I am thankful for the space.
For the vastly shifting light and colour in the same view, that reminds me how what we bring to the situation impacts what we see and experience so much. How we have choice in how we perceive and what we see and experience. How if I change the amount of light I can bring, I see something completely different.
I am grateful.
Is it time to leave?
Yes.
To leave what?
All the fears,
The control,
The need to know,
The need to plan.
It’s time to leave all the distrust you have learned of Me and to come back Home to Center.
To the place you Know Me.
To where it’s Still.
To where you do not doubt or need to change.
To where you are free.
It’s time to leave behind the horror you have learned.
It’s time to leave behind the disillusionment.
It’s time to claim the magic.
The hope.
The joy.
The love.
It’s time to reclaim Me.
It’s time to reclaim you.
I am here.
I am here.
I Am Here.
Resiliency can be defined as the capacity to prepare for, recover from and adapt in the face of stress, challenge and adversity. We are said to have four domains of resiliency: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
What does that mean and how can it help us?!
Physical resiliency helps us in our day to day lives. No matter what state of fitness/health our body is in, there are things we can do to improve our resiliency. Practices such as mindfulness, simple breathing practices and gentle movement practices have all been shown to help increase the physical self’s resiliency to stressors. This also helps us if sudden things happen like a fall or an accident. Having a level of resiliency helps the body to bounce back – in fact fairly literally in some circumstances! For example myofascial rebounding helps improve and entrain elastic recoil into the tissues so the body quite literally gets bouncier!
Yoga is a practice we can use to help bolster mental resiliency – or at the least to get curious about it. We often meet challenges in a yoga practice on the mental plane. Poses can be hard. Pain can be experienced. We may not be able to move in the way we would want to. We may judge ourselves against other bodies. We may meet parts of ourselves on a yoga mat we don’t like. If we can bring some of the yogic principles such as ahimsa (non violence) into our practice on the mental plane, we will help grow and deepen our mental resiliency. We can use our practice as a place to learn self love, self compassion and self acceptance, which we can then take out into the world and (hopefully) show towards others.
Emotional resiliency can be very tough in the modern world. We are taught emotional denial and even emotional tolerance – “keep calm and carry on” – but emotional resiliency is somewhat different. It is about leaning INTO the emotions and feeling them in a safe way, rather than avoiding them or even trying to change them. It’s the principle of going through to get beyond rather than trying to find a way around (whenever I write about that I always think of that children’s song about the bear hunt “can’t go over it, can’t go under it have to go through it..”). When we can nurture safety, we are able to begin to explore emotions knowing they cannot hurt us. We can use practices such as bitesizing, or have a facilitator with us to walk into the things that feel big and scary. Each time we do this and come through and beyond, we grow our resiliency. We come back to centre quicker and more easily.
Spiritual resiliency is the idea of being held by and connected to something bigger than ourselves. It is the basis, the aim and the centre of all resiliency. The greatest source of resiliency is always going to be that relationship with some form of a Higher Power. Yoga practice can help strengthen and grow that connection with something bigger than us. As we move our bodies, we feel the lifeforce energy. As we come into stillness we get to sit with God (whatever God is) with no airs and graces; just us and that Presence. We get to feel that sense of being held. We get to move WITH Spirit. We get to know that God flows in our veins and through our fascial networks and in our mitochondria and to make our practice recognising God – Love – running in and with and through everything. So much of all (w)hol(e)istic paths is about getting into that state where we can connect. Finding whatever way works for each person, for each body, for each spirit. By nurturing and growing the relationship with Spirit, our resiliency flourishes. We are always at our most resilient when our relationship with Spirit is at the centre.
In this fast paced, abrupt, surprising world, taking even a few minutes to focus on resiliency can help us to feel more grounded, more capable and less alone.
How do you connect with the realms of resiliency within yourself?
What is actually released in Myofascial Release? There is a lot of discussion around this kind of thing… For me, I am not sure the technicalities of it particularly matter. What does, is how people feel; THEIR experience of what changes or moves or shifts or releases or shows up. So what does that mean?
Well, people can experience this idea of release in many different ways during (and often after) a myofascial release session.
Sometimes it is a very visceral sensation of tension reducing and a sense of elongation or relaxation being felt in the tissues of the body… As if the tissues are melting like butter beneath the hands of the therapist, or prying themselves apart like a long, slow yawn. Sometimes there can be pain as the body releases the sensations it has held onto – sometimes people call this “good pain”. Other times it feels delightful. There is no right or wrong.
Sometimes it’s emotional and there may be different feelings experienced, perhaps even tears as they body lets go of stuff it no longer needs. This can be joy or anger or sadness or laughter. We have such a vast range or emotions that sometimes we don’t know the words for them or have any need to name them or analyse them. Sometimes they just move through as we work with the tissues and we don’t really know what’s changed – just that something has.
Sometimes it can be loud.. Some people find the energy that moves through them during a myofascial release session has a sound to it and they need to let it out. This may be as a guttural kind of noise, or a scream or a shout, or toning, or whatever sound the body feels it needs to make. This can sometimes be scary for the person receiving the treatment (and sometimes for people walking by the treatment room outside!) but it is very natural and very cathartic. Especially in our English culture, we are taught to be very quiet and non-expressive, so to have the opportunity and permission to take up space and make noise and to just let it out can be amazingly healing. Sometimes things can almost feel like they explode out and there isn’t even a choice.
Other times it is so silent and so subtle, both recipient and therapist can almost be left wondering if anything released at all, and yet at the same time, they both know something has shifted, something has rearranged, whatever needed to happen has happened.
Sometimes what’s released is expectations.
Sometimes it’s the idea of what treatment should look like.
Sometimes it’s the idea of how we are meant to show up in life.
Sometimes it’s the idea that we have to do or know or be anything.
Sometimes it’s the tiredness and the mask that is released.
Sometimes (I would hope most/all of the time) the treatment room is the place where you can release the façade you may feel you need in the everyday world, and it is the place where it is safe to just be however you are.
Perhaps it is energy that is released.
Perhaps it is belief systems.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
What does, is that the treatment room is a safe space to show up as and how you are, and to be received with love and grace. In that space you are the most important person. You are the one who is listened to. You are the one who is held.
There are no expectations of you.
You do not need to do or be anything.
In this space, you are welcome, you are safe, and you are seen.
I had to get a new number plate fitted on my car today. The previous one had disappeared without me noticing, likely taken by a slightly feisty river I drove through. I took the car to the shop and the guy very carefully went to screw the new plate on and it promptly fell straight off. When we looked, we saw the holes had been warped and would no longer accept the same kind of connection and so he had to adhere it rather than use screws. And it got me thinking about connection and underlying structure.
See, we often assume the old ways we have used are going to work. We don’t even consider that they are not going to. They worked before, why wouldn’t they work now? What we forget is if we are on a path of growth and exploration, sometimes there have been changes deeper down, and so when we go and try the old ways, they don’t work anymore, because the underlying structure has changed and it won’t accept the old way. And maybe we keep trying anyway, getting angry that it won’t work anymore, frustrated, sad… We judge ourselves and we hate on ourselves and we don’t understand and we forget to look deeper, preoccupied with the not-working and not wanting to look deeper at the why, at the possible lesson, at the opportunity to try new ways. And yet there is no fault here, it’s just that things have happened, life has occurred and so we have to find new ways. It’s not my cars fault I have driven it hard for years and warped the plastic, I don’t judge it for that. I thank it for keeping me safe for so long, allowing me to get place to place, enduring ford crossings and endless bumpy back lanes and motorways and the rush and bustle and unpredictability of the roads. And so why, when it comes to ourselves, do we not always extend the same generosity?
Life shapes us, it changes us, it warps and moulds and affects our very structure. Science is continually proving this… DNA can be changed… Fascia can be released… We are constantly being reformed over and over and over. And so sometimes, when we try to apply the old ways we used to use, they don’t work anymore, and then we have a choice. Either we get mad and try to force it and make it happen, and then get even angrier when it falls apart in front of us, or we find a new way, a different way, not better or worse, just different. We accept that we are fluid beings and our structure changes and life forms and reforms us over and over. We find new ways to connect. We meet ourselves where and how we are at. And then we carry on. And it’s ok.
My car still drives. It will still take me places. It has a shiny new number plate held on by super sticky adhesive patches. There was a different way to connect and for it to be. Not better or worse, just different.
And so it is with us, new ways become necessary, not better or worse, just different. We adjust. We flow. We change. We carry on. We go to new places and have new experiences and we remember the old because maybe we bear the scars and the reminders. The warped holes beneath my new number plate will always be there, but it’s just a reminder that we used to do it differently, and now we are doing it differently again.
If we move WITH our circumstances, WITH our lives, WITH our structure and our deeper changes, if we meet ourselves how we are now, not how we used to be, then we adapt, we embrace the new, and maybe the new is better, maybe we don’t like it so much, but there is a peace to be found in the acceptance. And so life continues. Cars break, things get warped, we keep on exploring anyway….
I find people hard.
Especially lots of them. In one place.
There is an expectation that we should all be good at that.
Me.. I am not good at that.
I get awkward and overwhelmed and embarrassed and forget how to speak and I sound defensive (or worse aggressive) even when asked supposedly simple things like my name and I…
I find people hard.
I was at a place earlier where the expectation was that I should laugh a lot. At first I did laugh, because there were funny things happening and people trying to make me laugh, and so I laughed.
Because it was funny.
But then it somehow got harder to laugh.. Not because it got less funny, but because it felt less genuine.
I was laughing because someone was trying really hard to make me do so and even though they couldn’t see me, I didn’t want to disappoint them and somehow it became harder.
It did not quite feel right.
And then.. Well then I became aware that everyone around me was still laughing in all the places they were meant to, and that they did not seem to think this was weird, and they didn’t seem to have kind of lost the reality of it. They still seemed to be having fun.
Me.. I found I laughed less and less.
Because it felt forced. It felt expected. And sometimes I did laugh because it was really funny and that was genuine. But other times I laughed with nothing behind it.. Just because I knew I was meant to laugh at that point in time.
I could feel my heart sinking because once again, I began to feel different and weird and out of place, and then I just wanted to leave. I wanted to run back to my solitude and the wind and the sky and the spaces between, and not be in a place where hundreds of people were all laughing and I was not, but felt I should be, because that’s what you do right?
And there was a horse in the road tonight.
There were all these people and flashing lights and cars and the people were all around it waving their arms frantically like maybe the horse spoke semaphore and I am pretty sure they were between it and the field it had wandered out of to get that extra sweet looking piece of grass, and maybe the grass isn’t always greener on the other side because on the other side were all these strange people forcing it further away from what it knew and from home.
And I think I know how the horse felt.
Because people do that.
They don’t mean to. They think they are helping.
Except what they do is they get between us and ourselves, between us and what we know, between us and Home.
And they do this because they are scared.
We are not in the field, or box we are meant to be in, and so they must fix this and put us back in it because this is so terrifying to them that all they know how to do is try to put it back to how it was before it became something it wasn’t, because if it doesn’t stay how it’s supposed to, well then..
Then suddenly all the fences become a little more meaningless, and those gaps between the railings and the space above and below is suddenly seen for what it is: bigger than the fence.
And the lines they have believed they have to live within start to fade and then there is a period of confusion because the horses are not meant to be in roads, roads are for cars.. Except no one told the horse that so it just sees a hard bit of ground with some really nice grass growing next to it.. Though in reality the grass probably isn’t all that nice right beside a road because it would be full of car type stuff and all that litter we thoughtlessly throw out of the window because someone else will pick it up right? Or because we are too arrogant to take it home to a bin believing we are bigger than nature.
We are not bigger than nature.
We are like those tiny little bars of fence within all that space above, below, around and through. Except at least the fence is just a fence..
Us..
We fence others in, and at the same time fence ourselves in as well.
We climb into our boxes and tell ourselves we have to laugh at the people who are trying to make us laugh, desperately trying to tell the same jokes like they mean it night after night. And when we don’t feel able to do that, we make ourselves wrong and become like the horse in the road, lost and confused and not knowing why people are looking at us funny and waving their arms like there is something intrinsically wrong with us when really there isn’t: we just wandered into somewhere where there was an expectation that we did not seem able to meet.
You laugh at comedy shows.
Roads are not for horses.
And I got out of the show as fast as I could, and I walked into the middle of the road, not at the designated crossing for humans, and I smiled because I could breathe again.
Because you see I know the secret..
Which is that the lines are not real.
The fences are an illusion.
You are trapped by nothing more than a trick of the light…
And if you just tilt your head slightly, you will see that maybe you don’t have to laugh at comedy shows unless you feel it, and that maybe, to a horse, a road is just another part of its field…
Because the horse knows the field is everywhere…
I went walking today somewhere I have been walking for over 30 years, and yet today, I discovered a whole new world of pathways and land I had never even seen before. It took a little courage to follow these seemingly new paths, not quite knowing where they’d go, but I also trusted I knew the land well enough to find my way home if need be.
The new paths led me through the most beautiful woods, filled with nothing but resounding silence and birds; no human noise at all. Then I came out onto hills and fields dappled with the light of the magic hour, and I smiled in pure wowness at how a place I know so well could hold so much I never knew was here.
And it got me thinking about my body, about my mind, about my neural pathways… Do I just walk the same ones over and over, not even thinking to look for anywhere new?
And I sat with this for a while and allowed myself to zoom out, borrowing eagle’s view for a few moments and I saw my mind and all its well lit, well commuted pathways, and from my vantage point I saw signposts I’d never seen, leading to darker, quieter, less busy places – spaces the human noise hasn’t touched.
One said “self-belief.” It looked like I’d maybe had a bit of an explore down there once, but it was overgrown and the entrance was blocked by something.
I went down to investigate and saw it was not blocked at all; it was just the path was obscured to my sight by a signpost saying “But do you really believe…?” And I realised I’d nearly always stopped there, choosing to turn back to my well trodden paths in the familiar woods of my mind, rather than daring to say YES and stepping forward.
And I zoomed back out and saw this pattern repeated over and over… These little questions blocking me from exploring and embracing my full self. I wondered who had written the questions?
It was my mind, so surely it must have been me.
What was I trying to protect myself from? Or hide myself away from?
And I thought about this as I kept walking.
And I realised I was scared of getting lost.
Scared that if I stepped out into the unknown, I’d never find my way back.
But as I looked out at the fields, and in at my vast mind, I saw ALL paths lead Home.
And I smiled, and I kept on walking, embracing the mystery within and without…
It felt wrong. Or maybe it was me that felt wrong. I was beyond the point of being able to reliably determine true from false. The days had merged into one long string and I could no longer decipher the differences between them either. And if I could not manage to follow a 7 day repeating pattern how on Earth was I to dive in and face the plethora of lies and truth wreaking havoc within and making me question wrong, right, left, up, down, me, not me? The very idea of having to begin the unravelling was exhausting. And so for a while I rested, and I avoided, and I distracted, and I made do, and I hid, and I pretended. And I told myself this was Wrong too. That all the shoulds that were flying round my cranium like missiles ready to take me out were Right.
That I Should be better,
Should be stronger,
Should be doing more,
Should be coping,
Should be creating,
Should be helping.
And then I saw it, again.
The weaponry.
The attacking.
And at first, I wanted to make that Wrong as well but I realised then I was just adding fuel to an already raging fire.
Maybe the only way through was to stop labelling wrong as wrong and right as right and wrong as right and right as wrong.
Maybe it was all just notes in a song, held together by the silences between, and the not knowing what was coming next, and the loud parts, and the quiet parts, and the spaces, and the nuances.
Maybe I was just in the spaces.
Maybe I didn’t need to have the whole song written out for an orchestra to play. Maybe I was more of an interlude, or more of an original piece, never written down for no one ever knew what was coming next and therefore whatever I was doing was exactly right, because no manuscript could ever contain me and no scale lines could ever predict how I may Be. And I realised maybe that’s the only right way to be.
To be ever unfolding, in the Unknown, not trying, not shoulding, not having a script.
Maybe that’s where the real courage is.
To be able to be unknowing, and unseeing, and unsure. To allow the supposed wrongs to be reclaimed as opportunities for connection and space. All great success is born of failure upon failure upon failure anyway.
Maybe it’s better to be wrong.
Who’d want the confines of having to be right? Those lines are too tight and I was never born to fit.
And I guess right now it doesn’t matter what day of the week it is; why am I trying to hold onto someone else’s idea of how life should be organised anyway? Maybe now is the best time to be wrong, to not fit, to not have to present in any way other than how I am.
Everyone is improvising.
No one knows.
So how can anyone possibly be wrong because right now, there is no right….
Thank you for all the times you held me when I could not hold myself.
Thank you for the lessons you taught me, and continue to teach me through empowering me to be still enough to witness and absorb them.
Thank you for always reminding me things pass and change and that there is beauty even in the darkest of places.
Thank you for being the constant I never knew I needed.
Thank you for your age, and your grace, and your compassion and your ferocious teachings.
You love me enough to throw me to the fire and watch it burn away all I no longer need.
Thank you for the space between spaces.
Thank you for teaching me about danger and fear and how to sit with it long enough that I can see the God in it too.
Thank you for the colours that have inspired so many palettes. The artists may never be original for you are Creation itself, but their attempts to meet you there are exquisite.
Thank you for showing me the passing of time, and death, and how all is a part of the great dance no matter what state the physicality may hold.
Thank you for teaching me of connection through the mycelium and the trees.
Thank you for teaching me to breathe. And to stop. And to be in awe.
Thank you for showing me the meaning of wonder.
Thank you for letting me wander.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Seekers of depth –
Where are you?
Hiding in the shadows of the centre of the room
Too soon.
You are needed.
Your low belief systems have been superseded.
Self esteem issues must be deleted.
Purpose completed.
It is time.
The divine in you
Calls.
No more walls.
The world is tumbling.
Soul quakes rumbling.
Pyramids crumbling.
Make way for the new.
Make way for the true.
That love is and I am
And no construct of man
Can ever take away from what Is.
This IS This.
Either side of the tide
Same face town wide
The deep seekers,
The truth keepers,
The relievers.
They wait.
Fears abate.
Seasons change.
And it’s Now.
And Now
And Now.
Arise my child
Be still for a while
Don’t get caught in the smile
Of not enough.
Break free.
Be clean.
Be seen.
Just breathe…