Yesterday I sat in an open-air timber frame chapel overlooking the sea. A place I came as a teenager, a place my middle school choir sang at the funeral of the father of one of our choir-mates. I had forgotten this until I got there and saw the tree under which we all stood, singing songs to comfort the grief of death with voices that had not yet known the deepening of life. I remembered the face of this boy, doing the best he could to sing through the grief in his throat. I remembered his body, hands clasped in front, a tiny bit of protection, as he swayed to the music. Before this loss, after this loss, he always swayed. Our choral director would tell him to stay still, in the breaks between chords of the school piano. Yet always his body continued to move, rocked gently by internal waves of feeling, of process none of us ever know about one another while we’re all singing the same notes. I felt myself remember him, remember his face, the way he nervously tucked his 90s grunge middle-part hair behind his ear, and I felt my heart open to him.
I came here to write a Very Important Letter, with the thought that Resonance comes before words. Energy Before Form, as says the principle of Involution: the Universe becoming Body.
I sat on the cold stonework of the chapel floor. All around me, I had forgotten this too, initials were carved into every reachable beam of wood. It is in the Heart where we remember our inherent connection and oneness with every expression of life. Here, surrounded by marks made by human hands, in the company of stone-beings cold under my sitting bones, the sway of pines and cedars mirroring a boy long ago, the spray of light rain dappling the pages of my notebook, rain which was cloud which was ocean, ocean surf rolling, gray expanse of ocean with white caps from the wind, wind on my face, I was in the realm of the Heart. I sat on my backpack to keep the warmth in my body, crossed my legs, closed my eyes, palms upturned in the relief of surrender, and tried to get clear. I felt my mind moving, my thoughts already trying to narrate the letter I was holding in my body; come back to the breath. The endlessly kind roll of the waves, an auditory anchor, the cold wind on my face, calling me to the here and the now. “Thank you for your letter. I am so grateful for you.” Come back to the breath. A moment of ocean air on my face. A moment of sensation of ocean mist on my eyelashes. A moment of levity. A sliver of a second of grace.
I wanted to get to Center. Center, where everything is understood, where everything is harmony, where everything is not only okay, but abiding in grace. Already perfectly aligned, right here in the eternal Moment. This is a place we can touch. This is a place, ideally, we can respond from. I laugh at myself for all of the times, while knowing this, that I’ve fallen miraculously, stunningly, flat on the face of every lofty aspiration of composure I might have had. This is why they call it a practice.
It amazes me to know that this place of Center exists and abides at all times - that the only thing we need to do to experience it is to get still enough to perceive it. It amazes me - the layers of “not stillness” that exist within me, that I am often only aware of as I sit in the practice of attempting to surrender to it. (I would say “trying to touch it” but trying can only take us so far. Eventually, we have to let go absolutely.) Yogas citta vrtti nirodhas. The second of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Loosely translated - “yoga is the stilling of the waveforms of the mind”. I remember the first time reading this, the way the layers unfolded within me. The entire system of Yoga (not just Asana) reduced to a single thread. A single, incredibly difficult invitation: Get still, touch truth.
I’ve written the second half of this piece twice now, both times, more words, more narrative, for a quality and an experience that exists outside of words. (Every letter is a waveform.) A beloved person in my life describes poetry as “the dance around the invisible thing”. I believe meditation practice can be described in a similar way. Every technique we have, every wisdom that leads us close, dances, ever more subtly, around Center, holds our hand as we get there, but the invisible thing simply Is. Technique leads us to the ephemeral edge. The rest is a slip into surrender, beyond even awareness of experience. (Every awareness is a waveform.)
There are so many practices in so many wise traditions that can lead us to the peak of the same mountain. (Also not my metaphor.) I am certainly not speaking as a person who’s been there, but I do love that mountain, in all of the ways that one feels when climbing a mountain: naively excited, joyful in the walk, restless and eager to be done, in despair, broken, continuing to walk, broken open, sitting for years in the valley between peaks, willing again, restless again, elated, restless, in splendor, restless, humbly willing, desperately grateful, in awe of splendor, restless again, looking at my feet.
What I feel compelled to offer you in the invitation of the moment is to remember the place in you that feels like deep resource. The place, however far away it may seem, that abides in grace. To touch, just for a moment, a felt sense of being held in harmony. We might have only ever felt a glimmer of a moment of this in our entire lives. But wherever you find it, through meditation or prayer, a memory of quietly holding your sleeping child, in a wave of profound relief, is a sense-memory of the resonance of the invisible thing. How we each cultivate this will be informed by the practices we hold dear; spiritual and secular alike. I was once in a 12-step meeting where someone, early in the meeting, casually mentioned that their meditation was washing the dishes. It quickly became a theme of the meeting. Person after person from all walks of life, somewhere in their share, casually mentioned “oh yeah, the dishes thing? Me, too.” Some speculated that it was the comfort of the warm water. For some, it was a tiny place to make order out of chaos. For some it was just the ritual of showing up in an act of care each day. But for all of them, the invisible thing was the same. A felt-sense of serenity, a moment of presence.
My inquiry this week is, what would it look like to try, just a little each day, to touch that presence? While the circumstances of my life will be no different when I open my eyes, how am I more resourced to meet them by touching, just for a moment, this place of peaceful possibility?
I offer you this inquiry, however it may light you up to meet it.
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Want to dive deeper into embodied invitations of element and spirit? I offer monthly sliding scale live Yoga Nidra workshops via Zoom on the first Friday of every month, and have a digital download library of past full Nidra practices to work with any time.