Growth and craft and love and misery. Pushing forward into someone new, pulling along the someones I was before. The delicacy of disentangling gracefully from no longer suitable identity. Boundary re-negotiation. Zeroing out before a necessary period of unpoisoning. Rage at being snakebit. Hurt at letting myself come to harm. Understanding we do what we do to do what we do. Three times to remember:
Learning to feel bad and being okay.
Learning to feel bad and being okay.
Learning to feel bad and being okay.
Relishing the journey. Chest open to the storm. The tussle and flow, the churning, frothing mast-snap of living engaged to reality. Wed to Now.
What they didn’t teach you is Now is full of overwhelms. And the only preparation for the present is learning to feel it. Attunement to reality. A love of truth. Easy, yes, nod, of course. Snap! Don’t tell me what you know, show me what you practice.
When it feels bad how do you soothe?
When it feels bad how do you know?
When it feels bad and the overwhelm comes and the old habits of burying, distracting, or spraying pain with abandon are insistent, can you shortcut the flailing and the misery? The anxiety and worry and crash into the pit. Can you give yourself the space to feel it early. To square up and say, in the slow rhythm of compassion, “I see you…. I know… it hurts, love…. It feels bad… but you’ll be okay.”
Can you make an agreement with yourself to carve out a sacred place? To allow yourself, in this space, to practice? With whatever grace you can muster. To show up in earnest. As a novice. To agree with yourself to ask, with humility, for help in this important work of letting be?
If yes, then you’re onto something. The promise of wholeness, an integrity, a possibility at an artful life.
What lies beyond feeling bad is an opening to what is. And from this place an overflowing abundance of care (and storms of a different sort).