Well its been a hot minute since I have shared anything here. I had made a promise to do it regularly and I let life get in the way. To be honest, I kind of lost my drive and purpose for a while but I’m back now with renewed vigour. Let me explain.
Last February, just before I got this site up and running, I lost my father to heart failure. It was a very difficult winter for me dealing with his health issues. He had a steep decline starting with a rapid onset dementia symptoms, declining mobility and multiple infections. Couple that with the fact that in my personal healing journey I was dealing with a lot of issues related to how I was raised and how that affects my current mindset. A lot of my toxic beliefs can definitely be traced back to my fathers influence. I was balancing having compassion for him and caring for him while deep down I was wanting to keep my distance as I tried to heal the shame that he helped create. In the wake of his death I felt a profound relief that he was gone. Partially that his suffering was done but also that my burden of caring for him was finished. Which also caused a lot of guilt. How can you be happy that someone is dead?
There were silver linings to the situation. I was shown the importance of community. Several of my friends stepped up to help me with my fathers care or to make sure that I was caring for myself and not burning out. I will be forever grateful to my little tribe. I also felt a renewed invigoration in my desire to share somatic and energy healing with others which allowed me to start this site and begin widely offering services. The surge of energy was unfortunately short lived. Although I have been offering services over the last year, my personal work stalled out for a bit. I stopped doing as much breathing of my own. I waffled about doing advanced massage courses. I made my life very busy to distract myself from my grief and guilt. It seems I had more healing to do before I was truly ready to fully commit to somatic practice.
Sometimes healing goes slowly and sometimes it lurches forward. Gentle reader, I have just been hit with a ton of bricks. It feels like the same ton of bricks that hit me after my first Breathwave session that launched me on my somatic healing journey but in this case it was a deeply transformative massage. I was in a place of feeling very stuck with low energy and motivation as the anniversary of my fathers death arrived. In the middle of all that, I had a training course for advanced ZenThai training. As part of our course this past weekend we were doing sessions on each other and I received a beautiful session with deep work on the hips and opening in the chest. At the end of the session the practitioner laid his hand on my upper back, touching my heart center from behind. It was at that point that my heart cracked open. I wept – starting with gentle sobs then moving to crying uncontrollably as my body shook with emotion. I don’t know if you have experienced this type of emotional release but it is powerful. There was no one thing I was crying about, I was releasing a heavy burden of shame, guilt and fear and I felt so much lighter afterwards.
And now as we enter the lunar new year, the year of the fire horse, I feel a new energy coursing through me. I have gotten more accomplished this week than I have in the last month. Motivation is through the roof and I feel renewed and ready to take on the world – one somatic healing session at a time. If you feel you are ready, please join me. I don’t promise that it will be an easy journey but its certainly worthwhile.
Raven's Breath Somatic Facilitation 