Slowing Down

It's been a busy time as nature slows down, turns inward. This season....I still consider myself a new wife, new mother, new stepmother, new householder. And I find myself pulling from very old files. Family life from the house where I grew as a child. Married life gathered from marriages that never worked. Holidays from Hallmark.

How did I end up like this?

You'd think twenty years of all kinds of therapy, meditation that allowed me to peer through windows of timelessness, and a yoga practice devoted to teachings of honoring the self within, would have set me straight.

But what fascinates me about my own life, my own mind, is the impulse toward repetition, how patterns love to reproduce across time. Indeed, how patterns adventure across years of new, redefined territory, look for an opening, then resume their play at the first chance.

Is it lack of discipline or is it perfect just the way it unfolds?

One thing about it, I get to really look closely at the patterns that shaped me as a child, those of my parents which I now enact in frighteningly similar daily ways. It's both endearing and horrifying in one instant. The grace here is that I find a place of love for my parents that I could have never known if I had gotten over it all, healed from it all, moved on completely. And in the horror I find compassion for myself and, by extension, them.

The result of those years of therapy and practice, though, is a particularly acute sensitivity to natural cycles -- and an accompanying form of illness that arises when I move against those rhythms.

In the last month I've had every variation of a cold and flu, several internal infections...the list goes on. Tonight I feel a weight on my chest, hard to breathe. And I get it.

I have Christmas hangover. I am suffering from my own willingness to live the way long-standing rules of culture prescribe. I cringe to write it, but it's true. I knew every word to The Sound of Music the other night on TV. My husband looked at me like who are you! On one hand I espouse all the perennial wisdom teachings, while on the other I try to be the good nuclear family person. Not that those have to be miles apart. But they are for me right now.

All those years of seeking were not easy and, amazingly, I find myself back where I started. But now with more curiousity. And with new maps and resources, information I didn't have as a child.

I used to be proud to assume a 'spiritual' identity, but tonight I find more humility in being honest with myself about what I don't know.

In the last few nights of this year, I'm growing quieter, less stubborn. Sick. Healing. Slowing down.