The doing arises from the being.
We’re all born of mother: the sea, the lakes, the waters of the amniotic fluid in the womb. We long for actual mother without understanding that it’s the great mother who’s always available to embrace us in her loving-compassion, waiting in the wings of our hearts for the invitation of yes.
When we drop down into the center of Self, we find that place of inner mother and our self-trust is restored. When we trust in the flow life, we remember how to live.
***
Summer 2015
It’s my time to write. But I don’t want to write. If I write now it will come from effort, pushing, the time pressure that this is my hour to write so better get busy. Nothing ever flows that feels good from that place. I’ve written enough that the discipline is in place and I can force myself to write, but it doesn’t come from joy or bring joy when it’s forced.
So I sit instead. After a morning of clients, my body wants to sit. Needs to sit. I sit on the couch and exhale. Immediately I notice the congregation of bees outside our living room windows. They arrive every summer around this time to collect the pollen from the purple flowers, and it’s always a joy to see them. My sons love to stand at the windows and watch the bees. It’s better than television. We marvel at their miraculous dance.
I step outside and feel the warm summer air envelop me in her gentle breath. My body exhales a few more notches. The difference between inside and outside is subtle but palpable. Just a few steps away from the house and the calm of nature invites me to meet her rhythm. I sit down on the grass and watch the bees. Hot sun. Hundreds of bees. Their buzz is a symphonic hum of pleasure, the sound of summer.
A dream from last autumn, after the flood, filters up from my subconscious: Rows and rows of bee boxes on our lawn. A thick stream of bees flying west. I want to harvest some honey before I leave but I’m too scared to approach. I ask my mother to harvest some for me and she reluctantly says yes.
And the poem that followed:
My mother is more than my mother.
She’s the great breath of scarlet scarves
who swirls in the sky.
She’s the water who flows gently then
ferociously through our land.
She’s the ancestors who find me in the
night when the veil is thin,
slipping between the worlds to remind me that
I am never – ever – alone.
She’s the woman who dwells in the glade at the creek’s edge,
and even now, when the rubble of broken limbs
clatter the sacred spot
she weaves her worlds in web strands between the
still standing trees
calling to me:
Come, my child.
Do not forsake your land.
We are here.
Walk between the rows of bee boxes that stand invisible on hidden green grass.
Do not be afraid.
Your mother cannot harvest the honey.
Walk the land, my child.
We are here to guide you.
We walk the rows.
The bees fly east in thick golden streams
a kite tail of desire,
seekers of nectar who never stop despite our human failure.
Unprotected yet protected by mothers unseen,
I reach my hand into the warm hive.
Thank you, I whisper to the bees.
Eventually I go back inside to get my computer and bring it to the creek to write. The mosquitoes fly near and I resist the habitual impulse to swat them, as I’ve learned from my son. Instead, I ask them to please leave me alone. One lands on the edge of my keyboard and I watch it before it flies away. I sit for the next twenty minutes without a bother. Coincidence, perhaps. I’m happy I didn’t take a life.
I sit and write slowly. I watch the water in the creek, a trickle now at summer’s end. I write a sentence, a word, then stop and look up. I allow for the expression to emerge from the being. It’s the sense that it doesn’t matter, like being slightly tipsy and taking the edge off the urgency to know, to understand, to produce, to find the answer. In the being space of the feminine where there are no answers. Or it’s all the answer. It’s the paradox of holding the opposites, the truth spot where the opposite of yes is yes and opposite of truth is more truth. Where sitting and watching the water or the bees is just as valuable as any piece of writing.
We live in a culture that pushes at every turn. We demand faster results, more productivity, higher paychecks as measures of our worth. We even expect babies and children to comply with developmental milestones and send parents into a tailspin of worry if their child isn’t walking or talking or reading or socializing by a certain age. In come the interventions, the diagnoses, the therapies, the medications. If we could simply trust in our own rhythm and timetables much anxiety would be alleviated. If we could slow back down into the wise wellsprings of our bodies and listen, we would have full trust in ourselves and in life.
This is what it means to repair self-trust: to sink into the thick honey-rhythm of our infinite wisdom and live from that place of knowing. It’s there, waiting for you to touch it, to reclaim it.
As Jack Kornfield and Brother David Steindl Rast share in conversation:
Jack: “The invitation is allowing ourselves to shift from doing to that quality of loving-awareness, gratitude, sacred presence, to the mystery of being here.”
Br. David: “This underlines an important fact that the stopping is an expression of your trust in life. When you trust life, we go with the flow.”
Being in the flow, letting go of trying to control the outcome, is so much more fun. It requires a leap of faith and courage to get there – to loosen the white-knuckling grip of control – but once you leap of the cliff into the river of not-knowing and not having to know, life becomes so much easier. When we stop pushing so hard, we allow room for the mystery of being to unfold, and we open up the space for something else, something mysteriously bigger than us, to lead the way. And there, protected inside in the space of non-doing, lies your true Self: the one that knows yourself, loves yourself, and trusts yourself. When we allow for that self to emerge, we know the way.
Join me as we spiral into the center of you, where the touchstone of your self-trust rests untouched and waiting for you to remember, to live the life you’re meant to live. The next round of Trust Yourself: A 30 day program to help you overcome your fear of failure, caring what others think, perfectionism, difficulty making decisions, and self-doubt begins on Saturday, January 9th, 2016. I look forward to meeting you there.
