Bear with me, while I tell you about loss, this loss and how it’s working me, changing me and I am becoming a different version of myself. Bear with me, because I’m not sure I have words for it yet, but it feels like it lives deep in my belly and I keep putting my hands there over and over again. And somehow I know that this is where life really is, where truth lives.

I have spent so much of my life in my chest, fluttering slightly above myself like a hummingbird. And at times I even have memories from the perspective of the ceiling because I needed to be slightly out of body to tolerate the moment. Like that time I auditioned for a gospel choir in San Francisco and I sang This Little Light of Mine, I’m going to let it shine… acappella except that I was so terrified (and terrible) that I floated all the way up to the ceiling.

But since my dad passed, I feel the gravity, the gravitas, the soberness of landing in my body, of my hand on my belly and I am realizing that I don’t need to impress anyone from here. That from here, I don’t need to perform or be bright or shiny or upbeat. And how much energy that actually takes. I’m conserving my energy.

Bear with me, because I’ve forgotten what else I wanted to tell you, but it feels important that I let you know that you don’t have to do that either. To be shiny or bright or upbeat. What’s not true takes so much energy.

And Laurie told me about Joni Mitchell this morning and how Joni started playing jazz and made two whole albums like that, but nobody seemed to like them and the albums didn’t sell very well. But here’s the thing I heard Laurie say: She was playing the music that was actually moving through her and not the music others wanted her to play.

And I wonder what music wants to move through me now and what music comes from that belly place and what gets birthed from there.Bear with me, because I’m not sure where I’m going with this, something about loss and how I am a different shape now and how I am grateful for this. Something about what wants to move through me and how I want it to be from my belly, from my gut and not the fluttery place of pleasing. And how I want that for you too.

Leave a comment if you resonate with this message about creating from this place of belly and knowing… I’m wondering if this is a developmental phase for women!