HUGE!

"You're HUGE!"

Not the greeting a pregnant woman with 7 weeks to go is thrilled to hear at 8:45 in the morning. I was torn between wanting to laugh out loud at the brutal honesty of it, to flush with embarrassment or to feel stung. I suppose it was a bit of all three if I am to be honest.

It did get me thinking though - and thankfully, I have the luxury of some time this morning to come to my blog. As a sidebar, I'm quite relieved to be here. Working as a Physio, even part-time in a supportive setting, is beginning to remind me why I left in the first place. The pace is soul sucking. The process, the worldview, what I would describe as the low expectations that people hold for their health and well-being, becomes very dense and heavy. My energy is beginning to flag at this point in my pregnancy which seems to compound this sense of density.

I do find that creativity flows in different ways when I step into the Physio world. While I struggle to create on the page, I become very creative though my "hands on" interactions with clients. The concept of 'energy flows where attention' goes has never felt more true. After a long absence from daily contact with clients I have realized that an incredible thing happens when I can focus, become still and breathe in the midst of the chaos - and that is that I can "see" with my hands. Not the quite the way I see with my eyes, but more like I can feel through layers of tissue and sense when I have reached the place where the injury lies. I can "see" the physical issue through my fingers and know just how and where to move to next. After learning all the basics, something clicked and I began to make it up as I went along. My friend and colleague, Irene and I have often shared a laugh over how we struggle to reduce what we have just done with a client in a chart - friendly form. Its not impossible it just requires an incredible amount of reductionism - hence the soul sucking! But I digress....

"You're HUGE!"

After flinching inside, feeling betrayed once again by a body that doesn't seem to fit the norm - I realized that yes, in fact, I AM huge. I have never been a delicate creature - at least not in my recollection. I have been fit and fat and everything in between. I am currently enormous with child as my body is taken over by a process that is unstoppable and infinitely creative. Who I will be, what I will look like afterward remains a mystery to me. One thing will remain, however, and that is my hugeness. It may not be physical size but it most definitely will be robustness.

I have a huge spirit. I love life. I'm not likely to disappear in a room - even when I want to! I've spent years and endless amounts of energy trying to disappear. Trying to become smaller than I am by dieting, slouching, treading lightly, speaking softly, laughing quietly. Its just not me ... its me attempting to be someone else and it simply doesn't work because part of the robustness of me will always sneak out somewhere and blow my cover. Even worse, leave others wondering just who I am really based on the paradox of who I am authentically and who I have been acting like.

Which leads me off into another tangent that has been snaking its way through my journal pages and that is my comfort with paradox. Off and on over the past year and half I've been engaged in a conversation about the many paradoxes in my life. For example I know clearly that the over riding intention in my life is to make a difference in the world - and in a public way as a writer or speaker or teacher. The truth of that sits so easily in me that I find it hard to question even when I have no clue about "how". In fact the "how" will take care of itself as long as I keep showing up in my life and participating fully in what has heart and meaning for me. I believe that fully.

Here is the paradox - what has heart and meaning is my life at home. I value my solitude and quiet creative time more than gold. I want to be with my husband and children in the evenings and on the weekends. I love being the person with flexibility in our family who can take care of the details, plan the big stuff and make it all come together. After years of putting my family second and myself last while I juggled the demands of business, I relish this period in my life the way someone who has survived a desert trek relishes water.

Just last week as I drove home from the cottage with a sleeping child and an exhausted doggy, I found myself listening to the conversation in my head (I always do my best writing holding onto a steering wheel rather than a pen or keyboard!). The conversation went something along the lines of this: perhaps paradox is not black and white. Maybe its not even the "grey-area" we've come to call it. Paradox, for me, exists as an infinite range of colour and shades. Different hues and intensities are all part of the range that exists within paradox.

I recall nearly flunking an ethics course in University because I found it very difficult to reduce a written scenario in to two opposing views when I all I could see was the range of possibilities that might exist in between. I could not reduce it to its basic elements because of the human factor. To do so required me to judge someone. It required me to take a stand that declared this person is right and this one is wrong and by god, ethics and human nature are far from that simplistic!

My comfort with paradox is not because I'm unwilling to take a stand or that I'm afraid of making a choice - although there have been many times when I questioned whether this was indeed a factor. No, I believe my comfort with paradox is that fact that I have become quite comfortable with the range of shades in between. It seems to be this space that holds exponential potential if I am willing to wander there. What emerges is often surprising and delightful and larger than the paradoxical situation itself.

This thought was an epiphany. In so many ways I have challenged myself to close the gap, chastised my wishy - washy-ness, pushed myself to hurry up - and all efforts are futile! My intellect might want all of the above because that is what it presumes to be "right" but the rest of me is clearly winning. "I'm going as fast as I want to and I'm enjoying the scenery", is what my muse says and my body chimes in agreement.

So "I AM huge!" and I'll take up as much space and time as I like because anything else is a waste of precious energy. I am big enough to straddle paradox in my life and my intention - holding all the space in between as open for discovery.

PS: If you are out there and reading ... say "hi!" My other ongoing conversation has been about creative community and my longing for connection in this facet of my life ...stay tuned for that entry :)