Take a few slow, deep breaths, allowing your awareness to drop out of the field of thinking and into the aliveness of your body. Down into your heart and then into your belly: opening, sensing, listening.
Allow your energy to continue downward, toward the ground, settling at your feet… just rest here for a few moments, held by the earth.
Is there a particular feeling that you’ll do just about anything to not feel? Something too raw, tender, or shaky to touch and be touched by?
How have you set up your life so as to never feel this feeling?
Don’t think your way to an “answer” but just open and listen; receive a response from deep within.
It requires a lot of energy to stay out of our embodied vulnerability. This is one reason so many of us feel tired at times; not only our physical bodies, but a deep, soul-level exhaustion.
What is it that you’ve turned from over this last year?
And what would it be like for you to provide a temple or sanctuary for these parts of you to return home?
Knowing that the intimacy, connection, and aliveness we long for will never be found in the experience of partiality, but only in a radical, embodied participation in the full spectrum.
When the visitor appears, it just might be the ally in disguise, coming not to harm or take you down, but as a harbinger of integration, a forerunner of wholeness. As a guide into the depths.
The guide, or the Friend, is not always sweet and flowy and familiar, but at times challenging, fierce, and “other” to what we already know. While not easy to receive and provide safe passage for this one, the Friend arrives with a fragrance of love.
But the nature of this love is only revealed within the vessel of your own body, in that holy alchemical laboratory that is woven together by the scintilla of light, which make up the cells of your very own heart.
Who is the visitor? Is there a piece of soul or a shard of unlived life that is reaching out? And how will you tend to them?
Photo by Franz Bachinger
My previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You
My online community - Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times
Listen to two recent podcasts where I was interviewed:
