On Connection and Disconnection to the Body

Happy Valentine's, baby <3

The reason I'm posting this today is that, well, it felt right. But also, this post is pure love. On my favorite day of the whole year, the pink and red, chocolates and flowers holiday—

—I want to put out a message that emanates and teaches love. To love is to take care. To take care of the self is to connect the body and the soul.

---

A lesson that I've learned recently is the lesson of feeling disconnected from my physical body and human experience. All in one month, I’ve felt so spiritual that I've forgotten to be a physical being--and so overwhelmed by my physical circumstances that I left no space for the spiritual. This week, with the new moon, I set an intention to find balance, and it definitely worked. Here, my love, is what happened:

You may have seen this little video on my Instagram story on February 13th:

An epiphany, that's what came to me when I took my headphones off at the gym. It was about my body and human existence, and that's what we're going to talk about today. If you've been reading these blog posts for a while now, you may have picked up on this thing that I never stop talking about: physical detachment.

I've been putting the puzzle together since October, when I felt a deep soul connection and simultaneous physical disconnection. I stopped relating to the physical world, and didn't understand how or why or what the consequences would be. Now, on the night before Valentine's day, I've gathered enough intuitive wisdom and knowledge to not just understand it myself, but to share it with you. And why does that matter? Because I’ve found that many, many people are experiencing this and don’t know what it is. Are you one?

Do you feel tired--in the mornings, at 3pm, or all the d*ng time?

Do you feel sad for no apparent reason?

Do you feel controlled by something physical: cravings, hunger, hormones, sleepiness?

Do you feel dissatisfied with the way that you physically feel or physically look?

I have felt all of those things--at several times in my life--and tried all kinds of things to try to fix them. Nothing really worked except for one thing: grounding my physical health into the Earth and letting my soul drift up into the sky. Nothing would heal until I had both of those pieces of myself in their homes.

The body, the physical self, needed Earth like these flowers do.

And the spirit, the metaphysical self, needed a clear, blue sky like these butterflies.

That's what this post is about--the opposite of physical detachment, which is:

The combination of physical and spiritual health.

---

This winter, when I more fully opened my eyes to my spiritual existence and my soul, I started to feel my toes lift, just a touch, but, before I knew it, I was up in the clouds, seeing the stars and the moon in a whole new light, understanding them, chatting with them, connecting, and happy about that. I was more in tune with my divine nature and existence, with my purpose and happiness than ever before.

Up there, in the clouds one afternoon, I floated into a village of blueberry people.

They were wild blueberries: always going to blueberry parties and making rich memories--the kind that if jarred, would look like a bowl of cereal with kaleidoscope colors for milk.

I loved it. It was something entirely new and exciting to me: the constant company, ultra late nights, and desire to simply enjoy. I built a life up there in two parts of the sky: the place where I spoke to the moon and his stars, and in the blueberry village. I thought that I could stay up there forever, in love with the alignments I'd found with my old soul and my blueberry youth. Then, my fruity life took over. Between my new job as a blueberry waitress, my new classes at BlueU, my new habit of rarely spending any time in my Ally baby home, and finding myself constantly at Rach and Kylie's, out with new friends, or on a date with a blue boy, I became a bit too busy.

Quickly, I began to feel drained of energy--the kind that comes from sleep (which I wasn't getting) and the kind that comes from something that I've always known is essential for me to feel peace, joy, and fulfillment: time alone with my spirit. In the midst of all the youth and fun, I'd greatly lessened my spiritual practices: journaling, meditating, reading, enjoying my podcasts, and listening to the quiet. And then, I realized that it was deeper than that.

Not only had I lost a bit of touch with my soul, but I was failing my body. My life before blueberry waitressing and BlueU had been incredibly balanced. I was buying my own groceries, which took a certain level of intention for food. The bags that I brought home from the store were full of, almost exclusively, eggs, bacon, onions, and peppers (for omelets); bagels and cream cheese (for each other); salad kits; and fruit.

But, I would still get some mighty cravings and grab a brownie sundae from Sam's Club or a whole bunch of candy from the Blueberry Outlet to munch on for the week. I was going to the gym very regularly, loving it, and sleeping well (apart from those few weeks where I refused to close my curtains because I wanted to have the night sky pour through, and would wake up all through the night because of the disruptive light). I would wake up smiling and just look out my window for a half an hour, or so, thinking very little and simply enjoying my existence. Then, I'd journal, meditate, raise my energy, get in tune.

That was the life, the dream existence.

A happy, go-lucky girl

Though I was up in the sky, I'd built a cottage in the clouds by my stars where I could eat (cloud cotton candy), drink (cloud water), and sleep very well on a bed made of clouds.

Then, the action picked up, like a gust of wind, and that home was blown away. I didn't even realize, until recently, when I noticed just how awful I felt.

My body was tired all the time, sluggish, and holding onto a little more tummy than usual. As far as time went, I was a hot mess: spending my homework time shaving my legs for a date, spending my sleep time watching The Bachelor at the girls' flat, spending my mornings asleep for as long as I could gamble, to make up for the late night before. I felt so wildly out of control, and that's when I realized that it wasn't just my home in the moon's valley of the clouds that I needed to rebuild, but my home on planet Earth, that I needed to return to.

I needed all three.

With that, I got tapping my chin and experimenting, trying to figure out how to get back home to earth. Floating across the sky came easy, but moving closer and farther from Earth, that was a whole other ball game. A few times, I managed to get a bit closer, but then, I'd get stuck in the line of traffic where the birds would run me over, and swear at me, and give me--imagine that--the bird. In all of my experimenting, on the moon's side of the sky, I somehow stumbled into a cloud garden.

There, white tufts would pass over me like mink-y blankets, and leave cotton-feeling flowers in my hands. These flowers had writing on them from the people that had drifted up to the sky before I had. Like the sweet messages that people etch into bathroom stalls (only the sweet ones, not the emo or vulgar ones), they said, "You can do it! Maybe try ______" and one day, an iris flower petal told me something that clicked. I tried it, and it worked. I was instantaneously falling back down to Earth.

Suddenly, a miracle cloud wrapped itself around me in a hug, then let go of me, and when he let go, I had a lovely set of wings--angel wings--white and gold, feathered, big and beautiful. Just before it was too late, my body did something right, and the wings worked... only enough for me to stop in the sky, then fall and scream some more, slow down a little, then tumble closer to the Earth. I bounced off my muffenz a few times, when I hit the ground, then ended up on my feet. And I was home.

Right outside of my little, Earth cottage that had been a bit taken over by cobwebs and dust, I knelt in the grass and kissed the ground, then rolled over onto my back and shrieked in delight--green! Green grass, green leaves, green hills in the distance--how had I forgotten just how lovely it was to see green?

I jumped in a mud puddle and picked an apricot from a tree, took a big bite, and let the juice trail down my chin. Home. I knew that I'd under-appreciated my home on Earth, that I'd become so excited with living up in heaven, that I forgot that the purpose of my life is to experience duality: growth and wilt, spring and fall, spiritual and physical.

With that, I started appreciating. I took a look around the place and thought about what needed to be done. "Well I'll need to run to the store and pick up a new broom, since the squirrel in that tree outside is whittling the old one into a javelin," I thought, pulling the curtains open and waving at him through the window. "I need new decorations--new, lively, fresh, rich things to fill this place... and not just decorations, I suppose, because it looks like this bed is a bit ruined and there's a hole in the floor. I'll need some functional things too." "Boy, do I have a whole lot of fixing to do, a whole lot of healing." So, I clumsily flew into town with my new wings and picked up a broom, then moved onto the next thing.

By the time the sky grew dark and the moon blew a kiss, hello, I was exhausted. Crawling into my temporarily fixed bed, I was closing my eyes and drifting into sleep one minute, then waking up to birds chirping in the next--no dreams. Blissfully, I glided around the run-down cottage, kissing the fruit bowl and hugging the dusty throw pillows. When I made my way to the sink to brush my teeth, I saw something newer than new in the mirror.

Where my new angel wings had been, newer fairy wings flittered about.

That's when I softly recognized how divine it all had been--the way that I'd landed just outside of my cottage when I came back to Earth, how those angel wings had just appeared to me, how I wound up in the sky in the first place, found myself in Blueberryville, and then, in the cloud garden, just when I needed it. I recognized that angels were guiding me, leading me wherever I needed to be, and the thought came into my mind--not from me, but from a higher place--that these fairy wings were meant to get me around on Earth, and that when I wanted to go back to my cloudy places, all I had to do was blink three times and imagine them, and my angel wings would reappear to let me fly back up.

I also understood that it wasn't a gift for silliness and adventure's sake, but it was a divine need. I wouldn't just think, "I wanna spend the weekend in the clouds," and fly up only for fun. It was going to be a balance, something that I would need from that point forward in order to fulfill my dharma. I would be flying up to BlueU for classes in the morning, then back to Earth to deposit a check; I would be starting my morning with some journaling in the moon's clouds, then making a trip down to Earth to cook myself up some good breakfast--I sure got tired of cloud cotton candy after a while. I'd been blessed with the ability to balance my life in the clouds and my life on Earth, so, I would.

---

There you have it, A collection of metaphors to illustrate this little lesson: the moon's sky is the soul; the Blueberry Cloud Village is my college town, and that cottage in a fairy forest back on Earth is a metaphor for the body.

There are morals and crumbs of wisdom in there, and now it's time for me to break down the raw, sharp cheddar of this story: the tangible, daily reality of that tale, what I did to change, and what you might consider doing if it aligns with you.

---

When I started to realize that I was sad, overwhelmed, and unfulfilled, what did I do? I tried to understand why. While I wrapped my silverware at work, or made my breakfast, I asked myself what had changed--what I was missing, and the answers that came back were:

1. the food that I was eating: very dense, non-nutritional foods from work

2. the dramatic shift in my amount of free time, and with that, the change in how well I took care of myself

3. stress--from all of that.

So, I stewed on those thoughts for a while. They didn't come to me in a bulleted list, they came to me in quiet thoughts that I felt a slight natural response to. When I gave myself the time and space to think, answers could find me, and my tummy would respond--it would just say, "Yes, this is it," or "Hmmm, that doesn't feel quite right, let's keep listening."

I was the one who put them in a list. I was the one who sat down in the quiet and asked, then listened for answers. And when those ones came, I took note of them in my mind, asking them questions, trying to figure them out. This is the work. And if you want to heal, the greatest advice I can give you is to be quiet.

Stop filling your mind with sounds. Don't turn your music on the minute you're alone. And definitely don't drown out your company. When you're with people, the answers very well might come from their lips. So be quiet. Take five minutes tomorrow morning to let your mind breathe. Don't you reach for that phone. Put it on the da*g other side of the room. Look out the window, or up at the ceiling, or at the back of your eyelids, and just listen. This is what changed my life. This is why I am who I am. And this has everything to do with who I become daily. It was listening to my intuition at the gym when she said, "Mmm, Ally baby? I think today is a no headphones kind of day," that planted the seed for this whole blog post. It's necessary. Our existence wasn't meant to be had with so much interference; human beings require those moments of listening the way they require love, touch, and appreciate--we can get by without it, but we won't be very happy.

What next? Expanding the consciousness of my diet--I needed to hear a few things from my podcasts and my intuition on the food that I was putting into my body. It was more than dropping the diner meals; it was about the history of my food--what happened to it from the time that it left its home to the time that it found a new one in my fridge (or tummy). Food has energy. Everything has energy, and I needed to make sure that not only was I eating clean, nutritious foods, but that those good-for-me foods were surrounded by good energy.

And that is going to sound real woowoo to a lot of you. It's something we'll get to later, when we talk about the power of energy, but it is absolutely vital. And that's why I started shopping at a health food store instead of Walmart. I have always had a great affinity for and chain of miraculous experiences in places like Good Earth, and that's because the energy in there is high. The people vibrate at a higher frequency, and the food is treated better.

Plants grow like crazy when you sing to them. Free range eggs taste better than mass produced eggs. I've known for a long time that my diet needs to revolve around fresh fruits and veggies, fresh meat--the kinds of foods that were recently living, but what I didn't understand until recently was that what happened to those things when they were living makes a whole lot of difference too.

Think about it this way: you have two athletes--identical in weight, strength, flexibility, all that--but one eats well, sleeps well, meditates, goes outside, and laughs, and the other spends all of his free time in a dark basement, watching TV and fighting with their family members. Though they have the same exact physical builds and strengths, I'd bet you that the first athlete would beat the second more often than not. There are so many more variables than the obvious ones, and that's what this lesson is about.

What I put into my body is sacred because this body is sacred, it is the home that I take with me everywhere, the way that I experience life, and I want to fuel it to the very best of my ability. So, I searched for some recipes, found some that I knew would be easy enough for me to find motivation to make, not too expensive, and went to the store for my new foods. I'll let you know how it goes, hunny.

Next, I sat down on my bed one night and journaled, for the first time in nearly a month, about all of my feelings on this matter--on my detachment from my physical body, on my then state of life, everything. Then, I evaluated it all and drafted a routine. I gave myself some structure to follow. It was manageable, easy enough to stick to, but with great impact. I created more structure with a budget, and, next, I'm going to figure out a homework schedule.

This is all still a work in progress, and it's fun to be at this point. I'm not unhappy about any of that anymore--just proud of my movement and growth.

Now, it might be a bit late to say this, but it is physical detachment. When you feel sad for no reason, when you feel anything less than lovely--it is physical detachment. It's a miscommunication between you and your body. The combination of the soul and the human body is divine and perfect. Mortality is the experience of missing the inherent perfection of our existences, and seeking them out. It is the continual ebb and flow between divine and faulted. So, if you have a problem with your body or your happiness, you have what it takes to fix it, you just need to find the recipe. And the recipe is going to be in one of four places: the soul, the body, the mind, or the shadow.

I cured myself of dairy intolerance by simply saying to myself daily, "I'm healed." As a co-creator of my reality, as an inherently perfect--and simultaneously flawed--being, I healed myself and changed my own world. There's so much more; there's always more, isn't there? But for now, I was meant to stop writing an hour and a half ago, so I better wrap it up.

I suppose that this little fable tells more than the story of physical reconnection; There's spiritual return too, and that's what I'll post about on Monday. Because I wanted to post today, on this lovely Valentine's day, I replaced my Friday Laundry List with this fine fella, but that doesn't mean that I won't be posting on Monday. Nosiree! Tomorrow's post will be all about The Return to Spirit.

Thank you for reading, I love you <3 and I hope that you feel that.