I knew it had been a while since I'd written a blog. But I just looked, and it's been over a year.
Words are powerful. They are one of the best tools at our disposal for creating our lives and our stories. They shape how we receive the world and also how we are received by it. They clue us in to how we feel and where we have been wounded. They shake with our passion and our fears. They ring out with our victories. They connect us and disconnect us.
Sometimes we hide behind them or try and use them to control how others perceive us. When used kindly, they can lead to an unfolding like a flower or the cleansing rain of tears. When used to manipulate or deceive either our own selves or others, they become like a weapon which can cut deep, with no truth to rinse the cut and begin the healing.
Have you ever been through a transformation so deep it felt like being born anew? All the words and stories you were so used to using suddenly weren't right... You shed all your identities like skins and in your new naked, tender, vulnerability it was like learning language and life all over again. In times like that, all you can do is hold yourself close and love yourself back into who you always have been, but fresher, clearer... perhaps more minimalist. And a little closer to your own sweet soul.
To speak preemptively during this period of incubation would be to throw the new baby out into the harsh world, defenseless and soft. Sometimes we need to hold our tongues and allow what wants to be born through us it's gestation before we voice it and watch it being blown around in the wind, from ear to ear.
This last year has been one of deep transformation for me. It's held unexpected news, deaths, miracles of forgiveness, some increasingly deep and rich friendships and the soft disintegration of others. It's held sacred ceremony and work and adventure. It's held successes and failures. It's held mistakes and lies - the biggest mistakes being the lies I tell myself. It's been letting myself be opened again and again by the beauty of this world... no matter how many reasons fear finds to close myself off. In this last year, I began traveling again and I had incredible adventures in India. I also finished a two-year program in Integrative Energetic Medicine. I have had periods of disorientation and confusion, followed by such deep clarity and knowing... only to lose myself again, at a different detour in the road.
And now I rest in the sweetness of seeing how all of these experiences have brought me to deeper levels of compassion, presence, trust, and vulnerable authenticity.
In closing out 2017, I found myself filled with wonder at the very simple truth (and the key to why energy medicine works): that there is almost nothing in this life that, when looked at with a loving and compassionate gaze, won't soften.
Now I'm not talking about the kind of love that is fear in disguise - the kind that wants, that fears losing. No. I'm talking about pure Love. The kind that sits in silence and waits for us to reveal ourselves. With no expectations or agenda. That doesn't see us as we were or as we could be, but sees us right here and now. Exactly as we are. And that sees our beauty, not in spite of our imperfections, but because of them. The kind of love that this life has guided me back to, the kind of love that we each deserve to receive, and that we each are capable of giving. The kind of love that we fear, while we so desperately long for it, too.
To look at the world with that kind of love is at once so simple and yet also one of the most challenging choices we have. So once more so you can really take these words in:
There is nothing in this life that, when looked at with love, won't soften.
I invite you to try it.