life: acoustic & amplified

when you’re ready     

I don’t think that anything happens by coincidence. No one is here by accident. Everyone who crosses our path has a message for us. Otherwise they would have taken another path, or left earlier or later. The fact that these people are here means that they are here for some reason. 

💞

        ― James Redfield

I make a distinction between relationship challenges that are sourced in trauma and those sourced in developmental stages. Quite often, they are inextricably linked, but not always. Sometimes what is blocking someone’s emotional availability and fueling dysfunctional behavior is primarily related to unhealed  traumas. But sometimes the deeper issue is that they are at a different emotional stage. In the latter case, it is not simply a question of holding the space for their healing. It’s a question of waiting, often for years, in the hope that they reach the stage you are at. An impossible scenario, both because you will have to stop growing yourself if they are to catch up, and because you really don’t know who they will be at the next stages of their developmental journey. They may grow into someone perfectly compatible with you, or they may move in another direction altogether. Perhaps the most important questions we can ask about a partner relates to their emotional age: How emotionally mature are they? What areas have they developed and integrated? What aspects are still under-developed?  And how will their stage of development intersect with ours? Don’t be fooled by chronological age. Stage—not age—is what matters most.

💞

(~Jeff Brown an excerpt from ‘Spiritual Graffiti’)

I am no teacher

To teach you how to love,

For the fish need no teacher

To teach them to swim

And birds need no teacher

To teach them flight.

Swim on your own.

Fly on your own.

Love comes with no textbooks

And the greatest lovers in history were illiterate.

💞

~Nizar Qabbani

We must not give up. It takes so much time to heal because we are not just healing our own wounds- we are healing the world’s wounds, too. We think we are alone with our ‘stuff’, but we aren’t. With every clearing of our emotional debris, with every foray into a healthier way of being, with every excavation and release of old material, we heal the collective heart. So many of our familial and karmic ancestors had little opportunity to heal their pains. When we heal, their spirits breathe a sigh of relief. We heal them, too.

💞

   – Jeff Brown

Lissette Hesmadt

Lover’s Leap Bridge

January 2016