Diary of a Healing Chick

Illustration by Vanessa Fiola for Recovering Yogi. 

I stopped writing.

Dang.

I have been miserable. 

Plenty to be thankful/grateful for and all that blah-blah-blah happy stuff.

But it’s forced. Forced out of ‘knowing better’ rather than a deep knowing. DEEP real-deal motha-f#cking KNOWING vs. a ‘knowing better’ that is well read and sounds great on paper. Cellular knowing goes up to 11. I’m stuck on 4. 

And there’s the fight and push and kick and scream of it all. The trigger finger on the ability to feel wronged and victimized and ‘OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE TO MY LIFE???’ 

But you know. I ‘know better’ than that. That story has been told before.

So instead of going down that road, I’ll focus on what hasn’t been done in the past 9+ months. 

Writing.

I stopped writing. 

I stopped writing here. Stopped writing during down time. I stopped the thing I love to do, which is find some piece of truth and attempt to give it words and make the laptop suffer under the hacking of fingers stabbing at it. I type loud. I LIKE it. 

I stopped writing out of fear of what others would think, those who know me casually, but don’t know how my thinky thoughts take me to places that don’t fit in with current popular religious views and are probably blasphemous. I wanted to write, but I stopped myself when I thought of having to explain these thoughts to other communities, ideas, belief systems, or what they might think of me for thinking them.

I stopped writing out of fear of what those in breath work would think when they found out that I lost my enthusiasm for it, that I had lost faith in ‘spirit’, lost my connection to ‘energy’, and just couldn’t bring myself to keep showing up for the ‘Ra Ra Unicorn-Pony-Rainbow-All is Love’ team. 

Because all is not love. Until it is. But it isn’t. Even if it is. Not when the monkey suit runs the program of fear and doubt and worse yet… when the monkey suit says something is wrong. On a cellular level. Shit, you’ve done something wrong and you can’t wrap your monkey brain around it and grasp what it is.

I went back to corporate America. Am I wrong? Did I give up? Did I walk away from something that could have been great? Was I deluded to begin with? Did I make up some mythology to justifty pulling a Joseph Campbell on my life and in the end, end up no better than when I started?

I don’t know. 

I used to write and share and teach and work with people one-on-one and tell them the most amazing things about themselves that they weren’t seeing. And I used to get frustrated that they didn’t ‘get’ it. They couldn’t grasp the brilliance inside them. 

And now I’m the one kicking and screaming and fighting against seeing the truth. Some truth that involves the beauty of the moment unfolding right in front of my nose. Always. Beyond money. Beyond my job. Beyond my fears. And it’s breathtaking, this opportunity to struggle. To fight. That I even get this chance to have a thought about something or other.  And that it might have some meaning AND be meaningless at the same time. Who knows?

Whichever way the wind blows. 

Who can say what this messy/pretty actually is?

I know one thing. I’ve got one kick ass thing going right now:

I have an awesome partnership with an awesome man. That I do know. 

And, yeah. Developed nation problems. I’ve got ‘em.

Eh. Maybe I’ll start writing more on that. 

Balance. How to deal with the chaos? Finding balance in the absurd. Take for instance my family…

(My cousin Michaela’s wedding to the amazing Brad Nichelmann, July 9th, 2011)

Going back to the whole reason I started this blog. Adventures in RA!

Each band-aid represents a 2” long needle shoved directly into the painful jointy bits. Not to mention the syringe nailed directly into the core of the rheumatoid nodule just under my left elbow. 

Here is my chasm. One part of me wanting to burst into tears and say, “Oh my God, enough. Why can’t I have a normal life?”

And the other?

“C’MON. You’ve got this, Borris. You can take it. Stand in the fire. Don’t fight it.” 

So, that’s what I did. I stood as the fire was injected in me. I didn’t fight it. I watched every last moment. 

Afterward, sitting in my car, before I turned over the engine, I turned over my thoughts to nothing, just NOTHING. I paused to breathe, and in the silence I heard Dr. Wiskocil reminding me, “We are never given what we can’t handle.” And I thought, “OK, God… We’ve got this. I’m with you. I trust…”

And I wonder if I’m talking to myself sometimes, even though I know better. I figure honesty is always the best policy.

Authentic/Tension

Because there’s this experience on the other side of The Sadness that you would never appreciate if you hadn’t experienced all The Sadness had to teach…

First off:

WOW.

The response to the previous post was tremendous. Thank you for all the emails/DMs/comments/notes. 

Special thanks to voice and speech teacher extraordinaire Laura Hitt and Satya Colombo for telling me my Disqus was busted. (For some fun reading check out Satya’s Edge Flow blog posts. No, seriously. The dude is en fuego.) 

The words of support were awesome, and most importantly, almost each and every one of you who reached out said, “I know what you’re going through.”

Not alone? Is it possible…?

And The Sadness? It’s still there sometimes. It has its way of taking me out and sending me into recluse mode. Sometimes it morphs into Anger. Or Grief.  Or maybe Fear. Whatever form it takes… It is terrifically uncomfortable, distorting and unnerving. It sits under my skin and makes some non-physical part of me want to crawl out of body and sit across the room in judgment of the fractured and jangled pieces of my psyche/mind.

This narrowing of focus and downward pull of energy always insists that It. Is. Reality. And there is no other truth to be found in its presence. As if the emotional wash and drain is the center point that all 3D experience moves through.

At my lowest point back in January, I remember thinking, “Oh my god. What have I done?  I’ve destroyed my life…”

It literally felt like the misery was hanging off every inch of my body, the thickness of the thoughts looming from the moment I woke up to the last moment before sleep and beyond into my dreams. Constant. Non-stop. Endless. And this suffocating realization that I couldn’t go back to my old way of life.

The way of life where I could blame others for my upset and/or pain? Gone. Being a victim? Gone. Having a hair trigger ready on the ‘f—k you, I’m out’ button? Nope. Gone, baby.

I was cornered with only one option; I was forced to start living and breathing in the tension of uncertainty and doubt, and my spirit demanded full authentic expression of this experience. No denying it. No making it pretty. No hiding it from others out of guilt or shame or fear of ‘not having it together’. I had to go there, see it and listen to all The Sadness had to say.

Answering the call and working with The Sadness turned my consciousness to texts older than me (way older), traditions deeper than my faith (way deeper), paths walked by seekers who came before (way before). I slowly watched pieces of me die, parts and aspects of who I thought I was wither and fall away and after The Sadness came The Clearing and then the New Life slowly rising to fill in the empty space left behind by my own quiet little meaning(less/ful) death. 

That’s what I want to say; The Sadness is overwhelming and the teaching is sharp, but the reward of hanging on and powering through? Breathtaking. There is the other side. In death is new life. Every day. Not a physical death. Something more. The kind of death that reveals the truth of the heart and appetite of the soul. Saying no to one way of life to make room for something that just in its potential is already more than you could ever imagine or receive…

Being in the shit is the golden sign that letting go is the answer, releasing control, giving it all up and giving in to something so much more richer, powerful and graceful. It’s there. Waiting.  

It takes a lot of discipline to let go of control… until it doesn’t. And then it’ll just be onward to the next section of The Path. 

I attend. 

And there was evening, and there was morning…

CB

Robert Montgomery is onto something…

The journey has now picked up an @satyacolombo… Shenanigans have begun. (Taken with instagram)