Gap Happy - Finding, Minding and Mining the Gap

We have this phrase – minding the gap.  Sometimes, watch the gap.  What does this really mean?  Pay attention.   Attention to what?  To the space between the train and the platform if you are riding the subway.  To the space between one thought and the next if you are meditating.  Or go shopping if you are walking down 9th avenue in New York.  Seriously, though, my whole philosophy of health might just rest on this one idea; everything you need to know is happening in the gap. 

There are many gaps, though we usually ignore them.  Big or small, we are still terribly accustomed to avoiding the gap.  We want to know.  We want to have prepared the questions, or have the answers.  Stepping to the next platform, to the next thought, to the next “doing” is almost automatic.  We don't want to feel at a loss, be without something to hold on to.  We don’t consider that a moment of “nothing”, a moment of gap, might just be the critical moment for choosing what we do next.  Even more critically, if we allowed ourselves to rest in this gap, what would happen? 

The gap between knowing and not knowing. The gap between diagnosis and treatment. The gap between treatment and your life. The gap between knowing who you are and finding out who you are now.  All of our potential, maybe even all that we could know, seems to lie in this space where nothing and everything is happening.  Your choices live in the gap, the choices that power your health. 

Finding the gap is easy. Most often, quite literally, the gap finds us.  But, can we allow that gap to “entertain” us, stir our curiosity, crack open our hearts.  Can we step right into the gap? Can we go even further and "mine" the gap, feel and know these things that will only show themselves when we move into the gap?

There is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in. 

                                                                     Leonard Cohen

 Crack the window, open the door.  Take a breath.  It is possible that in order to charge forward, in order to take the next moment of life in, the space in front of you is just the breath you need to find your own power and knowing.  And if you are ill, facing crisis, or maybe just ending a long day, the gap, the light, will show you how to go forward in a way that is true, a way that is you. 

Next week, powering down to power up, how resting actually fuels everything you do!

Sickness is NOT a Pathology!

By this I mean that it is normal to be sick.  It is something bodies do.  Sometimes you’d think being sick was a sin.  You are on the couch, down for the count, and you are thinking “I should be at work.”, “why am I so useless?”  or “what did I do to deserve this?”  In a culture of constant work, constant contact, constant availability by phone, tablet or computer, we are left with the sense that if we aren’t doing something, there is something wrong.  

Pathology is something abnormal, something doing or being something that it isn’t meant to be.  But bodies, believe it or not, were meant to be sick.  Sickness is really another way of saying  “change is happening.”  Being sick is a way our bodies allow new ideas to take shape, a way that new “roads” can be built, old ones dismantled.  Renovation, repair, and even destruction of our cells is absolutely necessary for vibrant health.  

When we are sick, our bodies put the “doing” out there in the world on hold, so they can focus on what needs doing inside.  Your body systems conspire to slow you down, keep you sleepy and basically prevent you from doing much in the usual sense.  For good cause. The cause, the need, even the demand for  change on the inside.  You wouldn’t try to change the tire on your car while it was moving, would you?  Why then, would you try to change seasons, jobs, relationships, or even hairstyles, without slowing down, let alone stopping?

What if we could accept that sometimes sickness is a necessary, even important, part of being human? What if we could use our sickness as a way to regain choice, to empower our health with the knowing that our bodies can and do absolutely know how to heal when given the right conditions.  Health, then, is NOT the absence of disease or sickness, but rather the presence of each of us in our own bodies, in our own knowing, in each moment.  

I guess this could sound like a tall order, but the truth is, you are already doing it much of the time.  You already know how to be a body.  You already know how to listen to the signals; hunger, thirst, fatigue, pain.  The question is do you? And the even bigger question is when you hear the body calling do you know what your choices are?  

  More on the matter of choice next week...