whatever-it-takes
sea your breath starts friday. this is the deeper truth I want to leave you with; you're the one who decides what has power and what does not.
“Renew thyself completely each day, do it again, and again, and forever again”
- David Thoreau
I stopped writing this piece in early March. Around then, I started digging into my whatever-it-takes hip flexor muscle, and then my whatever-it-takes psoas started digging into me. Somehow now it’s May. I still haven’t reached the rock bottom of this delayed grief, but I have addressed multiple generations of maternal stories and fascial layers of congealed rage, and maybe accidentally found a profound healing I didn’t know I needed. And I’ve no clue how to explain all that, so I’m not going to try, at least not in a newsletter. But that’s where I’ve been.
The grotesque descriptor “suckling a dead litter” strikes a woman when she realises she’s been wasting her energy on things that no longer serve her.
Draining life force away in an unrewarding marriage, job, project, habit, unhealthy pattern, relationship or endeavour.
What engages next is the whatever-it-takes muscle. Whatever-it-takes, when guided by intuition, is the soul stepping in to peel the dead away and save your damn life.
Whatever-it-takes to heal cancer, to fall pregnant, to beat addiction, to save your kid from depression, to protect an endangered species. Whatever-it-takes for the woman to reclaim her power.
If you are at midlife, if your joints are shifting beneath you like tectonic plates, if your tolerance for things you once accepted without flinching has disappeared, then this straight shooting mantra, whatever-it-takes, is clearing the lens through which you see everything. You didn’t choose it, it chose you.
It chose you to rescue your whatever-it-takes muscle from the greedy grip of the ego. The desperate decisions that abandon all integrity to close the deal, make a sale, win the war, work the hardest, undress for success or be a good girl.
If your highest goal is simply survival, you wont get anywhere near your real vitality. Society likes to label this self abandonment as “burnout”, but it’s more than that. Clarissa Pinkola refers to it as ‘hambre del alma’, the starving soul. Then there’s only one choice, you must do whatever it damn well takes to return home to yourself.
I call this soul conservation.
It changes your spiritual centre of gravity from the outside world to the inside world where all the power lies.
When I do whatever-it-takes to not be dependent on pain medication, I brave the cold almost every day. I wade in up to my neck. I trail my fingers in the water. My brain says, you’ve got to be kidding. It lists every reason to back up and not do this crazy thing.
No one tells you cold water swimming is 10 percent getting to the physical shore and 90 percent negotiating with the voice begging you to quit. It’s like being in heaven and talking to the devil at the same time. But then I duck under.
At first the gasp reflex catches my breath. Then after 6 minutes or so something weird starts happening. I can no longer feel the boundaries of my skin. My body has become one with a much larger body. It’s not numbness, it’s aliveness.
The weightless water is where pain leaves centre stage. It’s where I find momentary relief from a hip that will not stay quiet. Swimming some days sucks, but not swimming sucks more. You don’t know what’s underneath you and that’s where you adapt in uncertainty and surrender. I am just another aquatic creature akin to whale who must trust its environment and rise to breathe.
After choosing the underworld, the surface reveals that I need to meet my edges regularly. In the darkness and depth of facing my fears, there’s an invitation for expansion that I can trust my breath. We do breathwork not to become masters on the mat, but so we can support ourselves and all creatures on the planet.
Comfort is killing us.
Convenience is killing us.
Moderation is killing us.
There’s not a single anglo western country that makes the top ten of the World Happiness Index. Except for my Fin friends, although they are still perplexed as to why this is, might have something to do with the natural connection to cold/hot stuff.
When life no longer attunes to living breathing humans we need to become widowed to dead litters, wake up and say “I am going.”
wildly and whatever-it-takes,
Tina x
Starts this Friday! (3 spots left)
A group of soul conservationist breathers are gathering. Those who want lessons and love from the ocean are resonating, as well as those craving like-hearted connection and mates in community.
Breathwork - 6 week sunrise series
Starts Friday May 15th - Ends Friday June 19th
South Melbourne SLSC: 7am - 8am (warm inside)
breathwork + cold ocean plunge (optional) + hot drink (optional)
Last Sunday at my Autumn Breathwork event, Mel got her hand stuck down her arse. She wrote about it on her stack below and I’m sharing it here. Not because our most humiliating moments have the potential to go viral, but because the woman next to her had her back. This is what we do for eachother. Whatever-it-takes, and still we rise.
Beautiful, poignant, and thought-provoking words Tina! You're so right - as women moving through the many layers and cycles of their human experience, we do whatever it takes. And I have to say, "I had my hand down my arse" absolutely made me laugh out loud!!!! :)