Recently, I had a day that was really rough for me emotionally, so much so it gave me a bad headache. I felt so drained I didn't get done anything I'd planned. I felt worse and worse emotionally as the day went on, and fell in depressive habits of trying to distract myself by scrolling through Facebook until my phone died and trying to self-medicate with sugary junk foods.
When I was depressed, I would often get like that, where I felt so down and drained that the little voice in my head going, "you could do this and that and such to feel better," made me feel resentful and resistant. The resentment was a source of irritability; the resistance an expression of anxiety. Instead of recognizing my unhappy feelings and acknowledging them, I ran away from them, avoided them, suppressed them, did my best to numb myself.
I was receiving acupuncture to address some ongoing health issues. At one point in the treatment I had a deep visceral experience of a vortex or portal opening up around my belly and the words “Release the pain, keep the wisdom” came into my head. Those words continued to run the next day as I had a long session with a powerful practitioner of magic who does her healing through deep body work and massage.
The long history of headaches and their relief could doubtless fill many volumes. Although at the forefront of medicine in many ways (at least for the tenth century) Ali ibn Isa al-Kahhal seemed to have run out of practical solutions when he suggested lashing a mole to your head (then again have you tried it?). Hildegard of Bingen might suggest a need for more viriditas or 'greening' in your life, for "green is useful and mellow" as we know.
But sometimes there was only the suffering. Medieval Scots poet William Dunbar captures that pain well in his short poem:
As the solstice comes upon us here in the Northern Hemisphere our thoughts turn to surviving the cold. While it's considerably milder here in Scotland than it was while I was teaching in New York, cold it is and cups of tea provide welcome warmth. It's hardly surprising that people in the Middle Ages measured their lives in winters survived. In many ways the mid-winter celebrations offer a chance to celebrate that hope and restore it for the lean months ahead.
It's the perfect time to consider the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, which I think of as a companion to The Wanderer. Both elegiac poems that mourn a lost past, they celebrate the power of the comitatus, the loyal troop of warriors and find poetic resonance in the harsh world of winter.
The following is adapted from my new book A Sacred Marketplace: Sell without Selling Out or Burning Out. Mysticism + Marketing = Sales.
The marketplace is sacred. It is where community gathers.
I love the world of spirit. I am happy in it. I am also incredibly happy in the marketplace. It is where I get to share from my heart and soul. It is where I get to connect with other humans.
The marketplace is sacred. I am almost in tears as I write this because I am so deeply moved when I work with my students: When we are working together, we are in the real. We are discussing our actual lives, true feelings, soulful dreams, honest needs, terrible doubts, night-sweating terrors, dizzying triumphs, and more.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Some days can really wreck havoc in one's life, for years when a bad day hit me it was like being at the edge of the surf, wave af
