Sunday Night Magic – Meenal’s Version

How do you experience magic in your life?

Playing with subtle energy IS where the Magic is!

I won’t rehash the “on the surface” details of what happened Sunday night since Kris already shared them in his post on Sunday Night Magic. What I am excited and absolutely floored by was my reaction to the email that we both received. I GOT ANGRY! Not just ANGRY, but the rage full, vindictive kind of angry … the kind that wants to hurl fire back and torch the person who said the thing.

Huh??? How can this be a good thing in a conscious relationship???? Especially when this type of upping the ante perpetuates the cycle of violence we see in our world around us?

My life story has been one of silencing myself, avoiding confrontation, building layer upon layer of protection after two sexual assaults that occurred over 35 years ago, using “calm, confident, and competent” as a skillful way to hide my numbness. The frozen numbness had been so deep and thick that I could not access my heat … sex, passion, anger. Irritation and annoyance was the most I would allow myself to feel. I can attest to the reality that Brene Brown points to when she says you cannot selectively numb out one emotion without numbing all of them.

I have been on a decade-long quest to find my heat. It has meant shedding familial beliefs, my “calm, confident and competent” identity, and agreements in a very strong and loving relationship. “Peace and harmony” which were the old measurement have been replaced by “Heat and electricity”. All of this in a very conscious, loving, embodied way. It has meant that Kris has had to shed his own familial wounding around anger so that we could both welcome heat of any kind into our relationship.

So for me, the magic on Sunday night was the flow, force and magnitude of my anger! To be able to hold the intensity of it, to let myself feel all of it, to watch my mind rage and develop vengeful strategies! All the while trusting so deeply that with my embodied practices I could alchemize this heated expression of my erotic energy into something strong, powerful, and truthful.

Yes, you read that right! I said “erotic”. That’s intentional, even knowing I’ll push buttons with that word. I have never experienced the energy that animates me and the world around me as still. In waiting to feel the stillness in meditation, I would dismiss and negate the aliveness and vibrancy that would show up. There is always a pulse, a vibration, a flow that I sense. All very subtle, but there nonetheless. It is serpentine, undulating, buzzing, morphing from one feeling to another. It animates, it enlivens, it entices. How can that anything other than erotic?

So when my anger erupted spontaneously, forcefully, I could embrace it for what it was … the natural flow of my erotic energy, simply flavored with heat in that moment. Rumi wrote, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” The heat is one of many flavors that love can have. The barriers are the vengeful story, the pain of the “shut up” that I had sensed underneath the words in the email, and the reflexive overcompensating for the slowly healing wound from years of shutting myself up as a way to survive in this world. Had I not released them Sunday night by emptying out, the resulting resentment would have been a quick drying cement further thickening the barrier.

I am grateful for all that I have cleared from my body that I could viscerally feel the impact of the “shut up” as soon as it happened. I am grateful for the tools and practices I have that allow me to discharge the pain-stimulated thoughts, the emotional angst, and the impulse to retaliate before they harden into resentments. I am immensely grateful for the world-wide sisterhood that I have through Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts that I could find a sister goddess eager to witness my emptying out at 10pm on a Sunday night.