After my first healthy Winter in 20 years, I finally came down with a sinus infection that has dropped into my lungs just as we are on the verge of Spring emerging. As part of this I recognized that even though there are myriad pressures on me from work, family, study, etc., I was going to have take this lying down, literally. I really dislike being inactive.
However, out of this has come one or two useful insights. I recently made some decisions about details of my life path...and in the process I let some irritations settle under my surface and eat away at me. Instead of simply recognizing situations to be dealt with, I let them fester and I believe the result was allowing my immune system a great opportunity to be open to this onslaught. This is a painful lesson, but a useful one, as I learn how to navigate this subtle course correction in my life.
Additionally, in various areas of my life I have been presented with the idea of "slow down to speed up." It sounds counter intuitive, this idea of slowing down internally just as a crisis heats up. However, doing so and returning to my own center allows me to much more accurately assess whether or not a situation IS a real crisis...and often it turns out not to be. This recent illness brought home this axiom in a very physical way. As my asthmatic lungs were enjoying a nice nebulizer treatment (a breathing treatment involving a bronchodilator (lung opener) to open constricted air passages) I found myself experiencing the usual physical speeding up and tremors that these medications have as an undesirable side effect. I know this feeling well, having had years of experience with this. It has been so lovely these past few months to be free of this type of side effect, and I found myself feeling irritated at my "failure" to avoid this illness. As this thought went through my mind I reached for a glass of water too quickly as a result of my trembling and almost turned it over.
I told myself to stop, to move more slowly and accurately, and to give myself the space in which to be human.
That's not an easy road for me. I grew up enduring inhumane conditioning, and I still find myself demanding that I be superhuman, or at least other than human. It's interesting to note that the more deeply I accept my own humanity, the healthier I am. It's when I try to deny my humanity that I unintentionally make myself somehow smaller rather than growing larger to embrace the whole of who I am: Human and Divine. When I try to transcend my humanity, I get sick. When I embrace all of me, I feel good, strong, healthy, and large enough to do all the Work that I wish to do. It is the merging of all aspects of myself that creates the container -both large enough and strong enough - for the Work I feel called to accomplish.
Let us grow and embrace ALL that we are, rather than rejecting parts of ourselves and creating too small a vessel for the Great Work we are called to create.
Namaste.
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