Flow

Releasing what is held

I am on my knees. Face-down. Tears pour from my eyes. They overflow and run down my cheek before they fall onto the yoga mat, where my forehead rests. A puddle forms.

My arms are outstretched in front of me as far as they will go. I am folded; my torso is atop my knees—in child’s pose.

Summer’s evening light surrounds. Faintly, birds chirp in the distance. A soft breeze tickles my skin, and sends shivers to the places where my skin is damp, both from tears and sweat.

I am reverent. For nature. For my body. For what I’ve held inside.

The tears start coming harder and faster. I’m having trouble catching my breath. Pain is moving through my body. I am slowly cracking open. Memories and emotions flood.

A waterfall flows near my home in the summer. Photo by me.

---

At six-years-old I kneel against my bed, praying hands resting on my Strawberry Shortcake bedding.

I’ve been sent to bed at 7:30 in the evening. Mid-summer light streams in the window.

It is far too early on a bright summer night for a kid bursting with energy, and I say as much to my mother, who is present, but no longer sober. She ignores my plea as she shuts the door behind me. My father is out of town.

I can hear the faint laughter of my neighborhood friends through the open window. I imagine they are playing capture the flag, or hide and seek, as it gets dark.

Why can’t I be with them?

If my brother and I are in bed, she can do as she wishes. Without my dad, or us around, there will be no witnesses to her debauchery.

Why does she have to drink?

I stop the tears from coming. I’ve already learned if allow myself to cry, it will just make my stomach hurt.

Pray. Give it to God, I’d heard in church, over and over, already, in my short life.

God isn’t listening—I just haven’t realized it yet.

I stay on my knees until the darkness swallows and the lightning bugs blink.

Sleep takes me. I wake a short time later to the sound of my four-year-old brother crying.

Monstrous shadows ominously slither on the wall. Our old unfinished house creaks. I open the door. The dark hallway seems to stretch for miles.

Downstairs, I find my mother passed out on the couch, bottles strewn everywhere.

She can’t be roused.

I am alone.

I bring my brother to sleep in my bed.

Frozen winter waterfall. Photo by me.

---

I blink away my tears each time my mother is looking at me but not seeing me. When I suppress, I won’t feel pain.

I harden every time my parents fight. If I turn to stone, I will be impenetrable to the effects of their dysfunction.

I freeze when friends disappoint me, relationships fail, and each and every time I feel abandoned. I resolve that no emotion gives me strength.

I split, I divide, I compartmentalize.

I hold back in every sense. My breathing becomes irregular and shallow.

Tension is building as I age. When my daughter is born, I put everything into her, and all my energy is depleted. All of the barriers I’ve built can no longer hold.

Spring waterfall. Ice melting. Photo by me.

The dam bursts. The muscles and fascia throughout my whole body radiate with pain.

I feel old, decrepit. Unraveled.

Broken.

I am imprisoned inside a vessel that no longer functions.

My mind and body duel. A somatic decomposition.

If the body keeps the score, I am losing this game.

Drinking numbs the torrent of anxiety, depression, and shame rushing through me.

---

Fall waterfall. Just a trickle. Photo by me.

---

On this gorgeous summer night, I feel the years pass in an instant, like the whir of flipping pages in a book. I am all of my ages at once.

I cry the entire time I am on the mat. A deluge of released emotion.

In this sacred practice, I realize with conscious awareness, this is not captivity. I am back in my body, freeing….what has been held for decades. I can feel the bones beneath my skin. The torment is beginning to melt.

This mindful presence is providing me with something drinking never could.

I am awake. No longer numb. In the stillness of yoga, I can feel the anguish…move.

During savasana, I am now on my back—grounded—unearthing what has been buried. It is not on the fringe, not in a dream, and not just beneath the surface. I am facing it—it is rising up and moving through me. Light is emerging where there has been so much darkness.

I am not broken. I have always been whole. But now the parts are connecting again. All the different divisions of Holly are reintegrating.

This practice stretches me beyond what is known in the mind to what is felt in the body.

When I finish a yoga session, I am not the same girl who began this practice.

And yet, I am still the little girl on her knees, devoted—waiting for someone to listen, someone to see me, someone to cherish me. To hold me. To love me.

Breathing deeply through the tears, my arms are around my body. I’m holding myself now.

The tears run down the sides of my face and into my hair. A rushing waterfall. It is cleansing. It is ecstatic and energetic movement. Each droplet travels like cascading water—behaving just the way it should.

Streams may trickle, meander, and slow, but as long as water is present, movement will never cease.

We must do our best to remove any impediments so it may always flow.

---

Similar Reading:

All the seasons of the waterfall. Photos by me.