First name / friend,
I don't know about you, but this summer has felt like an incubator for me. This dance between acceptance and frustration, a true dismantling of myself and a realization that the last 6 months were undermining my relationship to self and my physical body. (for your sake, I hope your summer was better than mine!).
The past 6 months my body has seen a major injury that yes, is improved but not better (waiting for imaging and will not be surprised if it's surgical…), and this shift resulted in an unknown thread of mistrust between my subconscious and my body. Truth: this mistrust went under the radar because this injury led me away from my meditation practice because literally no position was comfortable for more than a few minutes. AND - likely what I needed most during this time was my meditation practice - hey, I'm human too. The snowball effect of this was my long covid worsening, insomnia due to pain, and as I wasn't tending to my nervous system my body was working with some serious inflammation - it's a vicious cycle really….
Summer is typically my favourite season, and this summer was shaping up to have lots of free time to beach and paddle and recharge…enter wildfires, combine with existing stress, enter severe eczema - only on my face, and for the first time in my life. There's a lot to unpack here with immunity shifts due to recent viruses and stress etc - but that's for another conversation… And just like that, summer dismantled. Recharging shifted to indoors and lots of time to get back to meditation and realize that somewhere along the line this year I lost faith in my body's ability to heal.
Let me be clear, I am not sharing this to get sympathy - I have my people and support. I am sharing this to say - no matter how long we have been tending lovingly to ourselves we all fall off track sometimes because of circumstances out of our control. And that's ok. Sometimes we need a season of shift to remind ourselves that we are human and being human is hard and that no one is perfect. The thing is, all this discomfort has reaffirmed why I am here doing what I'm doing and why it's important to go through hard things - it leads to growth.
Change doesn't happen in isolation, it doesn't happen in comfort zones. We need to get uncomfortable to be propelled to change.
And so, if life is comfortable right now - enjoy it, be in the sweetness. And if it's uncomfortable, know that you are in a period of growth. And maybe the reason why isn't clear yet and that's ok. What I know to be true is that when you are in it, FEEL it. Give it space. Breathe into it. Feel free to crumble, to cry, to spiral to wherever it needs you to go. It's through the hardship that we build our resilience, it's in the dark that we grow roots. If life was always easy no one would be motivated to change. We wouldn't have innovation and visionaries. We need the flames to burn down what we think to be true, and the embers to fuel the transformation.
“Within each of us there once was a fire. And for some of us it seems as though there’s only ashes now. But when we dig in the ashes we find one ember and very gently we fan that ember. Blow on it, it gets brighter. And from that ember we rebuild the fire. The only thing that’s important is that ember. That tiny breath of the living spirit."
- Ram Dass
Free Write: What is something that you have been navigating this summer? How does it make you feel? How would you like it to change? What is the lesson you can extract (even if you aren't quite ready to accept it)?
