Green Is Half Blues
How do you feel about 45 and rainy? Thunder booming like a Civil War reenactment? Oh, how about icy mini marshmallows pelting the window like aggressive little stones. Just when I've surrendered to another month in these pilly sweaters, a holy strip of blue slices through the sky's white dome and somewhere behind me a surreal, garish rainbow drops in, "Oh, hi. Oh, this old thing? Yea. ".
This springtime weather sometimes mirrors my moods, sometimes jerks me around like an impulsive dance partner. The contrast between winter's Desert Storm khaki and spring's popping array of pastels can feel like the jolt of a carnival ride. Although the little yellow birds flash on my balcony and speedily snag my gaze, part of me wants to spend a little longer pondering all these subtle, maybe more dull shades of bird and catkin that are of this moment.
Similarly, my mood is more blue today, as I ruminate on what seems like a lifelong story that loops like an old reel-to-reel. It plays this way, then that, repeating its theme song of "not quite good enough yet". I am an expert at redirecting, or maybe it's distracting, but today that stategy just can't take hold. I need to sit in this story, this hue of blue: to consider how it actually is essential to the story of the intermittently emerging green of early spring. Parts of myself that have been abandoned resurface and demand recognition. This green of spring is half blue (my biography), and half yellow, (the unknown of my life-yet-unlived).
As I've been writing here, in front of my big nature-view windows, the dome of gray has become dominated by blue, the balcony enriched by shadows as the sun takes its turn to sing a solo.
I won't let this kind of blue distract or dilute my old stories' request for my gaze, but I could borrow the sun's warmth and friendliness, and invite my exiled parts to sit with me, assuring them that I want them here.
You may recognize aspects of Richard Shwartz's Internal Family Systems work. He suggests six steps to meeting and knowing all our parts, including "befriend" and "flesh it out". In my practices, I also include physical and artistic expression to encourage these parts to step into the spotlight and show me who they are, in an embodied way.
In my yoga therapy client sessions, I provide the safe, friendly, confidential environment for folks to meet their parts, express them, and ask them what they need. We use words, movement, visualization, and sometimes art supplies.
Many of our banished parts simply want to be seen, heard and acknowledged.
Movement, singing, and drawing are some ways to access the intuition and creativity of the right brain. When we can let the left brain relax, and stop trying to "figure everything out", a wisdom arises about how to go forward. This wisdom is always here, but is typically blocked by left-brain habituation and fear. Like the clouds' intermittent covering of the sun, we may have moments of clarity that are forgotten again. Practicing, perhaps through right brain activities, is key to more freedom from forgetting what we always knew. The yogis call this knowing vidya.
My teacher calls it remembering.
The sky has gone white again, like the old TV white screen from my childhood. This writing and choosing images was the right-brain activity to remind me of my inherent wisdom, dormant though it may be! Maybe I can still remember that the sun is there, and will be there, when my blue is ready to ripen to green.
