Edges: “You are Your Best Thing”
I believe there’s an essence of relief and joy as well as a calmness that comes after we go through particularly difficult moments. Namely, we accomplish something we didn’t know we could.
For instance, we stay with a series of emotions that normally would frighten us and find that we are able to cope with new fortitude.
- Or we speak out clearly when before we’d avoid or say yes! when we felt a strong inner, no!
We learn to respect our innate parameters.
- Or we take on a challenge that feels insurmountable and yet our soul says — ‘please! go! and fly!’ The fire has been lit.
What is happening is we’ve gone over a personal edge. That invisible boundary that sometimes protects us, but oftentimes prevents us from stepping into our wholeness, our bigness, our full colored selves.
“Edges are names for the experience of confinement, for the limitations in awareness, for the boundaries of your own identity…. Thus, going over an edge is always an immense experience; you feel that your identity is changing, confused, lost or challenged.” (Arnold Mindell, Ph.D., Working on Yourself Alone: Inner Dreambody Work, page 67)
We find a different perspective on the other side of never, don’t, shouldn’t. It is an awareness that a former difficult experience can now be kind.
Our inner umbrella floats us over the valleys and sets us on a fresh visual plane of understanding — we can do more than we think we can. This is where we stretch ourselves and soar. Our inner self can see we are okay to explore.
Those former traumas that may have left indelible voices can no longer refresh our old bruises and therefore can no longer hold us captive in our memory and soul’s earthquakes.
Instead we step over fragments of this timeline and try something different. It is astounding. It makes me smile and write these words as the sun floods this room and the sound of the clock’s tick-tock brings me back to my chair; her oak was once a tree and those very branches bow and I can hear the wind and leaves sing with Toni Morrison’s voice, “You are your best thing.”
Carolyn Riker is a poet, writer and author. She has two books of poetry: Blue Clouds and This is Love. In addition to writing, she has a private practice as a highly sensitive mental health therapist. If you would like to read more of her words, follow her on Facebook at Carolyn Riker, MA, LMHC.
