I didn’t pull a tarot card today.

 

I’m feeling the pull to write from the Great Mystery and see what emerges.

 

As I moved through the last few days of personal retreat, I sat with something the main teacher/mentor had said many times.

She said (abridged) that a lot of people struggle with the process – or rather, they struggle to be witnessed in the process, because we judge how it looks. There is a lot about the process and Great Mystery that begins with “not supposed to”.

 

Great Mystery is the great unravelling. She is life itself.

I say she, because, by her inherent nature, Great Mystery is the wholeness of the expression of the feminine essence.

She is nature and we are her.

 

Something has come clear to me over the last few days – I don’t fear being with the Great Mystery.

Like many, I do fear being judged, being rejected. I fear being ostracized and hurt and misunderstood. I worry sometimes that I won’t be taken care of and I’ll end up on the street, not being able to pay my rent.

I worry about all of those things at the surface.

 

But there has always – always – been a deeper place I have felt held: With Her.

 

And so, I’ve spent my 37 years on this Earth, in this body, in service to Her.

At first, I confused Great Mystery with the Earth herself, so I spent my energy trying to save Her – what a cosmic joke! How egotistical my little heart! To think the Earth needed saving!

This realization that Earth is just part of her wholeness and reflection led me to journey even deeper on a quest to be here.

My service to Her, my curiosity, led me directly to my own body – and there, the whole cosmos, She, Great Mystery begins to reveal Herself in little glimpses and flashes.

 

Oh what an honour!

Oh what an adventure!

 

This path of learning isn’t easy for those of us who have grown up to be “educated” and learn the ways of worshiping the linear, logical, form. But something that I’ve grown to understand through my own experience is that not only is surrender the way – it’s the path of least resistance.

 

If you’ve met me, you know I’m all about the path of least resistance.

If you know me, you know that I am always looking for the path of liquid, of water, of the oceanic realm.

Her path, I now know.

 

As beautiful as the cryptic, poetic, and ethereal as that all is, I wanted to share and ground a snippet of how this unfolds in practical reality.

 

In my mid twenties, my yoga friend Lydia introduced me to a book that would change my life quite profoundly. That book, Bone, Breath, and Gesture, put into form deep truths that I had held in my own being for a long time. It was a rabbit hole of permission to explore an idea I knew so deeply in my bones: that the body is inherently intelligent and we need to stop “doing” things to it, and instead, allow the expression of Great Mystery to unfold.

At the time, I was on my own healing journey and way into embodiment. I spent most of my life completely disassociated from my body and chose extreme sports like climbing mountains as my path to escape it. When in my mid twenties, several soft tissue injuries in, and in a pattern of extreme chronic pain that would not go away no matter what kind of physiotherapy or treatments I subjected it to, my body said no.

It was time to stop all of this crap.

I couldn’t look away anymore.

I couldn’t escape anymore.

It was time to take a different approach.

 

Enter Liz Koch, the embodiment of healthy boundaries and embodiment, really. I remember watching her articulate her joints in this exquisitely fluid way – like waves on the ocean – undulations and pearly sparkle. I remember thinking “I want to move my body like that”. I also remember, seeing this woman move through this world, at that time, more than twice my age, that everything we think we “know” about the body (and about aging) is just perception.

Here I was, in my mid twenties, literally learning to crawl again.

 

So I crawled. I sounded. I sat. I waited patiently and I listened for Her.

I didn’t force movement. Instead, I waited.

I waited for Her to emerge within me.

Because by that time, in tasting Her, I realized she is me – and I am Her.

We are resonances of the same cosmic expression.

I have finally realized, that in being of service to Her, I am actually in service to me.

I am in service to the unique flavour and expression that is Her embodying through my unique form.

She is bigger than me, but also, She is me.

 

Over the years, I’ve steered my attention and awareness to Her as my guidance system.

Sometimes I get it totally wrong, as sometimes, I fall into those expressions of the human experience we all embody too – worry, rent, rejection. She has shown me that that’s ok too.

That it’s all part of it. It’s all welcome.

 

I am grateful to these profound, embodied mentors that began to awaken and stir something inside of me – awakening me to my own embodied expression and a thirst to share this juicy transmission with the world.

A bit of foreshadowing here, as when I started my business and work in embodiment, I was again trying to save the world (the irony not lost).

 

That aside, what I wanted to share is this learning, a quote from another mentor, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen:

“As long as we can stay within the not knowing, the knowing that emerges will be greater.”

And so, I offer these words, these transmissions, as a kind of reverence, as a kind of offering, in honour of the Great Mystery.

May we gather the courage to sit with Her. May we quiet ourselves enough to learn to listen to everything She has to offer us.

And so it is.