Uncontrolled

Freedom, feelings and the divine feminine

There is a game I like to play and I call it, I Feel.  I set a timer, settle myself down and give myself permission, full permission to feel.

This is a time where there is no agenda.  I am safe in whatever comes. 

Here is my body and I feel it holding. 

I feel…  my feet on the floor.

I feel… clenching in my jaw and a tightness in my belly.

I feel… anger.

I feel… sadness in my throat.

I feel… softening.

The game of I Feel is unattached to story.  All of my ideas, my biases, my I’m-angry-becauses, are left far behind.  I enter into the pure essence of the sensation, the emotion.

Feeling comes; feeling reigns.  I lose myself in the torrent of it all.  There is no right or wrong here.  We are beyond judgement.

This is the space in which healing happens.

It is meditation; and it is not meditation.  It is the raw chaos from which the created order comes.

Meditation has taught me to unhook myself from my mind’s stories.  Shown me in the reflective mirror of awareness that I am not my thoughts or my feelings; that there is a deeper, larger truth out there – in here – than all of the clenching patterns of my past and my pain.  Meditation is the place where I see that these are all just patterns.

In meditation thoughts, feelings, sensations arise and pass by like that oft-used metaphor of watching clouds in the sky.  But in I Feel? 

In I Feel I root my feet down into the ground of my being and I trust myself deep.  And as the clouds begin to mount and heap across the sky, I call out to them,

yes, yes, I see you, SHOW ME

and now at long last, at long, long last, flooding into the parched wilderness of my tight body and near-breaking soul… now the rain comes. 

Now the rain comes.

Soft rivulets run down my body, melting and melding with salt-tears from my once-dry eyes.  Cascading water plops, splashes and puddles around the skin of my feet, soaking deep into the waiting earth.

Now my body is in flow, rocking in rhythmic harmony with the water-washed world, no longer held apart.  I fall into the rain.

The force of this power floods into the world and I am washed clean in its wisdom, awed by its beauty, alive, alive, fully alive.

In the wake of the deluge, fertile fields spring up where once the land was barren.

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I don’t know that I’m suppressing until I take all the hinges off my carefully-constructed mental doors and enter into the expressive archway of I Feel.

Here I do not worry about trying to breathe deep to help the energy flow.  I do not say to myself, ah yes, but remember you are not this feeling.  I do not seek to “be the witness”.  Even these valuable teachings become trappings when we utilise them to try to feel in control.

Perhaps life is beckoning us deeper into the unknown, holding a lamp light and pointing us down into the darkness.

And so, for the time of I Feel, I do the thing I’ve been taught not to do, and become the feelings.  I turn the lamplight of awareness on pure feeling itself.

It is the deepest act of trust I can offer myself.

Because the greatest thing I have learned from I Feel is that I do not need to fear.  I do not need to fear what is waiting in the dark.

I unbind myself from the mental cages I’ve constructed around my emotional experiences, because now I see that it is the cage which I fear and not the tiger. 

And there is nothing, no tiger and no cage, greater than the love that I unleash when I become the Feeler, the one who is the soul-power of creative darkness.

This is the wild landscape of the divine feminine and it is the medicine my whole self needs.  To be no longer managed, controlled, held at bay, but set joyfully, painfully, honestly free.

There is Power here I did not know before.

Washing away the face that the world wants to see and exposing the one which is real.

I feel alive.

TOP IMAGE: Me in the flow of rage

BOTTOM IMAGE: Wild archway in the botanical gardens, Tresco Isles of Scilly

Both photos taken by my husband Sam