Phoenix Rising: Returning to What My Body Already Knew

Welp, true to me... it has taken me 3 months to come back and write again and as always too much has happened to even know where to being. I didn’t plan to wait three months before writing again — but maybe my body did. I think it knew I needed space to live the lessons before I could write about them. Now, sitting in silence at the  Kalama Meditation Center at my first ever Meditation retreat, I can feel how much of that first week is still alive in me. This is my return to what my body already knew. 

I still think going back and remembering what happened during that 8 week program will be helpful for me so that is what I plan to do! So here it goes! 

Week 1 was about returning to the body. It started off slow by listening to some meditations, affirmations and doing body scans, setting up a sacred space, getting outside into the earth, taking detox baths and making an herbal tea I drank in the AM and in the PM every day. 

The meditations didn't feel hard at this point because I am used to doing some form of this now that I have been working with my business coach Tanisha at Your Other Mind for about 9 months by this point. It was SO HARD at first to even imagine where I would be able to find the time to meditate, my life and schedule was so jam packed every day from 5:30am to 10pm pretty much every day. Through guidance I learned that time is construct and that I needed to allow things to be easy and slow. Through determination I kept at it and found a way. Though, had I not had that 9 months of priming it do think this part would have felt harder. 

I am not typically a bath taker, so I wasn't looking forward to taking baths. For one I would get bored and secondly, I didn't like having to clean the tub! But it was one of my assignments for the week and I completed the tasks like the good overachieving student that I am. I took multiple baths this week with different essential oils, and detox ingredients. I soaked until I got bored and then used the rest of the time to listen to the meditations and affirmations and also to read and think about my responses to the journal prompts, I was given that week. I specifically remember being in the bath, reading the journal prompts and crying because I was frustrated that I didn't know the answer or maybe it was that I didn't like the answer I was coming up with. Week 1 learned that I was very disconnected from my body. I couldn't specifically identify when I feel most disconnected from my body because I always feel disconnected from my body! WTF? Is this why I have such a hard time drinking water, because I just don't pay attention to my thirst cues? Then I started to spiral and think about all the other ways this has shown up for me in my life. 

I also learned in this bath journaling session that the place I have always considered my safe place (the farm I grew up on) was no longer a safe space for me. There are all these family dynamics recently have don't have anything to do with me per say, but clearly are affecting me that I identified and had to acknowledge. I was so not ready for that realization to come up. More crying...  

This week I also learned that my throat chakra was closed AF. While doing a body scan I literally choked every time I tried to swallow. I didn't even really know what my throat chakra was! 

Finally this week I learned that my body has been trying to tell me to slow down, and do less or maybe not even less, just do differently. I guess popping Tylenol and Ibuprofen daily should have been a warning sign?  I didn't know what doing less or differently could even look like, but I decided to trust the process and just go with it to see where this led me.

 This was all WEEK ONE! I should have known that the weeks that followed were going to melt me down into a puddle... Also, I never made my sacred space, that is still something that I plan to do when it feels right. 

Con Amor y Chakras Cerradas, 

Glo