the Cauldron

we’re going to start with naming what’s actually missing from our lives and start to feel it deeply. even if you can barely imagine it, you can feel it somewhere in your bones, what it would have been like to be born into a village where your worth and belonging were never in question. where you were bestowed, by birthright, a village whose job from the time of your birth was to make sure you knew how beloved you were.

we’ve lost this. and most of us have never been given permission to feel the full weight of that loss. that’s where we begin.

what happens when we acknowledge our loss and start trying to weave back this core, irreducible need for belonging? this isn’t something you do alone inside yourself. we’ll explore what it means to need people, to be able to lean into the protection of care so our vulnerability, weakness, fears, aren’t liabilities, so we don’t spend all our energy guarding our boundaries but let our people safeguard our needs. something shifts inside when you start letting yourself need. sometimes we soften inside. sometimes that’s when shame gets louder. we’ll hold and witness that together.

shame is the opposite of belonging and relational safety. it’s hard to look at directly because it shows up precisely where we think we are too flawed to be witnessed without some kind of exile. it’s not that you haven’t tried, but when you get too close to your shame, something tends to recoil. so we’ll come close to it together. slowly. your shame isn’t a character flaw, it’s what moved in when belonging moved out. sitting with this in a circle of care and tenderness and nonjudgment, you may find that getting close to shame, and letting love flow into those, scared, exiled , and hungry parts, feels less like danger and more like relief.

* (“the parts that have not known love” as a way to conceive of shame is a quote from my beloved teacher francis weller)

grief isn’t only about death. it’s about everything we were meant to have and didn’t. the village. unconditional belonging. the version of childhood where we never had to earn our welcome. these are real losses, and they deserve to be grieved. in this session, we make room for this grief to emerge, speak honestly, and move. when we metabolize our grief, especially grief we’ve long stuffed down (literally “depressed”), it softens us. it returns us to ourselves. you may leave feeling lighter, more expansive, with more capacity for joy, less resistance to receiving love.

when belonging isn’t guaranteed, we adapt. we learn to perform, to manage, to shrink, to over-explain, to pre-emptively disappear. in this session we’ll turn toward those adaptations. not to dismantle them, but to finally understand them. they made complete sense. they kept you safe. and when you can see them with that kind of clarity, the urgency softens. the self-judgment quiets. and from that quieter place inside, you tend to find greater response flexibility. the ability to choose, rather than just react. and to hear that sometimes-still-quiet voice of your heart speaking your true needs.

where this six-week container “ends” is really just a new beginning. by the time we arrive at this last session, self-compassion won’t be a concept you’re trying to apply, it will be something you’re living in a new way, and perfection will not be part of how you measure it. or anything about yourself. in this circle, the way we’ve held each other, in the tenderness that’s been modeled, and moved through each of us, from one another, will settle into us as a template for moving through our lives in an ongoing way. we’ll see ourselves more gently, and it’ll be easier to ask for our needs to be met from that place. we’ll learn with and from one another, and then we will carry that into our lives to share with those we love, and those we are going to bring into our lives with intentionality as we bring the idea of reweaving belonging into our own worlds. you’ll leave this group with something you weren’t carrying six weeks ago, a presence that’s your own, and calls more love into your life, so you can stop doing so much alone.