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.
We all adopt these paces in life; finding our groove...are we happiest in the fast lane, are we more middling or are we slow and steady. Should I say, we should find our own groove...yet so many of us live to the pace that is expected of us (or one that was set for us by the metronome of our childhood or cultural entrainment) and this "wrong pace" for our constitution can make us so unwell in the long-term; burning us out or even slowing us down to the point of long-simmering frustration with a life that doesn't keep apace with our longings and aspirations. When we pitch it just right, we land in our sweet spot, and our natural melody of life simply comes forth, asserting over the noise of everything else that may be going on. Our tempo may change according to time of day or the season but the key thing is that we are hearing its direction from somewhere within and then attuning ourselves to it, listening for the clues of our inner conductor as we swell our sound or soften it in ways that feel the most natural to our innate constitution.
It's time to own your energetic stature. That is, accept that energetically speaking, you are immense...far taller, broader, more majestic than your physical form suggests so accept that, allow it to unfurl and hold your energetic head up high. Instead of recoiling from life, allow your energy field to stretch up to the heady peaks of your capacity; which you can do just as soon as you are well grounded, with a roaring hearth firing in your belly and a glow in your heart. This is what it looks like to live in near-perfect balance and trees show us this (and so much more)...
You need to get to know yourself as your own primary structure. You simply don't need any more structure than that which you already are - a perfect vessel that is ready to hold the coherence of the light-energy you are ready to call in. You get to do this through the choices you make regarding where you place your thoughts and attention (the balance you maintain) and there are some things we all really need to consider when it comes to achieving that balance in the face of modern life...
If you have a vata dominance, how do you ground that airy, high-spirited, out-there, mercurial constitution long enough to find your way about in a physical body...and then stay there in a way that feels comfortable and sustainable? Here's what I've learned so far:
Its easy loving self when life is going smoothly; what about when its not, when the body (for instance) throws you a curve ball at the most inconvenient moment. I realised that this thing I thought I had, long-ago, achieved like I was the grand master of this very thing - a state of total SELF-LOVE and ACCEPTANCE - was a smokescreen for a more pervasive layer of self-judgement that was still lurking in there. I thought I had this thing off to a fine art yet I could now see how I was still holding it in; within the very depths of my being like the Loch Ness Monster beneath the pristine waterline. One rocky day in my "boat" and it was still waiting there to gobble me up....
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.
It's a truth I've come to own over years of learning to hold the equilibrium of my physical body that allows me to lead a normalish life - akin to countless others who think they have a shortfall of energy, I possess almost too much energy inside my cells rather than too little. Those waves of crashing exhaustion that periodically seem to want to floor me are because my tank is overspilling with energy, not running dry. And its a trait I notice about a lot of so-called energy-depleted people, especially women....
to fully claim my physicality....to not want to escape it, shrugging it off like an outfit I didn't choose but, rather, to feel the delight and exhilaration of it, daily, like a child that notices everything and never fails to marvel at how beautifully it all works...there are no adequate words. I would go through the whole of the journey again to have reached this point and know what I do about every square inch of this beautiful organic playground of me and how to operate it like never before, relishing its symphony of experiences and the delight of knowing how I chose to have them. It is in this overspilling love for the human bodily experience that the healing of just so many people (certainly mine) can be found and if, in any way, my experiences help to end the stalemate that has been perpetuated for just so long, between those who feel they have struggled with their own body and that they are at logger heads with it, then these words will have been worthwhile.
Living whole 