What's the Matter?

The Energy

How did this past Saturday's full moon land for you? What I've been hearing from clients and friends echoed much of my own energy last week. Nothing new. In fact, it stirred the old. Deep-seated grief, frustration, sticky childhood wounds brought us gut punches and heavy hearts. If that was some of your experience, I see you. And on the horizon, a whole slew of cosmic bodies start heading retrograde, so we'll likely be turning back toward what we didn't finish feeling.

Have you found yourself thinking, "What the heck is the matter with me?" or looking at a loved one and asking what's the matter with them?

That question usually comes loaded with accusation, judgment, shame. What if it's literal? What matter are we carrying?

The Teaching

Matter is anything with mass. Anything that takes up space. And grief takes up space. So does anger. If you ask your body where it keeps them, it usually answers truthfully: maybe you feel constriction in your chest, tension in your jaw, an ache that settles low under your ribs.

Sometimes it shows up as full-body exhaustion. A desire to crawl into bed, pull the blinds and hibernate for a few days. Or I notice a rawness to my emotions and literally everything makes my tear ducts overflow.

So why does "what's the matter with you" sting the way it does? Somewhere along the way, matter also came to mean the problem at hand, the complaint. The question stopped asking what we're holding and started assuming we're broken.

The older root tells a different story. The Latin materia meant substance, the stuff things are made of, and more specifically the hard inner wood of a tree. Timber. It may even reach back to mater, mother, the source that everything grows from.

Following that root led me to heartwood, the dense center of a trunk. It isn't living tissue anymore. It's years of growth the tree has held onto, and it's what keeps the whole tree standing.

That left me sitting with this: not everything we carry is meant to be set down. Some of it is ready to go. Some of it has become the thing that holds us upright.

So how do we tell which is which?

The Invitation

There's a difference between the wound and what grew around it. Some of what happened to us was not okay, and no amount of reframing makes it okay. It didn't happen for a reason. It doesn't need our gratitude. And still, something grew in response: a steadiness, a fierceness, a way of reading a room, a capacity to sit with someone else's pain. That growth belongs to you, not to the thing that forced it.

You can keep the heartwood without thanking the drought.

Trees know how to do both. They shed dead branches on their own, a process called self-pruning, and they keep their heartwood. Both are wood that's no longer living. One weighs the tree down, so it lets it fall. The other keeps it standing.

Your body knows the difference too, if you give it a moment to show you.

Wherever you are, take a few slow breaths and bring your attention back to the place your body keeps its matter. Your chest, your jaw, your belly, the tiredness that runs through everything.

Meet it without trying to fix it. It can be as simple as a quiet "there you are."

Now imagine setting it down. Not doing it, just picturing it. Watch what your body does.

If something softens, if your breath lengthens or your shoulders ease, that's likely matter that's ready to go. Let a long exhale carry it out. Open your palms, or press your hands to the floor or the earth and feel it drain down.

If something wobbles, if you sense yourself brace or it feels like you're losing your footing, that may be heartwood. Rest a hand where it showed up most deeply. It can stay. It doesn't have to be thanked, only held differently.

None of this is final. With Venus and Mercury turning retrograde, the coming weeks will likely circle back through old territory. What holds today may be ready to release next month. The question gets to stay open.

Then sit with these for a few minutes:

What did the hard thing build in you that you never would have chosen to build?

What are you still carrying out of loyalty to who you had to be back then?

If this weight vanished tomorrow, who would you be? And are you ready to meet them?

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