Lifeletter #187: I Dare You

A beautiful photo of an indigenous elder caught my eye in the airport yesterday. He was strong, clean, radiant. Jonathan and I talked about it, as he waited for his plane.

“What is it that pours out of him, that we don’t  often see, in our elders?” I asked.

In a moment I answered my own question: “It’s silence.”

“…He’s so still, so quiet inside-you can feel it, just seeing his face. That’s the true task of our elders: they are the guardians of our silence, our stillness.”

“Yes,” said Jonathan. “So let’s sit, right here.” We put down our cups, sat up straight on our plastic chairs, and closed our eyes for about seven minutes, dropping into stillness, into spaciousness, as the movement of people arriving and departing swirled around us.

I am infinitely grateful that I live my life with a man who will say, “Let’s sit, right now.”

Because the momentum of the speed that drives us is getting stronger all the time. Keith Witt, an integral psychotherapist says: “We are in a culture now where the demands are for us to just keep going and going and going until we break down, which is why 70% of all medical problems are stress related. Men and women both, but especially women, want to say yes to everything they think they should do. If you say yes to everything you think you should do, it will kill you. We all have to have a little bubble of self that pushes against the cultural demands to work too hard.”

That little bubble of self he speaks of is what I call your will, the part of you that can stand for something other than what is going on all around you. Robert Keegan, an evolutionary psychologist from Harvard calls it “the self authoring mind.”  Unless you can tap into the energy of your own deeper will, your real intention, you’ll get swept away, again and again, by the force of this collective momentum. It’s really very powerful. You can’t just decide once that you are going to live in a different way. It takes more than that to wake up into a saner, more loving rhythm.

A dear friend of mine left her home in San Diego recently, where she had been working full time as a spiritual teacher. She went back there last week and described how strange it was for her, to step back into that environment and remember how relentlessly she drove herself.  She said it was like looking through a window at her own insanity. But when she was inside it, she didn’t really know how insane it was. That’s how it is with us humans. We get caught in collective trances, and keep pulling each other back into the insanity, instead of helping each other climb out.

I wonder how many people you know, who bring you that sense of silence and stillness that I received from that photograph in the airport? Do you ever spend time with anyone, just being quiet, letting everything unwind and settle down inside you?

This is what I dare you to do. I dare you to stop right now, and take a long slow breath. Can you do it? Can you feel your feet on the floor? Can you take a long breath out and sink down into your body? Can you drop inside and just rest there, in the silence through which all of your thoughts are moving? Can you just sit and watch your thoughts, without being moved right back into the field of action?

Can you find the power inside you to challenge the sense of urgency: got-to-get-it-done-right-now? It’s not a casual challenge, this one. It’s not like a small turn in the road. You might have to dig deep to find the will, the depth of intention it requires, to turn in this new direction. It might feel like stepping into space, into the unknown. You might need a friend, or a whole group of friends, to start walking this new path.

 

I dare you to try this. And pass the dare along.

The cosmos

… needs you to breathe gently
for the miracles to be displayed.
Suddenly you hear the birds singing,
the pines chanting,
see the flowers blooming,
the blue sky,
the white clouds,
the smile and the marvellous look
of your beloved.

Cherish this very moment.
Let go of the stream of distress
and embrace life fully in your arms.

 Thich Nath Hanh

with love,
Shayla

photo credit: http://www.erikjohanssonphoto.com/