What if the Relinquished Body Refuses to Feel Fully Alive?

This morning I woke up craving espresso, and instead of getting up, putting on some clothes and driving downtown to buy some relief, I opened the curtains, looked out at the world, and lay back down with my feelings.

There is a vineyard past the walkway to my house, and so I looked at the vines, heavy now with grapes that soon will be turned into wine. The grapes are pale green and look like blots of weight against the leaves that glowed with early morning light.

I felt heaviness in my body, and when I let myself really feel the heaviness, I felt like a drop of water that was pulling from a surface, almost ready to fall. It was not comfortable as I was between two places: a surface and the air. I was attached to one but about to fall into the other.

What caffeine does is take me out of the fullness of experience and into straight-edged agitation and anxiety. Caffeine amps me up so I can’t feel life talking to me. Caffeine plugs me into my head, into the anxiety of What can I do next to use up this race car energy? What can I do to get back to normal? What can I do to stay two steps ahead of the feeling that I am wasting my life? That life does not want anything from me? That I don’t belong?

Then, around noon when the caffeine falls into headache and depression, I reach for sugar or more caffeine because I signed up for the ride, and I have to stay on until it’s time to go to bed.

Not feeling life takes so much work!

So today I went to take my dog for a run on the beach without getting espresso first. I felt myself drive what is one of my favorite roads: Bodega Highway. It winds up and down hills, past farmland and cows grazing and is, in the early morning, more often than not blurred by fog. I work with the belief that the drive is better when I am high with caffeine because then I can ride the excitement train and want to crawl out of my skin with the beauty of it all. I can play music and sing and feel shot out of a cannon.

Not high on caffeine, I felt the beauty, but I also felt the heaviness of my body still, the drop of water ready to fall. I wanted to sing and cry at the same time. Being happy and sad simultaneously can feel like a lot of work. It can feel like asking a thin straw to be a pipe made to handle gallons and gallons of water. It can feel dirty, complicated, rough.

I drove with this feeling and wondered what if would be like to live with this always. To never have caffeine to pull me into the intense scream of keep moving, to be the drop ready to fall.

I thought about the body of the newborn infant, how it is a drop of energy that goes from in the universe of the mother body to out, and then how the infant bears the burden of being born in communion with the mother who bears the burden of having split herself in two with the body of her child.

The body of the infant bears being born and begins to flourish in the communion of we with the body of the mother.

I have an idea that I stopped living fully when my body was asked to bear the feelings of being in the world without the mother’s body to offer communion and succor. I have the idea that coming into the world was too much for my nervous system, and so I learned to half-live, and I have found ways well into my fifties to continue to half live. There are ways that elevate me out of the depression: sugar, caffeine, buying things, worry, exercise, doing good things for others. There are things I avoid because they would ask me to feel fully: yoga, a committed and healthy romantic relationship, a meditation practice of more than five minutes.

What if over and over again we who lost their mothers ask ourselves, Can I stand this feeling?, and over and over again we say, Yes.? What if this near-constant question and answer dance is how one whole-heartedly lives in the body of a person who lost their mother? What if this question is the reason more adopted people kill themselves then non-adopted people? What if the no is No, my body hurts too much. No. My mind hurts too much. No. I can not do this without her?

How do we help those that can’t bear the body? How do we mother those who are “too old” to be mothered? is there a “too old” for bodies who crave mothering?

When I was lying in bed before going to the beach, I felt my heart beating. It occurred to me that my heart is a heavy, heroic thing. It just beats. Every day. Every night. It shows up and beats. It is not glamorous or all that sexy but it is what my self counts on, what my self needs to exist. It occurred to me that there is no separation between me and my heart. I am that beating thing. I am messy and throbbing and alive.

My heart, with each beat, says yes to another moment, another breath, another opportunity to reach out and hug another body.

Can I bear this feeling is also something that happens during really, really good sex, if you are lucky. Can you stand feeling as if you might blow apart, as if you might lose consciousness from sensory overload? Can you let your body love what it loves? Can you bear that?

Can you bear it now? What about now? And now?

And I, can I bear it? What about now? And now?

Yes.

What if this question is springing me into a way of being that monks and healers and mystics dedicate their lives to? What if this core of trauma is leading me to say yes to life on the daily, the hourly, minute by minute? What if my greatest struggle is also my way through to my greatest joy?

What if living this question means I don’t have time in my life for what doesn’t feel essential or true? What if relationships, jobs, habits, thoughts fall away because I can’t focus on this question and feel my body and answer Yes and do those things that distracted me from the song of me?

That sounds a potentially scary. And super lovely.

If change were easy they would have named it a walk on the beach.

I’m starting to muck about for a conclusion and saying things that are like, what?

So,

The end.