HeartBalm

The Vulture and the Sun (An Ancient Parable): When Healing Costs You Everything

When I first encountered this ancient story, something in me went still in the way that only something deeply resonating can still you. Part of it was my love of the sun - that ancient, irreplaceable force that makes all life possible, that I have always felt not just as warmth on skin but as something personal, something sacred, something nurturing, loving, and alive. To hear a story in which the sun itself needed saving, and that only one creature in all the kingdom could do it landed in me before I even understood why.

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But it was more than that. It was my own healing journey looking back at me. The one that has so often felt pointless. Too hard. Too long. Too much asked of one person in one lifetime. And yet I keep moving forward. Not because I always believe it’s working. Not because the path is clear or the reward is visible or there is a reward at all. But because my sensitivity leaves me no other choice. I feel too much to stop. I care too much to turn away. Something in me simply will not abandon the climb, no matter the cost.

Maybe you know that feeling. If you have ever been told you are too sensitive, too deep, to emotional, too willing to feel what others move past without looking back, then this story is for you.

If you have done the heavy, invisible work of healing - your own wounds, your family’s wounds, wounds that were never yours to begin with and found yourself exhausted, unseen, transformed by the giving - this story is for you.

Let it land in you however it needs to sweet one.

The Vulture and The Sun

One day, the sun began to fall from the sky.

It tumbled down toward the earth, and every creature in the savannah watched in terror. Without the sun, all life would end - swallowed by cold and darkness. Something had to be done. Someone had to act.

The otter came first.

Quick-witted, rational, a creature of science and ingenuity, the otter began to build - a tower of intellect and clever construction, designed to haul the sun back to its place. But the sun crushed the tower. Its power was not of this plane, not of this land. No amount of intelligence could hold it.

Then came the lion.

Fierce, mighty, the king of the jungle. The lion would simply push the sun back with sheer force. But the lion had one eye, as it always does, on its own pride. On its stature, its image, how it appeared in the doing. Too proud to be fully burned. Too concerned with how it looked to give everything. It pushed just enough to be seen trying and then stopped.

Then came the elephant.

Wiser than the lion, stronger than the otter, with skin thick enough to bear the heat. The elephant tried with everything it had. But it soon understood something devastating: it was bound to the earth. It could not leave the ground. Could not leap into the air. Could not exchange one realm for another. Wisdom, as great as it is, can only take you so far.

The elephant, too, gave up.

Now through all of this, the vulture had been watching.

In those ancient days, the vulture was breathtaking. Long, slender, iridescent feathers covering its entire body - its head, its neck, its wings - a plumage of extraordinary beauty. And as it watched the others fail, the vulture understood something none of them had grasped.

This task did not require intelligence alone.

It did not require pride, or brute strength, or even wisdom.

It required the willingness to give yourself completely. To care nothing for what it cost you.

So the vulture did not hesitate. It took the sun onto its head - burning, blinding, ferocious - and launched itself from the earth with a force so immense, so fully committed, that the weight of the sun began to lift.

Its feathers burned as it climbed.

First the head. Then the neck. Then the body. Its beauty - the thing it had always been seen and known for - was being stripped away in real time.

And the vulture did not stop.

It did not flinch. It did not look down to check how it appeared or calculate what it was losing. It pushed and climbed and gave until it transcended all space and time and became one with the sky - with the clouds, with the furthest reaches of the heavens.

And the sun, in that moment, finally understood.

Here was the one it had been waiting for. The one that could unify all realms. The one equally at home in the dirt of the earth and the fire of the sky. The vulture pushed the sun back to the very uttermost tip of the heaven, and then fell. Fell all the way back down to earth. From the divine to the ground.

Its feathers burned to nothing.

No longer the most beautiful. No longer adorned. Lying on the earth, exhausted, utterly transformed.

And the sun looked down on this creature that had given everything without asking for anything and gave the vulture a gift.

The gift of effortlessness.

The ability to stay in flight for hours without effort. Suspended, poised, vast - between heaven and earth. Watching over all life. Guardian of both worlds.

The whole process of this life and what must be faced is about healing. It’s about becoming whole. It’s about finding a way of living which brings something good out of it.

You were never the broken one. You were always the one doing what needed to be done. The sun has not forgotten. And neither have we.

With love, always Heartbalm Healing

I hope this meets you with love and understanding today. Please like, leave a comment, and subscribe for more HeartBalm Healing. As always, from my heart to yours!

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A prose poem that arrived whole — for paid subscribers.

The Vending Machine: And Then You Get Crickets

Over time you begin to see things more clearly, and one thing that becomes clear is how some people in your life treat you as a vending machine. And you probably didn’t even know that’s what you’d become. You just kept showing up, kept giving, kept making yourself available because that’s what you learned love looked like. That’s what you learned safety looked like. You pour yourself out over and over and somehow it never occurs to you to wonder why you’re always the one who’s empty.

They walk up, press a button, and expect something to come out. Your time, your ear, your energy, your heart. And it comes, it always comes, because somewhere along the way you learned that giving was the price of being loved, and being safe, and even being seen at all.

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They don’t say thank you. They don’t ask how you are. They never ask how you are. They just take. And then they’re gone until they need something again.

And the crazy thing is you don’t notice it’s happening. Because it doesn’t look like taking - it looks like friendship. It looks like love. It looks like the only kind of relationship you’ve ever known.

It’s never about you.

Until one day you ask for something - something small and inconsequential, and you get crickets. Nothing.

And that silence hits different. Because suddenly you can see it, all of it, how long you’ve been standing there with your arms full and your tank empty, mistaking transaction for connection, wondering why you feel so hollowed out after every exchange.

That gut punch is not the end of something - it’s the beginning.

You are not a vending machine. You never were. And the moment you really know that, feel it, not just think it, everything starts to shift.

For more on attachment trauma:

I hope this meets you with love and understanding today. Please like, leave a comment, and subscribe for more HeartBalm Healing. As always, from my heart to yours!

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The Question Nobody Can Answer For You: Your Wholeness Already Has

Someone asked me recently about my faith.

I was stunned but not surprised. Another “f” word to me. Not because the question wasn’t sincere. It was. But the word itself lands like a trap. Faith = Religion = No thank you. It assumes a level of status - if you are part of that “f” club then you belong, are allowed, acceptable, okay to some. As if the person asking can then put you in the right box and know how to deal with you, relate to you, or speak to you. It assumes you believe answers live outside you because you are incomplete without an external source to guide you, pray to and follow its rules. It assumes you are okay outsourcing your beliefs to a proxy (usually male), an earthly conduit to a higher (he) source, and following the masses who also believe.

I found the question invasive and stated quickly that I am a certified spiritual counselor and a recovering Catholic - a way to block the question so the person wouldn’t try to sell me on joining her group or belief system.

But it stayed with me. And on a trail this week, things came together in a way that helped me understand what I actually wanted to say.

Nietzsche said it plainly: “Once you label me, you negate me.”

The moment someone wants to label you as someone of faith, as Christian, as atheist, a wife, a mother, a believer, a skeptic, gay/lesbian, single, married, rich, poor - something closes and boxes you in. The infinite gets folded into a container, and whatever doesn’t fit gets left on the floor. The label for some can feel like solid ground, like secure containment and belonging but it’s actually oblivion. It’s relegating you to one thing - a word, a label, a stereotype. It puts you in a small box and says that’s all you are - nothing more.

But that’s not all you are.

What I find in opposition to being labeled by another or even when I do it to myself is to open up more fully, almost in defiance of the attempt to be negated and boxed in, and remember who I am truly. That I am everything, and I am nothing. I am all of it. Not as a cop-out, not as spiritual bypassing - but as the most precise, uncontainable truth of what a human being actually is. The everythingness and the nothingness. Whole. Infinite. Already. No label or membership required.

That’s not a religion. It’s not even a belief, exactly. It’s more like a remembering.

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It's Not Your Fault: And Why You Can't Hear It

Joe Hudson, the coach and founder of Art of Accomplishment sat down to break down one of the most powerful therapy scenes on film, and one of my favorite movie scenes ever - the It’s not your fault scene from Good Will Hunting. He didn’t just describe what happens, he named the mechanics underneath it: the e…

Do Not Miss This Moment / On light, darkness, and why survivors were made for exactly this

Do not miss this moment. We are in times where the darkest, most heinous and secret spaces and places and activities of society are being revealed. The worst of the worst is being highlighted, and it is sickening, exhausting, barbaric, unconscionable, disgusting, v…

The Core Wound of an Unchosen Life
When you stop performing a life and start inhabiting one

There’s this subtle thing that so many of us do from time to time – we start focusing on ourselves, and almost immediately feel guilty for it. It happens so fast we barely notice it. We feel guilty for not helping more or doing more. Guilty for not saving, fixing, contributing, improving, or holding the world together with our bare hands.

For trauma survivors and especially for those who grew up with narcissists or inside narcissistic family systems – inward attention can trigger an existential moral crisis. Such as, if I turn toward myself for too long, I must be selfish. If I focus on my needs, my wants, my desires, something terrible will happen, someone will suffer, I will be punished, abandoned, or I will be deemed as bad, or I will be destroyed.

But beneath all the guilt and our greatest fears lies a deeper truth… that many of us were trained from the very beginning to live as regulators and responders, not choosers.

We were taught to constantly observe, ready, prepare for, and feed, nurture, parent, and emotionally manage others (even parent our parents) in our sphere long before we had language for who we were as individuals. We learned to orient ourselves toward other’s moods, needs, wants, and volatility outside ourselves. We learned to survive other people’s storms and weather patterns that came and went without warning, to anticipate chaos as a form of safety, and we learned that our job was to figure out, fix, and stabilize unstable systems.

This creates what I now understand as a core wound of an unchosen life. When I was first presented with this core wound, I didn’t know how to process it, hold it or understand it. What did it mean exactly? I had been living. I had been doing things; moving, working, surviving, hiking, going out with friends, in relationships… Hadn’t I been choosing to do these things?

What I began to unravel in this understanding was not just that I didn’t get what I wanted but that I did not and had not experienced myself as an agent of my own existence. My life felt like something happening to me, not something I was participating in. It felt brutal, chaotic, terrifying, and uncaring in its never-ending assaults and upheavals of my life.

I had for decades, thrown myself into spiritual study, energy healing, manifestation, quantum theory - you name it I’ve studied it. All in an attempt to try and understand life from nothingness to now in this body, in this reality, in this world. A hopeful place of learning and knowedge that I thought would bring me all that I wanted and desired, and if I was positive enough, repeated affirmations, and followed the wisdom of spiritually aligned others who’s lives looked normal and abundant. But none of it worked. Just an emptier bank account, an exhausted body and mind, and decades of crushing disappointments and experiences that left me feeling hopeless.

The abrasiveness of my life kept breaking down and wearing away any layers of protection I tried to build up. It kept removing and dissolving any shock absorbers I had put in place to protect myself and allow me to move through the world as a sovereign being. I was still at the mercy of others’ chaos and the external demands of a world I could not control. It was no different than the family system I was born into. I was still bracing for the storms of others that I had to survive. Still playing out the responder narrative in a world and life I did not choose (but thought I had.)

When you grow up this way, choosing yourself doesn’t feel natural. It feels dangerous. It feels wrong, and it feels like betrayal. So we keep going. We override. We push. We numb. We adapt. We survive.

Until, at some point, the body says: No.

We’re left with exhaustion, total depletion, overwhelm, adrenal fatigue, chronic stress, autoimmune issues, depression, anxiety, and a nervous system stuck permanently in the “ON” position. Denial, distraction, and all the old coping mechanisms stop working.

There is a point where the nervous system stops negotiating.

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I Was More at Risk Than I Knew:
The ███████ files, childhood vulnerability, and holding rage without becoming it

I’ve decided to remove his name here. The focus belongs on the children, the survivors, not the man.

Like much of the world, I am horrified by the ███████ files and all that is unraveling with them, nationally and globally. And what we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg. I try not to look at images or videos or even listen to podcasters discuss what they are seeing, but it is hard to avoid if you have screens of any kind.

What has surprised me most is how much my feelings of vulnerability and fear have intensified.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

_Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

As a child, preteen, and teenager who was exploited by my family, especially my narcissistic mother and father, and surrounded by brothers and extended family who looked the other way, I can now see far more clearly how many times I was put at risk and how often I was placed in the path of older men in sketchy circumstances where inappropriate comments, boundary violations, and predatory behavior were happening. I was groomed for years by a friend of my parents, sent on trips alone with him as a teenager, and eventually assaulted, only to have my parents choose him over me and ignore what happened, and dismiss my pain. Looking back, there are countless moments that feel like I was being set up to be used, abused, abducted, destroyed, or worse. I lived in close proximity to that kind of danger, even if the most extreme outcomes did not materialize. But even those realizations feel small compared to what is arising now.

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Comfort Dissociation and the Quiet Work of Remembering
When separation is fanned like embers, and how we find our way back

NOTE: Written form version only - thanks for bearing with me.

I picked up Mark Nepo’s “Book of Awakening” at a little used book store recently. It is setup in chapters by date and so I thought it would be fun to start reading them corresponding to the current date. So I started late in January, and when I got to January 30th, I was lost for words. It hit me profoundly. Something that spoke to the chaotic times we are in, and something that offers a light in the darkness.

We are living in a time where separation is not accidental but actively fanned like embers, stirred by those who benefit from blindness, comfort, and loyalty to the status quo. Comfort zones and staying blind to reality has become a kind of dissociation for many or a sound achievement and way to live. A way of not seeing what is right in front of us, of staying aligned with systems and power structures that depend on our numbness and compliance. That kind of conditioning keeps people loyal, distracted, and quietly afraid to look too closely at what harms, exploits, and divides.

For those of us living with CPTSD, this moment of chaos, unrest, and fear can feel all too familiar. Many survivors have had the scales removed from our eyes for years, not by choice but by necessity, forced to see reality early, clearly, and often alone. We have tried to name what we see, to point to harm, abuse, and systemic distortion, only to be dismissed, minimized, or labeled as a problem, as too much, too sensitive, too intense. What feels different now is that more people are beginning to see what could not be unseen forever. As the world shifts and long-held illusions loosen, there is a quiet recognition emerging that what survivors have carried and spoken has always been rooted in reality. This can be both validating and tender, offering a sense that something is changing, and that we no longer have to hold this knowing alone.

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The Edge of Darkness and Light: Survival Notes from the Inside

As many of you know I write poetry occasionally. It’s been hard to find those creative depths in the chaos and darkness of life these days. But this poetic prose came through during a raw point recently - an intuitive download, and something I want to share here with you. It feels like a truth that may speak to others who have also lived inside the long loop of trauma, awakening, collapse, and becoming again.

Because this is a personal journal entry, I’m keeping it private and available only to paid subscribers. It feels important to hold it in a quieter, more intimate container, one that honors the vulnerability and nervous system truth it carries.

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