Miranda Miller Therapy

06/03/2023

🦅

We all have a Medicine Woman inside of us.
It’s an energy you can call forth.🙏🏽

True leaders don't create followers,
they create more leaders.

🖊: Sheree Bliss Tilsley .spirit.medicine 🪶

19/12/2020

May you take time this busy season to slow down and plant roots in the mud! ###

The next time you notice you’ve turned against yourself, tangled in a looping storyline about how you’ve failed, how you’re not enough, how there is something wrong with you…

Slow way down. Allow your center of gravity to drop, directing your energy and awareness toward the ground. Feel your feet on the earth.

Before you abandon yourself and your embodied vulnerability – parachuting into the unstable waters of rumination, shame, and blame – sense the roots extending out of the bottom of your feet and into the mud and the womb and the holding field underneath you.

In just this one micro moment, you are being asked to care for yourself in a new way, to see behind the veil, to cleanse your perception, and with compassion, to encode a new pathway. To provide a home, a sanctuary for the emotional and somatic world to unfold and be held.

With the ally of the breath, shift your precious life energy out of the overwhelming narrative, for it is no longer safe there. It is neither nuanced, nor subtle, not majestic enough to honor what you are and the intelligence of the ally and Friend as it courses through you.

Open into your belly, your heart, your throat, and the holiness of your nervous system. Place your hand onto the rippling life and listen.

Taking a few deep breaths, ask: what is wanting to be met now? To be known? To be birthed and touched in this moment? What is the wisdom of the soul, in its creative unfolding, longing for me to feel and metabolize?

In what way am I being asked to care for the vulnerable, the tender, and the shaky within me?

With curiosity, patience, and mercy, see the ways you leave the embodied world of pure feeling, bailing on your vulnerability as you escape back into the conditioned, old, unsafe narrative of complaint, resentment, shame, blame, and self-attack. Return home.

While it may seem you are longing for something outside you, in these moments you are only longing for your own presence. For safety where it was unsafe. Companionship where you were lonely. Reassurance where you were afraid.

For you need yourself now more than ever. This world needs you now more than ever.

Photo by Ervin Gjata

05/12/2020

There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his books, Benedictus (Europe) /
To Bless the Space Between Us (US)
Ordering Info: https://www.johnodonohue.com/store

Co Clare, Ireland - 2020
Photo: © Ann Cahill

25/11/2020

GRATITUDE

is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without and beside us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things must come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face across the table, of a son's outline against the mountains, is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit even stranger inner lives beneath calm surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.

….

from ‘GRATITUDE’
In CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2015
https://davidwhyte.com/collections/books/products/consolations-the-solace-nourishment-and-underlying-meaning-of-everyday-words-pb
…

After The Dinner
Photo © David Whyte 2012

11/11/2020

When your emotional world is on fire and you’re looping in the claustrophobia of repetitive thinking… slow down and direct your energy toward the ground.

With the ally of your breath, send the warmth of awareness into your legs and feet and allow yourself to be rooted in the earth.

The voices of the past - “something is wrong with you, you are not okay” – are sourced not only in early, biographical experience but in lineages of ancestral and collective trauma.

It will feel as if you need to turn away or urgently seek relief. This is the old groove that has been laid down in personal and archetypal networks over billions of moments. But the medicine is found within the weeping wound.

Inside the grief, the shame, and in the red and purple of the rage. Veiled within the confusion, the melancholy, and the ache of not-knowing… there await the scintilla of light.

You are okay. One hand on your heart and one on your belly. Feet in the mud and awareness in the ground. Go slow. Stay close. But not so close that you fall in and drown. Intimacy without fusion.

Slowly the tangles and the knots will dissolve. And all that remains is that substance which is everywhere, circulating and rotating around the center. Multiplied and sent out to the stars, scattering in the four directions.

The awe in seeing into the display, for just one micro moment, behind the veil, at what is truly happening here. Even the forgetting of that, too is holy, as it opens a door to remembering, to being remembered, to being found once again.

Photo by Bhikku Amitha

18/04/2020

There is a beautiful complexity of growth within the human soul. In order to glimpse this, it is helpful to visualize the mind as a tower of windows. Sadly, many people remain trapped at the one window, looking out every day at the same scene in the same way. Real growth is experienced when you draw back from that one window, turn, and walk around the inner tower of the soul and see all the different windows that await your gaze. Through these different windows, you can see new vistas of possibility, presence, and creativity. Complacency, habit, and blindness often prevent you from feeling your life. So much depends on the frame of vision -- the window through which you look.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his book, Anam Cara
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

Co. Clare / Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

21/12/2019

A small light of hope

Underneath so many forms of suffering we find a chronic sense of shame, a deeply rooted belief that I’m not okay as I am, that when all is said and done there is just something wrong with me.

It’s such a painful way to organize our experience, leaking out into just about every area of our lives but especially into our relationships, affecting perception and causing us to do whatever we can to compensate for that core feeling of unworthiness.

This primordial sense of defectiveness seems to have its origins in early environments lacking in mirroring and empathic attunement, where there was not enough contact and space for a little heart and nervous system to unfold, explore, and rest in unstructured states of being. Not knowing any other way, we blame ourselves, concluding that there must be something fundamentally wrong with us.

It’s so heartbreaking, really.

While it can feel so overwhelming at times, this narrative can be re-authored. New pathways can be unearthed in the body and psyche and new grooves can be laid down in a tender, sensitive, and flexible nervous system. A more integrated story can be told. A new dream can be dreamed. New cloth can be woven.

It is possible. I have been honored to witness this reorganization in the lives of many courageous women and men over the years. It is not easy and asks everything of us.

It is an act of mercy, kindness, and compassion to remind one another of this revolutionary possibility, especially during times of struggle, that there is hope. Even in the core of the most profound hopelessness, a small light of hope is buried there, the flame is still alive.

This is not some overly romantic, positivistic fantasy, but one grounded in the capacity of the brain and nervous system to reorganize. Of course, none of us know if everyone can heal and find a way out of profound trauma and pain.

All we can really do is share our own experience which, for me, is of the outrageous intelligence and bravery of the broken human heart and its ability to return home, a force truly greater than exploding stars.

24/11/2019

Beautiful words from Matt Licata to inspire your Monday xx

One way to speak about trauma is a state of psychic unbearability. Where thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images begin to loop, cascade, and waterfall upon us.

We cannot contain, tolerate, or hold it. We’re on the edge of utter fragmentation, drowning in a black pool, slipping underneath the quicksand.

To have another person, with a soothed empathic nervous system, near us, resonating right-brain to right-brain, to help us to collect the pieces into a sealed container, can appear as a momentary miracle.

Even if the intensity does not lessen, somehow we sense at a very primordial level that we will not go down. We will make it. There is a sliver of hope. A small piece of light.

To help another in this process of metabolization - to provide a home for that level of overwhelm, terror, and dysregulation - to digest it together and offer it back to them in more manageable bits, is an act of love.

Like a mother bird who eats and partially digests a worm for her sweet little babies before spitting it back into their mouths.

No, we cannot always provide this function and we must be honest with ourselves about our real-time capacities and our agreements with others, at times helping in other ways, including establishing clear boundaries in order to protect our own integrity. To not shame ourselves for what we are able to provide in a given moment.

To offer our listening presence, a blessing, some warmth, a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on; to pray that this one be guided, held, and not forsaken. To set aside our need for them to heal, shift, or transform, “get over” what they are experiencing, or go through it in a way that prevents confrontation with our own unfelt emotional world.

To seed the interactional field with hope, mercy, and kindness... the activity of intergenerational reorganization.

To breathe with them, listen carefully, say even a few simple words, anything so that they feel felt in that moment, that they are not alone.

Never underestimate the power of love and the devastating truth that so many of our dear fellow travelers have never really received this, a safe container in which to tend to overwhelming thoughts, feelings, and memories.

May we do whatever we can to help this world, to bear witness to the wildness of the human heart and nervous system to reorganize, and to the soul shining out of all sentient life.

Photo by Rene Rauschenberger

21/10/2019

Some Monday kindness

The OTHER Serenity Prayer...