How do you reconcile a desire to "tread softly on the earth" and all your particular health requirements and preferences with the unpredictability and other variables of travel when you go on holiday? And what is a holiday or vacation meant to do for you? La Vimea is a unique "biotique" hotel in the South Tyrol that helped me to find out what was possible to achieve now and (hopefully) even more easily in the future...
It's a case of, like the old adage says, dancing like no one is watching and allowing the sacred to emerge. You will find it's that elusive feminine aspect and she will swell at being allowed the free rein to express as she chooses...no particular movements or correct postures, no positions with names, no routines to follow...just exactly as she likes to express. Allow her to have her say and she will bring all the most disparate aspects of you together into a new kind of coherence, imparting the kind of strength that is an inside job. It's a female thing; we have known about this forever and we used such movements all the time until mass amnesia caused us to forget all but what was channelled into the sparse remnants that became the separate dance modalities that are enjoyed by the few today (far outbalanced by such widespread self-consciousness that most women bearly allow themselves to move their bodies fluidly at all). This is their forebear...and she's really wild! When we break the bands that hold us so rigid and proper, so apologetic and stiffled, so self-doubting and humiliated, we spill over our own edges and such healing flows out of us that we need no other source. In fact I recommend doing even just five to ten minutes a day of this kind of free-flow dance or even just arm and hand movement to music to all women in search of healing and wholeness; self-consciousness put aside, you might be amazed at what comes up out of yourself.
Do you struggle, I mean really struggle, to adjust to getting back into your body in the mornings? Even when there's absolutely nothing to worry about, there's no stress, no unhealthy lifestyle habits to explain it, nothing that could be making your cortisol peak when you wake, do you somehow know that you are treading a very fine line as you re-enter your conscious state each day? Have you had to entrain your family to tread very softly around you first thing in the morning because loud noises or sudden announcements get your heart racing, switch on pain? Even when you are perfectly chilled in your mind, ecstatic with life even, is this your "normal" experience of waking; like it's a precision manoeuver? Its a vata kind of a thing...and there are things you should know about how to make this easier.
Tuning into your own most-treasured time of "void", of a feeling you once stored-up for such a day as this, a distant memory of what it truly feels like to have nothing to do and nowhere to go can be such a gift to yourself. Especially if you can allow yourself to accept it as it is, on behalf of who you are right now, not making it about nostalgia as though you are trying to recapture some long-lost essence of your past when "life was better" or "you were more deserving of it". The biggest challenge is to allow it, to really give yourself over to it and not seek to make it into another project by orchestrating it or making it conditional. How easy do we find it to be in void and not allow the mind to seek something to do, to worry about or a way to make the time more "useful" or "constructive" (as we tend to regard it when we constantly keep ourselves busy)? Yet empty space is anything but lacking in use; and it might be the very thing we are needing most, the refinding of which will be the missing jigsaw piece that makes all else suddenly fit together. Like the hidden portal we couldn't see for looking, it might be the doorway to exactly where we were trying so hard to get to with our minds...and there it was, all the time.
The many and varying, often uncomfortable, symptoms of a woman's mid-life transition are all versions of this metaphorical (you could even say, metaphysical) "itch". Really, its transformation underway...a metamophosis...and in making it mundane, by denying it or even making it seem like a problem, a curse, we fight back against what is really like a spreading of wings from the chrysalis; bewilderingly, disorientingly beautiful. Our culture has done terrible things to downplay the stage of her life that is all about female empowerment and there is a minefield of superstitious beliefs and misinformation around it; no wonder we hurt and struggle our way through it. When we welcome and encourage that transition, we allow for it to be smoother...and there a number of reasons why we might want to be doing that. These are, you could say, the times we have always been waiting for...
Travelling away from home can be an extra-challenge for those of us with health challenges and sensitivities of any kind because it takes us out of our routine. It's not so much the distance but the upheaval that can be difficult to cope with (on top of the extra tiredness that comes with travel) when you probably have well-established survival tactics in place at home that enable you to cope pretty well with your health most of the time. Booking a holiday can feel a bit like planning to blow all that carefully created homeostasis to pieces in the name of having fun and there have been times when I wonder why I do it; is it even worth it (the answer, by the way, is yes). Changes in sleep arrangements and diet can throw health into disarray when maintaining that balance has become a finely tuned thing.
The extreme effects that resulted when two of us revisited eating sugar after a long break from it reminded me that these are the normal outcome of sugar consumption for all people. So the variance isn't in the biological effects but in how much people notice them or have adapted to shield themselves from, or absorb, the backlash (though the resultant health issues are seldom avoided so much as redirected into another form of expression; often a more severe health issue, further down the line). Most people push on through the effects of sugar without really acknowledging that they are there; as I know I did, for years. The more we consume the crazy amount of sugar our modern diet makes almost compulsory and extremely (shockingly) normal, the more we become (ironically) immune to it as the nervous system is pushed over the limit to where it has no choice but to turn down its own sensitivity to everything, even those things we want to experience, in order to cope; like a form of self-created paralysis. Its as though sugar only knows one setting - one that makes us receive more sensation, delivered in the most abrasive way possible and it is more than our nervous system, which longs to experience many things but wants to be way more discerning than that, can cope with. We become over-stimulated...and so we break down or are forced to buffer ourselves like we are under constant attack and, of course, some of us stop feeling at all.
Fibromyalgia is a shorthand code for “not designed for this world”, a label for being a misfit at a very deep biological level; but not because we are faulty but because the world isn’t ready for us yet or, you could say, we arrived early. It's a bucket title for those who are way too … Continue reading Out of this world
Is "gluten free" a distraction from health as suggested by this article? I think so; not that its a bad idea but its the way we go about it, focussing on the avoidance and not on what is actively most healthy for us to eat. There's such a core life lesson in this....a reminder to focus on what we DO want, to embrace what is POSITIVE for us, rather than being in resistance mode, avoiding what doesn't work.
I see in my dog a parody of same comic behaviour that plays out in me and mine at this time of the year, which he also finds something of a struggle being a sun-worshipper of the nth degree. He sleeps a hung-over type of sleep most of the day, his nose pushed deep into the pile of blankets that he insists upon, then he gets up for his walk (the one lively time of his day) and, once the sun goes down, obsesses about food and snacks like his life depends on getting another treat out of the cupboard, before falling back into a deep slumber in his bed. So what does this tell me..?
Living whole 