What Our Bodies Are Telling Us

By Rev. Amari Magdalena

We get sick or have an injury at different times in our lives.  In youth, we often more physically resilient and easily overcome.  As decades cascade over the waters of our lives, recovery capacity changes.  Most of us, I believe, feel we are much younger than our biological ages.  We may look in the mirror in amazement at the aging person viewed yet are content that inside we know we are much younger than that silly reflection.  Denial has a way of eventually catching up with us.

Some of the illusion may be OK.  I’ve been told for years that I look younger than my true chronological age.  Flattering that can be.  Enough ‘cover-up’ and we’d all look a bit more youthful.  Heaven knows the media slathers us with potions promising eternal youth in massive doses daily.  Even science tells us our cells are being made new all the time.  We are encouraged to deny the very process of generation, degeneration and regeneration.  So my question is, why then are we aging?”

I posit this question as I’ve faced a Winter of My Discontent with repetitive injuries and illnesses. Not in my plan, I think.  How inconvenient!  As I am forced to cancel event after event and absent myself from the general populace, I lift my head and shout, “ WHY!?!”  What genetic trickster is at play in my life that is impeding my good health?

Now I can hear, “it’s all in your head!”  This is followed by, “stinkin thinkin.”  And, I get it that our minds DO indeed have an impact over our overall health.  Yet, physical plan in all the kingdoms that I have observed, includes birth, acceleration, decline and death.  Doesn’t seem to be any escape. So my greater question, is what our bodies are telling us.

My message of several years has been, “slow down”.  Now it appears to be” slow the f…… down.”  Seems to be the “Upside Your Big Head” Cosmic whack that is informing me that the days of adrenal overdrive are over. My inner drive for accomplishment was early on cemented in my consciousness by parents who wanted “A” report cards brought home.  Now those folks are long gone yet their message lingers. 

So what is the pain, loss of mobility and breathing issues about, I ask myself?  Metaphysically they represent certain truths.  As you might also ask yourself when confronted by lingering health issues.  When I’m willing to take time for the answers, they are plain.  Pain signifies that something isn’t resonating-place, people, circumstances, economics, etc. Mobility, easy peasy, slow down.  Breathing a bit more complicated but knowable; feeling contracted, not expansive.

Physically there are also answers, if I care to listen.  Pain, stress simply stated.  Mobility, long list of injuries from activities not suited to my physicality. Breathing, growing up in a world of heavy smokers.  The latter most affected my late sister and me.  Everyone in our world smoked.  Finally, the body, like any vehicle with a lot of miles on it, wears out.  Some parts are replaceable; some not.

Emotionally, the answers may come from more past release work.  I’ve for many years felt that those of us with problematic childhoods have dragged a hidden ball and chain through life.  At times, we’ve perhaps cut off part of the chain or shortened it, yet it’s still there.  Energetically we still hold past experiences.  Many are saying we also hold DNA of the ancestors.  Many tools are available for finally cutting through the chain and tossing the heavy ball back into the nothingness from which it came.   Soul Retrieval, Past Life Regression, Body Work, to name a few are currently available.  Not affordable?  Barter. I admitted to my youngest son recently, that I still have cords to cut.

The ultimate answers for me, and perhaps you, are to LISTEN.  Stop pushing the envelope, start giving yourself breathing room, quit trying to prove yourself and your worth, maybe just enjoy the process of being-in all states of living. Get help if necessary. Return to those things that make you happy.  Trust yourself to find your more perfect place to live. Before it is too late, embrace BEING and surrender DOING!  And, importantly, thank this body for the journey!

What concepts!  Am I ready?  Are you?  It’s a pretty short ride all told, wouldn’t it be better to enjoy it and quit trying to navigate rapids?  I’d declared that my goals in life are now Ease and Grace.  Must be time to manifest those wonderful intentions!!

"It's also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that's sitting here right now...with its aches and it's pleasures...is exactly what we need to be fully  human, fully awake, fully alive." Pema Chodron

"I finally realized that being grateful to my body was key to giving more love to myself." Oprah Winfrey

Home: The Lifelong Search

By Rev. Amari Magdalena

Home, a word that conjures up a wide range of emotions, plays such an important part in our lives. Steven Spielberg immortalized, "ET Phone home.”  Perhaps a lot of sensitive people, feeling like aliens in their family of origin, felt they needed to find where home existed for them.  Thomas Wolfe, on the other hand, declared that “You Can’t Go Home Again.”  Robert Frost opined that “Home is the place where, when you have to go, they have to take you in.” Dorothy, clicked her magical heels together and chanted, “There’s no place like home.” Other proclamations of alienation or longing from different perspectives suggest that this place called home, can be pretty elusive.

Some people who grew up in the 50’s may get an image of Father Knows Best, with the authoritative, yet benevolent, male head of the family.  Others may have a different image from a sitcom relating to family and the struggles that so many experience growing up.

As I entered the New Age in the 90’s, I very often heard people saying that they just wanted to go home. It was true for me.  I did not feel I belonged in the family I’d found myself in.  Going home, meant death to a few; to others the rescue spaceship coming to take them away to some alternative reality or Universe.  However couched, it was a search for some sense of belonging.  Some of us found alternative mothers and fathers and families of choice, not chance.  They, in part, served to give us a nuclear family sense and the missed lovingness.

Decades after my immersion, and then withdrawal from some of the more fantastic aspects of the New Age, I came to the realization that the cry for home was an exclamation about ending separation. As it turned out, that disconnection was not from others, rather me.  All the judgments about the characters in my play of life, and my disappointment in not feeling connected with them, really had nothing to do with them.  They were operating in their bubble of Universe, and I in mine.

Gayle Sheehy captured this realization poignantly in Passages as she lay on the floor avoiding flying bullets in Ireland:  "No one is with me. No One can keep me safe. There is no one who won't ever leave me along." Gayle realized that only she would be with her always.  As my own passages and times a flight have taught me, better find home within.  That didn't mean, I'd never be lonely; it meant, I'd learn to find comfort in being alone.

I've said it to students over the years, and I still offer it as wisdom, the greatest love affair of your life begins with you!  Best to find those things lovable and tolerable about yourself, or your entire life will be filled with *compensatory relationships.  Those are the supposed makeup for our perceived shortcomings that invite transitory or unhappy pairings.  Trust me, I know this to be true. We will never find that person who can make us feel completely at home until we create a beautiful inward dwelling.

As Spring rapidly approaches, perhaps it is a good time to do that new season cleaning and start removing the detritus of self-judgment, self-loathing, self-recrimination and start working on creating the most beautiful temple of home, that we are capable of.  This is a kind of "do unto yourself, as you do for others you valued above yourself." Only then, will you come home to you and roll out the welcome mat to your inner light and true magnificence.

Love thyself and you will have ample love to share in generosity with others without having to set Terms of Endearment.  The wave of love will then come routinely in to your inner shores, like the tide, and wash over you always..

“If you treated your neighbors like you treat yourself, they’d move!”  Jonathan at the Lighthouse in Black Mountain, NC advised me years ago.

"The lost home that we’re seeking is ourselves; it is the story we carry within our soul.” 

Michael Meade

*Awaken Your Inner Personas: Transform Your Life

Amari Breakthrough Institute

Bringing You Home, to You!