Heart Holding Space

Taking the time, allow a fresh momentum 
to assault that crooked door
on rusted hinges.

Resting in the authority of your natural presence
allow yourself to come home,
emerge from this being you.

And yet still there’s that current
shunts you away from this –
a loping grey wolf
in the wilderness of your belonging.

Taking the time, allow a fresh momentum
to assault that crooked door
on rusted hinges,
crack its frozen joints,
charm its forgotten longings.
And let the discovery be enough.

Finding a heart holding space
for these abandoned places
of forest and caves,
the spell of your here & now blooms.
Let it be your home.

In the depth is the direction:
rising like spring waters,
welling up and filling out itself
in unexpected ways,

a new beginning.

 

This poem was a result of a session between barebody&soul and Addie van der Kooy.

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A Togetherness

Photo Credit: barebody&soul

A togetherness

Turning inwards,
cultivating a quiet flame,
a seed,
an unfolding
in the dark.

Allowing this light to take form –
a drawing-in to itself
& a spreading-out…

Making space for the surrender,
a togetherness takes shape:

Finding your own metaphor
for this belonging,
beyond you & me.

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My Heart is Here

My heart is here: arm finding itself reconnecting to the body

In conversation with Diana, unedited excerpts
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10 October 2019
Hi Diana

Just wanted to share what’s quite alive. I did a WBF session with A. after a late summer pause a few days ago. I thought it would be outside but my body just didn’t want to go when the time came and I respected that.

As we started up it was like a furnace firing up, spluttering before it got going. I got an extraordinary pain in my left arm in the bone/nerves as well as numbness and restricted movement. I was also resistant as this type of pain was a shock. I stuck in there and over the session the arm realized that it could connect to the body.

Memories came from my teenage years when I broke my collar bone on that left side. It was like the arm was reliving this on its own. And memories of my feelings in connection/part of/welcome in the human family (in family, amongst others, at school) as I struggled with this feeling ( I didn’t get it at home and somehow took it on that it wasn’t really available for me to belong or be welcome as me in LIFE).

What held me as well as my body was my longing for the energies of social interaction, the hustle and bustle of love & joy in daily life. This aliveness I’d felt when younger looking at other families, as if I was standing at their house windows looking in, alone, unloved on the street.

There seemed to be a knowing or resonance with the arm remembering its shock and these deeper and in fact simpler or more core emotional places of my teenage years. As the process continued I began to see from images of me at school that I did also belong to a living out of life, that I was part of a living web, maybe home didn’t work so well for me and created stoppages and imbalances but I was unarguably also held in a good web where I moved around.

The images also seemed to hint at how later when I left home why I might have come crashing down. It felt like the first time of touching into the sense of that collapse even while the main subject was the joy of everyday acceptance by my school & teachers & feeling a relief or love for my overall life while at school, even if there was this shock of an accident and the emotional shock or unresolved/blocked feelings at home.

I’m gobsmacked how the arm and body held and brought this. And I can’t help note that I just started to take some muscle relaxants after the doctor discovered an old injury in my neck. It feels connected, as if the arm jumped out into the space these may have created.

I wanted to share this with you, and I’m also conscious that it gives me a chance to put something in writing. I am trying to do this for the blog and finding that I don’t know how to connect afterward with my WBF experiences or indeed even share. Writing to you now I found I can connect the experience and the words, as if trusting or believing you can hear me, I can then speak.

Would love to arrange a time to connect again. I am taking the relaxants for a few more days 😊

10 October 2019
Hi barebody&soul,

I love that you are writing about what happened to you and how it connected you to some earlier trauma.  Writing is one of the ways that we can connect with our bodies. When I write a blog, it is from grounded presence and I let me fingers type out what my body wants to say without any editing.  This is the affirmation of the experience like what you just wrote.  Later I can go back and organize my experience in a way that would help others to understand the moment—like adding backstory for example.  If you would like help with that process let me know.

10 December 2019
Hi Diana

I would love to contribute to the blog and I remembered what I’d shared with you about the arm reconnecting with the body (10 Oct email above). I just arrived back from a trip to England and saw your email and found this correspondence now. When I read it I was taken aback – these are the same underlying relational senses I have in connection with “Me in England” I just described to my wife rippling through my being in connection with my trip and the deeper reorganization taking place inside!!

I’m happy to share it close to its current form but maybe it needs something more? As I can be perfectionist I realised I will take forever left to my own devices/probably not do it, for no good reason, so I welcome any suggestions. I could even write about this sharing with you and my trip to England now as part of the experiential web bringing me to share it to others via the blog. I like this idea of stories from the body shared in conversation and resonating later in stories and trips. It comes close to home. That home that is here and we wander from in search of. This moves me deeply. It is our shared story.

A title that just came was something like: Me, England. My heart is here: arm finding itself reconnecting to the body. These words seem to capture the ALL of that, which now feels like a this.

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