space and fear
Two big things:
First, I went on an incredible trip to Mary's Place by the Sea - a free retreat center for cancer survivors/ women living with cancer. I'm still sifting through all of what it meant to me and what came up and I'm sure I'll write about it in the future.
For now, on the topic of space and fear, I will say that just getting there - disentangling from codependent familial bonds, stepping off my high horse of being "the one who is always needed," acknowledging that I wanted space and could pursue that want - was a feat in and of itself.
Second, I now have a home office! It has light, plants, and most importantly...a door. This room had been my kids' playroom. Neither one was using it, and I was resentfully working from the dining room table, sighing at each interruption. Still, I felt that taking this space for myself would be wrong. More than wrong, fully impossible. Until one day, I just started moving their stuff out and my stuff in. Little by little I took up more and more space.
It's hard to precisely describe the fear that came up around this. As per usual, my body reacted before my brain could formulate thoughts and (TMI) my stomach was a mess.
Even as I look at these pictures and I see the beauty of that sunrise and the happiness on my face in this bright room, I feel sad that it took SO MUCH (cancer, to be exact) for me to allow myself these spaces: the stepping away, the taking up.
Ironically, fear of death is what made me take the leap to go for it. And fear of what? Of living? Of having needs? Of believing in my business? Of doing things that I thought might inconvenience others? is what made it take so long.
Tara Mohr in Playing Big, cites Rabbi Alan Lew's interpretation of different words for fear in biblical Hebrew:
Pachad is “projected or imagined fear,”...that, in contemporary terms, is what we might think of as overreactive, irrational, lizard brain fear: the fear of horrible rejection that will destroy us or the fear that we will simply combust if we step out of our comfort zones. There is a second Hebrew word for fear, yirah...{described as} “the fear that overcomes us when we suddenly find ourselves in possession of considerably more energy than we are used to, inhabiting a larger space than we are used to inhabiting. It is also the feeling we feel when we are on sacred ground.
For me, taking and taking up space brings up both. Pachad that everyone will hate me and fall apart if I take/take up space. Yirah that I am tapping into a new sense of purpose, that I've been through some scary shit (twice!), that all of it matters and means something that I want to understand, that I'm lucky to be here.
So, what was your biggest act of taking space or taking up space? What came up for you when you did it?
