DOITGIRL

Silence isn’t awkward, it’s golden. Don’t fill it, let it be, it’s ok to let the space between you fill and breathe.

This is NOT to dismiss the beautiful souls who write me after my “sad” posts — but I know part of my dharma is to openly discuss shadow, dark side, depression, and bring it into the light. Repression of our emotions and shadow was part of the patriarchy and has lead to so much anger hate and suffering— we don’t have to live that way anymore. Writing about my pain and confusion and wounds for me is as close as I can get to say, a tumor extraction. If I don’t reveal/release it, I get sick, stuck. We pull out the pain and we look at it, it dissolves in the light, we heal. It’s OK to feel all of this. This is polarity, tantra, we can’t have one without the other, light without dark. Remember how our bodies are about 70% or more water- and when water gets stuck, it gets diseased, the stagnancy creates disease? When I hold back, I get stuck, I get diseased. So releasing puts me back in the flow, like a wild river, I push through the dam. Don’t be worried about me, I heal by doing this, thank you for allowing. 

If you are being called to, nagged by, haunted by a dream, you can be sure that it wants to be born into this world and it has chosen you as its vessel. Birth it.

I just got home from gardening and I’m bone tired and dirty but grateful I didn’t have to be alone all day thinking about my latest disaster, and I checked my texts and a friend had written, “you’re going to meet someone, and he’s going to really get you, and he’s going to really see you, and he’s going to really love you.” And it hit me right in the gut and made me tear up because just two weeks ago I had known that, to put off the quest of men because one day I’ll just be seen and loved and there will be no more games or trying. But then I went for that bartender - who didn’t get me - with a vengeance, just the same. And it was as painful as I knew it would be, but I did it anyway, just like testing if fire burns, over and over again. We are so divine, and so human. And I’m just trying to allow it all. I’m trying to see it, and I’m trying to free it. And then I opened an email from my twin sister and she had sent me a story about Bill Murray and Gilda Radner and mom had loved them both, we as a household had loved them and laughed with them- Dad was more of a Gene Wilder fan, of course. The story was about Gilda’s cancer, and I’m reading a book where the woman just lost her mother to cancer and it played out so similarly to the story of us losing our mother, so painfully- as she puts it “flayed-alive”- similar. I used to not be able to watch Beaches or Terms of Endearment or read or talk about cancer, the horrors, the indiginities the suffering and sadness, but now I’m just, after years of running and numbing ceased to work, facing everything head on, letting it wash over me, do its work. I’m even reading about cancer, alone in my bed in the woods, and crying with this woman, for me, for mom, for all of us. I cried the hardest when this woman was saying goodbye to her mother, her mother said what I wish I could have heard, “I know you didn’t think I loved you, I know I made it hard on you sometimes, but I did, and will, always love you, wherever, forever.” Something like that. I guess I’m just having one of those exquisitely painful days, where everythign feels like a stab in the heart, my heart both so empty and full at once, but at the same time, I’m grateful to be feeling. Like how I walked with an old dog named Ruby today where we were gardening, she was slow but determined, every step a small triumph, when she used to run and play with ease, and I realized how old Gracie was getting, that this would be her soon too, and it all hurts, but it’s all beautiful too, because I feel how much I love her and how much we’ve been through together. How real love makes you real. And it hurts but at least it feels and it’s mine to feel, and at least I’m here to feel it. And if I didnt know love I wouldnt know loss. And you can’t have one without the other. So I guess you call this surrender.

That post about the man and the wine and mother’s day and shadow stirred up a lot of messages which I look forward to getting back to, but I must take the dog for a walk before I head out to gardening, before I go toss myself into the arms of the earth and ask for this stuff to be taken and transformed. I couldn’t fall asleep until late and I was in bed with Dannna Faulds poetry and the rain falling outside and the dog snoring at the foot of the bed and I could feel the deep waves of changes moving over me, like I was on the bottom floor of the ocean just looking at them move over me, move over me the way they turn a piece of sharp edged broken glass into something smoother, something tougher, something durable but loved. I saw what happend with the man and the wine and the depression on mother’s day and felt all these patterns coming togther tightly to be broken, they were suffocating, they had to suffocate me until I couldn’t take it anymore, until I had to finally break free, no matter what. I got overwhelmed when I got back from the ashram. There were emails and calls and talks about me being a Teacher, about what I Might Become, but I am still so much in the work, still so much in the Fight. My path isn’t going to look like some of my silky shiny friends who do yoga festivals with ease, I got chosen with this work for some other reason, and I’m not going to think about it anymore until I heal myself down here on the ground, live minute by minute, day by day, which is how I healed myself in the first place, living in the present moment, finding the portal of present time and climbing into it, finding freedom and paradise, the keys to the kingdom, through that hole in space, that is waiting for all of us. I can’t be worried about who I will be, and if I will succeed or serve, and I can’t keep talking about who I was, living those old ways, either. I’m grateful for this grounding process I can witness I am in, the gardening work, and to be teaching a few yoga classes, and for those of you who listen, and share. The emails I got the day I wrote the men wine mothersday post could have all come from me, some of them made me shake my head in disbelief at the similarities- and compassion. All these women wrote in with these huge overflowing hearts, the kind of hearts that will save this planet. These big loving divine feminine hearts that bleed for the earth. We need those now. I miss my big huge love heart that leaked, I dont want to be so shiva anymore, I want to be a golden river of love where ever I go. I miss my sweetness. It’s the time of the divine feminine, and I want to return home to the great mother’s arms. I miss my altar and the way I could feel her stroke my hair. I’ll start my return home after this storm that has followed me and swirled over my head for months, and finally, like the great storms, the best storms, cleaned me out completely, with no clouds hanging between my vision, no dead ends to keep roaming anymore, no the dead ends have all been detonated- I should know, I tried them all, they were always trap doors back to the beginning. So I’ll start the trek back to myself today, and meet you all on the road. I feel humbled, raw, little, hopeful. All I ever wanted was a little real life that felt like mine. That’s what’s important to me, my family and the people who love me and the earth and its creatures, and I’ll keep them on the map I’m following home, I’ll keep what I love as the direction I’m headed, my north star. Nothing else matters but what I love. I just got a little lost again. We all do, we all lose ourselves to find ourselves again. Cyclical, just like the cycles of the moon, just like the cycles of the earth. I’ll write soon. I do love you, and it feels good to mean what I say. To know, at least that, that I mean that, I mean what I say. What could be more important, I’m beginning to wonder, than congruency, than alignment, than your feelings, words, actions, all in line with each other. That’s where, how, I’ll find my peace.

I have so much to tell you but not a lot of time, I’ve taken up a new gardening job with a friend of mine, it’s good for someone like me an esoteric writer with a vata imbalance, to throw herself into physical labor, to dig her hands into the earth all day, to literally be grounded. Yesterday we mulched on a cliff of green that rambled and rolled until it just fell into miles of sparkling ocean. But other than that things haven’t been that great since I got home from the ashram, the chasm between this work, doitgirl work, and who i am is bigger than ever. I read recently many of us are feeling that way the rift between who we are now and who we deeply know we can be. I’ve been feeling that massive gap, I mean we can hear and read about self love and the divine and we can thnk about it and talk about it but embodying it? I’ve got some serious work to do. On the good days, I am doitgirl, I am connected to the divine and I can see my vision and I can see what the earth needs clearly and I can help, I can be of service. But on the bad days I’m back in the gutter, sad, scared, alienated feeling worthless and hopeless. I became highly aware of my shadow at the ashram, my unconscious patterns, the drama, the conflict, the destruction I create, the behaviors that keep sending me back to the starting line, having lost everything and having to start over. I hadn’t wanted to look at it my whole life, I hadn’t wanted to own those patterns, but I had to see it at the ashram when they manifested all around me, that it was my work, my doing. The biggest way we abuse our power is thinking we don’t have any, and letting it run amuk, unwatched unattended to. When we have a gift and we don’t use it properly, don’t serve with it. But maybe I finally owned my shadow too much after years of ignoring it, I haven’t released it, Ive lived with guilt and shame for it in it the weeks I got home, licking my wounds, apologizing for the wounds I’ve inflicted on others, hanging my head, Im back in my cave, wondering how I’d ever balance all this behavior out, or free myself from what feels like lifetimes of karmic patterns with men, self love, worthiness, other women, money. I had over corrected into my shiva awakening, I wasnt feeling feminine or loving, now I was just feeling tuff and defensive. I have been feeling downright unlikable. Again, Sarah, where is the balance? I had lost myself again, or have, I don’t know. I haven’t been writing because the things I want to say, aren’t blissful, aren’t so empowering. But that’s not how this all started, they were diaries about shadow and what’s been swept under the rug and stuffed into closets. And to free the monsters I had to write about them. And I think for this relationship with doitgirl to keep working I have to be totally honest so I can continue to free myself from these burdens and the only way that has ever worked was through my writing. Because that’s authenticity right, speaking even though your voice shakes. I’m running out of time this morning but I’ll tell you, briefly, I realized I’d been starving my dark side after my awakening, I was too ethereal and divine and not rooted or here or allowing for very much -I wanted to pretend I was never naughty, shadowy. I wasnt admitting to all my dark and unloved and unhealed. I wasnt’ balanced in polarity, I was either or, either dark or light, feminine or masculine. Well the other night I fed it, I went out, which I rarely do, and had too much wine, which I hate to do, and met a man, did adult things with him. It was a wild fun night. But I couldnt leave it at that. I haven’t been with a man in over a year, since I last dated someone. I had kissed a few exes, but nothing new with passion. Time passed and he didnt call, and in my head I made him up to be some amazing, sexy man, some answer to my problems, who could soothe some of my loneliness, the kind of loneliness a man can soothe. My body missed it. And I got excited about it, then… you know how it goes. He still didn’t call. So Sunday friend and I had wine in the late spring sun on Mother’s Day, which I always let myself feel terrible about, that day, it always manages to make me feel so motherless, and so we walked over to see him at his work- and lemme tell you, he had absolutley no interest in that, in seeing me. It hurt like hell, I don’t know exactly what it hurt. My ego, or my soul, the part of me that really didnt need to be repeating this pattern of men who didnt love me and too much wine. It was a hard fall and it hurt. Yesterday was hard, it was hard to get out of bed feeling so rejected but what’s worse it was all too familiar, a pattern from my old rock n roll party girl days, and that’s why it was so hard to rise and remotely shine - I had been there before, too often. Didnt I know better, would I ever? I think you’d call it an epic fail, sauntering in there on liquid courage with all this stored up hope he might some how help the wound, and then being flatly, stone cold rejected. I even thought about sending him a quick email, apologizing just for … I dont know. Existing. Low. Lower than low. I think part of me acted in fear and desperation, because he isn’t “the one, ” and I dnt want a relationship with him, the way he had flatly told me without me asking, but I panicked it might be a whole NOTHER year before I had the feeling of a beautiful man next to me while I slept. Because that part, I liked. But Monday, yesterday, I woke up in early in morning - I hadnt slept, just fended off nightmares- remembering how he had looked at me like I had the plague, and I was bloated and tired with a terrible bang-chop I had given myself the day before in the bathroom mirror, that whole maybe if I change how I look I’ll change how I feel or who I am move, just like how I dreamed of running away to Maine last weekend, the start your life over in a new place move that never works either. Because whereever you go… you know the rest. I recongized myself even less yesterday mornign than I have in years, and I wondered “Am I beautiful or am I actually totally heinous? Am I brilliant or actually insane? Lovable or… how he looked at me?” All of them, I guessed. That’s how I felt. And none of this was about him, it never is. It’s about me, it’s never about them. It’s all between you and you. And so maybe the me and me isn’t great right now. No this relationship needs more work than ever. I’ve been negative and low, deeply unhappy and unfulfilled again. The merry go round that doesnt let off, the hamster wheel, Groundhog’s Day. What will change? I don’t know. But something needs to, but I know that nothing changes until you do. So I hope I can, in the ways I need to, and I hope those ways become apparent. And then I remembered he really didnt know me, and those who do know me, well, they love me. I remembered once driving down the road and feeling this message, “to know you is to love you. And those who don’t love you, well they don’t know you.” It was a deep mothering voice, I wish I had thought to remember it in my despair yesterday. “To know you is to love you, and those who don’t love you, well they don’t know you.”