Back to Center

Lake Ilopango, El Salvador

How do you find your grounding when the fallout is a violent plummet? How do you stop yourself if the downward spiral is only picking up momentum? How can you pick yourself up again?

Being consumed by the lower states of being is like stepping through the floor. It’s a jarring and harsh drop.

There is no possibility of stopping, only the building of momentum.

But what if they key was not to resist but to let be. To surrender to whatever emotional purge needs to happen. To understand that the resistance elongates the fall but the adherence allows us to reach the bottom more quickly.

At the bottom, we can feel the ground more solidly. We find it easier to stand. To rise again to elevate ourselves to some higher level of vibration.

What does center look like?

I asked myself this at the bottom of particularly brutal spiral post breakup in August of last while on a revival trip in El Salvador.

My unlovability penetrated the marrow of my bones, leaving a searing acuteness of pain. Beyond the pain was the hollowness of despair and despondency.

Where do I go from here? What do I do with the pain? It has been but a few short hours since I’ve been consumed by grief that coiled into shame. Wasn’t it just the other day that I felt these strangling emotions so that I could release them? How cruelty is this reappearance of such inexhaustible dismay?

Practice makes perfect mercilessly rings into my mind and I see that, with the cycle repeating itself, I know what must be done. I must return to the pain in search of answers for that is where they will be found. The body knows how. Its knowledge is old and instinctual and is not to be questioned. My mind blocks the road to the pain, but I know another route. I know where the secret passage lies and, dark as it may be, it is one I must take.

I start driving up the highway with no destination in mind. The car wraps me in a layer of safety from the outside world and I feel swaddled like a baby. It gives me access to a tangible freedom that enables me to flee and feel as I need and as I please. I run not from myself but to myself. The mindlessness of driving on a straight road in which it’s impossible to get lost allows me to get lost in the crevices where I keep the things hidden. I rummage through them and they surface with a surge.

I feel it all, leaving no emotion unattended to. They heave through me, varying their intensity and duration, caring not for my personal preferences or comfort.

I feel until I’m numb and then I just hover in existence. My rote ability to drive frees my mind to just be, void of any demand to think or do.

This state of neutrality consumes me and brings me back to life. After a long while, I turn the car around to follow path home. I scale the ladder from neutrality to acceptance for my current life status. My jaw, once clenches, relaxes as I voice my remembrance that pain is but a catalyst for change. It’s a shaker so that we can be movers. I accept that pain is the price of loving deeply and that feeling anything at all is the price of being human. Above all else, these emotions are but fleeting clouds that come and go, sometimes staying longer than we’d like, sometimes ruining a fun-filled vacation, but always, always, always moving through us. Regardless of the pace.

My heart starts to lift with each glimpse of the ocean below and I feel as if I’m on a long extended path of the Pacific Coast Highway. A perk of inspiration is looming somewhere on the coastline up ahead and the same question resurfaces.

What does center look like?

Having moved past the grief, I have access to an answer.

Yet, the relief is temporary. A few days later and I wake in a frozen state. I lay paralyzed. The emotion is buried deep within me, and it is with a futile attempt that I dig for it, trying to extract it. It renders me incapable of making a decision, much less putting one to action.

It’s a place so stagnant there is little chance of finding hope here. But even in barren landscapes life has a chance.

I allow the immobilization to take hold, aware at some level of knowing that it’s temporary. From the still chaos comes a subtle trickle of knowing what to do.

An image appears in the form of a caldera filled with A coffee shop with a grand vista of this lake is my destination and between us lay fear and the unknown. I know not how I will get there and my resistance to buy an international phone plan wipes out any comfort google could provide me.

I begin. Fear, trepidation, anxiety, and all. They are my not-so-noble companions from the Pacific Coast through the capital to the lake region of Ilopango. Driving outside of the heavily regulated traffic laws of the United States creates much doubt in my mind regarding my ability to drive with competence.

I doubt myself. I have mostly been in the passenger seat when driving in Latin America and I know their ways. The lines on the road are mere splashes of paint as the people collectively decide that the highway will have 8 lanes instead of 5. Merging lanes seems to involve some form of telepathy and I haven’t the bandwidth to join the masses on whatever frequency they communicate through.

On top of the lack of laws are the lack of signs indicating which road is which. More often than not, I’m given directions using number of streets and simple directions. It sounds like 3 streets, turn left, straight 8 streets, turn right, straight and then ahí estás

And there I am.

I grip the wheel in front of me as San Salvador rolls past me on my left. There are so many things that could go wrong, but there is a knowing that no ill fate will befall me. I choose faith over fear, rooted in feeling the pull of what is calling me. I choose feeling over thinking. Now is not the time to be in my head. I put my thoughts to rest and I look at the world spreading out before me as I turn away from the city and toward the rolling valleys that roll up to volcanoes.

To me, center looks like a cup of steaming hot coffee and a grand vista. Something in nature or something in comfort. Something with cushions and colors that calm the mind. A crater lake filled with crystal water and flanked by mountains. It’s the sun hitting me at just the right spot as if I were a lazing cat or basking lizard. It’s warmth that heats me from the inside out.

For me, back to center is not complicated, nor does it come with bells or whistles. But always, it comes after I fully purge a downward spiral of lower vibrational states. I let it rush over me, take me where it will, which is, inevitably, to the bottom. The less resistance, the quicker the fall. The quicker the fall, the easier it is to see how temporary it all is. The easier it is to stand back up and make a decision to do one little thing that will elevate my emotional state.