We humans aren’t good or bad, beautiful or ugly, perfect or imperfect, but some complex weaving of all of these things. To witness, embrace and hold space for the totality of our being is a very potent practice that can bring the transformative magic of healing and change to our lives and world.

You’re not good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but a complex weaving of these things. Transform your life by becoming big and wise enough to embrace all that you are.

I am on a hike with a dear friend in a wild area close to the ocean. A creek runs through a small, verdant valley, guarded over by towering evergreen trees. We stop walking, stop speaking, and gaze in slack-jawed wonder at this miniature Garden of Eden, arising from a fertile meeting ground of dappled sunlight and rich, moist soil. The beauty is visceral, a shining green luminescence that thrums up against my own shining core.

“We are this beautiful inside,” I tell my friend.

Later this same day, another dear friend shares a story about having to explain to her ten-year-old son what an army is. Her explanation went something like this: “I am so sorry to have to tell you this, but we give money to a group of people who use it to buy weapons that they use to kill other people.”

This is not a judgment of the courageous individuals in the armed forces who risk their lives in service to their countries, but more a paring war down to its simplest terms and seeing the horror, the ugly, at its core.

We humans are this ugly inside. Not just in relation to war, but in the many terrible, destructive things we do to each other and to our planet home.

Both of these statements are true. We have a whole lot of beauty and a whole lot of ugly inside of us and in our world. These two polar forces, inside and outside, battle for dominion over our soul.  And it is here, in these opposing forces, that you find the transformative magic at the heart of your life story and our human experience.

This is never an easy conversation to have. If you are like most people, you’ve been socialized to push away and transcend the bad and the ugly, and to aspire to the good and the beautiful, while skating around the edges of the uncomfortable, unsavory parts of your own personality and our human society.

If you can do this, become big and wise and courageous enough to embrace these disparate aspects of your life and our world, deep healing and change happens.

A light turns on, revealing what once was hidden: the roots of your stories of wounding and pain, and the profundity of your gifts and powers. And in this place of greater awareness, you get to choose which of these two parts of your human experience to dedicate your life to. You can chain yourself to the ugly or you can embrace your beauty.

And in this choice making, where you show up and take responsibility for the full range of your nature and experiences, you determine the fate of your soul and your life, and that of our world. This is the gift of the beauty and the ugly.

Though these ideas may seem abstract, and perhaps even apocalyptic, the beauty and the ugly play out in the everyday of your life, and this is where real change can happen.

Take for example your imperfection, your personal ugly, that reveals itself in the aspects of your personality and life story that reflect your dysfunction and struggles. First, to be clear, there is no such thing as unsullied beauty and perfection. The ideal of perfection that we’ve been indoctrinated to believe in, and can never measure up to, is a lie, a distortion that blocks our personal healing and growth.

So why not try a different approach, sourced from the sacred feminine, where you show up to the aspects of your life that you see as your personal imperfection, and hold them in the loving embrace and awareness of the beauty inside of you. This is what the process looks like.

1. Start with personal awareness. Bear witness, without judgment or analysis, to your current state of mind in relation to your personal imperfection.

Pay attention to your internal tape about yourself and your life.

What do you see as the imperfect parts of yourself? How do they play out in your life?

How do you treat these personal imperfections? Do you push them away and judge yourself? What emotions do they evoke?

What deeper beliefs underlie your treatment of your imperfection? Do you see yourself as flawed? Do you measure yourself against some outer ideal or yardstick? What is this ideal or yardstick?

2. Access the beauty inside of you, the part of you that holds your love, compassion and self-acceptance. Connect with your perceived imperfection from these beautiful parts of your nature.

Step to one side of your self-judgment and current way of conceiving and engaging your imperfection. Let go of these beliefs and thoughts, if only for the moment.

Step into your beauty. Imagine it bubbling up from the core of your being and filling you with self-love and compassion.

Look for the perfection in your imperfection – what it teaches you about yourself and how it can guide your healing and positive growth.

3. Hold space for the totality of your being. You are both the part that pushes away and judges your imperfection, and the part that loves and accepts you as you are.

You are not good or bad, beautiful or ugly, perfect or imperfect, but some complex weaving of all of these things.

This is not an idea, it is a way of being where you access that part of you that is big, wise and courageous enough to embrace and contain all that you are.

Find this bigness of being inside of yourself and open wide to everything you have experienced and learned about your imperfection and your beauty in this exercise. Imagine yourself as a strong, resilient vessel that can hold the tension and power in the meeting and mixing of these opposing energies.

Don’t be surprised if this feels distressing and difficult. Our human psyche likes dualistic, either-or categories of good versus bad, and beauty versus ugly, and this exercise is outside of its comfort zone. Stay with the discomfort, without trying to repress or resolve it. You are increasing your capacity to be present to the truth that is your life.

What comes next is unknown. You have activated the transformative magic of your life story, both its ugly and beauty, and change will come.

It is this same transformative magic and bigness of being that can not only heal and evolve your life, but also our world. And this brings us back to the story that began this post.

You, and each of us, are indeed as luminescent lovely as the slice of Garden of Eden I came across on my hike with my friend. And we each have the ugly of human society inside of us that begets war and the countless other abuses and atrocities of our species.

Both these things are true, and both offer us the greater awareness and choice making that can mend and transform our collective ugly from our bigness of being and deepest beauty. Then maybe, just maybe, we will someday live in a world where a child won’t need to ask a parent, “What is an army?”

Check out Path of She book offerings in the Path Store.

Artist Unknown

The media feeds us an ongoing narrative of the horrors of humanity: war, political corruption, environmental devastation, mass shootings, to name but a few. Yet our lives are also touched by acts of philanthropy, creative expression and everyday goodness by the bright-souled, golden-hearted people in our midst. Between these polarities, we are left disoriented, torn between repulsion and reverence for these base aspects of our human nature.

Open your consciousness wide to encompass the totality of our human nature. We are beauty and beast. Then choose which of these polarities will rule your life.

Who are we as a species? Are we beauty or are we beast? Does fear or love drive us? What rules our world and our lives – an ethos of domination and destruction, or of nurturance and creation? And what do we make with our pain? Beauty and goodness, or more horror and pain?

I want to reach out and touch your heart. To feel your warm flesh and pulse under my palm. I want to tell you everything is going to be okay. That we can figure this out, we can find our way through the madness and destruction that dominate the headlines, and align ourselves with those that come into this world to spread goodness and beauty.

But I can’t. Because we live in a turning moment, a time of choice between all that we are and all that we can be.

Individually and collectively, we need to stop being afraid, stop judging and stop insulating ourselves from the raw truths of our joy and our pain. And hardest of all, we need to accept that the horrors the media feeds us and the beauty that touches our everyday lives are both expressions of our inner humanity.

In this acceptance, you can come to understand that you are not separate from the beastly and the beauty out there in the greater world. Your life story is woven from the best and worst of your personal history and makeup. And you, like every one of us, were born into and entrained within a collective ethos that produces terrorists, mass murders, poets and philanthropists.

What do you do with your personal pain? What do you do with your gifts and opportunities? Do you make more sorrow and pain for yourself and others? Or do you allow life to teach you, and help you blossom and grow into your true, big, shining self.

It all comes down to the imperative of choice making. In the face of the suffering and joy, and light and shadow of your life story, what do you choose?

Artist: Karina Pavlova

Deep, transformative magic waits for us in our flesh and bones form. Our body is a treasury of primal wisdom and sensate knowledge that speaks to us through the language of movement and sensation. Wondrously, one of the best, most joyful ways to access this treasure trove is through inspired, ecstatic dance.

Breathe in the music. Surrender to the movements that naturally arise within you. Explore your body’s sensate wisdom. This is the transformative magic of dance.

I am infinitely blessed to be part of Dance Temple where my dancing tribe gathers each week, under the guidance of brilliant priestess-facilitators, to dive deep and wild into our body’s transformative magic through free-form movement.

This same magic is as close as the privacy of your own living space, where you can dive deep and wild into the dance temple of your own sacred body. This pathwork exercise guides you in the delicious process of creating your own dance temple experience.

For this exercise, choose at least thirty minutes of music that speaks deeply to your body and soul. It can be slow, fast or a mix. Don’t include your preferred dance music or your favorite songs. You want to discover and inhabit your body in new ways, not slip into your existing patterns of movement.
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The air is hot and moist, charged with the moving forms of fifty plus fully-embodied, dancing human-creatures. I remove my glasses; with my compromised vision, the outer world becomes a soft-edged, fluid sensuality woven of sound, scent, energy and the minutia of muscle, bone, breath and sweat.

Step onto the Dance Temple floor with me. Surrender to the music. Dance the body’s primal wisdom. Be changed by the minutia of muscle, bone, breath and sweat.

This is Dance Temple, a place of free-form, authentic movement. Our brilliant, inspired priestess-facilitators lightly guide our process, setting our shared focus and helping us to inhabit this moment together. The rules are simple: move however you want, don’t talk on the dance floor, and respect yourself and each other.

What is deep, deep inside rises to the surface and speaks in the spiraling of my spine, the rotating of my shoulder blades, the gyrating of my hips, the reaching and extension of my limbs, and the fluttering of my fingers. I am liquid me, joyfully, ecstatically, powerfully present and free.

I cannot speak for the inner process of others, but what I witness around me are exquisitely beautiful people, of different ages, shapes, colors and gender options, totally giving themselves over to the music and the moment. This is diversity in motion — a kaleidoscope of swaying, bopping, twirling, grooving bodies, each with a dance as unique as their fingerprints.

I cannot tell you how or why, just that I feel an exquisite rightness inside of me and in our togetherness, a kind of collective homecoming within our moving, inspired flesh. Whatever emerges from this fusion is pure love, pure joy and pure magic, the very stuff that can heal our souls and transform our world.

We need more Dance Temple moments in our lives, where we stop talking, start grooving and let our body do its unique, delicious thing, speaking in its sensate language of movement and dance. Our bodies know what we need to heal, grow and flourish. Our bodies know how to be with other bodies in a place of self-expression and respect. Our bodies know how to cultivate joy, make love and weave beauty.

Maybe, just maybe, the thing that can change our world is as simple as embracing the dance temple which is our own sacred body, with its unique form of expressive movement and profound range of sensate knowing. Alone and with our dancing tribe, we can move and groove, waking and shaking things up, and finding our way home together.

Related Post: The Dance Temple Habit: An Exercise in Full-Bodied Dance Magic

 Photo Credit: Christopher Campbell on Unsplash

Our breath, though we ignore it most of the time, is something we are intimately familiar with. It is an innate, natural part of our human functioning that we could no more suppress than we could stop the rising and setting of the sun.

Breath is the magic of life. We come into this world on a breath, leave it on a breath, and mark every moment in between by its life-giving, rhythmic powers.

Every moment of our life is a gift from its life-giving powers. We come into a life on a breath, and leave it on a breath, and mark every moment in between by its rhythmic cycles.

Breath is the dance of our inner world with the outer world. In-breath: we enter deep inside ourselves. Out-breath: we share what is inside with the world. Return in-breath: we draw the world back into our body and let it feed and change us.

Most of us have lost the true capacity of our breath. We breathe in a shallow, truncated form, neither fully filling our bodies, nor fully emptying them. We ride the crest of our breath, rather than the deep and wide range of its powers and mysteries.

Yet what is lost can be regained. We can learn, through conscious awareness and specific techniques, to breath in the manner our bodies and beings where designed to function.

And when we do, our bodies are enriched and our conscious awareness expands, because breath is the bridge between the physical and the spiritual, where mysteries unseen are made manifest in our living forms.

Read the above once more, but now apply these same words to magic.

Breath is magic. And magic is breath.

Photo Credit: Miguel Salgado on Unsplash