IN IT TOGETHER
MARCH 2015

Hello Everyone...

Another month has passed, which I know because there's this thing called a calendar (wink). However, I can't say that it feels energetically any different than the last several months have felt. In my own little world, I continue to witness and experience smooth, calm moments that can be overturned instantly by someone's reaction to life - sometimes (of course) my own. As Dixie noted in her January newsletter, we're going from one intensification to another - external to internal and back to external. I can't help but see a visual of all of us as human yo-yo's.....wound tight in one moment, then unwound, then wound.....it's like Spirit is having a little fun at our expense! And I'm absolutely joking, of course.....that would make us victims, and we are anything but. Still, I have to smile at the visual of Spirit having fun playing with "us yoyo's"....all for our own Good, of course.

Dixie has said many times that whatever energy we're in when we enter an intensification cycle is magnified. I suppose that must mean that a lot of us entered into the first intensification cycle feeling exhausted, because honestly just about everyone I've talked to in this past month has mentioned feeling like all they want to do is curl up in their nest and sleep......that no matter how much rest they get, they still can't shake the exhaustion. This up/down/up energy is challenging enough when it comes to maintaining balance in our lives, but when you throw in the exhaustion factor, it becomes even more of a challenge. Most of us are getting through our days just waiting for the moment when our heads hit our pillows.

Magnified exhaustion, though, has its own purpose in that when we're tired, we get irritable easier - we don't have the energy to put up with what we consider to be someone else's drama or demands on us. Our fears are more pronounced. We are more "vulnerable" to our emotions because our guards are down - our walls are lower.....and ultimately, that's a good thing. It allows us to pinpoint our buttons, our fears, our griefs far easier than we normally can because we don't have as much energy to hide from ourselves and each other.

Years ago, we offered five-day intensive workshops called The Reyna Experience (by "we", I mean Dixie, Ava and I). We'd spend the first several days working from early in the morning to sometimes as late as 1:00 a.m. We knew the walls that were erected to hide people's pains and shames would start to crumble by the third day - it's too hard to maintain the energy required to hide when we are feeling physically very tired. Of course we were upfront with people from the get-go that we would be working almost non-stop for the first several days - the curriculum "flow" was important to stick with and also, we wanted them TO get tired for the very reasons mentioned - to let their walls crumble so they could stop hiding their inner Beings and let go of anything that limited their enjoyment of Life.

I pulled up to Dixie's a few days and as usual, her three beautiful yellow labs came running out to greet me. My eyes fell on Lady, a rescue dog who was scheduled to be put to sleep the day after Dixie spotted her on an animal shelter site a couple of years ago. Dixie was compelled to get Lady FAST, and so her husband and a friend drove to the animal shelter to get her. I was at Dixie's house when Lady arrived. I've never seen a dog in as much grief as she was. She was incredibly thin and had obviously recently given birth, but it was her eyes that told the story. Such sorrow emanated from them.....such despair. We found out she had been tied up in a small back yard for most of her life, given no human warmth and no value as a living creature beyond breeding. God bless her.

Though it took a while, Lady slowly but surely began to thrive as a direct result of the constant Love and patient nurturing she was given. She learned to trust that it was real and wouldn't go away. Gradually, she began to perk up her ears and wag her tail. Gradually, she began to show affection for the other two dogs. Gradually, she began to allow us to stroke her, to rub her belly (which she loves). Gradually, the light returned to her eyes until today, she is the first to greet me, wagging her tail and then running off to romp with the other two, happy and delighted to be in this new life of hers.

If Lady had arrived in her wounded state and been treated with impatience and disapproval for being wounded, there's no way she would have been able to heal. Instead, she was treated with Love and with gentle, unfailing patience and nurturing.

If only we could help each other heal as easily.

Now of course dogs aren't complicated like we humans are - they are who they are without apology and they have no need to hide themselves. We, on the other hand, hide ourselves like crazy. We have a sense of shame when we admit to feeling injured or hurt, or we feel as though we're burdening someone to talk about our "problems". We've been taught that in many ways.....by seeing someone roll their eyes when we mention a hurt......by hearing "Be a man" or "Big girls don't cry" or "I've got my own problems - I don't need yours"....by hearing someone tell us we just need to get over it, that we're making a mountain out of a mole hill. We learn it isn't safe to express our pain because of the many ways in which people react to it (or from our own misinterpretation of another's words or actions that WE think mean we somehow aren't doing life "right"). We learn to shut up and stuff it all, because it's "safer" and no one will judge us for having our pain. We learn to hide.

And the truth is, when we finally trust that it's safe TO reveal ourselves to another, we empower ourselves in ways that we didn't know possible. Life becomes richer, fuller - plus we give that other person unspoken permission to share more of themselves with us and we end up in a deeper, more meaningful relationship with each other than we could have imagined (not to mention we are clearer in ourselves as a result).

I mentioned Lady specifically because she is who she is - she didn't hide her pain when she arrived so it was easy to see what she needed and to offer to it. It's obviously not as simple to do with our family and friends because we hide from each other. We don't see their wounds and therefore it doesn't occur to us to offer to help them heal their pain. We see their tears and want desperately to "fix" them with words rather than to simply listen until their sorrow is talked all the way out of them. We see their anger and get angry in return or withdraw from their "negativity", forgetting that anger is always a cry of pain. We get impatient, we get defensive because we often personalize their tears and/or anger; we become judgmental because we expect them to act differently. It doesn't occur to us to put our hand on their shoulder and simply say to them, "How can I help?"

If only we could remember to be kind to ourselves and to each other....if only we could acknowledge that we are who we are because of our experiences, without shame or without apology.....if only we could remember that EACH of us is doing the best we can. Oh, but wait a minute - that IS what we're Learning to do......it IS. Gradually, gradually, we're getting there. Of course we won't get there as quickly as Lady did......but the basic ingredients for "getting there" remain, in my mind, the same: Love and unfailing patience and nurturing allows us to trust that we are safe to reveal ourselves. It's in the sharing of our hearts - the good, the bad, the ugly - that we learn Compassion for each other, that we learn to trust that our warts aren't going to drive away someone who truly loves us.....that we learn to BE who we are, without apology, without shame.....

We make things so darned complicated, don't we?

Hold on to your Spirit...        
Marty