When She Leads Me into the Fire
I’ve been moving through heavy waves. I’m facing conflict, protecting my peace, and sitting with the tension between disappointment and fulfillment. Scarcity and abundance. Boundaries and connection. All of these energies are alive in me. I’m reflecting, breathing and living through them right now. Some days, I feel like I’m being stretched at every edge of my emotional capacity. And yet in this season, something in me is showing up differently than before. I’m not retreating the same way I used to. I’m staying present through whatever I face. I’m allowing the moments to teach and expand me.
What’s making this possible is slowing down. Slowing down helps me hear myself. Slowing down keeps me from abandoning my body when everything feels like too much. When I pause, I can feel where the tension is living. I can tell when something is spiraling from fear. I can feel what’s mine and what I’ve picked up from someone else. Slowing down is how I move forward with more ease. Slowing down is how I return to myself.
In these slow moments, ritual finds me through my intuition, my breath and my body. I don’t need to light a candle for this ritual. The fire is within me. I’m breathing. I’m listening. I’m paying attention. I find myself speaking truths out loud without needing to plan and rehearse. My space feels different when I do. Sometimes my hands move on their own, energy sparking from palm to palm. A pulse begins in my hip and drifts into my belly. I can track the movement now. I used to struggle to feel any of it. But now the energy comes through with more clarity, more ease. Like something in me is clicking at a new level. Like I unlocked a door I’ve been circling for years.
These spontaneous rituals happen when I least expect it. Lying on my recliner under my weighted blanket. In the bathroom, while washing my face at the sink or scrubbing my back in the tub. While listening to Kendrick so I can let rage move peacefully through my body. In the middle of cooking, seasoning the batter to prepare the fish. Out of nowhere, I’m in the middle of a full-body ritual. Because my body knows. She takes the lead and I just follow.
What I’m releasing right now feels bigger than a moment. This is karmic, ancestral, collective, personal. This is everything I’ve been carrying and everything I’ve inherited. I’m choosing to face this with love. I want to understand where this fire came from. I want to be honest about how this fire shapes me. I want to do something different with the fire now. This fire is an invitation and an initiation to alchemize, to stay present, to transform.
Sometimes I’m met with rage that has no words. Sometimes grief presses down so hard I can’t breathe. Sometimes my mind floods with old stories, trying to convince me I’m still unsafe. I breathe and I stay. I stay with the heat. I stay with the heaviness. I stay with the feeling. I stay with my breath. This is how I build capacity. This is how I deepen trust with myself, trust with my body and trust with the fire.
I’m noticing that when I slow down, the fire doesn’t consume me, she reveals me. The fire shows me where I’m still performing strength. She shows me what I’m afraid to name. She shows me what I actually need instead of what I’ve been taught to want. Slowing down is how I learn to be honest in real time.
I see now that presence is ritual. Awareness is medicine. Choosing to slow down instead of react is its own kind of spell. A reclamation. A boundary and a return.
This is what emotional resilience looks like for me. I’m letting things hurt without rushing to fix them. I’m letting myself be held by something deeper than logic. I’m building strength through softness. I’m letting my body lead. I’m letting Spirit speak through sensation, through pause, through discomfort. I am letting her lead me into the fire.
And I am staying. I am—
Spirit,
May every pause be holy.
May my breath always find me before a fear pulls me away.
May my body remember how to return.
May I be held and nourished in what is slow, sacred, and unseen.
I bless the fire that reveals me.
I bless the slowness that keeps me whole.
I bless the path I choose, again and again.
Thank you, Spirit. Àṣẹ.