It arrived on Monday, May 1, 2017. Beltane. A time when Spring is at her peak and the energies of Life burst forth with verdant abundance and fertility. Renewal, sensuality, vitality, joy...a time to bring ideas, hopes and dreams into action. This was the day in which the news arrived:
“Teresa Reid, this certifies that you have completed the Open Floor Teacher Training.”
Inhale. Exhale. Deep sigh. Tears. While congratulations swarmed in...support and love and encouragement from peers and mentors, family and friends...bittersweet tears flowed across my face. Relief. Praise. An echo of loss. Here I was, standing at the threshold and completion of my training, just one week after leading my final Monday Open Floor (for the time being). The irony was too much for my mind to handle. My ego, so full of ideas, perceptions, and dreams of how it was supposed to be, went into full blown tantrum!
"This isn't how the dream goes," it murmured, "If you align your heart and soul to the path that calls you and follow your bliss it's supposed to flow with ease, right? Doors are supposed to be opening rather than closing!"
I had crossed some kind of threshold, indeed. Arriving somewhere I never thought I'd have to come. I didn't know how I had gotten here. I couldn't see where I was going. The vision I had devoted myself to for the past 9 years, including an image of who I wanted to be, the work I wanted to share...the DREAM of aligning my
work with what I loved...all of it was up and ready for the Dance of Surrender.
One of my teachers, Toko-pa Turner, speaks of this place as initiation by exile. You'll know it, she said, when your world view crumbles and everything you know about how to BE in the world dissolves - when you don't know what's next and part of you wants to go back but you can't. It is in these moments of exile that the only thing left to do is INHABIT the place WHERE YOU ARE - to let the absence you feel enlarge your life.
To let the absences we feel enlarge our lives.
I have always believed and experienced this work as something that is ALIVE. It meets us where we're at; continually moving, shaping, and molding us within the fires of discipline and surrender. The Open Floor training taught me discipline. Commitment. Holding a clear, heart centered vector. And now, on this threshold I am learning a thing or two about surrender! How to serve the work as it is NOW, not as I wish it could be or as it is lived by another. How to orient to an internal compass rather than external value, opinions or attachments. How to discover my way to honor the work, the dance, and how it lives through me...at this point in my life.
That may not look like ANYTHING I had imagined. In fact, it may look more like letting go. In some ways, by surrendering my dream I am finally learning to BELONG to my work. To know my love of movement is integral to Who I Am. It is the true calling of my medicine and although I can't always see or understand where the dance is taking me, I know it is dynamic. There will be moments of expansion and contraction, togetherness and exile. Some doors will open while others close. By holding a long vision of the dream while surrendering outcome...committing to endure while following the tiny whispers of my heart...I know, in time, something will emerge. Something beautiful will emerge.
I Love You ~ Keep Going ~ Teresa