You are listening to That Mystic Podcast, and I am your host, Reverend Joya. This is a show where we talk about all things spiritual remembering, embodying the true nature of who we really are, and talking about the very wild, messy process of rebirthing yourself through grief, loss, or that holy longing that's calling you home. Enjoy the show. Hello, beloved souls. This week we are going to be talking about landing fully in your body. And it's when, for me, when grief forces you to fully and finally incarnate? Everyone is trying to transcend the body to reach God. But what if the body is the threshold that you must master in order to reach God? What if choosing to incarnate to even take this form in the first place is itself the ultimate act of spiritual courage? And what if most people spend their entire lives trying to escape the very thing they came here to complete? So today I want to talk about something that no one really talks about in spiritual circles. And it's that most of us never fully land deeply at home in our bodies. We float, we seek, we solve problems, we're trying to ascend, we're trying to awaken. And we think we transcend or we want to transcend before we've even arrived. And you think you're there until grief comes along and knocks down and wipes out everything that you thought you could that you had built. And I'm not talking about the small losses that we can manage, I'm talking about the catastrophic ones that there's no undoing it. And I've discovered that grief does what years of spiritual practices couldn't. It forces you to finally be here. So let's go deep this week into this. Before there is awakening and before there is enlightenment, before there are practices or teachers or paths, there is incarnation, the soul's decision to leave the formless and enter into form, to descend from unity into this illusion of separation, to experience limitation, density, time, and ultimately death. And it really truly is the ultimate act of courage. And yet most souls never complete their soul's mission. We incarnate halfway, we take a body, but we don't fully inhabit it. And we spend our lives living inside of our heads, thinking about life, thinking about awakening, thinking about spirituality, instead of actually being in it. Or we float above our experience, disassociating from what's uncomfortable. Or we are eternally seeking the next teaching, the next practice, the next state to achieve, always looking for an exit from where you are. So we're here, but we're not here. And the body becomes something to manage, to control, to transcend, to ignore, to conquer, a problem to solve on the way to somewhere else. But what if it's not? What if the body itself is not the obstacle, but the very threshold, the very gate that we must walk through? And there are reasons why we don't fully incarnate trauma. The body learns early that it wasn't safe to be here, and so consciousness floats above, watching, managing. Our nervous systems are constantly on high alert. So we're never fully dropped in and we're never fully present. Or we're spiritual bypassing. We learned that enlightened people transcend the body. So we try to skip over the messy, uncomfortable, fully human experience of being and form. We take on a seeker identity, which means if I'm always seeking, I never have to arrive. Arrival means that I actually have to feel what's here. And what if what's here is unbearable? So instead, we hover close enough to function, but far enough to never fully, fully and deeply feel all that is here in every moment. We live our entire lives at arm's length away from our own experience. And some of us call this spirituality. But then when grief arrives, we have no choice. Well, that's not true. I guess we always have a choice. But when something happens, it shatters those illusions. It shatters the hovering, and we experience a loss so catastrophic that your manager inside of you cannot manage it. Your controlling aspect of you cannot control it. It's a rupture so complete that the seeking self has nothing left to seek. Death, betrayal, collapse, the kind of grief that doesn't ask our permission, it just takes our life. And in that moment, something shifts inside of us. Not immediately, not in that first wave, those first waves of loss, but somewhere in the aftermath, when that shock wears off and you're left standing in the wreckage that was your life, you realize that you can't float above it anymore. The strategies that kept you hovering, the managing, the seeking, the controlling, the transcending, the checking out, they just all stop working because grief demands presence. And I'm not talking about the kind of presence that you go choose in meditation, but the kind you're forced into because there's nowhere else to go but here. And you can't think your way out of it, you can't transcend it, you can't seek your way past it. So you have to be here in your body, feeling everything. And for the first time, maybe even in your entire life, you land. And this landing is not comfortable because your body doesn't know how to hold this much feeling. Our nervous system wasn't designed for this level of activation. So you shake, you sob, you scream into pillows, you curl up in the fetal position on the floor, and you just feel everything that you've been avoiding your entire life. Not just this loss arises, but all the losses. Because here's what grief does that spiritual practice often doesn't. I say it opens up the closet where you've stuffed everything, the closet you've been shoving things into for decades, the unprocessed sorrows, the abandoned parts of you, the wounds you never had time to feel because you were too busy managing, surviving, performing for your worth. But grief kicks that door open and everything spills out. And as you sit here with this, as you breathe through, wave after wave of feeling, something remarkable begins to happen. Your body starts to remember. Not memories like stories, but memories that are held in the tissue, in your fascia, and in the nervous system itself. The time you were abandoned at five and learned you had to be good to be loved. The moment you were ashamed and decided you had to hide who you really were, the day you were violated and your body learned it wasn't safe to be here, layer after layer after layer. Grief doesn't just touch this one wound, it opens all of them. And as you sit there with your hands on your heart, with so much self-compassion, breathing, staying present, your body begins to release what it's been holding. And not because you're trying to do something, you're not trying to heal anything, but you're finally here to feel it. And this is what landing means. Not transcending or floating above the body, but dropping all the way in, into the density, into the discomfort, into the full messy human experience of being in form. And there's neuroscience that explains what's happening here. When you experience catastrophic grief, the default mode network, the part of your brain that maintains your story, your identity, who you think you are, it goes offline. And it's not permanently offline, but temporarily. And in that space where that gap is that the narrator isn't narrating anymore, something else emerges. A presence that doesn't need a story, a stillness you can sense that was always there beneath the noise, and your own wholeness that was never wounded in the first place. And this is what the mystics call no self. Not because you've disappeared, not because you've ascended out of the body and have gone somewhere else, but because the constructed self, the one with all the parts, the hoverer, the manager, the seeker, the controller, all of it finally stops. And you discover what's always been beneath it. And I have been on a spiritual path my whole life. I've done the retreats, the practices, I've found the teachers, I've done the seeking, and I have had beautiful glimpses, moments of profound and utter peace, and openings that showed me what was possible. But I was still hovering above my body, not fully in it, still managing my awakening, still seeking the next level to get to, still trying to get somewhere. And then Weston died. And everything I had been seeking, all the presence, all the stillness, all the embodiment, grief forced me into it as a necessity. Because when you lose someone that profound, and you choose to stay present with the pain and not allow your mind to tell you a story, not to go into blame, not to go into ruminating, not go into wishing anything was any different than it actually is, which keeps you stuck in suffering. But when you go fully into it, you land hard into your body, into your grief, into the full weight of being here. And that landing, that forced incarnation, did what decades of spiritual practice couldn't. It brought me fully right here, right now, in this moment, in my body. And I didn't see it as a problem to solve, but as a sacred vessel for this experience. The body is not something to transcend. It's the altar where grief and God meet. And this is why grief is a portal, because it doesn't let you escape. It doesn't let you bypass. It doesn't let you seek your way past it. It makes you be right here, fully, completely, without an exit strategy, because there isn't one except for your own end of life in this body. And that is incarnation. And no, you do not have to go through a profound and catastrophic grief to land here either. You can choose to stop chasing. You can choose to completely surrender. You can choose to let go of trying to control or manage, but it's very difficult because even that desire to let go is being filtered through the desire to let go, the desire to get something. It's very tricky and very subtle, but it can be done. So here's what I've come to understand so far. The body isn't the way we transcend on the way to God. The body is the first gate we go through to get to God. And most souls never walk through it. We spend our entire incarnation trying to get back, to escape the density, to leave the planet, to return to source, to transcend the limitation. I hear these conversations a lot in spiritual circles. But what if that's the whole misunderstanding? What if the point isn't to escape the body, but to complete the incarnation? To bring so much consciousness into form that form itself becomes luminous. And this is what the mystics knew. Christ didn't leave his body to ascend, he transfigured it. Buddha didn't escape form, he sat with it until it became transparent. And the Sufis don't seek to leave the body. They seek annihilation of ego while in form. The body is the technology for ascension, not the obstacle, but the very path, the very gate, the very way itself. And for me, grief was what finally got me to deeply walk through it. So how do you work with this? How do you learn to land when your whole life has been about hovering? For me, it began in the grief, but it continues through, I don't even call it practice anymore. I don't do my spiritual practices anymore because it's not a practice of doing, it's a practice of being. I simply sit, place my hands on my body, my heart, my solar plexus, my crown, my third eye, whatever feels called. And I call in my nafsha, which is the Aramaic word for soul, I've shared before many times over the years. The divine spark that was never wounded, never separated. It's the divine spark that gives us life. We don't have a soul, we are a soul. We don't have a nafsha, we are the nafsha embodying this body. And so we tune into it and we ask it to guide us to presence. And I say, guide me to presence. Show me what's blocking the flow of the eternal now moment. Help me land fully in this body. And then I let my nafsha guide me. And sometimes my hand will move to places on my body that are holding, or I'll just feel an opening, a constriction loosen. I breathe into those places. Sometimes sound wants to come. I let it. I tone into the places that ask, not forcing it, but just allowing it. And sometimes I just sit in perfect stillness, letting presence move through me. Because it's no longer about me trying to heal myself or fix myself or ascend myself or wake myself up or any other thing. I'm not trying to do anything. I'm learning to land, learning to be here in this body, in this moment, without needing this moment to be any different than it actually is. And slowly, so slowly that I almost don't even notice, my nervous system is learning it's safe to be here. I can inhabit this form. Presence is not something I seek. It's what I already am. When I stop hovering above myself, when I stop bracing, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And as I practice this, as I let the nafsha guide me deeper into my body, something shifts. My body begins to reorganize. And the hypervigilance softens, the bracing releases, the tension that's been holding everything together, just let's go. And it doesn't happen all at once. It happens layer by layer. And beneath it all, I discover that the body is sacred. And not a problem to solve, not an obstacle to transcend, not something to conquer. It's the living altar where spirit meets flesh. It's the first gate I walk through and master to complete what I came here to do. And when you finally land, when you finally stop hovering or grasping or controlling or seeking, and you drop all the way into your body, you discover it's not what you feared. You thought that if you fully felt everything, you'd be destroyed. But what actually happens is you find the part of you that cannot be destroyed. You find your wholeness. You find your presence that needs no story. You find the stillness that grief revealed, not created. You were always already whole. Everything we've done from the projection of the wound was the wound, not the body. The body is our avatar. The body is our vessel, our vehicle for God, the divine, our soul, to experience itself in form. And when you come into that feeling, you realize you've always been here. When you're not seeking, you're not transcending, you're not trying to get anywhere, and you're just present in this form, in this moment, in this sacred, messy, fully human experience being incarnated. And this is what I mean by complete the incarnation, by bringing so much consciousness into it that it becomes transparent to light, so that every breath is sacred, so that doing your dishes is a holy meditation, so that your life, just your everyday boring, non-exciting life becomes the practice itself. And this is what grief taught me that decades of seeking couldn't. This body is not the prison. It's the door you walk through, it's the gate you open. And you can't ascend from somewhere you've never even fully arrived. So if you're in grief right now, if loss has cracked you open, know that everything feels discombobulated and upside down and inside out and confusing. And at the same time, all of that is happening, you're landing. And if you can practice being present in the pain, you're fully here in your body, in your experience, in the density and the discomfort and the sacred weight of being human. And it's not a detour on the spiritual path. This is the path. Stay with it, breathe with it, let it land you. Because on the other side of this experience is the wholeness you've been seeking all along. It's a difficult path, but it's a sacred one because to experience deep grief means we've experienced great love in this body. It's the full spectrum human experience. And it's what it means to wake up in the game, to be fully present. And when you come into and tune into being present with what is, without the story, without the ruminations, without the desire for the present to be any way other than it actually is for you. You find your freedom. You find your whole inus. You find this undisturbed part of yourself that's been waiting for you to come home to it your whole life. And with that, I will see you next week, beloveds. Wishing you many blessings. Bye. Thank you for listening to that mystic podcast. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and your comments are always so appreciated, as well as if you share the show with someone you think would benefit from the conversation. I invite you to join my email list so you can be the first to know when what I have launching launches, and you can join a community of mystical sisters just like you. Visit thatmystic.com. See you next week. Bye.