I had my first experience tweaking my back today. At 40 years old, this must be a rite of passage.

I'm lying on the floor with my right arm draped exaggeratedly across my chest in an attempt to discourage future spasms, watching clouds drifting by through the large bow window. I'm grateful for a mostly easeful existence with my physical body. It isn’t always so easeful in my mental space. Sometimes my body provides wise guidance. This moment feels like that. Body says: this is an invitation to choose to live with less difficulty inside my head. To choose ease whenever available. The difficulty in life doesn't have to be a two-way street.

Difficulty can come at me; I can't stop that. Since I was a child, trying to navigate the world through family crisis and through broader injustice, I met difficulty by stepping into a two-way conversation with it. I reacted and shifted my life to respond. How very normal of me! But now that I am 40, maybe I'm settled enough in my spirit that there can be opportunity for allowing crisis and larger injustice to be as it is, without fixing it. From the ease, the strength, the wisdom inside me, I can take action and make choices that create positive actions and ripples, based in stories of love and connection. Having the intellectual understanding of what's going on to know what might need to be undone. But starting the movement from within, to disrupt the hate, the harm, the negativity, the trauma that catches me like a sticky trap.

Lying on the ground, my attention held in the swaying leafless trees, I think this is what my body is saying. Your superpower is love, silliness, connection. Live from that. Give back to the world from that. The trees are always giving, growing, being fully connected. So too can I.