I'm really glad to be heading to North Carolina this afternoon. Dancing Lodge. And NVC. Two of my favorite things! Both are practices that shake me down out of my head and lead me to fully inhabit my body, and to surrender to my heart. I feel like the timing couldn't be more perfect. Now, as high winds blow ferociously outside my house, and the snow is beginning to fall, I am hoping that travel conditions don't become too difficult.
In the last week, I have felt tremendous shifts of energy and presence within my body. I have felt sweet aliveness flowing into parts of myself that haven't felt alive in a long, long time. I have felt blocks in my energy blown open, sliding away as the heavy, icy meltage of the winter. I feel a warm, radiant glow in my belly, and a powerful fire in my heart. It has been a long time since this bodily expression of love has filled me, and I am grateful. I recognize how this used to be a normal state of things, normal before all the challenges of my life came to push me into crisis, to confronting things within me that needed facing. And now that this feeling has returned, part of me wants to hold on to it for all it's worth. But I realize that what is more important than the feeling itself is the practice that connects to it. Can I breathe into my own resistance even when my heart is breaking? Can I stay connected to my heart in the midst of fear, or anger? Can I breathe my body and heart into openness even when it seems too scary, when it doesn't feel safe? I'm being given those opportunities now, as well.
What would it be like to live this open, this on fire, without needing life to show up in a particular way? To root myself in the practice of truly opening as LOVE in the midst of pain, rejection, sorrow, whatever? It sounds impossible. What would it be like to open this deep in the midst of my own mind's worst spinning, too? Sounds even more impossible. Yet, that's what I am feeling called to do. As I awoke today, my body was filled with tightness, fear, loneliness. My body wanted to close, to shut down, to just go about life today as a shell of being, not as a radiant heart of being. But as I was laying there in bed, awake, I rode the breath. I took the breath into my belly where the tightness was holding. I pushed gently into the resistance. I took the breath into my heart, where fear was holding, and pushed gently into it. Today these things feel pretty strong - the fear and the tightness and the resistance. Can I choose to accept where I am in these things, while also knowing that they are merely clouds blocking the sun that burns brightly in the center of me? Today, the answer is yes.
The way that energy is moving through me right now is unprecedented in my life. I have had a number of powerful energetic shifts, some ecstatic, some scary. This is more ecstatic, for sure, but also fills me with fear. I get the feeling that life as I used to know it is never going to return, and I'm mostly okay with that. But I also feel that the barriers that have kept me in my own separate existence are really being broken down. I am no longer strong enough that my heart can shut down effectively. I am alive in the web of life - I am affected by living in this world - that I can no longer resist. My heart will fill up with love, and it will shatter. Sometimes even within the same moment.
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