James Maxwell, LPC, RYT 512 -454-1850
"Love and trust in the space between what is said and
​what is heard can make all the difference."
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December 13th, 2021 - by Heather Nirenberg LPC-A

12/13/2021

 
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JOHN ROEDL POEM

8/22/2021

 




my brain and
heart divorced
a decade ago
over who was
to blame about
how big of a mess
I have become
eventually,
they couldn't be
in the same room
with each other
now my head and heart
share custody of me
I stay with my brain
during the week
and my heart
gets me on weekends
they never speak to one another
- instead, they give me
the same note to pass
to each other every week
and their notes they
send to one another always
says the same thing:
"This is all your fault"
on Sundays
my heart complains
about how my
head has let me down
in the past
and on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the future
they blame each
other for the
state of my life
there's been a lot
of yelling - and crying
so,
lately, I've been
spending a lot of
time with my gut
who serves as my
unofficial therapist
most nights, I sneak out of the
window in my ribcage
and slide down my spine
and collapse on my
gut's plush leather chair
that's always open for me
~ and I just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes up
last evening,
my gut asked me
if I was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my head
I nodded
I said I didn't know
if I could live with
either of them anymore
"my heart is always sad about
something that happened yesterday
while my head is always worried
about something that may happen tomorrow,"
I lamented
my gut squeezed my hand
"I just can't live with
my mistakes of the past
or my anxiety about the future,"
I sighed
my gut smiled and said:
"in that case,
you should
go stay with your
lungs for a while,"
I was confused
- the look on my face gave it away
"if you are exhausted about
your heart's obsession with
the fixed past and your mind's focus
on the uncertain future
your lungs are the perfect place for you
there is no yesterday in your lungs
there is no tomorrow there either
there is only now
there is only inhale
there is only exhale
there is only this moment
there is only breath
and in that breath
you can rest while your
heart and head work
their relationship out."
this morning,
while my brain
was busy reading
tea leaves
and while my
heart was staring
at old photographs
I packed a little
bag and walked
to the door of
my lungs
before I could even knock
she opened the door
with a smile and as
a gust of air embraced me
she said
"what took you so long?"
~ john roedel (johnroedel.com)

On Change - Milton Erickson

6/17/2021

 
“Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.” 
― Milton H. Erickson

On Becoming... Milton Erickson

6/9/2021

 
“Life isn't something you can give an answer to today. You should enjoy the process of waiting, the process of becoming what you are. There is nothing more delightful than planting flower seeds and not knowing what kind of flowers are going to come up.”

There are two things people can do about the pain of disunion...

3/29/2021

 
As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a Body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish, without some pain at the differences that come between them. There are two things that people can do about the pain of disunion with other people. They can love or they can hate. Hatred recoils from the sacrifice and the sorrow that are the price of resetting of bones. It refuses the pain of reunion, but love by the acceptance of the pain of reunion, begins to heal all wounds. -- Source Unknown

What Do You Do With Your Loneliness?

3/14/2021

 
YOUR LONELINESS

What do you do with your loneliness? One of the massive results of the
invasion of privacy so characteristic of our times is the increasing fear of
being alone. Loneliness is of many kinds.

There is the loneliness of a great bitterness when the pain is so great that any
contact with others threatens to open old wounds and to awaken old frenzies.
There is the loneliness of the broken heart and the dead friendship when
what was full of promise and fulfillment lost its way in a fog of
misunderstanding, anxiety, and fear. There is the loneliness of those who
have absorbed so much of violence that ail hurt has died, leaving only the
charred reminder of a lost awareness. There is the loneliness of the shy and
the retiring where timidity stands guard against all encounters and the will to
relate to others is stilled. There is the loneliness of despair , the exhaustion of
the spirit, leaving no strength to try again, the promise of the second wind
can find no backing. There is the loneliness of death when silently a man, a
woman, listens, one by one, to the closing of all doors, and all that remains is
naked life, stripped of everything that shields, protects, and insulates.

But there is loneliness in another key. There is the loneliness of the truth-
seeker whose search swings out beyond all frontiers and all boundaries until
there bursts upon view a fleeting moment of utter awareness and you know
beyond all doubt, all contradictions. There is the loneliness of the moment of
integrity when the declaration of the self is demanded and the commitment
gives no corner to sham, to pretense, or to lying. There is the loneliness in
the moment of creation when the new comes into being, trembles, then
steadies and finds its way. There is the loneliness of those who walk with
Spirit until the path takes them out beyond all creeds and all faiths and they
know the wholeness of communion and the bliss of finally being understood.

Loneliness is of many kinds. What do you do with yours?
​
--Howard Thurman, The Inward Journey

The Importance of Trust -- Quote from movie "The Art of the Steal"

8/24/2020

 


“It takes a betrayal before you realize the real currency in the world ain’t money - it's trust. Because if you got no trust, then what do you got.”

Tonight

3/19/2020

 
Picture

September 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden

11/23/2019

 
September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
​

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

A Santa Fe Artist's Unique Philosophy of Life

12/1/2018

 
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