A brief reflection on gratitude

I am thinking about gratitude today. Through the cloud of my many fears I am trying to feel what I am grateful for. There is really so much. And I am not terrified in that day in day out sort of way that I was in my childhood so I am daring to ask myself how gratitude feels in my body, so I can really get to know it better.

I am grateful for the tea I drink each morning that gets me going. The earth of the ceramic cup holds the water that has been boiled by the fire to bring me the fragrance and taste if the tea. It warms me. I receive it into my cells and the comfortable fire in my belly.  I look out at the sun and the trees. I feel the blood pulsing through my body. I sense the roots of the trees and I too can feel my connection to Mother Earth. I am grateful to the trees for reminding me of this. I feel this in my relaxing feet.

I sense the strength in the trunk of the tree and I know that I too can be strong to face what I am afraid of. My arms or limbs can reach out for what I need and this can create a favorable healing. I can reach out to others to try to sooth and support them. This helps me to feel warm in my heart. I am grateful to all my relations.

Making the Circle Again

I have felt fairly lost lately and I am aware I haven't written in this blog for over a month. Lost is not necessarily a bad thing but it is not such a comfortable state of being. I realize that having my daughter far away has changed my whole life. She had been my organizing principle for more than eighteen years and while things don't look so different from the outside (except for the time I don't spend with her), things are very different in the inside.

I honor my work tremendously and love it as well my students and clients, and I do have wonderful friends. But choosing to bring a child into this world is an awesome responsibility and I have tried to follow through, structuring my whole day for the most part to meet her needs appropriate to her age and development. It helped me to know her needs were more important than the obsessive thoughts in my head. She did in fact develop herself all the way to college, so I am alone in a different way. It is good as we are each where we need to be, each transitioning in a different way.

Now I don't know what to put first. My whole nervous system is confused. I am also mourning. I am disorganized and I don't know what is to come. I can't seem to impose a structure on myself and that is difficult because I am studying Ayurveda and we are asked through our assignments to implement structure and I am finding this impossible. I can't seem to follow through with much of anything. It is as if my life energy is asking me to wonder aimlessly for a time. Some part of my soul is searching and I can't rush the finding.

I can't follow the clock as the Ayurvedic system recommends. I feel a bit of a failure. I don't feel like cooking. I want to sit in my apartment and watch netflix about families with protective parents. (I did not have protective parents but very much tried to be a protective parent.) I am aware that my home is becoming more disorganized and part of me is really frustrated with this and part of me doesn't care.

I find that I seem to be able to manage a very informal fifteen minutes of yoga on either side of my day, between waking and sleep and sleep and waking. This is the only formal/informal practice I seem to be able to get myself to do. But I felt a sense of true relief yesterday when I took my sacred objects from the window sill and put them in the circle of the Medicine Wheel. A lava rock my dear friend Leigh brought me from Hawaii went in the east, a beautiful spiky conch shell my daughter found me on a beach holding the sea of Cortez went in the south, a split rock that in its wholeness held the heat of the fire from a sweat lodge led by my friend Dennis went in the west, and a quartz crystal he had given me before his death went in the north.

There was something healing about seeing these objects in the circle rather than a line that brought me together with myself. I checked in with a part of me that has been feeling vulnerable and I tried to reassure it. I felt a sense of being rather than a sense of having to do. I am keeping this version of the Medicine Wheel on the table for now.