I'd Like for You to Know - Meditative Poetry for Trauma Healing

I’d like for you to know
That you are not merely your thoughts

But deep red blood 
Flows through your veins
Heart is beating
Eyes are tearing 

You are human animal and primal soul
You are alive with the worlds within and without
You are at once many systems inside you

If you stop in this second and in this moment in time
You might notice a universe within your viscera
Pulsing, beating, breathing, expanding, moving, digesting, and flowing
It is as much you as any thought and more
The thought is only something which you do

But your breath – your beating heart is a wildfire
Alive without your command
Without your intention
A creature you are
Your cubicle may make you forget it
The green grass reminds you

I’d like for you
To experience
All that you are – below the head
Beyond the mind
The body whose origins were in your mother’s belly
Who grew into the creature which now reads these words

You are
You are

Your voice comes from your guts
Your tummy
Your soul
And the sound is from the air in your lungs
You human thing

Who yearns to touch and be touched
Who cannot say in words what it is that you long for in the night
You landscape of being you beating drum of heart and chest
You. You.

Maybe no one was with you there
When you were a young thing
Touching and tasting and sensing the world
Maybe no one came when you screamed out
When you were a new creature to the open air
Because why? Because they were broken too? Or forgot. How to be. In the body too. 
What was it?

But now grown as you are – stretching across the world
Let your life move out of you with rage and anger and fear and sorrow 
And let your spirit cry over top of your pain
Let the heat of life return to your face
And let the energy move through your legs.
Where you move the mountains beyond the horizon
Because in your guts, you know there is joy
And that is the truth.

And your heart still beats after all that.
I’d like you to know. 
Your lungs still expand
And tomorrow still comes
And you touch the earth with your fingers and toes and know
Deeply that you ARE. 

You are alive and it is not merely because you think. 
You are. You breathe. You move. You wake. 
You are.

Written by: Shyla Salmon