that murky thang...
returning to feeling (again and again... and again)
What is the next move? I’ve been contemplating for a while now. Wading through this murky river… waiting for something to call out to me in that clear voice. The one I always recognize when I feel it. The one that pierces my heart, makes my pussy drip, begs me to deepen my breath, to sit and listen and feel and open. To be moved. To trust. To let it all come.To become… something new. And something old again.1
And you know what? After a year and several months, the feeling returned to me.
Or, did I return to it?
You see, this power game is tricky. Sometimes you leave your power somewhere and have absolutely no clue where that somewhere is.
You search high and low, and mostly, everywhere outside of yourself. You read books and open windows, peer into others’ eyes, searching for yourself inside. Some days, you renounce everything you love, only to reclaim it all a week later, when you notice how absolutely fucked up you feel. You remember what it was like to cry at the drop of a pin and you remember the orgasmic bliss of feeling everything and you wonder how the fuck did I do that and how do I come back?
It’s funny, because you’re already doing it. Feeling. It’s just that you’re not feeling all the way through. You stop yourself. There are dams in the river. That’s why it’s murky. There are things you don’t want to feel… things you think you shouldn’t feel. Heartbreaks you want to be through with. People you want to hate that you actually love. Practices that seem too simple but are actually the salve.
There are endless ways to distract yourself from feeling. You know this, right? You do it all the time. Head in the clouds, daydreaming new careers or the “perfect man” or the thing that would finally, finally, get you to slow down and just be here.
Lol.
Well we know it doesn’t work that way.
You’ve gotta be here now. That cute little cliche. That truest truism we love to hate but that really is the gateway.
Presence.
Feeling.
Beneath the murky water there is a clear spring.
There is joy.
There is pleasure.
It’s yours. Always has been. Always will be.
Spring of vitality.
Aliveness in your fingertips, swelling through your belly, dripping from your tongue.
Drink.
The challenging truth is, sometimes you really aren’t strong enough to weather the storm. At least not alone. You run away. You back down. You forget everything you stand for in the hurricane of change. It breaks your heart so wide open you cannot bear to be touched anymore. Your sensitivity angers you. Your orgasm fades into fear. Your feeling spirals into thought. You think your way out of the storm in your body and into the clouds of hatred and fear. You forget about love for a while. You want to be fixed. You want it to be over. You want the end.
Well, aliveness is an eternal beginning. You say the words sometimes, eternity, vitality, self connection, embodiment. All these feelings you used to know viscerally seem only to exist as vapor in your mental body; it’s not that they actually went anywhere — you didn’t stop being love or aliveness or vitality, you didn’t actually become disembodied, you didn’t disconnect from your Self — you just shifted your focus; rather than harmony with your bodymind experience, you are in dissonance, like an rgb color shift; the communication is a little wonky. And it feels like a catastrophe. See, you are feeling! But you don’t like it. Right. Exactly. The anxiety, the fear, the confusion… yeah. Not safe to feel that, is it?
Well actually, it is.
Actually, feeling it is the safest thing because feeling it is the only thing that will bring you back home, to your felt sense of aliveness. Which is, in fact, exactly what you were searching for everywhere but within the feeling itself. Ironic, huh?
So here we are now. My next move. Feeling into it…
I can’t tell you exactly what it is yet, but I can tell you it’s got everything to do with feeling. Everything to do with vitality, Everything to do with cultivating the visceral understanding that you have everything you need inside of you, and the real mission is to remove what’s in the way of accessing it. And everything, everything, to do with connection — with yourself, with others, with the integrated power network that is always working under the surface.
With aliveness, until next time.
Faye xx
P.S. Thanks to Weston Parker for the title idea. You really sparked something.
vitality is my obsession and I explore it through movement ::: subscribe to serpentine spine for reflections, invitations, and portals to pleasure, joy, and aliveness
Something borrowed? Something blue? Yes… all of it. integration at its finest