BREATHING SPACE

It has been just a little over a year since I was diagnosed with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Group 1 caused by Scleroderma, an autoimmune disease I was diagnosed with over 25 years ago.

In this past year, I had to come face-to-face with my limits. My pain limits, my energy limits, my tolerance limits. I have had to face the idea of my mortality and what that looks like or how I desire that it be knowing that in the end I won’t have the control I so desire and must surrender to what it will be.

However, to the degree that I do have control, I have made my wishes known to my family, my friends, to my doctors. And so I am at peace with the idea of leaving the physical. Actually, I’m much more comfortable with that idea than the one in which I live a much longer life.

Interesting isn’t it that dying feels more comfortable than living? I ask myself why that is. I don’t exactly know that answer but what I do know is that living has most often felt difficult for me. I think I’m afraid to feel pain and yet this past year I have endured an incredible amount of both physical and emotional pain.  I tell myself I’m not strong enough to live with or endure what the future holds and yet my history tells me that is a lie because I have risen to every single challenge with which I have been faced in my life.

Is it that I trust what comes next much more than I trust life in the body? Perhaps. For I do. I have a rich, powerful connection with Spirit. I trust it. I know that when I am no longer in the body I will be free to just be the love that I know I am. I trust that knowing. I believe in my knowing for it comes from my deep relationship with the Divinity that resides in this physical body I inhabit as Raven.

At times my human and my spirit have felt at war with each other. My human body believing it knows best, my soul patiently waiting for me to catch up. My soul creating breathing space for me to access my Divinity.

What this past year has taught me is to inhabit this breathing space. This space created by my soul in order to feel the pain, the fear, the anger that comes with living life with a terminal diagnosis. Actually to living life period. The truth of this past year is that in spite of the pain, the meds, the fear, I lived my life more fully than I have in a long time. I traveled, to prove I still could. I scheduled healing sessions with clients to show myself I was still me. I did not let this diagnosis define who I was as a wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend, healer, artist.

I was as present as I could be in the moments that made up this past year. Whether I was writhing in pain in the sanctity of my healing space, giggling with my Soulsister’s or at the bedside of my son while he was in the hospital, I was present. I was breathing, I was loving, I was living.

And really that’s all one can do when faced with life in all its forms.

Breathe
Be present
Live Love Laugh Cry Rage Live Love Laugh (Repeat)
Give thanks for the whole package

And THAT leads me to a space of feeling limitless in a limited space.