They tell us to touch grass when we’re feeling overwhelmed, that the earth itself is healing, that it’s even a delight to our senses. And they are right. It is all of those things. It’s why I run at the park near my house instead of on a treadmill at the gym. Those dirt trails through the forest have a tendency to clear my mind in a way that I can’t seem to find in most places.
I am beginning to realize that the bottom of the pole is where I learn how to put the pieces of my own heart back together, that one place can sort of bleed into the other in the way that our lives sort of do. Life isn’t one or the other. It’s both and. We just have to be able to sit with it all, even in the times where it all seems to clash together. That is the place where we find what grounds us as an individual.
We tether ourselves to things in life, to people, to places, sometimes holding on for longer than we maybe should. It’s hard to let go of things, especially ones that we feel are hurtful or harmful. Pain is supposed to be a deterrent, and the sad truth of it all is that much of the time we do it to ourselves. We resist change, rather than embrace it. We clutch on to these old parts of ourselves like a busted life raft, rather than letting them fall apart and float away into the distance.
There is a lightness that appears when you begin to accept all of the parts of you in their messy entirety. Things in the past begin to make sense. The why of it gets answered. This doesn’t mean we have to like it, that we are proud of ourselves for what was said or what was done. The point is to teach us how to have some compassion with ourselves, how to forgive ourselves, and to stop punishing ourselves.
Isn’t that all we were doing anyway? Holding on to the shame to keep ourselves from moving forward with our lives in a way that makes us happy, to keep ourselves from learning how to fly?
As someone who was trained in classical ballet I grew up with the belief that grace and beauty came through a certain set of eyes, that I had to fit into a certain mold of what society told me I should be. I spent years suppressing myself to fit in that box only to end up sad and angry at the fact that no matter what I did I just couldn’t be happy in the ways that they told me I would be. It took a metal pole for me to learn how to climb out of that, and it is now where I’ve learned how to speak my truth.
Mad love, Jenna
