FLOWING
A lot has happened in the last month. I took an Express Arts course about sound and movement and went through a tremendous transformation which I am still reverberating from.
I learned that sound is vibration, energy is vibration, and thought is vibration, and when old negative thoughts get stuck in the body they form blockages that cause imbalance. But like Joshua blowing his trumpet and crumbling the walls of Jericho and operatic voices exploding glass, blockages in the body too can be shattered by sound. This is what I experienced, and after expressing the accompanying grief, I was lifted to a place of clarity where only beauty, joy and love exist. For days I had a smile on my face that couldn't be wiped off, and a poem I had written came to mind:
To soar above
All rules and expectations,
To soar above.
That's truly how I felt.
When the bliss wore off, my body felt like waves on the lake when two rocks were dropped in: joy and sadness were bashing and crashing inside me. One minute I was feeling one emotion and then with the quickness of a thought, I was feeling the opposite. I wasn't used to this experience and it was unsettling.
While this was going on, I was also writing until 3:30 in the morning and understanding things in a new way. It was like the pages in the Book of Wisdom opened up and I had access to it all. I just had to ask a question and the answer was there.
When that surge subsided, I was left feeling exhausted and fragile. An email arrived saying that Angaangaq, an Eskimo-Kalaallit Elder, would be speaking in Haliburton, so I went hoping to be calmed and re-centred. But he had a different agenda, and I was even more agitated. I didn't want to hear anymore about despair, I wanted to hear about courage because that was what I wanted to write about. I was witnessing so much fear, and what annoyed me most was that people only talked about courage with respect to fear: "Don't be afraid." "The only thing to fear is fear itself." "Act in spite of your fear." I couldn't think of one comment about courage.
On the way home, I thought about love being the opposite of fear because love was about the free flowing of energy and fear was about the damming of that flow. Then I realized if love is the opposite of fear and courage is the opposite of fear, then courage must be the same as love. And somehow that just felt right and my body totally relaxed.
Writing about courage was the same as writing about love, and as Angaangaq, or Uncle as he called himself, said, to do both we just need to "put one foot in front of the other" and carry on. We can't allow those dams to build up; we have to be like love itself and keep moving through it all. This didn't mean we ignored what we were going through. It just meant that when sadness, or any other feeling, hit, we felt it fully then kept going.
Uncle also said: the greatest ill in the world is that we put each other down. He said the way to melt the ice in the human heart is to begin using our vast knowledge wisely. And he also said, the stronger the heartbeat, the healthier humankind will be.
The spiritual journey is a very bumpy path meant to shake loose and crumble that which no longer serves. Letting my old stuff go now is as hard as letting go of the yellow blanket I had as a child. Interesting, seeing it with that reference, I understand I must once and for all drop the old fear-based ways so I can move on and stay in the next - the lyrical - stage of life.
It's not easy. In fact it's very trying. Thankfully, however, it is simple: love, love, flowingly love.
A lot has happened in the last month. I took an Express Arts course about sound and movement and went through a tremendous transformation which I am still reverberating from.
I learned that sound is vibration, energy is vibration, and thought is vibration, and when old negative thoughts get stuck in the body they form blockages that cause imbalance. But like Joshua blowing his trumpet and crumbling the walls of Jericho and operatic voices exploding glass, blockages in the body too can be shattered by sound. This is what I experienced, and after expressing the accompanying grief, I was lifted to a place of clarity where only beauty, joy and love exist. For days I had a smile on my face that couldn't be wiped off, and a poem I had written came to mind:
To soar above
All rules and expectations,
To soar above.
That's truly how I felt.
When the bliss wore off, my body felt like waves on the lake when two rocks were dropped in: joy and sadness were bashing and crashing inside me. One minute I was feeling one emotion and then with the quickness of a thought, I was feeling the opposite. I wasn't used to this experience and it was unsettling.
While this was going on, I was also writing until 3:30 in the morning and understanding things in a new way. It was like the pages in the Book of Wisdom opened up and I had access to it all. I just had to ask a question and the answer was there.
When that surge subsided, I was left feeling exhausted and fragile. An email arrived saying that Angaangaq, an Eskimo-Kalaallit Elder, would be speaking in Haliburton, so I went hoping to be calmed and re-centred. But he had a different agenda, and I was even more agitated. I didn't want to hear anymore about despair, I wanted to hear about courage because that was what I wanted to write about. I was witnessing so much fear, and what annoyed me most was that people only talked about courage with respect to fear: "Don't be afraid." "The only thing to fear is fear itself." "Act in spite of your fear." I couldn't think of one comment about courage.
On the way home, I thought about love being the opposite of fear because love was about the free flowing of energy and fear was about the damming of that flow. Then I realized if love is the opposite of fear and courage is the opposite of fear, then courage must be the same as love. And somehow that just felt right and my body totally relaxed.
Writing about courage was the same as writing about love, and as Angaangaq, or Uncle as he called himself, said, to do both we just need to "put one foot in front of the other" and carry on. We can't allow those dams to build up; we have to be like love itself and keep moving through it all. This didn't mean we ignored what we were going through. It just meant that when sadness, or any other feeling, hit, we felt it fully then kept going.
Uncle also said: the greatest ill in the world is that we put each other down. He said the way to melt the ice in the human heart is to begin using our vast knowledge wisely. And he also said, the stronger the heartbeat, the healthier humankind will be.
The spiritual journey is a very bumpy path meant to shake loose and crumble that which no longer serves. Letting my old stuff go now is as hard as letting go of the yellow blanket I had as a child. Interesting, seeing it with that reference, I understand I must once and for all drop the old fear-based ways so I can move on and stay in the next - the lyrical - stage of life.
It's not easy. In fact it's very trying. Thankfully, however, it is simple: love, love, flowingly love.
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