February felt heavy and messy until it didn’t. This morning, one of my students in the only virtual class I get to teach asked if we could do a practice around racing thoughts and anxiety. "Say less," I thought. Of course this kind request I easily could cater to as someone who also works with a super perfectionist, overthinking, overachieving and busy mind. It goes like this. We easily enter a trance. Often times it is a trance of unworthiness. Not feeling enough. What I relate to more these days is spinning into the abyss of keeping myself extremely busy, creating, organizing, planning and overdoing which comes along with the danger of evading, denying or rejecting emotions that need to be noticed. The practice lies in coming back home. To the sacred presence that is a gift granted to us all who are in this work of coming back to breath. To being here with the beauty and ugliness of it all. This can look like anything, this returning home to the heart. Being together, connecting, belonging, loving, cherishing, giving and receiving. Nourishing the soul with nature, staring at snow-capped mountains, life-giving foods, people who are able to hear and see, animals and whatever else floats your boat in the pürest way possible.
When it starts feeling heavy and messy, what keeps me afloat is this practice of noticing and returning. Small steps towards exercising again. Building somatic intelligence, sitting in silence, movies with the person, nourishing friends and family, organic foods from the farmers market where I meet and chat with the growers and my work which is a constant source of deep energy exchange, even if it sometimes brings me to a point of fatigue and burnout. I feel fortunate to be in a space where I can call a community space. It is the most deeply nourishing of all. This is a story about contracting and expanding. One does not exist without the other. Depleting and getting full. Fatigue and rest. They all belong. Worthiness and unworthiness. Judge none of it. That is the practice of self-love. A cyclical story of escaping and returning. Heavy and messy until it isn’t. Self-love mustn't be a strange idea outside of you. Because, it is not.
With love,
Armen Menechyan