I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is to be a Sacred being. What does it mean to connect with the Sacred and Divine, both within and outside? What does it look like to touch the Holy that lives inside as well as outside of this body? There was a quote on a tea bag for my daughter the other day that said “Your soul is your highest self.” And while I nodded to this truth I also wondered, what the heck does that even mean? Then on another day my tea gave me this wisdom: “The voice of your soul is breath.” This truth I felt deep within.
And when we put these two little tea quotes together, they are telling us that our soul speaks to us through our breath, and that we can know where our “highest self” is by checking in with our breath. Following this train of thought our highest self speaks to us through our breath, our breathing (or lack of breathing). And then, we can connect to our soul, our Divine, our Sacred, by connecting to our breath. And the deeper we can connect to our breath the deeper we can connect with the Divine.
Simply following a train of logic. Yet still I am left in this place of, okay, so what does that mean?
I begin every program and workshop with focusing on our breath. It has been a part of my own journey to mindfully and consciously be aware of and connect to my breath for several years, and I truly believe, have believed, this is where our work begins. This exercise has always been for me and my work, a way to guide others to connect more with their body, to find a way to ground and center and be fully present. It is where we can start, easily without needing any thing but our self.
To date, I have not brought the Sacred or Divine into this breath worth, not consciously at least.
Yet these little tea bags are telling me that perhaps I have been inviting and connecting to the Divine in this work all along, without realizing. That perhaps connecting to the body is a way to find connection with the Divine. That the Divine lives within us as well as outside of us and it can talk to us through our own breath and body and being.
In the (Un)Becoming Circle we are about to dive into some of the deep work of healing our Feminine wounds, our mother wounds. Part of this healing is finding connection with the Divine, the Sacred, the Holy; connecting to the Divine Feminine within us and outside of us. And as I told the women in today’s video, this work scares the shit out of me.
The idea of connecting to something that is both greater than the Self and also part of the Self is intense. For some the idea that the Divine is within is where they find resistance. For others it is the idea of the Divine outside of the self that is bothersome. We each were raised with stories of what is Sacred and Holy and what the Divine is or isn’t. More importantly, many of us were raised with stories of how we are unworthy of receiving the Divine within, that it is separate and we do not deserve to be touched by it.
These stories of unworthiness run deep. Deep in our bones, our psyches, our souls. In my work I guide others to dig into those stories, to find their value, to recognize and acknowledge that their own value and beauty. I start tackling these stories of unworthiness by guiding others, and myself, to connect to their breath, to start to fully breath. To stop holding their breath, and to let it out so that fresh breath can come in. To allow the breath to completely fill every part of the body.
The beauty of breath work is that you can do it anytime, anywhere. Connecting to your breath when you are feeling anxious or depressed or just not quite right, is something you can do right now. Or in ten minutes. Or while you are making dinner. Or right before you start to scream at the kids to get their damn shoes on (because you’ve only asked them to do it a dozen times already). Or even right after you have screamed at them so you can take the time to repair as needed.
Breath work can happen at any time.
And if we follow the logic up above, guided by quotes on tea bags, we can also connect to our soul, to the Divine at anytime.
Anytime. Not only at church. Or in the middle of the forest. Or by the edge of the ocean. But right now, sitting at this screen. We can each take in and release a breath, connecting to our body, to our Self, and holycrow, to the Divine too.
About a week ago I created the intuitive collage board for my Sacred Self program. When I sit down to create these collages, I just clear my head of all other thoughts except the program or project I want to focus on. Creating these boards helps me to find the core of what the program is to be about, helps to birth the program into the world, to make it something of substance instead of just something that is swirling around in my head. I sit down with magazines and scissors and thumb tacks and tear out and cut the images and phrases that speak most to me while I am thinking of the work to be done. I always feel a bit of a thrill as the images come together and the phrases start to take shape and the feel of the workshop or retreat is birthed into this world, on this bulletin board in front of me. Until recently I have never considered this to be the Divine speaking through me, but perhaps it is.
Perhaps there is more of the Divine and Sacred in the everyday than we realize. My daughter has been asking me about mermaids a lot lately. She’s at that age now where she tells me she wants to know The Truth and I see her fantastical world of fairies and dragons and Santa Claus starting to slip away. She asked me if mermaids were real. And I told her that no, they are not real. She responded with: “But the ocean is vast and deep and we haven’t explored most of it. So mermaids could very well be real and live in the parts of the ocean we haven’t explored yet.” I can’t argue with her logic.
Perhaps my daughter’s mother needs to remember it is okay to have faith in the unknown. Perhaps all of us could take a lesson in not needing everything to be cold facts and figures and to allow for a little magic, a little fairy dust, to enter back into our psyches. Perhaps we can open ourselves to the unknown and not shut it out because of fear.
Perhaps, everything is Sacred and part of the Divine. The budding flower. The falling leaf. The sunrise and sunset.
Maybe even those things we can’t see, like fairies hiding in the trees. Like mermaids living in the ocean depths.
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