🌑 This Bridge Called My Bliss
Hi friends,
I hope you’re all doing well in these last days of August. Frederic and I are savoring the end of summer on the east coast, currently visiting my auntie
Salem at her home in Martha’s Vineyard. This new moon musing is infused with slowness and sea air.
A new project has been brewing within me for quite a long while. Of course, my health challenges this past year have made it impossible to follow through. But, recently, I felt a surge of creative energy and convinced myself I could have it ready later in the fall. That is, until Monday, when I was driving up to see my sister at Camphill Village. I spent much of the three hour ride contemplating this online course I long to offer. Close to my destination, I noticed a familiar felt–sense in my body. I can best describe it as “leaning forward.”
Not a bodily leaning, though a handful of times I’ve noticed this feeling manifest as a slight angling of my posture in meditation (signifying me trying to get deeper). But underlying those physical experiences was an energetic leaning forward. That’s what I was experiencing on the drive. This energy can be very situationally intense, like when I was writing my book, nearing deadlines, straining to finish chapters. But for as long as I can remember, it has been the general pattern of my life — I push ahead with a constant sense (sometimes subtle, often hella strong) that I need to do more. More working, more sitting, more studying, more serving, more retreating, more giving, more chanting, more healing, more reading, more creating, more earning, more meditating, more, more, more…
Yes, this is a common tendency for many of us — trained into us by parents and communities and schools and jobs and social systems that insist on competition and financial systems that push scarcity and spiritual systems that promote striving and pseudo-feminist corporate manifestos... It has us measure our worth primarily through productivity even if that production is actually consumption and, most bizarrely of all, even when the “productivity” is actually about doing nothing.
People are (slightly) more aware of it now, but in my years of coaching people, it was definitely the most common unconscious pattern I came across. Reading
Jessica Dore‘s weekly newsletter on tarot & psychotherapy a few weeks ago, I was struck by this quote from the Spanish social psychologist and Jesuit priest Martín-Baró:
the healing power of any psychotherapeutic method depends on the dosage of its break with the dominant culture.
I don’t think I’ve ever written about it as “leaning forward” or maybe even
felt it so strongly as such before, but this is a pattern I’ve long tracked in myself and tried to understand and write about and undo. All of which has paid off. I generally am not tilting ahead nearly as much. AND, the leaning forward this week surprised me. It was jarring not because I believe I am completely free of it (or any of my other patterns), but because I was so far in before I caught it. I had already: plotted the timeline, collected resources (many stacks of books), started mapping the curriculum (lots and lots of colored note cards), signed up for course software tutorials, reached out to collaborators, rented a space, roped Frederic in to shooting it… I would have spent the next four months deep in hyper-productivity mode. Leaning WAY forward. I’m sure
my back would have started to ache from the misalignment.
Y’all, I really thought I was going to produce and deliver a complex course for you in the next four months (and drop a hint today - ha!). Even though I have other commitments this fall (including work travel). Even though I promised myself I would not push myself like this again. Even though I am practicing pacing things much more slowly. Even though I long to center beauty and bliss in everything I do… Sigh.
I have a Virgo moon in my tenth house. It's actually pretty perfect for supporting the creation of an online course! Also, for learning from mistakes!! I thought this new moon (in Virgo 😂) was at 4:17pm. It was at 4:17 a.m. [Frederic’s response: Why don’t you people use 24 hour time?! He IS a Virgo rising, my Danish/Italian sweetie.]
I will share an online course with you one day. I am allowing other (gentler… on me) offering ideas to percolate in the meantime. I am leaning way back. And I’ll meet you here on the next full moon. Or, hours later.
With much love,
Sebene
