Happy October. I hope this message finds you with ease.
This year has brought me to my knees cyclically. Sometimes in grief and often in gratitude. Through returning to the quiet where my knees anchor into the ground and my forehead touches the floor, I found a rhythm that feels true for me in this season. A season of forgetting and remembering. Reaching for discernment and falling short. Sitting with resistance and then, sitting some more.
The voices out there are pulling me to be less human. Even creating humanness out of machines that feel grey and lifeless. And then I push again, towards the ground, encircling a trunk, rubbing soil between my fingertips. I want more of this. I want more tears. I want to sit in the solitude that is necessary for cosmic leaps. I want to yearn with all creation seeking oneness.
I want to sit with your heart and hear your song whisper underneath the limits of language.
The tv shows, social media, the consumption, the noise, it’s not enough to satisfy. Without judgement, I’m seeking humanness and also, my soul and heart know a transcendence that is not fully realized in this body form.
I spent 7 days on a soil generative farm in July and it changed my entire life. I sat with the cabbages and wept. I thought about our original wounding being separated from oneness. That all the noise is clobbering us with more separateness. I sat with other hearts seeking the same. I allowed myself to be witnessed by Creator and felt a deep compassion wash over me.
And, since I left the farm, I’m in a daily practice to return. Not to the place, but to the state. This place of Self within me. Self is not a destination. Self is not about feeling great all the time. It’s the simple act of giving yourself an extra moment to return to what your heart already knows.
It’s a striving to being with what is, the parts of us that speak the coordinates of our human location, and to even still, remember our inherit sacredness.
That’s where the grit and tenacity feel alive for me. The returning invites some pluckiness, gumption, fortitude, and belief that you are worthy to strive. The softening of judgement that is all too eager to point all the ways you didn’t get there, out of duty or a well-worn path. And this judgement, resistance, or contrast, is part of it. The heat that allows for new life burgeon.
So I have found, it is about returning again and again. Primarily to see what my internal landscape is currently presenting. And through this attention, hope is most accurately planted, reflective of the context and conditions of the ecosystem it inhabits.
Here are my specific Returning practices. This is not prescription. Just what I’ve learned is working for me in this season.
- Wake up 20-30 minutes before my children to breath into my heart and be witnessed by Creator
- Listening to something grounding (here is what I’ve been listening to that’s connected to my spiritual tradition- salawat)
- See green daily
- Dhikr or remembrance chanting throughout my day
- Prayer
- Water, Protein early in the morning, etc.
- Mindful of transition, less multiple tasking, more presence
- Blocking apps from my phone from 5 am-9pm
- Soul to Soul conversation with like-minded hearts. CHJL’s community is a center for this.
Will you join us?
What are your practices?
With love,
sarah
Co-director, Lead Trainer | CHJL
