nourishment

The Cacao Journals: Water, a Deepening

~ nicole

Water: voice of grief,

Cry of love,

In the flowing tear.

Water: vehicle and idiom

Of all the inner voyaging

That keeps us alive.

Blessed be water,

Our first mother.

John O’Donohue, from “In Praise of Water” in To Bless the Space Between Us

The tender-hearted tendrils of our earthly soul need water to grow and flourish. While the earth as element brings us abundance and foundational grounding, water brings us into relationship and connection with deep soul nourishment that replenishes and cleanses us.

As we begin to look at and embrace who we truly are, we may unearth deep, raw feelings, feelings we have repressed, suppressed, and even “managed.” Denying and ignoring our emotions may seem to have served us, but over time, numbs us to everything, not just the emotions we choose not to feel.

We cannot only experience the feelings we like without the others. When there is no space for all our feelings, there can be no joy (and we all want more of that). Embracing the polarity, the duality, the paradox of sadness and joy needing to co-exist gives richness to life itself. Once we begin to feel again, we feel it all; life suddenly feels wonderful and shitty at the same time. It gets real again. Wisdom and freedom lie in the discomfort.

From this very real place, we are invited to face our deeper feelings, the grief and sadness of what we have left unsaid, undone, unfulfilled; what we have yet to leave, discard, and let go of, so we can dive down into the watery depths toward the messages from our soul. To access the deeper truths, we must open, allow and receive.

Water symbolizes our emotional center, our bodily intuition, the deep feminine, our subconscious and unconscious; and offers purification and cleansing of our soul. Deep and murky, in those shadows true treasure lies. Dipping a toe in or wading in up to our ankles, will do nothing for our soul. Riches don’t float to the surface unless they are tethered to the mud below.

To heal and nourish our neglected soul is deep, immersive work and yet can be held with gentle tenderness. Cacao became that gentle therapist for me, never taking me deeper than I could handle. She gently peeled back the layers of all I had taken on and assumed over time, so I could look at it all (and myself) with compassion and love. Cacao slowly raised things from my subconscious and unconscious during medicine journeys and in the dreamtime for me to examine in the gentle light of day. She invited me to be my own witness and healer.

Our soul wants us to feel again, not by wallowing, dramatizing or getting stuck in our emotions, but rather by witnessing them. How do we witness our emotions? By acknowledging them (“I feel sad” or “I feel afraid” or “I feel joyful”) and being grateful (thanking the emotion for how it has served you); understanding just enough of why it is showing up in that moment (you may want to connect to your inner child and then ask what she/he needs); and then fully accepting and integrating the feeling, allowing it to move through you. This is the path to healing and wholeness. We remember how to feel without being overwhelmed.

The lotus or water lily is a symbol of enlightenment because of the beautiful bloom that emerges from the mud. It is a symbol of purity, spontaneous generation and divine birth. – hunker.com

Allowing our feelings to be met in this gentle way tends to our tendrils, transforming the parched ground of our being into a lush, fertile inner garden with a pond of inner reflection and gorgeous water lilies emerging from the mud.

Copyright ©2019 Soulscape Coaching LLC.

The Cacao Journals: Element Earth, a Home Coming

~ nicole

I arise today

In the name of Silence

Womb of the Word,

In the name of Stillness

Home of the Belonging.

John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

In life, as we take on identities, responsibilities, expectations, attitudes, opinions and defenses, we often lose our truest self, our deep soul. This loss happens slowly over time, so we don’t notice until we find we are “living” a joyless life, one that lacks a sense of wonder and abundance. We become dissatisfied, disillusioned, and ungrateful. We trudge through life and relationships thinking is this all there is?

What remains deep inside of us is a sliver of hope, an untouchable essence that despite hurt or neglect is pure in its light. How do we rekindle that and grow that sliver into a shining, radiant light? We begin by reclaiming who we always have been. That reclamation may look like an archeological dig or even feel like an uprooting as we pull up what took root, shake off the clumps of dirt, and see what’s left to sustain us, which may just be a few spindly, seemingly fragile, tendrils. Those tendrils, while tender hearted, are resilient; they have lasted this long, so they must be.

How do we tend to them, nourish them, give them what they need to grow stronger and push up toward the light? We have to get back to the ground of our being, to the earth of ourselves, to our home. We do this through stillness and silence, dropping deeper into the self by inviting the sacred in.

We begin at the beginning with the element, Earth. Earth as ultimate mother, as nourishment and abundance, as an unconditionally loving and compassionate being, who provides and sustains. Honoring and connecting to the Earth reconnects us to our deep self. This is the indigenous way, the original way of being for us all.

Two questions arise when we look more deeply at our soul loss. The first, “Who am I?” opens us to a sense of rediscovery, curiosity and innocence. Turning our attention to and tending to those spindly roots. The second, “What brings me joy?” allows for exploration, adventure and wonder. The light of joy that nourishes our new/old roots and allows them to flourish. In this space of openness and allowing, we come home to something new and yet familiar, a remembering of who we truly are. Begin by simply asking.

Stilling the mind and dropping into that space through sacred ritual and ceremony, meditative practices, being in solitude or on retreat, contemplative movement, and plant medicine gives us a way to come home to ourselves again and again until home is just where we always are.

Copyright ©2019 Soulscape Coaching LLC

The gift of retreating

~ Nicole Gnutzman
“There is nothing more natural than for Life to align with Light in a sacred dance of co-existence and co-creation.”  – Birgitte Rasine, The Serpent and the Jaguar: Living in Sacred Time

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The Lake (Lake Atitlan) called me back and I returned, not alone this time as on my first solo retreat, but with 10 beautiful and brave souls, who were open to whatever awaited them there. And what awaited was more than any of us imagined.

As we opened to our retreat, we left the bustling world behind and immersed ourselves in a new energy, an interplay of quiet solitude and tribal community, relaxation and movement, restoration and revitalization, and receiving and giving.

img_2981We closed ourselves off to the world as we knew it and entered a cocoon, a sanctuary, to emerge from our chrysalis more vibrant and alive, and with bright wings that allowed us to rise above ourselves and the world and see with new eyes.

We lived into the spiral of life, the intertwining energies of the four elements: creation and destruction (fire), nourishment and growth (earth), deepening and flow (water), inspiration and clarity (air). And we yearned to take that emergence and transformation home with us, back into the world.

Re-entry into that world is always challenging after retreat as it seems less real or even unreal, an alternate reality of frenzied, ungrounded energy, disconnected from our own deeply felt experience while on retreat.

Retreating brings us back to our true selves, and we want to bring that radiant energy and truth back with us. It can feel like a burden as the world does not always welcome truth and radiance, but it’s a gift we must give to the world, knowing that everything we give will return to us perhaps not in that moment, but in time.

Our inclination may be to protect what we experienced, shielding it from the unremitting, relentless darkness of the world. If that helps us to keep the light within us alive, then let us hide it for awhile, but know, to hide it for too long, weakens it; it needs to be given to others, so they may shine too, and in their shining, their energy comes back to us. It is the energy of life, the spiral on its return journey, the law of attraction, flow.

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If we have one mission in this life it is to rediscover who we truly are, so we can offer our light and our gifts to the world as we walk on our soul’s path. Retreating from the world for just a little while to deepen that connection to ourselves and to life itself allows us the spaciousness we need to restore that light. And then we, and others we touch with our light, can shine.

Many of us will return again to Atitlan. Our retreat may become an annual celebration of the transformative power of the Lake and our own transformation….

Copyright ©2016 Soulscape Coaching LLC

 

What makes you weep?

~ Nicole Gnutzman

P1000133Yesterday, I was contemplating what to write for my blog post. Usually, ideas just come to me and they flow. A couple came to mind, but they felt flat, there was no flow, my energy did not rise with them. And if my energy does not rise as I write, then my reader’s energy certainly isn’t going to either….

So, when does my energy rise? When I care deeply about something or someone. When I feel joy or even sorrow. When I weep. And that’s when I remembered what made me weep last week.

I primarily coach women who are looking to find their soul’s path. And, as I do that, I discovered that after we’ve explored their gifts and what they love, moved on to addressing their fears and limiting beliefs, and created the confidence to begin living into their new soul-fulfilling beliefs, inevitably, romantic relationship comes up.

My clients want to know how to heal and grow their current relationship or how to create a healthy, loving supportive relationship if they don’t have a partner. In either case, they recognize deep in their beautiful soul that their relationship needs to support the whole, healthy, vibrant person they are becoming. I weep with joy for them as that come to that level of clarity.

And what I hear, when my clients share their worries and concerns about their current partner or the people they are meeting, is that they are not being met, their soul is not being lifted up or nourished, and they know in their heart that something more is possible. And that is what they truly want.

In the past, we often looked to our romantic partner for certain needs, be they financial or familial or sexual, and that is no longer the case. We don’t “need” partners in the way we traditionally did. We need them at a much deeper level. And that is when I wept again. I felt deeply for all partners, who want deep connection too.

To allow our partners to feel true connection, we have to find a way to express our deepest need for them, not from a place of neediness, but rather one of strength. To see and understand their gifts, to know what gives them true nourishment, and to be able to say with love and curiosity, “I need you,” or ” I need your help,” in such a way that they can respond with their gift or knowledge or strength. Deep connection follows the recognition of being truly seen.

Be curious. Express your appreciation. Ask for help that only your partner (or your prospective partner) can fulfill using their gifts. Create a sense of deep belonging. And watch what happens….

As we lift up and nourish our own soul and the soul of our partners, we all become whole. We live in alignment with our soul’s path. We love. We weep with joy.

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