Flying Closer To The Ground

“For your own unique call to be heard, you need to fly closer to the ground and pay attention to details, creating a more sensitive connection with your world”

Hilary Barrett, I Ching, Walking Your Path, Hexagram 62 Xiao Guo

In this dark, still time of winter in the Northern hemisphere, you can get very quiet, very still inside yourself, listening in with a slower, quieter world around you.  You can listen for your own voice in a way that might not be possible other times of the year.  Even in the wind and rain of some of the places in the country where winter is less about snow, there is still the bareness of trees, the gray sky and the short dreary daylight to draw you inward.

And in these weeks preceding mid-Winter it is a good time to ask yourself: How do I feel? What do I want? What do I need to say? Your saying may not come in words, but in pictures, movements or sounds.  Your wanting may not accord with your life as you currently experience it.  Your wanting may bring you to the request for change, change that may be slow or fast, change that may only now begin to gestate. 

Your feeling may surprise you when you really allow yourself to feel.  What I wonder is asking to be heard that is uniquely yours?

Sensitizing yourself to your own world, tapping in to what may be surprising, new feelings, desires and creative movements can only come about through stillness.  In Chinese medical thinking, in observation of our natural world, you can see that movement leads to stillness, stillness to movement.  Fullness leads to emptiness, emptiness to fullness, dark to light, light to dark and so on.  What this means, pratically speaking, is that you can sit still until movement arises.  I know that sounds completely impractical, but I wonder if you know just how much stillness you need, how much laying down, sitting still absorbing quiet and dark will actually be enough.  It could be more or less than you think. 

In my reflections about medicine, I am always drawn to look at what is the natural inclination of the body under specific and very individual circumstances.  I always interested to know and see when, where, how and what is happening in each individual.  Like the weather, these circumstances are always changing, always shifting, always revealing of reality.  Reality, though, is NOT pathology.  As you observe, becoming more sensitive, you are not becoming more neurotic, more worried, more obssessed.  No, you are actually becoming more accurate, more precise in what you know, becoming more yourself.

So here is the practice:  rest until you rise, rise and move until you lay down. Really rest. Really rise. Notice how long it takes to feel your own tiredness or your own energy rising.  Listen exquisitely, sensitively to the dark insides, the warm/cold outsides and everything in between.  Fly close to the ground.