Positive Pressure

I’ve always said that I am not a fan of pressure; time pressure, peer pressure or foot pressure, for that matter. Especially vexing can be the pressure for things to change, a pressure that often shows up as illness or accident. Yet there is a way that pressure is what maintains us, maintains our bodies, our minds, and our health. A healthy blood pressure, for example, is maintained by the proper amount of fluid flowing through our blood vessels. A healthy mind has the pressure of contemplating how to say what you feel and a healthy body overall is maintained by the perfect pressure of exercise and rest in some combination. In some ways our world is always exerting pressure on us, even just the pressure of the climate, if nothing else.

What I like to call a positive pressure is created by connection, whether it be a connection to a friend, to a job or to yourself, your creativity, or your feelings. Connections help to hold you, place you in your world. Without connection, we can’t survive. A connection to meaning and purpose can sustain human beings sometimes through the worst life has to offer.

Alternatively, a negative pressure is created by expectation or demand. In my experience this kind of negative pressure most often takes the form of ideas about outcome. When we think we can expect or demand a certain outcome, we pressure ourselves or those around us in ways that can paralyze us, depress us or even break us under the pressure. One of my favorite quips from Buddhist nun Pema Chödron is a twist on a phrase that comes from Buddhist mind training. The original phrase is translated as “change your expectations and relax as it is”. Nice advice, but Pema says “lower your expectations and relax as it is!” Really, give yourself a break and don’t wait for circumstances to make you break.

All pressure has an element of tension. Too much tension and we break easily. Too little tension and we do not feel supported. Applying a bit of pressure is the way we can begin to experience what degree of tension is already there. When we apply a bit of pressure, say in a question or a hand on our neck, we begin to know how we are. Our feelings surface in response. A certain kind of tension, as well as a certain amount of pressure, are necessary for any structure to be maintained and to respond to the stress of life.

How do you create a positive pressure, a vital relationship with life? How do you recognize the negative pressure, where you are interjecting expectation, even demand, into the equation? Pressure will not work if it is constant. Significantly and not surprisingly, pressure and release works to both inform and relax how we function. Think about how it works with your muscles, how when someone touches you with some amount of pressure you relax, and with another amount, you may tighten. Apply that same idea to your emotions, your thoughts. Observe how the pressure of your self-reflection and self-examination works positively or negatively for you. Observe how you respond to your own inquiry. Is the inquiry positive for you, the right amount of pressure? What would the right amount of pressure feel like?

For me, the right amount of pressure feels like love, care. And the wrong amount of pressure feels like irritation, distraction, even invasion. This week’s experiment; how can you create exactly the right amount pressure, how can you discover where is too loose, where is too tense and how can you engender the sensation of love and care for yourself, no matter where you are or what you are doing?

When Information is NOT Enough

It is easy in our times, to think that information is all you need.  Just look it up on the internet.  Just pull out your phone for an easy definition, the how-to video or the article explaining a particular political position.  But when is information not enough?  Information, you could say, is only one kind of information.  What else could you be informed by? Your gut, your experience.  But, what if you have no prior experience of your situation? What if everything is new?  Information is not enough when things are constantly changing.  We need more.  Information is not enough when you have lost your power of choice.   

And things are always changing.  This is true even in the information flow, on the internet.  In fact, things are changing so fast in cyberspace, that they can appear to be sitting still. Meanwhile, you can feel bewildered, overwhelmed, stymied, stuck, weighed down by the seemingly limitless amounts of information that often do not clarify what the best choice might be. 

So, where do you go to find something besides information? What is there, anyway, that isn’t information?  There is knowing.  Heart knowing. Belly knowing.  Eye knowing, ear knowing, even feet knowing.  Your body is an amazing library of knowing.  In every moment, your body is right here, vibrating with knowing, with a kind of “information” that isn’t really information at all, but direct communication about what is happening. 

The body does not use words to communicate.  The body uses sensation, pain, vibration, resonance to communicate its knowing. Your body speaks the language of sensation, perception and intuition. Words sometimes eventually pop up as you listen in to the communications from your body, but the knowing precedes them. 

Our perceptions are often barreling in at top speed, [information, in fact, would say, that at least 10,000 bits of information in every second are pouring in to our eyes, ears, and nose] that it can really be challenging to make good use of them.  That is the reason that even eye witnesses to a given event can differ so drastically in how they describe what has happened.  It isn’t that anyone is wrong, per se, but only that each person noticed a different one of the 10,000 things that poured in at that moment.  How then can we choose?  How then can we know?

I have a way that I use to listen in, to slow down.  I place my hand on my heart.  I place my other hand on my belly.  I stand or sit still.  I relax my muscles, feel my feet on the ground.  And I listen.  You could do this for any amount of time, until something pops in.  Something could be a word, a thought, a feeling, anything really, but after it shows up, you know.  You can do this anytime, anywhere, to bring forward your own knowing.

There is only one reliable source of information of any kind; your experience.  I like to say the only news you can use is your own.  When it comes right down to it, no amount of information can actually give you what you need to make an informed decision.  A truly informed decision has to include both information that you can find on the internet and the knowing that you can only find inside yourself. 

The Sound of Silence

There is something incredibly special about morning air.  Every morning when I wake up the first thing I do is open the window and/or the door and feel the air.  No matter where I am or what season, I am always anxious to get a whiff, to get a feel of what is in the air.  And always, no matter what, it is sweet.  Sweet in the way that a particular friend calls at just the right moment.  Sweet in the way that the rabbit hops right into the sunshine to twitch at nothing.  Sweet in the way the world appears after long periods of solitude and silence. 

I cannot deny that as much as I love words (and music) there are times when all I want is silence.  Space where there is nothing but the sound of my own insides to tend to.  It is for me a matter most important to my health.  My ears are sharp and sensitive.  Human voices can almost always draw my attention.  Bird voices, too.  Then, the question of how or where do I place my attention in a given moment.  Do I move toward the sound? Do I move to the feeling in my gut or my chest? Do I allow the thoughts that arise to draw me into some story or memory? 

Critical to my health seems to be the ability to tune in to my own body, to listen and to hear what is arising in any given moment.  You can train in this kind of listening in many ways.  You can pay attention anytime or you can arrange formal times to pay special attention.  Both are good.  Special attention might be called meditation whether sitting, walking or moving.  Open attention might be called cooking, dancing, talking.  All are good.

For most of my life, the main ways that I have learned to listen are meditation practice and questions.  Probably questions came first. Questions can take me in or out.  Meditation practice can tune me in to my own body and open me to the body of the world.  When I leave my cushion and return to my house, my car, my shopping, my walking, the world becomes bright and open, available in a way it wasn’t before.  This never ceases to amaze me. 

But if we only pay attention to what is inside, if we don’t allow the outside air to come in, we can become stuck and narrow in our view of how things are.  Strangely, we humans live in a skin that is both impervious and permeable.  This is an apt metaphor of how we might wish to live in the larger world.  Impervious, or perhaps, objective, even detached to many things that occur and yet permeable, open, touched by other things.  Do you know what touches you? Do you hear what the world is saying around you? Do you hear the voice inside? Or do you only hear the outside voices?

When I write, I have to allow both the inside and the outside voices to show up.  It can be hard to rest with the often cacaphonous sound of the inside and the outside carrying on together until somehow they begin to tune in to each other, resonating, sounding, the sweet sound of the world coming through me. 

I wonder how the world comes through you. 

Thank you Paul Simon for this amazing song about the interface between silence inside and outside, between an individual and their world.  And thank you, Disturbed, for this beautiful, beautiful rendition.