Beginnings always feel the hardest to me, the moments just before, sometimes feel excrutiating, or somewhow stuck. Even starting this post has felt difficult, as it holds so much in the making, so much to digest, to assimilate, so much from the being in the becoming.
There is something at this time of year, as we are heading towards the shortest day and the longest night of the year, which wakes up inside me an urgency to complete tasks, get things in order, so that I can prepare for the complete wintering and surrendering inwards. It's a moment which feels so full and pregnant with possibilities and yet the ask of this moment is to release it all.
There is comfort in knowing, both with my head (my cranial brain) and my gut (my belly brain), and my heart too, that nature is supporting this process of releasing and letting go. In fact, when the same energies were present a year ago I wrote about the Sweetness of Surrender so I will try not to repeat myself here.
This year I am less drawn to the sweetness of surrender once it happens, but more to the space just before, where at times it can feel just short of overwhelming, at the precipice of it all. I think that in order to let go and release what no longer serves us, we must first work our way through it, to whatever degree is possible for us in that moment, and digest and assimilate what we can.
I have found that increasing our awareness of our embodied experiences and physical sensations pays off. In particular in our gut and in our diaphragm - did you know that the gut can operate (to some degree) independent from the brain and the central nervous system? Hence why it has been coined the "second brain", it can detect changes in our emotional world and psyche that fall under the radar of our cranial brain. It can also respond to these and does not always send feedback and information back to the brain! The art of "listening to our gut" is not a new one but I think somewhere along the way of existing in a world that is becoming faster-paced and less connected with nature as we cocoon ourselves in concrete, we forgot to listen. We turned our energy and our focus on enhancing our cognitive abilities and sharpening the intellect, that we forgot that in order to increase our emotional intelligence we must find our way back into sensing and feeling into our gut and into our viscera. We disconnected from the 'butterflies' in the belly, from the nausea, the indigestible experiences and the emotions too difficult "to stomach", to remember that our body speaks to us and keeps us in check all the time.
To let go of the stuff in our minds, we must also let go of what is trapped inside our gut, and to let it go we must first be brave enough to pause enough to feel it, breathe into it, soften around it and stretch with it, incrementally at the pace that is available in each moment.
In other words, as is usually the case, my conclusion is that we can find ourselves in the continuous flow of life and in harmony with it, simply (but not necessarily easily) by committing to stay present with ourselves and aware of the present moment. A process, that I usually find easier to start on the mat, but not necessarily always. Recently I have also found a space to do that through danicng the 5 Rhythms.
The mat does offer a space of safe experimentation, of trial and error, where I only need to be in direct relationship with myself, whether the space is shared or not. When I step on the mat I am counting on the honesty of what my body has to say, all I have to do is listen.
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