I have cocooned myself in my bedroom today.
Strewn around me is the evidence of a life lived somewhere between the concrete and the illusory. Piles of crystals of all textures and sheen litter my white down comforter. Decks upon decks of precariously-stacked oracle cards quietly hum with witchy words and haunting illustrations. Books by poets and mystics lay open and marked, giving away the roads into my soul.
I am hiding.
In the past week I spent almost 24 hours in cumulative meditation, and something cracked open within me. There is an undeniable ooze escaping from my heart, and in this desperate human attempt to contain it, I've quarantined my entire being for a moment. It is an act of both love and fear, and I am so deeply in it.
There is a tentativeness to everything I utter or think right now. It isn't the same sensation of times past when I've returned home from these deeply intensive weeks just bursting to share. There is purpose and calculated intention with each word that crosses my mind or lips, and I am counting them and weighing their energy.
I traveled many lifetimes and journeyed many miles in the past few days. Meditation for me is not just about quieting the mind and relieving the body of stress (although it does help in those ways). It is also this deeply personal technicolor expedition into the very fabric of my being. When I close my eyes and find myself in the spaces in between, I am transported somewhere else altogether, and suddenly what was once solid becomes intensely fluid.
It is a place where alien plumbers tweak and adjust the frequencies of my energetic cords. Where light, etheric beings rinse my body of old pain and past hurts. Where I leave my physical shell and for a timeless chain of moments, I become someone else altogether. It is both profound and completely without tangible meaning.
And each time that I travel to these far reaches of my brain and soul, I come back knowing that I am changed. I feel this deep sense of transformation, and the translator within me illuminates the lesson. It is this divine feeling of moving forward but also knowing that there is absolutely no where to go and nothing to achieve. It is wildly paradoxical and maddeningly addictive.
But this time was different.
This time the lesson came. Just as it always does. But it knocked me squarely where I did not expect it. This time the lesson was so big and so sudden that for days I kept it quietly hidden in a safe fold of my heart. I would steal away in those shadowed spaces within to turn it end over end and examine every edge, every corner.
When I was finally done examining it in the darkest recesses of my soul, I brought it to light. I shared it with my people, and they held me while the waves of its energy rocked my physical body. I allowed the tears and opened the wound, and I brought to light what had felt safe only in the dark.
I shared the truth. About the smothering energy that told me to quiet my voice. About the foe disguised as a friend that whispered in my most vulnerable moment that it wasn't safe to be me. About the dark night of the soul that had finally culminated in this deafening clap of thunder.
And I set myself free.
But freedom doesn't always looks like what we expect. It isn't always this instantaneous moment of lightness and ease. It doesn't mean the work is done and we've short-stepped the learning. Sometimes it is a simple realization, a miracle perspective change. And although you feel infinitely changed and forever altered, you still have to pick up a shovel, put your head down and get to work digging your tunnel in the direction of your freedom.
That's where I am. Digging my way out of the cocoon I had been nestled into in the past few years, hell, maybe my whole life. I am lingering in the pain and honoring the time it has taken to create such beautiful wings. I am charging my energy and feeling deeply into this change of direction. I am quieting my voice so that when it rings, it will resonate deeply and carry beautifully.
I am readying my soul. Sometimes you have to hide just before that moment when you shine.