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“We need to be told that fear and trembling accompany growing up, and letting go takes courage.”- Pema Chodron
In an interview with Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein, she told a story about being sad and miserable as a child, and her mother would say: “tell me where it is written that you should be happy all the time?”. Somewhere inside of us, we each believe we should be content all the time. Triggers and upsets are unwelcome disruptions and visitors that we have very little understanding of or patience with. These hard places and dense feelings are severed from us, pushed into dark rooms, neglected, hated, disowned, and left to smolder and smoke under the crust. These parts of us— the dark ones, the in pain ones, the crying out ones— are as much a part of us as our happy selves, and yet, we don’t hold or acknowledge them. We go to war quietly inside ourselves against these facets of us.
The most challenging aspect of my life is welcoming and consoling this triggering energy and pain body. I constantly refuse the disturbances, call them names, and wish them away. But again and again, I am reminded that they are part of our godliness. They, too, are a part of this life— our life. Best, we welcome, include, and love what moves through us, so it does not lodge and harden in the corners of our jaw and over the lids of our eyes.
This guided meditation focuses on bringing a suffering part of us forward to listen to and hold. It aims to strengthen our fearlessness, to bring into the light what we may be silently neglecting and abusing inside ourselves. We take stuck and stagnant parts of us and massage them softly. We lighten the load of our ancestral trauma and create fluidity in our bodies.
Let us learn what perhaps no one showed to us. Let us slowly unwind from centuries of learned violence against ourselves. May we accept our triggers and be open to a conversation with them. May we stop refusing certain aspects of our humanness. And may we gently, quietly, allow ourselves to hold and be held within it all. This is how we walk and grow up, accompanied by fear and trembling. This is how we earn the courage to let go.
thank you.
love,
Sarah
