Kate Schubert

10/04/2025

🩷🌸🩷🌸🩷

If there’s one thing I wish more people understood about horses, it’s this: They’re not being difficult. Most of what they're doing is reflective of YOU.

They are giving you a RESPONSE. Not out of defiance. Not out of malice. But because they are wired - biologically, psychologically, instinctively - to respond to the world around them for survival.

So when you step into their space frustrated, disconnected, anxious, or unclear - they feel that. And they respond accordingly.

I see two things all the time…

• A spooky horse is blamed for being naughty, but the rider is nervous, stiff, and barely breathing.
• A horse is labeled stubborn because he doesn’t respond to a cue - but the cue was unclear, poorly communicated - and then the horse is punished for being lazy and unresponsive.

In both cases, the horse isn’t the problem. The human involved, however, is.

There’s a lot of incompetence in the horse world - but instead of accountability, we blame the horse.
We slap on harsher bits, louder aids, more aggressive corrections.We label them bad, lazy, rude, or stubborn… when really, they’re just confused, frightened, or overwhelmed.

Horses cannot be 'bad', they are just horses. People are either bad handlers, riders, or trainers. This seems to be a truth rarely spoken or acknowledged.

Horses literally can't manipulate. They, very simply, reflect what we bring to the conversation.

And that’s the truth people don’t like to talk about:
If your horse isn’t responding well, it might not be about them - it's actually in most cases about you.

So when something feels off in a session, pause and ask yourself:

Am I breathing deeply and feeling compassionate and optimistic?
Am I calm and grounded in my body?
Am I present - or is my mind somewhere else?
Am I feeling scared, under pressure, or frustrated?

✨ Self-awareness is the MOST underrated skill in horsemanship. The more honest we become about what we bring into the space, the more compassionate and connected we become as partners. ✨

Because it’s never about control. It’s about connection.
And that connection? It always starts with you.

28/03/2025

Beautiful words 🩷

I hope this note finds you well and that you’re enjoying spring and the re-emergence of the light. Here in the mountains, the birds are sharing a new song and the forests are coming alive - the purples, the reds, the greens of a new dawn. The pieces of light are starting to appear, as they tend to do, in places where we’d least expect them.

And so it goes on the path of the heart…

As we move from one cycle to another in both inner and outer nature, I’ve found myself reflecting on how we live in a world that in so many ways has lost contact with the holiness of mourning and its purifying fires, an absence which comes with profound consequences, including loss of energy (soul) and a feeling of being cut off from life and the heart.

In the words of Jungian psychoanalyst Donald Kalsched, “The inability to mourn is the single most telling symptom of a patient’s early trauma.” I have found this to be (achingly) true in my own life and clinical work.

It’s important to remember that in the death-rebirth cycle, there are two essential components: death, which I’m referring to alchemically, or metaphorically, as dissolution (the alchemical solutio) and, on the other hand, rebirth, renewal, and rejuvenation. It’s very understandable that this second aspect is the one we’re most interested in!

The dissolution aspect of the opus isn’t as easy or natural to embrace or see as equally sacred, equally holy, and an equal manifestation of love, of the Beloved as it comes here to seed this world with its qualities. It’s the Kali aspect of love, for those of you familiar with Hindu mythology, or an energy like Vajrakilaya in the Tibetan tradition, or Mercurius in alchemy, the hidden side of God or the Divine.

The darker aspect of the (transpersonal) Self plays an essential role in our individuation and healing, and being in conscious relationship with this dimension of psyche is indispensable on an alchemical path, though it is not easy to engage and stay with.

It can be supportive, if not necessary, to tend to this relationship alongside an empathic other, whether a therapist, mentor, teacher, or wise friend, ideally one with some experience of the inner terrain of the soul and the heart, where through a joined window of tolerance you can hold and process emotions and images that on your own may be overwhelming.

The truth is that we’re wired to rest and explore within a relational field; we just weren’t meant to walk the path alone - that’s not the sort of nervous system we were crafted with. Relationship - and engaging the mystery of the “Other” - is an essential aspect of the path of alchemical transformation and healing, and which we must discover within the fire of our own embodied experience. Just what this “Other” is for us can only be revealed by way of the path of direct revelation.

So there’s the death aspect of the archetypal cycle and also the long-awaited dawning of rebirth, where we’re offered vision and a pathway into a new way of being. It’s where a doorway, or portal begins to open, after being closed for a certain period of time. In my experience (my own pain, wounding, and grief), it is our willingness and capacity to feel and to grieve that bridges death and rebirth.

There is no lasting, embodied, visionary renewal without passing through the portal of grief, which requires us to slow down, come into the earth and the ground, and honor all that we’ve lost. It requires that we provide a home for shattered ones and for the integration of the dying pieces of an old dream.

This is the way we empty the cup so that it can be refilled with new imagination, cleansed perception, and a heart that is polished with beauty, wisdom, and grace. In this sense, grief is the forgotten portal. There’s a powerful and mysterious connection between our capacity to grieve and the emergence of new vision.

In my experience, this connection and subsequent exploration is often left out of many contemporary psychotherapies and spiritualities, which remain riveted to the upward, transcendent, and solar, or else the quick removal of symptoms (which contain important pieces of soul). But we have to go into the mud, the earth, and tend the lunar currents as well, for the new and the creative to take birth in our hearts.

The portal to resurrection and new vision opens through conscious, embodied lamentation, as we gather the shards of the heart and the scattered pieces of the soul, which are emanations of the strands, or scintilla of light, as the alchemists saw and conceived of them.

It’s a process where we collect the shattered pieces into a holy place and place them onto an altar in front of us, where we can enter into relationship with the shards of soul that must move on without us. And we can participate with a whole heart with the death of an old dream, and the way we were so sure that it was all going to turn out.

The nature of this altar and this vase will be different for each of us, with calligraphy, engravings, colors, and in a shape that is crafted for our unique soulprint. We don’t design the vase ourselves, at least not by way of ordinary ego-consciousness. The vase is outside our deepest hopes, fears, desires, and unfolds apart from our personal sense of will.

It is given to us by the transpersonal Self, by the Divine, however we come to conceive of that and is ours and ours alone - no one else can perceive or apprehend it, or design the vase on our behalf. A good friend, therapist, or mentor may be able to hold us and bear witness as we evoke and enter into relationship with it, but in my experience it will always remain out of full sight for them.

The vase, the altar, and any aspect of the soul wanting to come into our conscious experience will present itself in unexpected ways, through our dreams, out in nature, in a moment of intuitive knowing, or even through a disturbance in our mood or emotional activation.

The ally is mysterious - a trickster, mercurial, and always looking for us. But it does so in ways that will surprise us and that we aren’t able to apprehend ahead of time. This is the mystery of the alchemical vessel, which is not only literal, but metaphorical, a container inside each of us where the purifying work of transmutation can occur.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, yes, at times, it can feel like everything is falling apart, like we are falling apart. In these moments, the alchemical invitation is to open to the possibility that this process of “falling apart” is not some great cosmic error or mistake that we need to correct or repair, or to quickly put ourselves back together again.

Perhaps the shattered heart need not be “mended” in these moments and returned to the way it once was, but that in its shattering, the ally is revealed. Perhaps the “falling apart” is a harbinger of integration and emissary of the archetype of wholeness.

This one whispers to us, through a thundering silence, and invites us to fall apart consciously, to allow the alchemical process of dissolution, of yellowing, to unfold, honoring it it as an essential, non-negotiable phase as we open to rebirth and what it is that will emerge from the ashes.

Please take care of yourselves and I’m wishing you all the very best on your own wildly unique journey of transformation and healing - a journey that is never for ourselves alone, but for all of life, including the ancestors and the ones yet to come.

20/03/2025

🩷

When all is said and done
what it really comes down to
is how we treat each other.

After all the fancy spiritual and philosophical words and concepts.
After all the lectures and books and workshops and insights and self-help practices.

What it really comes down to
is how we treat each other.

When things aren’t going well for us.
And when things are.

When we think we are right.
And when we think we are wrong.

How we treat ourselves, too.
How we treat our own minds and bodies.
And how we treat our pets.
Our partners. Our friends.
Our family.
Clients. Students.
Strangers on the street.
People we sit next to on the number 36 bus, or in a restaurant, or in a doctor’s waiting room.

I don’t care if you’re a spiritual guru or a president or a homeless person on the street.

I don’t care how awakened or enlightened or woke you think you are.

How we treat each other matters.

How we treat people with more than us, and how we treat people with less.

How we treat the vulnerable.

It’s the only thing that really matters,
when you think about it.

What else is there,
except how we connect.
How we listen.
How we love.
How we forgive.

How we treat each other.

- Jeff Foster

21/01/2025

Powerful share 🌸

Jax and Viv invite you to an upcoming event they are holding for the Being Well online series - The power of Gratitude and Reciprocity. Jax shares an embodie...

13/12/2024

Yes, yes, yes 🙌

13/12/2024

Beautifully put 🌸

Attachment, fusion, and the yoga of relationship

In close personal relationships, it is important to emphasize a secure attachment bond and the co-regulation of challenging emotional states.

To practice kindness toward our lovers and friends, listen to the way they are making sense of their experience, attune to what they are feeling, and hold them during difficult times.

It is also essential to be on the lookout for unhealthy fusion, honoring the reality that we are not only connected, but also separate.

Any secure attachment must include healthy differentiation, where at times the most skillful activity will be to establish firm boundaries, assert our independence, privilege our own personal integrity, and allow the other to struggle with feelings of aloneness, uncertainty, and confusion.

At times we will disappoint those we love, and this will activate our historic core vulnerabilities… and theirs.

For many of us, disappointing another is just not safe, and we will do whatever possible to ensure they do not come face to face with the surging material of their unlived life. But allowing them to meet the reality of their own heart is an act of profound mercy and compassion.

While transpersonally we can speak about unity and oneness, within the relative we are also distinct, with our own histories and ways of organizing our experience. Each with our own fate and relationship with the divine, our own paths to travel; our own unique ways entering the mystery.

To dissolve these differences into some homogenized spiritual middle does not honor the sacredness of form.

If we do not consciously explore the reality of our separateness, it will inevitably manifest in less than conscious ways, unleashing unmetabolized shadow into the relational field.

Like all work of depth, this art form evolves slowly, as it marinates in the alchemical vessel of the body.

May we be kind to our partners as we navigate this territory – especially during these challenging times – honoring the vehicle of intimacy as one of the most provocative, sacred, and holy that we have in our modern world.

Art credit: Owl, as sol and luna, clay sculpture by Krista Marleena Art

06/12/2024

Beautifully put, a way of living cyclically and at the centre.

Tending to grief is the essence of the wounded healer. Proving a sanctuary and safe passage for its unfolding – in the body, the psyche, and the nervous system – requires that we fall to the ground, at times, and weep.

Weep for the shattering, for the dying of a dream, for the entirety of the unlived life. For it is these tears that form the substance of the portal to joy.

Grief is not something we “get over,” but a partner we spin with, honor at times, argue with at others, and lament with as the cycles of our lives unfold.

We live in a world that has lost contact with the holy waters of reorganization. But to marginalize the experience of grief to work against nature. Out in the natural world, the earth grieves by way of her seasons. We can feel that grief in a rain drop, if we allow ourselves to be taken apart and put back together.

There is no endpoint to this restructuring, no final state of resolution where we land in some untouchable place, free from our embodied vulnerability, our somatic aliveness, and from more burning.

Rather, we find ourselves in what the alchemists called the rotatio, the holy rotation of vast cycles of rupture and repair that touch and open the human soul.

The soul is endless and the visitors of grief may companion us for a lifetime. But the grieving, orphaned ones of psyche and soma come not to harm, but to reveal. And to open a doorway into wholeness, mercy, and light.

Grief is not so much a process that we “make it through” and come out the other side fully intact, but a non-linear, purifying midwife of the unknown. It moves not by way of straight line, but by that of circle and spiral.

09/11/2024

🩷

The death of an old dream and how it was all supposed to turn out. What was once so clear is incinerated and taken to dust.

The tendency is to get out of the death aspect of the archetypal cycle, and as quickly as possible into rebirth. This is so understandable; it hurts.

But there is wisdom, mercy, and grace within the dying that we short-circuit if we leave prematurely, before the grief, rage, and despair are tended.

Death is always an invitation into a grieving process, to gather the shattered pieces and place them on an altar in front of us.

It’s an act of kindness to slow down, turn off the electronics, touch the earth and ask her for help; and take the time to feel what we’re feeling so that it can be digested and metabolized.

Otherwise, the shattered orphans are sequestered into underground storage, held in the somatic unconscious and nervous system, in our muscles and cell tissue, in a frozen, half-processed, unassimilated form.

From there, they will burn, cry and rage and erupt, longing to return home.

If we move too quickly past our grief and onto the next thing, we run the risk of abandoning the grieving one, the heartbroken one, the enraged one to wander alone in an empty forest.

These ones, the longing orphans of psyche and soma, are not obstacles to the path, but are the very path itself. To offer ourselves permission, a well-sealed vessel or sanctuary in which the broken pieces can go through the alchemical cycle.

And, in this, we can ask the heart if what it truly wants at this time is to be mended, or if its deepest longing is for something else, cracks in its armor where a certain light can come in and illuminate the broken pieces.

The darker light of the rays of the black sun can only flow when the tears are flowing, when the wound is open and seeping, weeping with its essence.

This grief, heartbreak, shattering, isn’t in need of healing, as it’s not un-whole. It’s perfectly valid and pure on its own, as it is, as a radiant manifestation of a Whole Heart. Not waiting to be mended or put back together, but to finally be allowed to share its gifts, in new and creative ways.

To speak kindness, to embody compassion, to remember what’s most important to us, and to love this world in ways that haven’t been possible until now.

28/10/2024

So much yes to this…. ✨

Even if our primary interest is in spiritual transformation, we can’t separate out our unresolved relational trauma, attachment wounding, and narcissistic injury we may have experienced.

There just isn’t a bright line separating these things.

They intertwine in the body and mind and weave in and out of the cells of our nervous systems and hearts.

There isn’t something called spirituality over here, and then over there something called psychological and emotional healing.

I’m sure many of you have heard the saying that goes something like, “We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”

And of course, it has that wise-sounding ring to it. But from a more alchemical point of view, or a perspective from the fields of wholeness, it’s pretty dualistic.

A more alchemical approach would be to simultaneously contain both of those statements and the contradictory energies they embody, hold the tension of those opposites and through facilitating a dialogue and relationship between them, allow a new, third thing to emerge which includes the truth of each.

The union of spirit and matter, solar and lunar, oneness and multiplicity, transcendent and descendent currents - each equally holy as an emanation of the Beloved into the world of time and space. Each an equally sacred and valid arrow in her quiver.

If we attend only to that part of us which is Pure Spirit or Pure Awareness, what inevitably happens is that aspects of our embodied humanity, pieces of soul, and the lost ones of psyche and soma are located into the shadow.

From there, they color our perception, become evoked in others, enacted in the relational field, and somatized in the body as a variety of unwanted symptoms.

It can feel cleaner and clearer to stay in Spirit, to be sure, as if we’ve risen above the mess of it all and are in some untouchable and invulnerable state.

We can use our present-moment awareness practices to come closer to ourselves and our unresolved wounding, or we can use these same beliefs and practices as a way to dissociate and split off from our embodied vulnerability, unfelt feelings, and undigested psychological material - all in the name of “being in the now.”

Because these lenses of perception are unconscious, meaning they’re operating outside of our conscious knowing, we aren’t able to see how they are affecting us. Instead, we just assume we’re perceiving reality “directly,” “as it is,” in some pure and unadulterated form.

We stay in the present moment, but that present moment is alive with the ancestors and the ghosts of our unlived lives, the reality of implicit memory networks, and the entirety of our unmetabolized trauma and attachment wounding.

We stay lodged into the matrix of intergenerational trauma and trance, but aren’t aware of it.

If we fail to include in our inquiry the entirety of what we are – the shadow, the sore and hurt places, the betrayals, the unfelt grief, the disavowed rage, and a relationship with the orphans of psyche and soma - we won’t be able to live here fully, in a way that guided by wisdom and compassion.

If we don’t tend to the wounds around love there will always be a dis-integration within us, which will manifest as a dissociative split from our True Nature.

And we won’t be able to access that natural joy, aliveness, openness, and warmth that are the qualities of that nature, the capacity to play, to create, and to fully be here, in a way that is deeply meaningful and beneficial, for ourselves and for others.

28/10/2024

🩷🌸

In alchemy, things coming apart and falling away are essential stages of the work, evidence of the transmutation and the emergence of the red stone: something/ someone in my life, or some way of being-perceiving, begins to yellow; dissolve, disintegrate, reorganize; seeking our blessing to move along.

It can be a challenging and uncertain time, shaky, groundless, restless - and has a way of aching in the body, burning in the heart: an emptiness, a longing, and simultaneously, somehow, a sense that things are pregnant, open, naked, and alive.

That aching, burning, longing – reflected in the words of Rumi, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila – we might open to the possibility that these experiences are evidence of the Ally, of the emissaries of Wholeness, foreshadowing a coming rebirth.

But of course, it doesn’t always feel like that in the moment. Being ground to dust.

Maybe it’s Hermes who is beginning to appear, pulling back the veil so that we can see, cleansing our perception, polishing our hearts, washing our cell tissue from the inside-out. Hermes, being one of many trickster figures, whose role it is to link the various figures and wisdom-centers in psyche.

And also, to link the individual self with Ultimate Reality; to reveal that Unity as our perception is reorganized in and as a single, unified whole.

Mythologically, Hermes connected the Gods to one another, who would ordinarily stay in their own realms; the connection-maker who links together differentiated and dissociated parts in a system, in this case the system of the human heart.

A reconnecting and relinking of orphaned aspects of ourselves and pieces of soul who have become scattered due to trauma and other forms of emotional wounding, those core wounds around love.

Simultaneously connecting the individual heart with the Divine Ground, linking spirit and matter, linking Self with the unus mundus, with the one world prior to the emergence of the opposites.

It’s Hermes, as connection-maker, who plays in this in-between space, where at times he may appear and reveal his Presence, dancing inside those sore places, into the very center of the weeping wound, and provide the missing tincture.