The Spiral Path Blog

My friend Saleha laughs at me and shakes her head in puzzlement when I bundle up in -30° C weather and go for my daily walks. “It’s not weather that’s fit for humans,” she says, and she’s mostly right. This is the kind of weather that could kill me if I weren’t dressed for it or if I stood in one place for too long. I do it anyway, because my walks help to keep me grounded and,  as I said last wee...

Sometimes emotions get so mixed up and confused, don’t they? And when they get that way, and we get overwhelmed by them, we lose sight of the ways in which they take control of our behaviour and choices. Saturday was my last day with my youngest daughter, Maddy, before she returned to Vancouver for university. That’s where my emotional roller coaster started this past weekend – with some anticipat...

“Not only did she survive, but she kept rewriting her stories until she found enough space in them for all of the wounded to be held.” I’ve embarked on a new project recently. I’m writing a collection of personal essays that will eventually become my next book. Read more... **** Are you currently in your own liminal space and want a tool that will help you? I’ve created a free resource that you ca...

Tenderness and fierceness.  They seem to be opposites, and yet, surprisingly, they often go hand-in-hand. I first learned that lesson years ago, growing up on the farm, whenever a new mom – a cow, pig, sheep, chicken or goose – would suddenly become aggressive in their efforts to protect their young. One moment they’d be charging at any intruders and the next moment they’d be tenderly caring for t...

Authenticity and vulnerability – those are two buzzwords we talk about a lot in personal growth and community development work. Most of us know how important they both are, and so we strive to embrace them. But… there’s an important aspect that is sometimes missing from the conversation:  emotional safety . It can be very difficult, and sometimes even dangerous, to be authentic and vulnerable when...

I was standing on the shore as the sun set. The lake was a large blanket and the waves lapping at my feet were so small and thin they looked like someone was pulling a string under that blanket. To my right, the hombre sky faded from blue to pink. To my left, where the sun was gently slipping beneath the horizon, the blue faded into yellow and shades of orange. This being November, long after beac...

They are all growing up and moving away from home. I’ve already written about  my daughters leaving , but there’s more – it’s become a larger theme in this moment of my life. My book  is growing up and moving away too. Last Tuesday, we launched the  Dutch version  of the book. This baby that I spent years birthing is now being stewarded and lovingly held by people in another country, in another la...

I love slow mornings. Though I usually wake fairly early (on my own body-clock, not with an alarm), I take my time getting out of bed, sometimes reaching for my journal or a book first. Once I’m finally out from under the covers, I go from there to the bathtub where I also take my time (with a bath that sometimes includes Epsom salts). Eventually I end up in the kitchen, where I boil water for my...

I want to write something for you today, dear readers. I want it to be wise or gentle or provocative or joyful or challenging or peaceful. Or maybe it can be all of that at once – whatever you need it to be. I want it to stir something in you, to touch a tender part of you, to make you feel less alone, to awaken your passion. I want it to sparkle with originality, to shine with inspiration, to bub...

We are now in the twentieth month of this pandemic. That’s twenty months of a global liminal space that has disrupted the lives of everyone on this planet – some more than others. It’s not surprising, after such a long time of uncertainty and anxiety, that many of us are still feeling rather wobbly and unsure of how to move on in our lives. Lately I’ve been hearing from many people about how this...

I was once sharing a room at a retreat with a high-functioning businesswoman who was holding a lot on her shoulders. Each evening, after our sessions ended, I’d hear her on the phone talking with her husband about their clients and business operations. Though she was on retreat, she couldn’t stop working because so many clients (and her husband) depended on her. When she got off the phone one even...

Image cover: A gift from Heather's friend Susan, from  Stoneware Gallery I have decided that I am returning to love. No, it’s not that I ever abandoned love entirely. I didn’t become an angry ogre living in a cabin in the woods and scaring away small children. But… after a period of burnout, overwhelm, conflict, relationship challenges. and endless pandemic disruption last Spring, I was having...

I washed the windows this past weekend. Well… I washed MOST of the windows. And those that I washed, I had to do twice. I am remarkably bad at washing windows. If there’s an opposite of a “superpower” mine would be window-washing. I have never, in my fifty-five years on this planet, had a streak-free window. After washing the outside of the windows of the front and west side of my house, I came ba...

It all starts months ago. Whenever I consider that two of my daughters are planning to move out at the same time (each to cities more than 2000 kilometres away in opposite directions), I find myself dissolving into minor panic attacks. My throat closes, my brain starts to buzz, and suddenly I’m gasping for air and fighting tears. And then I soothe myself by slipping into denial, because… really… c...

The boat launch was busy, so I sat on a park bench a short distance away instead of my favourite spot near the end of the dock. In the parking lot behind me, a small boy in a life jacket was flailing and screaming “I DON’T WANT TO GO!” His dad was trying everything he could to coax, cajole, or convince the boy to head down to the dock to get in the boat with his grandpa. Nothing seemed to be worki...

Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke that wiped out the capacity of her left brain. As a Harvard trained neuroanatomist, she had unique insight into what was happening in her brain and was fascinated to discover that when she had only right brain capacity, she felt surprisingly blissful and connected to the universe. She lacked language capacity and had to work to regain her memory and academic kno...

Recently I learned about the Navajo ceremony that honours a baby’s first laugh. Whoever is the first person to make a baby laugh is expected to throw a dinner party on that baby’s behalf. In  one account of this tradition , the person who had to throw such a party (the baby’s aunt) also had to give that baby the gift of turquoise. The Navajo believe that when a baby is born, she belongs to two wor...

I have an uneasy relationship with power. Even though I worked in senior leadership in government and non-profit, where I managed people and influenced politicians, I still go into resistance mode when I feel like too much power has been handed to me or I’ve taken more than I “deserve”. I’ve found this to be especially true now that the influence I hold relies largely on my own ideas and wisdom an...

When you go white-water rafting, if you’re a novice, your guide will spend some time teaching you how to sit in the boat, how to hold your paddle, how to adjust your centre of gravity, and where to plant your feet so that there’s less chance that you’ll get tossed out of the boat when you hit the rapids. Then, once you’re floating down the river, your guide will watch the river and warn you when t...

A few weeks ago, I was in a FaceTime conversation with my friend Saleha, who’s just completed a master’s degree in counseling psychology. As we always do in our conversations, we were going deep into our past trauma, our families of origin, and the most recent breakthroughs we’d had with our therapists. While we were chatting, Saleha was sitting outside on her deck and I was in my bedroom. Read mo...

I got glasses recently. I’ve been lucky enough to make it to fifty-five without them (and still only need a weak prescription), but apparently my eyes are aging with my body. When I first put them on and noticed how clear the road signs and TV screens suddenly were, I realized that what I’d been accepting as clarity was actually slightly blurry. It’s the same in all parts of our lives – there are...

I adopted a new journal practice this Spring, after reading the book  Discovering Your Inner Mother . I wanted to nurture all of the parts of me that are connected to old stories, and I wanted to learn to mother myself better. Each morning, when I sit down with my journal (often sitting on the dock in the local park – my new favourite journal-writing spot), I write, at the top of the page, “Which...

“There are three things that are necessary ingredients for healing,” my therapist said recently. “Safety, safety, and safety.” Ever since then, I’ve been reflecting on what he said and I think he’s definitely on to something important. In therapy sessions since, I’ve been contemplating how I might have gotten some things slightly wrong in this regard in the past. And those mistakes? Well… I think...

On a news program recently, I heard a judge being quoted as saying that, in deciding the sentence for someone who’d been charged with a crime, he was influenced by neither emotions nor public opinion. And my response was… REALLY?! Is such a thing even possible? I think it would take some kind of unnatural, non-human capacity for detachment to be influenced by neither your emotions nor public opini...

“You can stay at the centre as long as you need.” That’s what I say to people at retreats when I’m facilitating a labyrinth walk. The centre is where you  receive  whatever gifts are available to you after  releasing  the baggage you were carrying as you went in. (The exit is the  return  when you bring the gifts back to your community.) Read more...