A breath for these tough times

Sending out extra wishes of Safety & Sanctuary for everyone in the path of the hard things, what a scary time we are in, inhaling and exhaling, for compassion, strength, courage, swift and steady miracles.

Announcement / last chance for Emergency Calming Down Techniques

I’ve been reeling hard lately in some cursed combination of heartache, numbness, political anxiety, winter stuff and some wild panic episodes.

Have been holding on (for dear life) to my Emergency Calm The Hell Down Techniques from a long time ago, and it’s been helping.

I am giving away a copy of these (ebook + audio recordings) to anyone who gives any sum of money to the appreciation funds / discretionary fund in the hopes that we can all keep practicing together, for each other and for the collective, and also for ourselves in these scary times. ❤️

Transcendence abides

Something about a moment

Last week I wrote about a transcendent experience I was fortunate enough to be swept away in — a wordless ninety minute dance in the arms of a former lover, and really so much more than that…

It was beautiful and otherworldly.

Somehow both grounded and dreamy, real and surreal, deeply playful and deeply serious, nostalgic and tantalizing, devastatingly sad while also simultaneously just whole-hearted joy, everything at once.

How is it possible to have an experience so pure, so exhilarating, so correct and so magical all at the same time.

There for it

I felt so alive that I wasn’t even sure it was real, if that makes sense, I know it sounds contradictory.

The whole experience was almost too thrilling to be believed and yet, it happened.

We were there for it and it was there for us; the elusive perfect coda to a long-lost love story, a heartbeat-by-heartbeat close-embrace healing for the hearts.

Impossible to describe, seemingly impossible that it happened

Again, how is any of this possible? I don’t know.

Transcendence is mysterious and fleeting by nature. And yet, there we were.

Right there in it, deliciously and perfectly in it. Held in the embrace of the dance, but also in the embrace and grace of transcendence itself.

I want to keep re-living it in my mind, replaying the magic, but the thing about magic is that it is by nature ephemeral; if it just kept hanging out then it would be something else, probably.

A sequence of monsters

Okay so I received this incredible gift of a perfect goodbye that was also a high-magic moment in time and space, charged up with presence, intention, love and something beyond all of that.

A double-rainbow arch of a moment.

And then, a few days later, I was hit by a heavy sadness, convinced that I would never experience a moment like this again.

It was absolutely, unquestionably, the work of a chorus of monsters, by which I mean: all the internal and internalized voices of doubt and sabotage that poke at us.

Only stale crackers from now on!

This train of thought said that it had, after all, been many years since I’d experienced anything like big magic, and maybe this was the last time!

Or maybe it would take another ten years, if I’m lucky, and everything in between will just be grey, boring, impossibly bland.

My whole life will just be stale crackers. And so on.

I will just be waiting for a moment that doesn’t come, and what’s the point? I got my magic, and now it’s all over.

Some laughter

Laughter is good medicine for monsters, and so I laughed.

Sometimes if I am unable to laugh at my monsters, I share their thoughts with friends who can respond with a string of laughing emojis.

But the idea of Only Stale Crackers Forever is pretty funny all by itself.

I understand why they think this is an option. We did have a long winter clawing our way out of the pits of despair. There have been some times when hope seemed lost.

Reasonable, understandable, legitimate

It is so very reasonable to fear that the memory of the delicious moments will fade, and to feel the anxiety and trepidation related to what if they don’t come back?! That’s all garden-variety scarcity stuff. Understandable.

We practice Acknowledgment & Legitimacy, and we laugh, if we can find the humor in it.

OH NO ONLY STALE CRACKERS FOR ALL TIME? Okay, first of all, I bet we can do something with stale crackers.

But also, we can put them aside and make a killer clafoutis instead if we want to. There are options!

There are options

The magic is not gone forever, and we can appreciate a beautiful reminder about what’s possible without sinking into the despair now that the reminder has passed…

What if there are more reminders to come? Can I invite in more reminders? Can I be the one who reminds myself?

Can I be the keeper of the reminders, the reminder-er?!

Moments fading into moments fading into moments

I went and did more outdoor dancing to try and lift my spirits, and it didn’t work, because even the good dances weren’t transcendent, and nothing compared to the sheer bliss of that impossible reunion.

But a few days later I went dancing again, and this time there were intense, powerful, blissful moments, and dance itself felt like a long-lost lover that had returned to me.

I wanted to share this feeling, and asked an older woman to dance who was sitting on the sidelines. We had a lovely, sweet dance, and I remembered how much I love leading, and while we were dancing, I felt someone smiling warmly from the doorway.

It was my new friend the salsa teacher, who wanted to tell me that my dance partner looked so cared for and happy, and to invite me to a beach day…

Another remarkable gift

On beach day, we hiked through the forest until we arrived at a cliff-edge overlooking the ocean.

The water was impossibly sparkly, swirling around rocks at the shore, rippling out into fractal patterns that seemed to make no sense. We sat inside little nests made from tree roots, and watched.

The air smelled delicious: trees and ocean and peacefulness. We felt high, even though no drugs were involved in this fairyland day.

Suddenly an elaborate sunset began to play out over the water and we realized that what had felt like an hour sitting up in our cliff perch had actually been closer to six or seven hours…

There, again, the magic

We traipsed along the forest trails, winding our way down towards the water, so that we could catch the tail-end of sunset from the beach.

When we reached the sand, we kicked off shoes and danced near the water, until suddenly somehow the sky was dark with a swath of stars overhead.

There it was again, the big magic.

It didn’t take ten more years

Sometimes I think people throw around words like “special” and “magical”, not even knowing what they can mean, or just how transcendent the transcendence can be.

But this was the real deal.

A lesson for my monsters and for any monster crew: they thought I could never experience magic again, or that at the very least, it would take another decade.

But it only took a week. It just so happened that we were the right people to appreciate the right place in the right moment. We were there for it, and it was there for us, whatever it is.

Elements at play

Even as I wonder at and delight in the good fortune of it all, I am also aware that there are elements at play.

RECEPTIVITY is so much of it.

Because that is the main thing, I think, the way everyone involved shows up for it, stays available to it.

Receptivity, playfulness, a willingness to channel joy or to be a channel for that joy.

What else?

Also something about getting quiet. Doing entry. Taking a moment. Taking several moments.

Interestingly, a favorite writer, Etgar Keret, just issued an invitation related to this, in his inimitable way, which made me smile.

It’s hard to make time for transcendence when it’s hard to make time just to take a breath and decompress a little. That’s a practice too.

Also sometimes we have to lower expectations in order to raise possibility.*

Maybe even lower expectations a lot.

*Pausing for an asterisk

The thing about lowering expectations to raise possibility…

My former mentor used to say this, speaking of people I would like to have relational healing with but cannot…

He would say that if you want to raise what is possible, you have to lower your expectations. I have sat with this a lot over the years.

I miss that relationship and it is gone, and the wisdom is there, and the wisdom reminds me of the person I learned it from, even though the relationship can no longer be.

Relational wishing

And this exact flavor heart-pain is partly why that healing dance of forgiveness and love with my former lover was such a big deal, because I need it to ripple out into all waters of all relationships.

Maybe my former mentor isn’t someone I can have a heart-healing with in the sense of both of us showing up for that, but I got to experience it with this other person whom I loved so intensely, and we wordlessly forgave each other for everything and delighted in our big love that was, and that was a miracle.

Do you see? Miracles rippling out in all directions.

Maybe all that was enough. Maybe all that was more than enough…

And while we are adding asterisks to things..

I said the person I had the transcendent dance with last week was a former lover and that’s not not-true, but really it’s so much bigger than that.

The transcendent dance of last week was with a former [person who was and still is important to me in all ways].

And the transcendent dance of this week beneath the stars was with a new friend.

What a beautiful surprise, to be re-surprised.

WHAT IF…

What I am taking from this is a lot of gorgeous What Ifs.

What if, for example…

There are different people (or tree friends or animal friends or majestic spots in the natural world) to share beautiful, meaningful, unlikely moments with, and different forms of these moments to be had!

What if I can stay receptive to transcendence and unattached to form…?!

What if all of this is a heart healing? What if all of this is part of the big, beautiful magic of life?

What am I learning, receiving, taking from this?

Oh right, transcendent moments can (sometimes) be generated.

Or at least, I can actively invite or put myself in the circumstances that might allow for them…

But/and/also: it does mean a lot of patience, a lot of getting quiet, a lot of entry.

And it also means accepting the stale-crackers moments and noticing the monster-choruses, and releasing judgment.

In fact

In fact, if I am taking anything from this, it is the reminder to myself that guilt, shame, self-blame and self-recrimination and other monster-stories really gunk up the machine, so to speak, and I am not going to keep adding them in.

I am going to notice, with sweetness, when I am forgetting to pause. I am going to pause, and breathe, and notice, and inhale life and aliveness.

Hello, beautiful moments and mundane moments. Hello, small miracles, and all of the in-between.

May it be so

May all this be a healing backwards and forwards in time too, echoing out into the beyond.

What completely magical and astonishing place are we going to find ourselves in next!

I can’t wait to find out, whenever it happens.

In the meantime, staying receptive, staying playful, staying with the waves of feeling…

Reaching arms up to the stars by the ocean for all of us.