There is this bizarre gap that exists between your body and your mind which almost everyone is aware of yet so difficult to tap into. You try talk therapy. You try to exercise it out. You even try to meditate out. Yet it lingers. I go here on this topic for I was given a gift in a recent business retreat to acknowledge it, feel it all at once, be heard with no advice or story trump, to be able to create an image of it and watch it transform into something more tolerable.
The experience reminded of a recent book "Feeding the Demons" by Tsultrim Allione, combined with Mirrored/Reflective Listening blended with a few other tools that allowed me to close a loop my mind would not stop playing as each loop was attached like links of a chain the connected to itself. I am sure we have all been there at one point in our lives. My body has been caught in the stresses of it all that my physical goals just kept un-goaling. I kept searching for something that would clear the body so I could keep at least one goal! Here is my story of the last 18 months. I am not looking for any sympathy. I am sharing the gap and how it got some light shed on it showing the bridge connection relieving the stress of the body and the mental creation loops in my mind.
Quick time table of events:
My mother dies November 2015 the day before Thanksgiving, 12.5 year old German Shepard dies April 2016 the day before we leave for California, family cruise vacation in October to celebrate my 50th, return to discover my 8 year dog has metastatic lung cancer and dies a week before Thanksgiving 2016, adopt a 18 month old dog day after Thanksgiving (the 1 year anniversary on my mother), husband changes jobs after 16 years, I expand the space of my studio with plans to further grow my business basically giving me a new job, have the best year ever in sales only to share a huge chunk with the tax man. Whew! Yup that was a lot for me and my family to endure.
My body stress kept rising and I kept ignoring it trying to plow through to succeed through all the grief. Then I realized I had to do something. I started SRI (Somatic Respiratory Integration) and Chiropractic care, attended more yoga, meditation, walks, joined a gym to workout with other people, created routines that didn't stick, journaled even more! You name it. I was doing it. Here I am a fitness professional and I cannot get my game together on this! How can I be example to others?
Stuck, frustrated and searching.
In that recent business retreat we focused on trying to find your authentic self fitting your human design where we got out of minds. Not in meditation to have an outer body experience nor an inner body. It focused on the in, middle, skin and outer. The whole body. Listening to where the body was holding onto emotions that countered the intentions of our mind and wants. It's that gap! Body language that is so loud and clear we cannot see it nor feel it. The body goes numb and the mind takes over losing the partnership having the two further disconnected. This past retreat I got the gift to reconnect. I was able to describe a "pot hole" that I kept jumping over or going around within my body as we focused attentively to what it was saying. By speaking the loops of the mind fed by the "energy stucks" of the body showed each as a counter intention to my desire. They came out one by one, softening the body and draining the battery feeding the mental loop chain.
Here are some of the loops or stories my mind created feeding itself over and over in the subconscious level.
What's next that I love that will die?
If we plan time away who will get sick or possibly die?
Expect stress and grief around Thanksgiving?
What expectations of success are upon me with the studio expansion?
What expectations of success are upon me with my husbands job change?
There were others really small and they matter too as their energy gets stuck in the body as well.
We push so hard tiring our minds, body and the spirit will soon too follow. Quieting the mind is one part of the healing process. Allowing the body to speak to un-clutter the mind's mini-loops cleanses the mind, softens the body opening up to what is a true authentic you. I was reading this morning an interview of Elizabeth Mattis-Namgel from Dakini Power, Michaela Haas, where she shared a teaching so '"simple yet perplexing: Don't create." Practice...leaving the mind in its natural state, without manipulating thoughts and sensations - not creating endless castles of thoughts and fantasies.' (Dakini Power, Haas, pg 154). I was given an opportunity to clear the castles of fear, loss and fantasies created in the mind in order to open the dreams of the heart.
Thank you for that gift and for reading my story.
Peace and Love,
Godelieve