We Stayed in the woods

These are stories of stories. The tellings of the work I do. All situations are true accounts. All realms are included. All things are shared with permission. Names are omitted for privacy.


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She sits down as she holds her arms close to her body. The little gap between her ribs and her forearm is just a sliver but cradles lifetimes of tension. 
She has come to find the parts and layers that have become buried. Her eyes seem as though they are always a bit ocean like. Salty.
She lives on the edge of complete emotion and numbness; the thread that weaves together the innocence of childhood and a future that has always felt heavy for no explicable reason. 
Pressure comes like waves that bare down on her as she tries to keep her lungs inflated with enough breath that the force doesn't collapse her. 
I take her hand and place my fingers at the point on the outside of her wrist. The balancer of the nervous system. 
When I touch her body I  get the sensation of squeezing, as though the space inside is being replaced by something pressing against her. 
I close my eyes and see mothers and fathers of fathers. The tension runs through. There is a cord, it ties old patterns through generations. 
With one swift intention it's cut. Simply. With honor. 
As we travel deeper we do not avoid the tension. There is no skirting around. Everything has intelligence. We let the pressure speak. 
It tells her it had come to fetch her. To wake her. It was the only way it knew how to call her to her depths. Like a storm that forces the sapling's roots to grow deeper, out of necessity. Out of balance. This is the language of nature. 
Not the balance of the scales. The balance of what follows the next, what gives life or lies down because of the force of something else. This isn't merely cause and effect, but it is the web that quivers when one strand is touched. 
The mind. We call in the mind. The Ally of the observer and the lens of perception. 'What if,' we ask the mind, what if this force, is but a loving intelligence leading her into herself? Guiding her into the cave of her own power?'

We stay in the woods surrounded by the tall trees, our elders, for many hours. 
We stay, and with the rattle of the seeds in their pouch, and the boughs of the cedar we talk to the insides and the outsides until they flow into one. Until it is no longer the grip of the unknown, but the guidance of something both within and without. 
Raven comes and so does deer. They come not because they are called, but because they are connected. Because when you weave one part of the web, it all quivers. 
I'm holding the points on her wrists again. There is a river of energy moving  down her arm into her body. Into her womb. There is a conversation happening between her nervous system and the place she created life. They had been shut off from one another. Just now the river runs through. Almost a lifetime of catching up. Her womb speaks of babies she's nurtured into creation and her nervous system hums about years of exhausting vigilance against a stimulus of fear. 
They speak until both relax into a mutual agreement that the fear was false and they settle into the awe of accomplishment despite. 
Raven calls out and I hear deer's hoof steps in the branches off to the right. 
The earth is still damp beneath us. The canopy has shaded us from the sun. Here we are held. 
I place my hands on her feet. I press into the big toe points. Merge the spirit with the body. Her body shimmies slightly as I hold concentrated pressure and a sweep of heat comes through. 
It is complete in this moment. The whole web quivers. 

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