Welcome to the Sacred Unraveling,
A seven-day journey.
Today's day four,
The emotional tides.
A water element meditation for feeling without drowning.
Welcome back to your sister.
You are officially now four days in.
You have arrived in your body,
You have met the fire,
You've sat the dark,
And here you are again returning.
That itself is the practice.
That itself is the courage.
Today we are going into the water.
So please find your place of comfort.
Let your body settle.
Close your eyes and take three of our threshold breaths in through the nose,
Long and slow,
Out through the mouth even longer.
Feel yourself crossing from the outer world into this inner one,
From the surface into the depths.
We are going somewhere tender today,
So please come gently.
The waves that arrive,
Uninvited,
I want to ask you something and I want you to answer it honestly,
Not out loud,
But in the quiet of your own heart.
In recent weeks or months,
Have you cried at something unexpected?
A commercial,
A song,
The way the light fell through the window at a certain hour?
Have you felt rage rise in you so suddenly it surprised even you?
Clean and hot and gone before you could name it?
Have you felt the tenderness so acute it was almost painful for your children,
For strangers,
For the younger version of yourself you sometimes catch a glimpse of in old photos?
If so,
Good.
You are not losing your mind.
You are not becoming someone else.
You are in fact becoming more of yourself.
The emotional membrane that has kept things neatly contained and socially appropriate and carefully managed,
That is thinning.
And what's moving through now is not dysfunction,
It is the actual truth.
During perimenopause and menopause,
Fluctuating estrogen and progesterone directly affect the brain's limbic system,
The seat of emotional processing,
Of memory,
And your stress response.
The emotional volatility so many women experience isn't psychological weakness,
It is your neurological reality.
Your brain is being rewired.
The emotional volume is turned up,
Not because something is wrong with you,
But because something is waking up in you that has been muted for a very,
Very,
Very long time.
What would it mean to stop apologizing for your feelings and start listening to them instead?
So now I want you to imagine yourself standing at the edge of a body of water.
It may be the ocean,
Vast and ancient and indifferent to your smallness in the most liberating way.
Or it may be a lake,
Just still and dark and deep,
Reflecting the sky above it like a mirror.
Or a river,
Moving always.
Always moving,
Never the same water twice.
Choose the water that calls to you right now.
Trust the first image that comes.
Feel the ground beneath your feet at the water's edge.
Feel the air,
Cooler,
Carrying that freshness that only exists near water.
Hear the sound of it,
The rhythm.
Notice how the water moves in its own time,
At its own pace,
According to its own intelligence,
And how it's been doing so long before you arrived,
And will continue long after you leave.
Now wade in it,
Just to your ankles to begin.
Feel the temperature of the water against your skin.
Let it be whatever temperature it needs to be.
Cool and clarifying,
Or warm and enveloping.
Your body will know what it needs.
This water represents your emotional life,
All of it.
The grief,
And the joy,
And the rage,
And the longing,
And the fierce,
Ferocious love that lives inside of you.
And you are not drowning in it.
You are standing in it.
And there is the difference.
Learning to be with the wave.
Here's what surfers know,
That the rest of us take a lifetime to learn.
You cannot fight a wave.
If you brace against it,
It knocks you over.
If you turn your back on it,
It takes you by surprise.
But if you face it,
If you move toward it,
With your body soft,
And your breath steady,
And your eyes open,
You can move through it,
Or over it,
Or even,
With practice,
Ride it.
The emotional waves of this season are the same.
The ones that take you by surprise in the grocery store,
Or in the car when you're alone,
Or in the middle of a conversation with someone who said something that landed totally wrong.
They aren't the enemies.
They are purely information.
They are your inner world asking,
Sometimes demanding,
To be acknowledged.
So I'd like you to think of an emotion that has been moving through you lately.
It may be grief.
That particular grief that has no single object that just seems to mourn something unnamed.
It may be anger.
The kind that feels righteous and long overdue.
It may be fear.
Soft and persistent,
Living just beneath the surface of your days.
It may be a love so large you don't know what to do with it.
Whatever it is,
Let it rise,
Now,
Here,
Where it's safe.
Let it come up through your body like a wave.
Notice where it lives.
The chest,
The throat,
The belly,
Behind the eyes.
Notice its texture,
Its temperature,
Its size.
And instead of managing it,
Or explaining it,
Or making it smaller so it's more comfortable for everyone around you,
Simply place your hand on that part of your body and say,
I feel you.
I'm not afraid of you.
I'm here.
Let the wave crest.
Let it move through you.
And notice,
As all waves do,
It peaks and then it begins to soften.
It doesn't go on forever because it never does.
You're still standing.
You're still breathing.
You move through it and it did not destroy you.
You never needed to be protected from your own feelings.
You only needed to know that you could survive them.
And you can.
You just did.
In the Chinese medicine system,
The water element governs the kidneys,
Which hold our deepest life force,
Our ancestral energy,
Our will to live and to create.
The kidneys are also the seat of fear in Chinese medicine.
And it's no accident that as the water element is called upon so strongly during the season of menopause,
Fear often resides alongside of it.
Fear of being too much.
Fear of being not enough.
Fear of who you will be when the woman you've known yourself to be,
The one defined by her cycles,
By her fertility,
By her roles,
All begin to step aside.
But water,
Dear sister,
Is also the element of wisdom,
Of depth,
Of the unconscious knowing that lives below the surface of things.
The ocean is deepest where the light does not reach.
And so are you.
The emotional intensity of this season of menopause is not taking you away from yourself.
It is taking you toward the deeper layers.
The ones that have been waiting patiently beneath the busy surface of your life.
Let the water carry you there.
Not by force,
By surrender.
The way a swimmer learns to float,
Not by thrashing around,
But by actually releasing.
By trusting that the water will hold what the mind insists must be controlled.
You are being carried towards your own depths.
There is nothing to fear there.
Only more of you.
The return to shore is now.
I invite you to walk back.
Nice and slow.
Feel the water releasing you as you move through it.
Your ankles emerging.
Then your feet finding the solid ground again.
Stand at the water's edge for a minute and look back at where you have been.
Notice that the water is still moving.
The waves are still coming and going and you are here.
Standing,
Breathing whole.
You didn't drown.
You were never going to.
So bring one hand to your heart and one hand to your belly.
Feel the breath moving between them.
The expansion and the release.
Expansion and release like a small tide of its own and know that this rhythm,
This ebb and flow,
This endless movement between feeling and stillness.
This is not a problem that needs to be solved because this is what it means to be alive.
Fully,
Completely,
Irreversibly alive.
So in the days and weeks ahead,
When the emotional tide rises in you unexpectedly,
In the car,
In the kitchen,
In the quiet of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon,
Remember this.
You are not falling apart.
You are falling open.
And there is a profound difference between the two.
So let's go through some affirmations.
I am not too much.
I am finally enough.
My emotions are not my enemies.
They are my messengers.
I move with the wave,
Not against it.
I am deep enough to hold all of this.
I am the ocean.
I am the shore.
I am both.
So rest here for a minute.
Let the sound of the water you imagine linger at the edges of your awareness.
Let it remind you whenever you need reminding that tides are not chaos.
They are pattern.
They are rhythm.
They are most ancient and faithful clocks of the earth.
And you move by that same rhythm.
You always have.
Tomorrow we go somewhere that may feel both familiar and unfamiliar.
We will stand at the threshold of the most unsettling question.
This menopausal season asks,
Who am I now?
We will walk into that question together.
Not to find a quick answer,
But to discover what lives inside of it.
Until then,
Float,
Dear sister,
Please know that you are always held.
Namaste.
