Bringing mercy, clarity and support to human needs.
Where does need fit in the spiritual path? Are there different kinds of need? When does it make sense to meet a need and when does it make sense to not? How do you tell? Join Jeannie for an in-depth exploration of the human experience of need and its spiritual implications.
Jeannie invites the body to soften and sink into the sturdy ground. She talks about need as a doorway into yin, and that in our culture we know very little about softening and sinking. Conditioning can cause us to have shame around need - early needs were sometimes not validated or were reacted to by our caregivers. Jeannie describes need as a natural reach toward life, and covers many types of needs, making a distinction between frozen needs that need to be felt and healed, and those that need filling. It is through our own experimentation that we find out what our true needs are in the moment and what needs should be explored and healed.
Exchanges
Exchange 1: Participant wants to explore needs we have that involve others. Jeannie talks about the need for connection and contact in order to heal, and how as we digest and move through our unmet pain, we can become less dependent on the people around us to supply us with our basic needs, and become more fluid and more easeful in moving in and out of relating.
Exchange 2: Participant wants to explore the distinction between adult (actual present time needs) and baby needs (unmet developmental needs that need healing). Jeannie talks about holy impulse, where the organic is prompting us toward something--true need in this case is clean burning.
Exchange 3: Participant wants to explore meeting ones’ own needs and also interdependence. Jeannie talks about listening to the still small voice, as we heal and sturdy our vehicles to prepare for the demands of our calling. The healing, refining, sturdying process unfolds as we keep noticing in each moment the pull of “you should” versus the resonating sense that an impulse is right to follow.
Exchange 4: Participant experiences the grip of the entitled baby along with anger, and has not found a way to melt into peace. Jeannie normalizes the anger of the young one and the integrity of it in relation to an actual young unmet need. While it's important to validate the need, it's also important not to act out our anger in relationship. What we thought we were due from others, was what should have come from our parents, and dissolving that entitlement can be humbling.
Exchange 5: Participant wants to explore respecting the need of the little one--not pushing it away or acting it out. Jeannie talks about how identified we can get with the one who acts out, and how important it is to hold the baby within and resource.