Sometimes despite your best intentions, the day flips the curb for the worst and you're left feeling chewed up and spit out. This happened to me yesterday after one of the most idyllic festivals: the Garlic and Arts festival in Orange.
Garlic and arts? I can't think of anything better.
...But there brewed the perfect storm of circumstances: heat, hunger, sugar highs, overexcitement, teenage angst; that made my kids flip their gourds!
From the moment we woke up, my kids had set in motion a relay race of how to drive us crazy. Finally my boundless energy came to E and I was a thunderstorm myself, taking kicks to the ribs from my pain body.
But it did teach me a few things, some are very similar to how I feel about this healing art: A way to return to joy is being a comfort for the pain, a space for it to gust then subside without following down a rabbit hole of negative thinking. Healing through the feeling of genuine compassion.
It also made me realize that parents need an abundance of healing love. Almost more than children since we can so easily succumb to the auto-pilot of our past programming. When we operate from a track, away from the present moment (or blindly), we can inadvertently pass on our pain, or the legacy of human suffering. So it's especially important that in the times when we feel depleted to lift one another up and let each other know that it's OK, that it's temporary, and to take comfort. Thank you to my husband for reminding me of this.