the edges of myself

As I intimated in my first post—now that I’ve started letting the words out, they feel they have an imperative to flow.   My brain is rewiring into a framework for my writing, narratives winding their way through my thoughts continuously.  I had forgotten until just today, that as a child I often had a continuous narration running through my head.  I liked to pretend I was the heroine in a novel—narrating my thoughts and actions as if someone were watching me from the outside—or reading me from the inside.  Then when I became a teenager it was an angst-ridden poetry of which I was the tragic subject.

Similarly in the last few days I’ve had words running through my head constantly—though I’m no longer a heroine, tragic or otherwise—just a messenger.

I currently find myself on a plane—beginning the journey back to my children.  I must acknowledge, I’m not ready yet—but then I still have two days before they are back in my possession.  These endless days of me, this time of remembering, of re-inhabiting, have been an incredible gift, and when taken in context, they have been the perfectly logical next step in my transformational process.

Step 1:  Realize it is safe to completely reenter physical, emotional, spiritual and energetic bodies.  check

Step 2:  Begin to acknowledge and delve into all the muck that has accumulated within each of those bodies throughout the last 35 years.  check

Step 3:  Give myself permission to let go of all of those things that are no longer (and potentially never were) serving my highest good.  check

Step 4:  (and this is where it starts to get a bit tricky) LET GO.

Letting go is such a challenging task for so many of us.  And the root of letting go is something entirely different for each and every one of us.  It’s those roots (and believe me, there are quite a few of them) that I find myself tugging on currently.  Some of them are thicker and dug down deeper than others.  Some of them are really spiky and pokey on the surface so the act of just grabbing onto them in order to pull is painful and scary, and sometimes opens new wounds.

What is our obsession with holding on?  Comfort.  Complacency.  Security.  Safety.  That was big one for me in my marriage.  It kept me clinging to my ex-husband long after the love had trickled down the drain.  I felt safe.  I could climb into bed at night, well after he was asleep, and have another warm, living, breathing human next to me.  It felt comfortable and gave me the tangible feeling of connection– though I couldn’t have been further from him.  It’s only once we begin to let go of those things which are no longer serving us, begin to acknowledge the truth,  that the ease and clarity of the interconnectedness of everything and everyone begins to seep in through the cracks.

Our bodies, physical and energetic, are a road map of our lives.  They move through with us and take care of us as best they can.  They allow us to keep going, when oftentimes we shouldn’t.  They compensate, they shield, and they do massive amounts of work on our behalf, most of which they never really get credit for.  But then they get tired, they grow older.  They start to hurt.  Pain is just an indicator.  Your pain is yours.  There is always a root.  There’s nothing mysterious about it.  It’s actually incredibly logical.  But sometimes the journey to the root of pain is long and hard.  Sometimes there are several different roots, and there’s always a myriad of ways to get to them.  Not everyone is ready or willing to undertake that journey.

In the last year and a half of sifting and sorting through my own personal muck, I’ve seen several different incredibly gifted healers.  I’ve gone through layers upon layers of myself, tracing through familial patterns, genetic lineage, ancestral paradigms, and finally past lives.  About a week before I had my first past-life clarity (this was about six months ago) I said to a friend of mine who has been working through her past lives for years, “I think it’s so amazing that you have that clarity, I just can’t imagine having it.”  BOOM.  I forgot to knock on wood.

I’ve always recognized my karmic or soul connections long before I’ve even been on their radar.  My best friend, for instance, I remember the first time I met her with such crystal clarity, it plays like a movie in my mind.  It was my freshman year of college.  She complimented my argyle socks.  From that moment on, for the next several years, she was in my sight.  We had very little, if any, interaction but a few mutual friends, and somehow we always seemed to be in close proximity to each other–she lived a few houses down from me, we worked at the same farm in the summer.  But it clearly was not yet time.  Then, a few months after my ex-husband (then fiance) and I moved to San Francisco, she and her boyfriend at the time arrived.  Game on.

Perhaps I mention her because my first karmic clarity had to do with her.  Before I had karmic clarity, I always knew those who I had karma with.  I knew very well that she and I had been dancing around together  for ages before this lifetime that we currently find ourselves in.  I also knew that there had been a lot of heart break there.  And boy was I right.  I won’t go into detail, because I don’t think that would really serve any purpose, and I haven’t even shared it with her (and may never).  But, that lifetime, pretty intense and clearly influencial came crumbling down on me like a ton of bricks.  It was crushing.

When I managed to clear my way through the rubble–find a path for myself to the other side of it, I had the most amazing perspective on myself and my place in the world and on our friendship.  And then, with the help of other healers, I put my hand around the nastiest, spikiest part of the surface of that root, and I pulled it out, all of it.  It was ugly and painful, but I got a good look at it, I felt that pain at the core of my being and then I let it go.  I realized that I didn’t have to carry it anymore–I received the message it had to deliver.  I moved forward and left it in the dust.

Everyone’s roots are different, and some of us, in this lifetime, will delve more deeply than others.  The most important thing is to honor your own process.  Start to listen to your body.  Sit with your pain, as opposed to reacting to it and see if doesn’t start to tell you something.  Give love and gratitude to your body, each and every one of your cells.  It’s working hard.  It’s carrying you through.  It’s doing a good job.  YOU are doing a good job.  Sometimes you need to hear that.