Pilgrimages and Paths

Sadness

How can the love for a pet run so deep? How do we fall so fully in love with an animal that they seem almost human in their understanding of our moods? How does it happen that as our pet sits silently looking at us, we forget they can’t verbalize, and we want to say “what? what do you want?”

Ms. Kitty has been part of our family since 2001. She initially had to find her place among three pets at the beginning. Then when our daughter took one of our cats to her home, Ms Kitty had only one, Baxter, to contend with.

Baxter was gentle and loved other cats . . . Ms Kitty not so much. She didn’t start a fight, never was aggressive, but if Baxter happened to walk in her space, she would hiss and he learned to tiptoe around her. Baxter was a lap sitter, and while he was with us, Ms. Kitty would just look at us with Baxter on one of our laps, and glare. She never tried coming up to sit on the empty lap. Just glared.

Likewise, when guests and friends came to visit, she would not hide like some cats would do, but instead stayed put (on a chair, by the fire on a rug, anywhere) and hissed vehemently. “Stay away” was all she meant — she never attacked anyone unless they tried to ignore her hissing and pet her. She just wanted distance from any human and any animal.

When we finally and sadly had to put Baxter down, Ms Kitty became a changed cat. She immediately claimed our lap whenever we sat down, purring contentedly and falling asleep. She still hissed at friends who dropped by, but for us she was the cuddliest cat we had ever had. At night, she would come up beside me on the bed and snuggle into the crook of my arm and fall asleep. . .sometimes for the whole night! She was a great friend and confidante. I trust that she ever divulged a secret I whispered to her. . .

This week she has been leaving us . . . she is dying, slowly but peacefully, here at home. My heart breaks as I see her growing thinner and struggling to walk on weakened limbs. Sometime over the next week, she will take her last breath. She will be gone but my grief will continue. And she will be remembered always. A precious, loved cat. Always.

From Curiosity into Love

The surprises I’ve experienced in my writing practice have dislodged me from curiosity into love. –Layli Long Soldier (Lakota Poet interviewed by Krista Tippett)

I have taught counseling students that their initial attitude toward their clients upon the first meeting should be curiosity. Curiosity about someone requires a stance of unknowing. One who enters a relationship of any kind with curiosity is saying, “I want to know you. I am listening. I don’t know who you are and what you love, what you think, what soothes you, what scares you. I want to know. I’m here. Please share what you can.”

The stance of curiosity in a counseling relationship, or any intimate relationship, is something that usually has to be learned and practiced because it doesn’t come naturally. I believe most of us most of the time encounter another person whom we don’t know assuming something about them. Almost unconsciously, we look at a person, at the clothes they are wearing, at their grooming, notice the color of their skin, their posture . . . and we make assumptions about this person. Our amygdala at work, probably, sizing up another being to see if there is threat or not. It is normal — I do it, you do it. And in itself this automatic reaction is not bad. It is only destructive if it is unconscious and not brought to our awareness. Unconscious assumptions cannot be challenged nor evaluated for accuracy.

In therapy, if we therapists are not aware of our assumptions about a client, we cannot be helpful to them. Our curiosity is a part of the healing skills we offer as we help them explore, discover, and tell us who they are. They then can make courageous choices that are more consonant with who they know themselves to be.

As we participate in the process of learning one’s own story and honoring one’s identity, our curiosity often becomes love. By love I mean deep resonance and respect for another’s willingness to explore what may be painful experiences or choices. Knowing someone deeply (as our curiosity and the other’s trust allows us to do) opens the door for loving the humanity, courage, and trust that another may place in us.

I am grateful to the many clients and directees who have allowed me to witness to their journey toward wholeness. Through my work as therapist and spiritual director the capacity to live my life with greater curiosity and love in all my relationships continues to grow and change me for the better.

Truth

The hardest part of writing is telling the truth. –Sue Monk Kidd

I have not written lately, and perhaps I have lost you, my reader. I have been painfully following the latest news commentary on the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justice and the chaos that has ensued from the appearance of one and now two women who are accusing a potential Justice of sexual assault. It has been disturbing and upsetting to me as it triggers memories I don’t want to remember.

The memories are not new. But I had buried them after each of them happened — not even realizing what they were and not naming them sexual assault or sexual misconduct because I felt ashamed and responsible for not preventing them or knowing they might happen if I were in a certain situation. As though I should have had a bit of God’s omnipotence to know what was about to happen.

The first I remember was when I was 16 and working a few hours a week as a cub reporter at our small town daily newspaper. My editor assigned me to cover a Veterans Day Parade and I was to ride in a car with a 60-ish VFW member. I climbed in the front seat, dressed in a modest Sunday dress and with my wooden pencil and lined notebook in hand. As we drove the parade route, windows up because of the November chill, my “host” asked my name and grade in school and how our football team was doing. I thought we were having a normal conversation and answered his questions. In the same tone of voice, he said he had always wondered what color pubic hair a blonde and a red head had, did I know? I could feel myself blush scarlet. I felt stunned. Was this ok? Is this how older men talk? What should I do or say? I stared at my lap and squiggled a doodle on the tablet. “Well?” he said.

I had never been on a date. I was very shy. Writing was my outlet — I was much more comfortable with writing than with conversation. I was a pastor’s daughter whose upbringing taught me that I was to make others comfortable and always try to understand things from other people’s point of view rather than challenge or disagree with them. And I had learned those lessons well.

“You’re awful quiet over there,” he chided. “And awful pretty.”

I had never felt pretty. I just wanted to get out of the car and run. But “try to understand and don’t challenge him” were what came naturally at that point.

“I don’t know the answer to your question, Sir,” I said without looking at him.

He continued asking lewd questions. I sat with my head down and tears coming and praying for the end of the ride. We finally arrived at the VFW where the parade ended. He invited me to go in to the bar with him. Without looking at him, I opened the car door, jumped out, and ran and walked a block toward Teti’s pharmacy where there was a pay phone to call my Dad to pick me up as promised.

Until now, I never told this story except to my sister and husband. And the awful thing is that it lay buried deeply in me until #MeToo burst on the scene. Only then did I recognize it as the first of many boundary violations that have happened to me. I was lucky, I know, that this was only words and not a rape attempt. But the feeling of being trapped in that car, with a man whom I was supposed to trust as a benign helper in my cub reporter job while he enjoyed my discomfort with sexual innuendoes stays with me today. It was the beginning of not trusting men, avoiding being alone with them, and feeling like a 16 year old when I have to be.

Why is it so hard for so many men to understand the impact of the much more serious traumas that Dr. Ford and Ms. Ramirez are telling them? Why must so many people minimize their stories as “just horsing around” — or worse yet, made up? I know some of you who read this will figure that it is just “politics as usual.” I want to know: what does it take to listen to someone with compassion and allow yourself to resonate with the feelings that come from such horrid events, however “insignificant” they may seem?

Jane+

We Are Pilgrims

What matters most on your journey is how deeply you see, how attentively you hear, how richly the encounters are felt in your heart and soul.

–Phil Cousineau in The Art of Pilgrimage

I’ll be offering a workshop on Pilgrimage at the Center for Spiritual Awakening in Allentown PA October 6. Yes, preparation for any presentation is takes effort, energy and time. But when I talk about Pilgrimage, I find myself energized and excited to be introducing this spiritual practice to those who may soon be taking their first pilgrimage.

My first “formal” pilgrimage — a journey that I named pilgrimage before I embarked on it — was in 2008 on a portion of El Camino de Santiago with 14 youth and 3 other youth leaders. I wasn’t a typical Camino pilgrim — or so I thought. At 59 I had already had a (successful!) knee replacement, was in reasonably good physical condition, enjoyed being with teens (as a chaplain at an Episcopal girls preK-12 school, I’d had lots of exposure and loved it). But I wondered and worried in the days preceding our flight. Was I too old? Would I be able to keep up? Could I stay awake late enough into the night to keep track of the few who might try to sneak out for the freely available alcohol in “no set drinking age” Spain?

Nothing I worried about showed up on Pilgrimage (of course!). Instead, Pilgrimage changed my life. It has become a mission for me to share the blessings of pilgrimage with as many persons as I can: in my classes, in workshops, in conversations, in homilies. Pilgrimage challenges the life we live so often on auto-pilot. In a new place (whether a nearby trail, a journey to a historical site or one important to your family heritage, or a trip across the Pond to the Camino), old habits don’t fit.

We are challenged by new circumstances, difficulties to overcome, even the challenge of leaving behind your earbuds and iPhone or getting used to walking in silence. Finding ourselves experiencing something different, we can choose to look at such challenges as torments — or chances to stretch ourselves and learn something.

We can try out a new way of seeing ourselves and the world we walk in — looking at everything that happens to us as having meaning — learning to see with the eyes of the heart as St. Benedict would say. For instance, I learned on my pilgrimage that I could see everything that happened on my path as a metaphor for my life and as a possibility for enlightenment and growth. The heightened awareness of being in a new place among people who spoke a different language and offered different food (octopus? it’s really delicious!) made me aware of how back home I often preferred to stay in my comfortable routine and avoided intermingling with those whose accents or language were difficult to understand. No more because of my pilgrimage — I am more open to difference — curious rather than shy or avoidant.

So much changed for me back home after my Pilgrimage. I was more trusting that God was present in challenges and I was not living my life unsupported. I was more willing to face challenges with the expectation that I would somehow grow through facing them. I was less fearful of “what might happen” and more trusting that whatever might happen I was not alone. I knew (and know) that I am truly loved by God. I sense more keenly that only a thin veil divides our world from heaven.

There is so much more to say about Pilgrimage, but dinner is ready and I am ready for it. So maybe some future blog will contain some of the rest of my Pilgrimage Truths. :^)
In the meantime, you might meditate on Kierkegaard’s admonition:

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk . . .I have walked myself into my best thoughts.

A Consequential Life . . .

I recognized the key decisions of living a consequential life is: Why am I here? What will I do? How will I do it? It’s a series of questions that we repeat all of our lives, especially during seasons of change. When we find the answers, then we are assured that we are on the journey to live a consequential life. These three fundamental, but crucial questions are the map.

From: http://www.deeannturner.com/a-consequential-life-part-2/

One of the tributes I recently heard relating to John McCain, late senator from Arizona, was from Doug Ducey, current governor of Arizona. Ducey described McCain as having lived a consequential life . . . That was a new phrase to me and one that has resonated with me in the days since. A consequential life . . .

In beginning this blog entry, I googled what is a consequential life? . What came up was a bit disconcerting: consequential life cycle analysis (CLCA). CLCA is not about a life philosophy, it is about the impact on a variety of industrial outputs when an element of that manufacturing process is deleted. ???

Of the 10 pages of google results that I reviewed, I found one reference each to Barbara Bush, Arthur Schlesinger, and Bernard Bailey as having lived a consequential life. Not what I expected. I was hoping for a variety of opinions on what living a consequential life might look like to various folks. I discovered Dee Ann Turner’s essay on the questions one asks about one’s life path on that 10th page.

The idea of one’s life being consequential is akin to living one’s life in such a way to leave the world better than how you found it. A consequential life is an intentional life, a life lived with questions and reflections on which path of many is consonant with one’s values and goals.

A definition of consequential offers synonyms like important, significant, major, momentous, weighty, memorable, far-reaching, serious. Regardless of one’s political loyalties or religious practices, We can hardly disagree with the assessment of Barbara Bush, Arthur Schlesinger, John McCain having lived consequential lives (I don’t know Bernard Bailey’s story). Most of us will not find ourselves in the public eye nor have opportunities to impact our world as Bush, Schlesinger, or McCain might have. But in my mind, I can live my life with the intention of leaving my community and those with whom I interact (family, friends, acquaintances, everyday passersby) in a better place than when I arrived on this earth. I do that through striving to glimpse the Light of God within each person I meet. I desire to do no harm — but more than that, to do as much good as I can through reflecting on my relationships, my resources, my time, my energy. And I know I will fail miserably quite often — but I will try anyway.

If you subscribe to the butterfly effect (Edward Lorenz: small changes can have large consequences), perhaps any encounter we have with others at any time — no matter how fleeting — can deliver unexpected consequences — can be consequential. Yes, the briefest of encounters — how we treat a check-out clerk, whether we wave another car to go ahead of us at the 4-way stop, how we respond to a harried mom with a fussy child throwing a loud tantrum — a frown? or a quick “I’ve been there, I understand”? Silly examples, perhaps, but consequential to someone’s day and also to mine.

I had to call an insurance customer service line this morning because something had triggered their system to reject my pharmacy bill. The wait was long, the music on hold was too loud, I was annoyed and my tone of voice would have conveyed that if I hadn’t been thinking about this blog entry. After a countdown (“you are the 4th person in line, please hold for the next available representative . . . you are the 3rd person in line, . . .”) that seemed interminable, a live voice asked how she could help me. She couldn’t spell Moravian or Theological or Seminary and after asking me to spell them, she apologized for being “so dumb” — I told her she wasn’t dumb, just unfamiliar with the words. She breathed a sigh and thanked me for being gracious. I could tell that she was more relaxed and smiling — as was I because I had responded out of my better self. We finished our business with good spirits and I felt heard and served well — no need to be irritable and pushy as I would have been had I not been thinking of the person on the other line.

If you are still reading this, I thank you. To many folks such reflections on what is a consequential life may seem pollyanna and unimportant. But it helped me be intentional with at least one small connection today with someone on the other end of a business call. And I think it helped shape her day.

Jane+

Did you notice . . . ?

For each act of hatred that makes the news, a dozen of acts of goodness go unseen in our world. –Bishop Desmond Tutu

Each time I taught my graduate counseling class in Spiritual Formation, I would teach the spiritual practice of walking mindfully. Students were already comfortable with sitting meditation and the breathwork that is part of mindfulness. So after explaining that they would be going outside for 15 minutes to practice walking mindfully, I let them go to it.

I watched them from a short distance.

Some students walked at a very slow pace, taking their time to feel the solidity of the ground beneath them. Some students would take off their shoes and wiggle their feet in the soft spring grass, then pick a blade, sniff it, and carry it with them as they walked. Some students walked a couple of steps and then stopped beneath a tree or the clouded sky and gaze at what was in front of or above them for minutes at a time.

After 15 minutes, I called them back to the classroom with a bell, and had them journal their experience. Then, anyone who wanted to could share what this was like.

“I walk this path every day to this building, but I never noticed the dappling of shade and sun until today,” one student said.

“I heard birds calling,” another said. “Are they always there? I never noticed them before on campus.”

“I’m always in a rush to get to class and I realized today that I miss so much around me,” a young woman said in a choked voice. “What else am I missing?”

All of us are rushing somewhere, or caught by our screens, or thinking about what we need to do 10 minutes or an hour in the future. What are we missing?

What small acts of kindness did we receive today that we rushed through and barely noticed? A smile when we took our freshly brewed coffee from the clerk at the coffee shop? A door held open by . . . was it a boy or a woman? We didn’t notice.

A maintenance person whistling while emptying the circular files in the computer room? A girl with a My Little Pony backpack stooping down repeatedly to pick up pieces of paper trash and running to the trash can at the end of the parking lot to toss her balled up trash in it, yelling “Score!”

Little pieces of goodness all around us. I’m betting there are 10 . . . 15 . . . maybe more every day that I fail to notice — and fail to affirm. Affirming, noticing, appreciating with words or gestures adds positive energy to those small acts of goodness and establishes a connection with the person offering goodness.

In times like these when it seems easier to see the world filled with dark, diminishing, and destructive words and acts that tear down rather than build up, perhaps small acts of goodness that are barely noticeable can offer hope that love and light can win.

Resilience, Ambiguity . . . and Hope

They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds. (Mexican proverb)

Maybe “they” didn’t know we were seeds. Did we?

To believe we can survive and grow when all seems lost requires hope. Hope comes from experience we reflect upon . . . living through difficult events, challenges, losses, or woundings. In the early moments of the difficult, we may feel unequal to it, perhaps overwhelmed, perhaps pretending or hoping that it is an illusion and will soon fade away. But when we have experienced and faced a challenge and come through it — whatever scars we may carry — we can know for future events that feeling unequal or overwhelmed and having no idea how to survive the difficulty is just that — a feeling and not a reality. We can trust that step by step, somehow, some way we can move through the challenge and find a way to continue our journey.

I learn that lesson again and again as I live into my later years. Each time life challenges me with another difficulty (small or large) I look back to difficulties I have faced in the past and find hope that carries me through the time of unknowing until I reach a place where the path becomes clearer. I may have to let go of some things that have been important to me, that I thought I could not live without. But I find out of those experiences of challenge has always come what I have called at various times nuggets of wisdom or pilgrimage truths.

William Bridges, author of The Way of Transition has guided me in that process. Bridges distills our human responses to challenges or changes into three internal transitional phases: Ending/Losing/ Letting Go, The Neutral Zone, and New Beginnings.

Events, difficulties, challenges happen to us. We usually have little control over such change events. Transition, unlike external change events, is the psychological and internal response to external changes. Transition theory begins with a jolt of change that disrupts our lives in some way. The change may be big enough to rock our foundations or it may be a seemingly small change that calls for just a slight shift. We may feel capable of adjusting relatively quickly or we may need to allow ourselves time to catch our breath, cling to something solid, and feel our feelings. Whatever the change, we need to take stock of what is left and what is gone, what we will need to take with us into the future and what we need to let go of. This first phase is painful and difficult for most of us. We may feel anger bubbling up unbidden, we may be irritable and prickly towards loved ones, our tears may well up without warning, our energy may flag, our optimism may be lost. Go with these feelings, knowing they are normal. They will not last forever. Slowly and honestly, take stock, find what matters, let go of the rest. . .

The next phase of Transition according to Bridges is The Neutral Zone. We have let go of the past, yet there is no new beginning — nothing that we can grab hold of. We are in between and it feels scary. It feels, too, like there is no way out of this in between time and we feel trapped and discouraged. This Neutral Zone is always for me a place of confusion, a bit of panic (will there be a future? how do I prepare if I don’t know for what?). Yet, if I “trust the process” and let it unfold (perhaps in collaboration with others) and if I call on who I am and what I need and can give, the Neutral Zone is a place where energy stirs and creativity pokes through with new possibilities. Such creative new beginnings are only possible if we trust that panic and confusion are part of this and that out of that state will emerge something new. Is this totally Pollyanna? Not at all. In every ending is a new beginning that will grow and enrich us if we do not succumb to the siren song of quick fixes. If we can allow ourselves to live in ambiguity, in not-knowing, our innate human drive for growth will eventually begin to offer up creative insight, and new possibilities.

The New Beginning emerges — always. This is what one learns through experiences of change and inner psychological transition. It may not be what we expected, but it will give us life. This is the grounded hope that we can trust when we have lived through this transitional process in the past and consciously affirmed the process in reflection. If we have been fortunate to not yet live through difficult change in our lives, we can learn this process and perhaps tuck it away in the back of our awareness for retrieval when we need it.

Many times after I have shared my story with someone, they have been surprised at my willingness to accompany others through their deep and tragic challenges while also maintaining an everyday optimism and cheer. They often say they could not have lived through the experiences I have described. I know that we can live through almost anything with the grounded hope and conviction that something is to be learned from transition, and that new beginnings will always follow endings.

Jane

Grief

I need someone who believes that the sun will rise again, but who does not fear my darkness. . . Someone who can stand in thunder and watch the lightning and believe in a rainbow. (Fr. Joe Mahoney)

Grief is one of the loneliest experiences one can have in our “I can handle this — I’m OK”, death-defying American culture. Many of us run from the grief of a friend and even pretend that we haven’t noticed their pain. We try to distance from the grieving by making sense of it with one of many inanities: “She’s better off now and isn’t in pain”, or “Don’t cry. He’s in heaven with God,” or “Your little girl is a flower in God’s garden now.” Our corporate culture gives us 3 days of bereavement leave and assumes we should be all over our grief after that.

Not at all! Grief opens a trap door into deep darkness where we search desperately for the path that will return us to the life we knew — but we cannot find it. And indeed there is no path back to the life we once knew. That life is gone forever because of our loss. We want our dinner table to have the same faces around it — but someone is missing. We want our self-confidence back after the loss of a job, and yet when we bump into a former co-worker at the grocery store, we turn down another aisle hoping that she hasn’t seen us. We feel an urgency to make a friend more comfortable by reassuring him that we are just fine even though our sad eyes betray the lie.

I need someone who believes that the sun will rise again, but who does not fear my darkness.

Yes, I need someone who can allow my tears to flow. I need someone who doesn’t feel the tug to cheer me up. I need someone who can just hold me safely and firmly in a hug that lasts long enough for me to relax into it and trust the closeness.

I need someone who has faced the darkness of loss in their own life, who knows the pain is deep and real, and yet who knows — at a cellular level — that however long the darkness of grief lasts for me or for anyone, healing will follow, and I will laugh again. It is only someone who has felt the numbness and darkness of loss suck them into the dark, bottomless pit. . . one who has waited, longed to find, yearned for the path that travels toward light again . . . only that one can truly bear witness with their presence alongside another’s grief that joy will come with the morning (Psalm 30:5).

. . .Someone who can stand in thunder and watch the lightning and believe in a rainbow.

The path toward the light and toward life again is not backward toward restoring what was. The path toward the light is a path toward a life that is different in some way. Grief changes us. Loss (whatever has been lost) has taken something from us. Over time as healing comes, we can learn something about our resilience, creativity, faith, hope, love. Love will connect us forever with what we have lost., if we wish that. Memories will remain. But we will need to move forward with our lives, looking for a way to use the lessons of loss and survival in ways that may help others. We can create meaningful action from the hard won struggle that heals.

I pray that when we heal from our own losses, we may become persons who, having heard the thunder and seen the lightning, still watch for the rainbows. May we be the ones who can be present in another’s darkness without fear, knowing the sunrise is just over the horizon.

Jane

Staying Grounded in a World of Despair

I am in need of peace and hope. No, I am not in despair, but there are times in this chaos of 2018 in America when it seems that all that was familiar is being dismantled or hatefully deconstructed. And what I value in life: kindness, honesty, caring actions towards others, strength of purpose, wisdom . . . these things are being devalued, tossed away, seen as weak and worthless.

It is when I realize I am on the edge of the dark abyss that I go to my Poetry and Inspiration digital file. When I taught, I always opened my class with 5-8 minutes of silent centering/meditation/ breathwork and then (to end the silence) read one of many poems that I had collected over the years and that fit the day’s class content. One of them was Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Today is a day on the edge of the abyss, and so I go happily to walk in today’s rain shower and feel the cleansing and peace of just being alive. I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

Blessings and hope and peace.

Jane +

Future Selves on the Path

Last week I attended a workshop on being open to one’s Future Self . . . a wiser, more self- and other-compassionate part of yourself who has already lived through whatever challenges you are currently experiencing. While it may sound a bit woo-woo to some people, it is a concept of time that is endorsed by quantum physics which suggests (in a very broad interpretation) that time is fluid and that the past, present, and future are present in various streams in our present life.

Experiencing the future self through guided imagery with a trained therapist can provide a supportive, creative way to be open to multiple ways of coping with, healing from, enduring suffering. I have adapted this experience for my students in classes I have taught by asking them to close their eyes and imagine that somewhere off in the future, there is a part of them that has already lived through whatever they are presently going through. That part of themselves has wisdom that they haven’t yet discovered, has worked through the quandaries that students may be baffled by or are worrying about, and has lived through what students are presently facing. I then ask them to let themselves feel a connection to their future self at their heartspace — perhaps a thread or a light running from their hearts to the heart of the future self even if the future self is not visible to them. I ask them to “see” and feel that connection (perhaps putting their hands over their heart). After a minute or so, I have them open their eyes and begin to write a letter to themselves from their loving, compassionate, wise future self telling them what they may need to know. Once written, they seal their letter and address it to themselves in a place they know they will receive it over the next year. I collect the letters and keep them. At an unplanned time during the next 12 months, I mail the letters.

I don’t ask them to respond to me when they receive the letters from their future selves. Nonetheless, between one-third and one-half of the students let me know that what was contained in the letter had come at “just the right time” and contained exactly what they needed to hear. “How did you know when I needed to hear this?” several students have asked. I didn’t know. Their future selves did.

I don’t read the letters, so I don’t know what they contain, but I also participate in writing from my future self and mail my letter at the same time as theirs. My letters have invariably addressed stresses that I didn’t know I would be facing at the time I wrote and lifted up for me some strengths and insights that helped engage my compassion and insight in a new way. Yes, the words and sentences were mine, but in imagining and “becoming” my future self as I wrote, I actually could feel the comfort of a companion who could lift me up (or walk me forward) on my life’s path as a more whole person.

Our future selves are always with us. We can tap into their wisdom, their life experience, their compassion — because it is actually ours. They are who we become with just a few more steps on the path. What is your future self saying?

Jane

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From: http://www.deeannturner.com/a-consequential-life-part-2/

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