burial
It’s amazing to me that the more quiet I get, the more time I take to really look inside, the more I start to notice that my thoughts and emotions have transformed into physical things. Sometimes it’s just in the way I hold my shoulders or the tension in different parts of my face. As this revelation has slowly come to me I noticed a friend of mine who has made a major career and life change posted a picture of his face on his social media. He has experienced so much growth in this past year. He posted a picture and I could literally see in the bones of his face a different way of being and a different way of holding. The space in which we hold our physical bodies is so critical telling the story about the space were holding in our emotional bodies.
What at first is a thought and then a feeling starts to take up residence in us. The more quiet I’ve taken, the more I’ve moved my body in yoga asana, the more walks I’ve taken in the trees on the crunchy leaves feeling the raindrops on my face , the more obvious these feelings are to me physically. I am so sensitive to them and aware of them. I can almost see them. They are so real to me and they bubble up to the surface without a trigger without any type of ask.
That feeling wants to make itself known. I find myself closing my eyes, putting my head on my pillow and experiencing a rush of memories and emotions that have been hanging around for a very long time. That have been residing in me quietly. I am well aware that there’s so much heaviness in the world right now between political tensions, the fear around the pandemic, isolation, and sometimes I wonder how much of that fear is really being transmitted from something much deeper within ourselves. Is it really the heaviness of the world or is it that the heaviness of the world is a mirror reflecting back to us what we wanted to look at for so long. How many of us are walking around with feelings and experiences that we’ve never truly processed and let ourselves move through? I know that a lot of the feelings that are coming up for me both physically and emotionally have been around and have been asking to be seen for a very long time. They have been waiting quietly in the shadows for their invitation. I am grateful for the quiet and I’m even grateful for the chaos that has allowed a light to shine on so many places that want to be healed. Ultimately we all just want to be at peace and to be loved and to be seen for who we are and to be accepted. To be able to just be exactly where we are and exactly who we are around the people who we know are also on this path with us.
Love. Let’s just talk about love for a second. Whether it’s being in love or the love of a child or your love for a parent or love of some of experience it is such a big emotion. So many descriptions circling around love. Exhilaration, passion, depth, excitement, exhilaration, but also fear, vulnerability, softness, surrender, the ability to let our guard down. What happens when the love we know changes and turns into something else? What happens when that love is no longer what you invited it in as, does it ever really go away? I personally don’t think love ever goes away no matter how it changes. So often we might have to put it away. That love has to hibernate and it truly feels like a death. We bury it, in some sad forgotten burial. But what if we are just planting it and all of the experiences we’ve had? What if it’s really just a burial, an enriching of the soil, a quiet time to to create the base from which the next part of our life will grow?
If you truly break down the universe there is only love and fear so I tend to try to focus on the first even in times when it isn’t realized in the way that I was expecting or wanting it to be. But we can look at any experience or emotion in this same burial sense. Where does it get stored in the body and what happens if we don’t truly let ourselves move through the experience or feeling, to transmute it?
Looking out my window right now all the leaves are falling off the trees. One at a time, sometimes in clumps. It is our reminder that things die, and things change and there is a cycle to everything. We need to let go, we need to use what is gone as an opportunity to grow what is next. Dense, nutritious and deep. We need to bury, give reverence to and allow what is dead to serve as the fertile soil for what is to come in Spring. So when the thoughts have become feelings , and feelings get stored, let us process and bury and re plant. We tend to, we honor and then we let go. Creating all the while a place within our lives for the next beautiful thing to bloom. Spring is always just around the corner, and rebirth first requires death. We are all just walking each other home right? I see you. I love you. Keep going.
