I’ve gone through many long periods in my life when I’ve cried almost every day.

The faster I’m growing and making changes in my life, taking risks, putting myself into uncomfortable situations in the pursuit of expanding my comfort zone, the more I cry.

The more somatic meditation I do, the more I cry.

The more embodiment and healing work I do, the more I cry.

Crying is associated with growth, healing, and letting go of pain.

Vulnerability is necessary for true leadership.

It takes more courage to be with the pain than to try to run away from it.

And trying to run away can only ever work temporarily anyway.

What’s good about turning toward our pain, is that it gives us a chance to be with life as it really is, as opposed to sustaining our neuroticism, our ego-projects, trying to freeze everything in place, trying to control ourselves and everyone around us.

When we turn towards our pain, we remember that it was for us the whole time.

It is the fuel that empowers us with purpose and clarity, when we turn toward it, as a practice.

And we begin to discover more life with less effort required for the living.

We discover a life that is surrendered to something even greater than our own attempts to build and protect who we think we are.

We are so much more, so much more beautiful than any idea we could come up with.

And when we practice being with life as it really is, through embodied, somatic practices, we experience more of the beauty, ease and infinite grace of life.

Crazy, I know.

Counter-intuitive…. or, at least, counter-conditioning.

It turns out that the poison is the cure.

The pain is the medicine which, when we turn towards it, transforms us into more of whom we are really meant to be:

Infinitely, more fully ALIVE.