The Strength to Feel, the Courage to Heal

TRUE grounding leads to real resilience

As this post is delivered to your inbox, I am on my way to northern Michigan to participate in the Raw Vegan Wellness Retreat. One of my offerings there is a talk that I call Raw Resilience. I’ve done my best here to capture the essence of this talk, for those who will not be with us at the retreat (absent the substantial audience participation I will elicit!).

“To be fully alive is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To be alive we must be willing to die a thousand times.” ~Pema Chodron

This may sound frightening, but it points to the importance of RESILIENCE, which may be the most important quality we can possess. And I mean true, authentic resilience - not putting up a tough front, rising strong to push through more performance, or pretending things feel fine when they don’t. Real resilience is about our ability to return to our pure, relaxed natural state, again and again and again, until our natural awareness of its permanence returns. With this sacred knowing, we can hold our earthly experiences more lightly.

Life is full of curve-balls and unpredictability, and we don’t get to have all the control or answers we want. If we wish to thrive, we have to learn to get comfortable with this discomfort. When we meet this chronic tension from a place of quiet, spacious awareness, we can begin to accept it and to gradually expand our ability to live peacefully amidst great risk and uncertainty. The higher you reach, the bigger the risks and uncertainties you will face, and the more resilient, flexible, wise and resourceful you will need to become. “Blessed are those who are flexible, for they will not get bent out of shape!”

I am often asked, “How can we stay “grounded” while flying higher?” No doubt about it, a pure diet will beckon you into a higher frequency. Experience has shown me that to live in this light, I must be willing to go ‘out on a limb,’ and remain there; untether myself from the comforts and luxuries of the shore; live out of the box; and shed & release old identities, roles and expectations. I must become willing to meet my true feelings, listen more deeply, and trust the soft whisperings of my innermost wisdom.

Being grounded is often perceived as being settled in some familiar place with familiar rules, routines and rhythms (‘the shore’), or numbing ourself into a dull calmness somehow, to cope with inevitable stress, emotion, and disillusionment. We often don’t realize or admit the extent to which we numb ourselves strategically.

I would like to offer the idea of grounding as remaining present to my pure essential nature, my permanent natural state - which is love, peace, joy, and compassion - no matter what my external circumstances may be. This grounding becomes resilience. My conscious presence with my body and my felt experience, moment by moment - and my intentional daily communion with the loving source-energy present in the earth, water, air, sun, and my own breath – this shows me the way.

Becoming grounded in my true essence is how I become RESILIENT. It is through closely observing my thoughts, my emotional reactivity, and my resistance to reality, that I begin to see what can be gently released, to liberate me. When I am grounded in knowing the peace of my spacious natural state, there is no reactivity or resistance to life. I am free to simply show up as a loving and compassionate presence, holding all things lightly and enjoying the ride. I become aware that I AM spacious awareness, and I delight in the beauty and miracle-moments all around me, wherever I go.

As I release layers upon layers of super-imposed identity with my thoughts, my emotions, my body, my food, my achievements, my failures, my relationships, my roles – and begin to identify instead with my innate wholeness and oneness with all – living takes on a whole new kind of resonance and flow. I begin to look forward to waking up each morning just simply to see what there is to see, just simply to feel what there is to feel, and just simply to know what there is to know.

With the assistance of a cleansing, uncooked natural diet, we are re-tuning, re-integrating, and recalibrating to a new, higher frequency – the peaceful, inspiring frequency of love and coherence.

It’s important to distinguish between the false grounding we attempt to pull off through various numbing behaviors, and what it looks and feels like to be actually grounded. Humans commonly over-use cooked or heavy foods, coffee and alcohol or other drugs, screen-time, socializing, sex, exercise, shopping, home-renovating, work, novels, and many other distractions in an attempt to avoid feeling what is beneath the surface of life. Some tactics wind us up, some pull us down - but all of these excesses serve to distract us from feeling the mystery of what lies underneath the surface of life.

Embarking on a purer diet, such as a low fat raw vegan program, can provoke an experience that may initially feel disorienting and ungrounding. In some ways, you may feel even less resilient emotionally, even while you will quickly become more resilient physically. As the substances that had been (often unconsciously) used to gain a false sense of grounding (which was actually more like numbing) are relinquished, we are stripped of our usual coping strategies.

Here are some commonly reported initial experiences, when shifting into a raw vegan diet:

• Feeling a new sense of pure connection, while simultaneously perceiving an uncomfortable DISconnection (from what was known)

• Homesickness for a place that no longer exists; a profound sense of LOSS

• Disorientation – wrestling in an intense new way with perspective, meaning, and purpose

• Uncertainty, and a primal fear of isolation, or not fitting in anywhere anymore

• Feeling ourself literally on a different wave-length or vibrational frequency from others

• Feeling “raw,” or extra open and exquisitely vulnerable

• Feeling overwhelmed emotionally, or incompetent to do what we see is needed

Now, when you feel into being grounded in a healthy, open, true and resilient way, what comes to mind? I think of a sense of passionate tranquility, or dynamic stillness. I feel very much alive and inspired, yet calm and trusting. I feel deep-down safe to take some healthy risks. I feel self-confident and resourceful, even when difficulties arise. I feel my natural connection to a higher order of things, and I am aware that I am safely carried by a loving, benevolent life-force.

Can you imagine ways in which a pure unprocessed diet, though it strips away our old defenses, simultaneously opens up an opportunity for us to become more grounded, and more resilient? Awareness is the first step, and it’s difficult to be fully aware when our experience of life is dulled and obscured by the strategies we use to avoid fully feeling what is real. Willingness may be the next important step - the willingness to accept the invitation into a more expansive perspective and experience.

Brene Brown, Rising Strong: “When we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our asses kicked. People who wade into discomfort and vulnerability and tell the truth about their stories are the real badasses.

Straddling the tension that lies between wanting to go back to the moment before we risked and fell, and being pulled forward to even greater courage is an inescapable part of rising strong.

Rising demands the foundational beliefs of connection and requires wrestling with perspective, meaning, and purpose.”

Practical tips for navigating this shift in ‘real life’:

Steady daily practices, a critical discipline – brings freedom:

pure food – unburden the body

stillness and silence - slow down; mental and physical rest

communion with nature; bare feet, sunshine, trees, greenery, natural bodies of water

observing thoughts, body sensations, reactivity, and resistance - from the distance of stillness and calm spacious awareness

reflective journaling and self-inquiry

conscious Gratitude, awe, curiosity and wonder

Choose courage over comfort; Faith/trust over doubt/mistrust; love over fear

Practice radical non-attachment, willingness to let go of control and need for answers

Choose discipline because it feels good and leads to freedom. Set simple, do-able intentions and commit to following through.

Focus the mind on empowered perspectives and practical solutions (rather than succumbing to stories of anxiety and overwhelm)

Cultivate flexibility; expand your perspective through stillness, nature, spacious awareness

Seek opportunities to CONNECT rather than to be sabotaged by an illusion of disconnection

Take the time to listen for what you really need, what you really want, who you really are.

Being present with intense emotions or uncertainty feels challenging. It gets easier when we learn to just OBSERVE the movement from a distance - SEE the emotion as simply an ENERGY, or an energetic wave, moving through your mind and body. Try not to engage with the thoughts that are stories you are making up in your mind about the feelings. Or - laugh at the tiresome absurdity of the stories!

Simply bring your presence to the pure energetic vibration of the emotion itself, without the story. Be curious about it. Observe its movement patterns. Watch it eventually dissipate and disappear on its own.

YOU are still your natural state of peace, calm and balance. YOU remain, as spacious awareness – non-reactively watching the show.

True Resilience is knowing your Wholeness, trusting your Sufficiency, recognizing your Sovereignty, and having the deep knowing that you can be brave, take risks, and safely learn from whatever results happen. The inner journey itself is all the inspiration you need for a life worth showing up for, and knowing you are held and accompanied all along the way by your own divinity – that’s the real magic.

Turn your perspective around to see the more beautiful stimulation of the INNER journey, and you will get excited about THIS! You may even come to love ‘failure,’ for its invitation to growth (‘The Joy of Burnout,’ by Dr. Dina Glouberman).

Some simple mantras to cultivate Presence:

* “May your path be the sound of your feet upon the ground, Carry On.” ~band called ‘Fun’

* “With every step, arrive.” ~Thicht Nacht Hahn

* “With unflinching steadiness, march on your path, believing that the infinite creative power is behind you.” ~Paramahansa Yogananda

I will close with one of my favorite quotes of all, from the movie August Rush:

“Listen. Can you hear it? The music. I can hear it everywhere. In the wind...in the air...in the light. It’s all around us. All you have to do is open yourself up. All you have to do…is listen.”