You are the Experiment!
These days I am reading a lot about epigenetics. This is a subject that I am fascinated by; the idea that we change ourselves as we interact with our world. We are all in evolution, changing constantly. We couldn’t be otherwise, so to me it makes perfect sense that our bodies would have the capacity to respond on the deepest cellular level to what occurs. And now, this has been proven, shown, in the most practical, logical way in studies that show how cells behave. But long before there were scientific studies, there were humans who used their own bodies and their own experience to study the nature of things. I could digress here into a discussion of world religion, but more importantly, since we have made a new religion of keeping our bodies healthy it make sense to examine our own experience with each and every substance we encounter.
You are your own living experiment. Each and every day what you do, say, eat or drink becomes an invitation for change, growth or resistance. And each and every thing you do has an impact, a result, even if you can’t or don’t notice what that is. It is continually amazing to me how this works. Our bodies, these wonderful instruments of life, continue to play their tune whether or not we listen. But when we do listen, there is so much there to learn, to play with, to enjoy.
What if you listened openly, objectively even, to the way your body speaks to you? You body doesn’t use words. Your body uses sensation and feeling, even thoughts to get your attention. Yes, even your thoughts can arise from a physical source. Just think about how mad you get when you stub your toe or in my case, bang my head on the car door and get a huge goose egg. Maddening. I hopped around, my eyes tearing with anger and pain. Hmm. Strange, isn’t it, how powerful a simple accidental sensation is to get our attention and produce a feeling, an emotion. It is easy to think we are in control of bodies, or better yet that we’d like to be. In fact, in this ongoing relationship between our bodies and our minds there is little that we control. What if instead of talking down to the body, you listened, allowed for the fact of it, the simple fact that pain may have a say?
Letting your pain have a say is honoring, respecting the bare fact of it. And respect is about our willingness to look again and again at where pain IS, where it steps in for each of us. Honoring pain is about listening, really listening, without agenda and without expectation. Not to the words because there aren’t any, but to the quality, the feeling, the knowing in your own experience. It is there. For sure.
What do you hear?
Equal Light
Fall light is entirely compelling to me. In the gold sunlight that late afternoon offers these days, everything looks rich, soft and inviting. Even the shadowy areas beneath the trees look friendly, gentle. The darkness is growing, but somehow the days of almost equal amounts of dark and light bring an energy for looking and evalution, a weighing-in with ourselves that is rarely available other times of year. I lie on the ground feeling my heart beat and my nervous system slowly discharge the excess from my day. The earth, it seems, can take it. More than take it, the earth seems to grow only more strong, more verdant with the energy she absorbs. She absorbs sunlight. She absorbs water. And she absorbs the energy we humans are continually radiating no matter what kind of energy it is.
In Chinese medicine the earth is described as the source of our Yang energy. Even though the sun radiates light and heat from it’s home in the sky, we can’t directly use it. Instead, we convert the sunlight that we absorb through our skin into Vitamin D, which powers our hormones, our endocrine system, part of what we might call the Yin or the fluid of our bodies. But the Yang energy, the part of our energy that propels us into action, that lights us up you could say, comes from the earth we walk on right through the soles of our feet.
The balance of these two ways we use sunlight is a perfect match for nourishing both the inside and outside of our bodies. And in a perfect balance of exchange, the light we absorb through the surface goes to serve the innermost aspect, what I like to call the essence, while the light we absorb via the earth, a light that has undergone empowerment through interaction with the soil, goes to serve our ability to take action in the world.
To take advantage of this earth energy, you could take off your shoes and socks and get your bare feet on the ground. Most of the time, our feet, our connection to the earth, are barricaded from the precious Yang energy that the earth radiates, by the soles of our shoes. Some materials will conduct the earth energy like leather and cotton, but most man-made materials won’t. Until you get some skin contact with the earth, the nourishing energy can’t flow in. Something really different happens when even for just a moment you let the earth energy flow into your body. Such a moment can power the whole day.
In the spirit of this seasonal dance, you could use the balance of light and energy at this time of year to equalize, to take a kind of objective and steady look into your life, bringing balance to what you might absorb and what you might let go. You could look at what is nourishing for you and what is costing you more than you might wish or even draining you. You could prepare for the cold and the dark, by choosing carefully the things you want to see around your home, knowing you’ll likely be spending more time indoors. In this balancing act, some things will go to the light, transformed by absorbing heat and light. Some things will go to the dark, to the earth to be dissolved, disseminated, recycled. Either way they will go on to power you and the earth, returning to sunlight, to mineral, to soil and recharging all that lives. A beautiful balance.
Are You Coming or Going?
Last week I went to the beach. I love the seashore. I love the rough sand, the sound of the waves, the tides coming and going. No matter how choppy the waves, there is something soothing, restful even, about the way the water moves, coming and going, coming and going. If I spend enough time in the presence of this natural movement, I myself begin to move differently. I find that I begin to notice my own coming and going, begin to be acutely aware of the ways I lose or gain connection to myself, to my feet, to my own feeling, to my own thoughts.
Nothing is ever truly static in this world, never really standing still. We are always coming and going. Consciously or unconsciously we move into our experience and we move away, often moment by moment. You can try this; stand still for even just a minute and see whether or not you are actually still. There are always little movements, little movements that take us back to center, away from center, back into thought, away from thought, back into body, out of body. In each movement there is a coming and a going, a moment of arriving and a moment of leaving. These moments are precious.
The fact that we come and go is just that, a fact, a natural feature of our mind. But the way in which we pay attention to the comings and goings is a whole other matter. The precious gift of each coming and going is the power in each of those moments for you to change, for you to make new, novel decisions, try out new ways.
Where are you in a given moment? Are you off in some fantasy? Are you thinking about lunch? Or are you here in this moment, boring, painful or peaceful as it may be?