Waves
the descent before the rise
This week was like a constant emotional flood. I was submerged in the vast ocean of sensation and emotion. Somatic work isn’t the quick fix, qigong isn’t the quick fix, nourishing my cells isn’t the quick fix, there is no quick fix.The weight of the world felt like it was settling right into my bones and when i’m not careful, a bitch drowns in it.
But the paradox is that sometimes I don’t want to let it go. There is this strange pull to keep it, twirl it around, hold onto it, shake it off, bring it back, to the misery, I meant mystery but autocorrect came with that one, and the beauty of it all because at times it makes me feel connected.
Last friday was the beginning of the dance. I was walking my happy ass to student clinic one moment and in a deep panic the next. The cold air felt like it was sucking me dry as if I couldn’t recall how to breath, as if this unconscious motion that has been happening since I came screaming out the womb in this earthly plane just was forgotten. I was shaken up after that. I received a treatment by a fellow student who completely rocked my world. Rocked it so much that after the treatment, I was floating on a bed of anxiety for hours. The treatment was like pulling at two people who are stubborn af in their opinions hoping they would somehow meet in the middle. Enter DU-20 which is to raise yang and lift the qi and KD-1 which is to ground you. I felt the opposite of grounded. I felt like the gates of all of the emotions I felt earlier during my panic walk came rushing back in while I was just trying to pick up the pieces screaming, “I just want peace!” Yet here I was with a nervous system busy hosting an entire emotional orchestra.
I lost my crystal that day that I have kept in my pocket for years.
That wrecking lasted for days.
Doing simple tasks felt earth shattering.
I was feeling everything so much that there was this hopeless despair of an aching broken heart that needed to be untrapped from the grip I was holding on to so tight while just trying to keep it together.
It made me realize the lack that I have been holding on to. The lack of confidence in my body for staying rooted and feeling safe from different events that have happened throughout my life. The lack of love I was giving myself to be in a state of deep replenishment versus deep deficiency. The lack of love I was holding on to because it was more comfortable not being in receiving mode or to be fully seen in my essence and keep it to myself while entertaining what has been outgrown.
Back to the hopeless despair of our aching. This is the same energy, the same reservoir, that fuels our service.
It is in this deep, unshakable sorrow while being frazzled at the post office under the fluorescent lighting (where this aha moment came to me) where the seeds of compassion grow. The movements in this reservoir may crash differently, sometimes more potent and sometimes more subtle to the energetic body, but they rise from the same depth, from the same boundless place within. I realized that what breaks us also mends the world. What pulls us under is what we use to rise, to stretch our hands into the dark and offer what we have, however small or large.
This is integration. This is how we transform. This is how we serve.
Integration sounds cute as hell but it’s where we get bloody. The more conscious I am of myself, the more I realize there is always integration to be done. For years, I was so comfortable in healing, healing, healing, that my soul was like bitch you need to integrate while my mind was keeping me caged in.
I realized I am actually ALLOWED to give into hopelessness. Into despair. But I made a vow to myself from these places that I travel to quite often. The vow is that I will create from this place-the place that connects me to the very depths of humanity.
Being alone is where I have found both an immense amount of safety and a deep, gnawing unsatisfaction. I’ve realized its because I am the collective. Just like you. We are the ocean. The isolation has mirrored the vastness of the sea- endless yet aching for connection. The insecurities, that whole “being seen” thing, is what reminds me of my humanity, of that wholeness I once entered this world with, that was long gone and started to come back again.
And again.
And again.
In the vulnerability of showing up, ungrounded as ever, frazzled to the core, is when I remember what all mystics have wrote and sung about:
we are all here to love, imperfect, in our longing.
This week was that reminder that is in the reclamation of ritual that we reconnect with this truth. Despite everything that we endure, everything that we have struggled with, despite all the things that have cracked us wide open, we are still mf here. Still longing. Still reaching to be touched by the wholeness of life.
We are here, not just to survive this journey but to live it. To feel, to create, to be seen, and to be.
Every vibration, every whisper of the universe, every heartbeat of the collective. I think part of the work in life is to learn how to relate to the “down.” To rest. To receive. To not fucking knowing and building trust anyway because nothing grows at the mountain tops. To make room in our nervous system for this receiving. This isn’t some shallow new age concept, it’s something I have lived multiple times and still do. It’s a forever thing. This work is for the mystics, those of us here for the love of it but also for the love of how it transforms our lives in ways we could never predict.
We are here to transmute suffering- our own, the world’s- into service. We leave death and return, remembering why we are here. We indulge in this great turning of death into rebirth again, and again, and again, in one lifetime. Some of us live it every month. Some of us live it every week. Some of us live it during our Saturn returns, which we have at least two, maybe three, in a lifetime.
This past week I was swimming in my own and the collective suffering, trying to find the glimmers that support me and all of those I came here to share my life with.
Today, I received a crystal from a classmate, infused with reiki.
Today, the ocean inside felt more still.
Today, I got to start again.
xoxo