Leaky Belly!

I'm up a little later than usual and it's already light out. One of those mornings that it was hard to get up, but now I am feeling sad for missing my early morning writing time. Tonight I go to a class with Lynn to learn about advanced splinting for my belly so that I can do the exercises where I lie down and lift my head off the ground. Sounds simple, I know, but when I lift my head, my belly pooches out which separates the muscle and can undo all the work that I've been doing. I have such a tendency to pooch anyway, even when I'm standing. I've now been doing the exercise protocol for nearly 3 full weeks and I may be noticing a slight difference.

One thing I am definitely noticing is that I am feeling more clear and focused with my work and business. In the first few weeks of doing these exercises, I was feeling challenged physically and emotionally and quite lost in those challenges. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do or how I wanted to move forward. I felt like I was being held captive by my saboteurs in the fog of my doubts and fears. As I l look back with my little bit of perspective (a couple of days of clarity!) I realize now that I was trying to move forward as if nothing was different. Just charge ahead. I had thought the exercise protocol might affect me on deeper than physical levels, but I hadn't considered that it would impact my way of doing things and getting things done. Somehow I didn't put that together.

As I write, I am realizing that I also just wrote "I have a tendency to pooch" which means that I push my belly forward and out. I push. I push forward to get things done. I push out of fear that if I don't push and make it happen, nothing will happen...and ultimately that I will fail. I will be a failure.

One of the shifts I am noticing is that I have slowed down over the past week. Not just go-go-go, but using my time when I am not coaching to read, to create, to write, to vision, to receive. Yesterday was a cold, snowy (yes, I know, snow in May!) day and I spent all day inside on my bed with my computer, books and notebooks. I got a lot done, but not out of efforting or pushing. Rather, out of receiving, creating, having powerful conversations, researching and writing.

My focus is shifting. Actually, it feels like my internal compass is shifting down...into my belly. How do I mean that? Hmmm...I am feeling into that one. That's actually new for me - to feel into my body for an answer to a question like that. I am feeling a strengthening deeper than my muscles develop. It is like a cohesive container is being created within my belly and it is receiving intuitive impulses and guidance. That guidance actually now has a place to land and be received, and then to be acknowledged, and then to processed, and then to be acted on.

Before, the guidance may have landed there, but it had no way to be contained. The split was like a leak in the bowl. My belly was like a sieve. No wonder I could easily feel like I was in a fog or that I would lose my clarity, conviction and motivation to follow through on something. The "something" had leaked out and was gone, and I was left acting on what at one moment was a great idea, but now had no substance.

I am recognizing this energy dynamic as I write. This is the energy dynamic of a "leaky belly"!

I have had a leaky belly! LOL. Never realized it quite like that before. That's funny! And it also helps me to really understand how I've had great ideas and commitments to certain goals and then it's like they disappeared and I couldn't feel them anymore, so I would try and will myself to accomplish them, and at the same time, it was like I had amnesia about what I had said I would do or accomplish. So then I would end up feeling really badly about myself, my inability to stay focused on a goal or vision and to create what I wanted. I made myself wrong and bad, and that I wasn't good enough, or committed enough, or courageous enough. Basically, I wasn't enough. So I might as well give up now and go home.

Well, if that isn't my story that I've stuck with for years and repeated over and over again.

I have made it about me and WHO I am. What I am realizing is that it is NOT WHO I am, but rather about this energy dynamic and pattern that I HAVE.

I am going to let that awareness come down into my belly and be in my belly bowl and see where this goes. This is a new way of thinking about and being with myself.

What a journey this is.

Suseya,
Sahara