

    When I have these moments, when I wonder about you and if you’re okay, my own fear and anxiety decrease. Thinking of others is such a healing practice. So is caring for others. As the spiritual care worker in a long-term care facility, I am considered an ‘essential service’, and when I am with a resident, there is no thought of myself. The fearful, anxious thoughts disappear.

    Deep Presence brings relief.

    If you read the last Letter, you will remember my account of the Woodpecker, appearing at just the right moments in time to remind me that the Universe is as conscious of me as I am of It. Three days ago, I arrived back at the house after an endorphin-producing run to the rat-a-tat-tat of the Woodpecker. She was in the tree above our driveway and I stood and watched her hammer her head into the trunk at rapid-fire speed.

    Impeccable Timing brings relief.

    The above photograph of the snowdrops is evidence of a miracle, really, since the entire front garden of our house was dug up last fall to fix a leaky basement. All of the soil was removed, creating a 6-or-7-foot trench around the wall of the house. The dirt that had been removed was then dumped back in the trench to re-fill it. The result was a big, uneven pile of mud. Now, after a long winter, those snowdrops you see in the photo pushed up through the disturbed ground in the exact same spot as they always do, year-after-year. How?

    Life Finds a Way.

    In times of crisis, in times of despair, in times of great fear and crippling anxiety, I look to these experiences of Deep Presence, Impeccable Timing and the Unstoppable Life-Force Energy to keep me going and to keep me growing.

    And I think of you, and hope that you are accessing your own inner resources and outer practices to keep going and growing, one moment at a time.

    From the Fires of Love,

    Celia

    The Return

    • February 18, 2018 10:48 am

    Dearest Readers,

    Resisting Love, the last blog post, elicited a number of heartfelt responses. One woman’s comment struck me as particularly pressing.

    She wrote:

    “I appreciate the message of acceptance and I have to admit I was left wanting more….more about how….how to accept…how to stay open…..how to live and trust and evolve….”

    Isn’t this the million dollar question for all of us? How? How? How do we do it? How do we really live? Not just cope or get by or survive the daily struggle but really embrace Life fully and joyfully, living as though each day were our very last?

    There is no One Manual. There are many manuals to choose from to help guide us but despite being given great wisdom from the sacred scriptures of our ancient cultures and having multiple modern-day self-help books from which to choose, none of us really knows what we’re doing. We are all just figuring it out as we go.

    This is really something, isn’t it? We are all trying so hard to get this Life Thing right. And it isn’t easy! Being human is very confusing. Why did that happen? What am I supposed to do about this? What do I do with all of these thoughts? How do I handle my emotions? Am I doing enough?

    Without an Instruction Booklet we pretty much just carry on the best we can. And we really are all doing the best we can. It might not seem that way sometimes and yet this is where ‘how to accept’ comes in. How would it be for me to accept that we are all doing the best we can with what we’ve got?

    The inner perfectionist balks. Are you kidding me? she says. He is not doing his best and she could be doing way better.

    There is no Acceptance when I am expecting everyone to be operating at a perfect level of human awareness and behaviour. Acceptance requires that I let go of unrealistic expectations and remember that just like me that person is trying to figure out how to live.

    ‘How to stay open’ is just as challenging. Staying open means leaving myself vulnerable to being rejected and getting hurt. Staying open means I will not be in control of the situation. This is unthinkable. The inner protector says, It is better to armour up and shut down. But being numb doesn’t actually feel all that great. What to do?

    The ‘How’ of anything always starts with a conscious decision. I am deciding to practice staying open even though I am afraid to let go of my desire for control. Once we make the decision, it then becomes a little bit easier to take the necessary action, in this case welcoming the fear of rejection.

    That sounds really unpleasant. Welcome the fear of rejection? Are you nuts?

    The only way I can possibly welcome anything this uncomfortable is by cultivating a Deeper Understanding of Who I Am. This is where ‘how to live and trust and evolve’ comes in.

    If I am 100% identified with my temporary nature, my little finite human life, then I will experience all hurt and rejection as being about me, about my person, as my fault. This misguided identification will then result in shameful feelings, which, in turn, produce the controlling, perfectionist, armoured-up person living in fear and anxiety.

    Cultivating a Deeper Understanding of Who I Am involves dis-identifying with what I think and feel and desire. Take note, I did not say annihilate. Thoughts and feelings and desires are natural, human, and necessary and I am not trying to get rid of them (and believe me, I have tried).

    I am simply trying overcome the false notion that my thoughts, feelings and desires are the sum total of my being because when I mistake these instincts for my True Identity, I suffer.

    But if I am not what I think, feel and desire then who am I? What is my True Identity?

    As I wrote in the last post, Who We Are is nothing less than The Evolving Manifestation of the Mysterious Energy Creating and Sustaining All Things at Every Conceivable Level of Physical and Non-Physical Reality (aka ‘God’).

    The human challenge is that we cannot Know This with our intellect. This Knowing comes from a place in us that is beyond the intellectual mind and it is only by cultivating This Knowing through formal or informal practices like prayer and meditation (in any and all forms) that This Knowing becomes intuitive (oh, and studying astrophysics helps, too).

    Once this intuitive connection happens, the How is more readily accessible because there remains only one, simple action left to take: The Return.

    The Action of Returning is key to accepting, staying open, living, trusting and evolving. And it’s not too difficult, though it does require vigilance. Every single time I realize that I’ve forgotten Who I Really Am, that I’ve become identified with my thoughts, feelings and desires, I return to the Deeper Understanding of My Being, my True Identity.

    How often do I practice The Return? A hundred million times a day.

    Whenever I realize I’ve disappeared, forgotten, resisted, distracted, escaped, left the building, I return, return, return.

    To what am I returning? To That Which I Already Am.

    Yes, my anger, fear, self-loathing, doubt, insecurity, jealousy, resentment is still there. This is my humanness and I will never outrun it (and I do still try). But what we are returning to is far deeper than our humanness, it is That Which Makes Us Human.

    From the fires of Love,

    Celia

    Resisting Love

    • October 14, 2017 12:52 pm

    This blog post is the last issue of The Healing Journey, the letter I send out to subscribers. You may subscribe here to receive the email.

    Dearest Readers,

    ‘Love’ gets a lot of air time as the final solution to the world’s problems.

    All you need is love. Make love not war. Whatever the question, love is the answer.

    I do not disagree. In fact, I would march in any protest holding a One Love slogan high or chanting it loud and long for all to hear.

    Why, then, when we are so good at touting this truth, do we still resist love? And not just on a global scale, as a peaceful solution to mass discord, but on a personal one as well?

    How many people do you know who hurt themselves or reject goodness or resist love? A few? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Billions?

    For your separation from God is the hardest work in this world.

    This line from a poem by Hafez (or Hafiz) says it all. Why are we working so hard to separate ourselves from That Which We Already Are?

    Lots of reasons. Trauma, addiction, mental illness, low self-esteem, self-loathing, desire for power and control, fear.

    In short: because we’re human.

    In evolutionary terms, it could be argued that we are still at the very beginning of our journey toward full, conscious awakening. There may be a few awakened beings walking around but most of us are still dragging our knuckles and clubbing each other.

    Why?

    Because we don’t realize Who We Really Are.

    I think I’m Celia. And I am. I’m also the Evolving Manifestation of the Mysterious Energy Creating and Sustaining All Things at Every Conceivable Level of Physical and Non-Physical Reality.

    (I know, it’s a lot easier to say ‘God’ but the word divides. You’ve heard me say it before, we need a new word. Or we at least need to come to some kind of agreement on what the word means. Until then, I’ll create variations.)

    Being Celia, or human, means I am subject to human experience. Human experience includes wrestling with ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’ I am going to get hurt and rejected. I am going to suffer. Because I’ve suffered and been hurt and rejected, I’m going to identify with these experiences. Naturally. And this identification is going to lead me to believe that I am unworthy, unloved and unlovable. Hence, when love comes my way I’m going to resist it. Or even before it comes my way I’m going to make sure it doesn’t arrive. Cut it off at the pass.

    This is the wound of separation, which leads to the hardest work in the world. So how do we heal?

    First of all, there is no cure for being human. It is what I am. No matter how hard I try, I will not outrun my humanity and the fear that comes with it.

    In the same way, I cannot outrun That Which Makes Me Human. I may be able to resist The Force Behind Human Existence but extricating myself from It? Not a chance.

    This is why separation is ‘the hardest work in the world’. Because we literally cannot do it.

    Resisting Love because we’re afraid of being hurt or vulnerable or rejected is the expected human reaction. Understanding that it is impossible to resist That Which We Already Are is the evolved and awakened response.

    Still, resistance persists. I may know intellectually that I am the Cosmos Looking at Itself or a Child of God or Bliss Absolute or however you want to say it and yet there I go again, pressing the self-sabotage button, rejecting Love before it rejects me.

    It’s okay.

    We can’t annihilate our separation work any more than we can outrun our humanness. Because our separation work is our humanness. This is how we are made. If we didn’t have the veil of separation we’d be God. Or the Thing That Makes All Things Possible. That veil is what enables us to be here.

    So, if you are in the resistance, if your separation work is generating or perpetuating the suffering, be gentle with yourself. We’re still evolving. We’re not getting it wrong.

    I recently asked a 105 year-old woman what her secret was. “I just live,” she said.

    May we all just live, as we are, trusting that Evolution or Divine Love or Cosmic Oneness is doing Its good work in all of us, even now, and even now, and now and now…

    From the fires of love,

    Celia