As young children, we did not have the capacity to discern
between feeling bad and being bad. In the little one, I feel bad equals I am bad. Observe how this leftover association continues to color the
landscape. When you feel sad, depressed, anxious, or ill, what meaning is
automatically associated with these experiences? What judgments, shaming, or
interpretations do you unconsciously add onto the raw embodied experience?
Pull back slightly and enter into relationship with the
feelings. Provide a home in which they can unfold, dance, and communicate
essence. Separate a bit, but not so much that you disembody. Stay close, but
don’t lose perspective. There is so much space around your experience. Touch
the space, the emotion, and the sensations all at once. Practice intimacy while
not fusing. This is a holy art that you can learn.
You are the warm, open meadow of awareness in which all
feelings come into being, dance for a bit, only to dissolve back into the vast
ground from which they came. Find the sacred middle and rest there, between the
ancient pathways of denial and fusion. It is in this crucible in which the
great process of metabolization by love will unfold.
Listen carefully for the invitation – early in the morning,
late at night, as you wander through the day, as you take the risk of
heartbreak and mingle your awareness with a sunrise or with the moon in her
fullness. Come closer. Open into. Breathe with.
The new way is alive and rippling. The pathways are
revealing flexibility and their longing to be reorganized. Soothe the fire with
presence and healing compassion. Renew your vow to no longer abandon what is
moving within, to no longer pathologize your sensitivity, vulnerability, and
the full-spectrum nature of what you are.
There is guidance emerging, taking whatever form it must to
reach you: an old feeling, a charged emotion, an eruption of somatic aliveness.
What you are is a field of wisdom, though it is a wisdom not perceivable by
ordinary means. Open into what is appearing now and behold the creativity that
you are. Hold it within your heart and provide illumined passage for the
revelation.
Photo by Evgeniia Litovchenko
New book – The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – to be released in April
The Way of Rest summer retreat – registration open now
