“Unwinding” is a great word to describe what happens when you’ve been holding on and finally get a chance to relax. My muscles are releasing. I am unfurling. The couch holds me.

I am so tired and want only to sleep a long time. I’m a little upset about overbooking myself with the Thanksgiving cooking projects. Or overburdening myself with planning to work remotely while doing all the cooking projects and trying to be with my family. Somehow or another, I’m here, and I see now it wasn’t necessary to do so much. I can write in time for myself in my life, too. My need for that is growing.

I had a long, hard, necessary cry with Dad today on our mountain bike ride. I still feel like crying. I have so much to learn. So much more humbling myself and maturing to do. I ache for the long rains of life washing me clean.

Crying is so important. It’s an expression from the soul.

It reminded me of Ayahuasca, to cry like that. People always laugh or grimace and say, ‘Oh, doesn’t it make you throw up a lot? Sounds awful!’ and part of me thinks, ‘Yes, and that’s the point!’ We can be so terrible at staying present through the uncomfortable, vulnerable parts of life. We don’t like breaking down and crying, or feeling nauseous and throwing up. We try to hold ourselves more ‘together’ than that. But the feelings demand to be felt! We feel life; life comes through us as energy; there is no stopping it, not without the severe cost of self-stifling. But we try so hard to suppress and stifle, to fit ourselves into pretty boxes, and still the energy finds ways to move through us when we are mindless. It finds outlets in our favorite mindless (numbing) activities.

I am always struck dumb by the healer’s ability to hold space for emotional process; struck with gratitude, as well as utter amazement, when that kind of space is held for me. Aren’t we always worried what people will think of us when we cry? If you can’t stop it from coming and it comes, and someone sits with you without trying to make it better, without getting uncomfortable… it feels as important to the healing process for someone to witness our grief, as it is for us to just feel it. Or maybe it’s that sometimes we need to be reminded that it’s okay to cry. When someone gives us permission, the wall inside crumbles a little bit, and something golden spills over. Liquid gold, from the heart. Soft. Exposing our beautiful, honest brokenness.

Emotions take time and don’t follow our mind’s logic. So we don’t value them. And yet, so powerful, to release what you’ve been holding in!

“The healing is in the return.”

So thank you to life, to my dad, to all the healers I’ve known in my life so far. Life is good. It’s hard but worth it.