Wonderful You,
I invite you to work on something with me this week.
These past few months, I have been devoted to the consistent act of grounding and rooting myself in my body and in the moment it finds itself a part of.
I realize Nature is always present, it can’t live outside of itself or in any other time zone, and this gives me a reliable downward current that I can offer my body.
Dissociative disorders of all degrees including anxiety, fear, and depression can leave us feeling quite alien, not really here, like condensation going from solidity to seeming nothingness.
As I slowly heal and amalgamate with a new version of myself not yet crystalized, I have come to notice something peculiar about how I walk.
My feet barely touch the ground, in fact, I walk on the outer edges of my soles, arches turning upward as if not to impose too much contact on the ground. My head lifts up so much higher than my body, the impact of my weight barely visible on the sand and I tilt forwards as if walking away from my own form.
As I walk, I feel the great mass of Earth beneath me and yet my feet barely dimple Earth’s skin. I walk so lightly, so apologetically that I sometimes have to stomp my way around to prove to myself that I am here.
I tend to walk barefooted so I can feel the ground - so I can make contact with that which whom I wish to come into relationship with. But it takes a considerable effort to be reciprocal in this quiet conversation.
Earth always leans forward, I always retract.
So I have decided to change my approach to grounding entirely.
There is no place I feel more at home than Water. It is a place I feel I can be most myself, adrift from life’s heaviness and cumbersome needs. What I find is that after a brisk, cold swim, I start to feel heavy - like all my cells took on weight and I get to carry each limb like a glorious bag of wet sand.
Suddenly my place in the world is a little more visceral, I feel like perhaps I am more noticeable, more here.
I know many of us feel like we don’t fundamentally have a right to be here. It might not be a conscious thought we are aware of - but more like a submarine belief that peaks through the surface of certain desires that make us want to disappear, escape or that make us feel like we don’t quite belong here.
We need to stomp ourselves back into this life sometimes, without apology. We need to claim our ground, our bodies, and our realities. I am here. I am here and it's okay to be me, it's safe to be in this body and take up the space I need to exist.
We have internalized the idea of minimal impact, of making ourselves unseen and unheard in order to comply, in order to protect ourselves. We learn to leave only footprints, to spiritually ascend our bodies so we don’t feel their aches, but all of this denial of our physicality causes an internal evaporation process that removes us from the only place truly belonging to; our bodies.
