Shedding Skin

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A year or so ago, I had a dream.

I dreamed I was standing in a grove of wide-branched, thick-leafed trees. It was nighttime. Between the dark of night and the thick of the trees, I stood in darkness. No moonlight or starlight made its way through to my eyes. The darkness was deep, yet not at all frightening. Rather, it seemed to hold me in a kind of embrace not possible in daylight. Perhaps in the darkness all is allowed to simply be what it is. Perhaps.

As I stood in this darkness, my eyes fell to the ground and I saw that I was standing amidst a sea of white snakeskins. They were scattered all around me. The whiteness of the skin was seemingly brilliantly white against the beautiful darkness all around me.

I’m normally afraid of snakes – an old phobia that’s gotten much better through my life, yet still remains to a lesser degree. But, as I gazed upon the skins, I felt no fear even though I wondered where all the snakes were.

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Just this past month, I co-facilitated a retreat at Feathered Pipe Ranch called Waking the Inner Teacher. One of my co-facilitators was Michael Lennox, an expert in dreams. I shared the dream with him and in response Michael suggested I see the skins as coming from one snake, and that this one snake was me. I was the snake shedding all these beautiful white skins, and I was doing so by coming to trust in the darkest of the dark places within.

Over these past few months, especially since returning from my time in Montana, I’ve been in the throes of another shedding. I don’t really know exactly how snakes shed their skins, but I sense it isn’t an entirely comfortable process. I know the shedding I’ve been going through hasn’t been comfortable or easy. Yet, something deep in the soul pushes and prods – gropes to find its way through the darkness out into the light.

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I’ve written about The Project, how we all have one, and how when we take it off and set it down, we can breathe in a way we’ve never breathed before, and we feel a kind of freedom we’ve longed for. The Project is made up of all the beliefs you’ve taken on about who you are supposed to be, how you are supposed to live and look, even what work you are supposed to do in the world in order to be successful and conform to familial and cultural expectations.

I liken The Project to those protective aprons the dentist places on you when you have X-rays. It’s heavy and protective against rays being projected onto you, and when they take it off, you feel light again.

As I shed what feels like a deep layer of old outworn identity, I feel this lightness, and a kind of joy. It feels simple. It feels unencumbered by the heaviness I’ve carried around me almost all of my life. I now see why that heaviness was there. Like the X-ray apron, this heaviness was a form of protection, but it was also a reflection of the world in which I was raised. I’ve seen how I took on the look and feel of the world in which I grew up, thinking that’s what the whole world was like – because as a little one, that was my whole world. I was a child of the late-fifties and sixties and there was a lot of heaviness not only in my family but in the world at large.

So much of the hard and stern ways of the structure we live in were actively engaged during those times, ways we are seeing pronounced today in the rigidity of our political and corporate structures. Conditioned masculine and feminine ways of being kept, and keep, many people trapped in suffocating gender roles.

Children are very impressionable and the daily impressions of their world become set in the psyche as the way things are…until the soul pushes and wriggles and finds its way out of those old impressions. This is what I’ve come to see so clearly over the last few weeks. And even though I knew this intellectually for a long time, until I could be with everything that was stored in my body – impressions, emotions, events, beliefs, energies – and allow them to be revealed and move in the ways they needed to in order to be free, I couldn’t come to know this new skin. Or maybe it’s more an original skin that was covered up. It feels that way.

The playfulness and lightness that are here feel pure and innocent, while at the same time there is a new sense of maturity, a sense that holds a kind of responsibility that feels right and good.

This new and supple skin seems to delight in the simple (yet entirely magical and mysterious) experience of being alive.

While dancing last night, I was taken by a sense of awe at the ability my body has to move in the ways it does, by the way small white lights looked lining the walls of the room we danced in, and by the way each of us dancing seemed to find our own unique movement and expression while listening to the same music. All very simple everyday things lit brightly by eyes that have been opened to the blessing that it is to be here, alive, in this body.

I know that the whole world is in a big transition. Both our individual and our collective skins are being shed and its not at all comfortable. But something in us knows we’ve outgrown this old way of seeing the world through eyes of separation, distrust, and sternness. Much of our societal tendencies reflect a belief that play and pleasure, softness and compassion, creativity and giving, are weak values to live. Yet, these very places of tenderness that we’ve tried to protect by hanging onto our old skins are what we must embrace again if we are to know our wholeness and humanness, and we are to truly understand (even the slightest bit) the gift it is to be human and to live our lives as an offering to life itself.

We women hold a way of being the world hungers for. It is what we are when we stop trying to be what we are not. We are not men.Our bodies hold offerings we must now live if we are to survive as a species.

 

Photo : AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by rustman on Flickr

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Awake and Alive with Celebration and Ceremony

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Despacho Ceremony

I arrived home last night after just over two weeks of travel. Not the longest period of time to be away; yet, somehow

The feeling of coming home was wonderful. Even though I was away experiencing wonderful, beautiful, life-changing things, I needed to come home…come deeply home. I mean this both literally and metaphorically, and the two are intertwined.it felt like I’d been gone a long time.

When I walked in the door, I realized just how much the last two weeks had transformed me and my relationship to home. I felt more home than I ever have, and it’s no accident that this comes from profoundly shifting my relationship to the earth and to life.

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I was lucky to spend time on the land in both Alaska and Montana, and I experienced both places as very different in feeling. But, what shifted was how I relate to the land. This relationship has been shifting over time; yet, beginning a practice of active contemplation and prayer to the land, to pachamama, and witnessing how she responds has softened me to what it means to be alive.

During the five days of reatreat at Feathered Pipe, which I co-led with Michael Lennox and Karen Chrappa, the land wove its medicine deep into my bones. From the moment I was asked to come teach, the land began to call. I heard it. I trusted what I knew. I didn’t know how things would unfold, but I could tell the land was calling.

When I arrived at Feathered Pipe, I could feel the softness of the land, and I could feel myself settle into its embrace. I could feel the earth’s open arms.

Over our time there, we held beautiful ceremonies that helped us learn how to weave our love and prayers into the land. I moved from a knowing of earth’s sacredness to an active remembrance of her sacredness, to an active and whole-hearted thank you to Pachamama for everything she gives so graciously, so readily, and with such love.

Remembrance and voice, woven together, weave us into the land. Karen Chrappa guided me to come to know this, how deeply we are loved by the earth, how each of us is her child and how alive this relationship is. When we remember this, and when we actively engage in this relationship, when we are truly grateful for what is given, coming to see through the lies of entitlement and privilege, we begin to hear and see and feel and know that the beauty of the earth is the very same beauty in ourselves.

It can feel like a stretch to consider that the earth is alive and has a soul…yet, it is so. While it can feel easier to know this and feel this when we are out somewhere in nature, like I was in Montana, our task, our very important task, is to come to know this deep connection to our true home right here, right where we live, deep in the city where the concrete covers the dirt, or deep in the suburbs where strip malls line our streets.

This relationship is crucial. Coming back into Pachamama’s embrace through remembrance, through gratitude, through an active celebration of the wonder of life is what helps us remember our true nature as earth and water, fire and air. We humans are not owed anything. We have tried to make ourselves believe that we are, yet somewhere deep inside we know it is not so. Entitlement and privilege cut us off from the nourishment and sustenance that active receiving and remembering offer.

There is no succor in entitlement. There is no relationship when we are steeped in false privilege.

There is no possibility to know the aliveness in our cells that dances in all of life when we keep taking, taking, taking as if there is an endless supply of earth to consume.

Deep in the belly of home we know this to be so, and the soul comes to know satiation when a true and real and whole ‘Thank you’ is lived and offered.

I have not known why my path has been to travel to so many ‘alive’ places. I do know that many places have called to me and I have had the profound luxury of being able to answer the calls. I am coming to see that one of the elements of wisdom growing inside me is this relationship with the land, is this known experience of the uniqueness of the song that each place sings. I am coming to know great reverence for life through this body I’ve been so generously gifted with.

Being here, right here, fully here, is to be in relationship with the earth, with life. Breathing in the belly. Listening to life’s song, and singing to life in return. Receiving what is offered, with gratitude. And, knowing it is all given because life lives for life. We’ve been taught we get because we are ‘owed’, yet receiving is entirely different. Receiving happens when we come to know that the love is infinite. It is a flow. Love asks us to receive, deeply, so deeply that we finally come to know that hole we’ve been trying to fill in our hearts can only be filled by this love.

I am coming to see how little I know, except what I know in my bones, and I know it in my bones because they are awake and alive and grateful with celebration and ceremony. I know my practice will now actively include these things. Something has awakened within.

I’d love to know how you’ve come to know the sacredness of the land and of your own body. I’d love to know how that is for you. Please share with me and with others in the comments, if you feel called to.

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photo by Anne Jablonski

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