ALIGN embodied wellness

19/11/2023

Healing hurts. But what hurts more is the refusal of the call.

The true pain of living is the abandonment of self, the mind-body split that makes us fear life.

Our ache may be heavy and our souls tired today, but resistance makes it all feel a thousand times worse.

Rejection of where we are amplifies suffering. Until we cannot take it anymore. Until there is no way out but in.

Diving into the blackness, we discover not death but more abundant life.

This is the great paradox of healing, which all great artists and poets and seers have known. We die into our trauma and discover our courage.

The fiercest warriors are the ones who have let life break and remake them a thousand times over.

The gods of healing are calling through your pain today.

Healing hurts, sometimes, yes, but the hurt itself may eventually heal you.

- Jeff Foster

15/09/2023

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before.

Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”~

~Alice Walker

art: Alyse Russell

08/09/2023

TRAUMA
is the invisible force
that keeps us running, restless,
in pursuit of some intangible goal.
Caught up in some unnecessary activity.
Addiction. Compulsions. Distractions.
Makes us escape into thinking.
Makes the body feel unsafe.
Makes the present moment into an enemy.

If we slow down.
If we stop.
If we rest.
If we simply do nothing.
Then we will have to face ... ourselves.
We will have to face buried feelings.
All the s**t we were running from.
All the darkness.
The gunk.
The muck.
The loneliness.
The aches and the boredom.
The night and the emptiness.

Trauma says, “Run!”.
Trauma says, “Do Not Stop!”.
Trauma says, “Just keep going!”
Trauma says, “Stopping is unsafe!”.

We start by proving to ourselves
that it is safe to rest! Safe to be still.
Safe to do nothing, just for a moment.
Safe to think our thoughts and feel our feelings ..... and not ‘fix’ the moment in any way.

We can begin - one moment at a time –
to digest all the undigested things inside.
Stay with sadness for a moment longer.
Be present with our joy or shame for an instant more.
Breathe into our anxiety instead of running from it.
Become curious about our discomfort
instead of distracting ourselves with unnecessary food,
drink,
cleaning,
drugs,
shopping,
Internet,
thinking,
talking,
overworking,
yoga,
seeking,
more thinking,
rumination,
fantasy and false hope.

We can challenge the core story at the heart of trauma:
That the present moment is unsafe.
That the body is somehow working against us.
That feelings, sensations or thoughts are dangerous.
That stillness and silence equal non-existence and death.
And that we have to ‘do’ something
in order to be worthy,
and loved,
and whole.

It takes courage to stop running.
It takes courage to lean into the storm.
It takes courage to touch the darkness inside
with the infinite light of our curious attention.

It takes courage to break the addiction to futures.
And be present.
And breathe.

And not know.

- Jeff Foster

13/08/2023

19/07/2023

We are not saints, we are not heroes. Our lives are lived in the quiet corners of the ordinary. We build tiny hearth fires, sometimes barely strong enough to give off warmth. But to the person lost in the darkness, our tiny flame may be the road to safety, the path to salvation. It is not given us to know who is lost in the darkness that surrounds us or even if our light is seen. We can only know that against even the smallest of lights, darkness cannot stand. A sailor lost at sea can be guided home by a single candle. A person lost in a wood can be led to safety by a flickering flame. It is not an issue of quality or intensity or purity. It is simply an issue of the presence of light.

~ Kent Nerburn: Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace

[Art: Roch Urbaniak]

09/07/2023

Today
I gave up
On healing my trauma
I gave up
On practicing the skills
To become whole
Today I gave up
On evolving
Into that ever elusive
Better version of myself
Today I submitted
To the wound of love
I stopped pointing at it
Looking at it
Soothing it
Tweaking it
Fixing it
Finessing it
Hiding it
Polishing it
I stopped this game of separation
I crawled inside the wound
And spread it open
I decided to wear it like a gown
I accepted my total and utter
Failure
To be anything else
But me

~ Maya Luna: Deep Feminine Mystery School https://linktr.ee/thevenuspath

[Image: Damian Drewniak Fotografia]

09/07/2023

Chameleon Aura: https://amzn.to/3prkgAz

24/05/2023

You’re not building a social media following.
You’re building a life.

It doesn’t matter how many followers you have.
The book deals, the interviews, the viral content.

You’ll come to see it’s all rather meaningless.

Success comes and goes.
Fame. Likes. Popularity.
Money.
Climbing the charts.

The wheel of fortune turns and turns, relentlessly, and sometimes you’re going up and sometimes you’re going down, and the trick is to not get attached to any of it.

Enjoy it, sure. Experience it all, why not.
But know that in the end, what matters are the moments.

The present moments.
Only those.
Or rather, how present you are in the present moments.
Because they are all you have and all you can grasp.

At the centre of the wheel, at the hub, stillness.
At the centre of the turning world, you.

Your heart. Your vulnerability.
Your deepest truth.
What you long for. What you fear.
What truly matters to you.

All the money in the world won’t buy it.
All the parties. The likes, the fleeting approval. The sound and the fury of manifestation. The dopamine hits. The highs.

The number of things you own.
The trophies on your wall.
Your spiritual accomplishments.
Your mastery of form, too.

None of it really matters.

Here’s what matters:

How deeply you can connect with your fellow beings. With yourself.
How widely your heart can open.
How profoundly you are touched by the afternoon’s marshmallow-like clouds.
By the birdsong in the evening.
By the stillness of night.

How you treat your kids.
Your partner.
Your pets.
Strangers in the street.

Here’s what matters:

How deeply you have made friends with death.
How grateful you feel for each breath.
How close you have come to God, to the fire, or rather, to the great pre-verbal Mystery towards which the word God can only hint.
How much you can let go.
How much you can surrender.

How much you can giggle each day at the seriousness of the mind.

You’re building a life, not an audience.
Not a career.
Not a bank balance.
Not a following.
Not even a legacy.

You’re building a moment.

You’re weeping at the sunrise.

You’re lying in the summer grass, laughing like a child.

You’ve found yourself, and that’s priceless.

- Jeff Foster