I used to be a climber; then my climbing partner fell to his death.

“Im not a climber anymore,” I said this the other day to a friend, and he laughed. I asked what was funny about it because to me it seemed like a simple, true statement, and he said something along the lines of , “well, it was just such a strong claim, and so complete. Like, I don’t climb much anymore either, but I don’t go around saying I’m NOT a climber, with such conviction.” 

Pause. Consider. He had a point. 

In my life, I have had many identities. Strong identities. I was a climber. A college student. A yogi. An herbalist. A homesteader. An earth skills instructor. A business owner. A teacher of Kabbalistic wisdom. Etcetera. And while I still practice and teach those things, I now take pride in my careful dismantling of identities that are too strong, because I believe identities can be dangerous when they’re too strong. Because they can change. For example if all I am is a leader of a community, and the community dissipates (this happened), then who am I? If I own a business and then close the business (I did this), what am I? Or a common example that is not my own, if my primary identity is that I am a mother, and my children grow up and leave the house, who am I? Or if my main identity is that I am an athlete and then an injury causes redirection, who am I? So, I practice identifying with the eternal and appreciating the stages in life that comes and go. It’s a practice. In progress.

It is one thing to gently realize that I teach yoga and practice herbalism and like to climb, and it is another thing to resist the identity altogether, “I am most certainly NOT a climber,” for example. When there is a trigger, there’s something there to look at. Twelve years it’s been there and I didn’t even see it. Not until today. 

What is it to be climber? Well, literally I would strap up to ropes, my climbing partner at the other end, and send the rocks. I started when I was 12, got competitive at 16, and was dedicated through college. I didn’t drink or do drugs or party too hard, because inevitably I’d be waking up at 5am to go send some big walls the next morning. Four, five, six pitches up. There was nothing to feel anxious about. Nothing to thing or worry about. Besides the most minuscule, nearly micropscopic bump or crevice in the rock, because that is what will keep me from falling. The present moment. The next breath. Up on the rock, that is all there is. 

I climbed because climbing brought me out into the natural world.

I climbed because climbing brought me into my physical body.

I climbed because climbing brought me into presence.

I climbing because when I did, I found God. I knew God when I was out there, up there, mountains high and held to the rock by my taped-up fingers, a friend at the other end of the rope. 

That friend at the other end of the rope was the climbing partner. 

It’s a certain kind of trust to have your life tied, literally, to another person, another person at the end of the rope that is holding up your life. His name was Ben. He was my climbing partner, my best friend, and I loved him.

Climbing saved my life, in many ways. And it was to climbing that he sacrificed his. 

There was a time when he was mad at me. I didn’t understand it then. I do now, thirteen years later. We were young and immature in many ways, and he’d been in love with me, and I hadn’t quite gotten it. He was still not talking to me when he died. 

I remember where I was, and it was around this time of year, maybe even this very day, twelve years ago, when my friend called to tell me Ben had fallen to his death while free climbing in Rocky Mountain National Park. He was climbing one of the hardest climbs, without a rope. Testing his abilities like young men need to do. And then, he met his edge. He met the hard rock beneath him. He met his death, eternity, God.  

Ben didn’t believe in God. We’d stay up for hours with our friends Natalie and Shane  and Steven, and some others,  looking at the stars from whatever far away place we were camped on, and contemplate existence. I wonder what he thought in those moment before his death, as his feet slipped and his body fell through the air. He died too young. He was brilliant. An engineer. Once, I wanted to be Laura Croft for Halloween and so he made me two fake guns out of metal, from scratch, at his lab, just like that, no big deal. The orange caps were a kill  good thing because they looked so real.

Sure, I’ve thought about him. I’ve cried about it. I’ve asked for his forgiveness and I know he’s not mad at me anymore. 

Here is the thing about identity: for a long time I was the woman who lived in the woods, the medicine woman at the edge of the forest, who warmed her house by fire, and I explicitly “did NOT live in the city.”  I was proud of the resourcefulness and ruggedness I had cultivated after a youth growing up in the suburbs. Proud of my learned ability to chop wood and carry water and skin a deer.

I was “NOT a city dweller,” and that strong resistance tells me there was a trigger. The truth is, I wasn’t confident that I COULD live in the city. I was afraid that all the energy, commotion, hustle and bustle would overwhelm me, would cause anxiety, or that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. It was not until I felt strong within my own self, until I had cultivated inner resilience and self-trust and ways of leveling out my energy, that I felt I could live in a city. 

For some, living in the city is easy, and living alone in the forest ( like I did) feels terrifying. In my life, I like to take on my monsters. Not all at once, not always right away, but when I am ready, and while doing the inner work, I like to prepare myself well and then do the thing. Live alone in the woods. Live the city. Know that I can do it if I put my mind to it and do the inner work necessary. 

When I visited Austin, I remember spending a whole day walking downtown, in the heat, along the dirty streets, through the traffic and the loud trains and the many and varied kinds of people. Ten years ago, it would have overwhelmed me. But today, I live in a city and there is a simple confidence that I could live in the woods or on a farm or in the city and be okay, be more than okay. Finally, I had released the trigger. I I was ready, and into the city I went for my next adventure. 

So for 12 year, I was NOT a climber.

This is so different than simply being someone who doesn’t climb much anymore. But what is it to be a climber?

A climber is someone who strives for excellence. Someone who sets a goal, who gets still and present, who connects to her breath, and who works steadily towards that goal, even if she falls, even though she will get scratched, even though sometimes it feels like she is (sometimes literally) hanging on by nothing but her first jammed into a crack. She is someone who cultivates trusting relationships with her community. She is someone who finds the alternative route, the gentler route perhaps that others couldn’t see, when the obvious way of muscling through wasn’t available to her. I have always been a climber. 

Grief is a funny thing. Grief can be cyclical. Seasonal. Even if we’ve already grieved a thing, sometimes it comes back, sometimes there’s a layer deeper that we hadn’t felt yet, that we weren’t ready to feel yet, and then it comes up when we’re ready, to feel it some more. Just because we’ve processed grief (or whatever the charged emotion), it doesn’t mean it goes away forever. You know, the sad event still feels sad, it just doesn’t run the show anymore. 

So how do you know if the charge is running the show or not? It’s not always obvious to our own self to see. But usually, when we have a charged resistance to a thing, and especially if it was a thing we once loved, there is something there asking to be healed, to be felt a layer  deeper, accepted, and then released. 

The good news is, once identified, the charge can be cleared. Now, in this moment, having brought awareness to my trigger, having felt it, having breathed through it, having taken it through a process, I feel clearer. Now, I may not be “a climber,” but I’m also not “NOT a climber.” I’m just a woman who used to climb a lot, who might climb again someday, if the opportunity arises. The idea even feels a little bit exciting now. In this moment, I don’t feel triggered anymore. I didn’t even know I WAS triggered.  But now, having let it go, I feel the difference. That old charge was driving me and I didn’t even know it.

So I’ll end this sharing with a question for integration for you to contemplate.

Question for integration 1 - 

What identities do you have a charged resistance to? What are you, most certainly, NOT? 

Question for integration 2 - 

What ARE you? What do you claim, with certainty and ownership and permanence and pride, that you most certainly ARE? Could that ever change? What if it did? Would you feel okay about it? Who would you be then? 

Thank you for reading.

Much love and warmth, forgiveness and acceptance,

Sheefra 

{Post Script Note - Identifying and releasing old charges, so you can be in the driver’s seat of your life, is what I do for others in my professional containers. I am slowly and surely updating my website, sheefrablume.com ,  and changing my packages to make my work more accessible. If you’d like to schedule a reading and session, you are welcome to reach out and we’ll make it happen.}