Warmer, Warmer – Colder, Colder

How would your life change if you trusted that your challenges are a part of your journey home – back to yourself and back to life – instead of feeling that the challenges of your life are here because you have done something wrong or you are being punished or God fell asleep on the job? What would happen if your illness, your difficult relationship, your demanding boss, your compulsions, the havoc that Covid 19 brought into your life and maybe even your troublesome dog were showing up in your life to help you heal?

I am in the middle of a very challenging time in my life – the pain from two surgeries that were supposed to relieve the pain, and the havoc that Covid 19 is bringing into my children’s lives – but rather than being a victim to these experiences, I am interested in what they bring up inside of me. It is what I call the you-turn in my book What’s in the Way IS the Way.  Through the light of my curiosity, my challenges invite me into being present for what I am experiencing and to open into the healing balm of my own heart.

The warmer, warmer/colder, colder game can give us insight into what this looks like.  Remember that game from childhood?  You hide something and when your friend is searching for it, you say, “warmer, warmer” when they come close to where it is hidden, and when they go away from it you say, “colder, colder.”

Imagine a diagram with an up arrow and a down arrow. When we live in the colder, colder place, we get caught in the up arrow. Our challenges take us right up into our heads and we follow our thoughts into the rabbit hole of struggle. The storyteller in our minds tries to figure things out, resist, judge, attack/defend and when all that fails, falls into hopelessness and despair. It then usually tries to go numb with compulsions. The last thing our storyteller wants to do is actually experience what we are experiencing. So, we leave ourselves for the struggles of our minds when we most need ourselves!

This is where warmer, warmer comes in. When we follow the down arrow into our immediate experience and the healing balm of our heart, giving whatever we are experiencing the light of our attention, we begin to open up again. In other words, we get ‘warmer.’ Let’s take fear for example, which has shown up a lot around my pain –“Will this ever go away? What happens if it gets worse?” When a story of fear comes, if I fall under its spell, my body gets tight, my mind gets even tighter, and I am cut off from the healing balm of my own heart.  So I get ‘colder.’

If instead, when I notice that I am getting tight, I bring the light of my attention into my body and explore what is happening there, my mind calms down, the tightness softens, and I now have access to my heart, which is kind and tender to both the story of fear and all of the tightness it brings.

The more we bring curiosity to our immediate experience, the more our hearts open. And it is our heart energy that every single part of us is longing for, especially the parts we don’t like.  So I invite you to draw an up arrow and a down arrow on a number of sticky notes and put them in important places like in the refrigerator, on the TV, on your pillow as you make your bed in the morning, the steering wheel of your car, by your toothbrush. Allow these notes to be a wake-up call to remind you that going up into your head promotes more struggle while going down into your immediate experience, (and if you can access that right now, at least down into your breath) is where all lasting healing happens.