Lean Into It

Leaning into it is something I have been thinking about a lot over the last several months.

I recently gave a presentation at a professional counseling conference – my first time to do so. When the opportunity first came up, I was torn. I wasn’t sure, as a counseling intern, that I had yet acquired the depth of knowledge to speak for 90 minutes on a specific topic. I knew that the effort required to create such a presentation would be enormous. I was nervous at the prospect of standing in front of other counselors who might question my knowledge. Could I really do it? When I considered it, it felt like I stood on the edge of an abyss – maybe not a huge, cavernous one, but a big, dark hole nonetheless. Uncharted territory.

This has been a familiar (though never really comfortable) experience on my journey of becoming a psychotherapist – from my initial decision to make a major career change and return to school, to seeing my first client and creating my own website and blog. And now I am putting myself out into the therapist community as (gasp!) someone with unique, expert knowledge that is worthy of sharing. Each of these experiences has given me the same feeling of stepping out into the dark and unknown. A feeling of pressing necessity at what must be done now with no clarity at all about what would follow, how it would turn out.

You might say, well, you didn’t HAVE to do any of it. I can see how that would seem to be the case. But I have re-realized over and over, that, yes, I DO have to do it because, challenging and sometimes scary as all these things have been, every one of them has emerged out of intimations of life within me. Small little sparks and urges, sometimes nearly indistinguishable amidst the questions and uncertainties, especially early on. When I first read through the thick syllabi packet for my first semester of graduate school courses, I felt a momentary surge of terror: oh crap, what have I done? But I was so enraptured with depth psychology and so hungry for meaningful work that I knew I had to walk on and continue leaning in, no matter how murky the path ahead was. And I have been amazed at what has unfolded from that first leaning in and all the ones since. I am constantly moved and delighted and humbled by the rich, deep work of soul that I now get to engage in with others. I am intrigued by the new, more alive me who is always emerging (but who was also in there all along).

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I think that being true to what is trying to emerge from within us often requires us to lean into it. Such leaning goes against our primal, survival instincts. We tend to seek what is familiar and secure, and the idea of throwing ourselves into the unknown (whether it’s a new experience or a new emotion) seems not just absurd, but life-threatening. Why should I venture into that dark cave when it’s perfectly safe out here? The frustrating truth (and at this point in my life it does seem to me to be a truth) is that a life based largely on choices of safety or convenience or ease often ends up feeling like an unlived life. Dry. Barren. Flat. Wanting. Partial. Like something has been missed or wasted or lost.

So we each have to find our own ways to lean into what we want and need. No need for big, heroic efforts (which is something I’ve had to learn), especially if it feels scary or you’re not sure about what you’re wanting or needing. Just a gentle leaning in to test the waters and see how it feels and what happens. And if you are struggling with leaning into something you think you might want or need, it is always helpful to be curious about why.

Even now as I sit typing this blog post, I have a sense of having to lean into it – putting words to these kinds of experiences is an effort. A part of me doesn’t want to try, as odd as that might seem to confess to you, the reader. But another part of me can’t NOT do it. I have to try to express this search, this need, for a real and meaningful life that we all experience. I have to let you know that I am here, trying too. Struggling with it but leaning into it anyway. I have to tell you that something HAPPENS when we lean into things. Something more.

Sacred Play

A boy frolicking in the ocean surf (see below* for more information about this photo)

Each time I sit down to write for this blog, something inside me becomes very intent and serious – earnestly feeling around for what wants to be said, searching for words to capture it, imagining how those words will be experienced by you, writing, rewriting, and rewriting. For this part of me, soul is a serious, urgent matter, and I feel a need to communicate everything I can about it. To give it form. To ignite something inside you. And yet, once I have posted my latest thoughts, I often feel to some degree that, once again, the essence of this soul thing has partially eluded my efforts to express it and share it.

Logic says, yes, of course, that is to be expected. After all, we aren’t talking about some observable, known quantity here, some scientific experiment. But the frustration isn’t soothed by such dry, reasonable arguments – knowing you have undertaken something that is going to be elusive doesn’t make it easier when it does, really and truly, prove to be elusive. Knowing it is going to be challenging to channel your aliveness doesn’t soothe the anguish when your efforts at expression feel less than the vibrant swirling that is inside you.

So what do I do with that? What do YOU do with that? Beat yourself up? Give up? Pretend you don’t care? Buckle down and try even harder because, darn it, I’ll nail it this time? I know I am guilty of all these responses at different times. I bet you are too.

Instead, why not give ourselves permission to play?

What do I mean by play? I mean allowing room to be spontaneous and experiment with your usual way of being and doing – fuzzier edges, more flexibility. Letting go of what’s “right” or “good” and simply finding inspiration in your efforts. Remembering (and this can be really hard for many people) to be compassionate toward yourself and the new life that is emerging in what you are trying to do or say or create.

This changes your efforts from high-pressure, all-or-nothing struggles to more playful, successive approximations where each attempt is some thing. Not THE thing, captured wholly and exactly, once and for all. But SOME thing. A portion that strives for your truth, even if it’s a little awkward or fumbling or sits a bit crooked.

Watch children play sometime. Yes, they are playing in the usually understood meaning of the term – frolicking, pretending, laughing. But their play also has a serious tone to it – they are intent in their activity. Ask them what they are doing, and they will explain it in a very earnest way. At the same time, there is also plenty of room for a cardboard box to become a house, or for the rules to change in the middle of a game, or for chaotic blue and green crayon scribblings to be sky and trees and grass.

So expressing what is alive inside you is most certainly a serious matter, but it is serious in the same way that children at play are serious. You are expressing your essence, giving form to your soul’s strivings, but at the same time, you can express it in many different ways and there aren’t nearly as many rules as you think. In fact, rules tend to suffocate it. I think of it like tossing a frisbee with someone. Some tosses might be good, others not so much – one toss might go that way, the next one another way, another one might roll off into the bushes. If you try too hard to get it right, your throwing becomes awkward. If you give up because you feel like you’re never throwing it right, well, that obviously doesn’t lead anywhere. But if you can enjoy the experience of tossing the frisbee because it just feels good to do it – to feel your body moving when you run to catch it and to laugh when the frisbee flies off in a crazy direction and to feel the sun shining on you – then the game of tossing it, instead of, say, sitting inside in front of the television, is what matters.

In the field of psychology, D.W. Winnicott, a psychoanalyst and British pediatrician, did extensive and very touching work with children, and he showed play to be not just an amusing pastime, but an activity that is crucial to healthy development of the self for both children AND adults. “It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self” (from Playing and Reality, p. 54).

Or to put it in the less formal but also wise words of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, one of my favorite bands:

Give yourself a chance
To find a way.
The holiness of play
Is here to stay.

(from “Dance, Dance, Dance”)

I am moved by their use of the word, “holiness.” Play is, indeed, sacred – have you ever thought about it that way? It is sacred because it softens the rules and, thus, creates room for something new. We all need it whether we’re 8 or 80. And if you think you are playing because you habitually shun structure, it might be that, for you, play means toying with adding some structure. Play is simply doing things differently, making a point to break out of the old habits, and then noticing what happens and how you feel. No judgments.

So I end this post by saying with full sincerity (and a giggle) to you and to me…

Run along and play now.

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*This photo is provided with credit to chrisroll whose portfolio is at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=2140.

Are you listening?

"Deva Listening to Dhamma" (see below* for information about this photo)

Are some people not capable of listening to soul?

This question came up briefly in my last post. Well, actually, the question was whether some people aren’t capable of feeling alive. But I am expanding the question here today because there is a difference between feeling alive and listening to your feelings of aliveness (the topic of this blog).

Listening to something means both hearing and heeding it. Following its guidance. So listening to soul means not just being aware of your inner stirrings but also expressing and honoring them in some way, making them more explicit. Self-awareness with some type of response. Being and Doing. Let’s talk about these briefly, just enough to get a basic feel for what they’re about.

Self-awareness grows from repeatedly turning your attention inward and asking, “What am I experiencing now?” Returning again and again to notice what is happening inside you and then scooching over a bit mentally to make space for whatever you find. This repeated, patient, curious attention – much like you would give to a small child you love – allows you to gradually notice and take in more and more of your inner experience without shrinking from it or drowning in it.

Reciprocal with noticing your inner experience is acknowledgment and expression. Each feeds the other. For example, you become aware that you feel a subtle but excited interest in something new and different, you express it to someone, you notice you feel even more excited about it, and you decide to research it or check into it. Or it might be an entirely internal process where you feel a particular emotion, acknowledge fully to yourself that you’re feeling it, notice its fluctuations for a few days, and ask yourself how it feels to have that ongoing awareness, perhaps even gaining some insight from it. These are rather simple examples. But I hope they convey the sense of an upward spiral of experience that is gradually fed by noticing and responding to your aliveness and natural energy. To me, when I read these examples and really imagine the experience, I feel a low resonance, a hum of excitement and inner energy.

Do you feel that?

I think that feeling is the immediacy of the present moment, starkly and insistently alive, as described by Rollo May, a PhD and psychoanalyst:

“To confront the reality of the present moment often produces anxiety. On the most basic level, this anxiety is a kind of a vague experience of being ‘naked’; it is the feeling of being face to face with some important reality before which one cannot flinch and from which one cannot retreat or hide. It is like the feeling one might have in coming suddenly face to face with a person one loved and admired: one is confronted with an intense relationship one must react to, do something about. It is an intensity of experience, this immediate and direct confronting of the reality of the moment, similar to intense creative activity, and it carries with it the same nakedness and creative anxiety as well as the same joy” (Man’s Search for Himself, p. 267).

Now to the question we have posed: Is this experience – listening to your core self – impossible for some people to achieve or sustain? It requires certain qualities, not just the ability to self-reflect and discern, but an ongoing sense of purpose, inquisitiveness, and courage. A willingness to listen and keep listening, a willingness to act and keep taking action. Simple but not.

I think that a large number of people have the capacity to listen but aren’t. And I believe others are less clear with a small number possibly not having this capacity. This makes me wonder: where does the latent possibility of listening lie? And how might it be different than you or I would expect?

Here we arrive at, I think, the more exciting question, the real question, in this whole discussion:

Are you listening to your aliveness?

Because if you are, you will be more open to and patient with others’ experiences of being alive.

You will know that striving to listen to your inner world is challenging, that it always brings surprises, that there are more ways soul can be expressed in an individual’s life than there are individuals.

You’ll be less likely to project your own lack of listening onto others, expecting them to do it or assuming they can’t or condemning them in some way, when it’s really your own aliveness that needs tending and attention.

So more important and more impactful than whether someone else is listening or can listen is whether you are. Not just because doing so awakens yourself. But because, as a result, you are able to step back and make space for others to find their own way too.

So…are you listening? What happens when you do? And do you make space for others to do so?

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*The photograph I have included with this post is titled, “Deva Listening to Dhamma.” (It is from Wikipedia and is by Anandajoti (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.) The carving in the picture is one of thousands at Borodur, an 8th-century Mahayana Buddhist monument in Indonesia. The figure pictured is a deva: any supernatural being in Buddhism who is “more powerful or more blissful than humans” (according to Wikipedia). And dhamma is the essential quality of the cosmos or of one’s own nature (a simple definition that seems consistent with the longer Wikipedia description). So, in short, the picture shows a supernatural being listening to the essence of the cosmos and herself – a striking image of listening to soul, even haunting as it resonates for me (and maybe you?) here, now, 1,300 years later.

What is it to feel alive?

“There’s a certain moment in each man when he becomes completely alive. Alive like at no other time, when he lights the sky with his very vivacity. Of course, some people lack that capacity and others don’t seem to have it outside the sex act. This fragment, this instant of electricity that strikes, is really you, your soul, your being. I sometimes feel it in me when I hear a magnificent actor reading Shakespeare. I become transformed, unique, complete….I know I’ve seen that moment in you many times.”
- from Trinity, a historical fiction novel about Ireland by Leon Uris, p. 343

Now here is a ripe fruit for us at this early point in our discussion of soul. A mentor figure is speaking to a young man. He paints a vivid image of experiencing soul. He also makes what I think is a jarring, provocative statement about some people not being able to have that experience (a topic I’m saving for later).

When I read this description of soul, I was instantly excited to share it with you because, for us, it puts some initial words to how it feels to experience soul: completely alive, lights the sky, vivacity, electricity, transformed, unique, complete. Read that list of words again, more slowly, and notice the feelings they stir in you. They describe a big emotional experience. A moment when something outside you sets fire to something inside you, making you feel wholly yourself and more than yourself. A moment of resonance, possibly beyond your ability to fully understand or express it. Such moments are unmistakable encounters with soul. Maybe it’s a moving reading of Shakespeare. Or an electric connection with another person. Or a vivid dream. Or a magnificent scene in nature. Or a surge of emotion. Or a flash of creative inspiration. There are endless possibilities for Big Soul moments for all of us, and we usually know them when we feel them. Something ripples through us and among us. We are changed.

But what about Little Soul moments? When you are trying to listen to soul and get in touch with your aliveness, believing that big moments are THE moments can be misleading and discouraging. It is like believing your sex life should be like the sex you see in movies. You can end up spending lots of energy desperately chasing big moments, some of them ultimately hollow. You can end up feeling listless, despairing, broken because you aren’t “LIVING!” I am not diminishing the impact or value of big moments. I am just setting them aside momentarily as only one way of experiencing soul, attention grabbing and exciting as they are.

What I am highlighting right now, because they are unique little jewels and often where we have to begin in learning how to listen to soul, are the more subtle moments. The stuff of everyday.

Taking a moment to really feel your delight in the soft coolness of the sheets and blankets and pillows when you get into bed.

Noticing you feel stressed and, instead of grinding on, pausing to renew yourself in a meaningful way.

Being fully in your body in any moment and feeling its murmurings.

Noticing a fleeting, tell-tale feeling or thought.

Pausing to allow yourself to wonder at the new growth from a presumably dead tree.

These moments are smaller sparks that are also “really you, your soul, your being.” Moments when you connect with your unique aliveness, though a bit more quietly. Moments that can also transform you, gradually, with their gentle constancy and unexpected magnitude of richness and life.

And yet we tend to rush by them and dismiss them in our hurried, hungry, airtight lives. We assume they aren’t significant. That they aren’t enough. That they can’t truly sustain us and feed us and help us. Not really. We feel desperately starved and gorge ourselves with bigger, fancier moments.

So I am going to allow these little moments, trust them, to stand here on their own. No big, fancy explanations.

Simmering. Worthy of our trust. An inviting doorway. Enough.

What else is true?

Before we begin talking about listening to soul, let’s establish what it is we’re listening to. “Soul” is, for me, the best possible word for that which is alive and resonating in us and the world around us. Now pause… Let that sink in for a moment. Because that’s essentially it.

Seem simplistic?

In a sense, it is simple. You don’t have to hold any specific religious beliefs to engage with soul. You don’t have to read philosophical books. You only have to stop and listen and notice. Soul is always moving, humming within and around and between all of us. It is always expressing itself. And I believe that, unlike the typical dictionary definition, soul is not separate from matter – I believe that we can and must engage soul by also engaging the physical world, including our bodies.

So listening to soul is simple in that we are listening to something that, I think, wants to be heard, received. It is not hiding from us.

What makes it challenging and endlessly fascinating is that this seemingly simple act of listening asks much of us (not always what we would think) and it gives us much in return (not always what we would expect).

In this blog, I want to explore the profoundness of listening to soul – the expected and unexpected ways that soul expresses itself, how we struggle with it and embrace it, how it feeds and changes us, how it simultaneously solidifies and ignites our sense of self. Lest it seem that this will be an exercise in singing Kumbaya or thinking happy thoughts, I want to state clearly that listening to soul is an act of vast courage because it requires us to receive and feel what IS, which might go against the grain of what others expect, what we have lived, what we want to be true. So I want to wade into the waters of soul by starting with why it is often hard for us to listen inside and what this means about the posture required to listen.

If soul is ever-moving and ever-present, why do we so often have trouble truly listening to it? Why aren’t we just automatically and irrevocably tuned into it? Why is disconnection from our aliveness, I believe, so prevalent that it is a near epidemic in our society, playing a significant role in myriad issues such as depression, anxiety, addiction, and somatic symptoms? Because many of us have, in some way, learned to dismiss it or distrust it or have been blocked off from it – maybe no one has ever modeled for us what it means to listen to and manifest our aliveness, or maybe we have been actively discouraged from listening to it, or maybe we’ve experienced trauma (whether one big capital-T Trauma or several small-t traumas) that has cut us off from it, or maybe some combination of these. However it came about, this disconnection from soul from which so many of us suffer has been programmed into our way of being so that we automatically, and often unconsciously, react defensively to our aliveness – numbing it, repressing it, somehow avoiding it – because it feels disruptive, threatening. Even for those who are blessed with being able to feel and express their aliveness, it requires continual awareness and flexibility to embody the ever-evolving truths that are always rising up from the inside.

The ingrainedness of disconnection from our aliveness and the perpetually shifting expressions of it mean that we must listen differently when we listen for soul. We must listen openly and with curiosity, ready to hear what truly is; ready to make space for whatever we discover; ready to alter our previously held beliefs. Here we come to a crucial and provocative question in listening to soul: What else is true? This is the question that a professor in my counseling graduate program, Allen Koehn, repeatedly posed to me and my classmates. The course subject was the Trickster, an archetype that embodies the unexpected, a figure who is, as Allen described in the course syllabus, an “enemy of arbitrary boundaries.”

When listening for soul, we tend to impose arbitrary boundaries and approach it with preconceived ideas, assuming that soul can be found here and not there, that soul looks or feels a certain way, that soul is always “light” or “good.” If we ask ourselves, “What else is true about soul?” – if we really sustain that question without dodging it or retreating to what’s familiar – we immediately move into a space where soul can be something very different. In fact, a question that can often get right at the heart of soul in a situation is “Where do I think soul isn’t?”

I experienced life peeking out from an unexpected place recently. It’s a simple example but exactly the sort of small spark of aliveness that we tend to dismiss or never notice as touching something in us. As part of clearing some space in our backyard for a vegetable garden, we had to remove a large (and quickly getting larger) mimosa tree. Being an unabashed tree hugger, I was extremely sad to see it cut down and could not bear to watch as it was hacked into. After the dirty deed was done, jagged bits of wood lay all over the grass and only the stump was left, looking rather gruesome and obscene with its freshly, crudely amputated limbs.

Typical of a large yard project, the stump has remained long after its limbs were removed, and I was struck when I recently noticed new growth emerging out of the very cuts that would seem to have killed it. My immediate feeling was awe at how persistent life is. How amazing that tiny new shoots came forth from those deep gashes! The tree, stripped down to a mere stump, was still pressing outward, still insisting on life. Though I had seen other severely stripped down trees put out new branches, I had just assumed life couldn’t possibly come from these ravaged remains, but it was still very much alive – stirring in the dark underneath the surface, gathering its energy to find a new opening. And in a beautiful paradox of vitality, the opening where new life first emerged was a deep cut, a wound.

This is one of the hardest places for us to trust that our aliveness is expressing itself: our wounds and suffering. I will write more about this later but, for now, I want to hold that specific experience as just one answer to the larger question I am posing to you and to me, a question that we must begin with and repeatedly ask as part of listening to soul: what else is true about how soul can show up? Where do we think life, vitality, truth, or new possibilities cannot possibly come from? For if we don’t ask that question, if we don’t question our assumptions about soul, we preclude opportunities to hear it and engage it – within ourselves and with others.

So where do you think soul isn’t? And what happens when you ask that question? Does anything change?