December Asides

This wisdom seeking heart

Feelings are an important part of life, and yet they can be incredibly inconvenient. Particularly in a busy world, one filled with responsibilities and duties (a word that belongs more to my mother's than to this generation), feelings are often best set aside, in preference for the ability to carry on, smoothly. Yet, the darker feelings, sorrow, sadness, grief, fear, and pains of all colors, live just at the boundary where shadows shape the dimensions of our experience. It seems that if those darker feelings are not lived, offered light, they may fold in upon us, narrowing our inner worlds, limiting our sight, thinning our dimensions, and our depth. It influences everything, even our dancing. We cannot only feel the good and happy feelings. We need to invite the shadows, give them space within, so that they may be cared for, even loved.

Care within is difficult to do, not least because it requires time, but also because there is pressure in these economically driven (western influenced) cultures to avoid these feelings, to buck up and set them aside. Get on with it! Yet, doing this will lead to a life without the depths of joy, awe, and grace. Happiness is never enough, it thins. Where as feeling fear leads to courage, feeling grief leads to gratitude, care, and compassion. And so it goes with every shadow and dark presence. 

I have been monitoring the size of my heart and my bodily felt feelings because I wish them to grow in generosity and care. So, I have tried not to avoid pain. This Fall has been filled with moments of difficulty for me personally and, I am also profoundly challenged by the wars, genocides, and greed that exists almost everywhere – of which my own nation is a perpetrator if not a generator. And the world, ahhh the natural world ... There are times when it is painful to see people buy more. More and more. And, I know you all understand and likely have similar moments. There are times when I want the world to just stop as I walk through airports that are more like shopping malls.

But this is not a situation of us and them. I too am complicit. We are all interconnected. If I weren’t heading to Boulder, the airport malls wouldn’t exist. I have two choices, to feel, or not to feel. Not going to Boulder will not change the corporations who spew most of the world’s pollution, making stuff.

I choose to feel. It is not easy. My only choice is to live with pain that I know will not go away unless I banish it, become numb to it. This condition is true, only if I wish my heart to grow fuller. And I do. I totally want a heart that is in motion. And, it’s not like my heart is small, I just am someone who wants to open my darker corners so that I grow. What I do in the world depends upon it.

It is also important not to be overcome by sorrows. Learning to move with pain and through pain takes courage and skillfulness. This can mean becoming friends with difficult feelings, inviting my body to speak, realizing I am not the pain, remembering that joy is a choice that is also present and needs no reason. Pain is something we have, not something we are. When my thoughts are about my very self, the frustrations of being human, these I can do something about. This does not mean dismissing my pain, but rather seeking to understand what I have come to believe that is the basis for its formation and for my actions. How we think matters. How we act matters, too.

My world-pain needs me to be resilient so that I can stay present, have clear boundaries when necessary, but able to open as well, and stay soft and strong. It needs me not to contribute to further pain when at all possible, although I drive a car, fly to gigs and eat meat. I care to understand these choices and feel the pain of their contribution to the world's distress while always seeing more than simply the world's distress because there is always more. I act as best I can to further relational intelligence and continue to grow.

And, it is good to cry, to cleanse the wounds of what can feel like helplessness and hopelessness. Especially where the world is concerned, there may not be an end to pain, yet there is an end to tears, for a time, because eventually the clouds part, and the sun shines. We work our way through pain and into realization, or awareness. And, where the light shines, when the light shines, it is brilliant. Not avoiding feeling, my heart gains capacity. Part of that capacity is to see more light, available or not, everywhere. When that happens, I feel I am not alone in darkness. I have an ability to walk in light, not by avoiding how I feel about the truly awful, but by walking into knowledge of it, getting stronger every day, moving through it to bring what sight I can, touching the world care-fully with my inner eyes and my wisdom seeking heart. 

Dancing the weight of the moment

As I age, I realize how important changing the scale of my experience is for sustaining the abilities to be true to an experience and understand its context, both. It is a kind of path to freedom, an ability to be wholly involved, but not lost.

I love edges, the line where this becomes that, where balancing becomes free-fall, engaging can dis-engage, an idea shifts into action, practice finds its underlying principle, a lift finds the end of its suspension, that place where a decision will be made, by the earth, by the circumstances, by an alignment, or by you. The sharper the edge, the cleaner the action. Dancing the edge is fast, its clean, its exhilarating. So, hanging out in feelings, taking the slow route to change, golly that’s tough.

And yet, feelings are an invitation to travel inwardly, explore a scale, slow down. Hang out. Wait. Do nothing. Let the moment expose itself, stop generating. Listen. Don’t go to the next thought, the next place. Allow this one the fullness of its taste. Stay in the body, now, and now, and now. Thin slicing an engaged experience as it unfolds. Active passivity. Staying in relations. 

And then, because change is what life does, the experience slides onto another scale, like rolling down hill. You notice that if you just hold the feeling, gently, with an open hand, it will do something like roll-open to show a whole other something you couldn’t make happen. I often wonder if the difficulties people have are that they remain on the same scale of experience, and can’t shift with it when the shift comes. They work so hard to live in a recognizable world. It's like living on flat lands – no rolling.

Luckily, I live in a wild world with lots of rolling available. The changing scale of experience is a grace and a key for me. I am really skillful at finding the edges where it's easy to shift, but I can ask myself to stop and let it just happen. It's there in my dancing – to not just master my scales, but be mastered by my scales. Living lightly, being easily moved – dancing the weight of the moment.