The Gifts of Consistency
It’s almost been a whole year since the birth of Body Origins and through that time I’ve tended to it like a sapling, bringing the kind of consistency that doesn’t look like much day-to-day but over time bears sweet fruit. Recognising the need to balance this effort, I gave myself permission to rest deeply over winter, especially in August. I also celebrated my birthday last week and in the wake of that moment in time it feels like I’ve stepped through a bright sunlit doorway into a new, unfamiliar place.
Maybe it’s the energy of turning seasons, the aliveness of spring that is everywhere in the wind and the flowers. I’ve always loved that my birthday is at the end of winter, it marks a personal threshold of growing and change but it also marks a greater cyclical threshold and this gives me the opportunity to emerge from a deeply rested state into the light of clarity that comes after a much-needed sleep.
Over the last year there have been many moments of uncertainty, doubt and fear in laying down the foundations of my business, and yet through the sustained practice of steadiness and simplicity I’ve come to create a rhythm that now also sustains me. This is one of the gifts of consistency.
In my down time, I’ve been reflecting on the ways I choose to live and work and what this says about me, my values and the kind of world I want to be a part of creating. Over the last few years, I’ve settled into myself and my choices in a way that has brought me so much peace. I’m reading Sarah Wilson’s i eat the stars at the moment, which is about ‘how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world’. Sarah’s book is full of research, collaboration, insight and perspectives that help see through the confusion. One of the perspectives she offers is anti-chaos, a deliberate choice to create and maintain simplicity in a world that is often actually trying to confuse us.
I immediately resonated with this term and realised that this is what I am tending to in everything I do. I’m creating anti-chaos (or trying to). It’s a practice that requires commitment and long-term vision, but it’s one to which I have become so dedicated; of that, I have no doubt. Through much wading in the mud, I’ve found some stones of wisdom, meaning and insight; I carry them in my pockets and hold them like touchstones of remembering peace every step of the way. Often this wisdom shows up in the practices I have chosen to keep in my life again and again, and they offer me something whenever I need it.
Tea as a regular personal practice offers me the gift of remembering who I am and what I want to live for. It’s time for me to be still with myself and the elements for long enough to listen to the silence and return to a slower baseline, and to remember how powerful peace can be.
Craniosacral Therapy has given me access to an internal map of my body laid out with such clarity and spaciousness that my system feels robust enough to come back from personal chaos again and again into this remembering. In the last five years, it feels as though the whole complex system of my body has been through a slow restructuring and I have enough hindsight now to see the immense value this has had on every aspect of my life. Instead of weeks, I can move through challenge in days, and I know how to find or ask for the support I need.
Vision Quest is not a daily practice or even a regular one. Quest is for certain moments in life that are too big for the daily tending, that need to be marked by ceremony and need some guidance, shape and instruction. Vision Quest has been for me necessary in moments of initiation to shepherd me through big change, to ask the big questions of my life. I know that what I am gifted in that time with wild nature is lasting and true, and it gives me the faith and clarity I need to keep living a life that is aligned with my values, beliefs and my soul’s true calling.
The integration of these changes has not come through effort and understanding everything, but through time, with patience, and by paying attention to myself and my surroundings and how I react to everything that is happening. All the while, I continue to keep my door open, my heart open and my mind alive and empty enough to breathe in whatever is coming towards me, no matter how uncertain the future looks.
In her book, Sarah Wilson talks about the choice between facing uncertainty with anxiety or excitement. The difference is whether we anticipate something with fear (and so we procrastinate in order to save ourselves from finding out the bad thing we think will happen) or with curiosity (so we take action and see what might happen with openness to every possibility).
Uncertainty is always all around us. Our task is not to know, but to think and feel for ourselves and find ways to meet the mystery in all its beauty and bigness. I continue to share these ways of remembering for my own benefit, and for my community. It’s a solace to me that I know I will be here, tending the fire of my life consistently and slowly. I hope that you are also tending yours and taking solace in the simple and meaningful approaches you might be taking. They might seem small and insignificant, but over time they will bear gifts you can’t imagine.
In love and connection,
Helena
