A Passage for Curing
I learn from students and clients as they awaken and discover their own secret passages to the interior. Part of our Qigong and Reflection class is dedicated to a brief contemplative time after our Qigong practice. We take the time to reflect silently to deepen our connection, through writing, sketching, coloring, or even doodling, to afford us teachable moments. After a recent class, one student shared how he was able to come up with a creative solution through diagraming for a work project, while another revealed his insight of how writing serves to cure, or preserve, the Qigong practice.
These Qi insights carry us in surprising ways. They certainly carried me as I pondered the salve for my own curing. I too am sketching and diagramming projects related to my legacy and roots journey, a land of my own making: an inner landscape mapping past, present, and future, where I am on precarious terra firma. In this place, bittersweet remembrances collide where I am serenaded by Cuban lullabies and lulled by scents of Havana roses. This is the part of my creative life where I collect things and set them aside: an assemblage of images, voices, words waiting to be merged.
When writing and practicing from my truth there are days that I have to convince myself what is meant to be cured, will be. Being a believer in the work means being willing to cut that which will not grow so it can be cured, re-fired into new material, a tender new growth. I edit at my desk, cherry wood carved into artifact, where my hand and chaos have merged in mild agitation, as I attempt to cut away what no longer serves. In that instant, an intensity rises, a fuerza, a sense a fierceness, not a fierceness masked as agitation, nor the kind that comes in retaliation to feeling pushed around. It rises from roots, deep in the my heart, deep in the dantien and blazes out through my eyes, revealing the passage to my true nature, where heart and eyes can be open, tender, strong. It is from this stable place where I am able to see that the practice has cured me, and the place where the practice continues to be cured.
