I’ve been reading about trauma, in preparation for this workshop and, unsurprisingly, it’s been bringing up a lot of feelings and sensations. One of the worst is the feeling of tightness in my face, behind my eyes and in my sinuses, like there’s something clogged or clenched that won’t go away. This separation from myself. A lot of times I respond to my pain as if it were an enemy, and I close myself off in order to “save” myself from the pain, or at least to be free from experiencing it. But when I do that, the pain doesn’t really stop, it’s like trapped in the space created by closing part of me off and it rattles around and ends up rotting and spreading and the rest of me stagnates.
Some of what I was reading were the quotes on Planting Seeds, which are amazing and wise and full of insight and compassion. And I tried to respond to myself in that way, using the techniques for internal change and spiritual growth I’ve learned through Reclaiming and many other places. And two nights ago I did return, re-connect, go deeper than the pain to that place where I am always strong and whole and Divine. I’m learning that it’s time to let go of the pain and cycles and addictions and illusions. In a way, I hold onto the pain, to the wounds, because they’re familiar, because they’ve been around so long they’ve become part of my identity. But the pain, in a really deep sense, isn’t mine. It isn’t healthy for me to keep it, and it isn’t a burden I need to carry alone. The birds, the wind, the water running through my veins and out of me as urine, the earth that holds me up, the ancestors that watch and love me–all of these will help me to transform. To transform, I need to allow myself to manifest my strength in the world. It is time to do so.
At a class I recently attended, one of my Reclaiming friends spoke about her experiences witnessing people die in hospices (she’s given me permission to write about what she said). She said that the hospice workers told them not to ask questions of those who were actively dying, because it distracted them–dying was something that people had to work to do. She said it was like “unbirthing”, in the way that babies have to work to be born, to come through that difficult, squeezing squeezing squeezing channel into the world. She said it’s the same way when you’re unbirthing parts of yourself or patterns that no longer serve–you can’t just say, okay, I’m done with that, it’s a struggle, it’s a process.
“Unbirthing” is a concept that really resonates with me. And I think it has implications far beyond the personal. As a society, we need to do the work of unbirthing racism. We need to unbirth our denials and compliances, our addiction to control, our (self)-destructive assaults on the living web of the Earth. There is so much we need to unbirth, and we need to do it together, with the deepest and kindest parts of ourselves, parts of each other, parts of the world.
Tags: denial, disconnection, letting go, reconnecting, stepping into my power, unbirthing
