Out Of My Body

I've been feeling the strong desire to run away lately.  The type of running away that involves hole-ing myself up in a room and ignoring everyone, and escaping into a book.  Or watching a movie marathon (SO wanting to watch all of the Harry Potters back to back!) and not taking care of any physical responsibilities, like cooking or cleaning.  Or even losing myself in deep thought.  Engaging myself in the philosophical and spiritual world that I've kept separate from my "real" life.  The stuff that feels so right and just pours out of me when writing to someone online, but that has a difficult time coming out of my mouth in a way that makes sense to other people when talking face to face.

I know my body can't go anywhere, but my mind and my spirit sure can!  I can leave my body here and go play out in the ethers.  Oh, it is so fun out there, you know!  Spiritual laws are so much more lovely than physical ones, and much more enjoyable.  Where love heals all things, creation takes but a thought, where there is no time, only this moment,  there IS a purpose and meaning to everything, and we are all filled with this divine light and wisdom.  Being in the physical, sometimes it's easy to forget them.  Easy to feel like they don't exist, that the only thing that does exist is pain and suffering because that's what keeps popping up.  The physical world is so dense, so separate.  It can feel imprisoning.  The spiritual world is so free and expansive!

I often see physical manifestations of my "inside" world, especially when something is really taking a lot of my focus, or even more when that thing is trying to get my attention so I WILL focus on it so I can work through it and release it.  Last week I found this sunflower in my garden.  I've never seen a half orange, half red sunflower before.  The other sunflowers of this type have red in the center and orange on the outside, or vice versa.  I stood looking at this one with wonder for a long time, pondering it's existence in my garden.  And then I got it.  Split in half.  I feel split in half.  Absolutely.

Lately I've been wrestling with the question of how to be both fully spirit and fully physical.  It feels like I've split myself most of my life- I have my day to day physical stuff and I have my "out there" spiritual/philisophical self.  I often feel deep in the "out there" side when doing things like journaling or looking at the sky or whatever, and then I get yanked back into the physical side when people talk to me or my kids fight or I have an alarm that brings my attention back to time.  I have absolutely been accused of daydreaming, "having my head in the clouds", not hearing when other people talk to me. . .  I feel like I can't live the expansive, spiritual side because there is no proof that it exists, other people can't see it or touch it or verify that my experience is real.  That's probably why I stopped breathing for a bit and started crying during Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when Dumbledore said "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

This past year I have been developing my "out there" side more, trusting that abilities and feelings that I have are okay, perfect even, even though at points in my life I have been told otherwise by other people.  I have also been developing the physical world around me- gardening, becoming the caretakers of 23 guineas and 10 ducks (hopefully more soon!)  Making plans for our farm and working to figure out how we can make a living off/with our land.  Digging in the dirt a lot.  And then there's my paintings that feel like they're a bridge between the two, a chance to make physical that which otherwise only exists in my feelings or mind or heart. 

I've had this piece partially done for a few months and was just able to finish it last week.  It's called "Out Of My Body".  I feel drawn to do a series showing the process of a spirit being as separate from the body as it can be, choosing to be outside of the body as much as possible, then progressively becoming more and more embodied until the spirit and the body are one, fully in balance and harmony.  I have no clue what the rest of the series will look like because I feel like I'm here right now, preferring to be out of my body.  There have been other times where I have felt like my spirit has been in my body much more fully, but I'm having a hard time seeing that at the moment.  I'm just not there right now. 

I have been hard on myself this past week about how much I want to run away, how I keep hearing "I don't want to be here!" in my head.  How much I want to retreat into a different world, into someone else's life through stories or movies.  I normally don't have much "screen time" because I feel like it distracts me from my real life, but lately I've been craving it.  We've watched the third and fourth Harry Potter, the first and second Matrix, and John Carter of Mars.  And I've been feeling guilty that we've eaten dinner in front of the tv for so many nights in a row, guilty for wanting to enter their worlds instead of staying in my own.  Today that dissolved somewhat when I realized that although sometimes I AM running away from my life so I can forget about the pain and the problems and the discomfort, at other times it's about immersing myself in a world of infinite possibilities so when I go back to my world, I can see my pain and problems in a different light.  Which can actually be really beneficial!  After all, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them," as Einstein said.  


It's comforting to escape into stories because I have this trust that everything will turn out right in the end.  That no matter what the problem is, everything will resolve in a way that feels good at some point.  Would I want to actually live Harry Potter's life?  No, I honestly don't think I'd be brave enough, I think I'd hide in a corner and cry more than the story allows for.  My habits of freezing in fear and digging in my heels just wouldn't allow everything to flow as it needs to.  But I love the stories, and the situations don't terrify me as much as they would in real life because I'm coming into the story with this trust that it will all work out.  And maybe that's what I'm trying to find by wanting to run away to them right now- the deep and complete trust that everything will be okay in my own life.  I do have that trust to some degree, but not to the same degree as when reading a story.  So maybe that's the goal- the trust that if I cast off all fear and actually do extraordinary things everything will be okay, just as if I were a character in a book.  


Maybe that's the key to choosing to be in my body, to combine both spirit and physical.  Trust.  Trust that I can be in my body AND be okay even though it can be incredibly painful.  I can be okay while it is painful.  Trust that I will be safe even though I can't see the big picture.  Trust that my spirit and my body can work together as equal partners and neither one will get squelched or suppressed.  Trust that my spirit can stay intact in all of it's expansive amazingness while being contained in a physical vessel.  Trust that I CAN be my true self while on this planet, I don't have to hide it by trying to run away and never show it to anyone.  It is SAFE to be FULLY ME.  


It is going to take some processing and releasing to get to that last sentence, but the relief I felt from writing it tells me I'm on the right track!  Maybe I don't have to run away anymore.  :)  It is SAFE to be FULLY ME.  I WANT to be FULLY ME.  I CHOOSE to be FULLY ME.  I AM FULLY ME in this body, on this planet, in this moment right now.  Wow.  :')