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The Lie of Separation

The Lie of Separation

Last updated on: December 5, 2015 at 12:32 pm by Anita Brown

The Lie of Separation 2015-12-05T12:32:22-06:00 Anita Brown

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Back in May 2015 I was signed up for a weekend training in NYC with Phoenix Rising Yoga therapy.

The day before I had the thought “I love learning new things; especially about yoga!” and suddenly a new deeper thought came in– ‘This isnt about learning dear. This is about healing.” Woah!! What have I got to heal? Haven’t I done enough deep work during the 8 months of yoga teacher training I completed in Novemebr? Such a silly girl– there is ALWAYS more to heal.

Upon arrival our very first partner activity is gently placing two fingers on one another’s heart- front and back. As Lea’s hand approached my sternum, I felt as if she had to push through a dense block to reach me. After a few minutes of silence and breathing together, she is instructed to slowly remove her hands from me.

I instantly burst into tears. We have only just begun and there are two more days ahead of us.

I go home and sleep like a rock for over 10 hours, missing my alarm. Arriving late to class, I apologize and explain that emotionally I do not feel up to partner work and will observe for awhile. Within 45 minutes I am curled in a ball on the floor and back asleep!!

Suddenly, I am awakened crying and feeling ashamed. I glance around the room and see everyone assisting one another in hip-openers. They are rolling and stretching one another and no one is crying. I hear in my spirit ‘The hips hold shame. Release your shame’. I yell in head — You are not even experiencing a hip stretch!! How in the world are you the one releasing shame??

The crying stops. The emotion passes and we take a lunch break. I head outside to take in the hustle and bustle of New York’s Soho neighborhood. I find a tasty Indian spiced potato flatbread and chow hungrily. I am awake, alive, grateful and open.

The afternoon continues uneventfully and I head back to my friend’s house on the other side of Hudson.

Sunday morning and I had almost forgotten I would awaken in a strange bed on Mother’s Day. I am filled with sadness missing my mom and my children. But my friend had very thoughtfully been prepared this might be the case and greets me with flowers and a card! I am verklempt.

Heading back into the Big Apple, I feel mature and excited for our final hours together. Living in South Jersey and mostly working from home, I don’t enjoy these adventures often enough I decide.

It’s now about 5pm and we are just a few hours away from finalizing our level 1. We are instructed while sitting cross-legged, to close our eyes and imagine being divided in half, top of head to seat.

My eyes fly open and I am filled with terror as I had felt my body violently sliced in half with a huge machete. I look around. No one else seems bothered. I wait, feeling anxiety rising.

The teacher wraps up and asks if anyone has any feedback. I say with a tremor in my voice what just happened. I then begin to lose sensation in my hands so I stand up and begin shaking them, hard.
The tears come hard and fast and I almost hyperventilate but then return to focus on deep inhales and slow exhales. I say I am ok now and retreat to the ladies room for some water and rest.

As the months have passed since that experience, I have contemplated numerous times what my body was releasing and relaying. My birth father visited me once in the hospital Novemebr 5th 1965 and I never saw him again after that day. I believe there was a part of my psyche that believed it had been ripped from him.

This part was integrated back that day relaying the message that I am healed, whole and fully connected.

God wants the body to function efficiently and effectively in unity. Therefore, what happens to one part, or what one part does, affects the whole. What we do does indeed make a difference because we are individual parts of a living, spiritual organism. Our actions will produce an increase of good or evil, efficiency or inefficiency in the use of spiritual resources, effectiveness or ineffectiveness. For me personally, the practice of YOGA (union, yoking) has been key in healing abandonment trauma.
To understand this, perhaps we need nothing more than a deeper awareness that, despite the way things may presently look on the surface, our worldview – how we look at life and all its jumble of events – is quite narrow compared to God’s. We are not separate from God now or ever. Just as we cannot disconnect from our own arm, we cannot sin or feel enough shame to plunge us into eternal darkness.

Isaiah 60:19
No longer will you need the sun to shine by day, nor the moon to give its light by night, for the LORD your God will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory.
Once we see things from His perspective, we can see we bear a major responsibility to the body of Christ because God has included us in His great purpose.

Are you spiritually disconnected or knitted into the Body with Christ as the Head? Actually, this would be a more accurate description –to ask your heart all the ways it has hardened from hurt and surrender to Resurrected Love preparing a space in you for something new to be birthed this Christmas.

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