(I found this among my drafts from nearly 4 years ago…it was written in September of 2018….and it is the post I was just about to write today)
Still there.
But I want to call it something else now. Because in that moment, it was indeed that feeling after a massage, or after a walk in the rain with your love, or the feeling of fullness after a lovingly made meal with friends.
As time goes on though, I am recognizing it as something more. Something more intrinsic to life. Like good fertilizer. Like breath you don’t have to think about. Like the beating heart that goes on and on each and every day.
But how on earth did I get here? How can you get here?
Time + Action
It is as simple as those two components. How much time or what type of action, I do not know. I can point to fixed points in my life, and I can also see that from the moment I first took breath I was clearing, healing, becoming. At each rising I am both Being and Becoming (as my spiritual director reminds me). It doesn’t stop and there is no rest.
Unless we choose to stop and rest. If you choose this, please do so with a witness, a guide a friend because we risk getting stuck right there. Have an agreement with someone that you’re just going to take a break for a month, a week, a year and then get back to it. Some individuals have stories that are thick and mired and the work is stinkin’ hard. So, go to the beach and soak in that sun then get back to it.
I have a client who takes action as though he can clear all the karmic blocks and restrictions he has accumulated on his soul’s journey. He’d like to do so in this lifetime because he has tasted a flow, the eudaimonian flow of nirvana/heaven to know what comes with release of old wounds and stories. So why not.
i have a client who weeps at the thought that there are multiple lives our souls live because this life has been so hard she doesn’t want to contemplate coming back around for some god-awful reason. So she clears out of desperation to make sense of this life with no hope but to rest.
Both reflect their paths for this life. There is beauty in both. It is my responsibility to hold space for the hopeless client who just wants to get through….so let’s get through and then let’s get through and then let’s get through…..until we start seeing we are in a place of craft and design instead of repair and reconstruction. Like a yard at an abandoned house, where you have to go in with an industrial mower just to see what is what. We cut that grass down till it looks like a hay field. We see where there had been flower gardens or tree stumps. Childrens toys are uncovered alongside wasted cig butts and beer cans. So we clean up those, too. As we do so, we create stories of what life had been like in this home at some point. We look at the overgrown weed beds and decide what to recover because look, there is a hydrangea bush and a forgotten rose bush, or what we just mow down with the next pass, with the plan to seed it all back to grass. Slowly, this abandoned, gnarly, lawn horror reaches a place of the blank canvas.
And the dreaming begins. What if we take down that old tree and plant a Japanese Maple? What if we bring in some mulch around the old steps to create a clean welcome? What if we just go ahead and bring in a dumpster and throw away the refuse and start over?
This is us on our way to bliss. It is the flow of work. It is the realization that we clear to find ourselves, our truest selves, and we dream ourselves back into being.
I’ve employed prayer, guilt, denial (oh, yes, what a big one), protection of the perpetrators of my wounds, forgiveness before I was ready. These all served a place. Mostly just to get started. Loosening of the jar lid. I moved on to spiritual direction where I could speak out loud experiences known only within, taking the sting of them away after a time, vocalizing fear and anger and emotions that contort the face into ugliness in the reliving of ugly things experienced.
At some point, there were monthly massages. for 15 years I received a monthly massage. No indulgence. I believe these served to keep loosening and accepting a body and story I had come to numb out.
At some point, there was a shamanic journey to my lower world, stretching of yoga, soul work, mapacho, and continued methods to turning numb into feelings into release.
And that brings us back to bliss.
This bliss is not a high. It is not a temporary thing (unless I choose that path). It is a new starting point. I am so aware these days of how close bliss is. You won’t see a silly smile on my face to indicate this. What I’m experiencing is internal. And it looks like the following things:
I am not creating story (OMG this is so HUGE)
curiosity leads
past trauma has been released like Fall leaves (yep, I don’t understand it either)
forgiveness and love are like rivers of living water within me
a new vantage point has been provided so that I can see from above and within
explosion of new gifts of self and being
Being and Becoming is the truth and it is a powerful truth