18 May Finding your yellow arrow of guidance
Hard to know, exactly what life is all about.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a hunger, urge, dream of life being better than it is, personally and for all of us.
That push inside can guide us into the unknown. It’s not like that internal push guides us perfectly.
We’ll make mistakes. Often many mistakes in our process of finding our way. I’ve certainly made a ton. At the same time, I’ve come to learn that mistakes arise as wisdom, guiding us, sometimes gently, sometimes a great deal more harshly.
Thinking of this I remember Carl Jung writing that we have nightmares when we aren’t paying attention to our nightly dreams. Our daily and nightly dreams are like Hansel and Gretel walking us into the dark forest, dropping bread crumbs to find your way home, not to the old home but the home of our dreams and hopes and longings.
Trauma changes the fairy tale fantasy. Instead of finding the bread crumbs, when there’s trauma it’s like the wolves have come in and eaten all the bread crumbs so we can’t find our way out of the dark forest.
And yet, the path out of suffering remains. The path has always been there, it does, however, get obscured, hidden, and gets completely covered over. But it’s there.
Let me tell you a story that illustrates this…
My father had always wanted to walk the Camino de Compostela in Spain. The Camino is one of the oldest pilgrimage paths that my father had learned about in the 1950’s while living in France. Having wanted to make the journey, life intervened: my father met my mother, had five kids, and lived a very full life.
Many years later, almost fifty years later, my mother had died, my father was 84 and he remembered his dream: he wanted to walk the Camino. Up for an adventure, my sister and I offered to go with him.
Ah, I digress, you think. What does this have to do with Hansel and Gretel and trauma?
Over the many centuries, the Camino had fallen into disrepair over all these centuries. People who walked the Camino had a difficult time finding their way. The path, even today, can be treacherous.
Someone had a brilliant thought and decided to help guide these pilgrims along the way. This someone went out walking the Camino with a box of spray paint and marked the path: this is the way. Now this way. Take this right.
(See if you can see the yellow arrow on the brick wall in the picture above.)
Those arrows, like the bread crumbs in Hansel and Gretel’s story, guided our journey (this was before the days of GPS!)
On the Camino, those arrows painted by an unknown hand, some with drip marks not tidied up, guided our journey, marked the path, and brought us to the goal, Santiago de Compostela.
As I enter mid-life and remember my dreams I realize that there have been many ways I’ve been guided. Different arrows that have pointed to dreams, one of which is this newsletter, to find ways of creating supportive, inspiring communities for people to heal from trauma, using the suffering of their lives to open the heart of compassion.
What guidance have you found in your life? What has helped you make the shifts you want? How might you find a yellow arrow marking your path today? do me a favor and leave me a note below
We all get lost at various times in our lives. We feel stuck and can often feel terribly alone.
Having a resilient community of people who understand the dark and foreboding world of trauma, who have lived the chaos but are willing to serve as helping hands, as guides along the way makes a difference.
It’s my hope that the work I’m creating can continue to provide research, hope, motivation, and connection to you as you look for guidance. We’re going to be running a Meditation Skills in Healing Trauma course in the next while and would love for you to join us in that. To get on our interest list to find out more please use this link: https://safelyembodied.lpages.co/mts-2018-interest/