Your Sacred Circle

"My Sacred Circle" gouache on paper, 30" x 22" 2024.

I like to listen to podcasts while I paint, and recently came across an interview with Tim Ferris and Elizabeth Gilbert which really spoke to me. In 2022, while in treatment for chronic illness in Calgary, I read (and listened to) a lot of books, and Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love was one. Like millions of women around the world, I identified with her spiritual quest, and her general search for the meaning of life. She’s a fantastic writer, and she also gave voice to many emotions I was feeling at the time. I loved it so much that when it ended, I listened to it again on long walks along the Calgary skyline. I was just as captivated the second time around!

The Calgary skyline on my daily walk

So when I heard Tim Ferris' podcast interview the other day, not surprisingly, I felt as if she was speaking directly to me, articulating my own thoughts all over again. I’m not going to summarize the interview, but a few salient subjects stood out: the idea of living in alignment (and what happens when you don’t); the notion of self-friendliness; and the concept of a personal sacred circle, which kind of encapsulates all three.

Living in Alignment

Living in alignment isn’t a new concept to me, but it’s really come to the forefront of my awareness in the last year. I’m sure you’ve experienced this: you become aware of an idea, and suddenly you see evidence to support that idea everywhere. It’s on your radar because your mind has deemed it important, so you’re attune to it. When I was in Calgary, Dr. Hoffman talked to me about living in alignment, and so did my acupuncturist and my somatic therapist, all in slightly different ways, but it just didn't sink in.

In Eat Pray Love, the character Liz recognizes she can’t continue to live a life she feels is wrong for her: she can’t stay married and have a baby because that’s not what she felt called to do. Liz describes this in the Ferris interview:

“I got married at 24 and worked hard and bought a house and made a plan to have a family, and then instead of having a family, I had a nervous breakdown. Quite literally. Everybody was moving in this one direction and my entire intellectual, spiritual, and physical system collapsed, which I now see as an act of God.

I now see that’s the Tao, that there was a force that was trying to communicate to me, “This is not your path, and I will kill you before I let you do this. I will kill you before I let you be a suburban housewife. I’m not allowing it. I will put you in so much physical pain that you’re going to have to notice that this is not the life for you.”

This year, I found the same lesson in James Hollis’ writing (he’s a famous expert on Jung). Says Hollis: “In the second half of life…the questions change. What does the soul ask of me? What does it mean that I am here, and who am I apart from my roles, apart from my history?” The teaching is about knowing yourself, knowing your path, and then living accordingly.

In Primal Trust, the program I completed this year to rewire my brain's limbic system, Dr. Cat (the founder) also teaches about the negative consequences of living out of alignment. In the program, through many exercises, I began to understand who my True Self is, and the ways in which I was living out of alignment with the values of that self. Dr. Cat emphasizes how this sets up a tension in the psyche which will inevitably manifest as physical symptoms in the body, and chronic illness over time.

Says Gilbert, “I’ve gotten what I wanted a lot in life and it almost killed me. So I’m not so interested anymore in what I want. I am good at manifesting what I want, and I’m good at almost dying from getting what I want. So maybe there’s a better question to be asking than, “What do I want?” She clarifies the question should be, “what would you have me know today”? She is speaking to God, or G.O.D (greater organized design), Source, the universe, or universal love, depending on what you want to call it.

I found myself nodding my head— it resonated with me so much. I almost died too, from getting what I wanted (achieving all my goals). This is because my goals were out of alignment with who I am, at my core... from lack of understanding of my core values, and having absorbed the values of my culture instead. I thought these accomplishments would make me feel worthy, but instead I drove myself so hard, I made myself dangerously sick in the process.

For example, although I enjoyed many aspects of nursing (especially helping people), it isn’t my true vocation (my calling). And it took me away from what I’ve always loved to do since I was a child, which is to create. I was an introvert and I delighted in endless hours of drawing, imaginary play by myself, being in nature alone, and spending time with my animals (dogs and horses). Remembering who I was as a child, and what I loved to do allowed me to recognize that creativity was my highest value. Renewing my commitment to my creativity has been very liberating AND healing.

"Healing Brain Fog" gouache on paper, 16" x 12", 2022.

Maybe you're wondering why getting what I wanted made me so sick, and why living in alignment is so healing? Because there was a push-pull going on in my psyche… for example I wanted to do dangerous stunt-flying, but I was also afraid of it; or I wanted to be an ER nurse because I loved helping people, but I was a hypochondriac as a child, and terrified of dying. In fact I had a debilitating fear of flying, and I hated hospitals growing up … so I… became an ER nurse and an aerobatic pilot?! You can imagine, these situations were tremendously exciting to me, and challenging too… but they caused a lot of conflicting, intense emotions. And that psychic stepping-on-the-gas, then the brake, then the gas… took a toll on me. I am still a pilot, and a nurse, but I don’t practice them right now. Instead, I’m devoted to my art. And surprisingly, I feel good about that! When I'm living in alignment, there's no more resistance inside. And when there's no resistance, my nervous system can relax, and my body can heal.

Self-Friendliness

In the Ferris interview, Gilbert talks about her darkest, most-depressed moment:

“I was given this instruction, and it came in as clearly as I’m talking to you, and it said, “Get up, get a notebook and write to yourself the words that you most wish that somebody would say to you…. what that letter said was, “I’ve got you, I’m with you, I’m not going anywhere. I love you exactly the way you are. You can’t fail at this, you can’t do this wrong. I don’t need anything from you…“… “You don’t have to improve, you don’t have to do life better, you don’t have to win, you don’t have to get out of this depression, you don’t have to ever uplift your spirits. You could end up living in a box, under a bridge, in a garbage bag spitting at people, and I would love you just as much as I do now. The love that I have for you cannot be lost, because it’s innate, it’s yours, and it is not — I have no requirements for it. If you need to stay up all night crying, I’ll be here with you. If tomorrow you have a garbage day again, because you’ve been up all night crying, I’ll be there for that too. I’ll be here for every minute of it, just ask me to come and I’ll be here with you.”

The astonishing thing was that it, even talking about it now, I can feel the impact that it has on my nervous system to hear those words, even in my own voice. It was the first experience I’d ever had with unconditional love.”

This practice is very similar to one I’ve been doing in my somatic work. The idea is to self-soothe when my nervous system is over activated, because a body can’t heal when the nervous system is stuck in the fight-or-flight, sympathetic mode. Many people like me who have suffered trauma as a child, have nervous systems that are easily triggered, and get stuck in the sympathetic mode, unable to calm down. And if they are chronically activated, this significantly diminished the body’s ability to heal in general, and leads to chronic illness and autoimmune diseases.

Somatics teaches tapping, breath work, somatic reorientation, and soothing self-talk as methods for bringing one’s nervous system back into a state of calm, so I was excited to try Gilbert’s practice of writing a love letter from Universal Love. At first it felt a bit weird to write myself from the perspective of some imaginary omniscient being, but in all honesty, it doesn’t matter if I believe the voice is Love, or God, or my own brain… the result is the same. When I read my own letters, the words do resonate… and by that I mean they touch a place that clearly needs some extra self-friendliness.

Gilbert has created a website and a project involving thousands of volunteers, who also want to learn how to be more friendly and loving to themselves. She states (on the What? page), “LETTERS FROM LOVE is both a learning space and a spiritual practice. Here, people come together to discover their inherent value and exquisite preciousness, and to learn how to write and speak to themselves from a place of love and friendliness.”

"Santi's Mandala" gouache on paper, 16" x 12", 2023.

Sacred Circles

Finally, I come to the point that started this whole blog, the concept of the sacred circle. Mandala is the Sanskrit word for sacred circle, and I’ve written about mandalas in my blog post Mandalas As Mirrors. So when I heard Liz Gilbert talking about sacred circles and Joseph Campbell (an author I’ve loved for decades), I listened carefully.

“The great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once said: Here’s how humans make something sacred: You draw a circle around it and you say everything inside this circle is holy. It’s sacred because you said so. That is called a boundary, and a boundary is not a wall. A boundary is not something that you hide behind. A boundary is a golden circle that you draw around the things that matter to you, and you say everything inside this circle is sacred… You get to decide what is sacred. The sacred thing inside the circle can be your time, your creativity, your loved ones, your privacy, your recovery, your values, your mental health, your activism, your joy, your very heart and soul. You yourself can stand at the center of a sacred circle that you drew around YOUR VERY OWN BEING, and say, 'Everything inside this circle is holy.' Not because you think you’re better than anyone else, but because you have humbly accepted stewardship over the divine and mysterious gift of the universe that is YOU.”

Gilbert says a boundary is a certain kind of sacredness that women never got taught, because women believe (and have been schooled by culture) that they must take care of others, at all costs, and often at the expense of taking care of themselves. Does this resonate, any women out there?! If I think of how many times I have put everyone else’s needs before my own (especially as a nurse and mom)… how many times I have let people cross my boundaries because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings by asserting them… O.M.G.

Finally, FINALLY an alarm bell went off in my head, after all of these lessons of self-alignment and friendly self-talk… after months of learning from Jung and Hollis, Byron Katie and Martha Beck, and my somatic therapist…yes, finally… DING-A-LING!! 🔔

Enough is enough! The universe gave me this one existence to take care of: this body, this mind, this heart, these children, these dreams and passions and this creativity, and these loving relationships, including my pets…. this life is what I draw my golden line around… this is what’s sacred to me.

And I truly believe that I had to learn all those other lessons first, before I could understand the concept of being at the center of my sacred circle. The conversation with Gilbert in my head is what gave birth to my painting “My Sacred Circle”.

Was it my subconscious instructing me to paint mandalas for the last two years? Perhaps. It makes me smile to think about our consciousness as the tip of a giant iceberg, the tiniest piece poking up above the surface of the water, while the massive subconscious and unconscious extend deep below the surface, like a whale below a little floating duckling. There is so much we don't understand about ourselves.

These are some of the questions I've been thinking about, and maybe they will spark something for you. What do I value? What don’t I care about, and can let go? Who do I let into my circle because they treat me with love and respect? How do I want to spend what time I have left on this earth? Am I feeding my passions, or someone else’s? Am I at peace today?

What's inside your sacred circle, and where do you draw your golden line?

With love,

Lise