I M Perfect lady

Tag: releasing

  • In Control Within the Flow

    Today's reading, March 21,in the Book of Awakening, by Mark Nepo "To Harbor and Release"  I love this one.

    "Often the pain of resisting makes us rust like iron, and in order to re-enter the flow of life, we need to be scraped back to our original surface.  Our feelings, if not released, bread the heart with their grit. Like windows filmed by weather, we wait on loving hands to be rubbed clear.  It is inevitable.  Experience covers us over, and the expressive journey lets us come clean to the table of light. Again."

    "All things in existence participate in this involuntary cycle.  For human beings, the process of living stains us repeatedly with the grit of being here, with heartache and disappointment and the pointedness of being human, which can sicken us if harbored or make us whole if released.  Again and again, we, more than any other life form, have this majestic and burdensome power to harbor or release the impact of our experience."

    "Humbly, we are asked to keep the flow real between what is taken in and what is let out.  We have only to breathe to remember our place as a living inlet.  Experience in, feelings out.  Surprise and challenge in, heartache and joy out.  In a constant tide, life rushes in, and in constant release, we must let it all run back off.  For this is how the earth was made magnificent by the sea and how mankind is carved upright, again and again, by the ocean of spirit that sets us free."  Mark Nepo

    What we have to remember, what we take in, we have to let out.  I love, "Experience in, Feelings out."  This one sentence alone says so much.

    I believe that children who were abused in childhood, learn to experience and not to let the feelings out. We instead try and hold our feelings inside and do so til we explode in various ways.

    Rarely are children allowed to express their feelings after being sexually abused or physically abused.  We experience and then we have no outlet.

    This alone has created an unnatural way of being human. To take in things in silence our of fear of reprisals, is living half way.  This is how the rust builds upon us. And in my experience, only by expressing what has gone unexpressed, do we clear away the layers of film upon us.

    The natural process of Experience in, Feelings out, is disrupted in abuse and this alone is the cause of so much disease and violence…we are out of control, out of order, not able to work correctly.

    The term harboring resentment came to mind.  I didn't know that when we don't express our feelings (release them) we are harboring.  

    I had truckloads of expressions to release, and in the beginning they flowed like a rushing river, tumbling over each other, with volumes raised, they tore out of me…held back so long their force near violent in the outward flow.

    While it had to be shocking and out of character for others to witness this of me, it felt extremely healing to say what I had failed to say…for years.

    I wasn't the most prolific or articulate or kind as the words came rushing out, but I was scraping off the rust of old feelings I hadn't felt.  Some were not so pleasant or kind themselves…and all had to be felt in order to be released.

    Now, it is my intention to not let layers of unexpressed or unfelt emotions pile up upon myself, for it feels heavy and a burden to carry…so whatever I experience, I let my feelings out…I don't like holding on to feelings.  

    Harboring your feelings seems safer when you have been abused…we learn to keep them in order to get along and for sheer survival for some.  

    Abuse teaches us to live only taking in…never in a healthy release.

    I am still learning how to release.  Sometimes it still comes out very fearful or childlike in expression, but to me…it isn't about the delivery, but rather that they get out.  Maybe over time, with enough space and healing, I will be able to release them with a graceful kind and compassionate delivery…and not the hurried careless abandon that often rushes out.

    I will find my natural releasing stance…that isn't totally harboring or rushing abandon…but rather a fearless authenticity, beautiful yet powerful, in control within the flow. 

     

     

     

     

     

  • Yoga is the Winner this year.

    I began this year with a promise to do 60 days of yoga in a row, and I did. I then decided to do another 60 days in a row and I did, I believe I did 4 back-to-back 60-day challenges before my streak began developing holes.

    Today I am down 20 for the year.

    As I approached the mat today my body was stiff and weak and just not in the mood.

    Each posture I did my best, but my best looked like a beginners effort. I felt I was being asked to perform something far beyond my level of effort.

    What continues to surprise me is that the pain in my joints, my hips and lower back still persist.

    And along with the pain come the tears.

    You wonder how much a body can hold.

    What I wanted most was to be wrapped in a cotton blanket and swaddled in a quilt with a fluffy pillow and suck my thumb…to not move to make another joint scream.

    It still surprises me that I go to the mat for this torture, for the blanky option is available each day as well.

    I am not stopping on December 31st I will continue to yoga along, in hopes that one day I will come to the end of the body’s pain.

    339 days have passed by and I have tossed my blanket aside and stood on the torture mat for 319 times.

    He says, you can either suffer for 90 minutes or 90 years, pick one.

    Yoga is the winner this year.

  • In Peace I Lay Down

    As I lay in a floor pose in yoga today, I became aware of the lump in my chest, and I wondered what they would find at my sonogram today.

     

    My doctor thought that perhaps it is an infected milk duct, and I thought while on the floor, how odd that is, since I am not nursing, I wonder how that could happen.

     

    My next thought, what have I been nurturing or holding close like a baby to my chest and what energy is in this area?

     

    The energy in this area is my heart, where I feel my feelings, where I express my self.

     

    My next thought was that I have been holding close to me things that hurt me. 

     

    Holding and wanting to nurture hurtful people, allowing them close into my space, opening my heart, and then getting hurt emotionally when I am misunderstood and once again and set outside.

     

    There is not only an emotional toll, but also a physical toll this is taking on my body.

     

    Today as I lay there I knew I had to let them out of my heart, let go of hanging on and release them…and the line in a hymn came in “God will take care of you…”

     

    In tears and in peace I lay down.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Affirmed by His Experiences

    Maha Mudra, a chapter from Waking by Matthew Sanford.

     

    “When I return home from the hospital, everything seems the same – my blue velvet chair, the sounds of my fridge, the creaking of my wood floors.  Everything except for the feeling that I have recently chatted with aliens.  That’s how my body memories strike me.  How could my body have memories?  Bodies don’t have memories, minds do.  Not only did I believe this growing up, but my philosophical studies reinforced it.  Now, in the span of a few days in the hospital, my sense of who I am, where I begin, and where I end once again has broken wide open.  My body interacts with the world and records it regardless of whether my mind is having any experience.”  Matthew

     

    This is so reassuring to someone like me who has no memories of the actual molestation, the rape that my friend witnessed, and yet my body has given me the feelings of it, the paralyzing terror.

     

    While Matthew couldn’t recall the accident where he was paralyzed, his body was aware of the whole ride and recorded it and stored the information in feelings.

     

    It is the storage that I find remarkable.  It is stored until we are strong enough or willing to seek deep inside of us and explore the feelings that seem to be there at odd times, or feelings that don’t match our thoughts in reality.

     

    When my body responded physically to the news that my father was a pedophile, there wasn’t any thing I could do but follow its lead.  I knew by the second day that I too was a victim; I just didn’t know how I knew, for my mind was still as blank as ever.

     

    Yet deep within my cells, I felt the truth of it all.

     

    I knew that he molested me, I knew that all the times I feared him were justified and I felt this to be true, with emotions and feelings that were beyond an intellectual thought.

     

    Matthew continues.

     

    “ This seems simple enough.  For example, at any given time, the back of my head is visible to the world during every instant that I am awake.  My body is also present in every second that I am alive, even while I am sleeping.  Both of these thoughts are easy to grasp intellectually, but to feel them – that is different altogether.  I felt those body memories in three dimensions.  They went beyond the two-dimensional mental experiences and instead expressed themselves through the three dimensional experience of my body. That my body could be a possessor of memory made me confront something that was undeniable.  My body – not just my mind was also conscious.  How does one truly open to something like that?”

     

    “The act of “opening” consciousness makes us feel both uncertainty and the onrush of silence that comes with it.  This is one of the reasons that becoming aware is often painful.  There are many stunning things about the Grand Canyon.  One of them is the eerie silence that accompanies its vast expanse.  It is both awesome and unsettling – one knows not to stand too close to the edge.  The feeling of openness and a confrontation with silence are deeply related.”

     

    “Opening to the fact that my body was conscious caused me intense grief.  I took advantage of my thirteen-year-old body so many years ago. It was subjected to profound violence and I abandoned it in the process.  Did I really need to?  Was it really my only option?  The existence of these body memories made me confront the silence and uncertainty of recognizing my own mistakes.”  Matthew

     

    I know the grief that follows this awareness of consciousness within the body, the neglect we feel for not knowing it was alive and filled with feelings and how it awaits for our cue.  I am humbled by this body and I am now trying to release it from any other feelings that are lodged within. 

     

    Yoga seems to be a vehicle for doing this.  Matthew also speaks of his experiences with yoga…

     

    I will write more on that tomorrow.

     

    For now, I am affirmed by his experiences.