Following our True North is an ancient concept that we inherited from many lineages.
My ancestors come from many places and include nomadic, tribal people who landed in Ireland. They lived in tune with nature's rhythms and worked with a medicine wheel that honored the four directions and the elements.
In some traditions such as the Celtic Medicine Wheel, the direction of the North relates to the element of Earth, winter, stillness and ancestors.
Their Earth-based ways were viewed as witchcraft, they were forced to adapt to the religion of the colonizer, cease speaking their mother tongue and survive famine because their food sources were stolen. Sound familiar? It's a heartbreakingly common story.
To be clear, my ancestors were also the colonizers. As my meditation teacher says with a good-natured chuckle: "we all have murderers and rapists in our lineage." All of the gifts and burdens of our bloodlines are encoded in our DNA.
My practice has been to reconnect with those ancestors that are cheering me on and have resources for me so that I am able to process the un-metabolized pain that was passed to me.
I want to share a story...
After recently experienced my first embodied healing through a dance/movement therapy training, I was feeling called to explore new methods of healing. It was like lifting a dead log to find an entire world of life underneath that I had never seen before.
I discovered that a dance colleague of mine was also a sound healer. Though I had no idea what that meant, my soul said "yes" and I booked a session. After we checked in, I went down into her basement full of crystals and sat, cozy in the darkness, as if within a cave...
Time and space completed shifted for me as she brought us into a deep time meditation. I realized that I had been conceptualizing my lineage in a vertical way - with me at the bottom, feeling the weight of every being before me. This concept dissolved into a spacious horizontal expanse which lifted the pressure from my shoulders. It became simple: why wouldn't I do everything in my power to heal in this lifetime, with the support of the past and in support of the future?
At some point in this timeless session, my friend began to channel my ancestors who wanted to speak to me. She told a story about me, little Hayley, returning to a cave where an indigenous man greeted me with a warm "welcome home." As she drummed and sang for him, tears silently dumped down my face. I didn't know what was happening at the time. I sense now that I was feeling belonging for one of the first times in my life and experienced a huge release of grief at having been separated from my Indigenous roots for so long.
I left that session on fire with purpose. All of the pressure I felt to maintain a certain identity for belonging in my immediate family were burned away, because I met my deep time family. That night I birthed DANCE HEALING, creating a free workshop for my community in Seattle. It was the soul / body work I needed, so I supposed others might too. Turns out: yes, they did! And I'm still guiding this work - though it has evolved immensely-eight years later.
Connecting with my Indigenous self in an embodied and imaginal way brought me into contact with my True North for the first time. The sensation of having a compass pointing me in a clear direction that stitched together my past, present and future.
Blockages of suppressed grief were cleared so I could click into alignment with my blueprint - the bone deep knowing that this is who I am.
In my most recent embodied ancestral connection, guided by a mentor Nala Walla, I met a new ancestor who held me in her big bosom with joyous warmth as if saying: it is safe to lean into me, baby; being alive is a gift!
The messages that our ancestral guides have for us live in our body and have the power to re-orient our way of being. With this gift, I relaxed into a confidence within myself and felt empowered to share my joy with others.
The opportunity to connect with our ancestors is always here, when we trust our instinctual knowing in our body and vision.
This is what we journey with in Wild Embodiment: True North. We refine the language of the body - your somatic intelligence-so you can learn to follow your vessel's guidance without judgement.
Our body is connected to all time. It is a portal to our ancestral wisdom.
“They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.” -Dinos Christianopoulos
Many indigenous people who have maintained contact with their roots, or for those of us who are remembering them like me, are given a responsibility to tend the seeds that were buried; to keep the flame of embodied, Earth-based living lit.
We are now living in an incredible time of the seeds opening up to be shared once again with the "top world." There is no going back. But there is a merger of the past and present wisdom that can support us to co-create a world that we want to pass on to our future kin.
Many of us are moved by this opening. We feel a fire inside of us that wants to burn away the old stories and awaken the new, like a phoenix.
We may have met a breaking point within ourselves where we couldn't keep up the facade of the colonizer anymore. It was too painful - physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually - to stay asleep...to keep playing the trauma loops...to fall in line with a familiar, fearful narrative.
The "breaking point" or surrender is what opens us up to the possibility that we contain the power within us to change...like the seedling that contains the entire tree breaking open to grow itself.
“If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill." - Rumi
This process of "falling ill" is what we call confrontation in somatic healing arts. It is a necessary and sometimes challenging aspect of the process of transformation where we must turn toward the thing that is our illness, look it in the eyes and say: "Hello. Welcome."
The beauty of embodied healing is that we alchemize these parts of ourselves by letting them be. By accepting them into our wholeness. How do we do that?
Rather than trying to fix our embodiment, which stunts our natural healing process, we let ourselves be where we are. We move with the intelligence of our soma (body) rather than against it.
We try our parts on for size rather than outcasting them. We play with embodying the warrior, the critic, the slut, the bitch, the hag, the [insert part of ourselves we've deemed 'bad' here]. We bring our masks into consciousness by drawing them and speaking from the voice of our drawing. We liberate the parts of ourselves we've cancelled and uncover the truth underneath.
When we embrace our wholeness, we accept it into the soil of our body, and let nature do the work of breaking down what we don't need. We naturally experience a release like a good rain. Then we partner with our creativity to reach toward the light i.e. the parts of ourselves who are re-sourced (i.e. connected to source).
As we collaborate with our body and imagination, we create space to make choices. We are no longer unconsciously chasing our tail in a pattern that we call "fate." We can see the pattern and we practice slowing down our response.
Restoring choice requires awareness.
Awareness requires embodied presence.
Embodied presence becomes your compass.
When we open to the conversation that lives deep in our bones, we tap into our energetic blueprint - who we are meant to be in this lifetime.
Our blueprint is affected by our imprints - the life experiences we have that either amplify or suppress our core self.
Embodiment work helps us metabolize the imprints - they could be traumas - that don't serve the realization of our blueprint (core self).
When we burn through the imprints, we tap into the truth. The "river beneath the river" as Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls it.
This truth is undeniable. It reminds us of who we are. It is our soul embodied.
When we touch this place within ourselves, we get clear on our path. We receive inspiration to move forward. We align with our destiny. If only for one moment. And then another. And another.
This is the path of the True North.
I see you, brave one. Here on the path of reclaiming your wild wisdom.
Here are some TRUE NORTH journal prompts for you:
What is my relationship to my ancestors like?
Which ancestors do I feel most connected to? Disconnected to?
How do they teach me through embodiment?
How does my Earth body share these messages with me?
What is my body / ancestors guiding me towards at this time?
How do I know when I am living my True North?
All of these questions and more we will be journeying with this year in WILD EMBODIMENT: TRUE NORTH. You can learn more and join us here.
I am honored to dance with you in this life, dear one.
Please comment how this moved you.
See you out there ~~~>>
In body and soul,
Hayley
P.S. I'm teaching a FREE somatic workshop this Sat, Sept 28. Join us here.
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