Monthly Archives: April 2023

The Ancestors

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Whether we think about it consciously or not, on some level we all know how our past can influence our present. Whether it is the childhood we got and how it continues to impact us, a health issue that runs in the family, a family secret, wealth passed on, being a college legacy, or carrying the hopes and dreams of those who came before you. In whatever the form, the truth is, what came before us, is in us. A part of us. That doesn’t change. But what can change is how we choose to be with what came before.

In the Energy Medicine training I am in, there is a lot of focus on the ancestors and it has gotten me to think in different ways about the people who came before me. Ways that are taking me beyond the stories I was told, as well as the ones I have told myself. A new light being shed on things I took for granted, didn’t recognize or believed were set in stone.

This week I decided to make space on my alter for my ancestors. I had no idea what I was going to do. I had nothing to place on my alter to represent them. But I didn’t let that stop me. Instead, I decided to begin by cleaning things up. Which in hindsight seems like the very place to start when working with our past; a desire from within to clean things up. One that says, things can be different.

So I began by taking everything off the alter. A kind of clean slate for myself and my ancestors. This turned on another truism for me; once we open to cleaning things up, we actually have to do something with that intention. We can’t just think about it and expect things to change. We can’t just wallow in the blame or the bad luck of the bloodline and expect that our lives will be any different.

As I cleared each item I was tuning into what I wanted to keep, and what I didn’t. This is the discernment phase that says, “I get to choose. Things are not chosen for me based on what came before.” I get to decide how to move these things through my life; what to keep, what to let go of. I found myself with four possibilities in this very tangible process of discernment: What to Keep. What to Repurpose. What to Pass on. What to Let Go of.

That about sums it up. What is it that got passed on to us that we actually and truly want to keep? Not because we are supposed to, but because we have done our due diligence to determine its importance in our lives. What is it that we got that doesn’t quite work in its current form, but could be rearranged to suit us? What is it that we have that no longer serves us, but could be offered to another in a way that serves them? And finally, what just absolutely needs to go?

To know ourselves is to know who came before us. But it doesn’t stop there. It is also to own the sacred responsibility that what we choose to carry forward, and how, is always ours to decide.

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Readiness

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One of the things I am always wondering about is how can we make the changes in our lives that are not only necessary for some specific reason, but that would actually bring us closer to who we truly are, and what it is that we most desire. While I have explored with myself and others many, many reasons for resisting what we most need to do, it still confounds me. And while there are those who have laid out clear maps to what stops us and how we can change, more often than not, we don’t.

What’s going on?

I just can’t seem to accept that we would work so thoroughly against ourselves. Sure, maybe we don’t feel like we deserve it. Maybe we don’t know any other way. Maybe, as Freud would have said, we have a death wish. But still…Something continues to nag at me. It feels like there is something that is so much Greater than all the roadblocks we put up, that is just bursting to get out.

This past week I had a mundane experience around all of this that felt anything but mundane. I take a weekly yoga class that has been bringing me through road construction that is slated to last for four years. Right at the beginning of this, my husband gave me an alternative route to take. But the first time I tried it, I overshot where I was supposed to turn off and had to spend time trying to figure out how to get back to where I was going.

Since I don’t have GPS or a cell phone, it truly was me trying to figure it out. It created some tension over being late for class, so I never tried it again. Only, the delays have been getting worse; in response to which, I have been leaving earlier and earlier.

But for some reason, unknown to me consciously, this week an impulse came over me to try the alternate route again. It was incredible! The roads took me past farms and wild life sanctuaries. The mountains in the distance stood in contrast to a clear blue sky with fluffy white clouds sailing along. I saw two hawks sitting on top of a barn overlooking their domain. It was all so magical. And it took far less time, and I was far less tense.

What the heck had I been resisting? Prior to trying the new route, like a rat in a maze, I was immersed in a myriad of traffic lights, construction, car congestion, pollution and stress. Not to mention moving through a kind of visual urban ugliness. And right next to it, this whole time, was a kind of traveller’s paradise that I had been turning my back on.

I know we can prefer the devil we know and I know there are many, many facets to why we change and why we don’t. But on that day, it felt like beyond all the specifics, all the things we do and do not know in this regard, it really does boil down to some kind of unconscious readiness. Some kind of alignment with what already exists within us, or at the very least, right next to us. And while we can know some of what allows us to be ready or not, there is also something mystical at play here. Something unknowable by our rational minds that want it all to add up so perfectly in terms of exactly what we need to do. Leaving us to believe that there is some magic formula code out there that we just need to break.

This makes sense to me. Think about all of the advice, all of the information, all of the programs and all of the degrees and theories that focus on change. You would think we would have it figured out by now. Since we don’t, there has got to be more to it. More than it’s because of our past, or because we are weak, stubborn or without willpower.

What if all the doing has us running right past something? What if instead of trying to fit ourselves into the existing models, the million dollar question we need to be asking ourselves is, “Given that I want something else, what do I need to do in order to be ready?”

Bottom line? What if instead of all the efforting and all of the failed doing, this is about accepting what is already there and already wants to happen? This then becomes an issue of timing and evolution; like a flower blossoming in the spring that has done nothing more than say “Yes” to its time. This is in no way to say we give up or make up excuses. Instead, I am proposing we wonder what it would be like to believe that there is more to what we know about change. And from there, to tap into what it is inside, beyond good and bad, that wants to change, and ask it what it needs to blossom.

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The Language of The Body

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There are so many ways to be with the information your body is giving you. For instance, you can ignore a sensation or a recent change; denying what it is you are experiencing. You can drop into the grips of fear as you imagine worst-case scenarios. You can choose to medicate yourself with all kinds of things from food to pharmaceuticals so that you don’t have to feel what you’re feeling.

Or, you can be willing to learn the language of your own body. In order to do this though, you must be willing to recognize the Intelligence that resides within it. This includes seeing the symptoms and the sensations of your body as an essential language. Communications that offer you important information about your life. This is vastly different from seeing symptoms and sensations as beyond you, inconvenient, or as punishment and evidence of wrongdoing.

I once heard a physician say that if you spent enough time with someone, they could tell you what was wrong, how they got there, and what they needed to heal. Wow! Can you imagine that level of connection with yourself? A kind of intimate alignment with the truth of what was happening for you, while also serving as guidance in every facet of your life. For that is the beauty of being with the body in this way. What you figure out here, you take with you into the rest of your life. 

Believe it or not, it is possible for you to know yourself at this level. But it takes effort. And commitment. A commitment to learn how to choose to stay in your body and to hear what it has to say. No matter what. This means allowing yourself to be wherever you are, and to begin wherever you find yourself with the symptoms, physical states and sensations that are present.

This will not be easy to do, especially initially. As a culture, we love to pathologize, catastrophize, commodify and vilify the body and what it is doing. We make our bodies wrong and tell ourselves that every physical problem we have will lead to dire consequences. Or we commodify the body, believing that health is the same as looking young according to some fantasized and unachievable technological image of perfection. 

But if you’re looking for something else, listening to what your body is saying requires, first and foremost, that you are actually in your body. Otherwise, how will you know what it is communicating? How will you accurately decipher the messages it is sending you? Learning to locate yourself within your own body can be as simple as asking, “Where am I? Am I here?” I know many of us would say, “Of course I’m here!” But are you? Too often our bodies are in one place and our minds in another. Split in this way, we live separate from ourselves and from the very body that is offering us a way to be here and experience the living of our lives.

Once you’re in your body, you have access to a language that is different from the thoughts, beliefs and conditioning of the rational mind. This language is a continuous stream of information in the form of urges, needs, sensations, states and symptoms that speak to you every moment of every day. Taken together, they offer the framework of a necessary and adaptive approach to life that allows you to adjust, stop, do something, not do something, know something, survive, and ultimately thrive. A true gold standard for navigating the world beyond the prejudices of the times and the restraints of our past conditioning.

Does it make any sense to you then that you would want to ignore or medicate these messages away?

If this resonates, consider getting into the habit of pausing once a day. Take a long, deep breath and ask yourself “What am I feeling right now in my body?” Pay attention to things like the body parts involved and the quality of the sensations. Forget about trying to fix it or even figure it out. This is not about imposing worries or preconceived ideas on top of what is happening. Instead, it is about allowing the body the right to express what it is expressing while you listen as deeply as you can. 

This one simple practice alone helps you begin to build a framework based on the reality of the signs and signals of your body, as opposed to the fears, the worries, the Internet searches and the tyrannies of a mind that just can’t stop itself from generating a disconnected and disturbed relationship to the body. Don’t fight this. Let the mind be, while you turn your attention to what it is that is actually happening in your body. Give yourself the gift of being with yourself as is. From there you will kno exactly how to proceed.

Adapted from my book Trusting Your Body: The Embodied Journey of Claiming Sacred Responsibility for Your Health & Well-Being



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Holy Rage

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A conversation that seems to be cropping up more and more between my husband and I centers around some version of how to hold the “irritation,” the “frustration,” the “impatience,” dare I say it, the “rage,” that we are both experiencing when we look out at the world and see what is happening.

I put all of those hot button words in quotes to draw our attention to something I believe is crucial here. That being, the so-called “negative” emotions, the very ones we are most afraid of, and have been the most conditioned to suppress, are often sacred inner guidance coming to reveal something to us about what is happening. Like when a firm stand needs to be taken because the behavior or the circumstances are so off-base and out of alignment. Or because something is in violation of what should be inviolate; like when it comes to what supports Life, and what does not.

To work with such intensity is to say Yes to claiming enormous personal responsibility for how you understand and let these emotions inform you. For at their highest use, they are incredibly powerful and life-changing. But it is like learning to work with fire. Things can get burnt. Things can get out of control. Which is why so many of us are afraid to recognize and honor the message that is being conveyed to us by the fiery ones.

To be clear, this is not an excuse to go off on others, or to give you a pass because you are over tired and don’t have the bandwidth to be more patient or tolerant. Instead, it is an exercise in getting to know yourself so well that you can distinguish between a holy message and an out of balance response on your part.

To work with such charged emotions means opening up to the possibility that these seemingly troublesome feelings have a place; without indulging them or defending harm done. This requires developing a lot of self-awareness because god knows we don’t need one more of us justifying our rage as something useful and deserving in the world.

At their best, these fiery emotions can be a kind of holy rage that wells up from within. A kind of wild and transformative fire that is born of a steadfast commitment to a better way; offering up renewal and rejuvenation in its wake. But here is where practice and self-reflection comes in. For to wield fire is to know its power and its limitations. It is to get clear that this is never personal to another person, only to the behavior. And it is never about the reckless, self-indulgent “raging” driven by social media, party politics, victim mentality or a need to be right.

So, if you’re up for it, the next time you’re experiencing one of the so-called fiery, and even to many of us, dangerous emotions, wonder to yourself, “What’s this all about?” You will need to be relentlessly honest with yourself. You will need to be clear about where the emotion is coming from. And you will need to hold that however it’s used, it’s being done for the highest and best good of all.

P.S. If you catch a whiff of “they deserved it,” you’re in the wrong place. At its most balanced there is a clear and steady flame to holy rage that never feels out of control and never carries an intention to harm.

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