healing

The Loss of a Man...

The Loss of a Man...

What happens when someone you love leaves this world? When a living piece of your reality stops being there?

The doors open, they pass through, and you don’t. Then the doors close and you can’t see them anymore. And you can’t feel them or smell them or touch them. You can’t hear their voice or experience their laughter. You cannot stroke the back of their neck or nestle your palm against theirs. You cannot feel the warmth of their body touching your own. You no longer experience them twitching softly as they sink into sleep.

When someone you love leaves this reality, you are struck squarely with the understanding of the interconnected nature of your identity as a human being because there is a raw, gaping hole in who you understood yourself to be, in what you experienced your reality to be.

The Key to Transformation: "Let it be there, let it change"

Over the course of the last year, I have had the great honour of working with world renowned, Canadian dance artist Margie Gillis. When it comes to experiential wisdom of the body in motion, I have yet to meet anyone with a more in depth, sophisticated or compassionate understanding than she.

Margie has a wealth of adages that she uses during her classes to guide, suggest and support her students into deeper contact with their own embodied experience. One of these that stands out in my experience as a foundation for accessing transformation through movement is:

“Let it be there, let it change”

So often we feel that we have to make change happen. We force ourselves into the gym or to run harder and further. Though the assertion of will is important and there is a time for pushing ourselves, we need to understand that depth healing and transformation doesn't happen through anticipation and pushing for the future; what it takes is a full and complete recognition of the present moment. When we are fully present with and for what is, whatever we are experiencing moves naturally through our system, keeping the system in a state of healthful flux and allowing fresh experience to emerge.

To experiment with this in your own life, next time you are in an 'unpleasant' state (ex: irritated, angry, upset), try the following steps and take note of what happens for you:

1) Take a moment to draw your awareness away from any outer distractions and into your own experience. This may mean leaving the room and finding a quiet space to be alone and with practice can be done almost anywhere (bathrooms can serve as great 'halfway houses'!).

2) Place your hands on your own body and genuinely ask yourself, “what am I experiencing right now?”

2) Take note of what you feel in your body. Try to avoid putting a word label on anything too quickly, just breathe deep and invite whatever is happening to be there.

3) With the statement “let it be there, let it change” in your awareness, take a few deep breaths. Continue to experience your feelings as sensations as if you were listening to a song or piece of music that you love.

4) Once you've noticed that the quality of your experience has shifted, take a final breath and return to whatever you were doing.

Note: Personally I find this exercise most useful not for the big upsets but when I feel just subtlely 'off'. For example, I'm in the grocery store and notice that I am slightly agitated, or on my computer and notice that there's an inertia and heaviness to the way that I'm working. These more subtle feelings are signs that I'm ignoring or glazing over a deeper message.