This is the flow.
Today, hot coffee poured into a dainty teacup.
The alternative coffee concoction that I’ve been bubbling about for the past few weeks nonchalantly takes a break.
This is the flow.
Today, I borrow my sister’s toothpaste.
The frankincense toothpaste I’ve been pearly-white raving about has humbly requested a mini-vacation.
This is the flow.
Today, on the meeting ground of Zoom, I top off a tall glass of water and gather with women from all around the world to talk about mothering, childbirth, fertility, periods … we circle the way women have always circled.
We tell our stories.
“Story medicine,” a mother of a new born son calls it after sharing beautiful details of her free birth at home.
This is the flow.
Story medicine. Let me offer a bit here. Perhaps that is what I do here … I write to express, to piece moments together, to glimpse meaning in the small details that weave together to create a life that breathes.
Story medicine. Perhaps that is what I do here … but I am hesitant to define and curate sharp boundaries on this writing, on this work … and this is the flow.
There, on the Zoom call, an expecting mother listed everything she was doing to heal a yeast infection. Minerals. Diet. Probiotics. And yet, the breakthrough came, and we can all see it on her lively face, when she connected the emotional element, when she dug deeper to the story she was telling herself, to the story that was playing out in her marriage, when she unearthed how this story was nestled into her psyche.
This is the flow.
The uncovering of the story, the illumination of the narrative manifesting in symptoms that speak.
“You can analyze mineral intake, but it’s ALL emotional, psychological, energetic,” the hostess affirms. “You’re the cause. The rest the effect.”
There is flow here for me. There is liberation and vitality. I know that many people address their health in a myriad of ways. To each their own path. I am simply offering what brings me alive.
This is mine. This is my flow. This is where the resonance of truth expands my breath.
I am the cause. The symptoms the effect. Radical self-responsibility and unconditional love are my go-to healing agents. There is story medicine here, in the body.
And the question to start the story that’s being told and held in the cells is simple …
Is this decision/thought/food-choice/action/self-care response … coming from love or fear?
“Healthy” lifestyles can be dictated by fear. A colorful meal of kale and carrots and a sweet potato can be eaten with a calculating mind and not a grateful belly. Yoga can be a punishment (more vinyasas to cancel out what was or what was not eaten for lunch, longer chair poses, no savasana … ). Meditation or walking outside becomes regimented, a marching order, along with bodywork, celery juice, ice baths, zinc and vitamin D … self-care, health and wellbeing deflates into a to-do list.
Check this off and march on … and I’m sensing another way of instinct-led, health-glow living.
See, I’m not knocking healing modalities, supplements, and all the naturalistic, gorgeous ways we can nurture and nourish wellbeing in our physical bodies. PLEASE. Receive all that aligned support. And I believe that I can actually open up to truly receive their benefits when I am in a state of embodied ease, not when I am fixing, scrambling to ensure a perfected healthy lifestyle.
What if enjoyment is the key to health and vitality?
Enjoying being alive in this body – noticing the stories about our bodies that stagnate the flow, where we are seeking outside of ourselves, to whom and to what are we giving away our power, where are we analyzing the mineral intake in the desperate hope to solve a problem … when really the solution is in plunging into the depths of our emotional terrain? In the sneaky stories that slither through the wild grasses of our psyche?
Here’s where I stumble into the rabbit hole. My skin. The next skincare product is not going to fix me. Cleansing my inner gaze with mother-loving compassion is the tonic that brings me home to a wholeness always present … even if there’s a spunky zit or two.
I guess these days I’m relieved to just shrug off a fear I am so tired of wearing … of living in fear of this body, of trying to get her “perfected” and right. Of looking outside myself for approval for answers that fail to fit.
She’s already perfect. This body. The blemishes, too. She’s always right. In homeostasis or seeking homeostasis. That is the story medicine I needed from the women on Zoom. All of us reflecting to each other, through vocalizing our challenges, pains, joys and desires, that medicine of story that connects us to each other, that is the heartbeat of our shared humanity.
This is the flow – to check in with curiosity, to answer the instinctive nudge, to trust myself enough to live, eat, move, intuitively. To know that it is safe for me to have needs, and creativity blooms by the way I answer them.
This is the flow – living within the loose bonds of a story medicine that frees me to be an ever-evolving, ever-changing human being.
So today, coffee in the teacup. Tomorrow, who knows? Grant me the flexibility, the excitement to shift and change, to summersault back and forth. Let me live the medicine of being alive moment to moment, enjoying every sip as I flow.