I’ve just returned home from a two-day, walking adventure: hiking over to Alfriston, and making the return to Lewes the next day. It’s a replication of a trip my wife and I did two months ago. As a comparison of the blog header image reveals, we are transitioning into another phase of summer: and I can often start lamenting about time moving too fast. “The grass is turning brown, the swifts are leaving for Africa, it will soon be autumn”…you get the drift! I’m doing my best to allow time to slow down, and to not get carried away by the story – after all, I have only just finished work for my summer break. A whole 5 weeks lies ahead.
I know all too well how a good story grabs; and I so often leave what is now and buy into the threat that lies ready and waiting in the future. I’m not alone, I know…I’m getting to know the pull of the story, recognising it earlier, and changing an enduring theme.
On Saturday morning, as per a ritual set down since moving to Lewes in the spring, I got up and rode over to Eastbourne. I passed by my favourite boulangerie and picked up breakfast for a sit on the beach. As I plonked myself down on the pebbles there was a sense of arriving: a relief somewhat physical (after 90 minutes of pedalling) and yet strangely emotional too. It was as if the vast, expansive vista “out there” joined with the expansiveness “in here”. In the Buddhist teachings, buddhanature is often described using the metaphor of the blue, cloudless sky. There was certainly something that was evoked in the connection of within and without. I recognised a sadness welling up – a lamenting that I find it so hard to arrive here, in the now, more often.
Be, longing.
The sadness was a longing for “this” more often. I know this is ALWAYS here, and yet so often I don’t find it…or trust it? On describing this experience to my mediation mentor, I explained the irony in my description – here I was, arriving in a space / place I long to be, having ridden there on my bike…when so often I find myself on this unicycle with a long seat-tube, pedalling furiously in a somewhat superficial attempt at life. I am sad I don’t find the ground more often.
I sat on the pebbles…I found ground.
On finding ground…I opened to the vista.
On opening to the vista…I received the world.
On receiving the world…I feel myself as a part of it (not apart)
Grounding, opening, receiving…and (what I wrote about last week) coming to know an embeddedness.
Whether it be in the language of Merleau-Ponty or William Blake, to open and receive the world is to experience our non-separation from it. This was the sadness: the tender “kiss of the world” as I allowed myself to embrace and be embraced. The more I let gravity take me down, I become the life that is living around me: the pebbles, the sea, the sky. This felt such a lesson to me: almost like the perfect place from where to be a human being…
…and indeed, from where to practice psychotherapy! To recognise we are contingent and coextensive with the world. The world is not out there to be lived in, but rather the world moves through me as I move through it. I am part of this life, as it is living itself. To stop pedalling, fall from the height of my saddle, to land…and like humpty-dumpty, crack open. Far from being put back together again, to remain open and receptive is to be embedded; this is to be healed.
Of course, life is also about getting on the bike again. The art is to do so without leaving the beach; the art is to do so without clenching, contracting. I’m headed on retreat tomorrow – a week in the company with esteemed meditation master Tsoknyi Rinpoche. I’m super excited and super nervous. This retreat is so timely, and yet so hard to take myself on because of all that is going on in my world…and “needs me” to oversee….well, that is what the story tells me!
To ground, open, receive (and allow life in and through) takes courage; it takes support. When clients come to therapy it is with a story of (on some level) not having the support to land and open to relating with the world (with other beings-in-the-world). I am one such being, and some of the courage to do this work myself is to be of better service to the clients (and trainees, supervisees) I work with. To go on retreat is how I find courage – support from the teacher, the teachings, the community of others trying to ground, open, receive too. It can seem somewhat paradoxical that I need to take myself away in order to arrive more fully in the world. But like a dear friend and I were discussing just before I started writing this post, sometimes the baby warrior needs to take a step at a time. Grounding, opening, receiving came easier on the beach because like an exposure experiment, to open “without threat”* is the first step. Grounding, opening, receiving when surrounded by other meditators is again, another step. Practice, practice, practice…a rehearsal for life itself.
See you on the other side.
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*perceived or real