Since I accepted a full-time teaching position this year, the shift in my daily routine has me thinking about balance even more that usual. With the fall equinox arriving in the Northern Hemisphere this Thursday, I am reminded of Missy Vineyard's perspective:
"Balance would be better described as an exquisitely delicate act of continually recovering – not holding – our uprightness. In order to achieve this, a subtle poise and mobility of the head on the spine is essential to stimulate our [vestibular] system, which sends its data to the brain, enabling it to know our spatial orientation – particularly the direction toward the ground, and the direction of movement of the head.” (How to Land, p. 22)
I am captured by the notion of balance as a practice of "recovering uprightness," restoring or rediscovering verticality, integrity, equanimity. This practice requires a willingness to move to the edge of balance – even perhaps allowing ourselves to fall – as a way to find the ground and a sense of direction. I'm inspired to consider this as an on-going practice of bodily becoming. How are you practicing balance in this season?
Sustaining the fire by tending the flame
In the northern hemisphere, we recently celebrated the summer solstice, the moment when the earth's axis tilts furthest toward the sun. Solstices and equinoxes have always captured my imagination as a way to mark the changing seasons and as a lens for contemplative practice. The summer solstice is often associated with fire, energy, passion, fertility, and creativity.
This year we hardly need a solstice to remind us that the world is on fire. A global pandemic and the recent, brutal murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain, and countless others have served as catalysts for a reckoning with a core wound in American society. I find myself searching for a third space to hold the paradoxes of this moment: grief and gratitude, fear and confidence, despair, and hope.
At the same time, it is tempting in moments when passions are blazing to expect that we could never revert back to the status quo. However, for lasting changes to occur, we need strategies to stoke the fires of transformation and sustain our energy over time. Just as fire needs heat, fuel, and oxygen to sustain itself, our personal vitality is supported through intention, resources, and space.
Like the heat that activates combustion, our intentions awaken our energy and kindle our drive to act. Intentions are more like guiding principles than goals. They articulate a sense of orientation and awareness, rather than achievement. Intentions are also not dependent on the actions of others. For example, I can create an intention to live from a place of curiosity regardless of whether or not others show up this way.
Resources provide the energy to nourish intentions. Although we may initially think of material assets, resources can be physical, emotional, relational, experiential, and imaginational. Essentially, resources are anything that helps you connect to the goodness of life. To support my intention to live with curiosity, I might identify the qualities I associate with it, such as wonder, delight, interest, admiration, creativity, and imagination. I could choose a work of art or a poem that evokes these attributes or remember a time in my life when I felt curiosity.
A sense of spaciousness, openness, and availability are the enabling conditions that invite our intentions to emerge. This involves giving ourselves opportunities to practice slowing down, pausing to notice our breath, and the connection between our bodies and the ground.
What intentions are arising for you in this day, month, season? What resources do you have to support your intentions? Where do you have opportunities to slow down, to create a space for your intentions to arise?
Moving with Mutability
Over the weekend, I had the delightful opportunity to participate in a virtual retreat through the Center for Spirituality in Nature where we explored the possibilities for connecting with the sacred in our own backyards. For me, a central element of connection is movement. I was delighted with the prompts to inhabit our landscapes through the lens of the senses, but I also found myself compelled to ask: How does this landscape invite me to move?
Many of us are continuing to move through a landscape of uncertainty. The natural mutability of spring is magnified by the global uncertainty we face. Impermanence is a fundamental part of life, yet we often resist it--especially when it involves loss, separation, ending, or death. Once again, the teachings of Thich Nhát Hanh comfort me:
When I lived in Vietnam during the war, it was difficult to see our way through that dark and heavy mud. It seemed like the destruction would just go on and on forever. Every day people would ask me if I thought the war would end soon. It was very difficult to answer because there was no end in sight. But I knew if I said, "I don't know," that would only water their seeds of despair. So when people asked me that question, I replied, "Everything is impermanent, even war. It will end someday." Knowing that we could continue to work for peace. And indeed the war did end. Now the former mortal enemies are busily trading and touring back and forth, and people throughout the world enjoy practicing our tradition's teachings on mindfulness and peace.†
It's very natural to freeze up in the face of so much uncertainty and fear. Fortunately, there are many ways to move from freeze to ease. Sometimes it requires a slowing down, a pause to discover your roots reaching deep into the earth. At other times, a brisk walk or run with the breeze pressing against your skin offers the resistance you need to press forward. Sometimes all it takes is your favorite song turned up to full volume and a willingness to embrace your inner disco diva.
How does the mutability of this season invite you to move? Are there new movements you'd like to make? How can you create opportunities for new movements to arise?
As always, if you'd like a companion on your movement journey, I'd love to dance with you!
† Nhát Hahn, Thich. 2014. No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 13.
Dancing for Our Lives
As I step off the path, the soft ground gently yields to my weight. The smell of muddy earth rises to meet me. A dog barks in the distance, and the sounds of children’s voices, elevated in play, mingle with the rattle of bare branches in the wind. The stream burbles softly. Further along, it slows almost to a standstill, its outlet clogged by fallen leaves.
Read the rest of my post on the Women in Theology blog.
Befriending Darkness
Last week a dear friend shared the news of her sixth pregnancy loss. Another is grieving the dissolution of her marriage. Meanwhile, I am mourning the loss of my career and the professional identity I built my life around. All three of us have also lost our fathers in the past few years. Sometimes the weight of grief is crushing, and darkness seems to press in on us from every side.
In the Christian tradition, December is the season of advent. Advent, which literally means “arrival,” simultaneously remembers the incarnation of God in the birth of Christ and anticipates his return and the restoration of the world. The movements we make during advent – lighting candles, singing carols, and reading sacred texts – invite believers to contemplate the birth of Christ as a means to sustain their faith during the darkest days of the year.
In the northern hemisphere, advent coincides with the celebration of the winter solstice, the moment when our corner of the earth reaches its furthest point from the sun, and we experience the longest night of the year. (For those in the southern hemisphere, the winter solstice occurs in June.) Throughout the world and across time, people celebrate the winter solstice with rituals that celebrate the return of the sun and the victory of light over darkness.
At the same time, the winter solstice is associated with the earth element and with the natural cycles of dormancy and decomposition. It evokes images of releasing, going to ground, stagnation, and decay. However, many plant species – especially those in colder climates – require a period of latency to effectively enact the processes of germination and growth.
In his beautiful book, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhát Hanh writes
Everyone knows we need to have mud for lotuses to grow. The mud doesn’t smell so good, but the lotus flower smells very good. If you don’t have mud, the lotus won’t manifest. You can’t grow flowers on marble. Without mud, there can be no lotus… When you’re overwhelmed by despair, all you can see is suffering everywhere you look. You feel as if the worst thing is happening to you. But we must remember that suffering is a kind of mud that we need in order to generate joy and happiness. Without suffering, there is no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering, and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.
As the days grew shorter this season, I noticed in myself a tendency to cling to the light as a remedy for darkness. I tend to associate darkness with suffering, and so I hurry away from it, rushing with relief toward the light. This year I’ve found myself pondering what it might mean to “befriend the darkness.” What is enabled by our journey in and with the dark? How might we move with suffering, embracing and cradling it, as Nhát Hanh suggests, as the very grounds for joy?
Wishing you peace and love amidst the darkness and the compassion to hold suffering with tenderness in the new year.
Passing Through
Summer is drawing to a close. Kids are back to school and fall décor is appearing in stores. Almost imperceptibly, the days are getting shorter. But the air is still hot and humid, and our farmers’ market stalls are filled with late summer produce—tomatoes, summer squash, okra, and green beans. Welcome to the in-between.
The theme of transitions has been on my mind since the end of June, when I attended Up & Down, a 2-day movement workshop at the Feldenkrais Institute of New York co-led by nervous system specialist, Irene Lyon, and professional dancer, Elia Mrak. Mrak introduced a particularly potent exercise, entitled “Passing Through,” by observing that we are always traveling between things: between day and night, between work and rest, between last year and next year, and, ultimately, between birth and death. “Passing Through” asks trios to negotiate with the task of attempting to travel between their partners while their partners are simultaneously trying to pass between them.
As we shift from summer to fall, I am aware of my habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and enacting transitions. I usually experience transitions as disruptive. I feel suspended, untethered. I long to feel my feet on solid ground. I find myself alternating between resistance and rushing in an attempt to avoid or at least minimize my discomfort. In “Passing Through,” I discovered that dwelling in a threshold place can also be simple and pleasurable. We began slowly, gave each other space, found places to pause, and sought pathways that were mutually beneficial. “Passing Through” evokes a quality of being that reminds of these words from John O’Donohue:
May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.†
As you move through the transition from summer to fall, where do you sense the thresholds in your life? What are you leaving behind? What new pathways are before you? How can you find moments to pause, to deepen your attention to self and others, to discover mutually beneficial ways of “passing through?”
†O’Donohue, John. 2008. “To Learn From Animal Being.” To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. New York, NY: Doubleday, 73.
