The Fruitful Darkness

It has been a long while since I published a post on this blog, though I continue in the inquiry as much as ever. I intend to post here more regularly as a way of cataloging my learning and various expressions of my work and discovery in this area.

For this post, I will jump to The Fruitful Darkness, a theme I used for a recent gathering. It is that time of the year - when the daylight gives way to the darkness, the days getting shorter, our energies going inward. It would seem that societally, we do much to avoid or deny the darkness and the other experiences that accompany it (uncertainty, not knowing, fear, silence, solitude) as legitimate and (I would say) essential dimensions of our experience. This is so much the case that the degree of illumination around major cities in the world has impacted the migratory patterns of birds and other natural biologic cycles. So it bears some reflection, a willingness to move into the darkness and see the wisdom that nature offers us there.

David Whyte offers that the darkness provides us with a kind of discernment about what is true and essential to us:

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte ~

What happens in the darkness that this way of seeing becomes possible when it may not be so possible in the light?

Lifted into the embodied present through poetry

"i thank you god for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birthday

of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitable earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any - lifted from the no

of all nothing - human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)"

-e.e.cummings

-Selected Poems, 1994

As suggested in this e. e .cummings poem, it is through sensation that we awaken to life. Through our senses we experience ourselves as living beings resonant with the pulse of activity within ourselves and in the world around us. Sensual embodiment is the capacity for receiving and responding to this aliveness – the excitement, information and stimulation available through our senses and our inner felt sense.

It is through sensual embodiment that we interact with our environment, registering pleasure or pain, empathy or revulsion, delight or fear. The perception of inner felt sense enables us to recognize our state of being, attend to our basic needs, assess whether we are in balance or out of balance in our physiology. Through still subtler levels of embodiment, we are able to identify the nuances of emotion, to interpret and act on an inner impulse, apprehend our connections with our environment on an energetic level – come into communion and resonance with it.

“The senses are complementary powers evolved in complex interdependence with one another. Each sense is a unique modality of this body’s existence, yet in the activity of perception these divergent modalities necessarily intercommunicate and overlap. It is thus that a raven soaring in the distance is not, for me, a mere visual image; as I follow it with my eyes, I inevitably feel the stretch and flex of its wings with my own muscles, and its sudden swoop toward the nearby trees is a visceral as well as a visual experience for me…..My various senses, diverging as they do from a single, coherent body, coherently converge, as well, in the perceived thing, just as the separate perspectives of my two eyes converge upon the raven and convene there into a single focus. My senses connect up with each other in the things I perceive, or rather each perceived thing gathers my senses together in a coherent manner and it is this that enables me to experience the thing itself as a center of forces, as another nexus of experience, as an Other”
- David Abram
- The Spell of the Sensuous, p 61

Our propensity for thought, evaluating, comparing, interpreting and judging removes us from our direct experience, sets us apart from our living nature. To come to know the life of our bodies and the world around us directly requires a discipline, a habit of attention in which we bypass thought and our inner mental chatter to open to, perceive, be nurtured and come into relationship through our senses.

Here are some practices to consider in engaging the present through sensual embodiment –

Opening to life through your senses:

Go to a place in nature where you find yourself enlivened or nurtured. Spend at least an hour taking in the experience through your senses – touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, seeing and opening the perceptive ability of your heart along with your other senses to enter into relationship with your environment. Notice how your body responds to the stimuli – pleasure, delight, joy, inspiration, etc…let yourself register the delight, take it in, just BE and connect to the living nature of your being through your experience.

At the end of your time of exploration through the senses, take 15 minutes to do an automatic writing exercise, writing from your bodily experience. Note what meanings if any have been communicated to you and through your sensual embodiment.

Tuning in to your inner impulse:

Give yourself a date for at least a two hour period of time (though a half day is even better!) in which you spontaneously allow the ‘soft animal of your body’ (from Mary Oliver's poem 'Wild Geese') to inform you about what it wants and to guide the agenda for how you spend your time. It is important that you not plan your activities for this time in advance; rather, the opportunity is to ‘listen in’ to your sensing and feeling self to inform your choices and actions in the moment. This might be a single activity or a series of activities that unfold one from the other as you continue to sense in to ‘what’s next?’ Be fully present in and savor each experience you choose. Let your body tell you what is enough time for one activity or another. Keep tuning in to note your satisfaction, contentment or the impulse to complete and move to something else.

Let this be a solo experience for yourself, so that there is nothing else influencing the agenda for this time. Afterwards, reflect on what this experience was like. How easy was it for you to access through your sensing self what you wanted to do? What was the quality of your experience when guided by your sensing self? What would it take to integrate more of this way of paying attention to yourself into your daily life?

It takes time to 'tolerate' the present

I have had such a lovely day today!  Awoke to sunshine here in Seattle where the days have been gray and cold.  Meditated and did some morning movement practices. Although it was Father's Day, my husband was out of town and my daughter and I went out for a delicious brunch and friendly conversation.  Then I came home and spent the afternoon working in the garden.  I have felt relaxed and present and at ease all day. 

Working in the garden was filled with sensual delights - the smell of the soil, the birdsong around me, the breeze on my face, a kind of conscious connection to both the overgrown plants I removed and the impatiens, hosta and helleborus I was planting.  What was most significant was that I allowed myself this day.  I allowed myself to be fully present through each segment of the day, to take it in, to let it have all the time it needed - our lunch, the planting, taking time for a drink of water, cleaning up.  

Seven years ago last month, I left my internal medicine practice of 20 years.  I left because I was committed to creating a venue to teach people about conscious embodiment as a path to wholeness.  I was also committed to having my work be something that emerged from my life as whole cloth - not something that dominated my life so much that there was no time for anything else.  This was my intention at the time.  But what I didn't realize was how long it would take to really manifest my first intention and fully embody the second.  (In fact, the latter has had to come before the former!)

I gave myself that first summer - 2001 - to decompress from many years of training and the long hours of practice.  And yet, I didn't have a clue about how to be 'off duty'!  Mary Oliver's poem  The Summer Day was my guide post - I wanted to be 'idle and blessed' as she writes about in the poem.  And yet, for all of my life - nearly 50 years - 'idle' meant 'unproductive', 'indulgent', 'lazy', 'adrift'.  My mind went to guilt and doubt, comparison and judgement when I was idle. My body could not fully settle into 'being' after years of perpetual 'doing'.  My muscles were taut, coupled to purpose, poised for action and not just any action; but action that would be outwardly measured as valid.  Playful, carefree, joyful or spontaneous were not adjectives that could apply to me at that time! 

'Recovering Catholic', 'recovering physician' - however you look at it, I had been conditioned by years, decades of reinforcement that busy-ness, productivity was the only worthy pass time, the 'measure of my days'. The present - whatever it held - was not enough.  I - unless busy with some redemptive activity - was not enough.  

It has taken 7 full years for a transformation to happen within me.  Literally a trans-formation - a change in form or structure.  I had to shed layer after layer of requirement in the form of expectations, beliefs and what I call the 'have to' body (a bodily predisposition to acting 'as if' I must comply with something expected).  I endured months of depression on and off over these years as I left behind the former measures of my worth, my identity, my need to know.  My personal practices of meditation, somatic centering, aikido and then yoga have been critical, providing me with a new reference point for my experience of aliveness, of what it is to be alive and to be me.  The reference point now is first in the body, my connection to the ground under my feet, my breath in the center of my body, the verticality I experience as I lengthen my spine, a sense of my own 'weight and density'  as May Sarton refers to it in her poem 'Now I Become Myself'.    

Now, this weekend, today, I see how far I've come.  Now I can experience the present in its fullness, as a rich encounter, a savory delight.  Like there is nothing more.  I can be idle or active and blessed equally either way. I have grown capacity to experience the embodied present.  And it is all a gift, everything is a gift.... 

Well now, it's only appropriate to end this post with Mary Oliver's poem - The Summer Day. Let this be an invitation to you, dear reader - to take your time to learn to 'tolerate' the present:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?  

Who made the swan, and the black bear? 

Who made the grasshopper? 

This grasshopper I mean - 

the one who has flung herself out of the grass, 

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down - 

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. 

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. 

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. 

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 

How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, 

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't every thing die at last and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do 

with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

from New and Selected Poems, 1992

The intelligence of the heart in the direct perception of nature

I am reading a book right now that has captured my imagination, heart and soul.   It is one of those books - like Richard Heckler's book Anatomy of Change was for me years ago - that is presenting me with another dimension of experience that I did not know I didn't know.  Or maybe I have known glimpses before and that is why I am so drawn into the book now - like it is calling me home.  The book is The Secret Teachings of Plants: the intelligence of the heart in the direct perception of nature by Stephen Harrod Buhner, a well know medicinal plant expert and earth poet.  

This book is a love story to me.  It is an invitation to any of us living in the western world in the 21st century to re-ignite the resonant connection we are capable of having with all matter, and plants in particular.  Our science now allows us to understand the capacity of the heart as a perceptive organ - Buhner addresses the science thoroughly and then guides us into an experience of relatedness, understanding and deep embodied wisdom through our senses, including the resonant field of our hearts.  He draws on the experience and writings of several well know earth poets who have approached nature as the 'Thou' of Buber's I-Thou: Thoreau, Goethe, Luther Burbank, Masanobu Fukuoka among others. 

I am moved, awakened and humbled as I read - 

"Plants and the wildness of the world bring healing to our bodies and to our souls as well; it is possible to reinhabit our interbeing with the world, to live embedded within the living communications that surround us, to re-bond with the world from which our species emerged, to live every day surrounded by the touch of kin upon us." 

This is an invitation into the Embodied Present.  May all beings find themselves surrounded by 'the touch of kin' upon them.....

The Invitation

I have begun this blog to give voice and conversation to the place that the body holds in the well being, creativity, interrelatedness and evolving consciousness of human beings. So much is written and said about the brain and the mind with little recognition that it is through our physicality as a whole that our consciousness arises.  

Whitman wrote "I swear to you that body of yours gives proportions to your soul."  What is it about embodiment, about inhabiting our form that liberates our spirits, gives expression to our essence, invites us to become fully present, allows us to at once manifest our uniqueness and transcend our 'separation' from other living things?  What would it be like if everyone lived as though this were so? 

Join me in sharing stories, questions, insights, discoveries, celebrations, teachings, explorations to enhance communication with others about this crucial domain of human learning and growth.   

Love and blessings,

Julia

What is 'the embodied present'?

What is 'the embodied present'?  any moment as it is experienced, met, engaged, apprehended through the lived experience of the body - our sensing feeling thinking breathing intelligently alive natures.  The body is always present.  It is a gateway for us (in the western world especially where we tend to be run by our thoughts) into the present, into what is present both within and outside of ourselves.  It is my intent in this blog to continue my own personal investigation of 'the embodied present', what it is to be present in an embodied way and the gifts and challenges therein; and what it is to cultivate an 'embodied presence' - a quality or state of presence that invites others into their own experience of the present.  I look forward to learning from any of you who may also be drawn to this inquiry.  This is my joy and what I seek to share in the world. Julia Smith, May 2008