feelings take time
I was born body-mind connected. Curious and instinct-driven about my body in motion from the get go: twirling, skating, hop scotching, tree climbing. Anything that ends in “ing”. Enthralled with body moving through space in relation to gravity. Concurrent with all this whirling dervish activity was incessant, obsessive reading. Anything I could get my hands on, haunting the public library on the regular.
My body and mind literally grew up together, a relationship fostered by communicating parallel perspectives. My heart? Pretty much shut out from this exclusive bond, busy as it was with wrestling its way to safety. My emotional need was to turn down the environmental volume, fly under the radar, disappear as needed. I wonder about the effect of early trauma. Know that for some of us a challenged childhood leads to closing to bodily sensation or to distrust the thinking mind. But such has not been my journey.
I didn’t even know this was my journey until I moved out of my childhood home and began to glean perspective in fits and starts. This last quarter century my heart really started to rattle its rusty cage with a passion. As each corroded jail bar topples, an ever more ferocious heart is revealed. Expansive and demanding expression. The range of emotion at times frustratingly difficult to discern or articulate. A bit late to the party, this heart yearns to join the song body-mind has been humming for decades.
A trio can be a complicated relationship. A bit trickier than duets. How to work as a team? What is alignment really? Gabrielle Roth talked about trizophrenia: our tendency to think one thing, feel something quite at odds with that and then act in a way out of integrity with what we are thinking OR feeling. Alignment happens when body, heart, mind are on the same page.
My heart aches to be included in the lineup and this demands attention. My heart hops on the in breath highway to link up body and mind, offering fuller, fresher notes of harmony. It lights up in wide compassion…for the ache of the world, the suffering of beings near and far. And, just as crucially, with compassion for my own halting capabilities of self-attunement. Feeling takes time; my mind is quieter in a way, as it experiences decreased airtime. That is a good thing.
Join me this week to foster your own form of integration, whether to pay more attention to your precious body, whispers of your heart, or insight simmering on the back burner of your mind. Take a moment for yourself this week.
❤️Bella