Taken By The Flow of Life

~Surrendering to the force of generosity & abundance

About five in the morning, when I was living in the Himalayas, an amazing sound would often wake me up. It was a Shiv baba, a wandering devotee of Lord Shiva, standing under my window, singing for his breakfast. Sometimes there were two or three of them. Of all the sounds in India, the rippling sound of their voices is the one that still lives in my heart.

Those babas could sing with every cell of their body. I would sit up in bed, open the window, and sit there drinking in the sound as it echoed off the mountains and valleys. The depth and sweetness of their voices, their resonance, the vibratory power of the song—all of this came flowing up to me in an effortless stream. Those babas wandered all through those mountains, living the life of a devotee, a renunciate, a contemplative. They carried nothing with them except a few things in a bag on their shoulder and a blanket on the other shoulder. And a strong wooden staff for walking. Those morning visitations were like bathing in a sacred stream of sound, freely given. I have remembered the Shiv babas thousands of times since I left my life in India for the world of structure and responsibility, of calendars, deadlines and mortgages. Knowing that I left the shining vastness of the Himalayas, but I could never really leave the flow of life, the creative, endless flow that those babas were so connected to, so aligned with, so surrendered to.

We cannot ever really leave that flow—we are always in the river of life. And still, it can feel like we are stuck, caught in a backwater, a swamp, a mud hole. Instead of flowing with the river, we are holding on to the sides, resisting the current. Several beautiful women have spoken to me lately of a deep longing to ‘let creativity have its way with me.’ One of them said, “I have a need to let go and be taken by the flow of life.”

Their language moved me, it spoke so directly of surrender. We know instinctively that we connect with this flow by letting go, by trusting, not through hard work and effort. There is a sense that the flow comes from a source that is inexhaustible, infinitely generous. We may have had many experiences of trusting in this flow, of being held and nourished by its mysterious source. But this is not where the ego lives. The egoic mind lives in scarcity and doubt and fear and holding back. It is not natural for our survival based mind to trust in this flow. So we have to take on this way of being as a practice, and surrender to the practice, just as we want to surrender to the flow.

The practice is about action, about giving, about stepping forward, taking a risk, making an offering. It might feel counter instinctive—that’s not a problem. Authentic practice often goes against the grain of our instinctive conditioning. We do it anyway, because of what we love, because of what we want, because of what we know. We sing the song, we write the poem, we make the confession, we talk to the stranger, we pick up the phone, we step into the unknown. Annie Dillard says it very well: “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for later . . . give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.

Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”

Our deepest longing is to give of ourselves without holding back, to join in the flow, to dive into the current, to know that we are held by something greater than ourselves. It’s so painful to hold on; and we can’t make ourselves jump into the river. Suffering, and practice and grace wear away at us, until one day, we find ourselves in the water.

Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping.
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.

We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

—Rumi

 

with love,

Shayla