Writing
While writing the piece “ Healing Trauma Through Our Body ", the original glitched while I was trying to save it and was deleted. Upon other things that happened that day, I couldn’t say I was surprised at the occurrence. I was disappointed because after having writer’s block for nearly 2 years, it was the first thing I was able to produce that resonated with me and felt beautiful. I tried to remain calm and tell myself that the information is still within me. I then found that trying to calm myself down was ironic considering I had just written a piece about allowing ourselves to feel through our experiences, yet I wasn’t letting myself grieve. I knew that once I would be able to rewrite the piece, it would no longer feel like that big of a deal. But, I don’t get to skip an essential part of the process as if how I will feel later on is how I feel right now. So I began to cry tears not even related to this topic at all, tears that were filled with all the times I’ve tried to skip a process I didn’t deem important. Earlier that month I had realized a similar lesson: I felt extremely disappointed regarding issues around my health. Some things from my negligence in adolescence began to arise in my 20’s. Despite starting to take my health seriously years ago, I couldn’t outrun the consequences of my early neglect. I kept wondering what I could have done to prevent this, asking why I was still being punished when I already made a promise to take care of my health. Wasn’t that my lesson? To not take advantage of this body? In the midst of my confusion, I meditated. In this meditation I was reminded that punishment and consequence are not the same thing. Punishment is socially constructed, but consequence is a lesson of responsibility and karma. Nothing that is not our responsibility will ever be chasing us. So I tried to understand what my responsibility outside of taking care of myself was, in this situation. I realized that just because I didn’t have enough guidance to tell me the importance of my health or just because it wasn’t my fault that as a kid I didn’t know better, didn’t mean I was exempt from having to confront it. Just because something isn’t my fault, doesn’t mean I’m not responsible for it. I realized then, that the issue I had to resolve was that I’m always trying to undo the mistakes I make, instead of accepting my consequences and striving to move forward. I was always living in some form of denial and everyday just became a day to make up for the past. There is no way to live in the present moment, if everything I ever do is to undo something else. I learned my reluctance to accept reality and that I was always trying to bargain with the Universe instead of deal with what I’ve caused. Trying to be like “if I promise to do this from now on, can you make this situation go away?” which is less of a prayer and more of trying to escape my consequences because for so long I couldn’t distinguish that from punishment. All this time I had been an escapist, weak-willed and it was in this instance I decided that I wanted to change. I want to learn to move forward, not necessarily without fear or disappointment, but with courage and the will to become better. So the Universe brought this lesson to me again and asked me how much I really wanted to change. So I cried and grieved for a piece of writing, among other things I couldn’t recall in the moment, but I could feel coming from somewhere within me and so I tried to write again. But everything I wrote felt like a watered down version of everything I had said before and all I was doing was failing to remember everything I had lost. So I tried again the next day and the next week and a few times after that and nothing I wrote felt as good as the first one. And I suppose that is a lesson of grief too. I was never able to produce something I was as proud of again and I can’t differentiate if that’s because I grew a romanticized version of my piece through the process of grieving or if that’s just simply what it was. When trying to understand what writing that piece meant to me, I thought about the inability to share it with those who may have resonated but also feeling like I may be perceived as less than I’m able to show up as. So maybe learning acceptance is a greater gift for me than an accomplishment.
I found myself always asking the Universe for validation or confirmation that my actions were “correct” or if they were supporting my highest potential. I would often ask if I was learning my life lessons the right way or handling situations correctly-- if I was doing this right. I realized then, in the middle of what at the time felt like a prayer, that this wasn’t about the Universe. I realized that this isn’t a battle of learning the Universe’s desires, but a battle to understand my own. If we are part of the Universe then answering to our highest form of self is answering to the Universe. There’s a Universe within us that seeks to be answered. Seeking confirmation of our actions is to admit we don’t fully trust our choices and I was always looking toward the sky for a totem or numbers that could lead me to feeling like I was in sync with a fate greater than myself, not understanding that there is nothing greater than the self. Ahh, so it is then, that what I was seeking was a feeling. Seeking to find guidance in the Universe that already existed within me. It’s not me and the Universe, it’s just me. Because I am the Universe. I don’t need the Universe to not be alone, because I’m not, I’ve never been. Answering to my highest potential, my highest calling and continuing to grow into something more than that, is the journey of answering every question I’ve ever had. The Universe will not start a war with me unless I’ve lost sight of myself and even then the war is between myself and me losing my path. The Universe will never start a war against me that I don’t start myself. So am I doing this correctly? Yes. Because I’m always striving to. The battle isn’t, “by doing this am I answering to the Universe’s desires”? The Universe does not have desires, humans do. While humans are the Universe, the Universe is not human. So life then is about passing the lessons we have set for ourselves. The Universe was never the one who set up the lessons in the first place. Life is a game we create with every choice we make. The Universe is just the board we play on. It’s not “if I have self-control the Universe will forgive me or reward me”. It’s “if I have self-control then I will learn to beat my addiction to pleasure”. It’s a game that tests our own will to evolve. It’s not about seeking the Universe’s forgiveness or the Universe’s rewards, but our own. It’s a game of passing the tests we created ourselves, in order to test our own potential against the greatest version of ourselves-- to become exactly that. The game of life is not to become god or we wouldn’t be born to a human existence. If we really did strive and achieve enlightenment, we would simply just transcend and leave behind our earthly bodies. The game of our life is whatever we create for ourselves and only we know how to beat our own creation and pass the lessons we have set up for ourselves. We’re all playing in our own game, but each person’s potential to clear it benefits every single player because by fulfilling our individual purpose, we contribute to the purpose of all. We are whole all on our own, but we are not complete without each other. So we must recognize that we are whole, before we can understand what it is to be complete. We can’t win by controlling or manipulating another because we have no way of knowing what their game requires. We have no responsibility over their creation, we can simply only support it by recognizing the purpose of our creations. To focus on another person’s game is to abandon our own. To continue to grow and expand our understanding of our personal creation, our life, through the choices we make, is to support everyone else’s journey of clearing their lessons through their own will to achieve it.
When asking the question: "What does it mean to be alive?" Our response may be to experience the world, or to breathe, or to fulfill our desires, but I have come to learn that the most important aspect of being alive is this body. This may seem simple, probably obvious that the body is what keeps us alive, but our body is alive-- our body is life. Without this body, there is no world to experience, no breath, no desires to fulfill. Our body has a function to heal and restore so that we have the capacity to live our daily lives to our highest potential. The limit of that potential differs from person to person depending on their individual circumstances. I remember once leaving an acupuncture appointment reminded that the body’s natural state is calm, relaxed, and at ease. I remember a feeling of awe wash over me as I thought about how we have normalized being accustomed to feeling unsafe or in constant fight or flight, to the point that I couldn’t realize my body’s way of trying to communicate to me about the state of my health, whether that be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. Our body is always communicating with us, it shakes while doing difficult exercises, shivers when it’s cold, backs away from someone or a situation that makes us uncomfortable before we can even realize we are. These subtle notions are our body’s will to survive and its response to being alive. Our body remembers our past and responds to situations in accordance to those memories. Our body may not be able to recall the events of a particular situation but it will respond based on the emotions we’ve associated with them. When we're up at 3am embarrassed or ashamed about something that happened in middle school, what we're experiencing is our mind's ability to manipulate a situation to match the emotions we associate with that memory. Oftentimes, our memory is faulty. We’re not actually recalling what occurred at that event, but what supports our feelings about it. We continue to carry that event with us because we continue to carry the emotions associated with it. If the same thing that happened in middle school were to happen now, it most likely wouldn’t lead to a shameful or embarrassing memory. This is because we grow, learn, and mature. So what seemed like the most difficult lesson for us at one point of our lives, a few years down the line probably won’t hold the same difficulty. What does not change, is the feelings we associate with it and the only way to release those feelings is to face them and release them. So, if we change the feeling associated with that memory, the memory itself has the potential to change. Our body is what stores our emotions or "energy in emotion" and when those emotions are suppressed or not felt through, when that energy is not longer in motion, they become stagnant and can manifest into physical problems or repeated cycles because our body can’t differentiate that the feeling it’s experiencing isn’t happening in reality, but simply a memory of a feeling that hasn’t been released. A key to understanding ourselves is understanding our body. Grounding into our experience and tuning into the language of our body allows us to access parts of ourselves that cannot be manipulated through thought alone. This is why when we slow our body down enough that our emotional baggage becomes obvious, a response may be to find a distraction, at least until our body has some form of a breakdown and cannot be ignored any longer. Addressing our body’s desire to heal through learning its communication patterns, supports our needs on a physical and emotional level, aiding our ability to address our trauma. Our body, the vessel that supports us on a biological, emotional level may need healing, but we are simply experiencing life through ways of growth. The body may heal, but the human grows. To need healing means that we have wounds that require our care and attention. To identify with healing can become an attachment to our wounds, subconsciously making it difficult to actually find supportive ways to let go of what no longer supports us. We may have wounds, but to be attached to associating as a wounded individual can be halt to the process of healing itself. Our journey with understanding our health and wellness is about figuring out our personal relationship to balance and what that looks like for us. Our environment, diet, the social circles we surround ourselves in, our focus on our basic needs: rest, care, nutrition, shelter are always teetering on a scale. We are constantly evolving and changing, and our body adapts to those changes. What resonates with us now, may not in a matter of time so adjusting to what restoration and balance looks like at the time is how we can properly care for the life we are living.