Sarah Blondin is a free weekly newsletter. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $7/mo, you’ll gain access to my monthly Q&A and my serial-Folding In. The work I create here is reader-supported, hence the lack of ads and sponsors. Thank you!
Hello all!
thank you for all your questions and for trusting me with your deepest inquiries.
May you have a gentle day.
love,
Sarah
Dear Sarah,
Do you ever listen to your own meditations? s morning after waking up I somehow heard/felt which recording I wanted to listen to. It often goes like this. I sit and something pops up, whether it's a recording from your book, courses, etc. This morning it was 'discovering your intrinsic self', a meditation that started my journey years ago. I didn't listen to it for a long time. And it surprises me how after these years, this completely touched my heart. After days of being in fight/flight, convinced it would never change, I feel different now. Does it ever scare you to come home to yourself after a storm? That finally feeling center and a bit of calm feels overwhelming in a way.
She swung back into her life like a hailstorm
Tiny fractals of balls of ice, pelting down into herself.
Each hit her like a scream. “Wake up,” one echoed after another.
Awakenings often come after a violent shake.
A voice so loud it spits stones
Splaying open the quaking life hidden
behind its own innocent defenses.
This is a poem I wrote that I think speaks to what you are talking about. The overwhelm, the coming home after a storm. The finally returning to and acknowledging the quaking life hidden behind its own innocent defenses. It is tender to come home, often so tender we avoid it at all costs.
I crave it now, however. The finally landing. If I have been away too long, a voice calls from deep in my belly, and the second I close my eyes, it swallows me and takes away the sting of things. The beauty of self intimacy constantly surprises me by it continuing to deepen and open.
Truth is like that, it feels uncomfortable at first, but then, it makes a home in us and changes us and how we see the world and ourselves. That distance we all sometimes live in—the fight or flight that distorts our perception, are fear thoughts running wild in us. Life comes in, and startles us often, creating an automatic, knee-jerk reaction and rejection, that we must work to evolve through. Instead of abandoning the body and ourselves, we must feel the fear held inside of us. For us to move into conscious awareness, the rejection must be turned into acceptance.
It’s ok to feel into our body, to let that fear and fright be seen by us. It has taken me such a long time to really meet my fear when it comes. To close my eyes and feel directly into it. And then once I am still, it changes, softens, releases, and disappears entirely. Leaving me home, inside myself, alive and awake again.
You see, that tenderness that overwhelms, that centering is all you’ve ever wanted. So know its name, feel it for what really is— your heart coming back online.
And yes, sometimes I do listen to my own meditations. “Honouring Life” always makes me cry. I am constantly surprised by what I write in my reflections, they are just what I need to hear, and it’s almost as if something is mothering me. Kissing me on the forehead and blessing what is so tired and afraid in me. I do not hear myself talking to me or take it as my words per se. I hear it as divinity. Something truly holy spilling into and through me. Thank goodness there is such a thing. Thank goodness.
Often as soon as I hear your voice, I start crying. I wish I could get to this place of deep rest and calm, but mostly it's crying and sitting/wrestling with my experience. I know you talk about how coming home sometimes feels like this. It's your energy, your softness, and everything your voice/meditations have meant for me that just makes me cry. I just sometimes wonder how to 'approach' this...
When you come home to your body, and it shows you what is there, if your body says, "this is here," let it come. I want to encourage you to not rush or skip this step—the tears, the wrestling, the coming home, and being overwhelmed by unwept tears and feelings. Approach it by allowing it as best you can. To not touch or manipulate the expression asking to surface. Our greatest challenge and task is to let the body inform us of its contents and then gently witness it without criticizing or shaming.
Coming to know yourself is a process unique to you and what lives in you. Spiritual growth and attunement is the most uncomfortable experience. It is a process of discovering and uncovering, which means there is something hidden within each of us that has been covered. To realize something precious in us has been thrown away and buried, not encouraged to grow or breathe life, is to discover a great wounding at our core. How could this be comfortable or easy?