Feeling

How feeling deeply, truthfully, fully what life wants us to feel is the pathway to healing.

“Feel what there is to feel.” That’s one of the things I keep saying when I teach a yoga class. Because whatever we experience in life --and especially when the experience is on the painful side--, allowing ourselves to feel fully our own humanness, our own soul is the only way to overcome a situation.

Sometimes, life feels like too much. That’s how I’ve felt the past three weeks. The spring equinox has brought me into an emotional swing. It all started with my Naturalization Oath Ceremony on March 10. Yep, I’m a Franco-American now. I felt like I was losing my roots. While getting ready for the ceremony at home the morning of the event, I stumbled at every step I made, dropped objects from tables and chairs, and realized that my 2-year old Aloe Vera plant was uprooted. I came out of the ceremony anxious and puzzled with a major question--what does my soul want, right now? Continue living in the U.S. or move to France? I’m still waiting for the answer to show up in my heart. I know it will soon.

After my naturalization, I left Atlanta to spend a few days in a small humble shrimp fisherman’s town of 2,000 souls on the Georgia coast. I needed a break after the weeks spent designing my yoga-based Thriving After Illness workshop. I ended up in a B&B run by JoAnn, a Northeasterner who gave up her corporate job ten years ago to move to the South, and open her own small hospitality business. I started coming down with a nasty cold on the very first day of my vacation and so I was in a blur the whole time I was there--but even amidst my haze, something beautifully unexpected happened. I immediately clicked with JoAnn and her friends. It made me reconnect with something I had long forgotten—being surrounded, daily, by friends who drop in and come and share a talk, share their feelings, both their happy times and their struggles. This is a lifestyle I had all of my life in Paris until I moved to Atlanta, ten years ago.

I drove back to Atlanta feeling JoAnn and her friend’s compassion, kindness and joy, as well as the isolation I’ve often felt in Atlanta. My reflection was not one of trying to change anything, but just being and feeling.

For the past three weeks, I’ve avoided the yoga mat. I’ve just started returning to it, this morning, breathing and moving as slow as I could, feeling deeply my own reality, as well as the muscular knots that go with it.

March 28th, my birthday, was a new moon. In numerology, 2017 is the year #1 (2 + 0 + 1 + 7 = 1 + 0 = 1). This new moon in the year #1 apparently means a big shift (I overheard it, the other day, at a talk on energy healing). If you’re also in the midst of a shift, here’s my advice. Stop doing. Instead, allow yourself to feel and dive into the depth of that feeling. I guarantee you, feeling is healing. Let’s meet on the other side.