The fullness of your own ecosystem.
Years ago, in a session as a client this time, I found myself describing the way I felt inside. On the outside, things looked fine. I was functioning and doing what needed to be done (side note: beware the “fine” that creeps into your descriptions of self!)
But.
When I slowed down enough to feel how I actually was? A different sort of story: desolate, alone, burned crisp, dizzy. Somewhere off in the dark, spinning.
“Wow,” said the practitioner. “That sounds like a terrible place to live.”
It was a terrible place to live. I realized, with a jolt of surprise, that I wasn’t describing a living body so much as a moon. This place - this me - was devoid of much gravity, caught in the orbit of the planets around me. What mattered was elsewhere. Life was elsewhere. Subtly, without meaning to, I had constructed myself as someone who moves around what others need, that responds to where “real” life lives: far away.
Only after I felt the weight of this description did I remember: I’m a planet, actually. Fecund. Full of life. Oxygenated. I had forgotten the fullness of my own ecosystem. The recognition returned me to myself. The relief was palpable.
(My wise daughter, when I shared this metaphor with her, pointed out that planets also exist in orbits - just larger orbits, around the sun. She’s right, of course. And with her scientific help we might take this further: We are moving together, but perhaps we don’t need to drain our own life to sustain the universe. Perhaps tending the place we live builds more intimacy, more interconnection.)
Over the years, I’ve watched this small acknowledgement re-set a sense of holding in countless clients: You are your own planet. A life-sustaining, complex, wholly alive ecosystem.
As pandemic restrictions lift, could I gently request, dear reader, that you not become a moon to all that is required of you, to all the ways you are needed and necessary? The outside may look the same - you may be working as much and washing the same dishes - but somewhere inside you’re holding the truth that your actual life is here, on your own planet. That there is an entire world to inhabit, one full of mystery, with its own wise pacing. Its own particular rhythms. This is you, beloved.
Ending with a little song from the Bengsons that contains this sweet line, “The world needs you / more than it needs what you do…”