I stayed over with friends in San Diego Friday night, which means I left Virgil by himself with some extra food for about 36 hours. When I returned home, he seemed a little punky - he was sleeping by the radiator by the window and he just seemed lighter and weaker than usual. His nose was snotty, his purr was barely audible, he didn't seem to want to cuddle, and in the morning he didn't bug me for food as he usually would.
Virgil has always been a bit of a punky cat - he's scrawny, oddly shaped by a benign birth defect, prone to respiratory infections, and has a nasty chronic ear infection that no vet has yet had an adequate solution for. So it wasn't a surprise, but I really hoped he would get better without needing a vet trip.
I'd been fussing over his cruddy nose and ear and he clearly didn't like that and got mad at me and sulked in the corner. Even though I'd been well-intentioned he was now giving me clear signals that it was feeling too sensitive, and I could tell he didn't trust that he couldn't come over to me without my trying to de-crust him with a kleenex.
So the next time he came up on the bed, I said, "Virgil, I know you're mad at me right now because I was cleaning your ear, so I won't do it anymore today. I'll just pet you nicely the way you like. Come sit here and make a snuggle and try to feel better." He was suspicious at first but I tuned in energetically, got very delicate with my touch, and told him he was a good kitty, and in about five minutes' time he relaxed and started purring again.
I put on some Abraham Hicks youtube clips and we snuggled together while listening. Somehow, the weight seemed to return to his body - he no longer felt wispy and weak. The volume returned to his purr, and he started responding to my touch again like he usually does, by rubbing his face against my knuckles. And then maybe 30min later I got up to make myself some food, and he came with me and ate some chicken from his usual place on the footstool next to the coffee table.
Now he's sleeping next to me while I've been writing my last few posts, and the snot is completely gone from his nose. The ear infection is an ongoing thing, but it doesn't seem to be bothering him at the moment. He seems completely back to his normal self.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. The idea is that the Velveteen Rabbit wants very badly to become real, even though he doesn't know what that means. He thinks maybe he has to be fancy or slick to be real, in order to please the little boy he belongs to, but he's told that it's just the opposite - that when he becomes real, he'll be shabby and ripping at the seams, buttons falling off of him. He finds out that the way to become real is by being loved, but really what is happening is that he and the boy are establishing an energetic relationship. He's no longer the brand new stuffed rabbit on the shelf of the toy store, identical to all the others - he now has his own relationship to the boy, which means he has his own identity, his own spirit.
When I think about this story, I think back to taking the Healer's Process retreat with Katherine Bird last summer and how I arrived knowing that my biggest challenge was embodiment. I was so down with all the academics of shamanism, I took furious notes, I grokked it intellectually so hard, but I resisted all the movement practices that were designed with embodiment in mind. I hated being in my body. I told the group this on the first day. "My body got tired of all the pain and abuse I was subjecting it to, and it doesn't have a good relationship with me now. It doesn't trust me anymore, because I kept exposing it to things it didn't want to feel, and eventually I made a sport of how much it could endure, because I was conditioned to believe that strength was toughness. My body gave up on me a long time ago."
Katherine taught us how the point of the practices was to clear the body of its accumulated energetic rubbish so that the spirit could enter, that the spirit requires a clear channel to be brought down into human form in the way that creates that mastery of presence. My body, I realized, was like an episode of Hoarders, and I was basically living outside the house. And if you want to clean your house, you're going to have to go inside it.
I don't really know how I did this, exactly, because of all the things I have accomplished in the past year, adding a daily meditative movement practice to my routine has not been one of them (although it is probably a great idea and I would almost certainly benefit, but... I need to pace out the changes I'm ushering in). But I did agree that it was time for me to be in my body. My healer Katherine Gerardi spent a session energetically releasing the filmy layer of my D-triad, dissociation/depersonalization/desensitization. At Amy Jo Goddard's Fire Woman Retreat I declared that my body was now for my own pleasure rather than for everyone else's approval, and that I from now on I was only going to accept touch that felt like a gift rather than a theft. I had a few sexual experiences that I can say were unquestionably pleasurable on a bodily level, and I had several incidences where I was able to tune in and honor my body's desire to not go somewhere or do something, and in those instances I responsibly canceled plans or set boundaries, or I didn't, quite enough, and I made a note of it and learned.
My body is starting to trust me again, even as we're both being slow and careful about what we expose ourselves to, even as we're going out less and less, even as we really honor where we're at and how we feel. It's a process, but it's unfolding.
My relationship to everything is changing. Nowhere is it more obvious than in my singing - if you listen to my recordings from 2012 next to the ones released last month, the difference is palpable. The same goes for my body language in videos of my performances - five years ago I was frozen grasping the mic of R-Bar, unsure of what to do with my hands or feet. This year, I filmed a video guerilla-style walking down the Hollywood Walk of Fame in broad daylight, not caring who was watching me, fully committed and sincere in every gesture. And sure, you could argue that those things come with practice and experience, but I know what the feeling is behind it, and it was an inability to continue to allow anything to stand in the way of my truth.
A year ago this weekend, I sang for the first time in ceremony, and I was shown then what was meant by the angelic nature - the angelic nature is the genius of the flow state (https://www.facebook.com/arden.leigh/posts/1653808464633881). I really didn't think I possessed that when it came to music, but the Archangel Michael (via the shaman channeling) had told me to sing because, he said, my voice carried the angelic chords. I saw flashes of myself, moments where it came through. The most accurate way to express it is that that was the night I fell in love with myself. That was the night I saw myself and I took my breath away. I sang, and I saw a vision of myself in the perfection of the flow state. "I am the light I see in others."
Today, I watch myself back on video and I see it. I recognize it because I know that others are picking up on it too, describing it with different language. Several reviews of the album pointed not just to my voice's power or talent but to its expressiveness, using words like "piquant" - which makes me think of the pleasant savory feeling I get eating the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of hint-of-lime Tostitos, which is an oddly coherent metaphor for how I also feel hearing some of my more deliberate enunciations in the songs. I'm still figuring out how to put it into words, but when the voice started flowing more effortlessly, I could concentrate more on the delivery of the message, and with that came the connection to spirit flowing through me into the words, landing as softly or as sharply as I needed them to. And of course my hearing has gotten better, and much to my producers' chagrin I am way pickier about my mixes, and now I know why I was called to create music - because in consigning myself to words alone I was only playing with one half of my brain. I was comfortable in the logic/reason/language polarity but not in the emotion/feeling/sensing one. It turns out the angelic chords aren't just about singing, that the flow state is also about having a more sensitive energetic relationship to music, being able to hear and feel, so that in creating music I can utilize a more colorful palette for communication since sound carries so many distinct archetypal flavors with it. Like Alan Watts says, the sound of a gong cannot be experienced in the words "the sound of a gong."
I recently wrote to Kat Bird, "I remember during your class your saying that energetic mastery would come in handy for someone like me so I could remain in my body even when I was in front of 500 people, because I remember at the time thinking that that sounded reasonable in theory but that I had no problem with nerves in front of big crowds. What energetic mastery really gave me was something so much richer and more colorful, it connected me to the perfection of the angelic nature, the flow state. And it broadened the range of colors I can express myself with by allowing me to tap into that very piquancy I had rarely been able to access in myself before."
I don't know how else to describe it except that my house has been cleaned and my spirit is finally feeling at home in my body. That I feel like the Velveteen Rabbit, becoming real with love, because I now have an energetic relationship with myself, which when you think about it is what love is.
And when you think about the fact that my cat went on this same healing journey too, that he went from being a fussy, hissy, non-purring, non-snuggling grump to having the relationship of trust and affection that we have today (story here), then it makes sense that he and I would also have a change in our energetic relationship, not unlike the boy and the Velveteen Rabbit.
And that maybe that energetic relationship of embodiment, the bringing down of the spirit into the body, can even save us a trip to the vet.
