Structure and Flow
and navigating the mess in between
“Be with it. Observation. Not judgment.” C responded last night to my expression of exhaustion.
Just before, my business coach offered at the outset of our call: “You can let go, you can be held, you don’t have to manage perceptions, you don’t have to manage me.”
‘Fuck’, I noticed, ‘she really sees me.’
At some point later she asked if I felt fear in my body. I realized no, I didn’t feel it really, but I felt that I was inhibiting my expression. I felt a band of restriction in my body. A long-time pattern. A big one. Unrelenting. “Will I deal with this pattern forever?” I wonder.
As I continued to speak and mostly listen, I tuned into my realm of being. Into what I was allowing.
I was trying to feel calm and cool and collected and present and wanting so badly to maintain the structure I’d been working diligently to create, with all this breathwork, meditation, building structures for my business, honing marketing skills…. AHHHHHHHHHH. It was a lot.
So I let go a little bit and felt a quite unpleasant fluttering in my chest, behind my heart, in my ribs. All this tension pounding in me. I hadn’t allowed myself a release mechanism.
A few minutes later it felt like someone’s hand was around my throat, choking me, making me gasp for air, gulp it in desperately, open myself wider wider wider to get the oxygen I needed.
Though the urge arose every few minutes, I couldn’t cry while I was on the phone. I kept overheating. I spent 30 minutes pushing, pressing, directing with my hands the energy that was stuck in my solar plexus and crowding my lungs. I pushed it into my belly, into my hips, into my ass, into my pussy. Into the core of my body. Into my pleasure centers. Into my womb. Into my fullness.
My upper chakras have been T I R E D.
Exhausted, as I shared with C.
About two months ago, after a powerful tension release in my hip and a self-pleasure session entitled, “sudden realization,” we had this conversation:
Me: When I was touching myself I noticed how strange it felt to not be holding so much tension. Like I go searching for it. It felt before like it was missing and I had to bring it back
And then I remembered that I had the ability to let go
So I did. And it felt light, and subtle. The subtlety part is what felt profound to me. My thoughts feel a bit prismatic.
Something about the overwhelm too. My baseline was overwhelmed and now it’s not. I feel like I am experiencing an entirely different body for the first time. It’s weird. Like taking off a suit of armor
C: Wow. In my experience with being part of people’s movement journeys, emotion stores itself in tension, and it can be a powerful release when the tension lets go.
The good news is you’re a little bit more free. But there is actually a transition phase, since we grow comfortable with our tensions. Like bodily Stockholm syndrome. It becomes a lesson to be ourselves.
And with that memory’s surfacing, I recognized the transition period I had been in was quite protective. I also realized it was coming to an end, this light and lovely layer of bliss to move through before the next phase which is, apparently, actually feeling. Feeling the layers and layers and layers of pain and exhaustion I’ve been negotiating with for who knows how long now. It feels like forever. If tension, then release. And then more. There’s always more coming. Why the fuck do I hold on so hard, knowing it is always coming. Knowing there is an abundance of experience available. That pain always comes, and pleasure always comes, and it never ends.
C seems to be just the right pain, though. He said to me once, (in reference, of course, to my backside), “She shall be abused the way you want her to be.” That right there is Love.
Bodily Stockholm syndrome is an interesting concept. Once we release the tension, it takes work to maintain the openness. True strength, to come back to the body and all that is present and available in the space that was taken by stories justifying, rationalizing, and intellectualizing holding onto the pain and suffering.
It takes work to continue letting go. To repattern the tissue. To open open open open open. To receive what is.
I’d been avoiding it. Not on purpose - not consciously. It was my inner protectors (you’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve done any parts work). The ones who still believe I don’t know how to nourish myself. The ones who believe I’m not safe. The ones who remember only anorexia and abusive relationships.
The protectors care for me; they want me to stay safe. They are highly untrusting of the people I love and the ways I want to open to them and the vulnerability I want to embrace and the yearning I experience. They don’t want me to keep letting go. So they drove me into work mode. Overwork. Too much structure. Not enough flow.
But last night, after noticing how bound I’d become, yet again, to the tension, I did let it flow. Ohhh, did I ever. I probably could’ve filled a gallon jug with the amount of salty water that poured from my orifices.
“I wish I could fall into your embrace,” I told C, a wave of hot tears falling from my face. “Hugging myself hard,” I continued.
“Hug hard then let go big. Expand. Repeat as needed,” he responded.
Despite the exhaustion, I couldn’t fall asleep until almost 4 am last night. My mind just didn’t want to release me. So I watched a million episodes of Lost Girl and passed out eventually. Today I didn’t get out of bed until 11:47.
“Are you resting?” he asked me this afternoon, as I sat outside with a thunderstorm looming above me.
I’ve always loved thunderstorms, and this one, especially, reflected my mood. So I sat and wrote a bit and cried a lot and waited for the downpour.
I wandered down the hill behind my house to a tree ripe with striking white blossoms, and stood, praying to Sky Daddy, praying to the wind, to the birds to the leaves, to the earth, to the mother of all mothers, to please, please, rain all over me. And then, drip, drip, drip. It started coming, slowly.
After 30 minutes or so I was absolutely soaked, chilled to the bone, alive, awake, very much in my body. Prayers answered. My nipples hard against my white tank top. my panties surprisingly wet not from the rain, but from within.
This storm was soul soothing. An ingredient of nourishment, though not all I need. (I need to touch him). The recipe is incomplete, always and necessarily. Not in a negative sense - in the sense that I am expanding, and hope to be, forevermore. I am a cauldron. Simmering, simmering, simmering. Sitting over a hot, hot, heat. Refining my being with each release.
Rain has always been healing for me. I am, after all, a cancer sun. Hard exterior, but get me in the water and I absolutely melt. The storm is a reflection of my inner self. An invitation to let her out, big and loud.
I’m the kind of person who goes outside because it’s raining. Not the other way around. Something about going inside when the sky opens up for me to see has always seemed confounding. Why would I not want to witness her glory? Why would I not want to become part of it!?
As I write this many hours later, I am licking tears rolling toward my lips while others run down my chin. One lands on my shoulder and I’m not sure how it even got there. Emotions are so god damn messy.
I look outside where the sky is now bright and blue and see my neighbor walking, staring at his phone. He’s been doing this often the past week or so. I’ve never seen him walking so much. Many times a day, he wanders around, gaze down into the digital abyss. I wonder what happened that propelled him out the door. I want to go hug him even though we haven’t spoken since I was 10 years old and he perhaps 14. We don’t know each other. Never did. And still, I feel a connection. I see a reflection of myself in him. The wandering.
Later I wander to the basement where there is a new wood floor and there is me and there is music and I become the prayer I need to explore.
“Is it okay for me to not be so strong sometimes?” I ask myself after rolling around the floor for 45 minutes to Feist’s uncannily fitting new album. “It is okay to melt? Is it okay to let go of the structures I’ve created? It is safe to let go?”
I hear all these questions enter my consciousness and my body answers. Opens. Demonstrates strength in ways other than the ones I’d been so deadset on expressing. Strength in softness. Strength in meeting myself exactly where I am. Strength in surrender. Strength in being seen in my tenderness.
Strength is an exercise in letting space hold me. As much change, as much space as I’ve created in my inner scaffolding, it’s still exceedingly easy to fall into the habit of trying to control everything.
No wonder I’m exhausted. I’ve been absolutely SUNK into my work the past couple weeks. Becoming, simultaneously, a blogger and an entrepreneur is a much greater challenge than I anticipated. When I started to take it seriously - take myself seriously - everything got a bit heavy. My nervous system? On the fucking FRITZ, now that I’ve slowed down enough to notice. Dysregulated. My attention absorbed in the logistics of the mental plane. The plans. The courses. The community I’ve been dreaming of creating coming into realization. And I am the one who has chosen to sustain this. Nourish this.
“Fill your own cup first,” they say. And I do. I do so much. Maybe I do too much. Too much emptying without enough filling. I’m just trying to strike the balance.
My body, I hate to say, I’ve been ignoring. She’s been neglected. Not abused the way I want her to. Not pleased either. The past few weeks I haven’t written poetry, I haven’t danced, I haven’t led myself deep into pleasure practice. It’s like I’ve been riding an edge but unaware of it. A dangerous place to be.
In the midst of writing the above, I realize I need to go back outside. I realize I’m still sitting here gripping at the writing. Creating more tension. More pressure. Telling myself These Are Things I NEED TO GET DONE!
Phew. It’s annoying to be in my head sometimes. Hence the writing? Must be. A double-edged sword. Writing is just the right kind of pain, also. The kind that draws me in deeper and deeper and deeper until I don’t know what’s real anymore, sometimes. Until I realize I am the one writing the stories I keep telling. And I am the one changing them. And I am the one mindfucking myself whichever way I want to.
I find myself on the porch talking to C. Recounting my dancing, telling him, “Somehow I started to think my twirling was unnecessary.” And, “too much structure, not enough flow in my body lately.” And he reflects, “Balance requires finding the too much to see what isn’t enough. Now find the center. But after twirls.”
“I’ll have to start imagining you’re going to spank me if I’m twirling too much,” I realize. It’s a gift to have memories that pin me to the moment. It’s also a gift to have videos of him filling me with his handprints on my ass
Love’s gift is presence, I’ve found myself noticing over and over again the past week. Love’s gift is rewriting narratives. Creating new memories. I remember a time when I would hear people say things like, “I want to make memories with you,” and being wholly unable to connect with the sentiment. I’d been in fucked up, abusive relationships my entire life. All I wanted to do was escape. But with him? I want all the memories I can make. I might even accuse myself of being greedy. A whore for the womb of our sensational memory creation.
Perhaps you know, though, what it feels like to finally feel what trust is. To feel the freedom, the pleasure, the subtle terror that comes with it. And to want more of that. Oh, the pain of pleasure is, indeed, wanting more of it. Each bite, a little assault to my heart. Another crack. Another opening. A little beg to my yearning. A deeper depth to my longing. Ugh. I am slithering. Swimming. My presence very much back in my belly, pulsing in my inner palace.
Earlier this week I was watching Californication, an old favorite. There is a scene in which Becca, Hank’s 12-year-old daughter, heartbroken at the realization that her twice-her-age guitar teacher is not a realistic love interest, asks Hank, “When will my heart stop hurting,?”
Hank replies, “If you’re lucky, never.”
Those are words I can live by.