I can live in mid-air.
It’s been a good skill to have these last few months while the School of Inner Health has been between homes.
Health has never had a dedicated classroom, and it’s been years since the School of Inner Health had one.
Now we are landing in our new home, finding places for pieces of furniture and artwork that have lived in my garage for years. We’re creating a classroom for classes I have dreamed of teaching for decades, and new curriculum possibilities that are emerging as the school takes root.
When I took over the School of Inner Health, I got good at driving the distance between school and home, and there was a huge familiarity in the feeling inside me – the felt sense of trying to be in two places at once.
An astrologer once took one look at my chart and said: “Oh, you’re one of those…always trying to sit down and stand up at the same time.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
I live in mid-air. Or I have most of my life anyway.
I can land in mid-air so well that I think I’m on the ground.
I can make ground out of connection, and gather people around me who can do the same. Our current cranial class, which will know three classrooms, is masterful at this. The very capable students have forged connections with each other that have created a depth and ground that has made continued transformative learning possible in the literal midst of uncertainty.
There is great excitement now among that class and within myself about what will happen as the school – and I – land.
Looking for home and being at home are two different animals, and the second one has taken decades to be part of my habitat – my habit was to move. I was better at moving than standing still. I could run like nobody’s business, get on a plane to somewhere I’d never been without a second thought. The adrenalin of the adventure was far preferable to the anxiety I had to navigate when I turned toward my own life.
When I was nineteen I went to live in Taiwan and China by myself. It was incredibly hard, but also exhilarating, a kind of euphoria I sought out over and over – taking at least ten trips to India and a couple to Europe alone in my twenties. It does take a certain kind of courage to travel in different countries, and it is far from easy, especially when you’re alone. For me it was also a fantastic way not to have to face other fears.
I told people then that I was more afraid of staying home. They laughed, but for me it wasn’t funny. It was a stark expression of my fear, of the activation in my nervous system, of the pain I carried in me that I could soothe in the Ganges easier than other places – but every place was a temporary balm.
It wasn’t staying home I was afraid of as much as making home, building a life, standing in one place and letting life unfold. I was so accustomed to my anxiety that it was normal, so used to being alone that it was familiar, and relationships were rare and short-lived. Back then, settling was a foreign concept, one not even on my map.
Thank goodness for growth, change – and love.
Finding a route to healing layers of my own trauma through Craniosacral Therapy and Somatic Experiencing led me to enough healing to begin to orient to new possibilities and be able to expand.
Over the last twenty years I have landed in two communities that are a huge part of my life and root my spirit at a depth that is rare in this world.
And over the last seven years, Chris, Nicole and I have transformed every room in our house into places of story and memory, and our yard into a garden and place for our chickens to roam. We have jumped our house out of suburbia while keeping it right here.
With the School of Inner Health as my platform, I am feeling myself land on multiple levels. I sense the ground being cleared for so many dreams and visions to take root. As we land on the edge of Denver, I am feeling myself land inside my calling – no longer turning away from the direction everything is pulling me in, no longer resistant in the same decades old ways. No longer sitting for hours in a parking lot because I can’t figure out whether to go South into the unknown or North to the familiar. No longer maintaining a separation between work and home.
I am feeling myself land inside my hands, point my fingers in the direction I want to go, turn the handles, walk into the unknown, knowing what I want to create there.
I am feeling myself land in a way that settles me, helps me stay put. There are more options now – and fleeing is no longer one of them.
Come land with me. Come to the home I’m creating for the school. Come help me stretch the boundaries of what is possible and make a place where people can grow into strong and capable practitioners of subtle and profound crafts – where we can place our irons into the forge of ancient wisdom and bend our minds and hands, and open our hearts in transformative ways.
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Also published on Medium.
