Day ... 19? Already?

Yes, a quiet period. Business, and lack of words, and learning.

I'm out of my dark night.

I have realized a bunch of things:

I have always felt like I was not a shy person, that I had a lot of energy, and have always been confused when people referred to me as shy. I understand this now as blocking energy; I've started to see the ways that I block my energy from leaving my body for other people to experience, and I am aware of the training I've put myself through in order to learn how to keep that energy in check.

A lot of the sad things that have happened in my life I have worked through completely -- on an intellectual and emotional level. Let me just tell you about my peer support years and womens-rights, anti-violence, and anti-oppression politics, and dreams of setting up healthy relationship workshops for young people. But I haven't worked through those things in my body. I can explain feminism to you and comfortably call people out on misogyny; and I can give you the tools and resources to help get you out of your unhealthy relationship; I can take you to a play about women who learn to paint abstract-emotional pictures of their vaginas through vagina workshops; but I can't paint you a picture of my own vagina. Yet.

Again with the intellectual workthrough: I talked and wrote and painted and meditated and reframed and accepted myself out of depression, and don't really consider myself depressed any longer, but it still feels normal to never want to get out of bed in the morning, and to have several-day periods of sadness, and to have low energy overall. I treat those times as moments of illness and care for myself kindly, and they pass quickly, but I cared for them by submitting to them and letting them run their course: by staying in bed, by accepting that I was going to get nothing done that day, and so forth. That's fine, but I just realized on a deeper level that tired and unenthused and submissive is not the vital energy of my life force -- what kind of life force energy would that be? It's energy I've absorbed and stored, and I've stored it in my body. Whenever I tweak my low back (twice this training, oy) I crash emotionally (my last few posts were the result of the last one; the most recent was today). Spending a little time (ten minutes) in healing with another trainee who ran energy and had me breathe into my back perked me up right away. The fact is that more often than not, when I'm feeling bad, I willingly and deliberately submit to that feeling. Usually it involves not breathing, and, unable to muster the will to breathe, I hold my breath and sink deeper. Breathing does not take a lot of effort. I have been unwilling to allow breath into my body to nourish my cells. It feels like there is a parasite in me that feeds on unhappiness, and makes breathlessness an addiction to feed it like candida makes the body want sugar to feed it, and, well, I don't know what other parasites take from the body and make it crave.

It's like the way my body slumps my shoulders and neck forward and makes me slouch. Time and time again during this training assists have proven me that the muscles in my back have more than enough strength to pull my shoulders blades away from my ears where I put them when I'm stressed, and that my chest is open enough for me to stand proud. I am strong enough to stand up straight with my chest up, my abs are strong enough to keep the kink out of my low back, but the muscles refuse to work that way. I'm willing to reject the pull of low energy and submission now.

Really the best thing that I've realized here is that I see and feel energy, and how to use it to heal. I've let go of the idea I had that I needed to have some kind of huge, dramatic, teary breakthrough, but I think I did have one big breakthrough among many, and it happened on Sunday, after I'd taught my second intro piece (My inner critic is disappointed in my performance but Ana says that it's completely insane, and I believe her, and am choosing to ignore it: I improved since the time before, which is great!). There was a woman who'd had a major accident that caused her whiplash and a concussion, and after I adjusted her in savassana, Ana got me to run energy on her head and brain, to help it calm down after being jostled. I was there for maybe ten minutes, and in that time my feet and my hands tingled... not pins and needles, something else. I sent cooling energy through my hands into her head, and could feel it moving down my arms, and could feel her head responding. It felt amazing, and my head turned into a dark and quiet cavern. In video review, there was some footage of me running the energy, and I was lit up like a lightbulb.

Partly the discussion about it was special to me because I've felt like I haven't had much deep attention paid to me during the training... attention, yes, and constructive coaching, but for some people Ana's known just what to say to suddenly transform their teaching in a dramatic moment of intensity, or she's shared searing insight into their lives. I have been getting a lot of corrections of technical mistakes, and comments about my clear instructions but low-energy teaching technique. Comparing isn't constructive, but I hoped for something personal, something that proved that Ana saw me in a special way. I just wanted validation. Anyway, I was on the screen, and Ana pointed out the good energy work I was doing, and later some trainees commented on how bright I was on the screen after I was done. I stopped feeling so middle-of-the road. When I was done with the work, at the end of the pose, she also told me that I'd done very good work and gave me a little bow in namaste. "The sacred in me recognizes and salutes the sacred in you." THAT means something to me.

As of right now, energy work is the brightest jewel in myself that I've found... but there are still five more days, and a lot can happen in that time.

And now: BED time.

Love love love.