“Your creative life force, your light, is always with you. It has always been with you. But sometimes you cannot see it or feel it because your body is trying to keep you safe.” These words from my teacher resonated in ways she could not have known.
My three siblings and I were in the room when my mother’s soul left her body. I felt her energy pass through me. And then the lights went out for me. Everywhere.
I couldn’t cry after she died. I physically couldn’t release the grief from my body.
I felt numb. In shock, even though we had known mom was dying for about a year before she took her last breath. Thirteen years after her original cancer diagnosis.
The numbness–a normal protective mechanism my body employed to try to titrate my grief and overwhelm–broke me. While I have words for that experience now, I didn’t understand what was happening then.
You see, I had imagined I would feel my mother’s energy after she died. And all I felt was … NOTHING.
My mom and I were not close until my early twenties. Much of my childhood trauma is a direct result of her actions or inaction on my behalf.
But we planted the seeds of a relationship when I was in law school and she was getting her PhD. A connection built over phone calls between the law library and her apartment in Boston. As a young adult trying to do and be all the things for all the people, my mom became my sounding board.
Over time, she became my lifeline–the only person I told when I felt overwhelmed by all the ways I was trying to hold the weight of the world. In some ways, she was the only person with whom I shared the whole truth.
When I transitioned from one career to another with no safety net in my late thirties and two small children at home, it was my mother who gently reminded me again and again that I was being held and guided, even when external circumstances might feel otherwise.
She helped me to cement a personal sense of connection to spirit outside of the fundamentalist evangelical upbringing of my youth that had traumatized me in more ways than one.
And with her death, not only did I lose her, but I lost my capacity to sense any energy beyond the darkness of the black hole that threatened to consume me.
It wasn’t until I went through yoga teacher training in 2017, spending literal hours on the mat and in my body, that I began to feel an energetic thread connecting me to universal energy again.
Five years in utter darkness–devoid of the connective threads that keep us tied to life, to hope, to each other. It would break anyone.
Rediscovering the sensory experience of life force, creative energy and visionary capacity within my own body has been a slow(er) process than I would have liked. Maybe because my body had been on the precipice for so long (decades) before true healing began. Maybe because we cannot think our way to healing. Maybe because my nervous system was still trying to keep me safe.
In any event, or maybe for all of these reasons, learning to work with my body and with my nervous system has been the path that continues to reconnect me to my own life force, our individual and collective potential for wholeness, and our capacity to claim more for our lives than culture would have us believe is possible. Yes, it has taken longer than I wanted it to take. And yet, when I consider how far I have traveled, I am in awe.
As long as your are in this body, creative life force is always with you. Which means, you carry within you all of the time the power to write a new story.
Can you feel that possibility inside your own body? Are you able to sustain aligned actions over time toward bringing that possibility into form?
Or maybe one of these statements more accurately reflects your current experience (aka somatic coaching* might be for you if):
You used to feel possibility but it has gotten clouded or lost along the way. And you wonder sometimes if you will ever feel that way again.
You feel your own potential sometimes but then it seems to vanish into thin air. You have a clear vision but struggle to take aligned action steps over time (just a reminder that these steps are most often micro and repetitive in nature as opposed to grand gestures).
You feel trapped in your own repetitive patterns or behaviors and despite your best efforts, you cannot seem to break free.
You know what you want but feel like you are still looking for the magic bullet strategy to make it all happen (and none of them are working).
You have some important decisions to make and your mind won’t stop spinning through the options.
You want to feel a sense of calm, confident solidity in a world marked by chaos but you aren’t sure how.
I would love to hear from you about your current relationship with your connection to your own creative lifeforce and sense of possibility and power. Please hit reply and tell me more.
Love,
Booth
p.s. For current somatic coaching options, book a one-time session or explore longer term options here. Or schedule a Discovery Call to see if somatic coaching is a good fit for where you are right now.
*Somatic coaching is not intended to diagnose or treat any medical or mental health condition. It is not a replacement for the support of licensed medical or mental health professionals.