(Originally published 2016 Luminous Life Maps, Edited February 2021)
How would it be to fully inhabit your body? To get into your body and fill out your experience of your body being… so you can listen, respond, and choose from your awakened embodied self.
What might happen as you get IN there? It’s a powerful place…your BodySpirit. You might learn to see, feel and trust your direct experience and knowing as the primary source of your wisdom. As your primary connection to ALL that you are…to the Spirit of you. As compared to the culturally endorsed masculine principle’s thinking, strategizing, anticipating every possible outcome and the imagined solution. Or the painful over thinking, second guessing, anxious-not-trusting and restricted risk taking these habits of mind can bring.
What if you drop IN, with breath down into your pelvis. If you soften your belly and feel into the feminine in your body…the sensory yumminess, breathing into the fluidness of you in this body. What if you stop bracing against this body? If you begin to let go the internalized negative and distorted images and story about your female body? Let loose the diminishing stories held in your body, about your body, let them unravel to find a deeper truth. What might happen if you unwound the lies that hold you small, hold you separate….what if you allowed the awakening of your instinctual wisdom, your potent power and enduring love? I wonder…what might happen next?
Whoo, I feel a rising up in me…I feel the swell of the ages of women who knew…women who knew the power of trusting themselves and the natural world, who worked with the rhythms, the remedies, the rites of life and time. These women, instinctual, potent, enduring…these women are US. We carry these women in our bones, in our blood, bodies and beings. We are these women…muted by modern life. We are these women…numbed by the unnatural rhythm of 9-5, the never-intended living solo with children and chores and details of making a life. Quieted by ‘too big’ hips, ‘too full’ bellies or too-skinny-taunts.. at first heard from outside us and over time echoed within us, becoming our own abuser. These undermining stories we tell ourself that quiet the rise of our righteous embodied power we need NOW.
We can awaken this wholly inhabited woman within. We can connect with her juice, her outrage, her grief. We can re-member her within us, pull her out and back together again. Through this body…following the simple invitation… to focus inward, on this BodySpirit, curious, hunting for the impulse, the feelings, the stirring of movement and emotion…and following that…that right there…follow that and notice. Waiting, full of our own attention. Whats next, and next, and next in this moving, feeling, alive body…we practice gathering all this. Gather and ground and build your capacity to witness the jewel emerging. The jewel of YOU, quietly waiting for your return. Right there she has been. Waiting for you to tire of distractions and feel the pull of something deeper in you, something more…calling you home to the treasure of YOU. Welcome home I hear, welcome home. I wonder…now, what magic might happen next as I bring her fully embodied to my every day life?
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