We always participate in a workshop with certain expectations and the expectations we have is what we think we want.  We always leave with what we need.  Sometimes what we want and what we need are two different things. 

Why?  

Because the part of us that wants is usually that altered ego frantic with – ‘I need to get out of this reality and working the survival self’.  So we tend to want to look into any workshop to find the bandaids, or the bandages to heal the wound. 

Your spirit wants something different for you, so that’s usually what you needed.  You leave with things that heal wounds.  You don’t have to cover them up.  They can heal.  The conscious mind wants to cover wounds up with a bandage.

All of this accurate, all of this good, but there is something particular I am looking for.  What have you been thrown into?   The unknown.  You don’t know what to expect.  You don’t know what to anticipate.  You don’t know what we are going to do.  Some of you might think you are going to be spanked, wrapped over the knuckles.  Some of you think you are going to be humiliated.  Some people think they are going to have to peel out of their internal boxes, reveal themselves and be so vulnerable that they feel naked and uncomfortable.

People have all these patterns in them that are here and that’s what’ve coming into the room for now.

My job is not to exacerbate any of those, but it is to help you understand that your vulnerability, your nakedness – all those things that you find are your enemy – to turn those around and to help you understand that they’re not your enemies.  There are no mistakes. You have them, you just don’t understand what you have.  It’s like finding a gem and you go put it in the darkness and from this, under the light, looking in the corner of darkness where that gem is sitting – what do you think you see?  You see this little blinking eye as tiny fragments of light perhaps touch one of its surfaces.  So you spend this lifetime looking at this eye looking at you and your mind conjures all these monsters and reasons, meanings why this eye in the darkness is looking at you.  Yet when someone turns the light on and you realize it was a gem.  I could never see all its faces and it was actually there all along for me to pluck and make it my own.

So we all have these shadow areas in our lives and we hide.  We hide from people.  We hide from ourselves because we conditioned ourselves to look in the darkness and go ‘I must hide, I can’t look at it.’  You know how people extrapolate.  We are made in the image of God.  We have the ability to tap into creativity so what does that mean when you see the eye in the darkness blinking on and off again?  We start to imagine.  Ooh the eye is red now.  It has all this mist around it.  OOOOOh, I think it’s getting bigger.  We start to do this with our creativity.  And when we start to do that in our internal world, we start to erode ourselves because eventually the room that was once half lit, at least, we find ourselves pushed into the corner in this tiny little beam of light and the rest is darkness.  Every single one of you in this room, including myself – we find ourselves in this place in our lives – pushed so far into a corner that we don’t know how to breathe.