October 2020
We’re making progress on the healing hut.
Sometimes when Jim’s hammer isn’t swinging I follow the path through the woods to the building site and lie on the floor where my table will be. I look up and notice how the rafters divide the sky into a mosaic of clear blue geometric shapes surrounded by the fringe of pine branches on three sides. I watch Hawk glide above and hear the calling of Crow. The healing hut site has already been visited by Fox, Turtle, and Deer in addition to the daily company of birds who watch our progress from the trees.
It’s a good place for a wander, and one morning recently I was led to a childhood memory I haven’t visited in years.
One of the families in the neighborhood where I grew up had a beat-up 1955 Chevy, big as a boat. It was a “lot car”, an unlicensed vehicle that was held back at trade-in time and allowed to rust in their backyard so that the kids and their friends could learn how to drive with it.
One of the families in the neighborhood where I grew up had a beat-up 1955 Chevy, big as a boat. It was a “lot car”, an unlicensed vehicle that was held back at trade-in time and allowed to rust in their backyard so that the kids and their friends could learn how to drive with it.
Eventually it was my turn to bump across rutted farm fields and careen through the apple orchards. And because the old car had a manual transmission – as most cars did in those days – I had to learn how to shift.
The first thing to learn about shifting a car is that you can’t just shove the knob directly from a low gear to a higher gear, unless you want to hear a terrible noise (“If you can’t find ’em, grind em!” my friends used to tease from the passenger seat).That’s where the clutch comes in – that pedal to the left of the brake (that could have been better designed to not look exactly like the brake, for crying out loud, my 14 year old self would have written if she were to review the thing). Its purpose is to disengage the drive train from the transmission so we can feel around for the next gear. Pushed all the way to the floor, the clutch is like a mini “time-out” – it lets the car coast, no longer actively propelled by the power of the engine. When the next gear is found, it’s time to release the clutch, re-engage the transmission, and power forward at a higher speed.
You can probably sense where I’m going with this. I had dreamed for several years of somehow transforming my massage practice into the healing practice that is the vision of my life’s true purpose, but it was not until my metaphorical clutch was unceremoniously stomped to the floorboards by the Monty Python foot of Covid-19 that I was able begin actually making that shift. My vehicle is currently coasting – no longer powered by the “massage gear”, not yet fully shifted into the full time in-person “healing hut gear”. It is a rich time of rest, creation, healing, and meditation. Can you relate?
It can sometimes be challenging to step into transformative change without taking a pause. This is why retreats can be so useful. A clutch, a retreat, a pandemic pause… as I laid on the floor of the healing hut I recognized the power of disengagement. Can I understand this pause as a useful part of my own healing and transformation?
Since the pandemic is affecting us all, I wonder if there is some part of your life that is ready to shift, too? What might happen if we changed our perspectives enough to view this time of pandemic isolation, moving toward the increasing darkness of winter, as a “pressing of the clutch”, helpfully disengaging us from our previous patterns? If you would like some help in gaining clarity around these questions, I’d be delighted to work with you in an online session while the healing hut is being completed. One of the things I have been exploring during this time-out is the surprising power of nonlocal (aka Zoom) healing sessions in facilitating transformation.I’d like to leave you with one more thought. What if – and this is my most heartfelt desire – the individual brave acts of our own personal healing add up to create a collective shift in human consciousness beyond anything we have ever known before?
What can we heal together?
