The Spiral Path Blog

In the movie  Don’t Look Up , two scientists (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) try to convince the public that an astroid is about to hit and, unless some action is taken to mitigate the threat, the earth is about to be destroyed. They have little success in their urgent mission and, at the end of the movie (spoiler alert) there’s nothing more they can do so, as the astroid hurtl...

Transcendent  (adjective)   [tran(t)-ˈsen-dənt] : exceeding usual limits ;  extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience ;  being beyond comprehension; a spiritual or religious state, or a condition of moving beyond physical needs and realities **** Every year at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, it happens at least once – I have a transcendent experience. It usually happens at one of the...

Krista is taking the month of July for some much-needed rest, but because Krista is a high-functioning person who is very good at GETTING STUFF DONE (she has, in the past, had seven part-time jobs at once, while raising children and running a church) and not very good at slowing down and letting other people get stuff done without her, she is resisting (and sometimes sending me belligerent texts a...

I had good intensions of writing something light-hearted this week, in celebration of the beginning of summer and the launch of my new program,  A Full-Bodied Life . The first lesson in that program is about embracing joy, so it seemed fitting to write something joyful. But then something hard happened, and those plans were set aside because it felt more important to write about this. Sometimes, t...

“ Tell the truth to yourself ,” sing the Avett Brothers, “and the rest will fall in place.”

On my semi-regular walk this morning, I found myself in the woods and suddenly realized I wasn’t really IN the woods. I’d headed down a familiar path, and yes, I was surrounded by trees, but I wasn’t really present. My body could have been anywhere while my mind was on its own separate journey. My mind was busy bopping around, thinking about all of the things involved in launching  my new program...

“Liminal space is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where we can begin to think and act in new ways. It is where we are betwixt and between, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next. We usually enter liminal space when our former way of being is challenged or changed—perhaps when we lose a job or a loved one, during illness, at the birth of a child, or a maj...

For the last eight months, I’ve been a solo traveler, wandering around Europe and Central America while working as a digital nomad. Sometimes friends joined me for short periods, sometimes I stayed with friends in their homes, and sometimes I was facilitating workshops where I was surrounded by people. Mostly, though, I traveled alone. “How do you deal with the loneliness?” That’s the question I h...

One of our guiding principles at the Centre for Holding Space comes from Christina Baldwin’s book,  The Seven Whispers: A Spiritual Practice For Times Like These . It goes: “Ask for what I need, and offer what I can.” This little truism is the foundation of our relationships – between Heather and me, between us and our team, and between all of us and our course participants. Many folks find the fi...

In my luggage, I carry two birds – a grey stuffed owl and a yellow clay bird whistle. Most of what I carry with me from place to place, as I travel across Central America, is functional, but these two things are purely sentimental. Read more...

When I think of peace, I think how over the years I have noticed a trend in the “meditation” and “self-help” realms where the images and the descriptions we are invited to associate with peace are focused on perfectly tranquil images, likely including a beautiful woman, probably wearing immaculate white clothes, with perfect hair and makeup of course, sitting in a relaxed posture in a gorgeous set...

“Can the liminal space also be joyful?” Someone asked me that recently, at the end of a talk I gave to facilitators of Deep Democracy in Belgium. “Yes, definitely!” I said. “I’m in such a liminal space right now!” Read more...

I was in Chartres, France, a few days ago. Everyone who’s been there says that, if I’m visiting the Cathedral, I should do my best to see the crypt. So I did my best. The website said the crypt was open between 2 and 2:45 p.m. It didn’t say a ticket was needed, and I hadn’t seen any signage when I was in the cathedral the day before that a ticket was needed, so I showed up at 1:45 and waited for t...

I’m on my Liberation and Tenderness Tour. After selling my house and putting my personal things in storage, I set off on what is likely to be a 5-6 month adventure, starting in Europe. (You can follow along on social media – #liberationandtendernesstour.) Perhaps you want to know what I mean when I talk about Liberation and Tenderness? I’ve been thinking about these themes for a long time, but I d...

Back when I first committed myself to diving deeper into this work of holding space, after I’d wrestled through the initial resistance and overwhelm that came when my  blog post  went viral and my inbox was suddenly flooded with requests for me to teach about a concept I wasn’t sure I fully understood myself, I started building the first version of what is now the  Holding Space Foundation Program...

“We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy. It simply depends on the attitudes, the perspectives, and the reactions we bring to situations and to our relationships with other people. When it comes to personal happiness there is a lot that we as individuals can do.” ― Dalai Lama XIV,  The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing Wo...

Two things. One, I need to stop saying out loud that I’m going to write a post weekly because obviously, I’m terrible at meeting my own expectations. Second, the musings that follow are definitely directed more at me than anyone else. For the last four and a half years, I have helped to lead a small church congregation here in Winnipeg. I am a lay leader, meaning I am not an ordained pastor. I oft...

You may have known this about us already, but Heather and I experience “the big ick” whenever we have to start marketing ourselves or our programs. Every year around this time, after a busy summer where we’ve done everything but a lot of work-related stuff, we realize that if we are going to continue to be in business, we really, really need to start marketing our programs. Read more...

I’m at the airport, ready to fly from the west coast of Canada to the east coast (where I’ll spend time with some dear friends), and then, next week, I’m heading to Europe for a few months, followed by some time in Costa Rica. I drove to the west coast from my home in the middle of Canada to move my youngest daughter back to university, and then I left my car with my middle daughter. All that I wi...

On summer mornings, I like to cycle to the park and then sit with my journal on a bench overlooking the boat launch (a practice I wrote about  on my personal blog ). Sometimes it’s a quiet place and sometimes (especially on weekends) there are multiple boats being launched. Either way, I enjoy the view. It takes a certain amount of skill to launch a boat well. You have to back in at just the right...

I am leaping into liminal space. I have sold my house and this month I’ll be selling my furniture, packing my personal belongings into storage and heading off  to Europe  for a few months. After that, I plan to spend  some time in Costa Rica , and then… I don’t know. I haven’t yet decided how long I will live a nomadic lifestyle and how (or where) I will eventually come to define “home”. When peop...

It all starts when a real estate agent sees me naked. It’s 8:30 a.m. and I am emerging from my bathroom, where I’d been blow-drying my hair, into my bedroom where I am about to get dressed. He is standing there, in my hallway, looking completely flummoxed. My real estate agent (not the one standing in my hallway), had told me that the first viewing by a potential buyer was happening at 9 a.m., and...

Recently, I created  a short video  about worthiness and posted it on social media. It was about how it’s hard to develop a sense of self-worth, no matter how many self-help books we read or therapy sessions we attend, if we don’t understand that we are all embedded in  systems of worthiness  and have been taught, since infancy, how to measure our worth in those systems. I was talking about system...

Tucked into the corners of the mirror in my bedroom are two photos of me. In the black and white photo, I’m a young child, reaching across the table to dip my finger into a bowl of sugar. In the coloured photo, I’m a twenty-six-year-old, standing next to my sister, with a large backpack on my back and a smaller one on my front. Mostly, I forget that the photos are there, but sometimes I catch sigh...

There’s a pedestrian tunnel I pass through regularly, in all seasons. In summer, I often cycle through, and in winter, I pass through on foot. The tunnel provides a safe passage under a busy freeway. It’s a connecting point between my sister’s house and mine, and it’s also along the best cycling route from my house to downtown. Read more...