The Humming Of My Cells
On Friday, as I was entering into the dog park, I noticed that the leaves on the trees were suddenly bigger, more expansive, greener, more stretched open wide than they had been just the week before. Spring has been slow to come in Minnesota and the few pockets of warmth that we’d have here and there would make my cells hum with life as I soaked in the sun in between all the stretches of grey and rainy days in April.
I’ve been listening to the We Can Do Hard Things podcast a lot lately and I’m loving the inspiration I get from the conversations they have with really cool people. Recently I was listening to the episode where Susan Cain talked about being melancholy and how society isn’t orientated for folks who feel sad. I’m paraphrasing here, but the idea being that we need to reclaim the wisdom in sadness. Rather than feeling that something is wrong with us because we don’t feel happy, we have an opportunity to explore the connection and bittersweet-ness we feel because we care deeply about something. How we might get tears in our eyes watching something that brings us joy. How we might honor our longing as a strength rather than a weakness. It’s something I’ve been mulling over and musing on as I prepare for virtual breathwork group this month.
The conversation reminded me of the term “griefwalker” by Stephen Jenkinson, who teaches about “how death empowers us to live and that we must know grief well in order to appreciate our own lives”. While I’m someone who is very easy to laugh and very in touch with my ability to feel childlike joy, I am also very connected to carrying deep grief because of the loss I’ve experienced at a young age.
The spring season reminds me especially of this! I feel an urgency to savor and to take in all the delicate blooms that have just bursted into existence from a very brown winter landscape. Because we know the cycle of the seasons, we know these blossoms won’t last forever! There’s an invitation to enjoy the beauty knowing that the shedding, dropping, releasing will be coming again eventually when the timing is right and can we be in the moment with where we are right now?
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These conversations about hard things and the impermanence of our lives also remind me of why I host breathwork. To offer a space for us to come and allow ourselves to feel all the things we feel as human beings living in this wild, chaotic, blooming, heartbreaking, beautiful life. To offer the opportunity to set aside time to pause and go within. Sometimes we tap into joy when we gather to breathe and that’s such a gift. Some days it’s our rage that we need to feel. Maybe it’s peaceful rest. Perhaps it’s feeling into our deeply tired and burned out bones. Often we allow the sad to bubble up. Always we get to feel the vibration of our cells humming because we are alive in this moment. This is why I love breathwork. There’s space for ALL OF IT. And we get to do it in community. We don’t have to carry it alone. We walk our own specific paths, of course, and we have our own flavor of grief and joy, but we get to walk with each other as we journey.
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Yesterday, we are experienced a full moon lunar eclipse in Scorpio. While I haven’t studied astrology, I know that this full moon has the potential to be an emotional one.
My wish for you this full moon is to embrace the fullness of your emotions. For the curiosity to listen close to the messages they have for you. for you to find those practices (like breathwork is for me) where you feel the permission to be fully yourself. For the opportunity to get quiet and find the spring beauty that makes your cells hum with aliveness.
And here’s an album I’m loving lately as a meditation to help those cells hum this spring: Resonance Meditation by Beautiful Chorus.