I woke up this morning to the sound of the wind moaning as
it bent around the exterior of our house. Each drafty space between poorly set
door-frames and missing doorknobs stuffed with socks howled woefully like a
ghost announcing the cold front blowing in from the north. I rolled over and had the moment of
ultimate relief that we feel upon waking up after a night of being ill. For
those first few seconds we feel completely well – normal, and slowly the “ick”
sinks back in, as if the body has to take moment to remember that it actually
isn’t well quite yet after all.
I stared at the ceiling, turning the phone over in my hand
trying to decide if I should reschedule the routine OBGYN appointment that I’d
planned for that morning. THIS proved to be an easy enough decision, so I
canceled and went back to bed. Maybe I’d feel better in time for my limpia and
flamenco classes by this afternoon. I wasn’t feeling that horrible after all,
just – you know – sour.
Why, you ask, am I even bringing up this bleak morning
scenario? Well, because ultimately I canceled all of my appointments for later on in the day
in order to honor a resolution that I made for myself this year; a
resolution of self care. Certainly, I might have been able to coerce myself out
into the blustery evening to halfheartedly stomp around the flamenco studio –
exerting myself to a moderate degree and hoping that it wouldn’t make matters
worse.
If anything, I would think that I should keep my engagement
to visit my spiritual mentor and bring her the blue corn bread I had baked in
exchange for a limpia and warm pláctica (heart to heart talk) about my reasons
for requesting a spirit cleansing. Few things can make me feel more
refreshed and revived than having the herbs and the egg swept over my
body while she rattles and sings and burns copal. Wasn’t that part of my self
care after all? But my body appealed and, as I had promised her I would, rather
than push this time - I listened.
This business of self care, can be tricky. We have appointments
to be kept and deadlines to be met and projects to be completed. As
professionals in a healing tradition ourselves, sometimes our passionate AND
compassionate nature gets the best of us as we try to have the biggest impact
on our students, clients, and community. We offer them advice to allow their
bodies to heal but we often do not take our own advice. We tell them that the
state of their mind, of their spirit translates into the medicines that they
make, but are we always heeding our own? We cannot make effective medicine when
we ourselves are sick and we cannot hope to offer a truly effective ritual for
others when we ourselves are in need of a soul retrieval.
While I am not encouraging opting out of our commitments
every time the going gets tough, I do encourage giving ourselves the permission
to take the advice that we would give to somebody seeking our own healing
council. “Listen to your body,” it will tell you if it is merely tired from
working long hours this week or if it truly is not up for the task and needs
you to show IT some compassion. Long periods of ignoring these messages can build up into deficiencies of the body and spirit over time.
Today, while sprawled in a robe on my couch, feeling
sensitive and a little week – my body is saying “thank you,” even as it
continues to cause me some discomfort. But my spirit is nourished for having
shown confidence in my own intuition, and the more I show her that I trust her
guidance, the louder and more clearly she will begin to speak.
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