I’d been working with an affirmations/EFT process for a while, and I found that it stirred up some extremely deep emotional wounds that I needed to heal. One wound, for example, involves losing my relationship with my daughter.
The problem was literally out of my control, since it had to do with her deep wounds caused by her stepfather’s bad behavior and nasty messages from my ex-wife that somehow made me responsible for the actions of her boyfriend. But knowing that I did not cause the problem did not make it less painful.
My current wife Ashara is a Joyful Wisdom Buddy, so she helped me delve deep into this emotionally debilitating challenge. Delta is a Joyful Wisdom Buddy, so she helped me delve deep into this wound, and her insights are different from Ashara’s. Dave is a Joyful Wisdom Buddy, so he helped me delve deep into this wound using EFT, which he’s simultaneously learning from me as a Supplemental Method.
In the five years from 2011 to 2016 (which is when I’m rewriting these pages), the various members of the Joyful Wisdom Community have used the Basic Co-mentoring Methods to help me brainstorm about the Joyful Wisdom Community, to help me figure out what to do about challenges that come up, and to help me figure out how to achieve better balance in my life.
I’m talking about my experience on this page, because that’s what’s most present for me, but in fact, there’s no one here who does not have their own deep challenges, heart-rending relationship problems, frustrations with blocked goals, or other major life issues. Our particular methods allow us to discuss and resolve major questions that we each have about our life purpose and our problems, and since they are one-to-one, they’re both extremely personalized and deeply enlightening.
My Joyful Wisdom Buddies have explored the following with me:
- After living his life in the shadow of a very repressive religious background, one of my Joyful Wisdom Buddies is now expressing his emotions and vulnerability for the first time. How do you deal with your friends and family who want you to stay in a tiny box when you’ve grown too big to fit into it?
- Discovering how to connect with the divine within people around us, even when they are involved in practices and ideologies that have harmed us in the past; releasing our wounds and finding wholeness.
- Exploring how to be a better priestess of the goddess Hecate in a two-year ritual cycle.
- Regularly exploring what trance experiences mean.
- Isolating the roots of violence in our consciousness and applying that insight to my Joyful Wisdom Buddy’s job as an ad executive. Exploring this theme, for instance, from the point of view of our aboriginal cousins who consider our partitioned lives to be entirely violent.
- Exploring the deepest meanings of our experiences, and gaining a new understanding of what’s possible for the future.
- Exploring health, including eating a Paleolithic diet, being conscious of the reality of how we are connected to the food we eat through the web of life, losing weight, and finding physical healing.
- How to balance serving others with honoring your own needs and personal power.
- Dealing with grief, including allowing time to truly grieve without making yourself wrong.
Do you have deep, significant conversations that you need or want to have? What would it be like if you had two or three intimate, trusted partners to talk about what troubles, confuses, or inspires and motivates you—partners with whom you’d regularly return the favor?
Who would you like to be on your team of Joyful Wisdom Buddies? Who do you believe would be most skilled to help you answer your questions, while you, in turn, help them to answer theirs?
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Next: The Third Step on the Yellow Brick Road: Intense, Deep Community
Cougar
deltadoster
The Joyful Wisdom Community 