The year of now
My commitment for the year is to be open to create in the now by staying in contact with what emerges in the moment. This asks of me to be and do in the now. To allow the doing to flow from my being so that my body can be a conduit in service of love and life.
On a recent silent retreat, it became clear how my tendency to procrastinate on certain matters is a postponement of life. In that moment of putting things of into the “fantasised future” I’m not allowing life to flow through me. I’m not being in the reality of life. I was not accepting the current reality as it is because it was not how I wanted it (or me) to be. I had a preconceived idea of how my being should look before I can do what life was calling me to.
The thinking was either based on a fear of the past or a projection in the future that was justifying my non-action to make me feel safe. Accompanied with uncomfortable body sensations which I rather wanted to avoid than move through. By allowing myself to be dragged down into the familiar thought pattern or pulling avoidant energy I was blocking the expression of life. We perceive the world through our senses, like the quote of William Blake
“Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” – William Blake
That perception in itself (the contact of the thinking mind with sensations) shapes how we experience the world and, in a way, create it. As William Wordsworth so beautifully wrote in his poem, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
This listening into life through the body (which I call “Lyfluister”) frees one from the conditioning and judgements of how you should be or do. Labels like procrastinating falls away in the loving contact point of the mind- body in the present. Then there is only the resting into the wise whispers of life. Which is ever changing and can’t be boxed into a generalised decision tree. It may reveal that right now the body needs to rest and doing that task is not in service of life. Or it may mean that you need to draw on the consciousness of will and complete the task to open space for what wants to emerge. The commitment that life ask is that we keep on opening ourselves to the conversation and really listen so that we can act with authentic clarity.