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Do you know that feeling when the entire world seems to lay heavily on your shoulders?
It pushes onto your favorite, cozy, green sweater, compresses the body beneath it.
A heaviness weighs down the intensity of joy you felt before. You can hear your own heartbeat in the spaciousness of your mind.
All the excitement of life becomes a distant memory. You are frozen like a mountain lake covered with piles of snow. The fiery rivers that once pulsed impatiently through your veins, dry into deserts of assimilation, comparison, and adaption.
You check the time. It’s flying faster, faster, faster. The clock keeps ticking. Tack, tack, tack. Hours merge into days, and days turn into weeks. No rest. Don’t stop. Not now. Seasons flow by as if they’ve never happened. Unnoticed. Unwelcomed. Unexperienced. They vanish like dust on a late-summer road.
You go through all the to-dos that you haven’t done today, counting all of what still awaits your attention. You see the lists transforming into puppets dancing before your face, pointing little bony fingers, demanding that you work.
Work faster, faster, faster. Accomplish more, more, more. You need to keep going with all this doing, doing, doing.
No pause, no rest. Stress becomes normality; normality turns into reality. Reality of no longer remembering why you are doing this endless doing.
Information, attention, goals, lists, people, parties, loud noises. Oh, those ridiculous noises. Not enough. Need to do this. Go, go go. Don’t stop. Just this one more thing.
And your phone? It ring, ring, rings. Your friends also are down, down, down. You have to be there for all of them, don’t you? Isn’t that what’s expected? Sacrifice what’s left of you to be there, there, there? Not here. For them. Not you. You hear their voice, calling for help, help, help.
They load all of their sh*t onto your shoulders. On top of the weight of the world that you hold within. On top of the precious body that carries you day in, day out—from stress to stress to stress to stress. Unnoticed. Unwelcomed. Unexperienced.
The weight presses you into the earth, onto the floor where gravity’s been waiting. You crack, you break there on the floor. Spinning, looping. Looping, spinning. The blood rushes through your ears.
It explodes right before you—all your lists, expectations, responsibilities, demands, all the shoulds, missing boundaries, and your little white phone—vanish into the dust on that late summer road.
Pause.
For the first time in what feels like centuries, you stop. You listen. You pause.
You are. Here. Now.
Laying on the floor you feel the firm, timber wood meet your aching body. Your exhausted, overwhelmed, sighing body.
You begin to feel this body, the floor. It holds you; supports you. You begin to yield into the earth. Releasing, releasing, releasing your weight—all the weight into the earth.
Tension softens. Muscles slowly relax. You begin to sense your heart beating in your tightened chest. With every beat, space opens.
Delicious, fresh air fills your lungs, and flows into your belly. You feel it rising, feel it gently fall, and exhale all the holding. You exhale out. Out of your body.
The breath becomes an ocean of waves rushing in and out. In and out. In and out. Oh, so naturally soothing, calming, connecting, and dissolving.
Life returns in an expression of here, reconnecting the pieces of you. You—experiencing this moment within. As you. For you.
Moved by the waves of your breath, your body is nudged onto its still-a-bit-wobbly knees. The breath whispers invocations to wake the rivers in your veins, and life slowly returns. Sparks ignite what has been so dry and dense before, inviting you to dance. Dance! Dance yourself free.
The earth lifts you to your feet, unraveled from all contractions. Unbound from the chains weighted ’round your ankles. Your hips begin to sway to the drum in your chest. It echoes through your bones, your cells, your entire precious being.
Liberating, liberating, liberating.
A warm summer breeze. Here and now. Memories of joy return.
You feel the warm, lush, green grass one step at a time as life breathes unrestricted through you. It weaves connections from you, through your feet, into the belly of the earth.
And there you are. Alive, alive, alive, and aware that you are free, free, free. Free to be you.
Now initiated into the teachings of balance—the sweet, replenishing sanctuary within—you walk gently into the world. You allow yourself to be guided and to move and dance by the seasons, meeting life courageously, openly, where restriction once reigned. Knowing.
Knowing this space is here for you to be. To be. To be. Truly alive.
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