Sometimes Wind, Sometimes Mud

Sometimes Wind, Sometimes Mud

I have been thinking about faith.

Not faith as certainty, exactly. More as the willingness to remain in relationship with something when I can’t quite feel it.

This began, as many of my ideas do, in my own yoga practice.

I was moving one day and noticing the various stages I seemed to pass through. Sometimes there is inertia and sometimes it moves gradually into more connection. Parts of me that feel separate can begin to communicate. I feel more cohesive, more responsive.

And I realized how familiar this cycle is.

Sometimes I feel like the wind.

Sometimes I feel like mud.

Sometimes I feel tall, spacious and beautifully organized. Other times I feel squished. There are practices when I seem to find my centre from the outside in—as though the architecture of my body helps me locate myself. At other times, centre emerges from the inside out, through sensation.

Neither one stays.

My practice has waxed and waned this way for years, and I think there is something about faith in accepting that.

I don’t need to panic when I am mud.

I don’t need to congratulate myself quite so much when I am wind.

Both are experiences moving through a living body.

Oposites or Between one thing and another

I’ve become increasingly interested in the place between apparent opposites.

Past and future.

Inside and outside.

Down and up.

Expansion and gathering.

Even time and space.

There is a kind of sandwiching that happens between them, and sometimes I can experience it quite literally through my breath.

As I inhale, I feel the ground, the earth element. There is touch: feet, pelvis, back, whatever is meeting the floor. I can feel gravity and the unmistakable down-ness self.

Yet at exactly the same time, out of the spark of flames rising, the inhalation creates expansion.

So I am experiencing down while something moves outward and upward.

Then there is a pause.

I have been playing with experiencing this as a more liquid place—the water element. Rather than immediately doing something with the breath, I can investigate the subtle horizontal expansion through the tissues of my body. What happens around the ribs? Between the bones? Through the joints? Is there movement potential somewhere I wasn’t aware of a moment ago? The hydration of the tissues is felt. 

And then I exhale.

The spaciousness begins to gather. I move from that more ether-like experience of space back toward ground, gravity and touch.

None of these states is the destination.

That’s important.

Because I notice that I can become stuck in an element—or in a sensation, mood or idea—and then begin to think about it.

And think about it some more.

A story begins.

This isn’t a failure of practice. It is an entirely understandable human response. Particularly because we often believe that if we think about something long enough, we will eventually have the insight that gets us out of it.

Why am I feeling like this?

What caused this?

What am I supposed to do about it?

And sometimes thinking is useful.

But I am increasingly interested in the possibility that I cannot always think myself out of a state. Lynda Cavelan Popov (the Virtues Guide) was a client of mine for years. I remember many words of wisdom from her but one thing she said to me stands out: “asking Why will keep you in a circle of thought, however, asking What, as in: “What can I do about this now?” Or “How can I respond to this?”, these help us move out of a circle state.” But what I am talking about here is even different from problem solving. It’s about staying with yourself and an experience, and it’s a kind of courage to stay with your self. 

Sometimes I have to feel it.

Not indulge it. Not fix it. Not judge it.

Feel its actual sensations.

And when I can do that with curiosity, something interesting sometimes happens.

I find the  place between.

Unfortunately, I was not a panther

This brings me to David Whyte.

Years ago, I heard David Whyte speak about creativity and the different parts of ourselves we are willing—or unwilling—to inhabit. As I remember the lecture, he talked about how much we want to present an exciting or acceptable version of ourselves.

We are quite happy to be the panther parts of ourselves.

We are considerably less enthusiastic about being the leaf-mould parts.

I laughed so hard when I heard this.

Because I had already lived my own version of it.

When I was a theatre kid growing up in Tsawwassen, we did the kinds of theatre exercises that were intended to help us know ourselves, understand what we projected and learn to trust the other people in the group.

I remember one particular exercise.

We were sitting in a circle and were asked:

What animal do you think you most represent?

I was in Grade 10.

I knew immediately.

Panther.

Hahahaha.

Apparently, there was no question in my fifteen year-old mind. I was a panther.

Then came the hard part.

The other people in the circle had to say what animal they thought you were.

Nobody said panther.

They saw me as a small bird.

Or a monkey.

I was shocked.

And disappointed!

There was clearly quite a gap between the creature I experienced myself to be and the creature wandering around in everybody else’s perception.

But I remember doing something with that information that still is a practice today.

Rather than deciding that they were wrong—or that I was wrong—I tried on the bird.

I felt its energy.

Then I switched back into panther.

Bird.

Panther.

Back and forth.

And eventually, by moving between those two very different experiences, I found something else.

The place between.

From there I could feel the essence of both without having to decide which one was true.

More importantly, one didn’t have to sit above the other in some hierarchy in my mind.

Bird wasn’t the disappointing answer.

Panther wasn’t the superior answer.

They were different energies I could experience.

That teenage theatre exercise has stayed with me for decades, although I certainly wouldn’t have had this language for it then.

And that is why I laughed when I heard David Whyte.

There was my panther again.

And now there was leaf mould.

What if I am also leaf mould?

Whyte’s image goes further than my teenage bird and panther story.

Leaf mould is not impressive.

It is decomposition. The fallen material on the forest floor slowly breaking down and becoming something else. In the literal natural process, leaf mould is created as fallen leaves decompose and ultimately contribute organic material back to the soil. 

What a useful image for the parts of ourselves we don’t particularly want to put on display.

The tired part.

The uncertain part.

The part that doesn’t know.

The part that is lying fallow.

The part that is changing so slowly we cannot yet see what it is becoming.

David Whyte talks about the courage it takes to embrace the phases and places of the self. How there are a few days in the month in which the moon is invisible or nearly. He suggest that not wanting to accept the leaf mold side of ourselves is like saying we will only go out in the light of the full moon, and never go out when the moon is hidden. He equates this concept of accepting the moon in various phases with faith. In his poem: Faith. He says in the poem, that he wants to write about faith, even in the moon’s fading into darkness. Faith is that even though you can’t see it, you know it will change again and be bright, and that it is OK to be in the dark. 

Faith:

I want to write about faith, about the way the moon rises

over cold snow, night after night, faithful even as it fades from fullness, slowly becoming that last curving and impossible

sliver of light before the final darkness.

In my memory and interpretation of his talk on creativity, he describes this poem’s writing process  that he is not full of faith, but wants to be. That it is like taking the first step into the chasm of the unknown. 

The rock that falls and doesn’t fall

During this currant exploration of opposites, another little thread appeared.

I was reading Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, a story about a boy, Kvothe, whose education takes an unexpected turn when he meets a man named Ben.

Ben begins teaching him sympathy and something called Alar.

In a passage, Kvothe is being taught an extraordinary mental exercise. Ben asks him to believe that a rock will fall when he releases it.

Easy enough.

But then he asks him to simultaneously believe that the rock will not fall.

Kvothe has to hold the two beliefs separately.

He struggles with it for hours.

Eventually he begins to learn how to hold contradictory ideas in his mind without forcing one to annihilate the other.

I stopped when I read that.

Because there it was again.

Bird and panther.

Earth and ether.

Down and up.

Inside and outside.

Wind and mud.

The visible moon and the invisible moon.

Not as an intellectual exercise in pretending that opposites aren’t opposites, but as an ability to stay with the tension between two experiences long enough to discover that there may be more available to us than either/or.

Where practice comes in

I think this is becoming one of the most important aspects of my practice.

I don’t practice so that I can permanently become the wind.

I don’t practice so that I will always feel tall, connected, centred, fluid and spacious.

That would simply be another version of insisting that I am the panther.

My practice gives me somewhere to experience the movement between states.

When I feel inert, I can feel inertia.

When I feel compressed, I can investigate compression.

When I feel spacious, I can enjoy spaciousness without needing to grab hold of it.

And rather than immediately creating a story about any of these experiences, I can come closer to sensation.

What is actually happening right now?

There is the floor.

There is gravity.

There is my inhalation.

There is expansion.

There is the pause.

There is movement through tissues.

There is my exhalation.

There is ground again.

This is much more tangible to me than telling myself to “be present.”

I can actually practice the in-between.

And perhaps that is where faith enters.

Not faith that tomorrow’s practice will be better.

Not faith that I will eventually become the version of myself I most admire.

And certainly not faith that if I do enough yoga I can permanently become a panther.

It is something subtler.

I can be wind and mud.

Tall and squished.

Bird and panther.

Visible and hidden.

I can experience myself from the outside in and the inside out.

I can feel the downward pull of gravity while simultaneously experiencing the upward and outward expansion of breath.

I don’t have to resolve the contradiction.

I can stay there long enough to feel what is actually happening.

And maybe centre isn’t the place where all these opposites finally disappear.

Maybe centre is the place from which I can experience both. The opposites sandwich my closer to the In between, and I feel stronger and more resilient. 

Because then the days when my practice feels heavy aren’t interruptions in my practice.

They are part of it.

The waning isn’t an interruption of the waxing.

The hidden moon isn’t an interruption of the full moon.

And leaf mould isn’t nature getting it wrong on its way to becoming a panther.

Faith may be much more ordinary.