Crooked and Straight
We’ve entered the season of letting go. Essential to letting go is flexibility, a topic intimately related to pressure. (Positive Pressure) How much pressure we can bear depends on how flexible we are. No matter how strong you are, if you are not flexible, almost any amount of pressure can cause distress.
Letting go has always had a mysterious quality to me. I never know if the physical letting go will result in an emotional letting go or vice versa. Often it is impossible, prior to the completion of the process, to know what exactly I am letting go of. In some ways, letting go seems to be about letting the picture blur somehow, as if seen through a window with condensation. This is the domain of the Lungs in Chinese medical thinking, the Metal element, the element associated with Fall. The Lungs are responsible for distributing “clouds” of moisture, creating the rain that nourishes our whole body. And we cannot let go without some moisture, some rain to wash away whatever we are holding on to.
What happens inside you when the weather changes, when the grocery store is out of your favorite snack, when someone cancels their date with you? Can you bend, change course, adapt to the new circumstances? Can you soften the gaze, see the picture through the rainy window? If these things are tough for you, demanding, stressful, you might need more moisture in your life. Moisture could be water or fat, (bacon, even or even especially) or it could be a good day in bed reading or staring out the window. Moisture is both the substance itself and the quiet, slow pace of a rainy day.
Essential to flexibility is a quality called “crooked and straight.” A funny saying, crooked and straight, but one that describes the Wood element from Chinese medicine.. Why am I thinking about the Wood element, which is usually associated with Springtime, here at the advent of Fall, you might ask? Well, I am thinking about the flexibility that is characteristic of a healthy Wood element. And I am thinking about what the opposing movements of Spring and Fall can teach us about flexibility. In Springtime, the pressure of growth makes things explode, show themselves in a tender green glory. In Fall the pressure is on slowing down, letting go, moving into a quiet, simple state.
Crooked here means we can turn, bend, move aside, like a tree that grows out over the stream at an angle, bending and twisting to get the sunlight it needs. Straight means we are strong, holding up under the pressure of climate changes, schedule changes, the everything changes changes. I’d go so far as to say that this kind of flexibility is the single most important quality for your health. I know it is most important for me. Everything that grows in the world, including humans, needs flexibility to survive. And everything needs a kind of strength. Yet flexibility remains key, pivotal, you might say, as everything can turn on whether or not we can bend with the pressures rather than stiffen against them.
Where are you straight and strong, still growing? And where are you ready to soften, to let go?
The Benefits of Being Sick
This week’s topic follows on the very first Monday morning missive, and to take things a step further. Not only is it normal to be sick, but, in fact, there is benefit to being sick. I know this notion sounds crazy and you might think that reasonably I would limit this idea to sicknesses that most often are resolved without intervention, but, actually, I mean this with regard to all sickness, short-term, long-term, acute and chronic, flagrant or subtle. You could say that common to all sickness is the pain; the physical discomfort, the emotional discomfort and the spiritual discomfort. All conspire to make being sick painful.
So, yes, I do mean all sickness. And I mean to point at the benefits of feeling pain. I’m not talking about suffering here. I’m talking about pain. Suffering is what happens when we won’t or don’t feel our own pain. Pain is what happens when something needs to change. It could be a big change, a small change, a simple change or a complicated one, but when we are experiencing pain, there is a call for change. Then the question becomes will it be a forced change or a change by choice. Will we endure the reality of what happens when we ignore the call or will we choose to change course before things get to painful? And what happens when the changes come so fast and furious that we can’t keep up?
Well, we get sick. That is what happens when change is happening faster than we can choose. How do we regain our power of choice? How do we catch up with change? We slow down or we speed up. When we slow down, we can tune in, find out more about what is asking for change and find our way to the next moment for change. When we speed up, try to get ahead of things, often we find that we are choosing without knowing, trial and error choices. Better than no choices, those made on the fly, but still chances are not always good that we will find the right rhythm in that speed. Speed requires a kind of ballast, a kind of balance that we might not have sometimes. On the other hand, slowing down, i.e. BEING sick, actually affords us a view, we can’t get otherwise. We can begin to appreciate ourselves, our bodies and our world, as we get slow enough to see what the choices are. It may not be glamorous, it may not be obvious, but the slow way is a treasure trove of insight waiting for you.
There are lots of ways to slow down. What is your favorite?
Henderson being sick on the porch…it’s not bothering him a bit!
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?
