Wow, isn't life sending us messages all the time!  The blog I wrote yesterday about having a (snotty) cold has vanished into whoknowswhere.  (I am sorry Karen, but your beautiful comment also disappeared with the blog...) 

I guess I wanted to be able to keep you posted and let you know that my day of rest was as healing and restorative as I could have hoped and I am now feeling like myself again.  Which means I am feeling keen to get to work on the Embracing Growth seminar coming up on January 21 and 22. 

Every time I sit down to work on these talks I get to walk the walk.  My own dissonance arises as I feel the vulnerability of exposing myself and this process to others.  Will I be able to to touch people the way my soul calls me to?  Will people leave with a deepened experience of their magnificent richness and complexity?  Will they have a sense, even a small one, of how loving and welcoming is their wise body?   Will they leave feeling a little more worthy of gentle attention in the disomfort of their moment to moment truth?

The challenge is that the process is so simple that it seems as though it should be easy.  It feels almost stupid to ask people to tune into body sensations - what the heck could that possibly do to improve people's quality of life??  Yet I know from hundreds and hundreds of hours of experience that living in that connection to ourselves changes everything.  We move toward what feels difficult and we matter.  And we grow.

Of course I use this process all the time in my work in the office, but that is such a different venue from the public talks.  In therapy we are one on one, and everything I do is specifically taliored to a particular individual, in precise response to what is coming up in that moment for that person.  In the larger group I must make the process more generic while still encouraging everyone to be as focused and precise as possible within themselves.

There is nothing generic about you.  Not when we get close to you.  And that is what we need.  We need to be close to ourselves, to feel the precision and specificity of our unique inner experience. 

We need to feel, really feel, what it feels like to be ourselves.  We need to spend enough time in that experience so we know what it actually feels like in our bodies, and so our bodies know what it feels like to matter in that way. 

This is a two way street.  We listen to the body as the body speaks to us in sensations, and then we mirror that back using words to describe what we are noticing.  We check to see if those words accurately match what the body feels.  We slow down and stay with ourselves.  And we notice. Does the body feel like we really do understand?  Does it register our care?  Does it sense we really do get it?  Does the body feel seen and known in what it actually feels right here and right now?

Slow and precise and patient, being with ourselves in what it feels like to be ourselves, even when it feels uncomfortable.  Even when it feels bad.  Especially then.

And as I write these words for you I see that I write them for me too.  Because I now feel closer to myself in how hard this is for me.  And in the compassion of that, I feel I can get down to my work knowing that the most important thing I can do is genuinely show up and be as connected to myself as possible.  So that I can authentically connect with others. 

Thank you for letting me get here with you.  And thank you to the blog-goddess who knew that I needed to write to you one more time this week.  The lost blog helped me get found. 

 P.S. I seem to have found a draft of the lost blog just as I went to publish this one... Hmmm...

Photo Credit:  D.Beder Photography