Dear Reader,
I don’t know about you but i’ve been experiencing a constant whirring over the past few months. I feel it just behind my eyes, like a merry go round that will not stop. I also feel it in my chest like i’m in a swinging seat on a ferris wheel that is moving a little too fast for its axis. Each day’s news images of more people, including hundreds of thousands of children experiencing starvation, preventable disease, drone attacks, military ambush and sieges, and unlawful arrest and deportation, take seats on the merry go around and ferris wheel in my mind’s eye. They quickly blur as we all spin.
When the sensation of whirring overtakes my nervous system, I feel little to no connection with the present, my body or other humans and more than human kin. In this mode, I go on autopilot and become a task generating machine, using a variety of digital and analog productivity tools to identify, prioritize, and schedule an exponentially growing list of action steps that keep me in perpetual motion. Unsurprisingly, this tactic does not support the settling of my nervous system but only accelerates the disorienting spinning within it.
I am grateful for the ability to notice this as well as all the teachers and friends who nurtured this ability. My healing journey has brought me out of dissociation - unconscious disconnection from my body - into an awareness of when I am disassociating - choosing to distract myself in order to avoid feeling what I’m feeling.
In her essay, “To Be Available to the Universe”: Trauma Healing within Black and Brown Freedom Movements, scholar Sonia Lee writes:
Toni Cade Bambara begins her 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, with an audacious question posed by Minnie Ransom, a local healer, to Velma Henry, the protagonist of the novel: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”
Velma’s question is poignant for me. The slow return to and reclamation of my body has made it difficult if not impossible to numb out or distance myself from what is distressingly painful to see, listen to and feel. The blessing and burden of healing is knowing when I’m spiraling in ways that distract, derail and/or distance me from what i want to resist or run from.
And I know that there is another kind of spiraling which is part of healthy growth, evolution and a deepening of consciousness. As many scientists and spiritual teachers (sometimes one in the same) teach us, spirals are pervasive in the cosmos. We see them in seashells, trees, flowers, tornadoes and whirlpools. At the microscopic level, we observe them in the shape of our DNA and at astronomical scale, galaxies take this form. Clearly, spirals have much to teach us about the journey of life and the dynamic energy of change. In my own life, I’m discovering that spiral growth can feel like a continual return to ways of being that sustain and enliven me through pivotal seasons. These ways of being feel medicinal, often moving what is stuck in my body, memory and vision. They draw me deeper into my sacred purpose and who I was designed to be.
As I draw close to my 55th be-earth day, I find myself returning to the ways of being of my 5 year old self. I’m returning to finding solace in piano keys giving way to the weight of my hands, to heart pounding exercise, to writing and vocalizing with reverence for my imagination and no clear outcome, and to trusting the felt sense that I am held by that which i cannot see. At 5, those practices sustained my desire to live. Spiraling back to these practices at 55 sustains my desire for all my relations and me to thrive.
Wisdom teachings about spirals also point to the way healthy human development moves in a rhythm between inward focus and outward expression. I am deepening my capacity to move between these orientations more fluidly, finding what feels like right pace in my body. In earlier stages of my life, I’ve erred in moving too quickly from personal study of a practice to sharing it in community as well as prolonging a creative process indefinitely in a never ending pursuit of "perfection". The spiral helps me see the movement between inner work and outward expression as a generative dance that facilitates a deepening of practice and understanding over time.
Spirals offer a beautiful and potent antidote to systems of dominance that peddle the illusion of one directional, ever ascending, exponential growth. Unlike these systems which are at once death denying and death wielding, spirals teach me that my own life journey includes cycles of expansion and contraction, of growth and decay, of mini births and mini deaths. Spirals reassure me that as I practice the movement of extending beyond what I’ve experienced before and then returning back inward, i integrate and embrace deeper and deeper layers of the truth and mystery within and around me.
This summer and fall, I’ll be sharing offerings that honor spiral journeys. I hope you’ll join me.
