I really hadn’t gotten sick since my early 30s, and I’m now 51. I experience that window where I know that if I don’t take care of myself I will get sick, and if I do, it will have been just a couple days of something that’s going around that could have come on. I’m good at catching those windows and giving myself added attention through self-care.
I might still be able to argue that I haven’t gotten full blown sick… I lost my voice before Christmas, both my eyes were red for several days, and now I might be feeling a little something in my chest. Gratefully, my energy is fine, I feel steady, my body doesn’t ache, I don’t have a fever, nor a headache or stomachache, or anything that might make me feel otherwise slightly incapacitated.
But it makes me wonder what I need to attune to. It’s at the tip of my awareness, but I am not fully there.
I am currently in a transitional time in my life where both my children are seniors; my youngest will be going to college next year, and my oldest is graduating from college. Over the next few months, they will both know what city they will be living in. Maybe one will even live with me, or maybe I will have a different roommate (my boyfriend). Alas it could be both. Or neither. I haven’t lived with another adult in 17 years. Also, my studio is in transition where my business partner and I have moved from being the main teachers at the studio to giving the floor to many others. We are figuring out how to make this transition seamless (probably more emotionally than anything else) and have us all come out prosperous with the growing community that is as strong and as dynamic as ever. I get how growing a business is an incredibly spiritual practice.
We care about the world, and the world is moving fast, and the divide so intense and painful, and at the same time there are voices that speak poetry, inspire, make phenomenal change, and blur the lines of separation to bring us together as one human race. We feel so threatened by hearing the other side, trying to understand them. Working alongside them can feel like selling out, and we have trouble reconciling with that. Yet that’s what it would take to heal the world and to heal ourselves.
I feel caught in this constant reconciliation between the two sides, because I can see that everyone is doing their best. I think I’ve got it, but I realize that it will feel like effort for a while until maybe my own life transition settles down, at least in my heart if not physically. I think perhaps the intensity of our socio-political world that I am so sensitive to and the transition in my work and personal life all at once has created more internal pressure than I was aware of, and my body is telling me to step back for a moment. Check out the landscape, switch gears a little bit, and remember and reassess what I am doing and why.
As I share this, I can say with sincerity that I love where I am, and I do embrace this period where how the next phase of my life will roll out (and what the world will look like) is unknown to me. But clearly, it’s stressing me out a bit. And as I write this sentence, I laugh as I recognize that I get to go through another huge shift that I hadn’t gone through since my early 30s.
Savitree Kaur 