The next time you notice you’ve turned against yourself, tangled in a looping storyline about how you’ve failed, how you’re not enough, how there is something wrong with you…
Slow way down. Notice your belly and solar plexus. See if you can allow your center of gravity to drop deeper into your pelvis by bending your knees slightly. Direct your energy and awareness toward the ground. Feel your heels, arches and toes touching the earth as though they are hands. Spread your toes like fingers, extending and reaching. Settle over your arches. Your whole body is held and supported by the earth under your feet.
Before you abandon yourself and your embodied vulnerability – parachuting into the unstable waters of rumination, shame, and blame – perhaps you can notice the sensation in your arches as your body balances above the earth below. Can you sense the energetic connection between your body and the earth-body as your toes and heels stabilize in the dirt or sand or grass or mud? Imagine there are roots, tendrils of light, pathways for inhale and exhale . . . your breath moving into and out of your body through the arches of your feet.
Taking just one micro-moment to attend to your self, to care for yourself, to rest, to be held and supported, you can cleanse your perception and encode a new pathway. Bringing your breath in through your arches and up through your legs, pelvis, belly, heart and head, you are able to meet and allow your emotional and somatic world to unfold and be held. Exhaling out through your toes and heels, clearing the tension and resistance from your body and anchoring yourself as the earth receives and burns away the old story.
With the ally of the breath, in and out, notice how this precious life force moving through your body shifts the overwhelming narrative. The old story, old beliefs, old habits are neither nuanced, nor subtle, nor majestic enough to honor what you are and are certainly no match for the intelligence of the breath of the earth as it courses through you.
Open into your belly, your heart, your throat, and the holiness of your nervous system. Place your hand on your body and listen with your fingers as breath enlivens every cell.
Continuing to inhale up through your arches, exhaling down and out through your toes and heels, ask: what is wanting to be met now? To be known? To be birthed and touched in this moment? What is the wisdom of the soul, in its creative unfolding, longing for me to feel and metabolize?
In what way am I being asked to care for the vulnerable, the tender, and the shaky within me?
With curiosity, patience, and mercy, notice the ways you leave the embodied world of pure feeling, bailing on your vulnerability as you escape back into the conditioned, old, unsafe narrative of complaint, resentment, shame, blame, and self-attack.
Then with your next inhale, return home.
While it may seem you are longing for something outside you, in these moments you are only longing for your own presence. For safety where it was unsafe. Companionship where you were lonely. Reassurance where you were afraid.
Breathe. You need yourself now more than ever. This world needs YOU now, more than ever.
