My birthday breakdown! Practicing what I teach

Grateful for the Arts of Ensoulment

After five years of intense stress (Covid, moving, family recovery, a baby at home, terrifying politics), I'm praying for the restoration of my health. What did I get for my birthday? A systemic shake-up. Fortunately, I practice what I teach. Read on if you are curious about how I’m applying the arts of ensoulment during my birthday breakdown. I’d love to hear what you’re practicing in the comments or get your take on what follows.

I was born on May 28th. During my birthday season every year, under sunny California skies and insane spring blooms, I feel depressed.

Last year when I mentioned this to a massage therapist, she directed me to The Book of Houses: an astrological guide to the harvest cycle in human life. I’ve learned to take planetary and seasonal rhythms seriously. Like many people, my body and soul is shaped by artificial academic and religious timing. I’ve launched into programmatic activity in the Fall, harvested final projects in the Spring, and hoped for more downtime in the Summer. Instead, each Spring, I feel a wintery pull to a halt. I want to lie down on the floor and do nothing but flop around.

So this year, I did it. I shifted how I time a year’s worth of courses and expectations. It took decades to honor my Spring downshift, and I'm happy I did, except for the presence of unwavering tears behind my eyes day after day. I couldn't identify the source. Could I be picking up someone else's grief? As a highly sensitive, soul-connected person, it's a question I always ask when I can’t relate to an emotion. I heed the Prime Directive: Sovereignty of Soul, crucial to a healthy body and soul in the art of ensoulment, reminds me that I'm not meant to do other people's emotional and bodily work.

Fortunately, most of my days include moving, painting, writing, praying, listening, and tenderly connecting with others. Invoking creative birthrights, the second key to ensoulment, allows my body and soul to stay supple as I navigate uber-high empathy and energetic pulls.

Gratefully, in conversation with a soul-friend, when she permitted herself not to care so much about others, my instincts lit up. On a body level, I flashed on the awareness that if I feel you, I care. What if this doesn't have to be the case? I need caring to be a physical choice, not an unconscious mandate. I need to be free to CARE NOT!

"Free to Care Not" dropped like a brain seed in me. My soul embraced it wholeheartedly. In good humor, I began sharing the good news with others. 

On the day of my birth, the 28th, at the family cabin, my grief sensations intensified. Distress related to my birth seemed unavoidable. My mom had two babies before I was born. One died in a house fire. She gave the other up for adoption. Although Mom was a competitive roller skating dancer in high school, she couldn’t move her grief. I never saw her dance, although she supported me to do so.

I was formed in a stew of despair. 

I’ve tracked this troubling truth. From ages 5 to 12, fully awake, I regularly saw an apparition appear– a burnt form transitioning into a flowing white energy. I didn’t know the story about the house fire that killed my baby brother until I was sixteen. 

I've always had access to visionary information. Thank goodness for an inner voice that directed me to learn about efficiency of energy, clarity of vision, and courage to love. Visions and sensations are real for me. Dealing with higher than average amounts of data requires me to have a robust Spirit Team, the first key to the artfulness of Ensoulment. Gratefully, I grew up in a church that sought to balance between rationality and the highly imaginative Biblical role models who spoke to angels, listened to dreams, and "saw" things. Reson and spiritual wisdom want interplay.

I'm lucky to have my husband on my spirit team. He’s a retired hospice chaplain. When he affirmed my distress as grief that felt like a movement in itself!

Might the tears be Moms? Am I to carry her mourning cry forever?

That afternoon going outside to help remove a fallen tree near the cabin's book door, I grabbed a branch, and my back twinged. I immediately stopped. I was still recovering from spraining my ankle at the home of my Mother's partner, my stepfather. I needed to pull back. So, I bowed to my limits, another art of ensoulment– our dance with suffering.

A week later, readying my home to welcome my long-time collaborator, Phil, I quickly vacuumed, picked him up at the train, and took him to lunch and the art museum. As the day progressed, my back slowly seized. When I got home, I lay down and my back completely contracted in excruciating pain. My system broke down.

I live in cohousing. My husband emailed our neighbors requesting assistance. Western and homeopathic pain remedies showed up at my door within minutes. One neighbor, a nurse, arrived and gently offered Reiki. She encouraged me to pay attention to whatever I saw as she moved her hands across my body. I told her I was processing old grief. As she listened with her hands, I felt tremors of energy release. I saw a brown band across my pelvis and the healing colors of turquoise and yellow in my left hip. I rested, took one Vicodin, and had ointments rubbed on my back.

Two days later, when I could move again, I led a dance chapel. Knowing how to honor my capacity, I felt the natural dancing prayer strengthen my body and soul.

I was energetically wobbly in the days afterward. I know that somatic destabilization occurs when shifting a core body belief. Breakdown is part of healing. Changing one’s mindset to restore balance, even a centimeter, can induce realignment.

Two weeks after my birthday, my high empathy no longer requires me to carry the grief I swam in. I’m preparing a memorial ritual for my Mother's babies. I’ve returned to Pilates and am gathering energy for the coming months.

Body and soul are so generous. What I pray for is delivered. A profound return to health. Spiritual helpers arrive at each step of the way as I listen, play, and honor seasonal needs with more grace, soul energy, and clarity. Concerning inherited grief, I love my Mom deeply and bow to her courageous journey with suffering. I live in gratitude for skills and artfulness as I respond to energetic data that is a challenge to offload. The art of ensoulment is that life-long quest.

I trust the wisdom of body and soul and know that beauty comes when I do. The best birthday present ever is to play a part in shining the light on resurrecting body and soul on Earth.

Keep dancing!