BodyGateways… Centre for Women in the Healing Arts

Muscle and Bone

Very recently, I met up with a small group of women, whom I had invited for conversation, intended, as in everything that I now create, to evolve mySelf… for my own sake. By fully sharing the truth of my experience, in each moment, with them, I know that we all become more. These are no ordinary discussions…

One of the women present shared a great metaphor about driving alone on a country road in dark (night-time), cold and blizzard-like conditions. Her car battery ran out of juice and she was not carrying any jumper cables in her car. Seeing a light from a house, up ahead, she removed herself from her vehicle and started to walk toward the light for assistance. As she trudged through the snow, she started running this dialogue through her mind… ‘What if no one is there? What if they won’t open the door to me? What if they refuse to help me? They probably don’t have jumper cables. They aren’t going to help a stranger. They won’t leave the house in this blizzard’…. and so on and so on. The distance to the house was longer than it had initially seemed, so she had created ample time to mindlessly magnetize her internal dialogue to income of more of the same. In due time, she arrived at the lit-up house and knocked on its front door. When the occupant opened the front door, smiled and warmly asked, ‘How can I help you’, the woman, frowning, growled, ‘I don’t want your jumper cables, anyway’.

Oh, the stories that we make up in our heads about our lives! We may hate our present experience, yet we continue to mindlessly project it’s quality into our futures… even the ones that are only 5 seconds out. While the woman’s story garnered a good laugh from the group, it drives home a point… that each one of us, in every breath, and awake, can choose to jump-start our experience of life, in full resource to ourSelves – instead of against what we intend (i.e. finding a jump-start) for ourSelves … and we can consciously choose to think our lives the way that we want them to be, in full support of our beingness.

We are manifesting individual reality all of the time. Stuff happens; batteries lose their juice; we get caught up in occurrences that we do not expect and that we find untimely and inappropriate. We feel scared and we feel angry. We get pissy about the things that, when considered after the fact, seem, rather, like life-rejuvenating adventures of sorts. And we make up our own stories about all of it. Since we are making up our life stories all of the time, I get that what I make up is either going to support me in manifesting what I say that I want… or not. What I say that I want may not be matched by a state of being that is actually supporting the creation of an opposite reality. What I say that I want may be not what I want at all. And only my body, whose soma holds the deep and undeniable truth of my experience, knows for sure. Without my claim to that truth, I’ll always be mindlessly at affect to my story as my creation, instead of being awakened creator of my own experience. I’ll be reporting on the weather instead of being the weather, mySelf. One is the story and one is the experience. One is disasscociated and one is associated. One is dead and one is alive.

Think about it. If you are experiencing – yet, so often, denying – the emotional charges/triggers you feel as counter-intuitive to what you say that you really want, then take a breath, and choose differently. The nature of your desire is the bone/skeleton/framework of your life as creative force; bones only stay aligned in the presence of fully oxygenated muscles, aerating to that desire. No oxygen, then muscles shorten, tighten and cramp…. causing bone to move…. and to push/pull associated nerves. That experience can show up, in physical space and time, as highly painful; that pain, as its own manifestation, is information in flow/not in flow. The only way to Self-align/re-align bone, is to relax muscle… the only way to relax muscle is to breathe… and no one can do that for me, except me… like no one can do that for you, except you. Choosing to consciously breathe is all that it takes – in full ownership of one’s truth, like it or not – to live meaningfully. If you do not know what you want, then, at least, own that! It’s a great start to claiming the more that you are and can become. A life-time of not owning – by denying – my own experience of cramping mySelf into small ‘spaces’ where inhale for expansion was not possible and exhale as sonic was dangerous, has made me expert in this.

The danger to our healthful states of being lies in believing and holding onto our stories as if they are our lives; in truth, because stories are not our lives, they are irrelevant. What is more important to our personal emancipation for well-being is to own our experience of the sensory cues that we feel in our bodies, of the energetic signatures that are anchored to notions of would-be stories and to let those would-be stories dissolve, as the illusions that they are. To insist that they are real only serves to collapse space in all systems, right down to the cell, denying the very movement and flow that is intrinsic to our human evolution.

What I resist, persists. Energy flows where attention goes. And, then, there is intention and attention. As, in the metaphor of moving toward cables to jump-start the car, then denying their existence in the face of not that, when is attention incongruent with my declared intention? And, when the ‘pain’ becomes ‘down and dirty’, does the story get that way, too? I mean, is there really a story to tell, before I choose to start penning a reality around the experience of my ‘pain’ in the moment. Go figure. This is how we make ourSelves crazy. Most of us have heard the definition of insanity: continuing to repeat the same strategies, all the while looking for a different result. Here, on the other hand, is my definition of sanity: no story!

Attention supports (or not) intention. Muscle supports (or not) bone. The genius, in all of this, is that not support is still support. I guess for me, it is about really considering the nature of support. When is support, support? When is support, brace? The distinction for me is that support needs no story, while brace, on the other hand, pre-supposes and demands story, any story you like, for its containment. Am I supporting mySelf in and for mySelf or am I bracing mySelf against mySelf? It plays itself out in the body as the final frontier… just ask anyone who has lived with chronic back pain… awake to this, I know that they can know the difference… asleep, it will always be the story about their pain/not pain and not about the truth of their experience of Self as painful/painless.

Own what your feel in your body; quit the story about it; take a breath – a generous inhale and an even more generous exhale; and move on. Story, like matter de-constructing itself in the force of accelerating wind, cannot, itself, live in the force of an awakened breath. Content, domained in our voracious intellect – and the god of the culture – is irrelevant. Context and process – as personal and unique – are everything; as such, they define individual experience… domained in the body.

We are our own Jump-Start! Jump the story – Start the breath.

Consider Women Gathering,December 5, 2009 and Women Awakening, November 18, 2009 – both in Kanata, Ontario – RSVP Sheila @ 613-292-4562 or [email protected].