My sadness Wants Stillness

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If you know me at all you know I love to dance and I’m always going on about how healing and life transforming dance is . My story is profound evidence of that. I rigorously trained in dance as a child and adolescent, and then when my father died suddenly when I was 16, is when I really began dancing to heal, express and move my grief.

 

Today however, I feel sad. I feel sad and I sense it in my chest. I sense it in my chest as heaviness and I don’t want to move. It’s a funny thing, I don’t want to move because I don’t want to feel it more, but I also don’t want to move because I just want to be still in the sadness so that I can feel it more.

 

How can both of these be true: moving makes me feel it more, stillness makes me feel it more. They seem to be a contradiction. Actually, they are not contradictions. Both moving and stillness can be ways of sensing deeper or avoiding. It’s all in the listening and honoring inward, and there are so many degrees of both moving and stillness.

 

Asking your body what it wants most, stillness or movement, will reveal the truth of which way will give you the kind of experience, healing, and support most appropriate at the time.

 

Today, my body and soul are asking for stillness so that I can sit with the texture of sadness and let it soothe my heart. When I sit with sadness, I might ponder and reflect, but I don’t go looking for reasons that I’m sad. That would take me out of the sadness into my story-weaving mind. Instead, I sit with the intention of sensing the sadness in my body and savoring the sensations that are asking for attention and loving care. If my mind wanders to a memory or creative idea, I let it go as a sprout or off shoot from the fertile sadness. Looking for reasons for the sadness, on the other hand, are about making the sadness wrong.

 

Today I feel sad and the liquidy heavy warmth flowing through me wants to let the tumultuous ocean dance for me. My body wants the pelicans to do the swooping and diving today. My soul wants permission to just be and let the chaos be around me, remaining anchored in my temple, and let my inward prayer touch in deeper and quieter.

 

Today I feel sad, my chest is heavy and the sadness flows through me like a warm liquid. I could easily attribute this sadness to my mother’s condition, and certainly that is weighing on me energetically, but to focus on that, instead of my body would rob me of my soul’s higher purpose for me to surrender to how spirit wants to dance through me and to let myself be used. If I were to focus on my mother, I would miss the felt sense experience of that and loose the opportunity for great intimacy with me.

 

Today I feel sad; I feel heaviness in my chest, liquidy warmth circulating through me, and a desire to be still in an effort not to override these feelings and sensations with overt, large muscle group motions.  In my stillness I might move in subtle ways that are authentic expressions of my visceral and cellular body memory seeking love and nurturing from my mind and heart. Perhaps some gentle music will seduce a subtle quality of movement that still honors the stillness.  We shall see what the stillness truly wants in each moment.

 

I’ll wait and see what my body wants today and honor that there are so many degrees of movement and stillness, today, in this moment, in each precious breathing moment.

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The Art and Soul of Craving

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We’ve been lead to believe that there is something bad, selfish and unspiritual about craving. If we want something really badly, we must be insecure, needy, or shallow.
But wait! Have you ever stopped to notice just what craving is really all about? In the world of Vividly Woman, craving is an art, not a selfish habit. Learning to drop down into and savor the sweet, arousing, rich place of craving is a woman’s way home to her aliveness.
As a woman, craving arises and dances in your being at 3 different levels which happen to correspond to your feminine power, your 3 inner fountains of feminine wisdom. Like a flowing fountain, each center is brimming with the vitality of craving that you can resource for a life richly lived.
1. Sensual craving- This type of craving is a lusting of the senses. It’s all about the physical body. i.e. craving for chocolate or to have your back scratched. As much as it’s about our sensing awareness of the world around us, it’s also about the corresponding universe of sensation within you.
 2. Emotional Craving- This type of craving is the acheing to love and be loved. A woman’s natural yearning for emotional connection and love is a strength and a power that has been known to overturn a car if necessary!
3. Intuitive Craving- This is a longing for god, spiritual awakening, or higher consciousness.
In each of the 3 types of craving above, a woman’s deep and passionate desire is evidence that she is blessedly alive and knows herself to be abundantly worthy of that which she is reaching for. However, the secret to the art of craving, is to understand at a body and soul level, that anything and everything which you crave is already inside you. Otherwise, how on earth could you crave it? For instance, why and how would you crave chocolate if you didn’t already know the taste of chocolate. You can only know it because it is living inside you.
So craving is not the problem.
The problem is the belief that what you seek is outside you when it is actually inside you!

Try this: Take your focus off the object of the craving, and place it on the craving itself. When you stop to notice the way craving registers in your body as sensation, you’ll see that it’s quite a profound and pleasant experience. The arousal that comes with sexual intimacy is a craving of the body that we love and enjoy. We can learn to understand all our cravings that very same way. Rumi, the Persian poet and mystic wrote, ‘The longing is the answer”. Here Rumi is referring to the longing for God. He is pointing out that if you have an acheing for connection to God, consider yourself blessed, because in that longing is the very connection that you seek.
At Sacred Sensual Splendor, the Vividly Woman Mexico retreat, we immerse ourselves deeply in to the sacred practice and exploration of craving to be wholesomely reunited to our juicy Goddess aliveness.
As a child you craved a train set or a doll. As an adult devoted to consciousness raising you’ve come to see that there is nothing outside of you that can complete or augment you. Everything you need to thrive is living inside waiting to be ignited. Instead of giving up the craving, just give up your attachment to the object of your craving. Look inside for that which you want more of and enjoy the waves of ecstasy that are the dance of craving inside you.

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