This is Heart work. Everything is changing. I know that I am sitting with all the discomfort and repeating, “I don’t want to go back”. I don’t want the world to go back to the way it was. I honestly don’t think it’s even possible. So how do I use my actions and words to make that real? The events over the last 4 months only amplified everything already that needed work. I got triggered and reacted with fear that I had buried. It shed light on things I had never even remembered while knowing the whole world was suffering the loudest and most united even in trauma that it’s ever been. Being able to feel my own pain and empathy for all those hurting around me is a gift. Being able to be concerned and to do something about it is a gift. Heartbreak is a gift and once it breaks it keeps growing and breaking more. Can I sit in it? Let it change me? Am I the same as I was in Feb or March? I’m not. I don’t want to go back either. I don’t want to ever close my heart down. Surrendering to the suspension of chaos and creation that lives in heartbreak. To make space for more change. This surrender not sacrifice. So I train at home, teach from home. I train for me and for you. There is a sense of responsibility for being a part of nurturing this new life, especially because the new world is taking shape. Aikido is the non-verbal communication of love and consideration with gigantic lessons in ego death that I can only find when I do the hardest work. It requires me to be sitting in the discomfort of doing 1,000 irimi tenkans at home until we can be safe going back to the dojo. It’s the time I take to find the holding patterns, the locked up memories in my framework, the allowance of acknowledgement, the forgiveness necessary to be able to allow a new flow of information where once only trauma lived. Because it isn’t about how powerful that I can throw someone or how it feels when you see someone fly across the room. It should be about how much I can take care of the person who is offering themselves to help me learn through an authentic amount of risk and connection to help me learn how to evolve as a human. To be able to train without speaking the same language as I do, to be able to consider loving and caring for the person without even knowing their name, the framework, their training background. To be able to see beyond gender or race. To be aware of your own framework and sit in the discomfort of unlearning damaging, old habits. To give someone unconscious permission to feel safe. Maybe for the first time. It’s about how much capacity that I have to look outside of just myself and take care of the people around me. My training partners and teachers gave me this gift. It is my charge, my call to action to provide this for others.
The + internal work and the external work +. This is the work that I will be doing right alongside you. It’s medicine and it’s nutrition. It’s necessary and it’s time. Take care of each other. We are changing the world.
It starts with me. It starts with you.
With love, Anna