New Beginnings....

Out the cave and in the forest! Everything appears to be bright English-countryside green!  My heart expands and is full of gratitude for my life : my whole life, caves and forests and all.  I am profoundly aware of the value of the dark dungeons of pain and voluntary cleansing that goes with sitting with your pain.  Eckhart Tolle calls it The Pain Body, Martha Beck calls it cave-diving and Debbie Ford calls it The Shadow.  Well, whatever you want to call it, it feels the same : like a scab has been removed from an old wound and now it is bleeding freshly, vulnerable to the elements, and it feels raw, exposed and deeply, profoundly painful. But, my goodness, when it heals, it feels marvelous : new found strength, new found gratitude for the healing and new found appreciation for the beauty of the scar, forever a reminder of your strength and courage to look at the pain and work through it.  Somebody once told me (or I might have read it somewhere) that the definition of courage is being scared and doing it anyway.  That is how I see working through emotional pain : freaking courageous!  I have only just started the career of life coaching (cringe at the label), or as I prefer to see it, witnessing other people's courage - and it is a complete marvel, watching others move through their pain.  In these moments, their beauty and strength and pure light shines through their human shells; their keeper's-of-spirit, and I feel like an avatar greeting another avatar, ' I see you'.  The great big feeling of connectivity, being one with it all, pervades my being and I am in awe of the other.  I feel a huge sense of privilege doing this work and an immense admiration for the other being in the room.  The whole process is not like that : there are itchy, scratchy bits and bits that want to bite and bits that feel bitten, yet the river flows onward and a change occurs and the world shifts.  They say that action is borne out of contrast, so the dark moments are necessary, a gift if you like, to bring about action, change and transformation.  Working with uncomfortable feelings instead of resisting the circumstances, the gift, the cave, just be there as a witness to your own journey and the wound will heal over and a stronger, more brilliant 'you' emerges, more whole, more comfortable in the human body, loving life, joyful, free.