By Melinda Glenister
It's been a while since I've been writing publicly. Sometimes the silences in between need a little longer than you planned. Sometimes there is more dust to settle. And sometimes the storm keeps going, nothing settles, and there is no form to hold on to. Sometimes you realise you can let the form go entirely, and gradually something completely new begins to emerge. That process needs it's space. It happens both at glacial speed and lightning fast. Before you know it the world looks different, and you look different to the world.
There have been many before and after watershed moments in my life, and this blog represents one of them. Not one that involves death or relationships.. and yet one that involves both death and relationships. To allow for a rebirth there had to be a death of the old. To find new life I had to redefine my relationship with myself... I'd like to introduce you to Version 457835!
Identity is a fluid thing if we allow it to be. The problem is that many of us get so attached to an identity that we see the world only through that prism, and we are unable to adopt to changing circumstances without kicking and screaming. We get so attached to the identity we cling to that we mistake the identity for us, and so if a belief is challenged we feel we are being challenged. We react defensively, push away the perceived danger and protect our land.
What if we instead actively choose experiences and interactions with the intention to bend and distort the fictional pillars of our duplicate self? What if we build our house with sand with the knowing that soon enough the wind will blow it down?
What if we engage in self-exploration with the purpose of allowing a new version of our self to appear?
Can we hold fast to our identity if everything around us is changing? I do not believe that we can any longer. The massive acceleration of change that is occurring in the world will create an ever more uncomfortable sense of resistance in us if we try to fight the tide. Increasingly, changes in universal energy (see changes is the Schumann Resonance for more) are gently ripping us out of our slumber and delicately stripping away everything that we thought we knew. This creates huge levels of anxiety in us, as emotions (most prominently for most of us- fears) are amplified.
But there is another way, other than digging in our heels and vowing to resist at all costs. Learning to move with the changes and not against them, leads us to a place of flow rather than feeling blocked or frozen.
So how can we turn this around? What do we need to learn from this?
Using our physical body as the perfect mirror of all we experience in ourself through our thinking, perception and emotions, and apparently outside our self through our interactions and relationships, we can begin to accept and embrace change, integrate it, and allow for reinvention gradually dissolving the resistance and knee-jerk reactions which block us and keep us chained to the past.
Inhabiting the body truly becomes an act of presence.
This is my tool, how I work with people- through embodiment. We can look outside ourselves for answers forever and get lost in ever decreasing circles. It will always leave us empty in the end. Learn to read our own body, to listen and to accept the ways in which it speaks to us, and it will guide us towards ever greater unity, harmony and wholeness.
The body can teach us how to allow change, how to ride it, thrive on it, enjoy it even. It can prepare us for whatever we face when we step out of the front door- it is a universal law...
"As within, so without." - The Kybalion
It is our task when we are in times of discord to remember, we do not need to solve whatever is going on in the world that we think we need to have solved. All we need in that moment, when all seems lost, is to remember to look inside not outside. Feel inside, slow down and listen, slow down and find our centre, let the body guide us back to reconnection, to embodiment and to wholeness. By allowing not fighting our experience, through giving space not contracting, we find presence once more, and only from that place can we understand that our experience of the outside world also begins to meld and bend as we allow movement within ourselves.
To learn more about how I work with this please see my workshops, or audio programs, or enquire about forthcoming retreats. You can also work with me one-to-one privately or on skype, or on a consultancy basis.
See next workshop 11-12 March - The Myth of the Core Continues..