Life knows exactly what it's doing.
This last year has been a deep dive into the bottom of the ocean. When I first stepped into the water I thought it would be calm, quiet, and gentle in its rhythmic tides. What I met instead were turbulent waves and heavy walls of water, throwing me around like uprooted kelp. I fought and fought and fought. I swam as hard as I could until I couldn’t anymore. Until, exhaustedly, I submitted; I let my limbs go limp, took my last sip of breath, and I sank down.
It was everything I didn’t know I needed.
This weekend is my birthday, and marks the day I left an old life behind. I remember when I left, I naively thought that pulling myself out of the arms of that relationship would be the hardest step. The biggest threshold.
That turned out to be the easy part.
More and more, recently, I’ve been sitting in reverence for the path I chose to walk. It was dark, and confusing, and unraveled the most tender parts of me. And simultaneously, it was the source of my deepest healing.
I see now that some beauty can only be found by swimming to the very bottom of the ocean. There isn’t a moment I would ask to be rewritten, and I sometimes sit in awe of the way pain can transmute itself into a catalyst for more Love.
There’s been enough time now that the sediment has settled. I see what had to happen in order to become this version of myself, but at the time I fought it. Hard. I wanted to brush it off as “just a breakup” and move swiftly forward, because that's what people do.
I was taking cues from a world that moves quickly; a world set on overdrive that barely takes a breath before it controls, makes, builds, or does the next thing. I felt the insidiousness of the belief that I needed to keep moving or else something was wrong. I was wrong. And I chose that belief over listening to my own body, heart, and soul.
I spent more energy in those first 6 months worrying that I was falling behind than I spent healing. Looking back now I see the contriteness. The absurdity of expecting a human heart to quickly patch itself up in a suitable amount of “time” in order to keep going. But the heart knows no time. The soul does not operate on deadlines.
I was trying to overlay human made constructs on the parts of me that move with the same force that governs the rhythms of tides and the changing of seasons.
And I was caught in this tension. My soul knew what it needed to do. It intently pulled me deeper into the darker parts of the ocean where it could rest, unravel, and dissolve. It had a natural, intelligent process it needed to move through. Like the exquisite way a flower knows when to bloom, or the leaves know when to fall.
On the opposite side, fighting against that impulse, was my mind; conditioned and afraid that I was failing. As if Life didn’t know exactly what it was doing, at exactly the right time.
What would be different if our culture normalized natural ebbs? The times when things are heavy, stagnant, or slow moving. My soul craved to sink below the surface and take its necessary fallow. How would we live if we honoured– even revered– the dying that needs to cyclically occur.
Fields can’t produce nourished crops one season after the next. Neither can the psyche. Expecting them to would be depleting, even extractive, and yet overdoing and forcing has become normal. But if life were a harmonious balance of the Masculine and Feminine Principles– the yin and the yang– there would be both effort and ease. Growth and rest.
I’ve been practicing resting for years and yet there I was, desperately trying to extract the lesson or the teaching in an effort to hurry it all along: can I just get on with it? What can I make out of this? What can I teach from it? How do I biohack this situation so I can get back to producing?
No.
The reality was I wasn't moving anywhere until I fully accepted that was not the point. The point was not to find the fastest mechanism to squeeze out the juice. The point was to ripen.
And that takes time.
It seems the wound is the heart-aching belief that we are separate from Nature; a belief that leaves our souls without a blueprint and our minds in chaos. A belief that somehow we operate outside of her laws and can’t trust her intelligence. This separation is so pervasive it’s written in the dictionary, where the definition of nature excludes humans entirely:
Nature// the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.
So when I look at how I responded to life asking me to surrender, of course I tightened and squeezed.
We have 70 trillion cells that make up the human body. Each of them know exactly what to do to stay alive and regenerate. I sometimes catch my body spontaneously sighing— discharging survival energy— while I’m looking at a sunset or cuddling my dog. It’s wisdom is incredible. And yet, I wasn’t trusting the intelligence of what Life was asking of me.
I began to see the errors in my belief structure.
One of the greatest gifts I’ve received from this past year was the depth of the relationship I built with Mother Nature. She became my support system, my mentor, my guide, my mirror… She was the one I went to when I had hard questions and big emotions.
Reconnecting with her nourished me back toward health. Slowly over time the trust I built with her became a new foundation. I saw that my resistance to what was happening was more dysregulating to my nervous system than the situation itself.
The more time I spent connecting with her the more I began to see myself as a part of this life-death-life cycle.
If I were to go back and talk to that version of myself one year ago, I’d tell her this: you are held. You are loved. You are supported. You are a part of it. And you can trust it.
Let yourself sink.
Because I believe when I meet those thresholds, as edgy as they may seem, I have just landed exactly where Life intended me to land. And if all goes perfectly according to plan, I’ll come out the other side completely transformed, exactly as I was meant to.
My recommendations:
Person: Zach Bush is an MD who’s work focuses on reconnecting people with nature to better facilitate and understand our capacity for healing. The way he speaks of humanity and nature as one has brought me to tears so many times. He articulates things I’ve never found words for.
Podcast: One of my favourite podcast episodes with Zach Bush. I could listen to it 10 times.
Song: A slow, sweet, moody, rich song that makes me put on my headphones and move with my eyes closed and heart open.
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