The second spring.
Or the sacred unraveling.
Welcome to day six.
I call this the grandmothers.
Welcome back,
Dear sister.
Six days.
Six days of returning to yourself.
Whatever your outer life holds right now.
However full or tender or exhausting,
You have found your way back here.
Again and again.
That faithfulness to yourself.
Is its own kind of healing.
So today we go somewhere that exists outside.
Of our ordinary time.
Into the long,
Unbroken line of women.
From whom you descended.
The grandmothers.
The great grandmothers.
The ones whose names you carry.
And the ones whose names the world forgot.
But whose resilience still moves through your blood.
Whose wisdom lives in the very marrow of your bones.
You have never walked this path alone.
And today we remember that.
So please find your position.
Let everything soften.
Close your eyes and take your three threshold breaths.
With each exhale,
Feel yourself moving.
Not just inward.
But backwards.
Through the years of your own life.
Through your birth.
And further still into the vast.
Warm ancient darkness.
That holds all of us at our beginning.
There is a truth.
So extraordinary.
It deserves a moment of complete stillness.
Every egg you were ever born with,
All of them.
The ones that became children.
And the ones that did not.
Were formed.
While you yourself.
Were still inside your mother's womb.
Which means that when your grandmother.
.
.
Carried your mother.
She also carried inside your mother's tiny forming body.
The earliest version of you.
You were there.
Inside your grandmother.
Before your own birth.
Already present.
Already part of the lineage.
Already held within the body of a woman who loved you before she even knew you existed.
You have been held longer.
Than your own lifetime.
And every woman in that line.
Every grandmother stretching back through centuries.
She moved through this threshold,
Too.
She felt the heat rise and the sleep scatter.
She carried the question of who she was becoming.
She had a body that knew what it was doing.
And she had what you are remembering today.
A circle of women behind her.
Holding her.
Passing something forward.
And they were passing it on to you.
So let's imagine a place that exists outside of time,
A fire circle in an ancient forest.
Women seated around a great central flame,
Their faces lit from below in amber and gold,
Under a sky so full of stars.
That the sky seems to breathe.
A stone circle,
A cave with painting on its walls.
Imagine maybe a shoreline where waves have been arriving since long before any human stood upon it.
Let any image come without forcing it.
Trust whatever arrives for you.
Your body will know this place.
And gathered here are the grandmothers.
Fully human,
Fully alive in this space outside of time.
Woman of all the eras,
Every color,
Every culture.
Some look like you,
Some look nothing like you.
And yet something about them.
Is unmistakably familiar.
A gesture,
A posture,
The way they hold their hands or their heads.
They've been waiting.
With the patience of mountains.
With the stillness of deep water.
Walk towards them.
Feel the ground beneath your feet.
Ancient.
Solid.
Consecrated by every woman who has walked it before you.
With every step,
Feel something in your chest begin to open.
The tightness of carrying too much alone,
Loosening,
Slowly in the presence.
Of those who know exactly what you carry.
Because they've carried versions of it themselves.
The grandmother closest to you steps forward.
She takes both of your hands in hers.
Her hands are worn and strong and warm.
They hold yours with a steadiness that asks nothing of you.
Simply here.
I have you.
You can stop holding yourself up for just this moment.
She looks at you with eyes that have seen everything.
Not just her own life,
But yours.
All of it.
She sees it and her expression holds only one thing.
Recognition.
The type of love that comes from knowing someone completely.
She has something for you.
Held in trust across generations,
Waiting for this exact season of your life to place it in your hands.
It may come as an object.
A stone,
A seed,
A small flame cupped in your palms.
It may come as a word your mind doesn't know but your body understands.
It may come simply as a just quality of being.
Settling into you like warmth.
Like a certain exhale of arriving somewhere you have been traveling towards.
For a very long time.
So open your hands.
Open your heart.
Receive what she gives you.
This has always been yours.
The healing that moves in both directions is this ancestral tradition that has always been carried.
This knowing,
Healing moves in both directions through time.
Forward and back simultaneously.
When you do the work of becoming whole.
You meet your shadow.
And feel your feelings.
And tend your fire and sit with your darkness.
You are then healing the line.
The grandmothers who could not grieve are grieved by you.
The ones who could not speak are spoken for by you.
The ones not allowed to take up space.
They're freed in some mysterious and real way every time you choose yourself.
Every time you stand in the clearing and say,
I am here,
I am whole,
I am enough.
You are the hinge point.
The place where old patterns complete themselves.
And new ones begin.
Think now of something you've been carrying that belongs to the lineage.
Rather than to you.
A belief about your worth.
A pattern of over-giving.
Learned so young you mistook it for your own nature.
A grief or a fear that arrived before you were old enough to know.
You could put it down.
Hold it with love.
Hold it with gratitude.
For what it taught you.
And offer it to the fire at the center of the circle.
Watch the grandmothers receive it.
Tenderly,
Without alarm,
As if they have been waiting a long time to take it back.
Now feel what remains.
A slight lengthening in the spine.
A breath that comes more easily.
Hands that feel for a moment.
Surprisingly beautiful.
And empty.
And that emptiness is your true inheritance.
The one that was always underneath.
And before you leave the circle.
The grandmothers have something to say.
Listen with your body.
With the oldest part of you that still knows how to receive.
And they say this.
We see you.
In every moment you believed yourself unseen,
We were watching with love.
In every moment you believed yourself alone.
We were beside you.
Closer than breathing.
Quieter than you thought.
You come from a long line of women who survived what they were certain would break them.
And not only survived.
But found on the other side of their breaking.
Something harder.
And more luminous.
Than what actually broke.
You are made of that.
You are the living proof of it.
And they say,
Go forward,
Go freely.
Go as yourself,
All of yourself,
And know that our love travels with you.
Into every room you enter.
Every silence you hold.
Every brave and ordinary moment.
Of your one extraordinary life.
I am the living answer to the prayers of my ancestors.
I carry their resilience in my bones and their wisdom in my blood.
I release what was never mine to carry.
I receive what has always been mine to keep.
I heal forward.
And I heal backward.
I am in the hinge point of my lineage.
I've never walked alone.
I never will.
Begin to draw your awareness gently back.
Feel the breath in your body,
The weight of your physical self held by the earth beneath you.
The same earth.
That holds the bones of every grandmother who came before you.
You are never more than a breath away from them.
Carry their gift with you as you open your eyes today.
And when the season grows hard,
When the unraveling feels like too much,
Place your hand on your heart.
And feel them there.
They have not gone anywhere.
They never do.
So tomorrow we're going to complete this journey together.
I'm gonna step into a clearing that has been waiting for you all week.
And we meet the woman who's been unraveling into herself.
All along.
Hole.
Free.
And entirely magnificently her own.
So until then,
You are loved beyond measure.
You always have been.
Please rest in this,
Dear sister.
Namaste.
