I just completed a cross-country solo road trip along the I-90 corridor through some of the most picturesque views in the United States. If you have never seen the fertile valleys along the Yellowstone and Clark Fork Rivers, the open skies of Wyoming or the barren beauty of the Badlands, you are missing some of the most stunning places in North America. Every time I pass through this part of the country, I feel the undisturbed peace of these places and undisturbed peace is what I spent a lot of time thinking about on this trip. Just like those that had the foresight to protect these places, I made a conscious commitment to establish a border around my peace and declare sovereignty. The drive through these lands is a fitting analogy for my own journey, through my inner landscape.
Eastbound, heading towards my childhood home in the Midwest, I retraced the path I took when I moved to the Pacific Northwest. As I drove, I thought about the relationships and events that were teachers in my life. Holy relationships. I was flooded with memories the first four hours of the drive and experienced a swell of grief. This often happens when I am alone for long periods of time and it's one of the reasons I find alone time so useful. I can clear the cache. I can hold space for what needs to come to the surface.
Well, grief came to the surface. Grief is the feeling that calls us to honor the presence and perceived loss of love. It is the feeling that reminds us of the wonderful experience we held for a time. Allowing grief and experiencing it facilitates its transmutation into gratitude. I am so grateful for my experiences with, and capacity for, love.
In South Dakota, I made a side trip through the Badlands just as I had done on my first trip west. My experience of this landscape was different this time. There was sacredness in the barrenness. It is exposed and weathered yet, hauntingly beautiful and enduring. Maybe I see this place differently now because I have passed through detachment and appreciate how floods carve canyons, erosion exposes beauty, and emptiness opens to vastness. It felt like a fitting place to honor all I have let go. I had a funeral of sorts for all of the teachers, love, dreams and plans I released to make room for the life waiting for me.
Journal entry June 7, 2024
The Badlands
Tracing my footsteps
Going back the way I came
And seeing it all for the first time
This sacred work
Standing in a few impressions
Longer than others
Skipping a few
This life isn't for everyone
Actually, this life isn't for anyone
It's beautifully mine
The drive east took three days and I was blessed with good weather and trouble-free travel. I spent over two weeks in Ohio and devoted time each day to connecting with family, friends, mentors, and clearing out my storage space filled with important memories like family photos, my grandparent's wartime letters, and keepsakes but also stuff. For me, this storage space has represented attachment to my former life and fear of letting go. I was ready to let go. My son and I took 95% of my belongings to an auction house and I kept only the deeply significant. Parting with possessions felt like an offering to the universe, transmuting my fear and attachment into trust.
I am creating space for what is meant for me.
Most days of my stay, I carved out time with lifelong friends. During one of these visits, I was sharing the profound experience I had with Osho's Dynamic Meditation in India. This meditation allowed me to access traumatic events and experience the suppressed physical "fight" or the voice I was denied. I felt and released my pain and anger.
March 8, 2024
In Rishikesh, I am steeped in Hindu culture and their food, dress, ceremonies, and devotion is something to behold. Tonight, the high holy day of Maha Shivrati begins, the commemoration of Shiva’s wedding to Parvati; the union of consciousness and matter or heaven and earth.
To prepare for this sacred time, one of the most significant days of the year for Hindus, we were given the opportunity to participate in Osho’s Dynamic Meditation. The practice began at 4:45 this morning and I have to say, it was among the most transformative experiences of my life and at one of the most pivotal times in my life (probably no coincidence it’s International Women’s Day).
This meditative practice takes place in five stages each around 15 minutes. The first involves intense chaotic breathing, which for me, after some time, connected me to traumatic moments in my life when fight or flight was activated but fawn or freeze was my only option. I thought about times I was unable to fight back or defend myself, moments I had to remain silent (unable to scream or cry), grief too heavy to bear, my experience as a woman trying to be heard, or abuse at the hands of men who should have been my protectors. After recognizing this energy in the body, the second phase is “exploding” (releasing all of that negative stuff to the universe). From the deepest place inside, you can scream, cry, wail, shake, throw fists in the air, whatever you need to do to release that pain you didn’t get to process in the past. You have permission to free that lion from its cage and let it roar.
Until today, I didn’t even know I could scream.
What follows that release is a period of primal breathing, followed by complete stillness to bear witness to the body, then… celebration.
The whole experience really moved me from the darkness of past experiences to light (or lightness), like a great unburdening.
After sharing this, my friend said, "I'm afraid if I start screaming, I won't stop." And I think that's true for the majority. For women especially. We are conditioned to deny our anger and suppress our voice, often for our safety. We are conditioned to participate in the silence that protects abusers. We are conditioned to believe expressing anger makes us less womanly (she's a bitch, unhinged, emotional). Many people today are finding an outlet for their anger in political debates or projecting their feelings onto another person or group of people, but our anger isn't meant to be used in this way. It is meant to move us into action. It is a personal messenger and it's not meant to find a home in another by word or force.
I have had a difficult relationship with anger. Especially male anger. My first experience with it in this world taught me to become small and powerless in the face of it. I also learned that responding to anger with anger creates more anger which can lead to harm, physical force or potentially annihilation. As a child I learned to deny and suppress my feelings, especially anger and pain, to survive. And that's what I attempted to do my entire life, but this type of self-denial is unhealthy. When anger is unexpressed and unacknowledged, it creates illness and disease in the body. It is not shocking that I had reproductive cancer in my twenties and a sarcoma directly over my solar plexus in my forties. These are the places I held my anger. My anger for being a woman and powerless.
In my first blog post, I shared how finally experiencing my anger allowed me to say "Fuck off" to the energy that no longer serves me. That might not sound like a very yogi thing to say. After all, what comes to mind when you imagine a yogi? If you're like me, probably a person sitting in a state of unshakable peace. I had to decide if I was going to continue to exist in the world the way I was conditioned or if I was going to listen to my anger and use it as fuel to create change in my life. "Fuck off" was the magic phrase that created a radical perimeter around my peace and safety and now that I have it, I will protect it. Anger was the messenger I needed to create movement away from what no longer served me. Anger transmuted into movement and action. Anger is not meant to find a home in someone else outside of ourselves it is meant to protect the home within.
Anger was the hardest feeling for me to reconcile. Like my friend, I was afraid if I let myself feel anger I would rage. After all, most of my experiences with anger were on the receiving end of men without control. I feared anger because I equated it with lack of control and harm. I thought if I allowed myself to be angry, I would become what I feared. What I found was the opposite. Feeling and honoring my anger brought me relief. I also realized, through the eyes of my childhood, I perceived angry men to be powerful. Power does not make another feel unsafe, afraid or small. True power makes others feel empowered and safe. Projecting anger onto others, causing harm or inciting fear are not signs of power they are signs of weakness.
As I was making my way back west, I drove through flooded landscapes and saw dams breached because they could no longer stop the volume of the flow. This too is a suitable analogy for my journey. Feelings must flow. Suppressing feeling is unnatural and leads to buildup that will cause disease, destruction, or eruption. At some point the levee will break or the volcano will erupt. The most important work I have done in my life is learning to sit with my feelings. Feeling it all is the fastest way to achieve sustainable peace. When I first began allowing myself to feel difficult feelings in therapy many years ago, my therapist gave me this mantra:
The more you resist, the more it persists.
Emotion is like a river, let it flow to let it go.
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