Pathways

Pathways

There are moments in your life where you must choose. Moments where pathways will be opened up for you to travel. These pathways or choices will be given to us in different stages of our lives. We will receive an offering from life itself, an offering of change, to go in a different direction, to move, to change who you are, careers, to step into a version of yourself that has been calling you. Should you choose to accept this mission, you’ll begin to embark on journey of dismantling.

I am on such a journey. It feels as if this dismantling has been going on for years, seven years to be exact.  Each year has brought its own unique version of dismantling. This year, it is the dismantling of old stories passed on from the feminine lineage of my ancestors. Stories of bitterness, sourness, lack, unworthiness, and so much more. I am feeling them very intensely this year, particularly the suffering my mother went through. As a young child I hated to see her suffer and didn’t realize the impact her suffering had on me, that I held it in my body locked up somewhere, that some of the sadness I held was the sadness I watched in her.

Being here on this retreat with other powerful women who all have their share of stories is a healing balm for me and for them I’d like to believe. Shared stories help us to remember that we are not alone and that so much of our stories are similar. The mother wound causes us to deny, reject, and mistrust that feminine part of us that holds deep power for living life softly and gracefully. In our stories, I can see how powerful the mother wound is, the effect it has on us women.

Yesterday my dear friend Amber who is assisting me facilitating this retreat gifted me with an anger releasing exercise and boy was it intense. The anger I felt was my mother’s anger at being abused. It was wrapped up in my body from the years I saw her being abused by my father. I did not know how to express this anger as a child, the powerlessness I felt to do anything. My body absorbed all those sounds and held on to it. Yesterday, I wailed as I gave myself permission to give it a voice, and the voice roared. To say I was grateful for her ministrations is an understatement. Amber is a gifted healer and clinician, and the women on this retreat has received a gift in her presence here.

When I think of retreating, it’s rest and soul healing that comes to me. I’d like to think and feel that the women who have signed up for this retreat has felt rested and healed in some part of their soul. Even if it’s only the planting of a seed that will take root when they return home. Each conversation has opened up a portal for each of us to step through, and to be held in such sacred community connecting one to the other is priceless. Our breathwork session yesterday produced varying experiences from a deep sense of renewed joy, gratitude for life, a reconnection to the body, and so much more. Breath is the primary medicine of life, it feeds us and it reveals to us. Being able to reconnect to our original technology that is our body is the ultimate medicine and gift. And as women we have done that on this retreat.

I am happy my mother has shown up on this retreat with me. Happy to have offered to her what she perhaps could not have done, take the time to wail, roar, and lament with other women to hold her. Honoring the ancestors this way is helping to clear the energetic pathway. It’s an unexpected gift I did not see coming. To the land, to the women in this group, to my dear friend Amber, I say thank you for holding space for me.

Grateful!!