Peaceful Duck

THE UNIVERSAL LAW OF PAUSE

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Peaceful Duck

When We Stop Chasing It––We Experience It.

Allowing myself to sleep in past 6AM, a gesture that I don’t often make to myself, I listened to my two cats scampering about in a determined crazy-cat frenzy. If you’re a cat owner, you know that untamed state that possesses our sweet kitties and then mutates them into wild beasts?

I indulged in a mattress belly flop, half awake and half asleep, in that magical subconscious paradigm.

“Do that which is not done by doing.
Make that which is not made by making.
Taste that which cannot be distinguished by taste.
Hold the same regard for the few and the many.
Requite the unkind with kindness…”

As I listened to their industrious pitter-patter for a long luxurious moment, I handed over my current labor-intensive chase to create my perfect world, to their obvious commitment to do the same. At this particular time in my life the culmination of life altering events were coming to fruition at once.

I was involved in the last days of the last editorial read of my first book’s deadline. I had just adopted an Amazon Parrot to join my already befriended Conure of 18 years. Both had been in the works for years.

The pressure to finesse the perfect book and the perfect birdhouse were both rooted in creating alignment in the world. The book’s focus being alignment between mind and body, the bird focus being alignment between adversaries––cats and birds.

When I finally decided to get up and face my day’s demands, what I found gave me pause.
I had created my dream! It had arrived!

A tiny sparrow was motionless on my kitchen floor. One of the cats had clearly captured it and brought it in from the terrace. I know this because, though I sleep with the terrace door open the curtain is closed, so the bird did not fly in.

Startled, of course, I tried to access the situation. Was the bird hurt?

I had heard that handling the bird would ostracise the sparrow from its’ flock. For that reason I placed a clean dish towel over it, swiped it up from the floor, and brought it to a pot of dirt back out on the terrace to offer a safe and familiar resting place.

As my towel was raised from the sparrow, it quickly flew away. All was well in the world. In fact, it was perfect.

All that ruckus I had listened to in my hesitancy to get up and start my daily dream chase, was the innocent witnessing of my dream being realized.

My cats had plenty of time to annihilate the bird, (I know this because they’re great mousers) but they didn’t. They choose to play with the sparrow (it was that sparrows lucky day!). Much like their mama—me—plays with the parrots.

When I reflected back on my mattress belly flop I recalled how open my pelvis was to the bed and how my quadriceps extended in a relaxed surrender away from the determination that fuels my gut’s passion. I was in a state of what Tao calls “non-doing” receptivity. I allowed the cats to be at the helm of the household’s direction.

“… Thus, one of integral virtue desires what is not connected with desire,
Sets no value on the rare goods of the world,
Learns what is not learned through learning,
And induces people to return to that which they have overlooked.”
Tao te Ching

It was a moment of trust.

So accustomed to using my quadriceps to drive my passions forward, this incident reminded me that, yes my quadriceps’ actions produce my future forward, but my quadriceps’ release recognizes that yesterday’s future is now.

Balance giving and receiving to move forward tirelessly.

 

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Loneliness is a Gift!

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Embrace the Self-Acceptance of Solitude

 

Pushing something away has enough fear, anger or purpose in it to fuel the separation. Letting-go has only the loss of what was.

Pushing away or refraining from the things you love, like too much chocolate cake or too many martinis; or to stop an activity you enjoy so an injury can heal, has an immediate reward—a svelte healthy body.

When asked to step back from something or someone you care about, like a lover or friend, or a job position or opportunity, what is the reward?

While some exit quietly out of respect, others believe they can change the circumstances and win back their favor; some become enraged so that they can reject the rejecter, while others blame innocent bystanders as not to condemn the dead. Neither respect, positive thinking, nor outrage or blame can fill the void of losing something or someone you want and love.

What in letting-go makes it worth the sacrifice of your wants and needs? What will ease the emptiness left in its wake?

Loneliness. That’s right, be lonely. Loneliness is worthy.

The solitude of loneliness brings the gift of self-acceptance, as long as you don’t consider loneliness as weak, feeble or pathetic.

This passage from the Tao te Ching explains it well:

Mold clay into a vessel;

It is the emptiness within that creates the usefulness of the vessel.

Cut out doors and windows in a house;

It is the empty space inside that creates the usefulness of the house.

Thus, what we have may be something substantial,

But its usefulness lies in the unoccupied, empty space.

The substance of your body is enlivened

By maintaining the part of you that is unoccupied.

Lao Tzu

Empty space within enlivens your mind and body because connecting with it is an acknowledgment of all that you are.

Loneliness guides you inwardly to recognize the vastness of you, the depth of your heart and the Divine wisdom that guides your material self. Emptiness realized awakens what is real, so you can step beyond what is known.

The Danger of Loneliness

The deep dive of loneliness can conjure up all that you think you should have done and all that you think you are, with an opinion that is harsh and often not your own. This level of experiencing unveils beliefs that you have adopted from past experiences and can lead to depression and motivate unsolicited reactivity.

But this level of experiencing is not the emptiness within. You are experiencing the unresolved holding patterns, held as tension, in your physical body.

To drop deeper into the empty space within, allow the maze of feelings that you are judging to exist just as they are. Separate what you are feeling from what you are thinking. Simply, be a witness to your feelings presence. When you feel a judgment come in, breathe it away and continue allowing your feelings to exist with curiosity.

Allowing yourself to feel is an action that requires practice.

You know when you are in the empty space within when you feel calm. Self-appreciation emanates through your solitude.

How To Transform Loneliness into Solitude

The triceps muscles are responsible for pushing undesirables away, challenging them helps you rise above persistent self-defamation. Triceps exercises also ask that you lift your chest upward, while simultaneously pushing resistance downward. At once you push a force away and lift your heart above.

Whether you are a fitness enthusiast or not, you can use your triceps to guide your attention. Any movement that asks you to push through your hands and extend your arms from the elbows uses your triceps:

  • Chopping vegetables
  • Writing
  • Pushing a stroller
  • Wiping dishes clean
  • Even the light pressure on a steering wheel when driving

Combine the physical act of engaging the triceps with the mental discipline to allow emotion without judgment or ill fate. With each breath visit your loneliness, not the subject of your loss or judgment of your feelings, you may be surprised how quickly the body starts to trust you and give you passage into what lies beneath your surface. Guide your mind and body into the spirited empty space beneath what is familiar.

You are exercising the mind and body as a united team that is for you, not against you. You are also believing that there is more than what you know, offering hope and possibility to your circumstances.

Remember Karate Kid, “wax on, wax off?” Practice pushing your attention to a neutral place to embrace the self-acceptance of solitude.

To let go is to let loss live, but to extinguish the meanings we place on it.

 

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Create Me-Space Throughout Your Day

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A joyful young woman

Do you like your job?

Well it turns out a staggering 70% of employees either, hate or are completely disengaged from their jobs.

This Gallup poll also said that even alluring workplace perks like nap rooms, free lunches, and massages did nothing to improve engagement.

It makes sense. Perks don’t address how we connect with our jobs. They distract us from our jobs.

Flex-time––personal time––offered workers the highest sense of well-being with a 44% satisfaction rate!

People want personal time and me-space throughout their days.

Flexibility to create our own hours, work from home, or take time outs whenever needed, gives us perspective. We are given the freedom to decide if the job we are doing rocks our world or doesn’t.

When we decide that we are where we want to be in our lives we get busy living it!

Disengagement, on the other hand, is a symptom of being uninspired. More often than not, this disconnect is with ourselves; the job is secondary. This can happen when responsibilities override our genuine interest. Once lost in a state of restraint, we become oblivious to our own authority and hunger. What is blaring, is the needs of the job, not our interest in the job.

Tao te Ching states:

The Tao is called the Great Mother:

Empty yet inexhaustible,

It gives birth to infinite worlds.

It is always present within you.

You can use it any way you want.

Lao Tsu

You can “use it anyway you want,” if you are still engaged with it.

Here’s the thing… your relationship with your job changes task by task. The need for connecting with your inner-authority––your need for me-space––is a revolving door that is always in motion. To extend yourself beyond the restraint of responsibilities, with interest rather than obligation, engage inwardly as deeply as you engage outwardly––STRETCH!

 

The more work that piles up the less effective it is to pull job responsibilities onto your already full plate. This overflows your comfort zone and contracts your stance––you feel inundated. Rather, when inundated, expand your self toward your work instead of your full plate. This distinction is crucial!

Stretch your world, your job and yourself.

Give birth to interest.

T. Wise

How do we give ourselves me-space when work piles up?

Posture is a simple way to create me-space so you never get so disengaged from your personal wants that you’re lost. To deflect the habit of pulling work inward, address your biceps muscles. Rather than contracting them, like when folded into a computer screen or hauling heavy objects, relax them.

Relaxed biceps open you in the direction of your attention, as if inviting an exchange. This changes the direction of your attention from inward to outward.

Try this…

When at the computer:

  • Sit with forearms resting on each side of your computer with palms up.
  • Relax your shoulder blades down through your bent elbows. This will open your chest and drop your shoulders.
    • Feel how the biceps muscles, that pass through the inside fold of your elbows, are relaxed even though they’re still folded
  • To type rotate your palms down without disturbing the elbows downward direction of weight.
    • Feel how the biceps muscles relaxed state allows your chest to stay open to receive. You stop grasping for what you need and instead invite what you need in.
  • If your elbows start to splay outward, notice how the biceps and chest start to grab and so does your attention. Self correct until your elbows learn a new habit.

When standing or walking:

  • Stand with arms down at your sides; relax your shoulder blades down through arms.
  • Rotate biceps and palms forward. This will open your chest and drop your shoulders.
    • Feel the biceps muscles open toward what you’re facing.
  • Walk with this rotation and feel how this outward attention opens you to receive what you pass by. A light exchange of energy happens with everything that’s alive.

Your body, mind and Spirit constantly need to integrate into its surroundings. If you’re too busy doing your job to be able to feel interested in it, release your biceps for a moment and breathe. You will be surprised how quickly you are inspired back into action.

To learn more about the BodyLogos technique, here’s a quick relaxation trick to Surrender Tension in 8-Minutes.

How the Body Aligns You on Your First ______! And how you align it thereafter.

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Malayan porcupine in nature

You meet someone new. Maybe in an interview or on a first date or a spontaneous introduction, and your heart responds openly. Your chest naturally rises, as if your body were smiling; and, the width between your shoulder blades retreats, like a porcupine retracting its quills.

 

More often than not you trust your heart’s message. You, almost without noticing, reorganize your inner self and let this new person into your life. Your passion to create alignment in business, creativity, friendship or love is ignited!

 

Then one day your body responds differently. Your chest contracts and your back widens—you are on high alert.

 

It is accepted in the West that the heart is our emotional seat and that the chest’s carriage expresses our heart’s emotional state. But in the East, it is understood that the heart carries our joy and the lungs carry our sadness, including the back’s carriage in the expression of our emotional wellbeing.

 

… Trust your natural responses;

And everything will fall into place.

                                                                   Tao te Ching

 

Your body expresses a smile of truth through your chest muscles that relate to your heart’s joy. It expresses the need to protect your smile of truth through your back muscles that relate to your lung’s sadness.

 

Cocooned between chest and back muscles the Heart Center’s rainbow of emotions are communicated through your chest and back’s alternating rise and fall. This oscillation acts as your barometer regarding what you want to align with in each moment. Your chest and back muscles take turns aligning with the situation in question.

 

When passion turns to high alert this emotional yo-yo, exhausted by extreme alignment swings, locks into one extreme or the other. Tension is the result—a physical holding pattern—that steals physical strength and mental resolve.

 

Here’s the thing…

Passion leads to purpose. What you are passionate about does not.

 

When what you are passionately aligned with is leading you away from what feels purposeful, a deliberate realignment is being asked of you. The internal alignment that happened initially, without much thought, is now demanding thought.

 

Allow your body to express what you’re feeling before you try to reason through the situation. Restructuring does not mean your more assertive—yang —nature of your back shadows the more sensitive—yin—nature of your chest, or visa versa. This restructuring asks you to meet the conflict as an aligned team that represents your smile of truth.

 

The conflict is about your relationship with the other person, not the other person.

 

Posture is the first thing that cues you in on how you feel about your relationship with something. Dialogue with your body before it shouts out with pain and fatigue. Listen when it gets energized, relaxed and sits upright. Ask yourself:

 

  •      Can passionate choices be, less about the choice and, more about being lead toward your purpose? The teaching tools that ask you to explore your values and value.
  •      Can protecting your passion be training the muscles needed for you to be purposeful? The call to action that asks you to step into unfamiliar territory.

 

What have we turned our backs on because we didn’t know what questions to ask ourselves? Living life in shades of gray offers way more options that living in black or white choices.

 

If you let yourself be blown to and fro.

You lose touch with your roots.

If you let restlessness move you,

You lose touch with who you are.

                                                                Tao te Ching

 

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Sob Your Head Off It’s Good For You

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Human face cloaked in mesh

Human face under a cloak of confusion

Expand your capacity to love!

You know those moments where no words can express or console your feelings; a deep guttural cry is the only way to pacify the hurt. It offers complete submersion into your feelings–separate from thinking–bringing solace to heartache. It’s as if, physically shedding tears makes room for mental resolution. And it is actually true–sobbing is a physical exorcism.

The deep muscular heave of a sob loosens the emotional grip of deep-seated beliefs trapped in your soft tissues. Beliefs misaligned with the present situation; beliefs that make you question love. (Yes, the body feels! The mind thinks.)

Even tears motivated by happiness, such as your daughter’s wedding day, there is a misaligned undercurrent belief causing the tears: you may have worried that she would not find a partner and be lonely her whole life; or on a more personal note, you may believe you’ll never attract the bliss of new love again in your life. Underlying beliefs are not always conscious.

The emotional undercurrent of mental beliefs runs through your body like a current that tumbles gracefully down the river. Misaligned beliefs create tensions that interfere with this emotional current, like a bend or jutting rock in the riverbed that creates a whirlpool. Physical holding patterns develop into pockets of tension that I refer to as psyche-muscular holding patterns. To release the pattern adjust your belief.

Easy right… just change your mind!

Not quite. First you need to release the physical tension holding the pattern in place!

Sobbing naturally creates that opportunity.

To create new beliefs, old beliefs need to first be released. A deep cry makes room for underlying feelings to surface, feelings you couldn’t access while holding yourself together. You begin to let go of the protective reason of thinking–the defensive self-talk that distances you from feeling love or loved. Your body’s feeling sense takes over and your mind is in a position to listen. This is a role reversal from how most of us operate in the world.

Think of it like this, attention is finite.

When your attention particles are all filled to the brim with excess thinking because nothing is making sense: life is overwhelmed with worry and doubt, or pent up fears are dominating your experience, there is nothing you can do but un-fill, undo, unwind–sob your head off! Thinking turns to feeling and you have a chance to consider if what you believe is actually so?

Keep this in mind the next time you’re sobbing your head off:

  •      Direct your attention to the essence of your feelings rather than the other person or your present situation.
  •      Allow your body to fully experience the physical wail–reclaim the child in you–and let go of needing to know all the answers.
  •      Keep it real–synthesize the heart’s joy and the lung’s sadness–allow them to coexist.

The hardwiring of beliefs around love comes down to the antagonistic emotional relationship between the heart and lungs. (Like people, every organ has its own personality!) Eastern healing principles recognize sobbing as an expression of sadness that lives in your lungs and the upheaval of joy that lives in your heart. What happens when we hold these emotions in is, we compress the chest muscles–the blanket that expresses the emotional condition of our heart and lungs. For this reason I call the chest muscles your Smile of Truth.

Signs that your Smile of Truth is becoming compromised:

  •      Concave chest & shallow breathing
  •      Protruding chest & rapid breathing
  •      Insecure sense of self

The release of tension that a good cry, meditation, stretching and relaxation all offer creates an “I don’t know” internal space where the certainty of our worries, doubts and fears once lived. Free attention can feel restorative or lonely and scary. Since tension is by nature character divulging, letting it go feels like letting a bit of you go. You revert to the innocence of your inner child and feel dependent on someone else’s wisdom to fill the “I don’t know” void. But that’s the great thing about being an adult. You have the wisdom to navigate through the “I don’t know” abyss. One thing is for sure, when you feel “I don’t know,” you can bet that you are in the midst of creating positive change.

You’ll Never Look at a Pregnant Woman the Same Again

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Losing one’s center of gravity is a lost and found phenomenon.

There she is walking ahead of you, legs slightly spread causing her whole body to waddle side to side. She looks like she’s steadying herself on a sailboat but, even from behind, you know she is pregnant. You can’t help but marvel at the miracle of childbirth and the mystery of the female form, but have you ever considered her instability as Creation’s stability?

Pregnancy is an energetic phenomenon. Her mind body connection must navigate through an interruption of being, what she has come to know as, herself. A foreign state of instability overrides everything; she has no control over what is happening to her! How does this instability serve her as a mother to be? (Yikes, it’s enough to scare the rest of us off!)

When talking to my neighbor, Lorelei, mother of one and soon to be two, she said, “Being pregnant is hard, but it teaches me a lot about myself. I can give more than I realized!” She explains how being pregnant stretches her beyond what she knew of herself in every way!

But she had to lose herself to find herself.

Lorelei’s first experience of feeling lost was impressed acutely in her memory. The moment she couldn’t get out of the car on her own volition she exclaimed, “Oh My God, this is really happening!” When we looked deeper into that moment she said, “It’s a foreign state that is one sided. It affects mom not baby.”

My holistic interpretation of this lost while pregnant is:
•    Her center of gravity–the Dan Tien Energy Center–is engulfed upon.
•    The sense of self that comes from knowing her center is growing increasingly distant.
•   The abdominal muscles have split centrally to permit the fetus to grow, leaving her detached from her core strength.
Up until now, her energy and strength have been devoted to her independent desires. Now they are devoted to keeping an embryonic life incubated and emerging. Her autonomy is gradually disappearing. (This might be a good time to say, I love you mom!)

How does this instability sure up the future for nurturing a new life?

Stripped of independence, completely exposed to the world, overwhelmed with fatigue, empathy turns to sympathy toward herself. She is solely responsible for another life form, afraid of unexpected pregnancy conditions (breech, cerclage, preeclampsia), as well as the common cold. She believes that the baby isn’t fully hers to safeguard until it is born.

I liken this unstable state to jibbing, a sailing maneuver that turns the stern of the boat, so that the wind changes from one side of the sail to the other. There is a moment in the maneuver that the sail is completely disconnected from the wind, directionless, powerless; but to navigate through life changes one must jib, let go of the control, to transform values and align with new circumstances. This applies no matter what you are birthing in life!

In this personal maneuver she transforms. She cries a lot. She is no longer embarrassed to feel; she has no physical shame left! In this loss of autonomy an internal spark chases her into action. The urgency to nest has her spouting demands, and expecting others to jump. Her mind becomes insightful, sensitive to the single life force she is sharing with her baby, knowing (not guessing) what they need.

In this lost state she finds her direction. A direction that can only go forward; there is no turning back. She has jibbed successfully!

All of this to say, once the baby is born she will need to jib back into the wind to re-find her independence. And when she does she will become acutely aware of the split down her body’s center, where her baby once lived. Alone in herself again, she is forever changed. Lorelei remembers from her first pregnancy, “I felt like I was missing a body part. It took me nearly 3-years to actually be able to own my new self. It was a weird identity crisis.” She recalls that trying to go back was the wrong focus. Trying to be healthy and embody a better newfound sexy–mature, accepting, soft woman–is what completed her experience of being a human incubator. To create a stable internal environment her external standards had to weather physical and emotional instability, but as Lorelei says, “Life is more than appearances. I can’t imagine life without children.”

Entitlement isn’t to be judged in new mothers. It is founded in the fact that she is a spirited and devoted incubator for the human race. As fellow human beings we are obliged to help her! Help support the journey back to herself.