HeArtwork: Good Medicine
Heavy. That’s what it feels like. That soul sickness that creeps into your life from time to time…maybe more often than you’d like. It’s like the heavy that hits you when you wake up from a fever-sleep. Your head is fuzzy, your body is too thick feeling, your thoughts are slow and lethargic. It’s too much to deal with the waking world in this state. Better to just slip back into unconsciousness...
And that’s what I feel like when the world has become too heavy for my senses to bear. Things aren’t clear and my perceptions are cloudy. The weight of it laying on my too exhausted body like a ridiculously dense quilt… thick and oppressive.
My heart and mind have been full of this heavy for awhile. Perhaps it’s the chaos of the last year. Coronavirus, political division nationally, natural disasters globally; as someone whose formative years were marked with one historically significant tragedy after another (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the housing crisis and economic collapse, and so on) we haven’t gotten an existential break in YEARS. In the meantime, we’ve been doing our best to carry on as if it isn’t affecting us.
…And that’s not even getting into our own personal traumas.
The weight of those troubles can overcome someone if they’re not careful.
Some days I just want to fall back into unconsciousness, be oblivious to how much it’s smothering me. But years of time have shown me this is not only ineffective for dealing with such emotions; it’s dangerous. You risk much by staying trapped underneath it all, letting it burn you from the inside to the out.
When I feel this way, I need medicine. HeArtwork Medicine.
I can feel it working...kicking in… as I bring up the sick parts piece by piece and rid them from my body. By taking all those things that threaten to burn you alive or smother you to death, you give a name to what ails you. You empower yourself to heal.
For me, this looks different, according to the ailment. Is it a feverish feeling in my heart? A brokenness in my soul? Is it sick or wounded there? I don’t always know right away. Only that it doesn’t “feel right”. Intuition is a strong part of processing those feelings and picking through the sticky, swollen parts.
Sometimes medicine application starts with a feeling on my heart that’s been sitting on me all wrong. Or an image in my mind that seems relevant in a way I can’t put my finger on. Or some words that come singing out my mouth, or writing from my pen—- expressing some hurting piece inside myself. HeArtwork has a flow of its own. The more open I stay to its process the more clearly those messages come forth, and the healing takes place. It’s an alchemy of sorts. A magic. It’s tuning into a frequency beyond myself, while simultaneously tuning deeply within.
I write this today to say--- Don’t keep your heavy and sick stuck down deep inside you. I know you’re carrying that load too. It's okay. Understandable. Highly relatable. How could you not be? And maybe you were reluctant to put it down or get out from under it. Because it’s hard right? It is so very hard to make those changes we need, to get well like we want.
But it’s not meant to stay stuck in and on and over you.
Bring it forth; expel it from your body--- by force if necessary.
Tune into your body so it can flow forth and out in its intended form. Keep applying good medicine to those wounds and weaknesses.
Eventually, the medicine will take effect.
And we get well. We heal.
It is my greatest hope that this blog will be an extension of that HeArtwork I’ve been practicing on myself...that the healing power could be shared and spread among us. That we could all become apothecaries for our souls...and maybe for others as well.
