By Collette Davis

I’m sat in Pete’s bedroom with the door closed. Everything is white. The strong silence is ringing and I close my eyes to begin the descent.

Travelling through tense tissue and frozen flesh, along boiling rivers of muddy blood, accessing the inner reaches of my body until I am fully submerged and come to learn that the tube of my entire torso is on fire.

I’ve tasted this experience once before and now know that this is the flavour of fear and anger. Acidic foam. Caustic and surging.

I sink into the flames and discover that I feel sick but not in a way that disturbs me.

I’m curious.

Fear and anger manifest as sickness in my body and as I track the embers to the pit of my stomach I’m strangely pleased with this affirmation. I fuse out and my head takes over. I’m inventing a conversation and fuelling a reverie before I realise and send myself back to sit beneath the acid tree.

The journey is cooling and it calms me to travel through these rivers and streams and move into the experience.

I ask my body what it needs … breath. Deepest breath. I breathe into the coals, offering more ease, helping the sensation to soften by stroking the inside of my heart.

How can I create more space with this breath and how can I bring myself to a place that honours my feelings but clears my head?

My head wants my voice to be heard. I have so much to say … but my body wants to me listen. So I sit a little longer.

Feeling your feelings is shaky work.

Going into your body and tracking those elusive articulations takes the skill and patience of a hunter. Sitting, waiting, watching.

Returning to the battleground and scouring the landscape of your anatomy to wash and cleanse the killing fields.

Observing yourself in relationship to others and looking for repeated patterns of behaviour.

Hungry to break old cycles and cultivate new neural pathways. Understanding what is really present at that moment in time, instead of through a distorted lens of past events or future fear.

Coursing the emotion through your systems and structures to allow it to pass through. To see where you’re holding it. Where it rises. Where it burns and sears and tears from the inside out.

Breathing yourself back to life by expanding from the inside so you can feel your way back in because, somehow, somewhere along the way, you forgot.

We forget that our bodies have wisdom. We forget to listen to what they have to say. We ignore their pleas at the cost of our deepest truths. And a voice that isn’t heard only gets quieter.

“A body whose wisdom has never been honoured does not easily trust. An animal with a crazy trainer learns crazy habits, runs wild.” ~Marion Woodman

If everything is in relationship then how am I in relationship to myself? My body? My thoughts, feelings and emotions?

How does my perception affect my relationship to the world around me and if I shift my perception does the world shift too?

Coming into deeper relationship with yourself can have a profound effect on how you communicate, how you see the world and how you interact with everything inside it. But what does that mean? A deeper relationship with yourself?

When we get curious about why we react in a certain way, who we judge, what we believe. When we explore the different shades of red we can begin to catch ourselves before our knee jerks. Before something harmful, callous or cruel leaps from our suddenly forked tongues. When we begin to inquire we can start to observe and become the witness to our own triggers.

Automatic reaction versus conscious response is such a beautiful play, so cleanly articulated, and I see myself in this dance, daily. I know when I’ve reacted badly. And when I do, I get curious. I try my best not to judge myself. I work to acknowledge my shadow, dive into my body and follow the emotion so I can taste it, drink it in and ask it to pass through.

So I can release the pattern and deepen my intention to respond with greater consciousness. To move from a place of truth and to speak that truth quietly, fearlessly and with love.

“Become so fluid that the waves of stimuli and emotion can glide through [you] unbroken and ‘untrapped’.” ~Rikke Brodin

For more self-study, The Urban Howl recommends The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book).

#GETCURIOUS