As time rolls on and on as it always does I find the spaces in which pain used to dwell become more fluid. I sense my subtle body, the ninth body of ten, unfolding in tantra. Where there was once tension there is now movement. I have created length out of the things that once felt like hard and secret stones. Small and cool in my palm I carried them, one by one, and laid them out in the warmth to absorb what they needed to unfold. Once gray and rounded like the hunched shoulders of broken men they smoothed under the sun, the breadth of them leveling and rooting, the corners lifting up as though grinning; they crisped.

I watch now from my ninth body and marvel at the beautiful symmetry of my hands and my thoughts. Observe the dank green as it spreads from Anahata Chakra, dampening across my chest. I find less and less time for the things and the thoughts and the people that don’t serve this mossy growth and find myself drifting farther away from the drafts that dry me, from the foods that sink me, from the scenes that smirk at my attempt of Samadhi. Even my hips agree with my progression, I notice glinting along me more pointed bones that arch forward like a question. I can hook my thumbs around those tapered points and rub; they beam.

I am lighter but understand with gravity that I may always beckon, however unaware, some weighted eastbound winds. There will always be an awful piece of all of us that allows for deeper engagement of the pain body’s senses, as we call into feeling the things we wish we didn’t know how to recognize. But we have a name for them, we call them home for supper, we accept a smaller sliver of the bed to make room for their great girth. Sometimes at night we awaken to their cool breath at the neck’s nape, we shiver and clutch the covers. Then nothing more. My hope is that you will bare some day a winter that will challenge you to seek your own warmth, and when the time comes you will no longer shiver in a shared bed. On the eve of this awakening the fine hairs at the atlas of your vertebra will erect, your fingers will uncurl in a beautiful progression, your eyes will open for the first time as such and as you turn over you spread your legs and claim the space as your own. I see you, the wings of your shoulder blades tucked beneath you creating a shelf for your heart space.