Back in my body / Words during hard times

Well, I have discovered my mountain - its weathers, its airs and lights, its singing burns, its haunted dells, its pinnacles and tarns, its birds and flowers, its snows, its long blue distances. Year by year, I have grown in familiarity with them all. But if the whole truth of them be told as I have found it, I too am involved. I have been the instrument of my own discovering...I can teach my body many skills by which to learn the nature of the mountain. One of the most compelling is quiescence*. - Nan Shepard, The Living Mountain. This passage is taken from a book called The Living Mountain, a collection of chapters hailed as 'a masterpiece of nature writing'. The words above are about her experience visiting the same mountain for many years. For me, it is a perfect metaphor for the mind. My mountain, is my mind. What wild and wooly times we're living in, considering we've all moved to these 'mountains'... Prior to the pandemic and the tragedies unfolding all around us, I believe that I lived in the 'village' per se. Meaning, I lived my life in a much more outward, physical, tangible way. I went to a physical place of work, I went to dinner with friends, yoga at a studio, drove to my nanas house on Sunday afternoons. Now, I live in the hills of my mind-scape. From what I've observed of the humans existing at the moment, is that we are living more in our thoughts, hopes, fears, anxieties and questions than in our physicality. It's strange isn't it? Living more in the mind than the physical world. When you're scrolling on your phone or watching the news and you're seeing this tragic thing, then the next second you're seeing someone dance to a snippet of a remixed song from the 90's or an ad telling you how to lose weight. It kind of takes us on all these weird tangents where we're swimming in pools of 'what am I going to do if X happens to me?' and then 'I think I could probably do that tick tock dance but I won't...'. We're being thrashed around like we're in a shark's mouth to be feeling empathy and sadness and horror and in the same five minutes we're meant to be laughing and feeling inspired and creatively charged. It's just too much to be honest with you. It's too much to be living in such a way that the thoughts we're having can overpower these beautiful, complex physical moments in time. Times when you lean your head back in the shower and the warm water runs over your scalp. Times where we're sharing pasta with buttery crusty bread or when you take a step outside and the sun hits your skin, getting all tingly. When you have that first sip of coffee. When you hug someone you care about and feel that little 'release' moment exhaling before you let go. Or my favourite, when your person puts their hand around the back of your neck to kiss your forehead. Head hitting pillow. Smell of a lit match. Brain freeze post scoop. Big morning stretch.

Skin to skin. Lavender pinch. Reliving these moments in my mind writing this, I wanted to try to get back in my body; whatever that means. How does one get back in their body? An old acquaintance used to talk to me about the thinking-self not living in the brain, but in the whole body. I sort of threw the idea away at the time because sometimes I think so much I give myself a headache. There's no mistaking where it lives at those times! But now I'm entertaining the idea a little more. Take the gut feeling for example, or fear or love. Those don't live in the head space for me, but they fill me up in strange places. Gut feelings are in my sternum tucked up in the rib cage. Fear is pressure on the sides of my arms. Love is in my collarbones and across my chest. After reflecting on this, I thought it would be helpful to draw on a quote I read recently. ''I was trying to write...and I found the greatest difficulty aside from knowing

what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had

been taught to feel, was to put down what happened in action...the actual

things which produced the emotion that you experienced'' - Ernest Hemmingway So here we go writing the 'actual things'. The other day I was sitting on my couch thinking about how life doesn't feel spontaneous enough, fun enough. What a surprise....that sitting on my couch on a Saturday night doesn't feel fun or spontaneous??? So I got back in my body. I drove into town, got a ginger beer & burger and took my camera to the beach. I sat there eating it with my phone firmly zipped in my bag, totally alone then 20 minutes later a couple with their baby. (So funny now that I think about it, that the thing I have been aspiring to lately was kind of shown to me almost like a movie- baby in a carrier on dads chest, mum taking a moment with her feet in the water.) I rolled up my jeans and stood in the thick foam that's been washed up on our shores lately and got some gorgeous snaps of the opal toned water. It wasn't some magical come to Jesus moment but I felt alive in my body, not my mind. The burger was so flavourful, the ginger beer was spicy, I love the feeling of the camera viewfinder pressed up against my eye. My feet got exfoliated in the sand and I belted out Jordan Rakei on the way home. This week, let's try that more. Whether you're volunteering, working, showering, cleaning, making... be in the body part where the feeling you're having lives and focus on that. With love, M Here's a song to listen to if you're so inclined // Back In My Body, Maggie Rogers P.s it's so great to be back. I feel emotional writing to you again after publishing such a personal piece about a recent break up. I've got a few blogs on the back burner that aren't ready yet but I hope I can get back to weekly posting xo *Quiescence: quietness or stillness; inactivity or dormancy.

Daily Ceremony is grateful to live and work on Yuin land that holds the stories of the Dreamtime. We pay our respects and honour the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past, present & emerging and acknowledge the stories, traditions and living cultures of our First Nations People.

Ceremony [ ser-uh-moh-nee ] A unified ritualistic event with a purpose, usually consisting of a number of artistic components, performed on a special occasion. Aka, life.