By Jan Martinez

I’m curious to know where the voice starts. Today I began my morning with a 5 Rhythms Dance meditation, followed by Theta music with binaural beats, so it feels as if my whole body is one harmonic instrument with resonance across time and space.

The balance of sensitivity and the awareness of boundaries has always been so important for me. I’m not clairvoyant, but perhaps I’m clair-sentient. Often odd sensations course through my body, some fleeting, some chronic. Today I’m reminded to ask if they’re mine.I recall times across the country or the globe, unwittingly I took on the pain or illnesses of my family members, frustrating doctors. Then only to find that they weren’t my ailments, my diagnoses, to begin with.

Lately I’ve had such pain in my upper back and arms. I attributed it to overwork or tension while typing, but now I wonder. Since my father’s death, my mother’s had similar pain, and after dancing today, I recognized I was literally carrying her pain. And in the dance, I put it down. So how to stay in compassion and not take it on…

It is said that the arms speak the truth of our hearts. I feel this as I write, or when I paint, or dance. Creativity flowing from my heart through my arms to my hands. The flow of warmth when I embrace a beloved friend or family member, in the warmer—or very much warmer—embrace of my husband. In this way, I find myself settling into the truth my mother won’t speak: how very, very much her own heart is hurting.

My neck speaks (1 min)

Sometimes it’s so hard to bear the weight of all these thoughts, the onslaught of ideas and songs and stories and pictures that go off like fireworks filling the sky, too many to appreciate any one, or like flower petals and rice thrown at a wedding.

Sometimes I want them to drip down like droplets of rainwater into my heart and then slide one by one down the thick rope-like vines and tendrils into the cenote of my belly.

There, in that cold clear water they can permeate and infuse my whole being like blood, that life force that courses through the pathways and underground tunnels of my veins.