Sitting by a creek, watching the water flow by, I focus on its surface. Its not particularly turbulent and the bright sparkly reflections are up stream. What I am watching are subtle variations as the currents merge and eddy together, patterns of light in the thin upper layer flowing water sliding under the air above. There is just enough reflection to be able visualize the surface, rather than looking deeper at the stoney bottom underneath.
I play with shifting my focus back and forth between the surface and the stones, until I notice a bit of seasickness. The surface is flowing and the bottom is not, and shifting focus is creating a tension in my belly. My friend suggests looking now at the bank across the stream and as I do I notice two things. I can feel that it too is moving, not a visual, but a visceral sensation in my body. I also notice my body relaxing deeply in a very pleasant way.
A knowingness that there is a fluidity to the land, to the world, arises in me. I’m not sure if is physical, energetic or spiritual, but I know it is true. At the same time I know that my body is somehow usually involved in making it all stand still; so as to fit the fixed, permanent, picture of the world that my mind believes in and finds comforting. Releasing this effort my body relaxes and my being opens. I feel lighter, freer, joyful.
It seems my body knows how to flow in this way, it is its natural state too. I have seen before how strongly the mind wants things to be fixed and static, an innate, but misplaced, fear of change and death, which results in the tension I was feeling in my body. This impulse is contractive, frozen, and in the end ironically lifeless.
The next day, watching a sunset, I am gifted a related experience. I have been feeling some grief, sitting with it in my heart, feeling into a pressure that will open it up, if I can stay with it. I do, and my heart suddenly opens into a joy that is so much larger than the grief, that can easily hold it and let it dissipate. Grief arises naturally when we let things go, let them change, or perhaps it is our subconscious resistance, going against the natural flow of life. This love in the heart, which is a deep aspect of my spiritual self, is infinite, large enough to hold it all.
When you can drop into a place of accepting the flow, stop trying to look at the stones as fixed and let them flow too, your body and being is no longer trying to hold two contradictory things at the same time. You relax, your being effortlessly opens, and will naturally release the resistance and the holding on that we experience as grief. Opening you create space to feel into your own infinite Being, which can hold and transform everything that you are releasing.
Find your own stream and feeling into it with your body, relax into the flow of life as well as the water, full of spaciousness and joy.
(© 10/2014)
