Veins of Gold

The dunes continue to shift under my feet. I am windswept. In my early twenties, I visited the Great Sand Dunes National Park where the tallest sand dunes in North America shapeshift in winds off the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Hiking the dunes makes you feel small the way swimming offshore does. Life is having its way with me, and this is my attempt to catalog the new perspectives I’ve come to.

Over a decade ago, I went to my first therapist when I lived in New York City. She gave me a screening for depression, and I filled out a questionnaire. At the time I was lethargic, melancholic, disconnected from myself, and fixated on perfection. I can’t recall much else, but I distinctly remember when a pen flew out of a tipped container. I snatched it midair like a frog’s tongue and set it softly on the desk. In that moment I knew that what I was experiencing wouldn’t be answered there. Whether or not that was the case, it was another thing I felt like I had to do alone.

Around the height of my struggle, I applied for a week-long workshop with a dance company I loved. I earned one of the 26 slots out of the 500 contenders. I regretfully backed out a month beforehand because I just couldn’t cope. I retreated to Idaho for a few months and started SSRIs. I didn’t finish half the bottle. Following an inner nudge (or stubbornness) I kept searching and exploring the unknown. Over time, by prioritizing my healing over everything else and choking down humble pie slice after slice, my life started to change. Instead of Love being something I couldn’t recognize, I began to feel it.

My recovery of perception is the thing I’m most proud of. Simple moments like watching a river flow over a rock easily bring me to tears, even when life feels like it’s crashing down around me. This summer has included multiple home moves. My family is redefining itself, split between two locations. I’m balancing a new work setting, continuing education, and mothering my four-year-old.

We can encounter Beauty so immense it feels undeniable, even if we can’t explain it. When we heal, we have more of these experiences. Life stretches beyond the common. What’s taken me a while to wrap my head around, though, is watching others firsthand have these types of profound revelations. The tears that stream from Beauty are like an elixir of life. I’ve seen too many of them to stay the same. As a practitioner studying this, I’m also seeing a similarity in all their processes.

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I scoop a handful of sand. It sifts evasively between my fingers, then calms to a heavy stillness in the center of my palm. I watch it reflect the light.

I sat across from someone and began the session. I was listening openly and saw in my mind’s eye his body pacing back and forth over his left shoulder. How odd! It was so clear. Later, there was an opportunity to root out some issues. I pivoted and asked him to relive this frequent interaction in his life, to replay it somatically and get a feel for what’s happening in his body. I asked him to make a position that expressed it, which he had never done before. He gave me a strange look, and said, “I feel like I’m pacing back and forth and back and forth” and mimicked the exact motion I saw him doing earlier outside of himself.

So, there is a “body” within the body, and those bodies aren’t necessarily doing the same thing.

I was feeling frustrated about my day and thought, what’s my body doing right now? I got a clear image of myself pulling my hair out like a cartoon.

A pleasant woman I had never met and knew very little about walked in. In the first five minutes of talking with her I was hit by this overwhelming sense of sadness that made it hard to concentrate. There was a pause in the session later on, and I asked about it. This mid-forties woman admitted she’s felt this ‘sadness’ ever since her teens. She lives with it and has accepted it as part of who she is. But is it?

There’s an inner story real enough to be perceived, suggesting that to some degree it’s physical. Even if we the way we perceive it is unconventional.

A regular client comes in experiencing an abnormal nerve pain in the soft tissue around his knee. I notice this happens around the time I know he’s been reengaged with a difficult historical relationship. I said, “what do you feel like doing when you’re around this person?” He replies quickly, “Run! Just run and get outta there!”

Our nervous system is an astounding 45 miles worth of electrical impulse. It runs a complex communication network that controls everything from our thoughts, emotions, and senses to involuntary functions like breathing and digestion. It transmits messages throughout the body to spark action. If our nervous system is saying “Run!” but we stay standing still…what effect does that have?

Kids are so refreshing to watch because their insides match their outsides. In sessions we can bring up a client’s inner child as a personification they can interact with, and sometimes surprisingly it arrives unannounced. I think it’s a brilliant way to broadcast ourselves so we can inhabit compassion and nonjudgemental curiosity. It seems though, our inner child may not only be a reflection of the present in our minds. It can express emotions and experiences literally, physically trapped in the past, like a looping living history.

A woman I worked with doing body alignment came in one day a bit scattered. So I did some guided meditation to soothe her system and she automatically transported into a vivid and lucid dream-like space. We started to subsequently work with this occurrence. I was learning something called the Yothera Method, which directly dialogues with someone’s intuition and subconscious mind. At one point this woman saw her inner child angrily smashing teacups with a hammer. This child wanted nothing to do with her adult self watching in proximity, so I proposed the woman take a hammer and start smashing cups alongside her. It worked! The woman eventually had her younger self on her own lap, offering herself love in a way she hadn’t before. This inner scene was the key to unlocking her decades-long self-condemnation over her mother’s death in her early thirties, which she now realized went back to her father’s death at age four. Again, tears from Beauty are otherworldly.

So, we have a “body” or story within us that can be perceived, and from the now or from the past. At this level it seems we aren’t subject to the normal rules of time, and our Being is nonlinear. The story above also reveals that we can consciously speak to an essence of ourselves - and it speaks back.

A woman wanted to work with her anxiety around death. We set a calm space and a vision entered of all her friends and family gathered around a fire pit on a beach (her favorite environment). She then felt an experience of Love so expansive and profound that it brought her to tears. It still does whenever she recalls it. She described it as how people have spoken about near-death experiences. It’s something she said she’ll never forget and felt lucky to have experienced.

I heard a man playing piano one summer day in Washington Square Park, a very lively spot in Greenwich Village. I can’t help but dance to melodic piano music when I hear it, so I proceeded to groove my little heart out. In a moment of sway, I distinctly remember looking up at the blue sky with the white clouds and thinking, whatever Divinity is - this is It. I felt high for a week.

A month and a half later my younger sister Anna took a trip to Washington, DC. She’s from Idaho and DC is not a regular stop. She stepped onto a crowded subway and sat next to a woman with some shopping bags. Somehow in their conversation Anna was explaining that she had a sister in NYC who loved to dance, so much so that she even did it to pianos in parks. The woman looked at her, “Does she have brown hair?” She reached for her phone and pulled up a video she shot and asked, “Is this your sister?” Turns out she had personally been there that day watching me dance. The woman’s stop came and the conversation ended before it could be reasoned. I took it as the Universe speaking back to me to say, “yes, that’s right, it was Divinity.”

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Dialoguing with places beyond the conscious mind is like mining for gold in dark mountain tunnels. Instead of searching blindly, though, somehow the Mountain knows what you’re looking for. It feels you tracing the walls with your fingers. Step by step, you’re subtly guided to a vein of gold. It’s an insight that matches you and your unique experiences, and it unravels and nourishes. The confirmation that we’re not just fumbling in the dark, and that gold is there to be found - astounds me every time.

The sand dunes shift underneath me. Because they are alive.

If you’ve ever had one change or one profound experience, it doesn’t just symbolize that one instance. It symbolizes the ability to go beyond. It legitimizes the step. If one step is possible from A to B, it’s probable you can get to Z. This is my case for hope. The gold won’t be where you’re already shining the light. We have to go into the unknown, but from my viewpoint, we’re not doing it completely alone.

P.S.

Another person also filmed me dancing in the park that day. My mom found it on youtube that same summer. It can be found here.