Sometimes it feels like I am at peace, flowing with the pulse of the universe. Then, below conscious awareness comes a random irritant. It’s like a pointed object or a pipette causes an alertness inside the envelope, the membrane that holds my body. It feels like I am a cell and something comes in and puts the entire contents of the cell on alert. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s not out to get me…it’s simply a pipette. It is happening all day…from emails bringing news of the world, to texts seeming to need responding, to a door opening or other unexpected, though harmless, sounds.

This is a place of healing.

I recognize there is activation.

And I remember that…it’s okay how it is. I let some part of me say, “It’s okay that it’s like this.”

And all of a sudden, there is space. I sense muscles releasing: shoulders, neck, upper back, buttocks, thighs…the muscles of fight, flight, freeze, the muscles that get activated again and again, without release, as I navigate life in this society.

And I remember that this young being simply wants to be held; to be held by her mother, by generations of mothers and fathers and villages, by the waves of the ocean. She wants to flow with the pulse of the universe.

The pathway to that is to let how it is just be. An act of love.

This is the place where I am hanging out. Here is where I am building resilience: recognizing the irritant for what it is (just that. nothing more. a physical activation of a nervous system); allowing it to be just as it is (as opposed to the quick, subtle and unconscious habit of hating it, pushing it away with my learned judgment of it); and feeling the love that is always there.

Always connected. Never alone.