The Strength Inside

I love to watch my husband's lips and listen to the sound of his voice when he says the word, "strength" as if he was some pupil in a grammar class out of the 1950s keeping the "g" silent.  It occurs to me that silent g is really the verb form of actualizing the strength inside. Not like some gangly g-sounding s t r e n g t h that goes boasting about with unfelt bravado trying to prove that as it reverberates through the air the decibel level of fear cannot be discerned by any listener nearby.

The quiet strength to overcome ourselves in overcoming others.  The willingness to accept what is and surrender about what isn't.  The courage to ask our higher selves for a change in our perspectives, a map for a different pathway rather than taking the well worn smoothed out path that our synapses have always travelled.

Inside strength waits quietly within our hearts to be activated from the depth charges of releasing our ego.  Trusting that in the quiet, quiet hush of darkness a light will dawn, stairs to climb out will be found, strength to go on will be given even as the storms outside rage on in their convincing ways.

My favorite Yoga teacher used to tell us to breath into our "mula bandha" or root lock of our chakras and bodies to bring strength up and out through our entire bodies so that we could have a sense of really being rooted as we stretched up and out to the sky giving us strength and flexibility to move into whatever pose was next. In this way, we become rooted in our strength yet flexible enough to bend and allow the wind to flow through and around us instead of knocking us off balance.

Strength with a silent "g", ever flexible and able to blow in the wind but staying rooted in our sense of being-ness.