Patience and Peace
Today has been a day filled with reflection and gifts of understanding. I began the morning with the memory of a dream. Something that has been unusual for the last several years. Once awake my thoughts were filled with traces of memories and gifts from those currently in my life.
I have been struggling for several months with the challenge of integrating my body into my consciousness and viewing it with compassion and love. I have been working with a wonderful trainer/guide for a year now and with his help I have begun to release a lot of the pain I have carried in my body for most of my life. I know that I disconnected from my body at a very early age to protect myself from pain and hurt. I’m not sure what the precipitating event was in my childhood. What I do know now is that I’m at peace with not knowing. This is the patience part I am learning to embrace.
I have been listening to Eckhart Tolle’s – The Power of Now and here are the words that resonated loudly for me today.
“Whatever you need to know about the unconscious past in you, the challenges of the present will bring it out.”
I regularly go to the “scary place” filled with fear when I work out. I’m not sure what that’s all about and I guess at this point I don’t stress about not understanding. All I do now is greet the fear, breathe deep and say “thank you.” Gradually the incidences are decreasing and I am able to smile when it comes up and see the gift of feeling and releasing it. Letting the fear come up and send it out my feet into mother earth. To stand firm and tall, breathe deep and center myself. To keep going. Now I am no longer paralyzed by the feeling nor am I overwhelmed by it.
There is a wonderful story from Zorba the Greek where he describes his wonder and delight at seeing a butterfly inside its chrysalis moving and preparing for its miraculous transformation. With love he opens the chrysalis to help the butterfly. He places it in his palm gently blowing his warm breath across it so that it can open it’s wings. Then much to his horror it struggles and dies in his hands. He acknowledges that it was not time for the butterfly and more importantly that there is a time for “openings and miraculous transformations”. It is what I have begun to understand. The reason all of these fears and strong emotions are coming up is because I now have the strength to deal with them.
Now how great is that?!! Whatever we feel and sense… fear and dread… love and hate…… all of it is a gift. The gift is being able to fully experience and embrace it, release it….once and for all to let it go.
Time to open and experience my own miraculous transformation.
