At the end of my yoga practice now, it is now my habit to fold forward with my forehead to my mat and face my open palms upward. I don't know why I started doing this. I just did and it feels like the right thing to do at that moment, I guess an offering of sorts.
Growing up, I never had to ask permission. As long as I took care of family matters and school matters, I could do whatever I wanted. Looking back, there are so many times when I made these bold, sort of outlandish choices, usually to travel places, and remember just letting my parents know that it was going to happen, then I would be gone and they would never ask me about it after I returned. It wasn't that they didn't care, they just trusted me and were preoccupied with the crises at hand. Also, I was incredibly shy so outside of travels, I spent much of my time reading, writing or running alone so there was a lot of quiet and there was no need in my house for permission to be still and quiet.
Permission-
noun
1.authorization granted to do something; formal consent:
Late Middle English: from Latin permissio(n-), from the verb permittere 'allow'
So oddly, one of the first times, I was confronted with this issue of permission was when my friend Rich and I were traveling in Asia. He is Taiwanese and was blocked from getting a visa to Indonesia. It was our plan and at the random whim of a border agent he was not given permission. There was no way to get around it and so we had to re-route our trip North to Malaysia instead. It was an enlightening moment for me.
To me, the most important kind of permission is the permission we give or do not give to ourselves. Most often we are our own prison guards/gate keepers to whatever we are scared of, we allow to be bigger and scarier than we are. In graduate school, I worked at a domestic violence help center for several years. People would come to me with their stories and I would listen and then I would help them with the paperwork and accompany them to court. What always astounded me the most, as a very petite person myself, is how puny these abusers often were. The word pipsqueak comes to mind. This monstrous person I'd heard about for a month, so scary in my mind's eye was just some punk, one, I remember, was a professor at Dartmouth. I was afraid the abusers were see me in this small town and follow me home or threaten me, but, of course, they never did. They only had power within the abusive relationship. It shows how subjective fear is, and always, the abusers were super afraid of me in spite of my small size because I knew their story. But to my clients, these people were all-knowing and all-powerful. Their fear was real, to be sure, but also subjective in a certain sense as well. The people I worked with, most often, were too worn down to give themselves permission to live differently.
I am certainly the gatekeeper to my own prison of intense anxiety, that is me alone, my struggle, my lonely prison; I created it and I now guard it. In struggling with anxiety last week, I did something I almost never do. I asked for wisdom and insight aloud before I fell asleep. The last time I did that this summer, in a deep ditch of anxiety, I dreamt about the word ahimsa all night. I was profoundly touched when I discovered the meaning of what I got back. And last weekend was the same thing, a word rung out to me all night, again a word I didn't really know. The word (except I am not even sure it is a word) was non-efforting. I mulled it over the last two days and came to my own conclusions about its wisdom and then I did what we like to do in the modern world... I googled it. It turns out it is a spiritual term.
Don't get me wrong, I am clear this is not an excuse to give up on life or be lazy. More, I really think efforting has to do with attachment and outcome. Non-efforting, in actuality, means to give energy, commitment, focus and passion to life. It is really simple in a way and really complicated in another. For me, that is an easy nuance to grasp because that is the way I write. I am clear in my writing that I am led, not leading. I am passionate and committed and so focussed but I am not certain of the outcome. There is no outline for the story, just a loose affiliation with the Odyssey and a strong flow.
One website I found states about non-efforting, "So how do you know then if you are meant to do a certain task when it appears to have huge resistance to it? The key is always to watch your inner state of beingness. If there is some resistance to what is being presented, or even denial of it, then this is a sure sign you are in fact heading in the RIGHT direction. And when this direction constantly activates internal frictions, then you can be sure you're revealing a pattern. This synchronicity is a sure sign you're on the path of Right Action...."
In these cases, a key to integrating the lesson and transcending the pattern is as follows...
Um, okay... All of the information about non-efforting talks about an open hand. And I've noticed that sometimes the body knows things before the mind, so I am hoping that my ritual this year of making a full offering of myself and my practice was a start along this path of non-efforting, of being happily, readily non-resistant to the flow of life.
“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
As always, I have a lot to learn.
Growing up, I never had to ask permission. As long as I took care of family matters and school matters, I could do whatever I wanted. Looking back, there are so many times when I made these bold, sort of outlandish choices, usually to travel places, and remember just letting my parents know that it was going to happen, then I would be gone and they would never ask me about it after I returned. It wasn't that they didn't care, they just trusted me and were preoccupied with the crises at hand. Also, I was incredibly shy so outside of travels, I spent much of my time reading, writing or running alone so there was a lot of quiet and there was no need in my house for permission to be still and quiet.
Permission-
noun
1.authorization granted to do something; formal consent:
Late Middle English: from Latin permissio(n-), from the verb permittere 'allow'
So oddly, one of the first times, I was confronted with this issue of permission was when my friend Rich and I were traveling in Asia. He is Taiwanese and was blocked from getting a visa to Indonesia. It was our plan and at the random whim of a border agent he was not given permission. There was no way to get around it and so we had to re-route our trip North to Malaysia instead. It was an enlightening moment for me.
To me, the most important kind of permission is the permission we give or do not give to ourselves. Most often we are our own prison guards/gate keepers to whatever we are scared of, we allow to be bigger and scarier than we are. In graduate school, I worked at a domestic violence help center for several years. People would come to me with their stories and I would listen and then I would help them with the paperwork and accompany them to court. What always astounded me the most, as a very petite person myself, is how puny these abusers often were. The word pipsqueak comes to mind. This monstrous person I'd heard about for a month, so scary in my mind's eye was just some punk, one, I remember, was a professor at Dartmouth. I was afraid the abusers were see me in this small town and follow me home or threaten me, but, of course, they never did. They only had power within the abusive relationship. It shows how subjective fear is, and always, the abusers were super afraid of me in spite of my small size because I knew their story. But to my clients, these people were all-knowing and all-powerful. Their fear was real, to be sure, but also subjective in a certain sense as well. The people I worked with, most often, were too worn down to give themselves permission to live differently.
I am certainly the gatekeeper to my own prison of intense anxiety, that is me alone, my struggle, my lonely prison; I created it and I now guard it. In struggling with anxiety last week, I did something I almost never do. I asked for wisdom and insight aloud before I fell asleep. The last time I did that this summer, in a deep ditch of anxiety, I dreamt about the word ahimsa all night. I was profoundly touched when I discovered the meaning of what I got back. And last weekend was the same thing, a word rung out to me all night, again a word I didn't really know. The word (except I am not even sure it is a word) was non-efforting. I mulled it over the last two days and came to my own conclusions about its wisdom and then I did what we like to do in the modern world... I googled it. It turns out it is a spiritual term.
Don't get me wrong, I am clear this is not an excuse to give up on life or be lazy. More, I really think efforting has to do with attachment and outcome. Non-efforting, in actuality, means to give energy, commitment, focus and passion to life. It is really simple in a way and really complicated in another. For me, that is an easy nuance to grasp because that is the way I write. I am clear in my writing that I am led, not leading. I am passionate and committed and so focussed but I am not certain of the outcome. There is no outline for the story, just a loose affiliation with the Odyssey and a strong flow.
One website I found states about non-efforting, "So how do you know then if you are meant to do a certain task when it appears to have huge resistance to it? The key is always to watch your inner state of beingness. If there is some resistance to what is being presented, or even denial of it, then this is a sure sign you are in fact heading in the RIGHT direction. And when this direction constantly activates internal frictions, then you can be sure you're revealing a pattern. This synchronicity is a sure sign you're on the path of Right Action...."
In these cases, a key to integrating the lesson and transcending the pattern is as follows...
- To watch for the synchronistic pattern continually activating similar aspects of inner tightness; then to work with the energy, not deny it, but to apply oneself with commitment, diligence and resolve. At the same time, to keep surrendering, opening and expanding internally so as to overcome the restriction of our beingness."
Um, okay... All of the information about non-efforting talks about an open hand. And I've noticed that sometimes the body knows things before the mind, so I am hoping that my ritual this year of making a full offering of myself and my practice was a start along this path of non-efforting, of being happily, readily non-resistant to the flow of life.
“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
As always, I have a lot to learn.
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