I have a jet tub, and although I enjoy the rumble of the jets pounding my soar muscles, the peace begins the moment timer clicks off.  In an instant, I sit there engulfed in the silence, stillness and warmth.  Everything stops.  For those few moments, I simply float in the nothingness.

Then my thoughts kick in.  And so it begins...

I am getting this is not unlike the landscape of my soul.  Rumble, rumble, rumble....stop.  Rumble, rumble, rumble...stop.

Or my hunger.

Only to stop it, there is no timer.  There is just a repertoire of fillers I’ve reached for to replace the rumble.  Because what is left in the stillness has been too much to bear.

I will admit it. These past 11 weeks have lead me down a tunnel into deep sadness, despair, anger and emptiness.  And it felt horrible.  This is certainly not what I expected.

I expected to feel better.  I expected to fix it.  Quickly.  In 12 weeks to be exact.

Never did I imagine for the storm to pick up during these weeks.  Despite my best efforts, I continued to look for life preservers to carry me out of the storm at every gale.  I wanted to head back to the light winds I was in before, where I felt I could still fly.  Sort of.  (Read - I can fake it.  Sort of.)

But faking it is something that no longer works for me.

Like Jennifer said in week one, I need to let the storm do it’s work on me.  Or as the analogy she gave us:

Think of the blacksmith. The metal has to be held in the flame long enough for it to become soft so it can be shaped into the desired object. This is true of our lives. If we can feel what we feel. Let it do its work on us, we come out able to make choices in our lives that are true to who we are.

Fire, water - whateves.  It’s all scary as hell, and staying there?  Frig, that’s hard.

Our hunger, that beast we try to feed, is FEAR.  “Here...grab this, reach for that, this will save you from that feeling, this hunger, that fear...”

We’re all afraid of something.  I get all panicky over a whole list of things.

You know what lives at the heart of that storm, the place where the rumble stops?

Love.

Love is the only thing that can truly rescue us.  Love is the gentle space that sees our stinky stuff as the muck that simply plugs the holes in our raft.  Not the puncture that sinks us.

Until we let the smelly stuff fill the hole, the storm will never cease.  The hunger will never be satiated.   The yucky muck is part of us.  The brilliant nuggets buried deep in the thick of it carries us to higher ground.  Trying to dump the whole plump overboard is like bailing water when we have not yet plugged the hole.  We’ll still sink eventually.

I am learning to roll with the rumbles.  When faced with dark skies, I can either run for shelter by acting out, stuffing or masking -- or I can choose to practice something different. 

I can become curious, drop my stories,  breathe in the pain...  Being gentle with myself will soften me into the flow of whatever is rolling in over the hills.  Where would love guide me, what would love do, how would love respond?

Although I know all this intellectually, I need time for it to permeate my soul, for it to become the fabric of my being.  To practice it.  12 weeks is nothing.  And for me, the gal who loves instant gratification, this sorta sucks.  I am also well aware that living out of love vs fear is most certainly rarely easy.

Right now, I stand in fear that I will just dive back into my habitual patterns, because that’s the comfortable dingy den my ego built.  Aren’t we all creatures of comfort?

Well, I can’t do that.  Not for myself, my husband and especially my children.  The most important thing we can do for our children is teach them how to live out of love.  And the only way we can do that is to live that way ourselves.  This is our gift to the world.  To love ourselves fully and completely so we can love others and therefore give them the spaciousness to love themselves.

That's what love would do.

So -- at week 11, I am pausing to let the storm do it’s work on me prior to entering into my final coaching conversation.  No rescuing, no stuffing, no acting out, no masking.

A simple, quiet reflection and practice of embracing the rumbles with love.

Image by: Victor Bezrukov