When I get housebound in the winter with illness or “cabin fever” I have a dual experience of the restorative value of retreat from the busyness of daily life and simultaneously a fearful wavering sense of purpose and direction. This arises as a deep awareness of buying into the cultural myth of the importance of external accomplishment as my main purpose in life. The story that I will be worthy of love if I do enough (or become enough) to earn it is persistent!
This pattern of getting quiet and then yearning for distraction from the inevitable simplicity of being is very familiar to me this time of year and I do have a habit of trying to reinvent myself during the winter solstice and new year. The difference this year is that I am more aware of this habitual pattern of trying to distract myself from the dark unknown with grand plans of self-transformation and find myself in a place of loving vulnerability to witness the beauty of my attempts to care for myself through this outdated ritual. The reason this pattern doesn’t serve me anymore is that the very nature of this habit comes from a sense of lack. If I am in constant reinvention of Self, then I am only perpetuating the belief that I am not good enough and that I need to create something outside of myself to validate my existence, to become someone other than I am.
The funny thing is that the main difference this year is that I notice how much judgement I have towards this process I go through every year, critically labeling it as another “existential crisis” which must be eradicated so that I will be forever free of the discomfort of the confusing unknown. I know in my heart of hearts that out of this mystery comes the seeds of new spring growth and summer fruit, but I still feel a palpable, visceral, and culturally fueled yearning to have a plan to finally resolve my inherited story of separateness and scarcity. Then and only then can I be free to live my life from a place of innate generosity of service and creation as opposed to fear and lack.
This duality arises when I feel out of control and purposeless, like I do during the dreamtime of winter. Even though I know it is not action I need to take right now, and not even to plan or resolve to act, I find myself tossing and turning in the dreamtime desperately trying to grasp on to a formula for the future. We just don’t like to be in the unknown. We trick ourselves with new years resolutions of self improvement which serves as inspiration for a while, but we all know these changes never last because they come from a place of scarcity. What I really want to practice is self love and self care from a place of acceptance and connectedness. Still, I don’t like being without a plan for self-improvement. I have spent so much of my life trying to transform myself that the thought of accepting my being the way I am is scary, as if self acceptance means that I will never manifest my creative visions!
I just don’t know what to do with myself when it is not a time of doing or reinventing or when I am too sick to dance and walk in nature (although there is always plenty to DO on a daily basis). My main practice in 2013 was to relax into BEING, and I know that practicing stillness doesn’t mean I just sit around all day and don’t participate in the creative flow of life, but now I have come up against a deeper level of doubt which challenges my experience of practicing living as a Human Being as opposed to a Human Doing. I realize that I still sometimes buy into to the doubt that if I maintain a Zen quality of being my creative pursuits will have no (external) motivation.
In the quiet of the deep winter’s pulse I gestate and hear clearly that it is not the time to know, or take action, but the time to listen, to see, to witness the deepest truths, which rest slow and dormant. A twinkle of potential in waiting. Within this unknown I sit, in the dark, to witness my frustration, fear and beliefs. I pay homage to the gifts of challenge and tenderly cradle the story of the difficulty of surviving in a time of separation and destruction. Longing for that clarity of non-duality, my mind yearns to figure out that which seemingly exists outside of myself so that I may illuminate my true purpose…which, of course my mind thinks is something other than Being. My ego would feel so much better inflated if I just trusted the illusion that I have it all figured out and under control!
Alas, the season of generosity brings me the gift of vulnerability. The acceptance of my illusion of separateness. The gratitude for this wise teacher guiding me home to the truth of the dark, as well as the pull of the other end of the spectrum, where summer illuminates clarity and swells ripe with ease of being. Even more than last year I do not cower away from this dark Dreamtime where my fear story dwells, but rather dive deep into the blackest waters of the unknown, surrendering to the effortlessness of floating like in a womb. I remember that I can breathe fluid, maybe even better than the whispy air of consciousness. In this dream I breathe the interconnectedness of all, my divine birthright, the Tao. Unable and unwilling to separate myself, I embrace the wholeness being, transcending into a memory of the vibration beyond polarities, beyond the story of my life, beyond the mental, emotional, and physical acts of survival. I rest in the essence which has no proper name in human tongue and no need for one..
I float
buoyant in it’s grace
levied by viscosity
made everything by it’s nothingness
The Luscious Way 