“Patience allows us to remain attentive and consider life beyond our personal moment in history. Patience is fierce focus informed by openness, intention, and “fallen light” that draws the eye of our heart toward clear seeing and skillful actions.“

We tend to confuse patience with doing nothing. There’s nothing passive about patience: it offers us discernment between what wants to “emerge” and an “emergency”. Most events are not emergencies but our nervous systems these days are dialed to “hyper vigilance”. There are thousands of good reasons to be awake but hyper vigilance is exhausting.

To discern between “emergence” and “emergency” or being “awake” or “hyper vigilant” means we are able to recognize the difference between struggle and effort. For those of us who can make that discernment and provide a space of equanimity for others, we must.

Do we need collective and personal change? Yes! And we need patience.

Patience/ Excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s Poem “If Each Day Falls Inside”

“We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and wait for fallen light
with patience.” Pablo Naruda

Seven Generations

The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people of northeastern North America, whose land from which I hail, said that in each of our deliberations we are to consider what is sustainable for the next seven generations. That means take the long view and patience is a skill necessary for the long view.

Patience allows us to remain attentive and consider life beyond our personal moment in history. Patience is fierce focus informed by openness, intention, and “fallen light” that draws the eye of our heart toward clear seeing and skillful actions.

Just as the wetlands lie between land and sea, so too does our self perception and body meet in the fluidity of the imagination.

The territory of “somatics” is a rich expression of the continuum between body and mind or body and perception. From this perspective, the body is the ground of our experience and psychology becomes the interpretation of our felt sense, our lived experience. There’d be no psychology without a body.

Imagination is the “place” where mind and body meet. It’s an open space of constant murmuring between mind and body. There’s a continuous dialogue between these two places just as there is between land and sea. The sea shapes the land, the land pushes the water back on itself continuously.

The wetlands, the places between land and sea are constantly shaped and reshaped by the ebb and flow of tides, sunlight, wind, warmth, and cold. We have within ourselves the same kind of fluidity. This is the interface of somatic movement and somatic psychology: that is, the mind/brain/body are part of one continuous flow of perception, rather than three awkward mechanical pieces— a ghost in the machine, a computer in our skull, and a robotic attachment from the neck down that either follows orders or betrays us randomly.

Our perception is fluid, changeable, malleable, because, as neuroscience has pointed out, the brain itself is also changeable, malleable, like the wetlands. The mind perceives, our brain receives, our body responds, the world responds to us and round it goes. A continuous dance of perception shaped by the interpretation of our life experiences. This idea is central to what’s known as “neuroplasticity”. We are not “fixed”. The beliefs about our body are not “fixed” nor do we need to be “fixed”. Rather, our ways of knowing and being can grow beyond our current experience.

Our core beliefs that whisper just below the threshold of our awareness remind us about our fears of belonging, our enoughness, our self esteem, our loveability, our capacity for intimacy, our sense of safety, all the vulnerabilities we share that make each of us uniquely human, are part of “this one precious life” as a Zen teacher of mine loves to say. They are gateways to our healing if we allow them to be.

Through the decades I’ve shared tender places with people. Such vulnerability shows up as a pain in the back, or the neck, and may reveal depression, exhaustion, shame, and also shows what’s possible. When the barriers are met gently, with respect, regard, support, they can yield and the waters flow freely again. This is the hope that the realm of somatics offers: a restoration of an open, resilient way of meeting life as it arises in body and mind.

To bear witness is a potent act. To bear witness is an antidote to helplessness, it is a testimony to our interconnectedness, and it relieves us of complicity because we allow ourselves to actually see the suffering of the world everywhere. None of us are exempt from the trials of this life. We can’t say “we are all one” and then say “but only when it feels good”.

It is the least we can do for those experiencing tremendous suffering. It takes just a few moments a day, to actually see what is going on and allow our hearts to be opened. To not look away at times of such crisis is what bearing witness asks us to do: it asks us neither to fix nor to withdraw in fear. To bear witness reminds us that there but for grace, go any of us.

We may look at our screens many times a day and see the difficult times this planet is in, but do we see? Will we turn away or will we bear witness? Technology makes more of a demand on us to look, see, and acknowledge what’s so, but we do have still have the free will to turn toward or turn away.

Will we do the inner work required to meet the “barriers to love” within ourselves the poet Rumi speaks about, the barriers to seeing what’s so, with well resourced hearts? If the answer is yes, then our inner work becomes a form of activism: a form of activism that respects all beings.

The reason to do our inner work is to discover that we have so much more to offer the world than our pain, that our hearts are vast, and that we can bear witness to both the love and the suffering of this world.

Beginnings imply endings, whether we are conscious of it or not. What’s challenging for most of us are endings and part of that difficulty arises because we aren’t aware that the ending process has phases. When we are disconnected from the natural unfolding of an ending, we are caught in linear thinking: “This will never end!”, “I will never have another relationship, job, or good health again!” “It will always be like this!” When we find ourselves using words like “never” and “always” it’s good to recall that impermanence applies to everything. Nothing is forever but the experience we have of a situation can feel that way!

Here’s why I take the time to write about this at all: an ending process has stages and being able to locate ourselves in those stages will reduce the suffering in our everyday life. We might be able to begin to appreciate the universality of our experience, which is not meant to diminish our experience but to allow us to recognize our shared humanity.

Stages of Endings

Drawing upon the writings of William Bridges, PhD, whom I’ve quoted before from his book “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes”/(Hachette Book Group) I offer you here a brief overview of the transition process of endings. This book is one of the most useful ones on my bookshelf and I recommend it to people with whom I work, often.

1. Disengagement–A phase where we are dislodged from what we’ve known, what is familiar: that could be our health, our partner, our home, our partner’s health, our work: this phase involves a loss, something we’ve chosen or something that is beyond our control.
2. Dismantling–This is a phase usually after disengagement where our identity that was built around the previous structures of home, health, job, etc. unravels piece by piece. Here the things, people, and/or social circles that defined us and defined our responses to the world, are shifting.
3. Disidentification–Here in this phase we experience a further deconstructing of what we knew as our “previous life”.
4. Disenchantment–As Dr. B names it, it’s a kind of floating between the worlds and life has a surreal quality. Here this phase our assumptions about reality are challenged.
5. Disorientation–Here in this phase, what’s gone is gone, we can’t go back to what we knew and we don’t yet have the energy to imagine a new future for ourselves.

It’s important to note that Dr. Bridges makes a distinction between making “changes” which are about reaching a goal, and “transitions” which are about letting go of worn-out ways of being that no longer serve.

Endings include the need to let go. The simple fact is if we don’t come to the place where we can let go, we are not receptive to whatever it is life asks of us next.

Each of us unfolds in our own way. There is however a pattern to transition processes and that pattern is imprinted within the human psyche. We are each part of the natural world and as such we are subject to the same rules of transition as everything else in the universe.

And after the letting go…

comes the “Neutral Zone”. The neutral zone can be (believe it or not!) the most challenging for we humans. Life as we knew it has ended, we’ve consciously let go as best we can and then….what? The ability to stay present and true to ourselves in this place of uncertainty is challenging but necessary. In the neutral zone we must learn to live close to ourselves and listen deeply for proper timing: to move too quickly can ironically slow down the experience of renewal we long for.

The larger cycles of pandemics, political, economic, and social upheaval that are impacting us now, are deconstructing systems and institutions that prevent us from becoming who we need to be. It’s important to name where we are, to seek the support we need, and to trust in the deeper workings of life. This is where our inner work intersects with becoming the change we wish to see in the world.

On January 4, 2021 I went into a 3 week solitary at 8000 feet on the ancestral lands of the Ute and Navajo people in Southern Colorado. My life was upended by a move I didn’t want and family dynamics that were chaotic. I trusted the piercing silence and time out of time would restore me.

While there, I was called to prune the deadwood of relationships that no longer serve. I owed nothing more to certain people and I’d already given too much of myself to keep them going. To be a good gardener means to be a good pruner in order to make room for whatever new life might come through.

The symbolic twigs and branches were tossed into the woodstove fire. I sat and watched them for a few moments and then closed the door of the stove. There was nothing sentimental about it, it was simply time to name situations for what they were and release them.

Pruning to me means the situations are energetically trimmed to the ground and I await better days when the warm sun and sweet rains return and I see what wants to happen. Being patient with that in between time is the challenge and the opportunity. It’s a place where our wisdom deepens and it’s not always pleasant but it was never meant to be. We often cannot see how we’ve grown until after we’ve come through such periods.

Collectively we’ve had to prune back relationships and expectations since late 2019. I’ve left some peoples’ lives and some have left mine. It’s been complex but the relief of living authentically far outweighs the losses.

We are being asked to live lean, to let our collective fields lay fallow and continue to let the great uncertainties work us, whether we like it or not. In case you haven’t noticed the dynamics of these times don’t care much about our opinions!

These times have “gifted” us in ways most of us would never ask. But if we dare put our ear to the ground, we’d hear a call to simplicity, deep listening and the courageous act of trusting what we can’t yet know.

May great heart, perseverance, and discernment be yours as we come to the end of a long year.