My sensory awareness group met today.  As I settled into myself and felt the support of the floor and the chair, a tear came and rolled down my cheek.  My throat felt tight and scratchy and I began to cough. Grief extended into my heart and down to my feet.

I shared that I was experiencing a visceral feeling of grief from my brother’s death on April 14th.  I had hoped I’d moved on.

Later, a woman  who’d just completed a workshop at Spirit Rock on death, dying and aging asked if I thought what I was feeling related “just” to my brother’s death.  I knew that it was more than that. She suggested that my feelings related to impermanence.

I could feel how true that was.

Later we worked with flexibility using partly inflated balls.  I felt my holding and inflexibility. I was trying to hold a stance of strength. I felt the work of holding back tears, what it does to my legs, neck, and spine.

What I learned today is that flexibility and impermanence relate and when I can honor the waves of both, float a little more openly on the natural movement I am, I can breathe, and tears may come, but in and through the tears there are waves, and released, I breathe, and am breathed.

Allowing immersion in impermanence, I hold both joy and sorrow, no dividing, and there I celebrate the wonder of being alive. Vitality is my wand and spring when I honor that impermanence is the ocean and land we share.  There’s nothing to do and nowhere to go. I’m here.