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The Power of Salty Surrender

Swimming is one of the few actions that makes my body happy. Swimming in mid-September in northern Nova Scotia takes a special devotion to aquatic bliss. As I stood on the shore in a waning day of summer, one of the few days not boiling or drowning its visitors, waves lapping in a rhythm of dare-ya dare-ya, I pondered how badly I really wanted to swim. Perhaps just savour the sea air, turquoise sky and gently-warmed sand? Maybe wade in, just to my knees? But the body knows what the body knows, that the bright ball of energy that is ME at the base of my spine WANTS TO SWIM … NOW. And with that clarity of thought came the brilliant awareness of how all of this is a metaphor for the process that allowed me to reclaim that clarity in the first place.

The answer is always YES in a quantum energy life.

My beach outing follows my fresh emergence from Decloaking and Living Authentically, a five-day intensive gathering of women seeking to reclaim their essence, reconnect with their bodies, and live their lives as creators of every moment, awareness by awareness, and choice by choice.  A week ago, I may have dipped my toe in the surf, shivered and backed away. I should read, I should enjoy the view, and my standby favourite, I should write, the stories would run.

Today I feel the pull of habits versus truth, habits formed from a childhood of avoiding danger, risk, and mistakes that no longer serve the life of an adult yearning to create, do and be all that is possible, and then some. And today, I allowed the chance to choose differently.

I have spent much of my life standing on the shore of the great expanse that is life itself, admiring it, loving it, longing to float and splash and travel through it, curious about what it held in the depths and beyond the horizon. And, I had made myself content to build sand castles and beach art with whatever drifted to shore, telling myself it was a great life of my choosing while underneath the truth of my experience, compressed and overlooked, slowly turned my skin to stone and my energy to rage. It’s too cold, too dangerous, too much work, too risky, the stories ran as I numbly gathered sand and scavenged the shore for supplies, you’re just fine here, doing what your ancestors did, what everyone around you is doing, proud traditions, hang in there, discipline and dedication will gain you great rewards. As a writer I began to wear thin from all the chatter within. Spinning stories endlessly in life left little energy or enthusiasm for creation of any kind, including those of words. The few pieces I managed to write were squeezed and silenced by an increasing number of stories and habits using everything from deception to outright bullying to ‘protect’ me and the life I had come to know as mine. Until one day, my divine signal within that is actually me shouted ENOUGH and I began to remember parts of me long buried in the sand, started to excavate, dust off, own and release the stories that, out of my awareness, had grabbed the wheel and were running my life.

Conversations like Decloaking put you back in the driver’s seat of your life, and in fact, insist you stay there, minute by minute, choice by choice. No handing off responsibility to a therapist or drug or trusted friend. You are the expert of you. I am the expert of me. Empowering? Absolutely! But in this moment when I’m about to plunge into freezing cold water, well, what the hell do I do now?

I stared at the water, knowing what I know. I braced against it. I’ll freeze. There will be other days. Curl up in the sand with a book and be done with it. I breathe,  feel the warmth of me at the base of my spine, the tingling of anticipation as I imagine the cool caress of the salt water, floating weightless, nowhere to be except in this moment. I wanted it. And I allowed that I could have it. Uncomfortable, maybe. Trust that it’s worth it.

Wading in to my knees was easy. Water creeping up to my waist, hoo boy that’s chilly. I stop, breathe, let the sun warm my back, swirl my hands through the surf to slowly acclimatize. A choice point: go back to the warm sand and embrace half-hearted joy in getting half wet, or breathe, surrender, and invite the full experience I want to unfold.

I breathe, relax into the gentle rocking of the waves, lean back and let the water take me. A brief gasp as the northern surf engulfed me … then an absolute peace. As I swam, I cooled to the water and it warmed to me. I floated, bobbed, felt its strength in supporting me, gave thanks that I live where this expansive and beautiful vista is mine to visit any time.  After a few minutes of bliss, a new truth emerged: it was indeed bloody freakin’ cold. So I  swam to shore, towelled off and lounged on the sand for an hour watching seals bob for lunch and seagulls dot the sky. I was also making connections, feeling how the sensation of surrendering to the momentary shock of the water was very much like surrendering to a new or different story arc, one that may seem to be more work or too risque or headed in an unknown direction. I’m mindful now of how often I brace against writing into the ‘unknown’, where I don’t have deadline and outline and word count clearly laid out, how unwilling I am to feel the momentary darkness of the unknown even though I know that it will lead to something awesome.

It was a perfect afternoon, perfect moment by moment, and a perfection I would not have experienced if I hadn’t trusted what I wanted, surrendered, and opened to whatever happened next.

How many times do we rob ourselves of what we want, of what energizes or inspires or fuels us, because we tell ourselves no, we’re better off without it, that’s weird, no one else is, that’s selfish, it’s scary … Paul Simon sang of 50 ways to leave a lover, while each of us know at least 537 ways to deny ourselves of anything and everything from an extra cookie to the trip of a lifetime because, oh well, this and that, blah blah blah. It’s a life and a choice. Life is swimming in September, relying on my body to know the temperature and conditions rather than a calendar and childhood admonishment that you’ll catch your death ... Trusting yourself is life, every time. There is no more powerful space to write from, or live from.

Thanks for reading,

Jennifer

Jennifer Hatt is an author, communications consultant, publishing doula and CODE Model Coach™ .
ownyourstorynow.com

To learn more about Decloaking and Living Authentically and other offerings in the WEL-Systems® body of knowledge,
visit https://wel-systems.com/
the brilliant website of its founder, Louise LeBrun, https://louiselebrun.ca/)
and the powerful offerings of CODE Model Coaches™ Stela Murrizi, https://sparkingthesacred.com/
and Sheila Winter Wallace, http://bodygateways.com/

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When ‘it’s too soon’ becomes “it’s time”

My labour this long weekend was in my basil patch, surrounded by my most favourite aroma in the world harvesting glossy emerald leaves for pesto and fresh basil lemonade. In the moment there was glorious peace and flow of creation.

Just behind it, though, was the energy straining to move, that would not be denied despite my best efforts to avoid it.  Back to school, back to work, back to autumn …  such sadness it evokes, yet to be grieving, angry, hopeless on such an abundant day seems wrong.  ‘Back to …’anything feels constricting, counterintuitive to me, to anyone knowing they were born to evolve, yet there is a sense of comfort, an image of safety, in returning to what was, even if only in the mind. An avoidance of loss, of danger of death.

And there it is. The pressure in my body, telling me it’s exactly the right time to pause, breathe, and dive straight in to how I hold death.

Labour Day weekend this year doesn’t just bring up my perennial grief at the end of a summer gone too soon. It also marks the 10th anniversary of our purchase of the cottage, a family play space with the ulterior motive of serving as a second address, heralding the slow dissolution of our marriage about to begin. It’s the first weekend of this ‘second address’ being mine, and an ongoing reminder that the card games and beach walks and rainy days spent building Lego are gone in a flurry of children evolving into young adults, with university and careers and their own relationships to play in. Who am I if I am not the mom with a houseful of kids, or even a house?

It’s also been a week of grieving other people’s children, sudden deaths of young adults in their 20s and 30s. There was a time when I would have felt the sadness just enough to fuel a prayer and condolences and a slight curiosity as to how these things happen. Now I find myself on a teeter totter of energy intense and active, on one side grief and fury that rages against a world claiming evolution yet killing our children before it is time, on the other the complete absence of feeling, numb and mutely watching all going on around me as a movie, not engaging, separate from it all.

It’s a choice point of separation that exists only in my mind, that my body says ‘no more.’

Who am I, and who do I become when I get off the teeter totter, the merry-go-round, out of the hellish playground altogether and own all that I feel, everything, nothing, and all in between, to drop the labels and live from what I know rather than what I ‘should’ do, or what is the norm?

I become someone comfortable with death as a part of life, life as a part of death, knowing that life, death and everything in between are labels for the experiences we as divine energy have in human bodies. I become someone who sees life and death becoming currency in the hands of those wanting our trust and our cash for their own selfish uses, terrifying us with stories to sell us products to defy aging, protect us from evil, or earn us a place in eternal life. We come from infinite energy into a human body for an experience on Earth, we return to infinite energy when time on Earth is done. Who would each of us become, what would our world become, if we owned and trusted that there is nothing to earn, no space to buy, no need to measure up, no fears to push down? All we have and all we need is breath, awareness, and the moment we are in to choose, create, and own our creation.

Death is all around us, when I choose to see it. My basil plants, harvested of their leaves, will die, their stalks and roots and the soil that sustained them composted back to the earth. My children will leave this Earth someday. For generations we have been taught how wrong it is, how devastating that children die before their parents. Absolutely it is. But at what age and what stage does loss of a loved one from Earth feel okay? My grandmother was 96 when she died; her death did not feel easy because ‘she lived a good long life’ and it was the ‘natural order of things.’ I miss her keenly, memories slicing like the edge of a knife, until I choose to open to another way to hold death. Not loss, but transition. Her essence returned to the infinity of the divine, still with me and a part of me, as energy rather than her voice and body tangible in front of me. So comforting, soothing as one of her crocheted blankets.

Who wouldn’t choose a blanket to curl up with rather than a knife? Or the scent of basil?

When I forget who I am, a divine signal able to create safety within myself, the only safety there is, I choose the knife, keeping the hurts fresh and the rage on standby. I tell myself stories and cling to memories for fear of allowing energy to move, light to shine, joy to enter, life to expand, for expansion brings me closer to my signal, myself, something I and generations before me was taught to hide, lest we behave dangerously, destroy something or be destroyed.

In the sunshine of awareness, grounded in the moment we’re in, the choice is clear.

Our power is in the moment, in ourselves, lived in the choices we make. I choose to allow the moments of sadness, the moments of fear, knowing that they cannot hurt me, and allowing them to move will free me. I choose to set down the knife and allow the world to shift, to change around me. To smell the basil and smile, not because it grew, but because of what I learn in the letting go.