YES!

When you heal, you go from wanting to be chosen to doing the choosing. - unknown

Healing it is not about them changing. It's about you changing. If you wait for them to transform, you may be waiting for all eternity. If you focus on yoru own healing, the door to transformation opens. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

“I honor your choices” goes a long, long way...

It's important to meet people where they are, not where we want them to be. There is a tendency, in many, to recharacterize people's experiences without being asked. You tell them you are feeling bad, they tell you all the reasons you should feel good. You tell them you are challenged by your circumstances, they tell you the way you can make things easier. You tell them that you have a plan to do something, they offer up another plan for you. Theere is a place for these offerings, particularly when requested, but often times they just make things worse. In face, we are more likely to arrive at the next best place on our journeys when someone actually attunes to where we are, without making any effort to improve upon or re-frame it. We don't need to be saved, we need to be seen. That's the healing, right there, I hear yuou, I see you , I honor your choices... goes a long, long way. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

No two wounds are created equal...

No two wounds are created equal. No tow traumas were identical. No two victims experience their suffering the same. It is very important to remember this when we tell others how they should feel, or how they should process their victimhood. What works for one person, or one trauma, may not work for another. And , it has been my experience, that sometimes it's the most sensitive and brilliant among us that take the longest to heal. So, share your healing wisdom, if invited, but never imagine that your answer is theirs. Our gifts are as unique as our sufferings. We each have to find our own path to healing. And the last thing we need to hear is that we are perpetuating our own victimhood when we take our own sweet time. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

To live with an open heart...

To live with an open heart is to walk a hero's path. There is nothing more difficult in this armored world, and there is nothing more profound. It's easy to head tri, to focus, to fixate, to manifest, to detach, to bypass the world of feeling. The world rewards us when we accumulate at the expense of our authenticity. But detachment is a tool, it's not a life. And it all comes at a terrible price, because we cannot be in the moment if our heart is closed. Truth is the gateway to the moment, and we can only know truth through the eyes of the feeling heart. Open wide... - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

It’s a different thing, to make a relationship sacred...

It's a different thing, to make a relationship sacred. When it's just the love you honor, you are still in tow different worlds. You love her, she lovse you, but what stands between you? What of the bridge between your hearts? What of the world you become together? Conscious relationship is all about the third elemnet - the alchemical combination of two souls merging, the living breathing world that you co-create in love's cosmic kiln. It's the difference between loving and serving love. It's the difference betweem the narcissistic quset for ecstasy and the joys of deep devotion. You serve loving. YOu are a devotee to the dance. The conscious-nest is a world unto itself. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

Enough shadow inside to own the light...

When you reach a stage where you can have a very dark and difficult experience, without having to look on the "bright side,", then you know that you have made progress on your healign journey. Because one significant measure of our emotional health, is our capacity to tolerate all of our experiences without jumping to reactive reframes. You reach a stage where you can stretch to accommodate the truth of your lived experience. You have enought light inside, to own the shadow. And enough shadow inside, to own the light. - Jeff Brown, Heatriculations

What if it's only a 'nervous breakdown' if you bottleneck and bury the emotions that are trying to come through you? That's what causes the breakdown - the resistance to what is, the stopping of the process before it has an opportunity to move toward realization and resolution. What if something beautiful is actually happening within you, something that wants to heal and move into full authenticity? What if this is not a nervious breakdown, but a nervious break - through, a profound emotional cleansing, a dissolution of the flase structures that have ruled your life, a breaking through to a more authentic state of being? - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

Depression is frozen feeling...

Depression is a frozen feeling. It's not a disease of the "mind". It's a disease of the heart. It is courced in unexpressed, unreleased, and unhealed pain that is held deep within the physical and emotional body. You can talk about it in therapy to soften its edsges, you can medicate it in the hope that is becomes more manageable, but the real work has to happen somatically, deep within the body itself. The frozen material has to be thawed out, worked through, released. Our shadown is not our enemy. Repression is. Unfortunately, we still live in a world that is afriad of the source material. So we shun it, bury it, 'manage' it with dissociative spiritualities, medications and feelings - avoidant psychoanalysis. All of this merely perpetuates and concretizes the problem. the only way to heal depression is to get to its roots. To get right inside thsoe frozen feelings, and thaw them out someatically. We felt the initial pain in our bodies. We must go right back inside of our bodies to feel and resolve it. No more damming up of our emotions. No more defenses and deniels. The feell is for real. Let's feel our way back to life. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

Love has feet that walk it through time...

"Twin flames" is one of the most dangerous delusional terms in the spiritual world. It refltects an undgrounded tendency, and often attracts New Cagers with very poor boundaries, who desperately want to believe that unhealthy relationship is soul-sponsored. Maybe it is, but that doesn't mean it is healthy or sustainable. The moment someone sayd they are in a "twin-flame" relationship I suggest that they buy a fire extinguisher and a burn kit. Because thye are going to need them. What we need now are soul connections that are centered, grounded, sustainable, mature. Love has feet that walk it through time. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

It's one thing to find your 'center' while detaching from the world. It's a whole other thing to find it at the heart of the world. For years, I left the world to find my 'self'. This was an essential step, because I was not yet self-connected enough to find my center in the heart of society. I was too light, too soft, too traumatized. But then I came to realize that if I couldn't hold to my center in the world, then I didn't have much of a center. If all it took was a few days in the marketplace, on urban streets, dealing with humanity, before I had to run back to the woods, to find myself... then what had I found?

A very fragile, hollow center. So the work continued this time in the world itself. No easy feat, because of my trauma history, but the truest work I have ever done. Because now, I can sit in the middle of hell, and feel my core. Because now I can stand amid the fires of distraction, and sustain my focus. Its one thing to find your center while hiding from the world. It's quite another to find it in the heart of the everything. Because the wholly grail is YOU, unstoppably solid in the heart of the madness. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

Inquiry is the bridge...

When valued personal relationships go silent, trouble often follows. I'm not talking about productive "time-outs" that are clearly expressed - I am talking about silence that is reactive, or an attempt to do harm. This kind of silence ensures that the connection will not find its way back to health. Because silenece fosters confusion, projections, and worst of all, assumptions about what the other is feeling or thinking. And assumption doesn't get us anywhere good. Inquiry does. Assumptions ensure that the wall will only get thicker, until there is no way to reconnect. Whatever you do, even if you are justifiably angry, try to keep the door to inquiry open. You may not be ready to process the experience, but allow for the possibility that you one day will. Because valued connections are hard to find in this crazy world. Anger doesn't have to be the end of the story. Sometimes it's the portal to a closer connection. Sometimes, it's the way through to great learning. Inquiry is the bridge. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations.

The whole world changes when one gets out..

It certainly feels good to imagine that the entire dysfunctional family will heal and mend. I held out ffor that vision of possibility for many years, largely because of the toxic, codependent nature of my trauma. If we suffered together, then we would rise together. But it seldom happes this way, both because of the complex nature of ancestral trauma, and because it takes so much energy and imagination to craft a healthier way of being. Most people who have been trapped beneath the rubble of family maddiess, don't have the energy, or the faith to get out from under it. It ahs become who they are. But you have to keep going. Traversing your path. You have to give yourself permission to shed the paradigm, even if it's lonely, even if you feel the temptation to go back and wait on the others. Family dynamics can be like quick sand, they may end up dragging you down with them. Stay firmly planted on your path. We need you. Because the whole world changes when one gets out. Because you are our best hope for a healthier tomorrow. I know it's difficult to get out alone, but you are never truly alone. You are raisiing the bar for all of us. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

You don’t have to apologize for how you feel...

You don’t have to apologize for how you feel. If you want to examine where those feelings come from, that's up to you. But don't do it because someone shames or guilts you for how you feel. That's their issue, not yours. We live in a world where how we feel is dismissed, re-framed, and manipulated at every turn. We must stand firmly in the truth of our feelings. Only from this place can live an authentic life. Only from this place can we glow and grow. - Jeff Brown, Heearticulations

It’s all, or its nothing at all...

Those who can't embrace their shadown can't embrace their light. It’s all, or its nothing at all. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

"There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen

I‘d rather be whole than good. - Carl Jung

The soul moves at a pace all its own...

Sometimes the people with the greatest potential often take the longest to find their path because the sensitivity is a doube edged sword, it lives at the heart of their brilliance, but it also makes them more susceptible to life's pains. Good thing we aren't being penalized for handling in our purpose late. The soul doesn't know a thing about deadlines. - Jeff Brown, The Hearticulations

It’s a reflection of their own limitations..

It can be difficult to not take it personally when an abuser or neglector cannot admit their mistakes, especially if they are people we were close to at one time. But it's not personal. Many abusers simply do not have the egoic strength to face what they ahve done. Because of whateer traumas they have endured in their own lives, they have never developed the structural foundation necessary to absorb their shame. Without a measure of psychological intactness, it is very difficult for them to acknowledge theif fragmented parts. This is not to excuse their behaviour, nor to deny its effects, but only to acknowledge that their ability to take responsbility is theirs and theirs alone. It is not something to personalise, to wait for, or to let delay your healing. It is a reflection of their own limitations. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

Unconditional love begins at home...

Unconditional love is a beautiful thing, as long as we don't use it against ourselves. I can love all of humanity, but that doesn't mean that I need to put up wiht all of humanity. The boundary, for me, is set at healthy self-regard. When my unconditional love for another undermines my self-respect, the fence goes up. Not because I don't believe in their possibilities, but because I have come to realize that there is no value in sacrificing my actuality for their potentiality. I make a distinction between human potential, which may well be infinite; and human actuality, which is often quite finite, particularly in those who choose, over decades, to remain asleep. Yes, they may eventually awaken, but we should never postpone any part of our own life waiting for that to happen. We should never hold back our own potential. Unconditional love begins at home, with the protecting and honoring of our own uniqute journey. - Jeff Brown, ‘Hearticulations’

There is so much left to learn...

We are often surprised when love fall apart. It makes no sense to us, how can soemthing so beautiful turn so ugly? But we should not be so surprised, because few of us are ready to hold love safe. Few of us are trained in the art of love. The entire world has been organized aorund masks and defenses. Adaptattion and disguise are our specialty. But love is a different world, an unmasked, surrendered landscapre that few of us have to articulate concepts, but to hearticulate feeligns is another planet altogether. We are only at the beginning of an enheartened way. We haven't downloaded the ways of the heart. We are learnign as we crawl. Best we stop beating ourselves up when it doesn't work out. There is so much left to learn. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

Shaming people for what they ‘should have known’ seldom supports progress... (

Shaming people for what they ‘should have known’ seldom supports progress. Helping them to see what they don't yet see, does. it's very easy to look down at those who don't yet see what you see. But where does theat get us? Nowhere> THey are many things I did, because I didn't know better. And even if there is something I now see, there are also many things I don't yet see. We are all victims, and victors, of context. If you believe in individual and collective transformation, you realize that we are always at a particular point in our development. We see through the eyes of our context, and as that context evolves, so do our realeyesations. That process can't happen alone. THe road to change is fraught with patterns and potholes. And we need each other to traverse new terrain. We need each other to be our eyes, as we forge new pathways of possibilites. Let's do that with compassion. Let's do that with reverence for each other's contribution. WE are all seeing each other home. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations

How terrifying. How delightful...

Love can happen in a split second. Bodnedness can't. That's the thing we learn the hard way. That love is not the end of the story. It's just the first chapter. The next chapters demand that we acknowlodege our wounding, clear our emotional debris, strengthen our capacity for attachment, learn how to authentically relate, mature in the deep within. Chapter after chapter of refining our ability to meet love with a true heart. This is the work of a lifetime. Our opus of opening. How terrifying. How delightful. - Jeff Brown, Hearticulations