Stepping out of the story..

I listened to a friend talk today about death, one of her close friends had a child that died and she was talking about grief, fear about not being able to protect her children from harm and how difficult it was to deal with imagining losing one of her own kids.

I heard her create story after story after story, I listened as the mind jumped here, then there, opinion, belief, drama. After about 4 minutes she winded down and then she said, "I need help with this."

I replied... So you have a friend that had an experience. You have a friend that had a certain experience. I repeated it a few more times. That is what happened. That is all that is happening.

Then a thought about that occurs (fear, powerlessness, What If... ) and you may notice that an energy (emotion) arises in your body. So what if you could just stay here (let your hand hover over the front of your body from your chest to your belly). What if you could just be here (in your own body) just noticing what's here, sensation? holding? heaviness? contraction? without any commentary, labeling, or story from the mind.

Stepping out of the story and into awareness of what is arising in the body. Noticing what's here, as a sensation, making space and just being with what is here..

What I've found is that this is the very intimacy I've spent my whole life looking for .. out there..

When I say BE with what is here, what I mean is... imagine that you have a friend that is having a really difficult time, you want to BE with your friend, you don't have a problem with where they are, you are not trying to change anything, you are just going to sit down with your friend and bring your tender loving attention to your friend, just be present. That is how you want to BE with what is arising, the heaviness in your heart, the contraction in your gut, the blockage in your throat, whatever you find .. just be with it.. meet it, practice allowing what here to just be here.

As we do this.. usually we start to notice a bit of relaxation, a deeper breath, so we let awareness notice this.. let awareness drop deeper into the body, coming back to ourselves, into the stillness within, discovering our ground, the ground of being, our own depth. So we notice this..

This internal ground of being, this stillness within, is what we actually want, this internal sense of calm and peacefulness. This is the space we want to live from, move from, parent from.

So the invitation is to just practice several times a day, notice what is here (especially when we are triggered or activated) and meet it, stay in the body, be very intimate with what is actually here (rather than what the mind says about what is here).