Embodiment Hour Thursday at Noon @ The Stoa ~ Being In the Grey
Join us tomorrow for another embodiment hour at The Stoa
Dear Friends,
Tomorrow at noon we’ll meet for another Embodiment Hour at The Stoa. Please join for free and experience the beauty of a group of people tuning into their feelings and sensations together as we process a piece of culture.
A warning that we will be working tomorrow with the by-now-maybe-overplayed Oscar incident between Will Smith and Chris Rock. I admit I am tired of hearing about it, but there’s still something to decipher. You have to wonder…why are we so obsessed? One of my teachers, Thomas Hübl, often points out that when we can’t stop thinking about or talking about something that happened in the past, we can be sure it triggered trauma. So, that’s what I’m curious about. Can we—together— work with our bodies to process and understand this cultural incident in a new way?
Being in the Grey
How are you with uncertainty and ambiguity? Does some part of you prefer to see things as black and white; prefer to KNOW? Take a minute to notice how the questions land in your body.
I’ve been working to loosen my grip on reality for decades now. That it has taken so long (and is an ongoing process) says something about how ingrained the human habit to concretize things is. I’ve done it through the study and practice of mysticism, regular meditation, hard-won initiations, psychedelics, deep and honest relationships, and parenting. Yes, that last one will really loosen your grip on everything including your “sanity.”
I am constantly running self experiments to see how attached I am to my beliefs, perceptions, and views. When I find them, I challenge myself to surrender control. This can be a precarious way to go through life and frequently takes one beyond the bounds of conventionality. I value flexibility and feel uncomfortable with rigidity. I don’t know if this is my nature, my “level of development”, my gender, or my upbringing. Probably a combination of them all.
Living in the grey space has taught me that there is a lot of possibility in uncertainty. This is the place where the truly-new arises. Because where there is no fixation, there is infinite potential. Being in the unknown has become not just enjoyable, but a kind of home base. The Buddhists talk about “the open ground.” Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche famously elucidated the point: “Enlightenment is like falling out of an airplane,” he said, “The bad news is there’s no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.” Devendra Banhart, the Buddhist singer songwriter describes love in the same way: “Love like falling…without ever landing.”
I propose is that our habitual need-to-know is keeping us stuck; unable to move forward into the unknown where something truly new can be born. Our desire for certainty, control, agreement, is a symptom of trauma. Fundamentally, we feel unsafe within ourselves, so we project the unsafety onto the world or find someone to fear or blame and call them “other”. We make someone right and someone wrong, something black and something white.
Underlying all of this is fear—we’re trying to survive. We haven’t yet got to the part in this epic story of humanity where we move beyond surviving into thriving. In order to do that, we need to heal and include all the parts that are scared, sad, confused, and lost. The way we do this—the way we find, include, and integrate these parts—is through the body and in relationship with each other. This is how we will find our way into the next great chapter…feeling our way forward…together.
We have to let go of the idea that it will “make sense” in the mental and intellectual ways we’re so used to (so comfortable with and attached to!). It might actually be a quantum leap that’s awaiting us when we finally find the courage and readiness to step forward to the edge of the plane and jump. No parachute and no ground. Can we become the people who can do that?
Tomorrow’s Embodiment Hour ~ The Slap
I didn’t watch the Oscars. I didn’t see Will Smith slap Chris Rock until the next morning when it was everywhere in the way things are when they’re surprising and seem to say something important about how we’re doing. Existing as we are now in this collective limbo, chaos, and uncertainty, a single event with the power to focus us is a cypher, indeed.
What happened? Even that is a matter for debate. It depends who you ask. Our struggle to find a singular, coherent and satisfying narrative is probably what fascinates most. I can feel the collective yearning for a shared reality and moral clarity…but the yearning must go unsatisfied because there is no longer such a thing. Yes, I am talking about the incident at the Oscars, but I am also talking about the state of affairs in our lives, our communities, our nations, and on our planet. How can we make sense of anything together? How can we come to agreement? How can we find peace, love, and understanding if we can’t even agree on what happened at the Oscars? See how we quickly come to confront our fears of fragmentation? Polarization?
My mother, an avid reader, pointed me to an essay by Jemele Hill in The Atlantic. Ms. Hill who is Black and writes about race, gender and politics, was on a cross-country flight when the incident happened. She says she landed to find 653 text messages. Her article, The Two Americas Debating Will Smith and Chris Rock, offers a straightforward look at how the matter seems to be viewed differently down racial lines. In other words, in some ways the issue is black and white.
One way to look at it is this: an event ruptured the facade of normality we’re all so eager to return to, and now we are dealing with the deeply uncomfortable feeling that there is no such thing as objective reality. There is not one way to look at things. Of course, this is mainly a surprise to people who have agreed with and benefitted from dominant collective narratives and shared agreements. I’m just pointing out that anyone who’s view has ever been marginalized knows that even a dominant narrative that is widely regarded as true can be deeply flawed and presumptuous. Textbook American History, anyone?
I admit, I have enjoyed a little speculation about what happened and who was right and who was wrong. It’s fun as a straw man, if nothing else; good material for getting curious about the views and feelings of the people around us. And it’s not nearly so fraught as politics. What do YOU think happened? Or maybe I should ask…how do you feel about what happened?
Our situation is indeed precarious, but it must also be seen as a the gateway it is into a new relationship with Reality as something we shape together as a collaborative exercise. We are constantly negotiating with ourselves and with others about meaning. More now than ever, perhaps, as so many views try to rapidly cohere real time across the world, through the internet. We are racing to find ways to meet each other anew, to include more in our experience, to find comfort in the unknown and unknowable. Maybe an acceptance of this would lead to our taking more responsibility for our role in the making and unmaking of our world—from the smallest household disputes to the situations that threaten our very survival on the planet. What would it be like to really hear each other and consider the possibility that things are not so black and white.