Why Your Soul, Like the Moon, Must Sometimes Hide
As I write this, it’s an interesting day of contrasting energy. There is a lunar eclipse, representing darkness and going within, occurring on an election day, which calls us to step outside ourselves and take action.
I’ve been feeling this same kind of push/pull as I recover from a lingering cold. My ego has been shouting at me to get out and work, network, go, go, go! While my soul says: Sit. You’re tired. You’re healing.
Even after I was feeling better, my weekend didn’t go as planned. My daughter was out of town and I was looking forward to getting out, but I had no energy. Someone recommended the show From Scratch on Netflix and said “Have a box of Kleenex ready!”
So I watched and, when I saw a scene of someone giving birth, it tapped into my old grief around losing my first baby. This quickly snowballed into grief over losing my best friend and my mother. Before I knew it, I was crying over everything and nothing. There seemed to be so many layers of unexplainable feelings, but as I let them come, I began to feel lighter.
This wasn’t the first time I grieved these things. It probably won’t be the last. But I had compassion for myself, knowing that we all keep circling back to our wounds, each time healing in a new way, a different way, a deeper way.
It can be especially frustrating when we think we’re finally over a physical illness only to have it replaced by an emotional “second wave.” But sometimes it takes these prolonged periods of low energy to help us surrender on a new level. In my case, I realized that I was spending the weekend doing just what my soul needed.
As I was navigating this, I picked up the book by poet David Whyte called CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words and opened to the word HIDING. What an appropriate word to ponder during a lunar eclipse!
Whyte writes that “Hiding is creative, necessary, and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.”
Sometimes we have to hide from the world, whether it’s to nurse an illness, or escape through TV, or read or walk alone, in order to reconnect with our soul.
When I ground into my body and allow my soul to guide me, I always seem to know what to do. It’s only when I resist that knowing that a tug of war begins. And that leads to suffering.
The best way to ground into the present moment is through the breath. This isn’t always easy. Breathing deeply and mindfully can bring us face to face with difficult emotions.
It makes sense to resist this. Who would want to open up to and listen to the negative voices?
But when we surrender to whatever is happening and allow genuine feelings to move through us, the resistance lessens. The voices get quieter. The breath is what moves us forward.
Conversely, If we don’t take care of our inner world, allowing emotion to flow, our thought process is going to manifest from the wounds of the soul. Energetically, we’ll be stuck at a lower vibration.
The breath allows us to access the light of the soul, even when that light is obscured by the ego.
“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance…” —David Whyte