In a moment of activation, we seek familiar ground, engaging ancient strategies originating in fight-flight reactivity. To deny and repress, on the one hand, or to discharge the uncomfortable energy, on the other. Colored by survival-level panic - and fueled by a sense of urgency - we spin into action.
But is there another way?
Before we descend into the tangled activity of self-abandonment, may we replace the urgency with slowness, the splitting with embodiment, and the demand for relief with that of curiosity and a radical self-compassion. In the alchemical place between the opposites, we find ourselves in a realm of not-knowing.
There is sacred data here, which is free to emerge as we enter into the vessel, and as we rest deeply in the core of the restless, pregnant, hot, aliveness of the emotional-somatic-imaginative world. No processing or shifting or transforming or healing... for now.
To just stay close. To listen. To feel. To sense.
To honor, validate, and bring breath to the feelings that are arising now to be known, to be illuminated, and to be remembered. Not errors, but allies; sometimes peaceful, sometimes wrathful, sometimes neutral.
To dare to allow in the truth that you are not a project to be fixed, but a mystery coming into form. That your vulnerability is not a mistake that must be remedied or transcended by way of process in time.
To attune to the constellations of the emotional world and tend to the longing of the inner family, as its members surge for holding in a sensitive, open nervous system.
To pause in a moment of activation, to slow way down, and breathe deeply. To ground into the muddy earth, with the water and sky and mountains as your witness. To practice intimacy with what is, but an intimacy without fusion, and to provide safe passage for the sacred return.
Photo of the color and the light up the way in Lapland, northern Finland
My new book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available
My next event will be a five-day retreat, The Place the Light Enters, with Jeff Foster, April 4-9 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO.
