H E A L I N G ▫ A R T S
Dear beloved one,
I am writing with a note to you, daughter or son of a mother.
If the mother experience you’ve had in this life has been a perfect one, this letter is not for you.
This letter is for those with a mother wound. A mother loss, mother pain. Mother scars.
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My friends tell me that I ask great questions. It’s no wonder that I became someone who asks questions as a healing practice.
The truth is I’m just endlessly curious. I love learning about people, about life, and especially about spiritual things. That’s probably why I read so much.
Recently, it occurred to me that I could intentionally use curiosity as an approach to problems and challenges.
So much of life is mystery, isn’t it? How do you face the mystery of life? The issues, questions, challenges? I don’t know about you, but the mysterious makes me curious, and curiosity is at least a much more interesting approach to the mystery of life than fear.
Curiosity used in this way might look like:
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,
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Have you ever found yourself dwelling on something negative in your life, unable to stop thinking about it, going over and over it like a tape is playing in your head? You might tell yourself that this constant worrying is actually beneficial; you might see it as you working on finding a solution to your problem or concern. Maybe the constant replay is of a negative memory, or a troubling thought.
This repetitive and negative dwelling is called rumination, and it happens in different degrees and intensities. It’s also a common feature of depression and anxiety.
Rumination is a mental loop, a dead-end, sometimes a continued rehearsing of hopelessness and despair. To ruminate is to get lost in the story, lost in the mind, lost in the negativity bias of the brain, lost in the past or the future. Sometimes, both.
The only way out is to first realize that you’re lost in the sauce, and then to let go of the mental hold. Let your end of the rope go, surrender the story, stop the incessantly replaying tape. Allow yourself release from that prison.
It might feel scary at first, but if you can begin to catch yourself when you’re ruminating and make the decision to let go of the story or offer yourself a healthy distraction (an activity that helps you move out of your head and into the present moment)-–
an inner silence eventually comes.
If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice when it settles on you, and you’ll notice what comes next:
the body speaks.
Loud and clear and in full feeling.
You’ll realize that it had been speaking all along but you couldn’t hear it because you were lost to yourself; you had abandoned it for the story, the mental calculations, the holding on.
It was waiting for you, in the present moment. As soon as you let go of the stories, you experience the body there holding your truth.
These truths sit in the physical form as pure feeling that can be experienced without the story, feelings that will begin to surface when you let go of the rumination. Those embodied feelings and sensations tell you exactly what you need to do about those issues you were trying to figure out in your head. They are very clear and unmistakable. They might take the shape of longing, sadness, disappointment, heartache, pain. These are the real feelings that the mental acrobatics was likely keeping you from truly experiencing.
The voice of whatever it is will speak. Your job is to honor and hold it. Create space for it as its wise and loving observer. Your job is to do your best not to run away, not to cloak it away in shame. Your only task is to give it some air, hold it up to the light. Get curious about it. Tell it, “I’m here for you, I see you. I’m listening.” Blanket it in all the compassion you can muster. It will give you its wisdom in return.
The body is in the present moment. That is where the solace and the answers (even the answer of “no answer”!) are. When you connect with the body, in this moment, it can help point you toward your way home.
The post above is for informational purposes; it is not meant to replace medical care, nor is it intended to prevent, treat, or cure any disease. Please consult with a qualified medical professional regarding your medical or psychological care.
Lately I’ve been thinking about emergence and transition, about what it’s like to move out of periods of darkness or change and come into new ways of being, living, and even loving. I’ve been thinking about the grief involved in that, about how necessary grief is as a process, how it eventually leaves a clearing…and about how often we experience a grief process but don’t recognize it as that.
The process is different when we’re able to call it what it is. Grief likes to be welcomed into the room, given a proper seat.
Continue ReadingThe body is our home for life. We live in it every moment yet most of us live in a disembodied state, rarely thinking about our body unless something is going wrong, unless we’re experiencing some kind of pain or physical dysfunction. And, maybe also when we’re dressing it, or thinking about how we’d like to change it.
But when you live with chronic illness or pain, it’s as if the body turns up the volume and regardless of whether you want to or not, you’re forced to live in a heightened awareness of the body you live in. You’re forced to live in direct relationship with it, and this relationship can be just as complicated as any other—you might experience anger, frustration, power struggles, days or moments when things are less difficult, and days when you feel more accepting towards its intricacies and idiosyncrasies. You might struggle with feeling like the communication is “off” between you and your body, like you can’t understand it and like it can’t hear you when you tell it you need a break from the pain or want to understand what’s going on with it.
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