A personal exploration of embodying nature in the midst of overwhelm. Embodied Solutions communities and events include individual and small group exercises embodying inner resources like nature.
I decided to sit outside with the trees for a while because I needed a reset. It’s the middle of the day and I have a lot to do, but I was feeling overwhelmed and unable to focus on any one thing. Nature often helps me with this, with its unrushed breezes and reminders everywhere I look that life goes on living even without me pressuring it to.
I’ve sat myself right in the heat of the summer. I feel warmth all around me, and a cool refresh every time the breeze reaches my skin.
It is humid and hot with a heat advisory. I feel my breathing a bit shallow and my heart rate higher than usual when I’m resting.
Another breeze comes and I feel the gentleness of the coolness. I become aware of a bit of moisture around my forehead through the extra cooling it brings.
The breeze picks up a bit and brings to my attention that my focus had gone to some physical discomforts and problems with the stressful perspective that there are seemingly no solutions.
Usually when I’m immersed in nature like this I can’t remember feeling any other way.
Because of how my morning has gone, I can’t imagine these two worlds can meet or influence each other: the constriction and rigidity of excruciating pain and fear, of “no solutions,” and the gentleness and satisfying contrasts of the heat alternating with refreshing cool.
I feel the pain and the rigidity in my back and neck. It is interrupted by the sound of splashing in the lake, a duck flapping its wings.
I feel my neck turned and my head hanging. It feels like there is a heavy weight pushing on it. I feel pain around my eyes and in my forehead.
Another breeze comes and brings its coolness. I can’t not feel the gentleness and the coolness.
A stronger breeze is so welcome. I want to receive it and enjoy it. I feel it physically but feel nothing emotionally, like I can’t receive the gift that the breeze is in this moment.
I feel the physical experience of the breeze some more. I notice my eyebrows frowning, pain in my back and neck. I feel closed off even, but I can’t distinguish where in me is closed and where in me is open.
The breeze continues and I smell a subtle presence of water. I’m not sure if it’s salty ocean breeze or the lake in front of me or from the rain clouds in my view.
I hear an airplane and I feel a burst of angry energy, but it disappears as fast as it was recognized.
I feel the breeze on my arm and feel like I could cry.
The thought comes, how can I be so gentle sometimes? When I can’t find the gentleness anywhere other times? My forehead frown softens a little.
I feel a sinking heavy weight in my chest. A deep breath comes and takes in all the humidity and heat. It feels intimidating but familiar and I suddenly feel an unfamiliar affection for the humidity and heat.
Sitting with the breeze now a bit lighter and not as frequent, I feel the heaviness of the heat and humidity pushing down on me.
A breeze comes and I feel how it lifts everything around me and my own energy joins that flow and movement.
A deep inhale takes in the hot humidity. I search for the affection I had and find only the familiarity. I think I would usually feel a bit more repulsed by this sensation than I do in this moment.
Gratitude comes for this subtle capacity to be in the moment. And gratitude grows with the recognition of the capacity to be present from the moment I started writing, in all the discomfort that was also present. It feels like failure to be so uncomfortable, to feel no gratitude, to feel overwhelmed, but at this moment I feel gratitude that I was able to be so present and even write about it and share it. It feels like a spacious opening in the density in my back is letting air in that wasn’t able to enter before.
I see a teeny tiny little lizard and it sends a surge of precious energy up through my back and a smile on my face I can’t stop from forming. I feel taken over by love and appreciation and I feel so grateful for this moment and feeling. A breeze comes and the emotional experience spreads and expands to include the breeze. The sun has been shining this entire time but it feels like the sun in me just came out and is now shining too.
I notice a hope and the thought that comes sometimes in a moment like this, that maybe this will stay with me now forever. I’m so familiar with polarity in me and take a moment to honor it, and the overwhelm that comes with it at times.
The breeze feels like it passes through me, like I’m made of air too. I feel the density in my back and head and neck and my heart thumping in the heat. And the airiness of my body remains even when the breeze is not moving around and through me.
Again the thought comes that as soon as I face my stressors the density and despair will return.
I sit again with an honor of the polarities, the breeze now cooling me again, and I keep feeling a bowing, a humility, a humility in not understanding, not knowing how to help myself practically or emotionally or mentally or physically sometimes.
I sit with an appreciation for this moment and the acknowledgment of the difficult time period I am living in life. A butterfly passes and I feel a fullness pushing against the inside of my back. A fullness that feels like completion.
A dragonfly gets my attention and I watch it skim the water. A butterfly comes right by me and seems to skim my head. The breeze touches all three of us, a bit stronger now than the past several minutes, and I feel the belonging here. The belonging of the appreciation and affection for the moment and the creatures and my own presence, and the belonging of the heaviness that runs up against a brick wall when trying to find solutions, that finds it hard to breathe in the midst of fears. I feel somehow the nature that surrounds me now entering my house that sits right behind us, providing a resource to help that density I get swallowed up in in there sometimes. My back relaxes.
I feel heat that makes it hard to breathe and realize the sun and shade have moved, so I reposition.
I feel into the discomfort of the heat, the comfort of the cooling breeze, and now I feel more of me if not all of me really feeling into it and embracing them both in this moment. It feels like if I was out skiing on the water, the calm but rush of aliveness now, compared to the depressive heaviness I could feel just moments ago.
A wave of hot air comes and I don’t feel so embracing of that. My stomach squeezes and my head throbs. Normally I would go inside to the air conditioning in a moment like this, but I stay. I feel into the heat and it actually feels dangerous to feel into it. I look up through the tree toward the sun and suddenly feel so cared for by the towering trunk and branches over me. The thought comes that this is silly but the feeling is so tangible my mind can’t deny it. A cloud covers the sun briefly and that too brings a rush of aliveness, awareness in the moment, how much things change and so quickly, awareness of it, oneness with it. The thought comes with sensation… what am I ever doing with my life if not feeling the moment with the sun the clouds the breeze the trees the butterflies and dragonflies and the lizards? An expansion fills my chest. It feels warm.
I am fascinated in this moment to feel additional warmth that is not intimidating in the heat.
I have run out of time and need to be done writing. I remember the image of nature entering the home I will now go into.
The contrast of the air conditioning is incredible. The lightness and relief fill my entire body. I feel like my cells are drinking in the coolness.
I picture nature entering my home in an abstract sensing and I feel an expansion in my back. It accompanies the dense pain I feel as I transition, like a compassionate witnessing that remains with me, even when I'm unaware that it's there.
