The next time you find yourself looping in repetitive thinking, spiraling within shame circuits, and drowning in a cascading waterfall of overwhelm, slow down and cut into the momentum with the warmth of your own awareness.
Slow the situation down. Feel your feet on the earth. Breathe deeply from the lower belly. Things are not always as they seem.
Come out of the seductive, sticky storyline and shift your center of gravity into the center of the raw life that is surging to be held. One microsecond at a time. Underneath the circulating heat, spin, and claustrophobia is a tender soft core that is longing for just one moment of you exactly as you are.
Stay close. Be a friend to yourself. Provide sanctuary and safe passage for the visitor to be illuminated and held. While the habitual groove is out of the shaky center, just this once step off the battlefield and turn home. Your body is aglow with sacred data illuminating the way ahead.
Slow, curious, warm. Open to a new way as you ask: What is it that I need right now? What have I abandoned in myself? What is being asked to be tended to, 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? Why have you come, I am listening, I will not forsake you.
In this, seeds of empathy are planted in your nervous system and scattered within the cells of your heart, watered and soothed 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 credit: the winter holding field in Lapland c/o adege/ Andreas, Gelterkinden/ Schweiz
My most recent book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available
The next book, A Healing Space: Befriending Yourself in Difficult Times, 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
