Page 16 - 31-3 Connections August 2022

Leaning In and Out of

New Life: A Practice

to Navigate the Tricky

Experience of Healing

By Sarah Cledwyn

When we are leaning into new life, new behavior, coming to life. One day she wanted to celebrate
new ways of being, the process frequently includes her new-found health and decided to go on a run.
lots of volatility moving between the old and I can only imagine her anticipation at moving her
new. This movement is simply part of the process, body, feeling good, letting the wind stream by her
neither good nor bad. One practice I have found skin. Unfortunately, a run was beyond her physical
to be helpful is to allow ourselves to move at the capacity at the stage of healing she found herself in
pace of our own healing and not rush ahead. It can and she broke the bones in her feet.
be excruciating and complicated to move slowly, to
be fully present, to stay exactly in the place we are. Have you ever been in a similar situation?
It can also be liberating and fruitful. Please read the
following words as an introduction to this kind of I won’t ever know what it was like for her to have felt
presence practice. so awful for so long, nor to finally be feeling well
and good, but we have likely all been in a place
What is emerging for you? What new life is stirring? of difficulty or dormancy for a long period, and we
Where are you pushing or rushing to be further may be able to remember the wild joy of those first
along in the process? rays of life.

I had a co-worker long ago who had serious chronic Please recall one of those times right now. And join
illness. She had been sick for a long time and was me for this practice.
on the decline. An organ transplant was a life saver
for her. She looked better than she had in years, For a moment, let us hold the whole experience
her energy was up; a degree of optimism was tenderly:

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