embodied living

So, what’s on your speed dial?

My first invitation was simple: let’s each of us connect to something bigger than our human story, personal biography, our small identity with its problems, preoccupations, and night terrors, even our collective anxiety.

People named different places they turn to when everything feels like it’s falling apart: nature, music, each other, pets, gardening, art, and, of course, dance. These are all honorable sources of comfort and strength.

I was asking us to think even bigger, to feel bigger.

To tap into the deepest possible place of resource—the Source that holds all of us, all of nature, and the vastness of the galaxies in its spacious arms.

There are many words for this: Presence, the Heart of Mercy, Big Sky Mind, Loving Awareness, or simply God (old fashioned and does not work for many people–please translate into your own language).

What’s your word? More importantly, what is your true refuge?

Sadly, many people seemed to have little direct, intuitive sense of connection to that larger reality—the one that’s always here, quietly allowing everything to arise, exist, and pass.

John Welwood used to call it the spiritual wound: a disconnection from the loving openness that is our very nature. This universal human wound shows up in the body as emptiness, anxiety, trauma, depression, and in relationships as the mood of unlove, with its attendant insecurity, guardedness, mistrust, and resentment.

What’s your version of this connection/disconnection?

If not feeling connected to the deeper reality, are you in touch with the longing for it? or with a vague ache in your heart, an absence, an emptiness at the core of your being?

I grew up Catholic which with its patriarchal dogma, institutional ritual, and cultural BS wasn’t great for that kind of openness but still, left a small back gate open in my heart for an intuition of a Love greater than the human emotion known by that name. `

Over my thirty+ years of movement and stillness practice, I’ve learned to cultivate a direct relationship with this Big Love – or what someone in the recent yearlong called “That Thang.” It’s not a ‘thang,’ of course. Ultimately, it’s our truest nature, and the deepest source of all comfort and ease.

But, it’s one thing to talk about it and another to actually embody and live from it, or let it live me.

In the meantime, it’s really helpful to have it on my inner speed dial.

Buddhists call it “flashing Bodhicitta:” in an instant of remembrance, opening to basic spaciousness and clarity, connecting to the brilliance of the awakened heart.

It’s especially crucial when working with people. In the presence of others’ pain and suffering, often enormous and intense, it can be easy to get confused, thinking it’s me who has to hold it, fix it, or at least make it go away. Instead, I can allow the great space of mercy to do the holding and healing.

Connecting to this greater presence isn’t spiritual bypassing.

It’s dropping into the biggest resource there is, so I can fully open to my own suffering and the suffering of the world, with clarity and compassion.