I have just spent a beautiful week on holiday in a place that is usually much hotter but this time was a little cooler than home. It means my tan is much less impressive :)
While away I was pondering over a couple of seemingly unrelated things that happened last month that I wanted to share as they have weirdly conflated and led me back to my work with Tea.
The first was that the River Wye finally received formal recognition as a living ecosystem and this means it now has intrinsic rights- the right to flow, the right to biodiversity, the right to be free from pollution, to be supported by a healthy catchment, to regenerate. Although not personally involved, I have a friend who was, and she shared how some of the river was taken into every legal meeting in a big glass container so that it was properly present and represented.
Although this is a human move towards protection and restoration, a righting of old wrongs, for me I feel a sense of homecoming. We can celebrate such a turn of events but isn’t it really just a return to what has naturally always been there. The river is still weaving its way from the Cambrian mountains of mid-Wales as it always has, it is all about the shift in our human perspective as we slowly recognise what we need from the Earth to be healthy - and it includes clean and vibrant water.
Homecoming for me is about coming back to what was always there.
The second was around the findings of the research project I was doing for my counselling training. It was exploring the particular skills we are taught to help make us more congruent and know ourselves better, under the premise of making us better at the job of supporting others. But my question was around why stop there? Surely such key reflective abilities are the backbone of a healthy society, impacting how we are in our relationships, with ourselves and others, human and beyond.
Many of my 'respondents' reflected on the essential need, whether dog-walking, driving or meditating, for ‘space’ if such skills are to be actualised. For without space, how can we become aware of what feelings and needs sit within us, how someone else has impacted us, why it matters to us. How can these feelings and needs have the opportunity to rise, be honoured, accepted, contemplated and met without space?
And therein lies the rub. It is incredibly difficult for most people in our current hectic, compartmentalised, over stimulating world, to have a healthy relationship with space, believing there is no time available to stop for a spot of conscious self-reflection. But in truth, it is more likely a great cultural avoidance strategy to be too busy, because choosing to sit undistracted and notice and feel into what shows up, can be incredibly uncomfortable.
Personally, having spend 4 years honing these skills, I have seen how it is another example of homecoming. It is what has always been there just our shifted human perspective has skewed it. It is the balanced way of being that would have been instinctive and inbuilt into the fabric of our day, because we had a better mix of work, rest and play, of aloneness and community, of cooperation and skill-sharing, living closer to the Earth as true human ‘beings’.
So my realisation is that this is my mission. I can introduce those who wish, to build a healthier relationship to space and learn to love the rewarding and insightful discomfort of it. I am perfectly placed because the incredible Teas I work with DO HALF OF THE WORK FOR US.
Impacting our brain chemistry to anchor a proper conscious space while comforting and soothing us as we inhabit it is the Tea’s job. That is Breathe and Brew in a nutshell and it is a homecoming, for it is a practice that reconnects us to what has always been there.
I wonder if there is a place for some sort of Breathe and Brew community, a regular online offering that might help? Whether guidance on questions to contemplate, shared quiet time together to have some accountability, if any of you have suggestions of something you would enjoy attending, please do let me know.
I know the answer is out there with you all, for homecoming is tied to the deepest sense of belonging and Tea has always been the original social connector!
We wish you a wonderful July and look forward to speaking to you again in August.
Anne x