Why we spiral, why it sucks and why we have to do it anyway…

So lately I have really been struggling with a capital S. I have felt like everywhere I look there is heartbreak and sadness. All of the collective vitriol on all sides about Ferguson, Bill Cosby, the intense dialogues about feminism has really taken its toll on me and a lot of us. I have to admit, I am right there leading the charge in a lot of these discussions, asking people to feel their own power and use their voices. I feel very clearly that it is important that we all work together to make voices heard. With all of this intense feeling and emotion comes intense backlash…..that energy we throw out into the world does not exist in a vacuum…we throw it out and we must take it back in some way to stay energetically balanced. When we hurl that much feeling (this is the energy in this case) outside ourselves we are quickly hit with that much back. It is a powerful, intense exchange that leaves us feeling very much alive, exhilarated (both in positive and negative ways) and plugged into the larger sense of our reality. (Though we all struggle with that continuously, for as yoga and many other mindfulness practices teach us, we are not our mind, and certainly not our reality.)  This practice, as present as it may seem, is not sustainable. When we ping-pong energetically in this way for too long, our true selves, that deep connection with the great energetic truth, becomes so muddied and clouded that we begin to spiral.

So what do I call spiraling? In order to understand it, first think of what a spiral looks like…..(in this case we are thinking of an inward spiral) it starts off large and moves in concentric circles until it reaches a fixed point. When we become too pulled into the cycle of intense external energy  exchange, our circles start to become larger than ourselves- growing until we have very little  remembrance of us and our true energy. This is of course not sustainable, and we begin to spiral inwards back towards our origins and our connections internally. This spiraling back is always terrifying to me, as usually I have circled the edge engaging in this intense external back and forth  and have completely lost sight of the fact that well, I have lost my rootedness. So in that amazing profound energetic dance that is the universe, I start moving inwards….and like water circling the drain I begin to move faster and faster back to my origin point. No matter how many times this happens I feel myself grabbing onto anything I can and very often it manifests as lashing out, or a bit too much to drink, or maybe just too many words having to be said to a usually very loving and patient friend. Eventually I finish the spiral back to myself, I breathe very deeply and I look at what I learned from the experience. It’s always humbling, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes sad, but part of the journey of it all. When i land back into myself, I have a truer sense of how to give and receive energy in an easier way,a softer way, a more sustainable way.

None of this means that I or anyone else will stop this spiral dance- this is part of what it means to be human, and in a much smaller sense part of a much greater universal reality known as Spanda.  We all spiral in different ways, some of us are much less verbal, some of us internalize our spirals more (for those people who know and love me, they know that I tend to kick and scream very outwardly for most of the journey), but at the end of the day a spiral moves us outside of our true selves, so we can move back into our true selves with more awareness of what that means. So here’s to the pulsation of the universe, the beating of our hearts, the inhalations and exhalations of our breath.