at odds

(a note to my client, myself, all of us)

My darling,
You have been at odds with your body for so long.
Effected by cruel messages of culture, shaped by forces of supremacy and oppression, deepened by the wounds of your mother (and your mother’s mother and your mother’s mother’s mother), exponentiated by violation and harm, unaided by the pace and pressure of this modern world…
You have been so at odds with your body.

Being that you are your body, you have been at odds with yourself:
your brilliant, brave, caring, complex self.

You, who were once a sweet baby with the softest skin and brightest eyes. You, who were once a gleeful child rolling down grassy hills, howling with laughter. You who will someday be old and greyed, having witnessed the world change a hundred times, having had your heart wrecked by grief and blasted open by awe. Time and again.
You, who is you now– seeking balance, giving of your love, working tirelessly to make anything in this world better or beautiful or different, finding joy as much in uproarious laughter as in a quiet afternoon. Unique, worthy, and here.

Yet you have been so at odds!

You have resisted sensations, impulses, needs. You have forgotten how to listen to cues of thirst or fatigue, to calls from your soul for connection and delight, to the aching in your center for enoughness, for ease, for love.

And it’s not your fault– not any of it!

What has been imprinted on you, from outside of yourself, has provoked each tinge of numbness, of constriction, of distrust.
Your gorgeous neurobiology has adapted
so that you stay alive.

So of course you’re cut off from sensing how you feel– you’ve experienced extraordinary pain, after all! How brilliant of your system, to respond by shutting down, shutting out.
Of course you are unable to relax, to lay still, to sleep; you’ve experienced such fear, your system has to keep you from facing it again. So you stay rigid and wired and invulnerable!
Of course you are afraid of what you need– touch, support, nurturance, connection– as they are spaces where you have experienced great betrayal. 

It all makes sense. 

This body, this being, this you with which you’ve been so at odds wants to stay safe. To stay whole and intact.

So by reclaiming your right to safe and whole, you are healing. By reclaiming your body and self, by learning and supporting your system, by listening and trusting, by allowing and forgiving, by enacting even tiny moments of kindness and attunement toward yourself, you are healing.
 

You are disempowering the forces that took hold, deconstructing the patterns of survival that formed, repairing the hurt of your wounds, and your mother’s wounds and her mother’s wounds and her mother’s mother’s wounds…

You are returning.
You are renewing.
You are remembering.

xo