Embodied Consciousness Awakening - that is the promise of the Trillium Awakening path. I am so grateful to be about to transition to becoming an interning teacher in that work. Today, on my neighborhood walk with my dog, I reflected on the origin of my journey to emBODIED awakening, not because it was "up" for me but because walking by my neighbor's house started a train of thought.
Pondering the things my neighbor I'll call Carole has told me, I realized not only that she reminds me of my miserable self of 30 years ago, but that my path to awakening arose out of the same physical, body-based misery that she is clearly suffering from.
This was my thought process as I walked my dog past her house this morning: Oh Carole. So many complaints. Physically so much older than your years. In pain and looking for the magic bullet, only relaxed and happy when you are smoking pot. Bitter and resentful, you married quite young and are still with the man. He seems to the neighbors to be all sunshine and smiles but from your account is a negative old coot, in pain all the time and generally a hindrance to anything fun you want to do.
When I first moved here, Carole told me that neighbor Judy doesn't like me, and that the man down the street nobody ever sees had a wife who cheated on him and broke his heart.
Ah. Hmm. What happened to me that kept my story from being the same as hers? What was the very beginning? I remember being envious and bitter of my co-workers who got promoted, the ones who had the nerve to criticize my work. I took offense at everything and of course I could not speak up directly to the "offender"...but boy I could tell everyone else who would listen. I was miserable and from what I could tell everybody else was too.
Remembering.... Louise Hay, the Queen of affirmations! You Can Heal Your Life. ( https://www.healyourlife.com/authors/louise-l-hay ) I was in physical pain and used Louise Hay's affirmations to get relief. And then, to get relief from the emotional pain, I read further...so challenging! Louise was asking me to step up, to get brave. To change.
And around the same time, 12 step programs ... what a whole new way to look at Life! I suppose if I had had access to a substance that "worked" I might still be back there. The food kept me on the rollercoaster and showed up on my body as fat. As a health professional that was too mortifying. That and the general unmanageability of my life kept me in Program for long enough to begin learning a new way of life.
It's been a long story since then. My body has been my teacher even though I really did not consciously know it. As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk says The Body Keeps the Score (see https://www.psychotherapy.net/article/body-keeps-score-van-der-kolk ). Trauma is stored in the body. The body tells us, using pain and illness of all kinds, that the trauma is there. We can listen and use the body's signals as a Doorway to Awakening.
Happy New Year Everyone. May we all LISTEN to what our bodies are saying. This morning's musing is just that -- there is much more to say. Thankfully our bodies don't stop talking no matter how much we wake up and wake down.
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