The Wellspring Within

There is a place inside me that I have come to know as the well. I first consciously came into contact with it just after my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, although I now recognize that it has always been with me and likely is also connected to all creatures across all time and space. It is a deep pool of water, oceanic in proportions, and when I touch it I can feel that it goes on forever-like a bottomless, endless well. And it holds my connection to water, and to all the things that water represents.

At this time in my life I was experiencing deep grief. And this grief felt bottomless as well. And honestly, it was, it is, it’s always there. I was sitting in a guided ceremony with a dozen or more people, some of whom I had never met before in my life, and I was sobbing for hours. Now I have cried my fair share in this life. In fact, if I’m being 100% honest, I am a bit of a wallower. As emo as they come. I’m an empath and I feel things intensely and there is a part of me that revels in that pain in a hurts so good kind of way. Sadness can be oddly delicious, and I have indulged in it in ways that are not so healthy-from a place of victimization. This time was…different.

This time I made conscious contact with the place within me (and I am convinced it is a place that we all share in) where my water element is stored. And as I cried, and I released, I also awakened to the fact that because the grief was endless, because it always lives within me, that I also have the power to keep diving deeper into it, or to surface and leave the well for another day. It was the most interesting sensation. It was the realization that even if I had until the end of time and all I did was feel this grief I still would not reach the bottom of it. It literally would go on forever. And counter-intuitively, I felt empowered by that knowledge. Because if I could never finish processing it then I was suddenly free to go at my own pace. To feel grief as it arose, and not have to live there. In other words, I was finally able to get my head above water and look at the stars.
Its taken me quite some time to integrate that experience because, hey, guess what, I’m a human. But I’ll never forget that moment of clarity, and the shift that rippled out from that space that, over time, has shown me that my power lies not in controlling my emotions but in how I choose to relate to them. Feelings are like thoughts, they just are. Trying to control them is like trying to grab onto water, or air, it just slips through your fingers. And the more we try to stop the feelings, the more persistent they become. The same goes for when you wallow in them, because attachment is much like resistance, it simply perpetuates more of the same.

So where is the middle ground between resisting, and attaching? What does that even look like? I’ve found that the middle ground is willingness. A willingness to allow myself to feel exactly what is real for me in the moment, and a willingness to let that shit go when it is ready to go without, you guessed it, attaching to it.

And how exactly do we do that?

Two words: self care. 

Oh and one more: consistency.

And by self care I don’t mean taking a bath with scented salts and staying in to read a book (although self care can look this way). What I mean is getting radically honest about what your actual needs are moment to moment. If you are an emo book nerd like me who prefers to stay home and eat chocolate while sipping tea and crying over Love in the Time of Cholera for the 1000th time another bath probably isn’t going to cut it. Often what I actually need is very very different from my habitual inclinations. Often it’s cardio time (physical exertion helps move stuck emotions and hormones from the body) followed by connection of some sort with real live humans and then a nourishing meal (followed by chocolate, a bath, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez). The key here is to look towards balance, which requires honesty, and then to commit to seeing it through. Which usually means trying, and failing, and then choosing to pick it back up again and again and again until at some point: it becomes second nature.  

And that dear hearts, is my definition of self love.