“Make Monkey Bar love.”
Katia Bozhikova
Katia mused on Jan 15,2018, just a month before being diagnosed with cancer for her third and final time.
“Love is like doing monkey bars. You can’t jump to the next one, if you are holding back to the previous bar. You have to be suspended in air for a second in order to move forward. Monkey Bar love is a lesson in love surrender.”
Katia and I shared a love for how words create a container for the frame of a feeling. But it was stunning at that time of my life how many lessons remained in my head, versus embodied in my being, from words alone. We are practice beings. And we are visual beings. When there is a visual attached to the words, it deepens and sticks while we practice.
And if you are anything like me, if the visual includes an animal, it permeates on a soul level, as it takes us deeper into a Fable, a metaphor for living. When i received Katia’s monkey bar love message, I see first our inner-child letting go of fear to swing from one to the next. Then, my visual play morphs into the suspension in air of a monkey in the jungle, the trapeze of the vines of nature, the buoyancy between, the great exhale, a joyful release, the space to breathe free to obliterate resistance to fear, the pause to empty, to lift to higher self, to allow the breeze on our smile of what’s now. And again, what’s now.
Monkey Bar love, I dig it.
So how do we do it, this monkey bar love?
Katia spoke further on Jan 18 to me —
Let LOVE in
In your body, physically, in any form — to breathe into a heart side hug, to stay in an unplanned eye gaze
A Touch of a hand — feel the connection to your self being held in an embrace of another
Cry on someone’s shoulder
Allow another to love you the way They can, without creating more stories of why
Katia always speaks in this moment, and her spirit always touching mine unlocked for me a daily mantra I self-mused for my 2021 :
Just allow, with ease, to receive.
Katia continued on January 18 2018, as she always did, taking me in deeper:
“I love you, with no expectations, no stories, no need for you to be different or give me anything back, romantic — not romantic, just purely heart based, with all your gifts and shortcomings.”
And then she pierced my heart:
“Now try that sentence for yourself in the mirror from time to time”.
Friends, it was about ourselves all along…The love from within that permeates outward, again and again, versus outside in.
Let’s all make monkey bar infinite love, from the inside out.
Thank you Katia. Your muse spirit is always here.
