No matter how things are going in your life, you can start right where you are. With mercy, grace, and a new sort of self-care.
The restlessness, the shakiness, the raw shattering, the grief; all valid responses to a sensitive, tender nervous system, in a world where it’s not always easy to have our center of gravity within a felt sense of safety.
We cannot tend to a future moment; it’s just not close enough, tactile enough, intimate enough. But we can surround and contain the achy life as it surges in a moment of here and now.
For just one second, shift your awareness out of the claustrophobia and spinning of conditioned thinking and into the soles of your feet as they make contact with the earth. Root there, into the mud and womb.
It’s not so safe in those old patterns of thinking – enactments of intergenerational trauma and trance. Allow your attention to come up out of the earth and infuse your belly, your heart, and your throat, with compassion, holding, and breath. Holy data.
Renew your vow: I will not turn from myself and abandon my embodied vulnerability. No, not this time. I will no longer pathologize my emotional experience, the somatic narrative, the story of my nervous system.
The lion’s roar: Grief is not pathology. Heartbreak is not pathology. Sensitivity is not pathology. Not pathology, but path.
Two seconds. Then rest. Then three. More rest. As we send breath into the broken shards, into the lost pieces of soul, a new groove is laid down, new circuity is encoded. As we turn the light around, a new pathway appears.
Ask the earth to hold you, to share her soothing water, shade, and safe haven, and stay near as you open.
Find a friend, therapist, lover, ocean, moon, star, or holy roaring lion to bear witness as you turn into the raw alive somatic world.
The seen and unseen ones are always here to help us, to reveal the way home. To illuminate the pathways of darkness and of light, each containing a particle of the mystery, a strand of love seeking you as a tender vessel through which it can come alive here.
