The Beginning

There is something that happens when your system settles into a place that it trusts. A place it doesn’t visit often, but it knows the way you know the creaks in the floor of the hallway upstairs in your childhood house, or who is coming up the stairs by the sound of their footfall. Your body knows this place, relishes this place, seeks this place out despite our greatest efforts to be anywhere but there.

It is a quiet place, this settling. It is nourishing and peaceful. And if you stay there long enough you begin to see that there is something even beneath the quiet. Some steady pulsing, slow and rhythmic, like the heartbeat of an ocean you once knew. The quieter you get, the louder it becomes. Maybe it starts in your solar plexus, beneath the quivering you feel just below your sternum. And slowly it spreads from here, spiraling outward until even the furthest reaches of your pinky toes feel full of this pulsing, feel full of presence.

And this fullness then begins to grow, to push out, to expand the boundaries of your body that you once thought were so solid. But in fact, here you are in this minute, growing, expanding. And in this expansion you feel a strength, a force moving beneath the pulsing, filling up these new boundaries. You push, stretch, breathe, fill your lungs and feel that center point of the spiral soften to allow for more depth, more expansion. It is courage, yes, but deeper than that even, it is a trust in the strength that is coursing through every cell in your body. It is a trust in your ability to repair. It is a trust in your ability to inhabit your body. It is a trust in your inherent resiliency.

This, my friend, is a trust in your deepest capacity – for growth, for healing, for movement, for love, for repair, for presence. This is home and the fullness of your existence.

Showing up for class

I have been thinking about the concept of an inner teacher lately. This idea that there is an inherent guiding wisdom within us, an intelligence that has nothing to do with the matter that sits above our shoulders and instead resides in our very cells. In the fluid within and between. It looks like sunlight sparkling on wet sand left behind by retreating waves. It is the quiet, steady voice propelling us onward when the loud self-doubting voice of ego tells us we’re not enough.

This teacher is patient. She is forgiving. She is wise and humble and knows the answers to questions that I didn’t even realize I was asking. She teaches me about stability and impermanence, trust and resilience, lessons about what it means to listen deeply.

And at the core of it all, at the core of this inner teacher, is a deeply profound sense of grace and ease. A fluid ebb and flow that does not need me to say when and where and how. A wisdom that just is. A quiet assurance of the principles of the natural world. 

I forget about her, though, more often than I would like to admit. I run around in this world focused on my failings and ways to overcome them. I fill my days with lists of things that will prove that I deserve to be here, that I am contributing in some way to this human existence. I forget this inner teacher that already knows all of this, already knows what my work is in this world and what I am doing here. I forget, but she is forgiving of my egoic flaws. When I forget all of this, all I have to do is show up for class.

Show up. Quit passing notes, quiet the internal and external chatter, sit down and listen. And that is enough. That is everything.