This week's Awakin reading is by Mark Nepo titled 'Living In The Freshest Chamber Of The Heart': Our ability to find something to love, and to love again for the first time depends greatly on how we resolve and integrate where we've been before. A great model for us exists in the chambered nautilus, an exquisite shell creature that lives along the ocean floor. The nautilus is a deep-sea form of life that inches like a soft man in a hard shell finding his prayers along the bottom. Over time it builds a spiral shell, but always lives in the newest chamber. The other chambers, they say, contain a gas or liquid that helps the nautilus control its buoyancy. Even here, a mute lesson in how to use the past: live in the most recent chamber and use the others to stay afloat. Can we, in this way, build strong chambers for our traumas: not living there, but breaking our past down till it is fluid enough to lose ... [Read more]