Lifeletter #188: The Fires of Slowness

Don’t accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.
Sit by a river bank some time
and watch attentively as the river
tells you of your life.

– Lao Tzu

I posted these words of Lao Tzu’s on Facebook last week. The only ones that showed, unless you scrolled further down the page, were “Don’t accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.” Within 24 hours, over two thousand people read that post. Which really got me thinking about how many people in our culture are longing for a totally different perspective on getting older, and a new relationship with time.

A Qigong grandmaster, a woman named Yang Meijun, began practicing when she was thirteen years old. She promised her grandfather that she would not teach anyone until she was seventy! At 80, she ‘opened her skill’ to the world. By that time she could transmit her Qi to make leaves on a tree move, to transmit colours, and heal many diseases. She passed away at 104.

Another old Japanese man was a member of Adya Shanti’s community. He spoke one evening about how difficult it was for him to be brought into an arranged marriage at a very young age. With a beautiful smile on his face, and no irony at all, he said, “Luckily for me, it only took me 40 years to learn how to love my wife.”

I think these eastern cultures have much to teach those of us in the West who have been living inside a very narrow and confined understanding of how life moves and unfolds. It feels to me that this pushing, impatient, demanding way of living is part of the aggression and violence that is erupting all over our world. I have participated in this kind of aggression myself, many times. And I have had to deal with the consequences. Now I am exploring what Matt Licata (www.mattlicataphd.com) calls, ‘the fires of slowness.’ These fires burn away the hard edges in us. They illuminate and set a match to the belief that I should be able to control my world, they incinerate the infantile demand that things happen when I want them to. Terrorists are an extreme example of this kind of energy, this very impatient relationship with life.

A deeply intelligent client of mine said something beautiful to me today. She was speaking of her work in the arena of her intimate relationship. “It’s ongoing,” she said, “and the progress I am making feels very slow.” What she said felt beautiful to me because it is so true. I believe that this is actually the nature of practice, and the nature of our human condition. Practice, if it is going to make any difference at all, has to be continual. And our evolution, our transformation, feels very slow, most of the time. There are moments of deep insight, and openings, and revelations, no doubt. But they don’t last very long. The force of our evolution is relentless. There will always be another edge, a new limit, to confront. This is not a problem. This is the nature of our existence. None of us are alone in this. Most of us are here, burning together, in the fires of slowness. Knowing this, we can open our hearts very wide to each other, and love whatever and whoever is here, in this fire.

with love,

Shayla