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?

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. 

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!