Tag: Space

Day Dreaming

Published on by Space for Nature

I am sat in my garden admiring the stillness and the warm glow of the rising sun as it peers over my fence and illuminates the lemon balm.

The sky is azure blue and cloudless and I sit in my hammock as the East is ablaze with a full round sun , blinding to gaze upon.

I am sitting with polarities. The polarity between grace and rage in these turbulent times . I am aware that I am aching to connect.

What I miss is connection. Connection with depth. The rich soul depth of true contact with another being.

I swim in rich internal pools of wonder and longing , naive and guileless, full of childlike wonder and innocence. I marvel at newly spun webs on the ash , the filaments of rainbow light that appear through cracks as I squint my eyes.

I am flighty and skittish – easily spooked. A foal finding her legs. I am often clumsy in the way I take to this body and its place on the earth. I often stumble about until something clicks and I can prance and throw my head as I skip and frolick , jerkily moving more life into my body and my limbs .Free yet contained and constrained by the physical limitations, a part of me confused as to why I can only expand to fill up so much space.

I can not be everywhere as I wish to be. I cannot fully touch the all that is . I can only anchor in a small part of this universe and it feels a little … uncomfortable …uncertain.

I am not sure if I like it or care for it much . It is alien to a part of me that has been to the sun and knows the cosmos as a brother. I feel estranged and forgotten and abandoned down here – where are they ?

They have left me with friends they say;

“With the trees and with mountain, with forrest and with hill

They will look after you.

With flowers and river and ocean, they will comfort you

With wind and with rain and with fire, they will welcome you, nourish you, revive you” they say , but still i am lost and my heart aches for the stars that are my home.

In the stillness of morning before the raucus caw of gul and crow and the quiet song of the morning birds, I hear the static of the atmoshpere warming as the Sun ascends on the horizon. I hear the fizz of atoms heating up. I feel the energetic shift from cool still night to dawning day .

I hear it crackle imperceptibly all around me . It’s this invisible sound that stirs and wakes my sleeping body each new day. Its magnetic pull that lulls me from the dream of sleep to the lucidity of wakefullness.

It leaves a heaviness , a sadness , of a soul returned to its box . I try not to let this realisation dampen my day but it feels like dead weight i can not bear to carry.

I look up and remember the sun , lazily surfacing over the rooftops and feel it lighten my being . I feel the joy and energy of life in my heart. Excitement and possibilities come to my window and invite me to play.

And I sit between the ache of longing for what cannot be and the joy of what can be created.

I sit between the darkness and the dawn wishing to be lifted back into the sun

Back into the earth

Back into the world

Back into life

And i carry with me both joy and sorrow

Belonging and loss

Fire and water

Strength and tenderness

Fear and courage

Hope and hopelessness

Grace and rage

And i take each day as it comes.

Touching into painful places ;I nourish them with warmth and light, courage and conviction, acceptance of what is.

I breathe.

Inhaling possibility, exhaling all that is done and gone.

One day at a time.

One step at a time.

One breath at a time.

Coming home to nature

Published on by Space for Nature

Spending time in nature is not only good for our mental and physical wellbeing , its good for our soul. We were created to live in harmony with the natural world not to be seperated from it.

When you reconnect to this earth you belong too , you reconnect to a lost part of your own being.

Regular time spent engaging with the wildness of nature , observing its cycles , noting the effects of the weather , learning the cycles of growth and decay – puts you in touch with a much wider circle of life – it brings a greater understanding of our own innate being.

It allows you to become aquatinted with other. That which is other than human and to see how we are deeply interconnected to a wider web of living and life .

You begin to notice the similarities and differences in being and realise how diverse this marvellous creation called Earth, really is.

Thats why I trained as a Wild Therapist.

For me there is something that happens when we take healing connection outside and allow nature to become part of the process. Something profound takes place. Sometimes obvious , sometimes much more subtle – but things always move and shift.

Perspectives change. However temporarily. Room gets made for new connections. Space is created for exploration and enquiry , curiosity and playfulness.

We allow ourselves to drop deeper , tensions abate , breathing deepens , even in our raw edges and painful places we feel held by an invisible love.

A love we may not know yet. A love we may find hard to bare. But it is there.

The love from nature. Silently waiting for us to reach out to it .

Patiently waiting for us all to come home.

If you would like to explore this healing connection with nature in a therapeutic capacity contact Alexa at spacefornature@outlook.com or look at the Wild Wisdom page for more information.

Initiation Embodied

Published on by Space for Nature

Embodiment requires you to drop out of the head space ,the place of thinking and judging, observing and questioning, answering and  processing external stimuli.

It requires you to drop down  from the mind space and in to the physical space of the body you inhabit, the space of feeling and sensing. We can often believe we are in this place as it feels impossible to conceive that we are in fact existing outside of ourselves , in our thinking , in our heads , separated from our bodies by our minds.

I recently found a space , over a weekend , to be completely still for a prolonged period of time and in this time I journeyed inwards. It was a spontaneous decision that arose from wondering  ‘what happens if I choose to do absolutely nothing ?’ So I followed the impulse.

I lay down and did nothing but consciously bring myself and my attention into my body. For several hours I came back into myself .

For the first time in nearly 2 decades I experienced a profound sense of contentment , a long forgotten yet familiar experience of oneness with myself and my environment. An echo of a memory of womblike safety and comfort . Nothing required of me , except to be . A  blissfully euphoric  experience.

I encountered many profound realisations in this place that I continued to process for several days afterwards – most notably my desire to return to that state and live within it permanently – followed by another realisation that it is not a state we can inhabit all the time in this world . There is too much going on. But it is a place we can visit and restore ourselves in from time to time .

On the one hand this was a very easy journey to make in and of itself , however its been years of work to arrive at a point where it became possible. The conditions just happened to be the right ones .

So I share with you here my journey , my Embodied Initiation. The poem is in 2 parts . The second part, Entering The Void will follow in my next blog .

Initiation Embodied- part 1

I drop down , down from the mind space ,

down ,down, down ,into the body space

and meet the numb indifference,

the pain, the anger, the sadness, the rage,

the shock…..

The fear, the anxiety, the empty spaces where ‘I’ used to be.

The hollows where ‘I’ used to feel .

The absences where ‘I’

once was.

I sense the breaks , the fractures, the rips in the fabric of my being and

I follow the painful and uncomfortable sensations;

The awkwardness, the restlessness,

the bruising and the stitches.

The aching and the cramping,

the heaviness and the stiffness.

The conflicting need to run and be motionless,

petrification and endless turmoil; flowing in,

only to be catapulted out again in fear,

in anxiety , in shock.

In shame , in guilt, in bitterness,

in powerlessness.

Back and forth between body and mind

until….

I can anchor a sense of safety in myself.

until…

I can find  the part of me that is always standing strong .

Unshakable and present.

Until I trust this part is here for me.

Until it has proven itself to me a thousand times

and never let me down.

I keep coming back to myself , until all is well

and then I drop down.

Down , down ,down into the body

that I used to know;

that I used to feel;

That I used to love,

before it was broken.

And I drop down deeper ,

deeper ,

under the skin.

Into the abyss.

 And enter the void.

(All words and image copyright The Well of Belonging 2018.)