I feel like I’m left to clean up after a party with a hangover.
Last night we had our first guest speaker on our podcast. After a three week hiatus in recording, having a guest on the show added to the already built up excitement of getting back into the swing of things. The anticipation of this great event was that shiny object glinting off the horizon for the entire week. Continue reading The stillness between the excitement
I know the path to peace is staying in the moment.
This has been a recent exercise I’ve been working on. It is actually pretty difficult for a person like me who’s thoughts tend to drift, play leap-frog, and jump from one stone to the next in the river of my mind. It seems I tend to find myself in moments separated by minutes.
So I’ve been working on keeping as much focus as I can on where I am and what I’m doing in each moment, or to try to keep the moment in a continuum rather than a series of moments interjected and shattered with a wandering mind. This is much easier to do when I’m focused on problem-solving at work, troubleshooting a specific issue, or working on an in-depth project. The trouble comes when I take on the tasks mundane, the routines that are defined by their common banality.
Those are the situations that make for a good starting point, an excellent opportunity to try to stay in the present. Standing in the shower with a brain having just lept from the symbol-rich and seemingly chaotic dreamscape that tends to want to latch onto a melody line like a viper is a great place to practice. Keeping keen focus on the process of becoming clean, rather than using the shower as shake-me-to-wake-me tool to meet the oncoming day.
While driving to work, staying focused on the roads, the lights, my speed, the cars and pedestrians in my field of vision. Almost every accident occurs due to even the tiniest distraction.
Walking between buildings and service calls at work. What a great opportunity to first scan my physical self, see where I’m carrying undue focus or tension, then take the time to really notice the evergreens, the crows at their bizarre socializations, the hue and tone of the sky, the force of the wind or breeze or even the stillness of the air, the lightness of the rain or the crispness of the cold autumn air on my cheek.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of being aware of the cues. Do I have an impetus to pick up the phone and text if there isn’t something urgent or important to communicate? Am I thinking about a project that is hours away from me returning to? Those are flags for me notifying me of my attention’s attempt at making an escape. My focus is about to dash out of the space that is the here and now and seek refuge from the mundane in the sanctity of distraction.
Now there’s nothing wrong with daydreaming or imagination. But if I spend the majority of my time there, what is the point of being here, in this life? I would be letting the precious gift of life slip between the cracks.
There’s something to be said about the container that is space.
I’ve heard this expression – holding space. It’s one of those terms that seems brandished about in the community of spiritual thinkers, energy healers, and light workers the way corporate culture tosses about words like scalability and user-centric. The difference is I don’t have an adverse reaction to the former.
I’ve never been given a clear definition on what it means to hold space, but intuitively I understand what it means. I know I understand it because I can’t begin to describe it here. If you take time to allow the term to absorb into your skin, if you breathe the idea of what it is into your lungs, you begin to get the feeling of it. What even makes it more difficult to define and describe is that holding space is very passive, it is a releasing more than a gripping or grasping that the term might imply.
I feel it because I feel my own resistance to it. I feel it in the readjustment to my daily living. I have processed the intensity of the beginning of the new work cycle. I have broken away from the cycle and demarcated its chapter by skipping town for a week, severing its trials from my daily routine for a spell to return refreshed, reset, cleansed, anew.
So I return from the lucid fugue state of vacation to a more subdued routine that does not contain such a frantic energy. Although the weather has written “Inclement” on the Hello, My Name is _______ sticker, slapped it on its breast pocket and proceeded to throw a temper tantrum, the energy around me is like a butler in between tasks. It is holding, still, waiting. It rests quietly, curled up in front of the fire that is the fall season stamping its feet, kicking leaves asunder and wailing at the top of its lungs, complaining that it doesn’t want to go to winter’s house. But it’s a thick heavy space, a space that I have been so eager to dive into, to float upon its surface of nothingness, to soak in the reverie of stillness…
But it feels more like waiting for the next bus to arrive.
I can feel how much energy is pulsing in the stillness. I feel as if I’ve taken the pupae’s perspective, where the metamorphosis is altering my form but the cocoon’s carapace hides the true events unfolding within. That’s what stillness really is. It is the howling winds of creativity waiting to be released at the bottom of the well. It is the oyster with its shell tightly closed working to insulate the irritant within, wrapping it in pearl. So I try to swim with an absent current, but when I float I feel the undertow threaten to pull me under into its depths, that malevolent and unseen tidal force that I’ve done my best to escape.
But the moments do come, the moments where I surrender to the beautiful amnesia that is the present. I let the subconscious tag me out and agree with its insistence on ignorance of all things time. And I simply breath. And hold the space.
I am the minister of myself 