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| The only way is forward |
Last night, I temporarily experienced a moment of respite.
(It's amazing what a beer, or two, can do!)
In my welcomed escape from the severe nervous energy that I had been sitting in all day,
I haphazardly typed in a Facebook status update that I wasn't afraid.
HA! "I am scared to death."
Last Sunday, I was back in the beloved arms of my loving community.
It had been too many months. Babies have been born and the kids are shooting up,
like weeds. My dance brothers and sisters held me in their sweet embraces and inquired
as to where life, of late, has taken me. The day was a surreal dream in that my
internal BodyMind was filled with complete and utter peace.
(The quiet before the storm, perhaps?) Yet, I ironically wove the tale of my current
now, a state that is filled with immense transition - I'm in love AND my business partner and I have dissolved our partnership. Shakti is moving out of the Prosperity Hive this week AND I don't know how I am going to pay her portion of the rent in addition to mine for this up and coming month.
I am so far pressed up against my edges.
It isn't even funny.
Fortunately, I taught myself something about transformation last May.
For a 'reformance' dance/art piece that we - the Prosperity Music & Dance Company -
presented at Jon Block and Adam Rosen's Sight and Sound event at Queen Bee's,
I had my peers roll me in 40+ feet of white, sheath fabric that I laid in, at the foot of the main stage,
for three-and-a-half hours. My friends inquired, "Are you sure, Cara?" "You don't have to do this."
"I know," I responded. "I want to."
The fact that my actions went pretty much unnoticed, and that our dance/art piece was not quite the fit for that space on that night, was superfluous. The real lesson was learned in the extreme discomfort that I laid in. At first, I experienced claustrophobia and the immense desire to breathe fresh air. Then, I felt fear - "NO! I CAN'T lay here for hours!" my mind started to scream. Once I worked through these feelings, my left hip began to throb as all of my weight poured down through it and onto the amazing wood floor of Alma QueenBee's Hive.
Afterward, a friend reminded me that, while in the chrysalis, the body of the caterpillar returns to a liquid state before it reforms into a butterfly.
And, I must admit, that my BodyMind has not been the same ever since. The emotional traction that all of my own self-imposed abuse and/or mental dithering once held over me no longer remains. What has remained, however, is my ability to sit in and be with discomfort without trying to run away from it or escape it.
Recently, another friend keeps reminding me of the Destruction found in Creation and his words are tinged with a bit of fear. However, even as I have been experiencing my own anxiety over all of the transition that is currently my life, I am going to continue walking forward. The death that is happening is, a large part, the demise of my EGO. A dying off of past ways that no longer serve me must happen as I continue to step into the unknown. What's to come is certainly a mystery.
Even though I'm a little scared too, I embrace this uncertainty. For remaining where I am is not an option and I'd rather try to play my hand in the gamble of living my life's dream and fail, then to have never tried at all. Rites of passage are, after all, not discovered in the comfort of security and change is the only constant we can rely on.
