Everything You Buried was a Seed*
Friends, hello.
Here is this amazing song by Bob Sima with the best words. Check it out:
~~~
Living my life as a victim was exhausting.
Energy-draining, life-draining, soul-draining exhausting.
Being a childhood and young-to-mid-adult stutterer, I felt suffocatingly impotent. There was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do to show up differently, to talk differently. Life was clearly doing it to me. As a child, one possible response was to not talk. Keeping away from people made total sense, hence the birth of my Lone Wolf-ness.
My loneliness was so dense; my isolation absolutely insulated me from others, which made everything one-trillion-times worse.
This might sound a tad depressing, but/and, it has a happy ending. It truly does.
There were a billion/per/day words I had to say, damn it. To list just a few:
Hello
(answering the phone kicked my butt)
Is Gladys there?
(asking for my best friend on the phone, I couldn’t safely say Gladys)
Every vocabulary word
(going up and down the rows in Spanish class, dying a thousand deaths as I waited and counted words & people)
Scranton
(saying the name of my hometown)
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Of course, I always wanted to be “a writer”, where ultimate freedom existed, where I could say absolutely anything, any sound, any combination of sounds—I could say anything when I wrote. It was beyond liberating.
As I got older, I became masterful at synonyms, at creating other ways of saying things, if there was any contextual wiggle room. I learned to think ahead, to ponder what might be coming my way, and, over the years, the strength of my synonym-izing blossomed into my super-power.
I don’t know how it happened. Getting sober was huge in this realm. At meetings, I would have to introduce myself to announce my sober time. Terrifying. And I did it. I felt it. And I would read aloud from the book when it was my time, dying a thousand deaths. And I did it.
Over time, things began to change.
I’m not clear how my super-power was born.
Out of the daily trauma? Outliving the trauma?
Out of the feelings of terror, outliving those feelings?
(OH, important point, I was a kid in the 50’s. My parents were told by the doctors to “Not pay attention to IT.” To my stuttering. Great idea. Only issue? Every time I opened my mouth, I busted our collective family denial.)
Out of the trauma, my super-power was born.
Post-traumatic stress becomes post-traumatic-growth
My voice is my strength, my teaching, my writing, my ways of putting words together—out of the ongoing trauma emerged the doorway to Grace, the doorway to healing.
Then I came to Kripalu. Here I learned that all of it, all the things I tried to control, all the feelings I pushed away, were coming to heal me.
They are coming to heal me. They are not coming to hurt me.
The feelings we push away,
The situations we ignore,
They are coming to heal us.
They are not coming to hurt us.
It is not new feelings, new fear, new anxiety filling us up.
On the path of transformation, moving feelings through the body/mind creates detoxification, purification.
It is the release of old feelings.
That is healing.
That is freedom.
~~~
Folks, what about you? What ancient feelings do you run from? Do they reveal themselves in your life anyway? Do shame and guilt keep you stuck in their endless loops?
What is your super-power? How was it created within you?
~~~
Dear Folks,
We practice.
We just practice.
Let’s pray for our practices.
Give us the courage,
Give us the strength,
To keep showing up,
To keep noticing
Just—
To keep noticing.
When we are able.
When we are not able,
May we rest in our own kindness,
The doorway back to wholeness,
The doorway back
To renewed practice.
May all beings benefit from our time together.
Blessings, all—
Aruni
~~~
*Everything You Buried was a Seed
title and song written by Bob Sima