I am watching this recovery process day by day, as well as being fully submerged within it too. I feel so calm. All my energy is being taken up behind the scenes so to speak, and this has left me free to just be with each moment as it arrives. No energy for worry or conceptual thoughts. Little spikes of anxiety appear, I am not sure why nor care much. I just register anxiety, and I breath with it. It doesn’t last, just disappears as all feelings and thoughts seem to when I don’t interfere with them or elaborate on them.
I noticed when I was swimming this morning, that my thoughts were a lot less critical and judgemental about others around me. I am not sure why, maybe part of the unwrapping I have had this week due to the shock, concrete around the heart has been exploded off!
It is a new week, and it felt right to start going out a tiny little bit more. I ventured into a beautiful very old walled garden in the frosty morning sunshine. I walked slowly taking in the textures, the smells, the birdsong, I pause and the leaves are falling from an old gnarled tree. There is nothing urgent to do, nowhere urgent to go. I feel very present, nothing else exists, and there is no separation for a moment between me and what I am observing.
I got a chill. I wasn’t scared, but I did feel an instant of an almost inhuman energy. It is far from warm and cosy. The words ‘the cold clear light of love’, came to mind. It feels unworldly. It is like the ‘feeling’ of infinity. It reminded me why entering deeply into who we are can be unnerving to our more human animal side. Familiar and yet intense, vulnerable and yet completely invulnerable in that vulnerability. To enter takes a big trusting.
I know we are there all the time of course, acknowledged or not, it is who we are. Pure clear consciousness, always steady, always aware, even while events and feelings and thoughts pass through. Even when we get caught up in our dramas, it is always there to return to. I saw in those fleeting seconds I do not have to hook onto anything. Dare I feel safe? Can I just facilitate a constant gentle and kind ‘throughness’ in each experience for myself and whoever I interact with and yet remain in stillness?
There is a tension in this. The movement and the stillness together. I have often wondered if it is that tension that I most resist and am afraid of. I watched the show ‘Vikings’ recently and I noticed in it that many of the characters held the tension, they did not break it with unnecessary talking. Silence had a strong place, there were long long pauses between communications…feelings were allowed to arise, looks exchanged in a state of poise within the intensity of the moment no matter what was happening. They made time as individuals to commune with their gods alone too. Not that they were great role models in many other ways lol!
It made me aware of the ways I habitually break that tension, and do not hold the poise. The way I can get slightly hysterical and giggly, or overly intellectual and analytics in an attempt to put some distance between myself and what is arising. Anything but surrender in complete vulnerability to what is happening and relax deeply into it. This is changing now as I allow myself to feel safe, as I learn connect with the part of me that is always calm.
For those of us who grew up with a heightened inner stress and sense of danger, I think it is really beneficial for us to take part in simple activities that retrain the nervous system. It is through such activities like swimming every morning and a daily walk in nature that my nervous system has learned that it is okay not to be on the run all the time with stress. These activities force the body to slow down and calm down. And so even if I do get a stressful moment during the day, my body has been exercised and I am contented on this animal level. This is a helpful reminder of the part of me that is always contented.
It is taking time to show myself that it is safe not to be worried. Safe to relax. I do not have to be on alert for danger all the time any more. I can let longer moments of stillness gently permeate through all the old habits of recoiling, retracting, tensing up, resisting. I suppose it makes sense that I spend a lot of time alone through this. I found that old familiars can sometime just strengthen old habits when we are around them. So for a time, for as long as it takes it is a solitary bit of the journey. Though not unsupported, even though that is what fear advised me it would be like and why I should avoid it. Support has come in unexpected forms from unexpected sources, especially when I am not looking for it. Fine divine choreography at work. All I have to do it look after myself and other and be kind and compassionate. Simple!
Learning to Rest with it All 