I haven’t been feeling well the last few days, but this morning I was reading the blog Mast Cells and Collagen Behaving Badly and her post today encouraged me to look at finding some inner strength and healing energy. It helped me this morning keep from going into one of those familiar dark spaces of discouragement and fearfulness when I’m low energy.

It reminds me of a couple of other things that have encouraged me, too. This quote is from, I think, Thomas Merton’s book on Chuang Tzu:

“Easy is right. Begin right and you are easy. Continue easy and you are right. The right way to go easy is to forget the right way. And forget that the going is easy.”

Yes, wouldn’t it be grand to give up my feelings that things are hard? It’s the first step on the path of giving up the idea that things are easy.
If I could do that, just really give it up–what might be possible? Well, I just don’t know . . .

Another quote that I think about sometimes is from Pema Chodron in her book When Things Fall Apart, who said:
“Life is a good teacher and a good friend.”
I think if I could really believe that in those dark moments . . . well, that’s when I’m really up against my limits.

The other day, I didn’t realize I was starting to get sick, it started as a feeling of deep tiredness, but then turned into another IBS episode where all I can do is stop and listen to my body and its sometimes inexplicable messages of pain and discomfort. I still don’t understand these messages very well, but I’m practicing learning more. I did try to keep pushing my energy into doing tasks that needed to get done–but hey, the body rules! It looks like I have to learn how to accord it my utmost respect, or it plays hard ball with me. And even thinking of it as something separate, is limiting itself. But I don’t know how not to, not really.

One thing I’ve been doing lately is practicing some qi gong, just some very simple things, illustrated by this short 4 minute video of Daisy Lee on the ocean shore, a place where earth and sky, water and land meet, doing a very simple flow, Showering Qi. I’ve been practicing that, in the evening at a nearby field, watching the Moon rise each evening toward fullness, but then I stopped as I wasn’t feeling well. Perhaps the Moon’s cycle also speaks to this, a balancing of light and dark at fullness and then surrender into the waning of what had become full. The Moon’s face illustrates the constant flow of Yin and Yang energies so powerfully. I could feel the practice changing me. So then I had to stop to incorporate the power of that change? Perhaps. Who am I now? I don’t know and is that scary? When the light of what has been darkens, it’s hard not to be fearful. But grounding myself in the flow between earth and sky helps me to let go, to just be present in the movement and being here, a level of paying attention I desperately want–and avoid.
Daisy Lee: Reconnect to Mother Earth and the Limitless Sky with This Vertical Alignment Practice

Another wonderful healing comes from a poem I read recently by David Wagoner, entitled “Lost.” I have been reading this poem every day and it expresses so powerfully what I have been feeling, I’m deeply grateful for all these allies that have come to me as I venture into what feels dark, but perhaps is simply the unknown, the seed of what’s next, and I look for what light I find that shines to guide me on the way:

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

~David Wagoner