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.  

Full of Medicine

If we fully express who we are, we are said to be “full of power” and expressing our medicine.
                      Angeles Arrien, The Four-Fold Way
 
Medicine these days can be a very confusing situation.  What exactly is medicine? Is it Western medicine i.e. the science of health? Is it Eastern medicine, i.e. the art of health? Or is it something even more mysterious, i.e. unique to each person and each situation? 

Since it is true that each of us is completely, 100% unique, no other is made exactly like us, I think it is safe to say that no one thing that we might call “medicine” can work for each and every one of us.  So how do we find the medicine that is right for us in a given moment?  I say we have to know exactly who we are at that moment.  To know who we are at any given moment, we have to have access to our own knowing, our own being.  We have to know how to dip in, drop in, fall in, get in, and be willing to taste, smell, touch, experience what is true for us in that moment. 
This is MEDICINE. 

I am not against Western medicine.  And I am not FOR Eastern medicine.  I am interested in how YOU might find YOUR medicine in the moments when it matters.  It matters, your medicine matters, whenever you are wondering how to go forward, how to be with what is happening.  Whether what is happening is illness, stress, excitement, accident or even ordinary routine events, your medicine matters for you. 

If in these moments that matter, you allow someone else to tell you what matters, you will always feel a glimmer of doubt, a space of wondering about what might have been.  When you mine your own medicine, bring forward your own knowing, then you need never wonder what is right for you.  You will know.

There is no one medicine.  And there is no RIGHT medicine.  Anything and everything can be medicine.  There is though, only one way to make whatever is at hand your medicine and that is by choice.  Choosing in consciousness, awareness will make whatever you choose your medicine if you are willing to honor and acknowledge the moment of choice.  This does not mean you KNOW all the facts, or that you even KNOW any of the facts.  You don’t need to know anatomy to know how your body feels.  You don’t need to know how to prescribe herbs to know how something smells to you.  Your experience, the experience that comes to you through your body, your senses, as well as your thoughts is critical to the making of the right medicine for you. 

So, in the moment of making medicine with someone; your partner, your doctor, your acupuncturist, your child, what are you willing to share? Are you willing to drop into the very moment and find what you need to make that moment your own medicine? 

If you find yourself willing but not knowing how, please consider calling on me.  I have a few ideas about how you might find your way in….:)

Shadows and Stillness

These are damp and bare times.  Dampness drives me to wrap myself in layers, to drink multiple cups of cocoa, to savor warmth.  And it invites me to sit still, to reflect, contemplate, meditate. Dampness also slows me down, even weighs me down.  The bareness brings me back to what is essential. In nature, there is not much extra around this time of year. Nothing is growing, nothing is blooming, really anywhere in the Northern hemisphere.  Light and shadow is all. The shadows beckon with a kind of warmth, womb-like, soft. The light provides a stillness that is uncanny, a kind of precision and clarity. It is a good time to allow this outer simplicity to bring you inward, toward your own essentials.  In the rush and flow of our active culture, you may easily lose touch with what is constant and essential within you. Sometimes it is hard to know it is even available.

 So, how can you access what is essential? One way is to sit still, doing nothing for as long as it takes to come home to yourself.  It could be a long time. OR it could be just a moment, a flash. Either way when you are home, you know it. Home in your own body, home in your own knowing.  Your body knows, you know. And even when it isn’t comfortable it is still yours.  

There is a long tradition of sitting still.  Thousands of years of sitting still you might say, beginning officially with the Shakymuni Buddha 2,500 years ago, but probably even before that, people often sat still.  They recognized the value of sitting, resting their minds, slowing or stopping activity in service of deeper knowing. Sitting still can be challenging. Or it can be such a relief.  You can sit while the chaos of your mind weighs in. Or you can sit while the repeated injunctions to DO something circle. And you can sit feeling dull, listless even. Meanwhile, the very light of your own attention can transform any kind of experience into clear open awareness, the natural freedom of just being.  Something inside you knows that this sitting still is essential, even nourishing, and yet we often regard it as useless, without substantive goals, without any apparent immediate results. Sitting with all of this, this chaos, this boredom, this knowing, is a kind of love for yourself that doesn’t really happen any other way or anywhere else that I know of.

A strange and bedeviling paradox remains in the partnership of movement and stillness.  Just like the light and shadow that is everywhere right now, you can’t have one without the other. You could even say that stillness is the shadow of activity. Just look at your own activity, how you move until you can’t move most of time.  How when you finally sit still a lingering feeling of loss, of wrongness can set in, so much so that you might even feel guilty for finally stopping. The movement still has momentum; you try to get all the dishes done before bed, try to respond to one more email before closing the computer, try to make one more stop before going home for the day.  And strangely, paradoxically, counter-intuitively, the more you try, the less gets done. And the more you rest, the more you sit, the more that actually can happen.
Try it. See what happens if you sit still for just 5 minutes each day. See what even that little bit of stillness, little bit of shadow does for how you feel.
Let me know.