Friday, February 25th, 2011
I often feel like I am the woman in this painting, looking out at the ocean. Only I feel that I have been standing there not for moments or hours, but for eons…looking out over the waves of the cosmic ocean, watching the worlds rise and fall, and rise again…
I have always adored the ocean, and kept it close to me. I believe I have loved it most because it is the only thing that I feel mirrors the depth and intensity of my heart. Yes, the universe is more vast…but the ocean is both vast and contained. Both contained and uncontainable. It is both wild and fierce, and soft and gentle. It both adapts to its environments and changes them. It is pulled by great gravitational forces, and can pull almost anything into it. It surrenders, and it rocks. But most of all, in passionate waves, it rolls…
It had been twelve years since I’d been to Hawai’i when I went last month. That previous time had been my first, after a long, hard winter. I remember waking the first morning to the sun, stumbling out my door and down the hill and plucking a ripe papaya. I opened it with my pocket knife and had my breakfast there, in the clothes I slept in. And I knew then that everything was finally going to be okay.
This time in Hawai’i I swam every day that the surf would let me in the water (it was a time of wildly high surf). I would swim out to the place just where the waves crested…and wait for them. I’d get so exited when a big one came, and I would swim rapidly toward it, until I was face to face with the wall of it, and then turn quickly to ride it blissfully in. Then I’d turn right around quickly in hopes of another big one. I did this endlessly. It was all I wanted to do and it brought me the most amazing joy.
There were only a couple of times when I knew, instinctually, that I had missed the moment and the crest was going to pull me under and smash me into the beach as I’d watched it do to so many others. So I dove into and through it, in those moments, just in time.
And I thought a lot about all of us, and how bravely we try to face the waves that come every day, and every night. They have always come, these waves of life, and feeling, for all humans. But now we live in a time where there are more of these waves of transformational energy than ever, and they are more potent than ever. I know we find ourselves being crashed into rocky shores and it may feel that it is too often. I know we may sometimes feel beaten.
I know, among other reasons, because when I arrived in Hawai’i I felt broken myself. Not unfixable by any means, but it would be a lie to say that I didn’t feel broken. For the last three years I have been remedying a serious adrenal depletion, brought on by a series of stressors to my body including reactions to food, and exposure to toxins (mostly in my travels.) My levels of the crucial hormones and substances the adrenals make were so low that it would have taken down the mightiest creature. They needed to be…for I am a might creature indeed, and I needed, to finally…go down.
Not because I was too mighty, no. Because I had been too strong for too long. I had been on my mission as an Oracle, carrying the memory and being brave and bold and passionate enough for every battle. I had put everything I had on the line, including my life, over and over. And I was always strong enough for more, if it meant completing what I had sworn to in my deepest soul, out of pure commitment and coming from deepest love.
And it has been, my friends, so very many lifetimes. Now, in this time when the Great Remembering is finally underway, I can let go and let all the pain and exhaustion of my lifetimes as a “spiritual warrior” be felt. So when friends asked why I didn’t just “tune in” and get the answers about why things were happening the way they were with my health and what I should do, I told them…
I know why this is happening. I am finally letting go now and all of this suffering needs to be felt, because it wasn’t before. If I had the answer about the perfect “fix” right now I wouldn’t allow myself to complete this release. There is also much I am meant to learn in the meantime, by putting one foot in front of the other and learning as I go. By not having answers. My beings had talked to me about the central issue being one of the nervous system, so I knew which way to look. But it was clear within me I neither wanted nor needed any further information. I knew all along I could heal myself whenever I was ready to, but I was determined, finally in this lifetime, to not cut the experience short so I could move onto whatever was next. I was determined, this time, to get every last bit of the poison out, no matter what it took.
After all, I told them, being an Oracle is not just about getting answers, even when you can. It is about not having answers too, when that is right. It is about trusting in the known and the unknown. It is about following that voice within, of the deep heart, whether it gives you answers or just one feeling at a time to go on.
And so, though no one I didn’t tell ever knew about it or could tell, I went through a really hard time in my body. Chronically inflamed, so stiff it was hard to turn over in bed in the night, waking up as if I’d just been in a train wreck, reacting to so many foods it was hard to find something to eat, losing mental focus and stamina, terrible muscle weakness and pain, reactions to toxins…all of it. It was textbook adrenal insufficiency, (though these symptoms can come with other conditions as well, my test results corroborated this) which I discovered on my own. In fact, though eventually I found practitioners who could help, a great deal of my healing and discovery has come by way of my reading and study. And oh, how much I have learned…
I have learned things that are going to make me healthy for the rest of my life. I feel incredibly grateful and gifted by all of this. And though it brought me to tears (and to my knees) so many times, it has given me so much courage and wisdom. Now, as I finally turn things around, every little gaining of strength feels like the most amazing miracle. I go to the gym and every time the exercise energizes instead of drains me…every time I can do a little tiny bit more without pushing myself, I am so proud. I press one foot after the other on the elliptical machine, listening to the pounding, juicy beats in my ears from my ipod, and move with my own rhythm exactly. This experience has made me better than ever at finding it. And that is a golden gift indeed. And when it comes into my mind that, “I am a strong and beautiful woman,” I know it is true. I can feel it pumping in my blood and moving through my muscles…the beauty and the strength that radiates from my pure heart. And now I will move forward not just more beautiful and more strong, but more healed and whole than ever.
I don’t take a moment of it for granted.
So when I swam into the waves it was a special moment. It was happening at the time when I had just crested and I knew I was finally rolling in. It happened at the time when, however broken I was, I knew I was starting to regain my strength. In order to reduce stress at every level to support the healing of my adrenals, I had made an even deeper commitment to fearlessness, and it has freed me at even more profound levels. (To me fearlessness is not the absence of fear, but the refusal to let it lead us.) So when I was facing the wall of the wave and swimming toward, rather than away from it, I felt not afraid but absolutely thrilled and alive. It doesn’t mean I didn’t trust myself when I knew the right moment had passed and I needed to dive through it instead, in fact it meant that I was entirely in sync and aligned with my instincts and intuition. I was completely one with their motion, and from that came my bliss.
This is indeed how we can walk through the world…even as we embrace the painful crashings as well, we can find that we are more often, rather than trying to avoid the waves…the waves of what we fear will consume us…we are heading right into them, and therefore we are in the best position to be fearless, to make an empowered choice about riding or diving through them, to be situated to do either, and to hear and trust the deepest voice within us. The voice of our vast, oceanic hearts…rolling in on the shore of who we are becoming next…
And when we do get rocked too hard, and we’ve swallowed water and sand and we can’t even breathe at first, we can take ourselves gently to a place on the beach where the surf sounds soft, and the sun is electric and gentle at the same time, and let ourselves be nurtured…and rest deeply…until the time comes again that we are called by the waves and we are ready to have them free us, and to ride them as the waves of bliss they truly are. To let them carry us home, again and again.
Love, Jennifer
