It can take a lot of practice, mercy, and an unwavering love of the truth to explore the various strategies we employ to take ourselves out of feelings we don’t want to feel.
To encode new circuitry requires a real devotion – to soul, to the materials arising within the body-vessel, and to the alchemical experiment itself.
At times, it will seem as if we are inside the vessel, fused with the orphans of psyche and soma; at other times, as if we’re watching on the outside. At other times, as if self, soul-piece, and vessel are one.
For each of us, there are certain felt experiences that have come to be associated with unworkable anxiety, triggering a survival-level sort of panic. In response, pathways are put in place to get away from the underlying vulnerability and back to safe ground.
This was once a lifesaving response, an early attempt at self-compassion, and can be respected. In the dissociative split away from the tender, however, we cut ourselves off from the aliveness we so long for.
In a moment of emotional activation, when we notice we’re starting to fall down the rabbit hole, sensing the familiar claustrophobia, the voices are getting louder, we can use this as an invitation into the experiment. The doorway to the laboratory is opened.
In one moment of recognition, we can pause, slow down, feel our feet on the ground. Things are not always what they appear.
Slowly, one moment at a time, with the help of the breath and the Ally, we can return into our embodied vulnerability, find the one there who is longing for us, hold them, listen to them, and ask them to show us what it is they need.
In this, we cut into the habitual momentum and trance of self-abandonment. We begin to see that the intimacy and aliveness can only emerge in our willingness to touch the vulnerability and provide sanctuary for its embodied metabolization.
Vulnerability and aliveness are not-two, and co-emerge together, each a pathway into the other, interpenetrating and balancing each other in union.
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