how do we find our way in to heaviness

stuckness, sludge

when it comes to visit?

Maybe a felt sense of heaviness, immovability, stagnation is very familiar in the body you inhabit. Maybe it’s not. Either way, if it comes through a doorway into your experience, how do you greet it? What words do you offer it? What tone, songs, movements away/towards?

Something heavy, weighty, sludgy, stuck has been with me lately. Steady, waiting, sometimes somewhere nearby, sometimes right in the center of my experience.

I’ve been trying some things. A very sad movie that pulled out a wash of tears. Plant medicines to open the heart, soften the mind. Moving the body: qi gong, alternating intensity and stilling into the heartbeat with releases through breath & sound inspired by The Class, yoga, long walks on dirt paths in the woods. Sitting meditation, grounding exercises, visualizations for moving energy.

When I’m looking to practices like these to support me in moving challenging emotional (and/or other flavors) of energy, I eventually land in the same re-membering.

It’s not what we do that enables shift. It’s how.

The way we are — with ourselves, with the Earth, with others — is the meat of it. The flavor, the tone. The other stuff is just modes of expression.

How are you being with yourself today?

How are you being with others in variously formed human, animal, plant, rock… bodies?

What does the way you’re being with yourself and/or others feel like—in the offering, in the being offered?

What type of listening, hearing, tending to, expansiveness is it making space for?

Spring has arrived on the land where I’m sitting. Plant material bursts from the earth, erupting and blossoming and painting the landscape in all directions.

Each day, as the sky darkens towards rain and then opens right back up again in a golden brightening, the world enlivens.

There is something in the coming and going Spring light that allows me to see the newness of the world. To feel it. To step into being with it.

And my body adjusts. To this new fluidity, this being-with the blooming all around. As I feel into the aliveness in my surroundings, I notice the possibility of turning that motion within. Of allowing my awareness to lean into the aliveness, the movement, the greenness of this interior landscape. Boulders shifting, mud slushing, air currents rising, heat blistering.

In the act of turning towards the aliveness within, things enliven. Recognizing themselves as alive in my gaze of awareness, they awaken. glisten. tremble. shiver.

what is alive within you?

how are you meeting it?

what doorways, tunnels, caverns, rivulets and vistas paint your landscape? which are you ready to be with?