Imagine self/SELF

As I reflect back over my work over the last 21 years, I recognize the thread that weaves all the counseling, writing, speaking and teaching into a meaningful fabric – supporting each of us in imagining our own individuality. I’ve been discovering and sharing tools, insights, inspirations and encouragement for forming a sense of self/SELF that heals, liberates and strenghtens from many directions both within and without. 

Yes, we are two in one.  The small self and the immense SELF.  I use lower case when I am referring to the small self that wants a linear life without complexity, with simple answers, clear choices and no confusion or ambivalence, yet finds instead endless dilemmas, wounds that resist healing, longings that never seem to be fulfilled and dreams that never die. I use all caps when I am referring to the immense SELF that contains endless paradoxes, contradictions, and riddles while remaining whole and integral and always has room for more.

My clients, readers and audiences are brave, creative and evolving.  They embrace light and dark, the internal and external, (self)love and (self)hate, the constant and the ephemeral, matter and spirit, growing young and growing old, exuberance and restraint, stillness and movement, humanity and individuality and ultimately, dying and resurrecting.  And they want to make sense of everything and find the right relationship to everything. They want to mature and ripen their thinking, feeling, and willing in finding deeper and often painful truths, forming more beauty and harmony and manifesting goodness unselfishly.

They are willing to devote time to imagining self/SELF – creating the image of the human being and the image of the constant and ever-changing “I.” Being willing to devote time requires a discipline, particularly in our demanding and distracting times. Ideally, everyday you have a time to reflect, to engage, to ponder and wonder, to write, to study, and to converse on this imagining.

The benefits are worth the efforts of time and attention. Imagining self/SELF is the only way to know self/SELF. Little steps will get you there and sometimes the little steps , on reflection, will be giant leaps. It’s fun and scary – like an outrageous rollercoaster ride where gravity intensifies and then disappears, where up becomes down and left becomes right and suddenly returns to a new normal.