To Bless the Space Between Us

     One of my author’s to love is John O’Donahue. He’s a treasure of a poet whose untimely passing in 2008 jarred a lot of us; yet, not surprisingly, his work continues to inspire.  One of O’Donahue’s books, entitled, To Bless the Space Between Us, offers ways to bless what he calls “seven rhythms of the human journey: beginnings, desires, thresholds, homecomings, states of the heart, callings and beyond endings.” The following might move anyone confronting the stuckness of life:

         To change is one of the great dreams of every heart – to change the limitations the sameness, the banality, or the pain.  So often we look back on patterns of behavior, the kind of decisions we make repeatedly and that have failed to serve us well, and we aim for a new and more successful path or way of living. But change is difficult for us, so often we opt to continue the old pattern, rather than risking the danger of difference.  

Throughout this book he champions the idea that “our very presence here [is] blessing”; that each of us has a “quiet light that shines” in secret; it “illuminates our minds to see beauty” and awakens “our desire to see possibility.”  Yet for many of us, at certain junctures of our lives, the idea of possibility seems not only remote but also utterly unreachable. O’Donahue blames, in part, the “commercial edge of so-called “progress” that is “all gloss and pace on the outside, [but] within” leaves us “too often haunted and lost.” Indeed, as a therapist, I often find people distracted by their busyness and so cut off from their deeper more creative, clear, selves that they’ve all but forgot how wonderfully they are made. When we are stuck, we may be aware enough to know that we need to do something new to stop the misery in our life, but we might not be sure what that new thing might be. Establishing a safe relationship with a caring therapist can be an experience that empowers you towards your own wisdom and renews your appreciation for the real blessing that life is.