The next time you find yourself activated and hooked –
shaming, spinning, and blaming another for an eruption within – slow down, and
give yourself the gift of pause. Take one moment and descend with the breath
underneath the compelling storyline, and into the center of the fire. Stay
close. For you need yourself now more than ever.
It is an outrageous act to drop into the core of your body,
out of the spinning narrative, and into the somatic guidance that is coursing
within you. It is fresh, alive, and unprecedented there, with your torso
aglow with sacred data.
Once you have provided a home for the aliveness to
illuminate, you can then return to what happened, and engage it from a more
grounded place in the slowness of the here and now. Until the feelings are held
and integrated, however, you will be caught in the complexes and the
unconscious lenses through which you have come to organize your experience, and
will inevitably re-enact an early environment of misattunement and empathic
failure.
It was intelligent and made sense to dissociate at an
earlier time, but you are being called to something new: to make new meaning,
to work through the old circuity, and to update it with revelation. To seed the
pathways with empathy, with holding, and with all the wisdom you have gathered
until now.
As you slow down and re-orient, you can then ask what it is
that you truly need right now. What are you being asked to provide for
yourself? What have you abandoned or lost touch with that is now surging to be
held and re-integrated? The invitation is to care for yourself in a new way, to
encode new circuitry and to rewire old pathways, planting new seeds which will
bear the fruit of embodiment, and will reveal an inner power.
With your heart open, make requests of your lovers, your
family, and your fellow journeyers, knowing that they will sometimes be able to
meet you, to see you as you are, and provide what you are asking for. When they
do, you can rejoice in this, and give thanks. And when they do not, you can
rejoice in that and give thanks as well, for the clear reflection of the
mystery of the relational field, and for the opportunity to take care of
yourself in a new way. For this is a profound gift that they have to offer,
though it is one that is non-conventional in nature.
Through this holy aspiration of self-care, you come back
into your vulnerability – into the tender and into the raw, for there is
tremendous energy, power, and creativity there. You are then able to step fully
into the reality of a warrior of love, come here not only to heal yourself but
to be a vessel of presence and transmutation for all beings.
Art by Eli Vokounova
The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now
New book – The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – to be released in April
