Feel your feet on the earth. Breathe deeply from your lower belly. Open your senses.
Come out of the seductive, sticky storyline which has started to loop and is no longer safe, subtle, or nuanced enough to contain the majesty of what you are.
With the miracle of here and now awareness, call off the war. Underneath the circulating heat, spin, and claustrophobia is a tender soft core that is longing for just one moment of your curiosity, warmth, and compassion.
Stay close. Be a friend to yourself. With the fire of your own presence, break the ancient trance of self-abandonment. Turn your body into a temple where a transmutation may occur. While the habitual groove is out of the shaky center, just this once step off the battlefield and turn home.
Recognize that you have been activated and flood that moment with slowness, mercy, and tend to the experiment. A holy invitation. 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? 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 by Darius Bashar
My new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - is now available for pre-order at Amazon and will be published by Sounds True in November. Learn more about the book (including a full list of online retailers) and early editorial reviews and endorsements here.
My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - is available at Amazon.
We've decided to leave our monthly online community, Befriending Yourself, open for enrollment during these uncertain and challenging times. For more information, please visit the course page here.
