I wanted so badly to get away from my uncomfortableness. I was in the bath working on a shadow. I wiggled and squirmed in my body, which was just the physical manifestation of me trying to avoid what I was working on. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of my face and I washed it away with my hand. My fingers ran through my hair and I enjoyed the sensation of the hot water on my scalp.

I had been purposeful with taking a bath. I knew myself well. I would reach for external validation, I would seek something that wasn’t within me to feel better. But, how could that ever work? Something from the outside can not make something from the inside feel better, it just doesn’t work like that. So, I placed myself in a hot epsom salt bath with essential oils. There was no one else here to make me feel better. There was no screen, no person, no social media or text, there was me. I would be forced to be with myself in all of my uncomfortableness. I had run the water all the way on hot, knowing that it would make me sweat. I knew that I was carrying this shadow in my physical body and I wanted to purge it from my system.

I had spent the night before thrashing at this shadow and woke up digging deep on the same shadow. Multiple times throughout the morning I had reached for my phone. I wanted to find comfort from a message or a call with someone else. A distraction, an avoidance, a momentary relief from my uncomfortableness. Each time I found myself reaching, I paused and saw myself. I met my behavior with a hug and told the behavior that I saw it. This was my behavior. This was my pattern. This was mine to own and mine to heal. As much as I wanted something outside of me to make me feel better, I knew that it never could. I knew that the healing had to come from within me. It had to come from seeing my wound, the root of my behavior, really seeing it for what it was and loving it until I integrated it.

So, there I sat in every ounce of my uncomfortableness with myself. I wanted the healing more than I wanted to avoid the discomfort.