The next time you find yourself looping in self-attack, disconnected with your body, and spinning in shame, blame, and complaint... slow down. Feel your feet on the earth. Breathe deeply from the lower belly. Return to your senses in the here and now.
Come out of the seductive, sticky, compelling storyline for just a moment and send your awareness into the center of the vulnerable, tender, raw life that is surging to be held. Go slowly, pushing yourself a bit, testing your window of tolerance but taking care not to fall into overwhelm.
Cut through the momentum of self-abandonment and descend into the core. Make the journey out self-aggression and into the slower circuitry of empathy, curiosity, kindness, and space.
Stay close. Be a friend to yourself. Provide sanctuary and safe passage for the visitor to be illuminated, held, and transformed, for in a moment of activation you need yourself more than ever. While the temptation is to turn from the shaky center, it is an act of love to step off the battlefield and tend to the fire. Your torso is aglow with sacred data required for the way ahead and is a portal of unimaginable creativity.
As you give yourself this gift of radical self-compassion, presence, and slow spacious awareness, you can ask: what is it that I need right now? What is most needing to be met and held? What have I abandoned in myself? What is being asked to be touched, right here and right now, with a storm of lovingkindness? Can I breathe into and with what has come, not as an enemy to transcend or overcome, but an ally of the depths?
As you slow down and turn in, seeds of empathy are planted in your nervous system, watered with new forms of self-care as compassion pathways are grooved and brought alive. Suddenly there is so much space. Breath where none was to be found. You are already held by something vast.
Through this aspiration to no longer abandon yourself, you come back into your power, grounded and embodied in the reality and perception of the warrior, a warrior of love, come here not only to heal yourself but as a vessel of presence and transmutation for all beings.
Photo by Nico Boersen
My latest book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available
The next book, The Unfolding Heart, will be published by Sounds True in early 2020, details to come
The next event is The Healing Shame Retreat: Spiritual Awakening and Transforming the Core Wound of Unworthiness, April 24-29, 2019 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado, with co-facilitator Jeff Foster
