The Healing Journey

A new year is kind of like a birthday: we anticipate, we celebrate, we make promises wishes, and resolutions, and yet, when the day finally comes, it is just like any other day of our life…except there’s usually cake and booze. For some of us, that too is a regular occurrence, and that’s a wonderful thing—in moderation, of course.

But as 2009 rolls out before me, I sit down and realize that I am at so many cross-roads of so many opportunities. So many doors closing while so many open. And some of the windows I’ve been looking out of all my life have turned into mirrors, while many of the mirrors I used to look into have become landscapes of the outside world.

We often live every day ordinarily. Ho-hum we go along, wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, watch tv, go to bed, dream, wake up, forget our dreams, and start the whole cycle again. And I’m certainly no exception. Actually, during the Christmas/New Years season I began to miss my routine- being home, knowing what I’m going to be doing when, having everything all mapped out. But I am also habitual in my tendency to drift in and out of inspiration.

There will be months where I do not write and I do not feel anything exceptional. And I get down on myself thinking I will never feel inspired ever again. But the tide always shifts again, and I discover some nugget of truth in my life that opens my eyes briefly—but it’s something so brilliant that it keeps me going for months, until I drift off again into the valley of uninspiration.

More often than not, the times that jolt me awake are uncomfortable—painful even. They can be something someone says to me. It can be touch. It can be laying down in savasana when it hits me. I’ll cry for days. My heart will sink so low it drags on the floor. When everything was fine before, now everything seems like shit. I loose myself in my emotion, hanging on tight, white knuckling the rollercoaster of life.

One of my teachers refers to this as The Fucking Healing Journey, because you know what? Life is hard. Looking at life honestly is harder. So why even bother then if it’s so miserable? Why not stick with the comfortable routine, the daily ho-hum, the everything is ordinary and therefore everything is good? You can, and people live their whole lives this way, and that’s fine because that’s their journey. But after the rollercoaster is over, and you loosen your grip, you realize that the ride has dropped you off somewhere beyond where you started. And you survived.

At this point in my life, the crossroads cropping up all over the place make me more nervous than they used to because I have people depending on me—at home, at my job, and now that I must provide for myself, I have to hold it together enough to get through and pay all the bills on time. There’s no real time set aside to figure all the shit out that comes up, and there’s no one that’s going to understand your journey like you. The Fucking Healing Journey is a long and lonely one—but after all the tears, and the heart dragging on the floor, and the frustration of people looking at your like you’re crazy when you try to explain yourself, you know more about who you are on this path than before, and you know that whatever life throws in your lap, you can handle it.