Leave It To Beaver

Not long ago I wrote a blog post about a journey I did where I met some beavers (Those Dam Beavers).  The interesting thing, as with many journeys, is that sometimes it is waaaaaaay after the fact when some additional meaning falls into place.

This journey was in reference to my latest adventure with a blood clot and how to heal it (which, by the way, is now officially healed, which means I am back off the blood thinners and able to eat my veggies again!).  In the course of talking to the lead beaver, he'd told me that I'd been "too busy."  I have to admit that, though I kinda got a sense of what he meant, I didn't totally comprehend the deeper meaning.

It had been my being 'too busy' that had dammed up my veins, creating the clot.  I was expending too much energy running around trying to figure things out but nothing was really getting done, thus I was just spinning my wheels and all that excess energy was being internalized.  With no where to go, this energy inundated my system, swelling and blocking my river of blood.  That's the part I got.  Kinda. Still, I wondered, if it wasn't reshaping my outer world, was I really too busy?  I still had to get things done, right?

Once I began to get on with my life I started slowing down a bit, and spending a little more time outside in Nature at special personal sacred spots to recharge my batteries.  Through this I began to taste an increasingly intoxifying wellspring that I'd all but forgotten about.  I began to plum depths of my soul that I hadn't swam through in years.  I started remembering who I am.

Thats when the bigger meaning sank in. Ooooooooooh! Right! That whole action/stillness/action/stillness thing, like breathing -- inhale/exhale/inhale/exhale. It's the same death/rebirth cycle I talk of so often. The seed requires the dark, silent womb of the earth to sleep in before sprouting forth into the sunlight to express in action and growth the deepest dreams it dreamed while sleeping in the earth.  And we can not run endlessly without rest and rejuvenation. The metaphors are endless, but what it comes down to is, to make effective change in the world -- to create the world and life I want that reflects my True Self -- I actually need to be in touch with that True Self.  I have to be that True Self.  This brings to mind (again) what Sandra Ingerman says: "It's not what you do but who you become that changes the world." I have to remember how to just be again.

The biggest, brightest bulb of revelation in this whole experience has to be the rediscovery and re-indentification of myself as an Introvert. Ironically it was the entering of a new relationship that really brought this home for me as I needed to juggle together-time and alone-time. I remember years ago, while talking to my counselor, how totally blown away I was  when she, almost casually, remarked, "You know, the common denominator of everything we're talking about seems to be your need for space, whether it's mental, emotional, or physical." I was dumbstruck by the absolute truth of that statement.

And so to validate this need, and to legitimize my seemingly abnormal requirements for space I delved into researching introversion, having read a really good book on it called The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney some years ago when I was still married, and when it was basically the only information out there on the subject.  I was pleasantly surprised, and ironically a little overwhelmed, by the wealth of info I found and the number of introverts that had come out of the closet in the intervening years to share their experiences and normalize this misunderstood temperament.  And the deeper I delved, the more of myself I recognized, and the more I realized that a huge number of things that I thought were wrong with me, that needed correcting, were actually hard-wired into me and, in a society that glorifies the extrovert, I just never learned, to this day, how to truly take care of myself.  I realized this is why my marriage broke up.  I realized this is why I started having anxiety and panic attacks.  I realized a lot of things and unnecessary hardships and struggles in my life were caused by this simple lack of recognition of who I am and how I work, and thus how to take care of myself.

There is a small part of me that grieves the last 7 or 8 years since my divorce and how much different it could have been had I learned these things earlier and been able to give myself the space I needed to, for example, spend time alone some weekends watching mindless movies without feeling guilty that I wasn't accomplishing anything.  How different it would have been to recognize my processes and allow my buried true self to emerge.

But all things in their time!  That is the past and my point of power is in the present! I am learning now, amidst much excitement and a sense of remembering something long forgotten, a deeper level of who I am.  Another layer of the onion has been peeled away.  Not only am I learning to ask for the space I require within relationships, whatever they are, in order to maintain a healthy relationship, I'm learning to give to myself those same necessities of space --quality space-- to allow the inner processes, which my outer reality depends on, to flow uninhibited.  I'm beginning to be more serious about the importance of fitting meditation and Tai-chi into my schedule as well as solitude time in Nature.  And most of all I am enjoying and loving the person I am finding buried beneath it all.

So golly thanks Beave. You've helped make life more swell.