☕ An invitation: make yourself a cuppa, press play, and walk outside with me.
Healing is a 6-lane highway. Successful crossings from fracture to wholeness are not determined by how fast we get to the other side, nor how ‘intact’ we are upon arrival…but in refuge; how often we create small islands of rest in order to keep going.
What many of us don’t realize, however, is that what initially offers us rest - becomes the restful life we long to live. The highway dissolves around the shelter we come to know as ourselves.
In the end, ache offers us the chance to meet who we essentially are in moments of respite - which makes pain a very wise sherpa on this journey homebound.
Lately, I’ve been discovering just how vital refuge is, not as a temporary space- but as a way of life. And it’s a practice least emphasized because of how focused we’ve become on the business of getting somewhere else…or ‘dodging traffic’.
outward is the new inward
Lately, I’ve been dropping down into my sense field in order to find what troubles me. From minor agitations to deeply ingrained habitual responses, I start my search at the edge of my skin and move slowly outward.
Can I locate uncertainty in the ground that holds my weight? Can I find unworthiness in the morning light that washes the whole tree outside my window in glorious gold?
I can’t seem to detect dissociation in a pebble caught in my shoe. And I can’t find suffering in evening birdsong, nor can I touch unease in the comfort of cotton resting upon my shoulders. I can’t find my inability to affect change in the sea anemone who hugs my finger as I brush against its gills.
I can’t find mortality in a handful of seeds or restlessness in palms caked in red dirt. I can’t find distraction in the cold ocean water that swallows me whole, or shame in the downy fur behind my dog’s ears.
Refuge is knowing that my body is receiving everything the world is so generously offering. According to reality, I am worthy, connected, and whole, despite my mind trying to prove me otherwise.
Your body too is receiving this refuge right now. Can you find what ails you in the relationship your senses have with the external world?
This investigative practice is teaching me repeatedly just how much the mind authors discontent. Mind adds a subtle filter to what is – it adds subjectivity to an otherwise perfectly neural situation. Mind makes life personal, which is a blessing in the height of summer, and a curse in the depressions of mid-winter.
We lose ourselves in whatever we become aware of - which is why we often lose ourselves in pain and lack because we still identify our sense of self with the mind. We simply lose our true nature, our faceless beauty to a mind-made-reality that has been seeped in its own juices of incapacity…which makes us believe we are incapacitated. But this is not true. In fact, it’s the most destructive falsehood we have come to believe in.
These days, I’m choosing to lose myself to something else, to unfiltered reality, to the present moment, to the true Self unbound by the polarizing ego, and to what is felt in the borderlands of my body.
I am losing myself to myself.
With this increasing sense of an internal home, all emotions are truly welcomed as guests because I’m finally the host of my own inner soiree.
The highway of eternal crossings dissolves around the refuge I am. The tar becomes a wildflower field. The way home, a monarch on the northerly current.
It is a wildly liberating journey to know yourself. That doesn’t mean it’s easy but it’s like finally finding the path that passes home over and over again. It makes life less of a burden, and more of a curiosity. And I believe that’s the greatest sign of healing.
Even the idea of crossing from where I am - to where I want to be - dissolves because I’m already there. I’m on the island I now call life. I am the island and the life.
And I no longer need saving.